neomarxisme

How did this blog go from being a very active, daily source of opinion and debate about the Japanese pop culture industrial complex to a totally abandoned shell of a website with the only the occasional dry satire about imaginary musical phenomena? Two words for you: Master's thesis. The clock is ticking and I've got about one month to finish what is likely to become a one hundred page monstrosity of repetitive prose about market structure and innovation bracketed with sociological theory, suspect interpretive approaches, t-tests, regressions, and tacked on marketing language to somehow relate it all back to "business" - the last task being as simple as tying up a polar bear with cheap twine.

The good news is that I've done most of the first chapters and have most of the data ready to put in neat charts, so I'm not panicked quite yet, but today the teach' threw me a presentation for next week on "Beyond Reductionism: Four Models Relating Micro and Macro Levels" from the dreaded The Micro-Macro Link, muttering something vaguely about that chapter not being in the translated edition and me being the only English speaker in the class. Last year, I moaned about my marketing curriculum not dedicating enough to (economic) sociology, and now every single class period seems to be all about Durkheim and Weber's methodological quibbles for no apparent rhyme or reason. Graduate students, be careful what you wish for!

On a physical health level, I pulled out my right shoulder from carrying around all my records from the house to class to Kichijoji for the Kiiiiiii release party. If only playing Jackey Yoshikawa and his Blue Comets off an iPod were as cool as old vinyl! They need to make mp3s much heavier and more fragile in order to up the cultural cachet.

Back to the point: this lack of web activity is deeply depressing. I really like my blog and I'm very sad to log on in the mornings and have nobody chiding me for being ethnocentric. I'll try to do more next week, but my mind is elsewhere at the moment. I realized the other day, I'm just not being stimulated into writing about Japan anymore, but I blame the thesis: the intellectual fatigue dulls my observational powers. Working on an extended academic project is fun, but I'm a multiple-project type of person and I start to go crazy when one specific activity wrestles all the others off the mat. There's my new album, Radio MXUT Vol. 2, questions of my employment, and all sorts of other critical issues to deal with come January 11th. I beg of you all to allow me this next month of hiding, and I promise to return to my post with new, improved vigor, resolve, and infuriating ethnocentricity!

Do yourself a favor and watch the making of USA for Africa's "We Are the World." Bob Dylan is just not having it. But neither would you if you had to pretend like Huey Lewis was your artistic equal.

I live in a peaceful, nouveau riche neighborhood on the border between Setagaya-ku and Meguro-ku, where the magnanimous demolition teams swoop in once a week to level another house with traditional architecture and replace it with two luxurious three-story condos measuring fifteen feet across. Lately, the construction state offered a handful of wealthy people a new place to call home in this Faux-Form-Follows-Function reinforced concrete Modernist daydream. The tenants next door were not so happy and raised this handmade banner upon their second-floor balcony. It reads: 「近隣の住環境を奪うな！隣家との間５０cm余り？風も通らぬ圧迫建設！！」In English: "Don't take away our neighborhood living environment! You can't leave even 50 cm between the houses? Such oppressive construction that even the wind can't pass through!"

One should not expect very much lebensraum in Tokyo, but I understand the neighbor's emotions: the sons and daughters of local merchants are selling off the old Showa houses and selling the land to real estate developers with an eye on the 40 year-old business star with the yellow Porche and high-water pants. But why such the abject desperation for land-grabbing in late 2005? This isn't the Bubble. Just give the neighbors half a goddamn meter and get a move on to destroying some more antique residences in Yutenji. Think of all the poor concrete just waiting for a chance to be used!

Hamasaki Ayumi engaged to a younger, foreign designer with an office in Roppongi Hills, who happens to be the son of graffiti legend Futura 2000? Even fiction doesn't get this fantastical.

Update: Wow. I apologize to the wedding party in advance for the high levels of ridiculousness this article inspired over at Momus' Click Opera. Like many others here in Tokyo, I found the matching of Ms. J-pop Hamasaki and Mr. Futura's Son to be a very unexpected event, and certainly questions of race or "Blackness" never popped into my mind. Meanwhile in Berlin...

