neomarxisme

In the early 20th century, soil erosion plagued the American South, but luckily there was a cure-all available from the Far East: kudzu (from the Japanese word for "vine": 葛 or kuzu). Farmers expected the plant to crawl graciously like a high-class ivy, but instead kudzu grew a foot a day until it covered the entire Southern landscape like a layer of green, leafy icing. Curiously, I've never heard anyone talk about whether the introduction of kudzu actually solved the soil erosion problem, but we all now read the vine-landscapes as a quintessential part of Southern culture. Americans, however, are hardly as crafty as the Japanese and have yet to turn kudzu into powdered starch-based food products or clothing (葛布). We just keep the vine as the butt of a cruel landscape joke and a symbol for R.E.M.'s early career.

For all the lamenting, I'm not sure the trees hiding underneath the monster weed are so special and unique to start with; at least kudzu's Imperial expansion gave the Southern United States s a distinctive environmental appearance.

The non-fiction bestseller Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner - a book about using economic methodology to analyze a whole host of social behavior - is currently huge in America, and I finally got a chance to read it over the last week. I was intrigued by the chapter looking at sumo wrestling being fixed. Essentially, the authors make the case that wrestlers who have a 7-7 record going into the last match win a statistically-improbable number of bouts against wrestlers who, regardless of the outcome, will finish the tournament with a winning record.

I'm not a sumo expert, but I've never heard anything about this widespread sumo fixing in Japan. Has anyone out there heard about this from Japanese sources? Is this a commonly known fact outside of the Freakonomics readership? The book claims that two wrestlers were hoping to out the system at a press conference but died mysteriously and simultaneously at the same hospital beforehand. (The police did not investigate for any foul play.)

These patterns of collusion between sumo stables seem to resemble other kinds of collusion in the Japanese media, political, and economic world, but I would wager that fixing "non-scripted" events in Japan can only continue as long as those involved have an informational advantage over the consumers/citizens. Would this practice continue even if sumo fans started receiving open and full information about the topic?

I discovered Puffy on my first trip to Japan in Summer 1996, and the fact that they inexplicably have their own American cartoon on the Cartoon Network has weirded me out for the last year. But now that I'm home and have a chance to watch a bit of the show, I realize that I approached the whole thing from a skewed perspective: Hi! Hi! Puffy Amiyumi has almost nothing to do with Puffy, the Japanese band.

And once you can convince yourself that the "band" is just a cartoon "front" for studio musicians, everything starts making sense in a Neo-Bubblegum dreamworld.

I love The Archies, Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution, and the Banana Splits - all late 60s/early 70s Bubblegum creations where the cartoon stars (or live action chimpanzees) would play groovy, vaguely-psych pop songs. Their output tends to borrow Acid Rock instrumentation and boil the whole era down to its most warm and fuzzy cartoonish tendencies. Sgt. Peppers or Magical Mystery Tour make good color palates for animations to begin with, and the emphasis on melody crossed easily over to children's music. Take the Archies' "Get on the Line" - with that funky bass hook and peace-love-and-understanding lyrics. The only way you can tell it's not a real "counterculture" single is the fact that it came out in '69 - by which time all the "beautiful people" were on heroin or getting killed by Hell's Angels at Altamont.

Puffy's entire musical career starts to make perfect sense when viewed through the perspective of Bubblegum music. Andy Sturmer's excellent songwriting has proved him to be more "Sugar, Sugar" than "All You Need Is Love," and if someone handed me a "Very Best of Puffy Amiyumi" CD as if it were a 70s Japanese Bubblegum compliation, I'd probably stop blogging and start a terribly-unprofitable reissue label. Ami and Yumi make more sense as American cartoon characters than real people, and my least favorite part of the show is when the real Ms. Ohnuki and Ms. Yoshimura pop up on the screen. Who are these Japanese girls?!? The last thing I'd ever want to see is the real Jughead - even if he was an awesome drummer.

When I was in Western North Carolina, we stopped at a farmer's market fruit-stand where the giant watermelon above was all of $5.50. Fresh farm peaches are $.50/pound, compared to $2.00/pound at a NYC farmer's market. Excellent, excellent fruit is dirt cheap in the countryside - especially if you buy directly from the farmers. Land is cheap, and there aren't many overhead costs, nor middlemen butting in and jacking up the prices. One of the reasons cityfolk flee to the country is that everything is much cheaper than urban areas. (And you can get Cheerwine.)

