a post-blog
I'm a bit late getting to this topic, but over on the Japanese internet, there was a huge debate raging about the art director/graphic designer Noda Nagi and her cover for Halcali's album Ongaku no Susume (on right) blatantly ripping-off "fine artist" Aida Makoto work "Aze Michi" (on left). This could be easily passed off as a "tribute" or "homage" to the original, but her detractors see this as one in a whole series of suspicious borrowings. Noda's artwork systematically steals artistic elements from other sources, like Bjork for example, which if done with the right "ironic wink," could be fine, but the bigger question being asked is, is it cool for Noda pick up fat paychecks and numerous awards in the commercial arena for art direction that is heavily based on works by contemporary artists?
The Japanese press, of course, stays silent about these kinds of controversies, even though a Newsweek-type "Separated at Birth?!" piece probably wouldn't hurt anybody. Meanwhile in the virtual sewers of 2-ch, tempers are flared and Noda is called things like "the Rip-Off Genius."
Taking a step out of the ideological battle itself, I'm interested in reappraising the general Japanese philosophy towards artistic imitation and theft (pakuri). From the outside, it certainly appears that Japanese artists have no ethical qualms about blatantly ripping off other works, and the Japanese media also doesn't seem to mind. However, there is enough resistance on the Internet and in maverick magazines like Cyzo to assume that anti-pakuri is actually the more subversive position. Since we've just lived through a couple decades of postmodern art intentionally questioning the notions of creativity and authenticity through copying/sampling, we are quick to confuse Japanese pakuri with the Western ironic version. The simple truth is that many Japanese creators are ripping off other works for their own benefit, hoping they don't get caught, but confident the Japanese media won't expose the truth and the Western media (or original artist) won't discover the copyright violation.
As an "art director/graphic designer" working commercial jobs, Noda's straddling the line between the two approaches, and I personally can't make a final judgment on her pakuri problem without knowing how much she acknowledges her own technique. There are plenty of Japanese, however, who unequivocally think she's building her career on the backs of other fine artists. With the Internet massively liberalizing the space for public comment here in Japan, one can only assume that those engaged in commercial pakuri will soon have to answer for themselves.
 | Jean Snow runs the Internette's most crucial blog about Japanese architecture, design, art, pop culture, and leisure - jeansnow.net. He also writes weekly columns for Tokyo Q on anime and design, frequently contributes articles to the gadget site Gizmodo, and acts as guest editor for the international travel guide Gridskipper. Without Jean's site, we with vested interests in Japan would be drowning in a sea of information overload. |
1) Why is your site called JeansNow.net?
Because Jeans. Are. Now!
2) Are you selling jeans right now?
No, but I really should be.
3) How many orders do you get in a week?
Well, this is theoretical, but I imagine I could get a few thousand [pairs] out the door every week.
4) Levis or Edwin?
Muji!
5) What do you see as the greatest challenge for Japanese consumer society in the coming decade?
The reluctant acceptance of outsiders (non-Japanese) contributing to the creation of trends from within.
Here in Japan, we are celebrating Golden Week - a week of consecutive holidays spanning from today's Showa Day (formerly Greenery Day and before that Green Day) to next Thursday's Children's Day. And in this spirit of revelry, I decided to hold "Golden Interview Week" where I will conduct a five-question interview with a different person every day. So without further ado...
 | B.J. Novak is a writer/comedian living in Hollywood, U.S.A.. He has appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central's Premium Blend, MTV's Punk'd (second season), and is currently a writer and actor on NBC's remake of the British cult classic The Office. (He plays the temp "Ryan.") Novak's blog can be found here ("I majored in partying! My professors knew nothing about partying, and the textbooks were always several years behind the current party trends. Dammit! I should have majored in economics and partied at night!!"). |
1) You're from Hollywood. What's up with Tom Cruise dating Joey from Dawson's Creek?
I am not "from Hollywood," nor is anyone else who works in Hollywood.
2) What about Tom Cruise?
What is this, the Defamer? I thought we'd be talking about the decline of Japanese consumerism or something. Look: everything Tom Cruise does is kind of weird and suspect. I don't know. I'm sorry Katie Holmes is involved in all that but whatever. Good for them. I'm sure they'll look like a great couple to all the 14-year-olds at the MTV Movie Awards. I'd say more but I want to play "Young Bomb Defuser Genius" in MI:3.
3) Who do you rate as the greatest prop comic working today?
Hmmm... There are so many great prop comics today. There's this one guy, I forget his name, who brings a prop index card with original jokes scribbled on it. Then he glances at it from the stage. Genius!
