neomarxisme

Apple fixed my iBook, and it's now 18 gigs lighter. I'm pretty sure I backed up all the important things, but I apparently am still missing exactly 18 gigs of stuff. The computer itself is running faster and slicker than ever before, and pretty soon I will make use of this newfound power in my blog entries. Stay tuned.

The special feature for this month's Cyzo is "Japan's Taboos." That does not entail stories on sticking chopsticks upright into a bowl of rice - they mean "media taboos." Those accustomed to the Fourth Estate and rampant tabloid journalism will be a bit underwhelmed by what is considered "off-limits" in the Japanese mainstream press: critical coverage of the male talent company Johnny's Jimusho, reasons behind recent politician suicides, Glay's management disputes , Yon-sama business intrigue, a CEO getting arrested for amphetamines, the dark side of adult video, and serious flaws in Queen Subtitler Toda Natsuko's work.

None of these stories seem particularly shocking or controversial, but because the Japanese mainstream media is highly dependent upon the dominant companies for access to information and talent, magazines tend to avoid getting their hands dirty in muckraking. Cyzo can get away with it only because they've created an alternate set of marginal advertising sources for their revenue structure, and they have access to a sea of frustrated first-rate journalists with stories to tell on the sly.

Another headline in this "taboo" vein caught my eye last week: The vicious and well-read political tabloid Shukan Shincho reported on a Korean television special looking into the "new religion" Soka Gakkai's leader Ikeda Daisaku. One of the subheads boasted information about, "the 'Dark Sides" of Soka Gakkai that could never be broadcasted in Japan!" Most of the shukanshi magazines work in this manner. They don't break stories as much as write about someone else - foreigners, 2-channel denizens - breaking a story. Now Shincho loves to hate on SG, but lawsuits in the past have made them think twice about opening up another volley. But since a Korean network dished out criticism against the powerful SG leader, the magazine gets to have a field day bashing their least favorite spirtual organization - all while hiding behind a wall of "hey, we're just writing about foreign broadcasting content!"

What is interesting is how both publications sell themselves on an idea of a self-censored Japanese media. The second-tier semi-tabloid press has a market niche of consumers who understand the standard practice of information sanitization, and these readers want to see the naughty bits left on the cutting floor. At the end of the day, Cyzo or Shukan Shincho can get "taboo" info out into the public sphere, but with much lower credibility than the big five media companies could bestow. These topics, while broached, generally stay out in the fringes of discussion. Breaking taboos in this way may be a temporary release, but they hardly put a dent in the fortress. Maybe the Internet will rot the foundations of the current structure, but until then, Japan is still a place - in all seriousness - where the media is not allowed to say bad things about boy bands.

On Saturday night, Japanese avant-comedy theater troupe Tetsuwari (Crack Iron Albatorosskett) finished up a month-long run of daily performances at the Little More Gallery in Harajuku. In tribute, I have translated their skit "Ken-chan's Mandala Reading" into English for your enjoyment.

Ken-chan's Mandala Reading

There's a large piece of paper with a picture of a strange Buddhist mandala. A man - Ken-chan - is standing and holding a pointer. His pupils watch him as he rattles on quickly with a hoarse voice.

I am too old to be chasing stories of teen celebrity coiffure, but I can't help but think there is a deeper meaning to Kimura Kaela's new unbelievably-unadorable punk haircut. At the moment, the buzzed sides have morphed from "heart" red to a sickly shade of lime green. For those unfamiliar with Kimura, she is an up-and-coming cutie-pie singer/actress, who in the past, had shades of alternative-ness, but nothing too shocking for a Seventeen model. This "rebellious" haircut appears to be a promotion stunt for her new harder-edged single "Beat" - a slight musical departure from the perky power pop her team created for her in the past.