The cover story in the new issue of Newsweek Japan (which I am pretty sure is an independent company from Newsweek in the U.S.) focuses on 「日本を誤訳するアメリカ」- "The America that Mistranslates Japan." The editors ask over a picture of 「SAYURI」（aka Memoirs of a Geisha) - why does America think Japan is all geisha, samurai, and Mt. Fuji? According to what I gleaned off the subway ad, they are outraged that the movie casts a Chinese woman to speak English lines for a story based in Japan. Hollywood is to blame, they say, for the never-ending prejudice against the Japanese nation.

While I've yet to read the full article, I find this topic very interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, OF COURSE Hollywood does not provide accurate depictions of social, historical, and cultural phenomena, but instead bends all ideas through a prism of entertainment and familiarity. Newsweek Japan may be certainly right to question the effects of American films in transmitting the core messages ultimately responsible for cultural understanding, but they'll have to go to the back of a very long line to cast their grievances.

I am also surprised about the timing of this article, seeing that right now, the world shares more understanding of contemporary Japanese society than ever before. As terribly inane Lost in Translation may be, millions of Western viewers saw a film featuring karaoke boxes, the editor for Dune, Hiromix, Fujiwara Hiroshi, and a Happy End song. Puffy Amiyumi are on American TV daily. Nigo sits behind Jay-Z at the MTV Music Awards. Thousands of kids make fan art to Katamari Damashii. In the last five to ten years, Japan for the first time has become something other than geisha and "Fuji-yama" for legions of young people.

Americans may find comfort in Japanese Orientalism - hot baths, sushi, katana - but guess what? So do the Japanese. Consider for a moment the possibility that Japanese society's constant messages of self-Orientalization may have left the internal media zone and traveled outwards to the rest of the world. A pleasant voice calls out: Come to Kyoto, salaryman! Hang out in the Gion with real maiko! A thousand Hollywood writers at a thousand typewriters could never come up with anything more Oriental than Japanese advertising for domestic travel. I suspect both Western and Eastern audiences enjoy these Oriental images of Mt. Fuji woodblock prints, onsen, and kaiseki cuisine - the big difference being that the modern Japanese users of these symbols get them "right" while Americans are often sloppy, uninformed, and implicitly racist. The images themselves, however, are not fundamentally discriminatory, but are used on a frequent basis precisely because they convey beauty to a large number of people all around the world.

I suspect that Memoirs of a Geisha most likely deserves the wrath of the Japanese press, but is right now really the low point of cultural understanding between Hollywood and Japan? Remember when Japanese businessmen were murdering women and using high-tech devices to cover up the video evidence only to be foiled by Wesley Snipes? ("Always bet on black") Americans in 2005 may think Japan is samurai and kimono, but c'mon, do you really think they don't remember that the guy who can eat the most hot dogs in twelve minutes is Japanese?

Stop what you're doing, people, and listen up. Remember what I wrote about Japanese pop megastar Hamasaki Ayumi being engaged to young, non-African American Brooklynite Timothy Something Something? Well, according to this Yahoo Japan Entertainment News article things may not be as crystal clear as the rumors first suggested. Turns out: the rumors may just be rumors. And what's more, there are all sorts of rumors about those rumors.

What's going on here?

* Last week, the Shukan Bunshun reported the scoop and essentially none of the wideshows, sports papers, or entertainment gossip rags picked up the story - despite the fact that this is the biggest deal since Seiko and Jeff.

* The Bunshun writes that Tim is half "Irish-American" and half-French, by the way.

* Turns out this whole story starts at Tiffany's where a clerk overheard our young foreign protagonist say that he was buying an engagement ring for the "Japanese Britney Spears." (He may have said other things, but the constant repetition of that Deep Blue Something song in the background drowned everything out.)