4) The rumor is that you sometimes open up for Bob Saget, who played "Danny Tanner" on Full House. Isn't he like the tamest, most-family oriented comic alive?
For those who don't know, Bob Saget is actually one of the filthiest, most shocking comics working, despite his squeaky-clean TV-Dad image, and it's really a thrill to see if you haven't seen it. He's a really great comic, and it's a thrill to see for the shock value alone. (As you may know, I am opening for Bob Saget at the House of Blues at Mandaly Bay, Las Vegas, on June 4th -- tickets on sale! My publicist told me that neomarxisme.com was the best possible place to plug this show.)
5) Do you see your character "Ryan" from The Office moving from temp status to full contract employee status on the next season?
Right now, my character is in the show just enough so that if they ever announce a "very special episode" in which one of the "main characters" died, it would obviously be my character. I wouldn't expect a trick like that from our show, but I remember that [Beverly Hills] 90210 when they announced that one of the "main characters" died, and I was nervous about who it might be, but then in retrospect it became obvious that the only reason they had that blonde freshman character was to kill him off. I hope that's not what they have in mind.
The N.Y. Times has a little feature on the Japanese knick-knack chain RanKing RanQueen, which purports to sell only the "top" items in a product category. Most select shops operate like editorial-retail and choose goods based on subjective taste criteria. So what makes RanKing interesting is their bold claim of scientifically-determined stock lists. Capitalist societies need middlemen to sort information and goods flowing in the stream between producer and consumer, but in the case of Japan where businesses interests dominate all other participants in the distribution chain, subjective rankings are a no-no, which explains the fascination with data-based vertical rankings in place of critical reviews.
So, where do RanKing's rankings come from? According to the article, they are compiled based on Tokyu Hands sales figures and also, "numbers from independent research companies." I'm suspicious about that last data set - seems like a perfect cover for the necessary tweaks to please the businesses supplying the goods for sale.
Since the mainstream political press and the consumer press all confer legitimacy upon themselves through an air of "independent review" and then pay the bills through direct financial payment from companies for pro quid pro positive press, I am really doubtful that these RanKing RanQueen rankings are actually "objective." In the case of this particular retail store, I doubt anyone cares either way, but I do take objection to the idea that these stores are "reporting on trends" when they might just be "making them."
Is it just me or does James Murphy sing like Snagglepuss???
Exit stage left!
Red Shadow's jazzy testament to Communism "Understanding Marx" sums up exactly why everyone hates Marxists and Marxism. We've all met insufferable Hard-Lefties like the characters in this song or visited a Progressive Book Center and seen enough bad pro-Shining Path pamphlets to have the messenger squash the message. The failures of Leninism and Maoism show squarely that nothing ruins a good ideology more than its own practitioners!
For a long time I had always wondered why the Beatles were so quick to abandon Sgt. Pepper baroque whimsy by late '67, but clearly, the Fab Four met enough real lumpen hippies outside of their elitist London LSD-eating clique to sell off the french horns and run back to roots rock'n'roll. Hippies managed to scorch all the good ideas of the 60s throughout the 70s and 80s by merely continuing to exist; there were enough Qualuude-addled astrologists to permanently make "peace" a dirty word.
The Mods' greatest key to victory in the revival game is their short lifespan and geographical isolation; almost no one has ever met a "real" mod, even a lot of people who grew up in London in the 60s. (Compare this to the hippies who still divide up the American political spectrum.) Without actual Mods to meet and greet, they all seem like charming boys with good taste in soul music and hot suits.
Before we start stating definitively that "the Japanese" think x or y in regards to their arch-inauthentic consumer lifestyles based on past subcultural fashions, we have to recognize that there's no other sophisticated consumer market on Earth with less exposure to the original adopters than Japan. Not only did the Japanese not have a mass hippie movement in the 60s, they were spared all the residual hippies of the 70s. And accordingly, "the Sixties" as a cultural format is worshipped more in Japan than anywhere else in the world. 90s Tokyo (especially with Shibuya-kei) was a love-fest to Mods, Vespas, Jacques Dutronc, bossa nova, psych-pop, and Black liberation. Japan's the only country in the world to have rereleased all the Association records on CD.