Now, I'm supposed to think that this haircut is "meaningless" outside of mere "fashion"-based intentions, but this does seem like a calculated attempt to remove her from the "cute idol" group and place her in "rock chick" territory. Fashion as genre identifier? Yes, but I can't help but believe she is personally interested in shunning the idol-factory industrial mechanisms and going "real" - and this new haircut is her way of showing it. Whether or not I'm being deceived by clever marketing or not, she is using fashion in the Western sense of having the behavior be attached to a particular philosophical disposition. This is clearly a protest, albeit in that cliché "protest" mold. If she grows her hair out and puts out a slick Europop album in the near future, I may be wrong about all of this, but idols don't just up and shave their heads.

I just wanted to mention that I've recently had some writing published in the following magazines:

	Harper's Magazine - September 2005 issue. "Grandma's Little Helper." I did a translation of Yumel doll spoken phrases for the "Readings" section. (Listen to Radio MXUT Vol. 1 for the Yumel in action!) Update: I found an online link to the text of the article.
	Tokion Japan - Issue 49. "Yukari Fresh." An interview with Japanese indie-pop idol Yukari Fresh/Yukari Rotten (Japanese only, with gratuitous Citrus references.) Also, there's a small box of text I wrote describing the Shins for Japanese readers. (Remind me to tell you about the time I saw Spoon play at a "Digital Music" convention afterparty and no one paid attention to such a degree that the lead singer told the crowd, "Hey, we're a really good band.")
	The Fader - Issue 32. "Get That Cheddar!" A description of a yellow acrylic ring that looks like a chunk of cheese. Great.
	OK Fred - Vol. 6 "Digital Listening" An essay on the way iPods have changed the way we listen to music. (Thank you to Ayano Kobayashi for the uncredited translation!) I also am somehow modeling yoga in the issue, which makes no sense, because I've never done yoga. (And what's with our Star Wars haircuts?) I also translated the Takahashi Jun (Undercover) interview for those interested in reading English.
	The Fader - Issue 33. "Takagi Kan" Coming soon! A narrative-style interview piece about hip hop's origins in Japan, extracted from trailblazer and legend Takagi Kan. Also included: an interview with up-and-coming Japanese visual artist, Queen Termite.

Nirvana. "Scentless Apprentice." Why in the world does this song end? No more blaming CD time constraints and commercial considerations - nothing feels phonier than when they stop rocking at the 3:35 mark.

Had there been streaming audio back then, they could have just kept going and going. Forget an album of songs: All we need is Nirvana spending every waking hour, playing this one song live, broadcast directly from the studio with no time delay. Backup guitarists and Kurt vocal clones would be on 24-7 call to provide ample time for bathroom breaks and sleeping. Pat Smear would still get two weeks off a year (as stipulated in the contract), but he would hardly be missed. In fact, a single guitar would sound best anyway. Just fire Pat Smear.

Had they been lucky enough to pull this version of "Scentless Apprentice" off, day after day, year after year, Kurt Cobain would still be alive, and Nirvana would have become the world's most legendary band. One song for four years!? With no breaks? Even in the Greater Western Seaboard Power Outage of 1996? (They had backup generators.) After a while, we all would get sick of that enormous drum beat, but you'd start to wear the whole thing like a blanket. "What's going on with the boys today" ~ (mumbled predictable "bad boy" lyrics, screaming) ~ "Okay, I'll finish this crossword puzzle, then hit the sheets." This was Nirvana's chance to one-up the entire concept of civilization, but they yanked the plug at 3:47. And for all those people who think Kurt shouldn't have wasted his creative talents on one song for half a decade (at least) - do you really think the guy had that many ideas left in him?

Everything's just been downhill ever since "Heart Shaped Box" came on.

This month's The Economist is convinced that Japan is going to be A.O.K. after all. Why? Well, after fifteen years of sluggish, incremental reforms, the economy has to be back on track, right? Right? While I was intrigued with the possibility that my long-term language investments would maybe pay off financially in the future, I walked away from the article a little skeptical about the writer's analysis. The arguments only differ slightly from the outlook in this year's OECD report on Japan, which essentially said, if Japan increases labor productivity, maybe they can get up to growth rates on par with the rest of the First World.

