neomarxisme

At first, Judas Design appears to be on your side in helping with a construction project, but then when it really matters, they sell you out for a measly amount of money.

On Sunday, we went out to Gunma-ken to go "Canyoning," which is an outdoor sport involving rappelling down or sliding down 20-100 ft. canyon waterfalls and being sucked into the turbulent waters for just enough time to really understand the sensation of drowning. Because of a huge downpour the day before, we were not able to take a crack at the 40 m monster pictured on the left, but just as well: rappelling looks easy, but getting your body to lean back into nothingness requires a triumph of will greater than I could currently hope for. Our Japanese-Brazilian guides - on their easily-obtained three-year visas - were refreshingly jovial and reckless, and sitting in an virgin Japanese river bed without concrete "anti-erosion" measures is a treat onto itself.

Since we were in the neighborhood, we drove over to the famous onsen resort Ikaho, which to put it nicely, has seen better days. I have not traveled extensively around Japan's more remote regions, but one of the things that always surprises me upon leaving Tokyo is how much the countryside wears the scars of economic downturn. Chiba, Shizuoka, Gunma, Nagano etc. are full of decaying cities with rusty, abandoned buildings. But this may not just be a problem specific to Japan; in fact, they greatly remind me of driving around the Appalachian Mountains in Western North Carolina. Now that both the farming and manufacturing economies have ceased to exist in post-Industrial nations, there's a real question of what is going to happen with the rural areas - especially since voters from these regions currently control politics in both the U.S. and Japan.

Despite the rust and rot, Ikaho is a really beautiful town, with small stores radiating from a stone staircase built up the mountainside. Nothing, however, seemed to have been updated in the last twenty or thirty years.

We went inside a 500 yen onsen hotel that had one operating bath and one broken one, a beer machine with only happoushu, and a rack of ancient video games and pachinko machines that have been permanently left unplugged.

I tend to like these aging towns and ancient ruins, but I can't help but think it would be a pretty depressing spot for a planned vacation. As young families rush off towards various Disneylands, corporate theme parks, and massive onsen/shopping mall complexes, these mom-and-pop towns become only a playspot for patrons as old as the shop owners. It's not just that the recession has hit these towns indiscriminately; the economies are based on a totally outmoded leisure culture. Kids now prefer extreme sports like canyoning or go abroad to exotic locations - which we all know, is cheaper than traveling within Japan - and these old cities based solely on the tourist money of Tokyo big-spenders are in danger of extinction. Much like Ikaho, the famous "honeymoon" spot of Atami in Shizuoka is full of empty, rusty hotels since young couples can now jet away across the globe for a similar price.

My fear is that these towns have only one generation left. Once the seventy year-olds manning the shops die off in the next couple of decades, I doubt that their kids - most likely living in Tokyo - would come back to their hometowns to protect an unprofitable tradition. Maybe the return of the urbanized children would bring an influx of capital or better sensibility towards contemporary tastes and could reinvigorate these towns, but if left in their current state, I can't imagine a bright future. I recommend dropping in and popping open a ramune while you still can.

I am not sure who came up with this genius Foma campaign, but I couldn't possibly ask for anything more in an advertisement: an anthropomorphized chimpanzee and a giant, white Great Pyrenees dog wearing red-and-yellow beanies. I can't wait for them to spin this into a television series, film, and internet hoax.

I had always assumed that the Japanese slang for "small" - puchi (or putcchi) - was some sort of homegrown creation, but lo and behold, it's an abbreviated adaptation of the French word petit. Seeing that it took me thirteen years of my life to figure out that deodorant came from "de-odor," maybe I'm the last person in the world to have noticed the foreign origin of puchi.

Often when I discuss questionable Japanese media practices, there's a cry of "The same thing happens in America!" While this is basically true, the reactions from the government and media are often very different. So let's look at some recent articles about media misdoings.

Sony Pictures has settled their 2001 lawsuit in which they were prosecuted for inventing an imaginary Connecticut film critic - David Manning - to provide positive pull quotes for advertisments. The Los Angeles Superior Court charged that the company had attempted the "intentional and systematic deception of consumers," and now Sony Pictures is paying out $1.25 million for the settlement. (link from R.)

Subtext: critics are so crucial to an American film's promotional campaign that a company invented a fake film reviewer to praise the studio's less well-received films. Interesting American twist on the tale: they got caught and fined.