Now they're doing the same with punk and hip hop, because they haven't met a billion white suburban kids blasting Jay-Z from their SUVs nor have any sort of perspective of how awful Nancy Spungen was. They've won the privilege of being able to detach all trends, fashions, and ideologies from the original creepy adopters. I'm not so lucky.
 | Jean mentioned this on his blog last week, but giant publishing company Magazine House recently put out a special mook all about the Japanese mass-fashion brand Uniqlo assembled by the editors of Relax. Japan's trendy lifestyle 'zines tend to sell their cover-stories to the highest bidder, but there's no ambiguity this time between editorial and advertising: this is just a paid promotion in magazine-form with a price tag of 680 yen. Inside are all the usual suspects wearing Uniqlo (Hi again, young creative female artist Kiyokawa Asami!) and hiding their bags of endorsement money somewhere off camera. |
Most "adult" Japanese fashion magazines greatly resemble the "aspiration book" style of American glossies like Vogue and GQ - pages of arty spreads and consumer products requiring income one step above the reader's current level. The teen lifestyle rags, on the other hand, are consumer guides with concrete information on brands, stores, and constructing certain fashion styles - here's where to buy earth music & ecology in Sendai and how to combine Mode-kei with Street-kei, etc. The functional need for raw info displaces any attempts at opinions or artistic fantasies and makes this media a perfect target for producer co-optation. And with no political content in the teen fashion market, the editors don't particularly care what kids actually buy and wear: if a brand wants to pay 500,000 yen for special treatment, hey, that's just more money for the publisher's entertainment budget.
In this light, Uniqlo buying a whole magazine makes perfect sense, whereas an issue of Esquire all about Sean John would raise a lot of eyebrows. I do find it hilarious though that Uniqlo made a whole magazine dedicated to itself and then has the balls to sell it.
Uniqlo's also created a very interesting advertising campaign to go with their new re-branding. The ad poses the question: "Do you hate Uniqlo?" and then lists quote after quote of Japanese kids talking about all the things they hate about the brand (paraphrase of one - "I got a Basquiat shirt, but then realized that everyone else had the same one, so I stopped wearing it."). At the end, Uniqlo chimes in and says, if you agree with the opinions above, be prepared to have your mind blown by the new ultra-fab Seleqlo boutique. Marketing textbooks often recommend advertisements that admit a brand's weaker points in order to create consumer trust, but most brands fear discussing possible drawbacks in the public sphere. Uniqlo's treading safe waters with this one, because the complaints are only those of trendy kids, and not the brand's large chunk of older, price-oriented consumers. Admittedly, Uniqlo's self-mockery in the ad comes off as pretty slick.
All this hypercommercialism kitsch, however, must have some sort of limit. When Tokion did its McDonald's issue back in the 90s, that seemed tolerable, but when will we all figure out that it's now just the largest companies directly purchasing huge bulks of once-independent editorial space and indirectly limiting exposure to smaller companies who lack the capital to play the payola game?
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In the mid-20th century, there was nary a utopian vision of the future that did not include magnetically-levitating monorails and anthropomorphic robots. When the clock struck 12:00 on January 1st, 2001, who didn't feel deep disappointment upon realizing that we still didn't have mechanical men around the house washing our dishes, waxing our Ford Mustangs, and making malted milkshakes? Finally in 2005, the Aichi Expo proudly fulfills the promises of the past with its Linimo maglev transport and trumpet-playing robots, but these feats all ultimately beg the question: is this the future we've been waiting for?
The expansive Aichi Expo grounds sit an hour outside of Nagoya, and to "beat the crowds," we decided to leave Kyoto as early as possible. After two train changes and a super smooth ride on the Linimo line (no wheels, no friction), we picked up our tickets, passed security (no water bottles allowed!), and found ourselves inside by 10:30 - nice! - at which point, of course, all the "reservation tickets" to the main attractions were long gone. The next ticket distribution would be at 15:00, so we had no choice but to visit the international pavilions for the next five hours.
Back in olden days, a Columbian Exposition or World's Fair could bring the common people access to a world into which they could never venture, but now with the advent of global media and cheap international airfare, each country's pavilion is no more than a tourist office, or at best, a experiential simulacrum for those too lazy to get a passport. (For the price of going to the Expo from Tokyo, you could probably fly to Thailand.) The big countries seemed to have figured out this redundancy, and built their exhibits to be marketing masking as "edu-tainment." The U.S.A.'s lackluster pavilion featured a film about Benjamin Franklin marveling at our modern world - complete with an iPod reference (eat that, Sony!), MC Benny F getting down to hip hop, and an exploitative nod to Native Americans' respect of the natural environment (keep drilling that Alaskan oil, boys!). The American building was the only one with additional security - odd seeing that Ben Franklin's a pretty neutral choice - who hates that guy besides French Monarchists?