This Economist article says the same thing - although with greater faith that today's more stable financial base will allow reform to create more substantial increases in productivity. Sounds good, but the Japanese economic planners still show serious hesitation in enacting reforms that challenge the traditional power structure.

The editors also put a spin on the demographic crisis: less people means less inefficient resource allocation. On paper, that sounds possible, but there are too many people still stuck in the system. The population as a whole is not shrinking - there are just no young people. And there will still be no young workers to pay the taxes of their pensioned elders.

This line - "And the strengths that made Japan rich in the 1970s and 1980sgood education, advanced technology and smooth co-ordination within companieswill again come to the fore" - also troubled me, because "education" is used as a monolithic concept. Japan does have an excellent primary and secondary education system for instilling fundamental social values and basic mathematics and literacy. But, these are skills most important for a mass-manufacturing economy, not a niche high-tech information economy. Training for the latter comes from a good university system, which Japan is nowhere close to having. Compared to India, Japan may have greater basic rates of education, but are they pumping out as many world-class, high-tech workers?

I really hate to be the eternal pessimist, but Japan's economic outlook is still contingent upon the government's active reform in various areas. And the neo-liberal implications of these reforms poses a direct threat to the "Japanese" system - in both general social stability and the centralized power structure. No one seems to think that there is a "Japanese" solution to the economic crisis; that is to say, the path to higher growth rates does not require changing some screws, but installing an entirely new piece of machinery. So, the Economist can assume Japan will make the rational changes necessary for resurgence, but judging on past behavior, there is no reason to believe that the last crucial renovations will be swift and forceful.

We are not pantries.

According to this International Herald Tribune article, the Japanese record labels are calling for a 2%-5% tax on portable digital music players, such as, the category-killing American-made iPod. These record companies claim that "the sudden rise of the portable digital players is robbing it of revenue that used to come from the fees on digital recorders," which seems hard to believe since the industry was already in major, major decline before the iPod really caught on in the Japanese market. Also, total CD, cassette, and vinyl sales only make up about 1/4 of all industry profits, and the general decline of the entire industry suggests that consumers have not just stopped buying the physical media but have lost an overall interest in the basic products offered - songs and artists.

But hey, an import quota on the iPod will slow down the market and buy the labels some more stalling time. Deep in these industry wonks' hearts, they hope and pray that Japanese consumers will reject digital files and go return to a CD lifestyle sometime in the near future. Oh, how we miss the glorious 90s!

Watching Japanese television the other day, my girlfriend astutely noted, "This hanryu boom (Korean boom) is bad for Japan, because it is inherently regressive." This trend is hardly concerned with Korea's exciting and innovative film scene: rather, older Japanese female viewers have fallen in love with Korean dramas, because they resemble the "pure love" storylines of old Japanese television shows. And now domestic drama producers have reached back into traditional molds to match what they perceive to be the new "least objectionable" consumer tastes.

Say what you want about Japan in the 90s, but mainstream Japanese culture in the 70s and 80s was not particularly diverse nor innovative, and if Japanese culture en masse looks to Asian television markets, and therefore, recycled versions of its own outdated formats, there's nothing particularly progressive going on. Japan could learn a lot from Hong Kong cinema, for example, but from Cantopop? ("Hey, it sounds like old Jpop!")

The other sad implication of hanryu is that Japanese young people have so little going on that the most newsworthy consumer boom is that of conservative mothers. I spent most of the last decade being enamored with Japan's escalating subcultural sophistication, so I never liked the delinquency of ganguro. But at least that trend felt new and vital. This Korean boom isn't even a growth of international cultural understanding - just narcissistic nostalgia from the only generation that remembers how to properly participate in the consumption process.

Some notes on these "tomorrow I have a mid-research thesis presentation" charts:

1) In the context of my research, "TV Appearances" means a song performance on Music Station, Utaban, and Hey! Hey! Hey Music Terebi.
2) Hikaru Genji takes the top spot on chart 1 even though their career essentially finished in 1994.
3) Interesting that the artists who get the most hit singles and albums over time tend to write their own music (with the exception of Smap and Hamasaki Ayumi). Japanese "love" idols only to a certain degree, it seems.