GM has ended their four-month boycott of advertising in the L.A. Times. The car company had decided to pull their ads after the newspaper's constant criticism of their products and CEO, but after negotations with the paper, GM has started placing ads again. The editor-in-chief at P.R.Week derided G.M.'s actions, saying, "A company that would expect these tactics to work is misguided. An editor that would agree to them is compromised. A P.R. professional that does not help the C-suite understand why these practices are wrong is a fool." (link from Sameer)

A major American company pulls out sponsorship as a way to pressure a publications' editorial department. What happens? They cannot sustain it for more than four months, and the public relations world - whose sympathies are solely with big business and not consumers - strongly oppose the boycott practice.

Not exactly recent news, but The Source's constant Eminem bashing has lost them access to all Eminem-related rappers (50 Cent, etc.). The magazine's vendetta against Eminem, however, seems to be directly related to the CEO David Mays' relentless promotion of his white co-founder/Harvard roomate Raymond Scott's rap career. In 1995, the magazine writers demanded Mays' resignation for placing a very prominent article about Scott's group Almighty RSO in the magazine. Failing to make Mays quit, the protesting staff members all left The Source. (link from Sameer)

Magazine editors quitting because the editor-in-chief is ordering content based on factors other than quality or importance of the artists themselves? Crazy. What did these unloyal "editors" think they are anyway? Independent voices or something?

Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima - a terrible denouement to a terrible war. I can safely say that nobody spent the solemn occasion thinking about Kris Kross' 1993 album Da Bomb (featuring "Alright"). For those too young to remember the 90s, "da bomb" was an expression originally used in the African-American community to indicate "greatness" or "excellence" - as evidenced by my high school "Class T-shirt" which read "Pensacola High School Class of 1997 - It's Da Bomb" under a picture of a round cartoon explosive, complete with wick.

Kris Kross apparently hoped to cash in on the popularity of the expression and threw a mushroom cloud on the album cover to suggest to their rivals and critics, "Our rhymes can vaporize 130,000 human lives in an instant." No one was less thrilled about this than Sony's Western music division, who had received the task of selling an album with the lyric, "I drop bombs like Hiroshima" to the Japanese public. Let's face it: the A-bomb references were wiggity-wiggity-wiggity-whack, but I'm not sure Kris Kross knew a whole lot about the nuclear victims' eyes popping out of their socks and skin peeling off, and perhaps they would have rethought the usage of the mushroom cloud after a nice trip to Peace City, Hiroshima.

Lately, we've been discussing the casual uses of nasty historical symbols - swastikas, blackface - and there's been an argument that we should fight "allowing atrocities to mark signifiers permanently" (Momus). But even if we open up taboo symbols to light-hearted play, the gravity of the historical circumstances behind these icons will almost definitely drown out any attempts at re-appropriation. Kids on the streets of Harajuku will never be able to redefine the Nazi swastika, unless it strictly remains within the vacuum of historical knowledge that is Takeshita-doori. For those people who know the story, these symbols act as convenient reminders of history's greatest human tragedies. I understand that groups should avoid permanent victimhood: "look what the Germans did to the Jews, or the Whites to the Blacks, or Japanese to the Chinese, or the Americans to the Japanese, etc." But certainly we can learn an important lesson from: look what humans did to other humans.

So, I'm happy that Kris Kross could never rob the mushroom cloud from the serious nature of nuclear holocaust. (Although when I see kids wearing their clothes backwards, I do think fondly of Mack Daddy and Daddy Mack.) I'm not convinced that those totally unaware of a symbol's perceived-meanings should be able to, or will be able to, lead the way towards a new definition, but I would hope that we still remember the lessons of the past even if someone were able to successfully "liberate" the iconography.