Most of the visitors lined up for the "major countries," so the better strategy was to hit all the more obscure locales - the Central Asian "Stans," the Axis of Evil, and anything else post-Communist. Seeing that our everyday life is unbelievably international to start with, the Expo's one charm is to provide exposure to the countries whose culture cannot exist on the free market. I very much enjoyed learning about Kazakhstani tents, Kyrgyzstani stuffed-animals, Uzebekstani architecture, and Tajikstani... miscellaneous. Yemen hastily put together a desert castle inside their space, so that they could open a cheap jewelry market underneath. Other countries exploited their prized commodities: Cuba sold Che paraphernalia and mojitos, while Sri Lanka went with curry and precious stones. The rich little countries - Qatar and Singapore - went crazy with super-sleek travel desks. Poorer places like Laos constructed their displays with color-matted computer print-outs.
No matter where you went, however, there was one common bond between these diverse cultural traditions: curry. Of course, Indian and Malaysian restaurants sold authentic curry dishes to the hungry masses, but when countries had a hard time finding a unique cuisine to fit the Japanese palate, Japanese companies moved in and opened up a curry stand. In Egypt, an eatery sold "Old Egyptian Curry," which looked and tasted no different than Vermony Curry from my supermarket. In Central America, the dark-brown spicy stew showed up again on the menus as a "native" dish. Sure, curry is a pretty international food, but apparently there's nothing in the Japanese mind that sums up the whole of the "pre-modern" world better than spicy stew over white rice (neatly divided in the dish, thank you).
At 14:30, we lined up in the hot sun behind 1,000 people, waiting for tickets to see the mammoth exhibit. With 16:00 tickets in hand and another hour to kill, we walked along the legitimately interesting Bio-Lung organic wall and then ducked into a display about Japanese water management. They spiced up the content with a gimmicky 3-D movie (watch out for the dragons coming at you!!!), which is about all you can do to make water management interesting for 8 year-olds. Before getting to ride an escalator slowly gliding past the mammoth exhibit (a Fordist approach to the spectacle), we were treated to Sony's Laser Dream Show - a crystal-clear digital film projected onto a massively wide screen. Unfortunately, waiting in line for this event limited our ability to see any of the other main attractions - Toyota's crazy car and robot band, the world's biggest kaleidoscope, and the house from Totoro (only 800 visitors allowed a day!?).
Expo's in the past - especially Montreal '67 and Osaka '70 - were essentially architectural showcases. We could always expect the Soviets to throw up some huge modernist monument to scientific socialism. Aichi's pavilions are all big warehouses with minimal exterior adornment - only Spain's hexagonal beehive facade went the extra mile. In the past, the old Expos could often veer towards a mass hedonic exploration of elitist cultural forms: contemporary composers like Stockhausen were the musical entertainment. The Aichi Expo's theme-park internationalism proves how much the consumer market has crushed the old system of intellectuals controlling the cultural space. The world is apparently just a big shopping mall.
Overall, the fundamental problem plaguing this Expo was that it completely lacked imagination. As an eight-year old, I loved visiting Disneyworld's EPCOT Center in the mid-80s with all the space-colonization fantasies, modernist aesthetics, and hi-tech computer games. Aichi ultimately provides no visions of the future, only rational solutions to current problems. Sony's huge digital projection is about 5% neater than what's actually the commonplace standard, and today's 3-D technology is no better than the days of Captain Eo. The Linimo is super smooth, but only a fraction better than the Shinkansen that got me to Nagoya. And what's more, exploration of hydrogen fuel-cell technology, environmentally-friendly industry, and greater internationalism would be possible right now if it weren't for political barriers. In the past, we were waiting on the scientists to realize our crazy ideas, but now we're just waiting on the politicians and the big businessmen to overcome their petty greed and start patching up the holes.
The Expo loves to talk about solar and wind power as renewable resources, but no one takes these seriously in real life. I saw Howard Dean talk about the possibilities of reducing foreign old dependency through wind power, and my conservative friends says, "Talking about wind power just shows how far he is from the mainstream." The Expo refuses to take any political message on the world's (well, the U.S.'s) current environmental policies, but without political support, these environmental technologies just become sources of entertainment and not practical ways to save the earth.
Now to the robots: all this robot technology seems at first to be exciting, but you know who plays trumpet better than a robot? A human. And they're a lot cheaper an investment too. No one needs anthropomorphic robots; we need robots to do things that humans cannot do. Japan's robot R&D ballyhoo is just hi-tech human hyper-narcissism rather than real scientific progress. How many millions were spent to make Asimo walk when there are infinitely better means of transportation than human-like bipedal movement? Why not build a robot that helps the elderly and rolls around the house? Instead, they're investing massive amounts of time and money into machines who will, at worst, do low level human tasks adequately, or at best, put humans out of their jobs.