What I find odd about Japan is that everything in the countryside is more expensive than Tokyo. My experience is mostly limited to the regions surrounding Tokyo, but fruit prices, say in Gunma-ken's Kita-Karuizawa (an area that reminds me a lot of Bryson City), are very, very expensive. These cities derive all their income from Tokyo tourists on vacation, willing to spend big bucks on the local meibutsu (famous regional product). So prices are jacked up. But now that the recession limits the extent of domestic tourism, less people can go and pay the high prices, which means the rural areas' dependency puts them in a terrible economic bind.

There may be some secret local markets for rural citizens, but overall, I never feel like there's anywhere in Japan that provides an escape from high prices - no matter how remote. Is there some hidden store where giant watermelon are 600 yen? But maybe - isn't it better to pay high prices and know that there is no migrant labor being exploited?

On a tip from Chris, here is an article about Fuji TV firing a director who was found to fake "reality" segments on the station's morning wide-show. This practice is called "yarase" in Japan, and morning shows have gotten into a lot of trouble throughout the years when caught staging news rather than reporting on actual events. Now I'm not sure why these particular production staff members got the stick, seeing that yarase makes up a bulk of television "reality" segments, but this action of discipline at least suggests that the public understands yarase to be a bad thing. If the Japanese liked their mass media to lie to them, I'm sure they would throw roses at these producers' feet.

In other news, Koizumi's postal privatization pirates won in a landslide. Here comes financial reform! (Yeah!) And then a 10% consumption tax! (Boo!)

Rockefeller Center, NYC.

Bar-B-Que Wagon, Lower East Side, N.Y.C.

From walking around famous NYC bookstore The Strand yesterday, I figured that a U.S. president's quality of tenure could be measured through the number of positive/negative books written about his presidency. This is to say: There are already at least 25 mainstream best-sellers about how George W. Bush is the Worst President Ever, and nary a supportive right-wing tome from a major publisher. Of course, book readers usually show some left-wing tendencies, but I don't remember this many exposes and polemics during the Bush I years. I guess most Republicans don't bother to write a 300 page book on the only reason anyone puts up with the current Administration at this point - why we have to support "our" president. That does the job in one-line slogan form.

"...well, my dad loves Shelley Long and Ted Danson."
"So, he's a Cheers fan?"
"He's never seen Cheers."
"He's NEVER seen Cheers?!? He would love it!"
"That's what I keep telling him!"

Central Park, N.Y.C.

Dear Blog Readers and Marxy Fans,

I am currently winding up my last days of New York vacation and album production. Just hours ago, we recorded me (literally) banging on an upright piano in an unseasonably hot Midtown apartment. Now we're trying to track down kids in Astoria who (literally) sound like a Casio CZ-101. Either that or find the misplaced 9-volt AC adapter.

I will be back in Japan on Wednesday, and ready to start up the blogging again. I may need some time to get over jetlag and discharge the excess salt and sugar out of my body. But soon enough, there will be controversial essays on Japan on which you may comment.

Sincerely,
Marxy

At this point in my life, Newark to Narita is nothing more than a time-stretched commute - some su doku, an Adam Sandler movie with the sound off, The Theory of Innovation (page 1-2), selected articles in the New Yorker - and then I'm there. Plus, I was happy to discover that if you ask for an extra cheeseburger during the mid-flight snack, you just may get it.

I apologize for my lack of Internet presence during the last three weeks. This blog became really bloggy, which is only interesting to the three or four daily readers (out of 3,000) who follow me as a protagonist. Most of you don't care that I visited the volcano in Central Park or that my new album is going to simultaneously have more harpsichord and be "louder." You want debate and drama. And frankly, so do I.

Several months ago, I was in the observation deck of Roppongi Hills, and who happens to walk in? Rudy Giuliani. Downstairs, there was an exhibition of miniature New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai city models, and Giuliani had scrawled on the wall: "I love NY!" (Milton Glaser lawsuit pending.) Tokyo mayor and right-wing loudmouth Ishihara Shintaro countered with: "Tokyo is the best." Much less catchy, but now having traveled to both places in the last 48 hours, I can't help but agree with the logic.

Tokyo is the best in certain categories - like a pretty girl with excellent make-up skills, immaculate fashion sense, and good taste in records. But I don't know if I'd use the word "love" about Ms. Tokyo, nor if anyone else would either. We all "love" NYC, because NYC pretends to "love" us by showing each and every citizen equal apathy. I could live in New York for ten to twelve seconds, and no one would bat an eye if I claimed myself to be a "New Yorker." Meanwhile, I can imagine all the hate mail I'd get if I started publicly announcing myself as a "Tokyoite" - mostly from M*mus ("You are nothing more than an American living in Tokyo!") And I'd agree - because this town, my scholarship, and Japan as a whole seem to operate on the assumption that my ilk and I will go "home" at some point. When you love and they don't love back, it's just called "infatuation" and you're better off leaving these feelings off your t-shirt.