Since the beginning of youth consumer culture in the late 60s, Japanese magazines have been the most responsible agent for guiding young, provincial teenagers towards the world's most essential products and lifestyles. No other magazines on earth provide such richly-detailed information and skillfully-curated features, but we would make a mistake to assume that the editors of Popeye and their ilk have had their eyes on the same super-trendy cultural hotspots the whole time. It wasn't until Tokyo's rich kids got even richer in the Bubble Economy of the mid-80s that the media industry started chasing sleek, black European fashion and gaudy designer labels. And it wasn't until after Japanese youth fashion exceeded the rest of the world in sophistication and creativity in the mid-90s that magazine editors started worrying more about what people were wearing on Omotesando than Fifth Avenue

So, I find it quaint to go back and read Japanese consumer bibles from the late 1970s - a time when Japanese cognoscenti considered "Ivy League" the top of the pops and America the center of cool. Yesterday at Cow Books, I found the January 10th, 1979 issue of Popeye with a special feature on "Campus USA." The editors went to the University of Texas, Colorado State University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz to bring back a consumer-friendly ethnology of American student life. I can't remember the last time any Japanese person (or any human, for that matter) thought that kids at American universities were the pinnacle of good taste, but as the editors write in a caption: "Cool? Who cares. There are lots of things much more fun on campus." (お洒落？そんなことどうでもいい。もっともっと楽しいことが、キャンパスにはたくさんあるのです。)

Ok, so maybe they definitely realized that the fashion habits of these college students went against everything they learned from decades of Western media research, but there was certainly an allure about young American kids partying down, watching football games, protesting against the criminalization of marijuana, doing crazy sports, attending costume parties, and living in cool apartments with foosball tables. (They do happily report that Lacoste alligators held a dominant position on the campus, creating some sort of practical shopping use for this otherwise abstract anthropological research.)

What I love about these old Popeye issues is that they are both great surveys of the topic at hand - American university life in the late 70s - and also, great surveys of what Japanese editors thought was cool at the time of publication. (A slightly-rare, highly-valued early 80s issue about the 60s is going for 5040 yen at Cow Books) Japanese style was based mainly on American examples up until the Bubble, but moreover, the centrality of universities in the 60s counterculture gave college campuses a relatively "far-out" image. (Yes, I'm talking about the Strawberry Statement.) They used to make films where Harvard students were the heroes - like Love Story and The Paper Chase - and not just over-intelligent, stodgy assholes who get their comeuppance from bums (With Honors), janitors (Good Will Hunting), or hip hoppers who smoke "magical pot" made from burying the ashes of their dead friend in the soil of a marijuana plant (How High). These days, cool seems to be the exclusive right of semi-marginal sub-cultures; even if Popeye or Relax return their akogare to America, it's the graffiti artists or the surf/skate communities around Jack Johnson and Tommy Guerrero, not Princeton eating clubs.

In the last thirty years, the American elite has lost control of the media and can no longer make J Press blazers the ultimate expression of cool. Even if popular anti-intellectualism is responsible for the loss of underground cultural interest in American universities, I also blame the decline of university culture; frat jocks really are as bad as we assume, and the last thing we need is magazines forcing designers and street artists to do "double-name" beer bongs and initiation paddles. But let's not assume that we were always above this. At one point in time, Japanese teens and their international brethren were busy reading about striped tube socks, streaking, and professors who teach "The History of Rock'n'Roll" - somehow trying to figure out how to shape their consumer habits accordingly.

I get a lot of fan mail that reads along the lines of...

Marxy - I love the site. I keep meaning to buy your album but I haven't gotten around to caring enough. If possible, please review your favorite academic papers of 2005.

"Slow down!" I reply: it's only August, and we know that the quarterlies save the hardest hitting research for the Holiday season. But I just can't say "no" to fans, so for Matt Davis of Columbus, GA, here is my short-list for 2005's best academic papers:

Dennis, Sara. "O.P.P. - the Tradition of Chattel and its Impact on the Legal Foundations of Adultery Law in the Antebellum South." Journal of Family Law 24:3, 24-45.

Ableman, Lewis. "Hip Hop Hooray - the Positive Long-Term Effects of Jumping-based Exercise Routines on the Articulatio Coxae." Orthopaedic Review 7:Fall, 56-59.

In its new campaign "Absolut Metropolis, the vodka brand Absolut picked up eleven "creative types" off the streets of Tokyo and asked them to put together an outfit/artwork inspired by the "Absolut" brand. I can't tell from the website whether these are "real" amateurs or recent Bunka graduates or what, but each individual conveniently has a different extreme-subcultural style. Put together, they are like a street-fashion Justice League Jr..