* But get this: her management company (Avex) "furiously" denies that conversation ever took place. And management companies never ever lie to protect the image of their clients! But they went as far as to create (or find, perhaps) proof that the conversation never took place, which led all the other media sources to (totally unsurprisingly) back off from the story for fear of losing access to other Avex talent and working knees.

* Now Bunshun writes that Avex refused to condone the wedding as Hamasaki is essentially the sole source of profit for the company.

* The rest of the article basically insinuates that Timothy is gay. (The Japanese media is a harsh bunch if they're not in your pocket. And, they really need her to get back together with the guy from Tokio - or else.)

* Oh, only if the outcome of this story actually mattered!

The other day I had the chance to interview an actual member of the Japanese television network music-media complex, and that person confirmed all the terrible things I had only once believed were part of my comfortably paranoid fantasy of how the Japanese entertainment world works. So in this new spirit of assuming the worst and being right, let us re-examine the Hamasaki Ayumi engagement saga.

1) Johnny's Jimusho has secret deals with the other big jimushos to create media stories that Johnny's male idols are dating the top ranked female idols. At almost every time, the biggest selling female idol "coincidentally" happens to be dating one of Johnny's stars. But they're not really dating, and that's why some of the ladies end up marrying other people out of the blue to everyone's great surprise. Clearly, Avex had made the same deal with JJ, setting up Hamasaki with Nagase from TOKIO for show purposes.

2) So, huge egg on everyone's face when Shukan Bunshun comes out with the news that Hamasaki Ayumi is actually dating a non-geinoujin American - not Nagase - and the engagement suggests that the Nagase has been off for a while, even though the media was pretending it was on.

3) Avex freaks out because a) Johnny's sees this as Avex's problem to be cleaned up and b) they don't want this development to affect the sales of their biggest artist.

4) Immediately, Avex goes into disinformation mode, warns all the networks and papers not to report the engagement story, an order to which the media of course obliges.

5) Finally, when the story "breaks" in the mainstream media, it comes out with various anonymous sources claiming that Hamasaki is well-known to visit gay bars, and perhaps, Tim is just one of her friends from that world * wink, wink *. The engagement is off, Bunshun invented the Tiffany's story, he is really gay. Problem solved. Nobody asks follow up questions.

I find it highly possible that the engagement was real and that the structures of the Japanese entertainment scene have again crushed someone's private life. But this world is all about giri vs. ninjou, with the latter being impossible when there's money to be made.

The new issue of Asahi Shimbun's weekly magazine Aera speaks out to its readers: "We support both the upper class and lower classes!"

The headlines:

* Does escaping the lower classes really lead to happiness?

* The happy lower class member's elegant lifestyle. The luxury of "looking forward to eating gyudon" on a 200,000 yen a month salary, and abundant holidays!

* The "Non-Poor" Complex of the Young. They grunt yes when asked about tough experiences at their job interviews. Seminars on how to do poverty and hardship.

* Why are female doctors choosing lower class men for husbands?

* Time management techniques for getting to the upper class world

Did you notice the word missing from this advertisement? "Middle class." In almost every post-industrial country, the population overwhelmingly identifies themselves broadly as "middle class" when asked in surveys, but in Japan this idea that "everyone is on the same socioeconomic level" became a mantra and then an accepted social fact. The war and Occupation's respective destruction and dispersal of wealth certainly made Japan one of the most socioeconomically equal nations on earth, but ever since the 1970s, Japan has lacked more class consciousness than is actually warranted. But without socioeconomic worries to define self, a lot of things perceived in other countries to be off-limits to the working man - high fashion, avant-garde art, fancy things - became mass marketed products, to the benefit of lucky artists and designers all around the world. Marxist ideology is boring anyway - let the lower classes consume like bourgeois dilettantes and create an aesthetically pleasant society! Forget the crushing debt now common to those living above their means! Think of all the positive externalities that we all get to enjoy while standing on their backs!