Yesterday, I went to the farthest reaches of Chiba for a semi-underground (read: no website) music festival in a creepy abandoned concrete hospital, and today, I'm off to an onsen in Ikaho, Gunma for some relaxation. I'll back jetting back to Tokyo tomorrow morning to attend class at 1, but then after that: blog posts.

Friday night: Shugo Tokumaru with full band. Just by himself, he's able to make an entertaining amount of extremely-precise, endlessly-overdubbed guitar loop noise with his Telecaster and somehow use the ensuing feedback work as an seamless introduction to his otherwise plain, folky songs. But with the band, he was able to effortless recreate the album tracks in amazing detail. "Mizu Kagami" went off especially well - even with all the sudden structural changes.

The four-piece Nhhmbase (pronounced: "nehanbase") opened up for Shugo. I generally hate 90% of the opening bands I see, but I had been looking forward to these guys after hearing their very lo-fi demo. Like almost every other single indie band in Japan (and perhaps, the world), Nhhmbase play only in strange time signatures. Sometimes they'd hit 6/8 and you could actually follow along with the rhythm, but the drummer tended to do weird off-kilter patterns on top of the song already being in 9/8 or whatever. so you're spending the whole gig counting, not listening. I tend to like the math assignment though, and I also like the singer's voice, which glides up into perfectly-pitched falsetto for crucial punch. If the band would just shut up between songs, they'd be gold.

(For the record: bands will find it in their favor to not spend any stage time announcing their next gig, because 1) it's obnoxious and repetitive and boring 2) no one cares about future gigs 3) and if they did care, they'd just look it up themselves. There should be a point system for stage banter: play 10 shows and receive 1 minute of "MC" time. We can work to eliminate Commercial Stage Banter by 2006!)

Low Life! I mean - Raw Life (ローライフ？）. On Saturday, I went all the way out to Kimitsu, Chiba, which is a lifetime removed from Tokyo to start with, only to have to walk another 30 minutes by foot to the venue, an abandoned concrete hospital. (I'll exclude the story of getting lost and having to bushwhack through an overgrown highway median.) First floor: doner kebab, dance music! Second floor: curry, t-shirts on sale (stereotypically crowded within the first 25 minutes of the venue opening), two techno DJs!, trancy VJing! Third floor: the muffled bass thump of the second floor, loud bands. This Aqua Marine Studio was all concerete, no lights, no ventilation, no nothing. Maybe ghosts.

Higurashi Aiha (ex-Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her) showed up at the end of DJ Kodomo and DJ Otona (Moog from Buffalo Daughter)'s set and played two songs solo, which was a pleasant, although baffling surprise. On the last song, her guitar string popped and she ended up singing the rest a capella - from a lyric sheet. Then the three preppie girls from Nisennen Mondai (にせんねんもんだい - the Japanese equivalent of "Y2K," only acceptable because it's post 2000 and they write it in hiragana) came on stage B and made long rounds of shapeless, colorless inpenetrable, techno-rhythmic noise with just drums, guitar, and bass. I went with earplugs for the day, which tend to cut out all the midrange and therefore strip all meaning from this kind of noise rock. Can someone fill me on the frequencies I missed?

What a crazy accident that this sleek, white cell phone's product number contains the letters i-P-0-D!

On October 14, 2004, I posted this entry, thus making my entry into the "blog" universe. After making the effort to write something every single day, my mt.cgi file weighs 4.5 mb! Okay, that does not sound very impressive. Let's try again: all the essays and comments on neomarxisme add up to 741,437 words. That's 2,455 pages of text if written in Courier 12. Nice work everyone. Our vitriol and bile will be stored on the Internet forever.