I must say there is something refreshing about the relatively unrefined nature of the models/costumes, but I still loathe the idea of taking creative people (or their more easily-obtainable equivalent) and telling them, "Okay, all that's great, but can't you make something inspired by a corporation? Hey, you, Rockabilly guy! Can you make the Teddy Boy hairdo reflect Alfred in Human Resources and the wallet chain be a statement on our just-in-time supply chain management system?" Brands can be an artistic source for imagination and inspiration, but only if you forget all the business reality behind the product - which is exactly what companies would like you to do in the first place.

This ad in particular would work better as publicized patronage than being forced into the frame of "brand inspired art." None of those "kids" really remixed Absolut as much as they just did their normal thing and got paid for it. It's like that apocryphal story about Aphex Twin: a major label came knocking on Richard James' door one day looking for its band's overdue remix, and since he hadn't even started, James just handed them some unrelated work, which the band ended up loving because they could hear exactly what Aphex did to the original song. Same goes here: the Marie Honda doll is only an Absolut ad if Absolut says it is and you peep at the final work through a tiny keyhole. But so is our modern advertising world, where corporations spend huge sums of money to force non-advertising into the straight-jacket of product endorsement. I'd be happy if these kids got paid for their work, but stop pretending like they did it for the vodka.

I usually can't bring myself to actually sit down and watch Japanese television, even for academic purposes. I've been happy to spend the last several weeks coding the guest lists for Music Station (1991-2004), but I could hardly stomach ten seconds of the inimitably-mediocre Arashi (45 guest appearances in 6 years!) when I found myself accidentally watching the real show last Friday. Japanese television is great only if you are a Japanese middle-school girl or a forty year-old housewife. Everyone else in the archipelago apparently has better things to do.

So, my general strategy is to flip through the three music channels - MTV, MoTV, and Space Shower TV - and watch enough video fragments to fill my dinnertime viewing. What I glean from this brief video watching is that the music industry is pathetically desperate to sell records, but for a long time, I could not put my finger on what it is about the videos that seems so cloying.

But last night, I watched the new video for Asia Engineer - a new feel-good, hip-pop band from Avex - that told the story of a young woman's rough time finding a job in the shuushoku katsudou (institutional job-hunting) process. Let me spell this out for you in plain terms; this is a hip-hop video consoling young consumers on the pain of failing to get a corporate job. Another work in this vein is the recent video from piano balladeer Salyu where she portrays a comet-obsessed office-lady (OL) and brightens up a stodgy, old corporate office with technicolor effects and Broadway musical choreography. Again, the sell is - hey, young OLs in boring black-and-white offices, I feel your pain.

Ever since rock'n'roll showed up on the scene, pop music's selling point has been either escapism (don't you want to live this outrageous lifestyle?) or hierarchical coolness (if you want to get to a higher plane of social existence, you must buy into this artist.) Both strategies are based on the natural pull of aspiration. These current iyashi-kei (buzz word for "healing culture") Japanese videos have absolutely zero of that traditional appeal and tend to basically tell possible consumers, "There, there. Life is hard!" with a motherly pat on the head. In essence, they are affirming these kids' institutionally-proscribed values instead of launching an assault against them.

To a certain extent, Eminem and Kid Rock do something similar with American kids in that they legitimize and celebrate "white trash" values instead of offering a "cooler" alternative. But the difference is that kids are embracing what society perceives to be moral and ethical faults precisely because that places them in a rebellious position against authority. Hell yeah, I got my girlfriend pregnant and then I did that drunken chicken car stunt like at the beginning of Footloose!

Meanwhile in Japan, the values being reaffirmed are those from essentially mainstream, "good boy/good girl" behavior. I'm sure that these videos were made on top of a mountain of market research suggesting that younger Japanese kids want to hear pop songs validate their mediocre, non-rebellious lifestyles, but I'm not convinced this is an effective strategy. While Japan certainly has a cultural inclination towards chastising rebellious behavior, the general rock'n'roll attitude of fantastical cooler-than-thou has almost always worked when marketing towards Japanese teens. The success of A Bathing Ape is that the brand went out of its way to not directly appeal to its core consumers. Most people use pop culture as a diversion from their mundane reality, and I'm not going to get excited about a music video that shows some lanky guy sitting at his laptop, writing a blog essay about Japanese marketing.

We should beware of kneejerk reactions that rock'n'roll must have a rebel edge to be "authentic," and I'll leave my "I-hate-when-supporting-musicians-at-rock-concerts-use-sheet-music" rant for another day. But perhaps this new cultural-marketing strategy gives us a clue about the nature of the unemployed freeter/NEET. If you believe the messages marketed to them, this new social class doesn't want to celebrate its dropout status as much as lament its societal failing.