Back when I lived in New York from 2001-03, there were these several thousand stylish twenty-somethings called "hipsters," and by the end of my NYC tenure, everyone understood that the look teetered on self-parody. I had imagined that the media's viciously detailed description of this subculture would quickly eradicate the lifestyle, but after walking around the East Village last Saturday night, I found that every single human being under 35 now dresses exactly like Max Fish circa 2001. (Long-term investment tip: tattoo removal services.)

I'm not sure what the original hipsters are now up to, seeing that the Lower East Side's once-chic grime has been overtaken by fancy bars and restaurants. That electroclash group Avenue D ended up naming themselves after a street that currently more frequented by I-Bankers than heroin addicts. The city gets more upscale on each visit, but macro-style seems to move at a slower pace. Cities take a lot of time to settle into a new fashion sensibility - which may explain why Tokyo is still all DJs and simian t-shirts.

For the last year or so, the Japanese number-puzzles sudoku (数独）have become a cult hit in the English speaking world. Although they appear at first glance to require mathematical skill, these games need only logical reasoning and the ability to count from 1 to 9. I, too, have fallen prey to their deductive seduction, but was a tad embarassed to be openly solving the grids while I flew to Tokyo. That's like being the guy who reads Natsume Soseki's Kokoro on the plane to "get into the spirit."

I returned home, however, ready to tell my Japanese friends that their beloved sudoku hit the bigtime in the West - only to find that no one my age even knew to what the word "sudoku" referred. Nor did they show any sign of recognition upon seeing the actual puzzle. Nor could they tell me where to put the eight in the third box on the top row.

But sudoku is like Cheap Trick: fame and fortune did not follow solely from being "big in Japan." Success on the archipelago provides an effective platform for greater world domination, but you have to adequately rock when given the spotlight. I tend to be cynical about the American misunderstandings of Japanese pop culture, but I like that the West seems to be embracing all sorts of great things long known to the East with a wider and wider heart. Sudoku may be a much bigger deal in America right now than it ever was in Japan, which is a promising sign of things to come. Soon, Americans will all be cutting their fingernails with clippers that catch the ejecting debris and drinking unsweetened ice teas instead of ten packets of sugar dissolved in carbonated water. And if I can start buying Black Black at a corner deli on Delancey St., I'll know that physical location is no longer a restraining factor for lifestyle.

This picture again!

About four months ago, the Japanese street-wear consumer guide for boys - Boon - had a special issue on "Cool T-shirts for Summer." One of the lucky tees to grace the cover was this Dinosaur Jr. tour shirt from the Green Mind era. At the time, I had assumed that the magazine was heralding the return of band t-shirts, or perhaps more specifically, 90s alternative band t-shirts. But this is a consumer culture incapable of extrapolation, and thus, the magazine coverage has led exclusively to an explosion of Dinosaur Jr. t-shirts floating around the city.

On Thursday, I saw two distinct kids wearing the monster shirt (modeled above) within a five minute time span. And judging from the differences in color quality, they are apparently both importing the old American shirts and re-pressing a new batch for the Japanese market. Is there a resurgence of interest in J Mascis, Lou, and Murph now that the t-shirts have the magazine world's authoritarian stamp of approval? Unclear. I've never heard the band referred to in conversation, except for someone once describing a Japanese band to me as, "Cool rock, like Dinosaur Jr. They have a turntablist."

Everyone should know, however, that the coolest t-shirt of all time is the purple cow design, which the website helpfully reminds us, was frequently worn by bass prodigy Krist Novoselic of grunge band Nirvana. I mean, if famous people haven't worn a t-shirt, how could it possibly withstand the social pressure of contemporary society?

A friend told me last night that the Shibuya record store Zest Records has closed up shop. A sign on the door states simply, "We have closed. Thank you," and with no new address provided and the webpage non-responsive, I have to assume that they are permanently out of business. According to Japanese bloggers, they ceased operation in early July. No goodbye party or official announcement - Zest ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

Zest Records began its life as a noise/avant-garde shop, but a new owner named Wakabayashi Yukinori turned it into the central record store of the Shibuya-kei movement. They stocked old bossa nova, 60s groove, mondo, European club-pop, plus all the records from domestic labels Escalator, Crue-L, Trattoria, and Readymade. Both Kaji Hideki and Matsuda Gakuji (Cubismo Grafico, Neil and Iraiza) worked there as store clerks. Zest primarily handled vinyl, which gave it a flavor unique from those CD super-warehouses down the street.