This time last year, I was reading lots of books and wanted a place to apply that knowledge to my observations of Japanese pop culture. The blog provided a perfect place to throw out those ideas and have them critiqued and reshaped into more appropriate forms. Despite all the bopping and bashing, the debate process has been a pleasant experience overall. On a professional level, however, I'm not sure the effects are so clear. Blogging is supposed to help you develop a "name" for yourself, but all my freelance work comes from personal links to other magazine editors with high social capital. (Traditional networking: 1, Internet: 0) All this intensive writing probably improves my prose to some extent, but the more I write, the more I get disappointed by my repetition of certain sentence structures. And moreover, I've always felt the blog to be a horrible detraction from my music: who would want to listen to a song by a guy who uses the word "aggregate" on a frequent basis?

From the beginning, I've said that I have no missionary goal about this blog: Even though I discuss Japan's problems in great detail, I am not personally fighting for the adoption of my solutions. I like Japan, and I'd like to see Japan work to protect the areas in which it excels. So far, my only goal has been to increase foreign understanding of Japanese culture - warts and all. I'm not sure I've succeeded here either, but I do feel that I've been able to derail the usual conversation into interesting, foggy areas like organized crime involvement in art, music, and fashion; institutionalized payola; the decline of mass subcultural sophistication; qualms about "Gross National Cool"; and the social meaning of bear posters.

But, my voice was too loud - some of you have confused me with an actual authority - and now I can't just throw stones from the outside. I don't like wearing these pessimistic clothes all the time, and I've been unsuccessful so far inventing faux optimistic ideas for the sake of balance. Last fall, I was happy to spend time crafting essays, but now I am too busy with the last stages of actual research and album production to really have the time. I have less fun doing the blog, and I'm sure all of you have less fun reading it. I don't want to pull something as dramatic as a hiatus, but I warn you that the low-quality and muted rhetoric will probably continue until January. Next year, we'll see if I really have anything left to say.

Thank you to all the readers and all the commenters. I've never understood how several thousand people could be interested in the very specific content of this site, but then I realized that they're all probably just skimming.

According to this Yahoo Japan news item, Kodansha has ceased production of shojo manga by artist Suetsugu Yuki because the work contained plagiarized scenes from several of Inoue Takehiko's comics. The rabble-rousers over at 2-Ch are credited with bringing attention to these illicit borrowings.

In the past, some have argued that Japanese culture has no inherent concept of "intellectual property" or cultural thievery, but this new development shows that companies at least behave as if artistic theft results in a loss of reputation. In the past, there was no outlet for critical discussion of these types of commercial transgressions; manga fans a mere decade ago had little to no resource for lodging audible public complaints about sloppy pakuri - especially with the mass media (most of them manga publishers themselves) rarely picking this kind of fight. In theory, businesses in Japan are supposed to be self-regulating, but now with the right kind of freedom and access to information outlets, fans can take over this correction function and do it more efficiently.

Whatever the case, these stories and ever-stricter sampling laws make it hard to believe that artistic theft is not publicly understood as a "bad" thing in Japan. And once again, 2-ch steers the media dialogue into new directions.

About two months ago, our favorite Japanese consumer-lifestyle magazine Relax did a special feature on "peace," which our favorite Scottish musician/critic Momus called in a recent comment on this blog, "quite admirable." I agree there is something positive about dedicating space to world peace and anti-nuclear proliferation instead of limited-edition sneakers, but the issue begs the question: can "peace" be a lifestyle choice devoid of political underpinnings?

As this Relax hit the stands, Japanese voters were gearing up to go to the polls, and while postal privatization was the primary issue, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party has recently been showing explicit interest in altering the "Peace Constitution" to remilitarize Japan, antagonizing China and Korea with visits to the nationalistic Yasukuni shrine, and continuing the use of Japanese Self-Defense Forces in the American Iraq War. So, voting against the LDP would be an extremely easy way to "give peace a chance."

Relax, of course, cannot bring politics into the "Peace" issue. For fear of upsetting advertisers, readers, and the Magazine House higher-ups, the concept must remain a form of laidback consumer lifestyle and not an anti-social or political rally point. I salute "Relax" for not doing an issue on "Yasukuni O-share" but I wonder how much credit one deserves for wearing a black-and-white "WAR IS OVER if you want it" t-shirt one month and then forgetting to actually "want it" at the next election. At this moment in time, Japan is closer to rearming than it has ever been, and motivated youth voters could actually use the democratic outlets available to them to send a message to the Neo-Nationalists.