As reported in the news media, the "Akiba-kei" magazine Elfics is holding the first "otaku" certification exam, OTAK. For those interested in taking the take-home test, the question booklet is included in this month's issue, between the anime-parodies and forty pages of erotic sci-fi art. (These artists seem to be tackling sex in same fantastical, non-empirical way as Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke wrote about the moon without ever actually traveling there.)

I would not normally have this genre of literature in my home if it were not for the fact that a serious, respectable American magazine requested a translation of the test booklet. Unfortunately for the editors, the exam is not as unintentionally funny as they imagined, but I did manage to find something quite interesting in the process of translating the test.

The OTAK is about 1/3 parody of Japanese test-taking (juken) culture, 1/3 honest attempt at knowledge certification, and 1/3 soapbox for the leaders of the Akihabara Otaku Rights movement. While the AOR does not technically exist, something like it seems to be bubbling up. In the first section about the origin of the term "otaku," one of the written passages specifically calls out Densha Otoko as a "fake" otaku trend - created by the mass-media and not an "authentic" part of otaku culture. Apparently, the exam authors are incensed by the recent media attempts to make otaku "cool" for the masses, which ultimately takes away the central taste-making authority from the subcultural leaders. First Densha Otoko, next maid costumes on network television, then drawing dirty pictures of prepubescent girls will in danger of being normal. How dismal this future. Keep your eyes on the prize, boys.

Meanwhile in America.

We went back in time to the year 1993 to ask 75 middle-school students what they would want to hear on an Internet radio "podcast" from the year 2005. Their answers very much surprised us - Liz Phair! The Turtels! [sic] The Russian Futurists! The Answers to this Pop Quiz on Animal Farm - and we hightailed it back to 2005 to put the cooler kids' song selections and self-written skits (!) into a fifty-five minute radio mega-mix, adding only the occasional mashup and George Michael track to make things sound adequately futuristic. So, without further ado, we present the first installment of Radio MXUT - created as part of the wonderful Tokyo-based bilingual culture magazine OK FRED's special guest-DJ radio-show series.

Credits:
marxy - mixing, mashing, haberdashing
u.t. - co-haberdashing, female voices, Richard Nixon
Yumel doll - irony and pity, "there is no such word 'haberdashing'"

"DMX vs. Beatles" mashup (1998) by the amazingly talented Phofo
"You Just Gotta Know My Mind" written by Donovan

Merci à Audrey et Yoshi (et Jean)! And thank you to the 7th graders of Mrs. Bates' English class - go Dragons!

(Roboko R.I.P. b. 2173 - d. 2005)

The September issue of monthly entertainment magazine Nikkei Entertainment - with Kuraki Mai on the cover and a completely unrelated Kuraki Mai advertisement on page six - has a four-page article ranking the popularity of Japan's gaijin talent (talk-show circuit "stars" of foreign origin). To the 8,000 people surveyed, this surely came off like asking, "What is your favorite brand of zipper?" Gaijin talent are "famous" only in the sense that they are on television, but I've never gotten the sense that they are particularly well-liked or respected. The President of the Dave Spector Fan Club probably has to get his younger sister to be the Vice-President every single year.

Television stations march these guys out to lend legitimacy to ineffective English programs, state opinions that "real" Japanese commentators would be punished for offering, or otherwise make the Japanese public feel adequately unique in regards to the rest of the world. Gaijin talent are required to speak fluent Japanese, and for some reason, wear a terribly unchic earring in the left ear.

So according to this scientific, objective poll, the most well-liked "foreign talent" is Thane Camus - who, for all practical purposes, is Japanese. Camus - whose grandfather Albert is up in heaven elated that his family is finally cashing in on his Nobel-prize winning literature - spent many of his formative years in Japan and is about as "foreign" as Margaret Cho is "Korean." Thanks to this poll, we have learned that the Japanese like their "foreign talent" to be Japanese. Perhaps a parallel would be Americans thinking Pat Morita is the "greatest Japanese actor" and National Lampoon's European Vacation is the "greatest foreign film." (Both of which are highly possible.)