Lately, I've felt that the Japanese middle class is caving in - which is nothing particularly special to this country, just a symptom of post-manufacturing economic arrangements. But the culture has slowly started to reflect this structural change. No longer is Louis Vuitton a "middle class" product purchased to keep up to a certain social standard, but a way to prove to the world you're not on the wrong side of the fence. You're either rich or poor, and here we have Aera implicitly making that point.

But I find Aera's "support" of the lower classes odd. Freeter are only freeter if their parents were white collar employees; kids from poor families who become convenience store clerks are just "poor." So, this "fun" of being in the lower classes - the holidays! the beef bowls! - is praising a false kind of poverty where kids know their parents can bail them out if the haircutting gig can't pay for the insurance bills. Rest assured, freeter will be authentically poor in about ten to twenty years, but right now, they aren't so much "lower class and lovin' it" as enjoying the ride down the socioeconomic fun slide.

A sane, rational man would note the advantages of both sides and eureka! create high level jobs that guarantee a certain degree of self-determination and ample free time. But jobs in Japan are not practical actions required to run a society, but symbolic actions for demonstrating degree of effort and dedication. I mean, do you understand the utter immorality of actually taking off your two weeks of vacation a year? So, you're either in the office for life or happily eating gyudon. Either/or. But if everyone in this country is such a groupist bent on total sacrifice to a higher order, why would "休暇もたっぷり" sound good in the first place? Shouldn't slaving away to the system be the ultimate hedonic experience?

Page 100!

As of today, my thesis looks like this:

I know what you're thinking: you're too wussy to put the whole thing in Webdings?? Here's the deal: there's this one professor at my university who can read Zapf Dingbats like it was Proto-Akkadian, and I'd like him to be one of my graders (he was supposedly spurned at an early age by a well-known entertainment management company - we'll call them "Donny's Dimusho" - and is sure to be sympathetic to my polemic objective academic arguments). One look at this font, and the wonks in the Gakuji Center are sure to send my thesis his way. A bonus perk: if I get the thesis back from my professor and he tells me it's great, I'll know he never got around to reading it. This font choice makes my ANOVA results incomprehensible.

I'm currently back home in the American South, getting teeth cleaned and boots repaired, and driving around listening to a cassette tape of all my various high school music projects' "best" four-track demos. In my senior year, when I was busy applying for colleges and not learning organic chemistry, my friends and I had the ill-conceived idea of doing a "rock-rap band," which came to be hilariously known as Red Star and Raised Fist. That band name was inspired from a paper I was doing on the Black Panthers (all us liberal American white kids go through a Eyes on the Prize phase), which was quite a big event in my young academic life because I "e-mailed" Panther founder (and BBQ mastermind) Bobby Seale about COINTELPRO being all up in his shit - and he wrote me back 24 hours later with an incredibly detailed response still dripping with that classic Black Power outrage. Talk about primary sources! I became a part of Senior History lore.

So, Red Star and Raised Fist made a three song demo tape for a local music festival, and the cover of the tape reads "International Year of the Comintern X." I can't tell whether I was being serious or not, but note the vaguely Leftist words thrown together in a meaningless way. The greatest part of the story is that our parents found out about the band name and made us change it to something less explicitly liberal. We went with Delmar (named after this ridiculous kid-demagogue at Boys State named Delmar Johnson III, who I once overheard stating that really, really respected Dan Quayle.) Another nice piece of trivia, we decided we wanted a "DJ" that scratched records with the band (this is pre-Linkin Park, mind you) and assumed the only one who knew anything about that sort of thing was resident cool kid, Matt Damhave, later of Imitation of Christ fame. To his credit, we never told him about the fact that our lame audition demo had him falsely listed as a band member and I can vouch that he has never done anything approaching this level of embarassment in his entire life. A day before the festival, we decided that us never having practiced and only having three songs was a good enough reason to cancel our appearance. So ended that.

In one RSRF song, the following stanza appears and settles once and for all that white suburban honor students should not rap:

Whack MCs and DJs go home
You're as lame as Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton and Eazy-E must be rolling in their graves.