Perhaps, we cannot expect the media to really work towards peace, and they may be limited in action to collecting fashionable artists to do exclusive pieces on the subject. "Rock the Vote" and other Americna youth-oriented political programs were hardly enough to bring down the warmongering Bush presidency. I very much doubt, however, that a German magazine would dedicate an issue to "Pacifism" and not mention the War (WWII or Iraq) nor political action. I have no doubt that a majority of the Japanese public wants to maintain a peaceful existence, but I fear that just wearing the concept like a warm scarf is not enough to change the minds of those who hold the ultimate decision-making power.

I guess what's good about having a real job is that you do eight hours of data entry and then can come home and do something else. Being a last semester student means I do something else all day and then come home to do eight hours of data entry. This number-crunching will all pay off shortly, however, when I start up the regression analysis! (I don't know what this means, but it will somehow scientifically prove my claims - as long as the r-square is large enough!) Or maybe I'm thinking t-value.

To be honest, I'm a data entry speed demon, but no good at statistics. This is a great family shame, seeing that my dad is a full-out professor of math-stats. So most of what I know about multivariate statistical analysis is what I've overheard in class - in Japanese. I learned "回帰分析" first and the English term later. Whatever the case, my professor introduces me to marketing professors from other schools as a "解釈主義" guy ("interpretivist"), because my whole research strategy does not involve processing surveys to match up with explanatory path diagrams. I'm kind of the black sheep of my grad student clan.

But to make matters worse, I'm taking another class from a rival professor who believes that inductive statistical analysis will not lead us all to the ultimate academic goal - theory! He wants us to go deductive (演繹法), which sounds great on paper, but has little to do with the pseudo-field of marketing. Reading Hayek or Hempel is hard enough but this whole "philosophy of science" genre has almost no relation to the practical business field at hand. It's like we're trying to learn whale industry management from reading Moby Dick. No, that makes it sound exciting.

Yesterday I attended Tokion Magazine's sold-out Creativity Now Conference, again at the La Foret museum in Harajuku. I cannot provide a play-by-play report like last year, but I want to mention a couple points about social class and Japanese culture brought up in the discussion.

* In the panel about "otome" women's culture, photographer and original Egg publisher Yonehara Yasumasa talked about discovering the gyaru/ko-gyaru movement in the early 90s. These were the days before loose socks and fake tans, when roaming gangs of rich kids called "chiimaa" ("teamer") ruled the streets of Shibuya, rolling-and-patrolling in their cars, stopping only to pick fights with rival groups infringing on their territory. The first kogyaru were chiimaa girlfriends, and like their beaux, were from elite private schools and wealthy families. These young women would often engage in "enjo kosai," which at the time was a method of "oyaji ijime" (picking on older men.) For example, they would charge salarymen ten to twenty thousand yen to sit at tea together - for exactly 1 minute.

But when the news weeklies started to pick up on the story in the mid-90s, the editors changed the content and meaning of enjo kosai to be more titillating and more easily comprehensible. Suddenly, the word denoted a new form of prostitution, instead of the "compensated dating" that was actually happening. As the media message spread out to the countryside, working class girls rushed into Tokyo to take part in this new movement - which some of them understood to involve a fashionable form of sex-for-cash. At the same time, older business men flocked into Shibuya to test out the waters themselves, thus creating the sensational "enjokosai crisis" of the late 90s.