Coming in at #2 is Bobby Orogon, a Nigerian "comedian" who intentionally bungles his fluent Japanese to get cheap laughs and keep the image of Africans back a couple hundred years. (The caption under a picture of Bobby in the new Cyzo dryly states, "Bobby is a talento fluent in Nigerian, English, and Japanese.") When considering his minstrel show persona, Bobby's relative popularity is somewhat troubling. But again, we should not take this poll too seriously. This whole exercise is like polling on the "least disgusting non-alcoholic beer." I'm not sure any of these characters would make the Top 200 list of "celebrities" in Japan.

Number #3 is Yoon Son-ha (Sona Yun) - a South Korean fluent in Japanese. After Yoon, there is a huge cut-off in points, and #4 Pakkun - ex-glee club member and self-designated "class clown" - does not even make it up to 1/2 of Bobby's point total. (For anybody reading this outside of Japan, none of these names will make sense to you, which is exactly the point. Foreign talents cannot exactly pick up their bags and go off to sell their trades in another market.)

Overall what troubles me about this article is its fundamental 19th century ideology that being Japanese is based solely on racial purity. There is a side-bar in the Entertainment article asking, "Why are the seinentai (young boy helpers) on the popular daytime variety show Warattemo Iitomo foreigners?" For Christ's sake! They're NOT foreigners - they are just half-Japanese kids with foreign names (Ian, John). But the whole media complex treats these "entertainers" as if their mothers (or fathers) have betrayed the Japanese national spirit by marrying outside of their race. Even Yoko Ono gets her name written in katakana and not kanji because she's been out of Japan too long. I say, let's bring this idea to America and call Fareed Zakaria "that foreign commentator" and make Natalie Portman teach Hebrew on PBS.

The Japanese-language Wikipedia is a very helpful online resource - especially for those looking for information about celebrities and Japanese popular culture. The management companies tightly control most information in the mainstream media on these topics, so Wikipedia writers appear to be excitedly writing entries about issues normally "taboo" elsewhere in society.

Take, for example, the entry about one of Japan's most powerful talento production companies, Burning Production. There is a very short section of basic descriptive information, and then it jumps into the following story:

At daybreak May 9th, 2001, an incident occurred involving bullets being shot into the window glass of Burning Production's office. An anonymous report was called in to the Akasaka police that "in the early morning, there was sound of a gunshot in the mansion occupied by Burning Pro." An officer from that station investigated the scene and found two bullets each were shot into two rooms. Later that day, the office staff - who should have noticed the incident - did not notify the police.

On October 8th, bullets were again shot into the window glass, and the police's 4th investigative section investigated the relation, opening up an investigation into whether or not there had been trouble with parties related to organized crime. After an inspection of the crime scene, officers learned that "the 38-caliber revolver bullets had adequate faculty to kill or wound."

For the most part, this story was not reported in the newspapers or mass media. In May 29th, 2005, the Tokyo National Tax Agency accused the firm of failing to report 1.1 billion yen in taxes.

And then the entry nonchalantly lists the names of Burning's famous talent as if this kind of activity was normal for Japan's entertainment world. For those unfamiliar with Japan's amazingly low crime rates, gunshots are rare, and their occurrence generally makes the evening news. You would think that (gunshots) + (Japan's most powerful entertainment agency) = (a big story) but apparently not.

Burning should probably work a lot harder to clean up this Wikipedia article. From the way it's written now, it almost reads as if they were affiliated with organized crime!

Tokyo's oppressive humidity has made all daily activity feel like walking knee-high in a bath of maple syrup. I'm exhausted from the minute I wake up to moment I start napping at 5 pm. This is bad for my productivity, and as some of you may have noticed, terrible for my blogging. So, if I continue to be boring for the next couple of days, blame it on hygrometry.

Momus, on the other hand, is in imaginably cooler weather, and blogging up a storm about how Japanese keitai (cell phone) usage is based on essentialist cultural attributes. That's to say, if it weren't for the brave multi-tasking of Prince Shotoku Taishi, Japan would be a nation of computer-based Internet users.

(Bonus credit to anyone who can prove that John Quincy Adams's personal habits predicted the development of the television sitcom in post-War America.)

I just viewed the "crazy" rock band Sambomaster's video for "世界はそれを愛と呼ぶんだぜ" (The world calls that love), which begins with a middle-aged boss telling a uniformed OL that she has failed to do an adequate job on her assignment. She then heads to the roof and emotes by listening to Sambomaster's single in her headphones (not an iPod, by the way).