All in all, the Aichi Expo 2005 is a tiny recalculation of 1985's vision of the future, but nothing close to a broad rethinking of human progression. No one even mentions the Internet, which is more revolutionary than all of the exhibits put together. Every day, time and space are continuing to implode, and the natural advancement of information technology may finally deliver us closer to utopia than any intentional modernist project.
They say that science-fiction is always just a comment on contemporary society, but the Aichi Expo fails to even shroud their vision in a futuristic, alien language. The world of international commerce, multicultural commodities, intercontinental travel, and environmental protection is already here for our taking. What's in store for us after that?
Tokion Magazine is holding a "King of Zine" contest.
| First Prize: A year of free health insurance. Second Prize: $500. Judges will be Kevin Lyons, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Deanne Cheuk, Ed Templeton, Eva Prinz of Rizzoli Books, REAS, Carlo McCormick, Sarah from Colette, Adrian Tomine and KAWS. All zines must be produced using a standard photocopy machine. |
More info at tokion.com.
This week's issue of Weekly Pureiboi has the usual mammary fetishization and baseball gossip, but also a rabid anti-Chinese cover story: "You won't buy Japanese goods? You say you've got a problem with the history textbooks? Make that Anti-Japanese Nation Shut Up!" And on the left in the radiant yellow circle, they hint that the Jietai (Japan's Self-Defense Force) is pissed-off and getting ready for war (武装). Just a little violence porn to go with the 36-F breasts.
In the U.S., the Religious Right likes to blame "liberals" for pornography's spread, but in Japan, the sex industry - prostitution, porn, even hostesses - is all operated under the auspices of the yakuza crime syndicates, who happen to also be major allies/sponsors of ultra-right politics. Pureboi is a mainstream mag, but they know what their audience wants to read; a past headline was something like, "We must save our beloved soapland!" Active support of the sex industry somehow bleeds very naturally into Nationalist ideology here in Japan, and I'm not suprised in the least that the editors' reaction to the anti-Japanese protests is to want to go to war over it.
I often avoid spilling personal details onto my blog, but lately I've felt that it's important for my readers to get a better sense of where I'm coming from. To remedy this problem, I've put together this self-conducted interview. I hope it is illuminating.
What's the deal with all the Naughty by Nature references on your blog?
I like to have the O.P.P.-ortunity to get Treach-erous.
Treach was the head guy in Naughty by Nature, right?
Thank you for ruining that joke.
I heard that you were asked in an interview at the age 16, if stuck on a desert island, what historical personage would you like to be stuck with, and you answered, "Woodrow Wilson."
Yes, that's true, but it made sense at the time.
According to the LA Times, you are some sort of cross-cultural blogger, chronicling the difference between Japan and America. So, I have to ask: what's the deal with chopsticks?
Economic determinism.
In Norimitsu Onishi's April 18th International Herald Tribune story "Asia history that won't go away," Acting Secretary-General of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Abe Shinzo was quoted as saying:
| "There would be a problem if the textbooks state something that the government does not assert, or if they go beyond the bounds of what the government asserts. It's natural that the textbooks follow the government line (italics mine.)" |
The LDP needs better press agents or something, because in the midst of this dispute with the authoritarian Chinese (who are equally egregious textbook editors), Abe is whining about the fear of his nation's centralized historical education not following the party line. Shouldn't they at least pretend that their version of history is the "real one" as justification for their actions? They are just coming out and admitting their belief that the LDP - not the government in total - has the sole right to control the state-mandated educational curriculum. If Abe says there were no comfort women, how dare they teach that there were!
As you may have heard, the Fuji TV-Livedoor hostile-takeover business drama has reached its conclusion, with Horie losing the battle but winning the war. Fuji gets Nippon Broadcasting back, but Livedoor walks away with:
| A) Fuji investment of $409 million into the company B) An alliance with Fuji TV to provide its contents on the internet (his original goal) C)Around $100-$200 milllion in cash since Fuji has to buy back the Nippon Broadcasting stock D) A month of free advertising from the tabloids E) The esteem of the entire youth community, who give Horie "props" for "fighting the man." |
After some family business out of town, I'm finally back in Tokyo. I spent a day at the Aichi Expo and will have a heavily-illustrated report/review/essay on the event up shortly. Stay tuned.
Leaving Tokyo for the weekend. Will be back on Monday night with some reporting from the Aichi Expo.
World War II is in the news these days. Just last weekend, Chinese youth vandalized Japanese restaurants and burned the Hi-no-Maru in response to events from the 1930s, and meanwhile, the Japanese conservative party is on a mission to boost fallen national pride - once emboldened from economic superiority - through a new retro-imperialism. WWII is an obvious place to mine for culture: back in the "Good War" (as Studs Terkel ironically called it), everyone was a victor (Pearl Harbor! Japanese surrender!) and everyone was a victim (Pearl Harbor! Japanese surrender!), and no matter which side you were on, the uniforms looked sharp.