In the mid-90s, the popular "alternative" girl's magazine Olive featured the store in an issue, and suddenly, trendy teens started crowding the little space on the weekends, looking to buy into what they perceived to be the most fashionable sound on the planet. But then vinyl sales peaked in '99. In 2002, I asked Wakabayashi in an article for Tokion how the future of the Japanese analog record market was looking. He answered, "a dark shade of grey" at the time, but evidently, it's finally gone all the way to black.

Shibuya-kei died a lot sooner than vinyl, however, and for the last few years, Zest had tried to reinvent themselves as a dance music store specializing in oshare club music (think Royksopp and Junior Senior instead of tech-house or hip hop.) DMR across the street already had the corner on that market, unfortunately, and a lot of longtime Zest fans felt that the store had sold them out.

When the indie record store Maximum Joy closed down last year, those with interest in international indie pop consoled themselves by saying, hey, at least there's Zest! But now, there's no Zest, and while Jetset and Escalator's Caprice can pick up some of the slack, there is the fundamental issue that this entire unique field of independent music has lost its market. Shibuya-kei is dead and now buried - with the alumni going into left-field experimental music (Kahimi Karie, Cornelius), dance punk (Escalator), or just repeating themselves ad nauseum (Konishi Yasuharu). The Neo Shibuya-kei kids have Oricon chart aspirations, mostly because they saw the original musical stream as stylish domestic pop and not the anti-major label struggle it really was. Most importantly, there are fewer and fewer young consumers who are interested in taking a chance with relatively experimental or innovative musicians, and as Japan veers further towards neo-Nationalistic navel-gazing, that collective impulse to explore diverse historical sounds from abroad has faded.

I am surprised that Zest lasted as long as it did. The heart behind that one-time energetic community has withered away, and we can now only expect the castles to fall one by one.

This L.A. Times article explores the decline of Hollywood star appearances in Japanese commercials. While more self-confidence about Japanese culture and a new interest in Asian celebrities has perhaps softened the demand for Western talent, the Japanese market is no longer overflowing with the wealth to pay mediocre American actors several million dollars for a spot. French soccer players and Chinese actresses are fortunately much cheaper buys and ultimately just as effective.

I do not want to say that an increase in neo-nationalistic navel-gazing stems directly from lower consumer budgets, but if we look back on Japan's more internationally-minded artists and citizens from the 80s and 90s, they were almost all rich kids - like Oyamada Keigo, Ozawa Kenji, Konishi Yasuharu, and Tanaka Yasuo - who showed a curiosity for the world through their spending habits. Japanese youth these days are not so lucky and depend upon their local mass market to entertain them. Or at most, they shallowly explore the English-speaking world's musical acts and films already within the mass distribution channels. Japanese teens love their Nirvana, but not necessarily their Nirvana (UK). In the 90s, consumers all strove to dig deeper, and that frenzy for completing perfect collections of knowledge has calmed down in recent years. The first song on any popular J-Punk or J-Reggae CD will tell you exact what kids these days aren't listening to.

The media seems to think that we should all be amazed by the kanryu boom, but I don't have to remind any of you that this influx of Korean culture has little to do with young people. Married women in their 40s love their Yon-sama, and teenagers go on with their daily lives unaffected.

The international acclaim awarded to Japan's pop culture in the 90s gave Japanese youth consumers more pride about domestic output, but now combined with a lack of money to pull too much from all over the world, everything is pushing towards a more monotonous local orientation. Now I don't think the new lack of Western actors in ads will have an impact on Japanese tastes, but this and the rise of blatantly pro-Japan youth culture are cut from the same cloth. Japan is really into Japan at the moment - partly because they want to be, partly because they have to be.

(A Side Note: While visiting a college campus in America, I ran into a Japanese female professor from prestigious Hitotsubashi University. She told me that her students asked her, "Why would you go to America? Japan is the best! Why would anyone ever leave Japan?")

Fall is in the air! Crisp weather goes nicely with my return to campus life. The professors are making my class load light to provide ample time for research. The data is falling into place, but there remains the steeplechase of academic framing.

In other news, my trusty laptop became ill on Sunday morning and is currently in the sick ward of Apple's new Shibuya retail store. They say it's the logic board, and they offer me free surgery for unknown reasons. Perhaps they bear a heavy conscience for their manufacturing errors.