I asked Yonehara later about the class issues at work here, and he said, "At first Egg was about the rich girls that working class yankii girls look up to, but now the magazine is dedicated to the working class girls themselves." Does the lower socioeconomic background of the subculture's participants help explain the group's different code of sexual morality? "The Japanese tend to adopt every part of a trend, so if 'free sex' is in, everyone thinks, 'OK, free sex it is.'" Like many Japanese social commentators in their late 30s/early 40s, Yonehara is somewhat exaggerating the thoughtlessness of Japanese youth consumer behavior, but I think the gyaru story does follow the traditional pattern of "top-down" cultural transmission. What started as an urban upper-class delinquent trend attracted a mass following of rural lower-middle class girls; enjo kosai started as a way to torment pathetic salarymen and ended up as a financial means to pay for an expensive designer-handbag lifestyle.

* In the last panel on "Tokyo System Crash," MC and visual art genius Ukawa Naohiro discussed Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro's recent crackdown on dance clubs. Apparently, they no longer issue permits for "discos" in the city, and even with the permit, clubs are supposed to shut down at 1 am. So, most venues have been registering as "restaurants," and when the floor managers get word about plain-clothes cops knocking on the front door, they pull out the required number of tables and turn on the required number of lights. At one party, the plain clothes cops requested Ukawa and Moodman shut it down at 1 - an act which the promoters argued would unleash hundreds of young people out on the streets, unable to get home by train. So, they asked if telling ghost stories was okay. The cops said yes and they spent the next half-hour telling ghost stories to a confused audience, increasing the volume of the dance beats in the background little by little until the party was back on track.

Ukawa blamed the problem on Ishihara's privileged background: "As a member of the Taiyou-zoku (50s rich-kid delinquents), his idea of fun is going to house parties at friends' summer homes and surfing. He doesn't understand our working class ideas of dancing." Ishihara's new mission is to open a fancy casino in Odaiba, which is again, a leisure activity primarily targeted for the wealthy. Rumors seem to suggest that the LDP is taking the issue very seriously, as a casino would attract foreign jetsetters and funnel their pocket money into the tax pool. So, in a couple of years when you're sick of tech house, you can go blow your cash on keno.

Still riding high from their electoral landslide last month, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party is proposing to raise the national consumption tax from 5% to 10-15% in order to pay for rising welfare and pension costs. The Communists had been warning about us about this Trojan Horse scheme - first postal reform, then a hike on regressive taxes - but we ignored them (mostly because their leader Shii Kazuo looks just like Rick Moranis.)

Despite the deflation of recent years, Japan's consumer prices are still some of the highest in the world, and while the fabled $6 cup of coffee is currently facing extinction, eating fruit on a frequent basis continues to require an upper middle-class income. I complained to some older, richer friends the other day that you can't find meals under 500 yen in Japan, and they were befuddled as to how I was eating for less than 1000. I survive this student life only through constantly scraping the bottom of the culinary barrel - homemade hayashi rice, Matsuya chicken curry (390!), multiple McDs 100 yen cheeseburgers, Saizeriya pastas - and I still end up spending 2x every month what I did in New York City. Less than 50,000 yen a month on food, and I feel like I've made it under budget.

Why is Japan so expensive? Some of it comes from the fact that so much has to be imported to this rocky island devoid of natural resources. But, mostly, the high prices are a built-in welfare system. The government protects inefficiencies in the economic structure through protectionist policies as a way to increase employment. Marui Young doesn't "need" such a massive wrapping staff, but they'll take on the extra people as long as you are willing to pay extra for it. Efficient labor and distribution systems lead to lower prices but also less need for human inputs (in the short run.)

I've always thought this idea of placing welfare inside of private business was an ingenious way to keep incomes equally distributed and labor motivation high. But now that Japan's high growth days are over, the high prices suppress consumer demand and kill economic momentum. And to add a 15% tax on top of these built-in "private taxes" would make Japan terribly cost-oppressive and kill off the remaining vitality of the consumerist life. Clerical workers may still save up to buy that designer handbag, but they'll be eating in Yoshinoya next to me for an extra month to make up for it.

Why not use payroll taxes or income taxes to solve this problem? Why use a regressive tax that primarily punishes the lower classes? Koizumi promises to avoid the consumption tax hike during his term (too busy with antagonizing the Pacific region with Yasukuni visits, no doubt), but the ball is bouncing in that direction. Goodbye, the $6 Cafe Renoir cup of coffee! Welcome, the $6 homemade cup of coffee!