Most of the Japanese public, however, rarely looks back fondly to the Empire, and instead, have been longtime believers of a pacifist internationalism. Nothing expresses this better than the 1979 TV anime series Mobile Suits Gundam.
Gundam is about a future war between the Earth Federation and a breakaway colony called Zeon. Today, the show is one of Japan's most beloved cartoons, but during its initial premiere, Gundam was a massive flop. And no surprise: the show is like a 30-minute toy commercial agonizing over the horrors of war. An emergency situation forces our main hero Amuro Ray into the Federation fight, and even after becoming the the army's prize pilot, he still constantly questions his own involvement. Other characters are introduced only to be killed a moment later, and the whole cast visibly suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Overall, it's totally humorless and often difficult to watch because the writers are unwilling to betray the gravity of the show's premise.
To emphasize the "war is hell" message, there's no clearcut "good guy/bad guy" distinctions - only a web of internal intrigue and relative moral clarity. The robot/uniform designs, however, speak volumes to the underlying intentions. Amuro's unit - Gundam RX-78 (yes, I am embarrassed to know this model number) - looks like a robot samurai designed by Gerrit Rietveld, hard lines and primary colors. The red, yellow, and blue resonate the benevolent Universalism of the Earth Federation, which until Zeon's breakaway, ruled Earth and Space in peace.
On the Zeon side, the uniforms are a pastiche of late 19th century European empire designs, if not flat-out Germanic. Throughout the show, sympathy towards Zeon's star pilot and heart-throb Char makes it difficult to automatically hate these independence fighters, but by the end of the first quarter, we start understanding the nature of the enemy: when a member of the Zeon ruling family gives a speech for his fallen brother, he ignites the mass rally with the chant of "Sieg Zeon!" under two flags looking much like Germany's iron cross and a black-and-white version of Japan's WWII-era flaming sun. Hey, Zeon just wants some Lebensraum! - but at this point, we all know what happened at Munich, and it's clear where the story is headed.
Opposed to the "universal" of the Federation, Zeon is the malevolent "particular" - wearing culturally-unique uniforms and demanding to be treated differently than the Federation's other members. In the show's moral trope, it is the Germanic Zeon's struggle for independence that starts the terrible war - absolutely a critique on the Axis Powers, and ultimately, the Japanese Empire. While the Gundam side is far from perfect, viewers can extrapolate a pacifist-orientation and good will from the Federation's futuristic universality. Post-war Japanese fondness of the universal over the particular, however, stems from an fundamental belief in modernist conformity: the group order only crumbles when individual countries/people try to stand out. The 20th century Modernist project of Universality may have been heavy-handed in its ignorance and suppression of difference, but its call for equality was an obvious reaction to the "selfishness" of particularism that started the War.
Today, the Japanese public has a choice between reverting towards 19th century Nationalism or continuing to support yellow, red, and blue Internationalism. With the current government squarely in the first camp and the people/culture in the second, this could be an interesting fight ahead.
Today's featured Japanese lexical item: 花柳病
Today's pointless jouyou kanji: 厘
 | As part of the never-ending late-Heisei taste deflation, the main alcoholic-beverage firms are currently marketing a new low-price, low-quality beer-esque beverage for those who think happoshu - the original low-price, low-quality beer-esque beverage - has gotten too ritzy. These new "malt-less beers" are classified under the ultra-catchy name - その他の雑酒２ - "Other Mixed Alcohols - Class 2," and this particular ad for New Draft (新生）proudly proclaims that it contains "soy bean peptides" (大豆ペプチド） and "the yeast from [Asahi] Super Dry" （スーパードライ酵母). Meanwhile at my local pub, this dialogue is surely in progress: What's on draft? Well, we have Sapporo, Kirin..., No - I mean in your "Other Mixed Alcohols - Class 2" section... |
I went to the Japan Tobacco (JT) site to grab images of the new spring "smoking manners" posters (there's a really crazy one I saw yesterday), but I could only find the winter series (all images above pop-up larger versions). Japan's consumer culture is probably the most season-sensitive in the world. Right now, we're in the midst of a billion pop songs about hanami and sakura, and in December, there will be another million Christmas-themed jingle-bell ballads. These JT ads go one step further than just winter-related smoking habits (you wouldn't kill your child's snowman, would you?!) and also promote commerce as part of their message. Don't smoke and go skiing! Don't smoke and visit tourist destinations!