Again, we see a young rock band trying to connect with possible consumers through demonstrating a direct empathy with bland-looking, white-collar, middle-class clerical workers. Soon Japanese grime heavies will use their song lyrics to provide test-taking strategies for college-entrance exams, and Osaka noise bands will yearn to create DVDs for comforting seven year-old surburban kids on their failure to get into prestigious elementary schools. By next year, all popular music will explicitly reinforce the capitalist cog lifestyle, so welcome to the future.

From Yuki, who got it from WTBW: the Japanese title (houdai) of American film Napoleon Dynamite will be Bus Otoko (Bus Man.) As Yuki points out, this new title has almost nothing to do with the film itself and 100% to do with the fact that there is a popular Japanese film/television show/internet hoax called Densha Otoko. (Even the tagline is based on 2-ch typography!) In last month's Cyzo, an article about the current "Virgin Boom" referenced ND as being "Bus Man" in Japan, but I was convinced at the time that the writer was making a bad joke.

I've meant to blog on Napoleon before, because I found it to be the most depressing movie I've seen in years. Everyone else I know thought it was "UNBELIEVABLY HILARIOUS!" but as someone who grew up in relatively crappy small towns, the characters' pathetic lives hit a little close to people I've actually known. My sister snapped back at me, "Napoleon seems lame now but he'll be the next Bill Gates!" There is absolutely no evidence for this. There are plenty of movies about misunderstood, smart nerds with potential - Lucas, for example - but Napoleon is the worst type of that totally worthless, unpromising nerd with very few redeeming qualities. His creativity seems to be mostly cribbed from RPGs - a fact that probably went over the head of anyone who's never owned a 20-sided die.

I saw the film last December through an illegal Bit Torrent download, and I was very suprised to come home to Florida and find the "cool" shopping mall stores - i.e., the places with Doc Martens - selling Napoleon Dynamite t-shirts. Kids were most likely buying them for the irony factor alone, slipping them over their Korn t-shirts before beating the shit out of the "unpromising nerds" of their own high-schools.

I'm not sure what Japanese viewers would get out of this film, seeing that Americans just deep down love to laugh at the lives of rural lower middle-class orphans. But, film appreciation is not universal. Everyone I know who is Japanese or French loved A Life Aquatic, whereas all the American critical community seemed to walk away disappointed. I don't get the sense that anyone in Japan went gaga over Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the way all my American friends did, so I'm not willing to put money on the Bus Man's chances. If it becomes a huge phenomenon, however, we'll perhaps know that this otaku boom is the real deal.

When trying to describe the characteristics of a national culture, one of the main problems is that these characteristics - held by some to be essential and unchanging - are always in flux. For example, take a look at the top ten Japanese music artists of 1989 vs. those of 1999 from the Oricon singles chart:

If you take a look at these charts over time, there is a sharp rise in the number of artists using vaguely Western words (or even Japanese words written in Western script) and foreign words written in katakana that coincides almost exactly with the growth of the total market. And now in the current market decline, "foreign" names artists are leveling off, and artists using four-kanji Japanese names are floating back up to the top. To illustrate this, I graphed the rise of artists with foreign names with the number of units moved of the #1 single.

Now, I think this is a bit of a spurious correlation. The adoption of foreign artist names had little direct impact on the music market explosion. However, I think it's clear that "Western" words became more and more popular as Japanese consumer habits went "international" in the very late 80s/early 90s, and production companies moved to foreign-sounding names to cash in on that trend. Also, groups - rather than solo artists - have always tended to take Western names (even back in the 60s with The Tigers or in the 70s with Pink Lady), and the 90s music market showed strong sales from bands and dance units, not just individual singers. Because of the enka tradition, however, there has been a strong, latent market in Japan for solo artists, and the artists in that style will most likely take on Japanese names. As 90s-type artists become less popular and the market shrinks overall, those old-style singers are breaking back into the charts by default.

Overall, the foreign name trend does seem to be in a bit of decline, perhaps because consumers are embracing their own "Japaneseness" or they have less interest in international culture. Johnny's hit groups used to have Japanese names - like 光GENJI or 男闘呼組 or 忍者 - but then in the 90s, they started taking on romanized names like SMAP, KinKi Kids, and V6. Now they're back to things like 嵐, but also NEWS. An equilibrium position?