Being computer-less forces me into a more traditional lifestyle: writing friends with pen and ink, listening to analog records, iChatting with the human voice, Bit Torrenting television shows from the air, responding to aggressive blog comments with telekinesis.

For those interested, Japan's bright and shining musical hope Shugo Tokumaru is performing songs from his new album L.S.T. with a full band at Shibuya O-Nest on Friday, October 14. Rumors have it that he's selling like hotcakes, so get your tickets while you can!

Harvard law and economics scholar J. Mark Ramseyer on researching Japan, from his book Odd Markets in Japanese History (Cambridge University Press, 1996):

After decades of dissertations on the subject, few self-respecting scholars any more start their analysis of Japanese behavior with an analysis of Japanese culture. They do not avoid the subject because they find no cultural differences between Japan and North America. Obviously, they do. Neither do they avoid it because they find the differences unimportant. Obviously, many find them vital.

Instead, modern scholars avoid the culturalist approach because starting with culture too often stops the analysis. Once we look for cultural differences, we can too readily take surface variations as fundamental, and explain artifacts of institutional differences as cultural. As those of us in Japanese studies know but seldom admit, it is precisely because of this easy reference to culture that we are now saddled with so much of what is so bad in Western accounts of Japan - that Japanese never sue because they value harmony, for example, or that there are no takeovers because Japanese see the corporation as a family, and that bureaucrats are powerful because Japanese defer to authority. One can use culture to explain almost anything about Japan, and at one time or another we in the West have done just that (7).

By playing your jetlag right, you have the opportunity to engineer yourself an early wake-up schedule, leading to a longer, more productive day. Working from 8 a.m., however, requires a pause for breakfast, and I spent this beautiful morning in "Gen X" nostalgia mode: eating cereal and watching MTV.

Lately, I've been talking about what I call "The Soft Appeal" - rock bands who make music that pays tribute to technocratic society and respectable middle-class aspirations, instead of presenting an artistic challenge or escape from normality. Today I happened to see the video for the traditional four-piece rock band Grapevine's new single "Hourou Freak" (Wandering Freak), directed by European photographer Anders Edstrom (who incidentally did the photos accompanying the piece about Yura Yura Teikoku I wrote for The Fader). The video is just one shot, without cuts, from a camera mounted on a tripod. The camera films the band in the background playing at a summer family barbecue in the park, only sometimes panning or zooming nonchalantly on various "audience" members. The "quiet Japanese life" angle immediately set off my "Soft Appeal" alarm, but the minimalism seemed to take away from the cheap sentimentalism I was expecting.

I flipped over to Space Shower TV to see a video for another traditional four-piece rock band called Sekai Ichi. This video is the latest work from groovisions, who are usually known for their cartoony colors, clean design, and "superflat" pop images. Oddly, the video just has the band face each other and play the song while the cameras rotate around the action in a non-intrusive, minimalist manner.

Both seem to exaggerate Japanese pop culture's current movement away from an o-share orientation - being fashionable or hyper trend-sensitive - to the love of "pure" flat, straight, and unflashy. While top-selling band Asian Kung-Fu Generation are sufficiently uncharming enough to qualify for excellence in this new criterion, their videos have been "wacky" or punched up with story lines. The two videos I saw this morning tried to emphasize the "real" of the rock'n roll by underplaying the promotional campaign itself - but without being too "raw" to seem threatening.

"Emo" has been a buzz word in Japan for the last several years, and current J-rock owes way more to the subdued, self-obsessed spirit of emo than the bombast and posing of garage rock, dance punk, or hardcore punk. The Strokes may embody the Rockist "back to basics" geist for the West, but these J-bands would see their contemporaries too tied up in the fashion-media complex, with all those "references" to 70s and 80s music and all. As we've seen with Shibuya-kei, referential music is ultimately based in consumerism and trendy oneupsmanship. These Japanese bands want none of that, or of artistic pretension, but only a unfiltered, direct relationship with their fans. Just "honest" songs with "honest" arrangements, no fancy instruments or new ways of playing.

As someone interested in overwrought, high-concept production, I am automatically bored with this entire subset of music, but I do understand why this works right now for Japanese kids. They don't buy things or go places or read about buying things and going places. They sit around with their friends and gab and drink and emote and do not feel particularly bullied by the media to feel bad about their own unambitious idea of leisure. All that idol pop, house music and Afro-mugging is bullshit spectacle. They want guitars that sound like guitars and songs that sound like songs.

And you don't need a high concept or a big budget to please this generation of kids. They just want the rock, thank you.