Last week I found myself watching a rental videotape of Amazing Stories - Steven Spielberg's mid-80s "cinematic" television show. I remember it being "highly acclaimed" during its short life, but perhaps my memories are malformed from a limited seven year-old comprehension; because like with any show from the 80s, watching it today is ultimately disappointing. No matter how innovative they were at the time, the scripts now read as long tracks of cliché plot points and over-traveled emotional modes.

In his book Everything Bad is Good For You, writer Steven Johnson has an explanation for why 80s shows have aged so poorly: pop culture's moral and content standards may have deteriorated but the structural complexity and cognitive requirements have greatly increased. So, viewers today are trained to expect less narrative hand-holding and more sophisticated, multi-tiered storytelling. We therefore get easily bored with the slow pace and obviousness of past television. Johnson's book may be the most optimistic thing I've read in years, and empirical evidence certainly matches with his ideas. After watching the entire first season of Arrested Development, episodes from the "high-paced" sixth season of The Simpsons feel rather slow.

Why has television become more complex? Johnson fingers the rise of repeat viewing: thanks to the VCR, DVD player, and syndication, we end up watching specific episodes more than once. This media environment creates a need for programming that can hold up to multiple viewings - a condition most easily satisfied through greater narrative complexity and the intentional withholding of vital information. To use one of Johnson's example, characters from The West Wing refer cryptically to events in early episodes that fully break into the storyline months later. Few could argue that all American television is super-intelligent, and the book's main examples mostly started as "boutique" shows targeted at highly-educated audiences. But difficulty does not automatically mean "elitist entertainment" as ER and Seinfeld's mainstream successes have shown.

Things are not so rosy, however, when thinking about Japanese television in Johnson's framework. Japanese TV is mainly variety shows, featuring panels of celebrities commenting on topics or pre-recorded segments. Drama series are short-term productions, and all television shows are filmed with video. (Think the visual quality of Latin American soap operas.) Despite the fact that the Japanese audience endures more commercials every year than TV viewers in other nations, production value is very low. (Important to remember here that American shows don't really make money until sold into syndication or international markets). The high dependence upon "idols" for the dramas' starring roles creates a palpable lack of acting talent. Reality shows tend to eschew the social psychology and game theory of Survivor or The Apprentice and concentrate on watching people (and kangaroos) eat things. Most science fiction anime certainly include complex plots, but I do not think I would be offbase to say that the networks' strategy is to create what Johnson calls "Least Objectionable Programming." TV is still family-oriented, blunt targeted towards a mass market.

Has Japanese TV gotten more complex over the last two decades? I would imagine that general show pacing has increased and there have been some individual programs with engaging structural innovations, but almost nothing on Japanese television requires the cognitive work of a show like 24. Why has "difficult" television not hit Japan? First of all, traditional employment patterns restrict the nation's most highly educated citizens from being home during "Golden Time," and therefore, Japanese TV does not make shows that cater to the most sophisticated market's more complicated entertainment needs. Television is a media mostly targeted to children, the retired, homemakers, and female clerical workers, and networks err on the side of understimulation for these audiences. Also, the lack of cable in Japan limits the amount of syndication, and subsequently, the culture of repeat viewing. Like in America years ago, shows need to make total sense upon the initial airing.

So, are the Japanese losing out on the intelligence-boosting pop culture described by Johnson? I would doubt it. The Japanese are absorbed by the two other media mentioned by Johnson - games and the Internet - which both require much more cognitive ability than earlier entertainment forms. Television is not the whole world, but it will be interesting to see if cultural complexity increases are a global or just a local phenomenon.

Sorry I have to be the one to say it, but the matzo ball soup selection in this city is terrible. And I doubt there exists a single brisket in the whole Tokyo-ku, which somewhat explains why an authentic reuben sandwich costs upwards of 2600 yen.

And when's the last time you've seen a Japanese person drinking Cel-ray Tonic? Dismantle this city and start over...