Until recently, I had been very skeptical about Japan's anti-smoking policies, seeing that the government profited directly from its tobacco monopoly for a long time and that most Japanese doubt the direct cause-and-effect relationship between tobacco and cancer. However, in the last year I've been surprised how many restaurants and chain cafes are erecting clear plastic dividers between the non-smoking and smoking sections. This is a real positive development.
 | According to The Economist's April 9th 2005 issue, Japanese television broadcasts over 1000 commercials per week - the highest rate in the world. Japanese commercials are much shorter than the U.S. (15 seconds is average), but the cheap production quality of Japanese TV seems to suggests that the ad-buy rates must be smaller. (And the networks surely don't pay the staff anything close to Hollywood union wages.) So perhaps the total ad time is close to the U.S. and Europe, but there are more commercials per commercial break. |
In somewhat related news, the Japanese watch TV an average of five hours a day - the most in the world. I'd like to see the demographic breakdown before jumping to conclusions (I'm guessing work-related gender roles have something to do with this), but I don't understand how the most watched, most commercialized television in the world is such a smaller business than the American television world. Is it that the Japanese can't sell their TV contents abroad like the US? Or is it that a lack of channels hampers the lucrative syndication system? Or just a population issue?
 | Tetsuwari Crack Iron Albatrossket is an experimental theatre troupe and may be Japan's premier dramatic ironists and meta-comedians. Tetsuwari's leader and playwrite Inui Akihito's descends from a long line of famous actors/writers, but he's also a student of Monty Python, The Harder They Come, and modernist drama. |
Usually based in a community center in old-timey Nezu, their short segments deconstruct traditional shitamachi culture and theatre itself through self-reference and absurdist techniques. Characters talk in parallel directions, rarely understanding each other, whether they be discussing the pirate chic of dead canaries, the mystery of hard-boiled eggs, high-quality glass polishing for uptown bars, or prophicies involving Damo Suzuki and an elephant-shaped Trojan Horse. There's also a surplus of dance routines and male choral group parodies with synchronized kleenex waving. Tetsuwari avoids the trap of dramatic pretention through their mix of "real" actors and stumbling amateurs: it's hard to tell if the guy in the state-provided glasses is pretending to forget his lines or just forgetting his lines. At the very least, they blow the entire mainstream o-warai world out of the water, and I would postpone final judgement on the possiblities of Japanese comedy until experiencing the live Tetsuwari show.
The gasshuku (合宿) experience encapsulates the quintessential aspects of idealized Japanese behavior into a short package: the welcoming of new members into a group, journeys out to the countryside, baseball, onsen, mandatory fun, drinking until 3 a.m. only to get up the next morning at 6:30 for breakfast and a factory tour. The system has its merits, but combining work and play is generally exhausting.
We went out to Ibaraki-ken, which looks exactly like Chiba, Saitama, Tochigi, Kanagawa, Shizuoka, or Yamanashi. Kanto's pretty homogenized economically and geographically.
Yesterday morning waiting for the bus, I watched the news footage of last weekend's anti-Japanese riots in China. I don't know much about the exact political motivations of the protesters, but I fear further deterioration of Japan-China relations. At the moment, the LDP's only mission seems to be historical revisionism - textbook changes, island grabbing, Yasukuni shrine visiting, re-arming. The right-wing appears to think that the only way towards a new Japanese nationalism is to completely erase the spectre of WWII, and this tacit support of old imperialism obviously doesn't sit well with the Korean/Chinese contingents. They in turn can exploit the perceived image of Japanese remilitarization to ease domestic discord. I don't want to throw my support for either side, but I question whether this is the best time for Japan to try to reclaim a 20th century version of nationalism when their Eastern neighborhors have never forgotten the past and the West lauds Japan for being a pro-environmental, pacifist neo-Internationalist nation.
Later in the day we toured a Hitachi turbine factory. Like most Japanese industrial workspaces, the plant was littered with "quality control" (QC) campaign posters to boost morale. Japanese QC management took Deming's ideas and perfected them, but my worry is that the system is too good: can this management system guarantee high quality goods even made in lower-skilled markets (read: China)? If so, Japanese firms may be in good shape, but the Japanese worker may no longer be necessary to Japan's economic success. This will radically alter income distribution if it hasn't started already.
Tommorow morning around 8:30 AM, there will be a live phone-interview with me, Marxy, on John Kabira's J-WAVE Good Morning Tokyo (81.3 FM). Tune in if you're in town.