I'm heading back to America for three weeks on Tuesday to take a small vacation with my family in Western North Carolina and then work a bit on my new album in New York. Hopefully this hurricane Katrina will spare my Florida hometown, which has already gotten two direct hits in the last year. I keep thinking these obvious effects of global warming will batter the Gulf Coast into voting for Democrats in the near future, but rational thinking is not our strong point. These are small towns where newspapers still print letters to the editor from readers convinced that putting fluoride in the water is a Communist plot. I'm not sure Lenin or Stalin ever got so uptight about dental hygiene.

Sometimes I think I get paranoid about Japan, but check out what this way-more-famous blogger says about postal privatization.

I just biked home from Mumbleboy's opening in Higashi Gotanda, which is an area full of enormous gated mansions. Every time I feel like I've found where the "rich people" live in Tokyo, I turn a corner and find another huge neighborhood of posh houses. Where are all the poor people who balance out the Gini Coefficient?

If the Empire really wanted to win the galaxy's hearts and minds, wouldn't they call the "Death Star" something like the "Prosperity Sphere"?

Re: "Creeque Alley." Did Mama Cass really want to go to Swarthmore or was that just the only available rhyme for "sophomore"?

1) Yes, they still make plenty of videos where barefoot girls sing shrill ballads in the great outdoors.

2) No matter whether the video tries to sell the band as a "real" band - complete with two guitars, a bassist, a drummer, multiple rappers - all you can ever hear in the mix of a Jpop song is an early 90s digital synth pad. There's not even a keyboardist in the group, and some Korg monstrosity is just blazing across the chorus.

From watching the career trajectory of these young punk and "hip hop" bands like 175R, Orange Range, Ketsu Meshi, and High and Mighty Color, I can safely state:

As t approaches infinity, all popular Japanese music becomes Jpop.

Try to go subcultural and the jimusho gently steers your ship back on course and overrides every production point with that huge 90s synth sound.

3) Digiki made a great point the other day: why is there no mainstream Japanese hip hop production with experimental or minimal beats? Most everyone assumes that this current wave of thug-life Japanese acts is just "imitating" American hip hop, but if that were true, there should be some Timbaland or Neptunes rip-offs where things sound pleasantly weird. Instead everything sounds like a mix between Groovebox versions of mid 90s West Coast and that omnipresent Jpop digital synth sound. SDP's last batch of singles were legitimately minimal and fresh, but the ideas of the pioneers and innovators do not seem to be trickling down.

4) There's a relatively new Minmi video where she is performing at a summer matsuri (festival) that seems to suggest to her audience, hey, R&B is just a new version of traditional Shinto dance culture. Both politics and art in Japan tend to legitimize themselves through association with or subservience to tradition, rather than attempting to be a better practical application of philosophical ideals.

For example, critics championed punk as being more rock'n'roll than 70s prog rock and disco, and everybody hates it when artists like E.L.O. (or even Paul van Dyk) try to claim that their respective genres are the "New Classical." This goes back to the "soft appeal": you can either sell music as being better or more progressive than what came before, or you can try to prove that it is "just as good" or the "new version" of a past format. This latter approach stabilizes society instead of challenging past structures or offering new directions, and there is something unilaterally unsexy about a stable society.

The latest issue of Time Asia has a rather informative cover story on the place of women in contemporary Japanese society.

They seem to take that morally-corrupt Western position of thinking women deserve equal pay for equal work, and on top of that, the writer does not seem to agree with LDP Assemblyman Nakamura Minoru that women who want equal rights are "uglier" than their peers. (Liberal media bias!)

The more articles you read about Japan's current woes, the more you realize how much the Total Dedication Employment System (or TDES) is to blame for most of the demographic and social problems. Employers created those "family-style" long-hour arrangements to fit the economic structure of the early 20th century (gearing up for high-speed industrial growth), but everything went downhill once companies refused to abandon those practices in the face of a post-industrial capitalist society with different needs and issues. Culture rears its ugly head again: No one can deviate from the past, because they think this managerial style is a "tradition" and not a temporary application to a former social structure - like refusing to stop watching television shows on one of those huge black-and-white TVs with a tiny screen, because it's an essential part of the "culture." Except I don't remember those TVs shrinking the birth rate and exploiting labor.