Online liberal mag Salon currently has a story criticizing Gwen Stefani and her Harajuku Girls. The author argues from a very American feminist/anti-racist standpoint, with which I sympathize, but I have a small contention with this sentence:
| While aping a style that's suppose to be about individuality and personal expression, Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out. |
I don't think the Harajuku look is "about" individuality or anything in particular (again, no content), and what's fascinating about the styling is that this consumer lifestyle's magazines' (Cutie in particular) guidance can create a homogenous look even within a look so extreme. I often run into a girl wearing baggy pink jeans and banana yellow flats with a aquamarine knit cap only to run into a girl the next day wearing baggy yellow jeans and pink flats with a aquamarine knit cap.
 | Humans After All was a hoax after all! Of course Daft Punk would never release such a repetitive, loopy mess of an album. I've got a friend in the Toshiba-EMI Yogaku-bu (Western music division) who filled me in on the secret and slipped me the real DP release due to hit stores next month: Robots After All. Here is the single "Rrobot Rrock" - a vast improvement over the original hoax version. |
Update: I took down the mp3 because it was too awesome.
Most of the first Western scholarship on "youth subcultures" in the post-War period grew out of work on teenage delinquency. Sociologists explained the Teds, the Mods, Rude Boys, Greasers, the Sharks (vs. the Jets) as working-class youth using their own culture of fashion and argot to separate themselves from mainstream society. Now that mass culture has fractured into smaller lifestyle segments and minority looks "trickle-up" to high fashion, the word "subculture" does not automatically imply deviance. In the West, there's no bigger sin than being a "poser" or having "inauthentic" reasons for subcultural affliation, and in this context, Western (and often Japanese) critics tend to bash Japanese punks and B-boys for not keeping it "real." Or conversely, certain champions of postmodernity celebrate these groups for their seemingly intentional depth-less re-appropriations of Western subcultural style.
The truth is, however, that Japan has two different kinds of youth cultural groups - delinquent subcultures and consumer lifestyles - and our failure to distinguish the two means attributing particular intragroup values to Japan as a whole.
The youth cultures recently venerated by Americans are essentially consumer lifestyles. Ura-Harajuku street fashion (Ape, Goodenough, Supreme/Silas), Shibuya-kei border-shirt Euro-fetish, Cutie/Spring/Mini daintyness, Fruits extreme Harajuku-cute, hip-hoppers, Rastas, punks, mods, and "mode-kei" fashionistas are society-condoned, media-directed looks with matching music and activities. Before 1988, all fashion was monolithic: there was only one way to dress "well," but after the DC-boom backlash in the late 80s, magazines responded by providing a huge list of possible choices - skater-kei, surfer-kei, etc. - each with their own brands, hairstyles, record labels, and leisure activities.
Japanese fashions may be largely based on Western working-class teenage defiance, but all the political content has been sucked out - even intergenerational rebellion. In the West, parents would freak out over their kids looking like a lyseric baglady, but Japanese parents can cope as long as they wipe off the goth makeup by the time they leave school. Questions of authenticity are moot. Without specific instructions from magazines on how to put together the fashion code, these looks would not and could not exist. I would guess that a majority of adopters are upper middle-class kids from good families, and their participation does not necessarily preclude future involvement in straight society. Actually, these somewhat alternative cultures support the employment system by providing "play" before a lifetime of serious dedication to the workplace or motherhood.
Even though consumer lifestyles are the most conspicuous "subcultures" in Japan, there have always been strong delinquent subcultures. These follow the Western pattern closely - using alternative fashions, slang, and other cultural practices to break away from the mainstream. In the late 70s, the yankii subculture developed from junior high students who bucked the system through wearing bleached permanent-waves and altering their school uniforms. Instead of high school, yankii entered the workforce - an act that fully limited their future employment options to working-class labor. They roved in gangs, picked up girls to gang rape (gombo), stared down kids from rival junior highs, and coordinated runs around the neighborhood on super-loud motorcycles (the so-called boso-zoku). Their fashion choices - yakuza-like short-cut punch perms, long jackets, kanji embroidery, severe sunglasses, women's heels - were self-determined, not media-mandated, although at this point, Japanese consumer society was not mature enough to target such a small market segment.
Meanwhile in Tokyo, Takenoko-zoku street dancers culled their uniforms from 50s rock'n'roll shops on Harajuku's Takeshita-doori. They were generally high-school dropouts engaged in smoking (gasp!), lighting firecrackers (gasp! gasp!), and other hankou, but opposed to the yankii, their culture depended upon the small consumer market tailoring to their needs. This symbiotic relationship between rebellion and consumerism resembled the early Carnaby Street of the 60s.
The late 80s saw the rise of the Chiimaa - car-based roving gangs of youth who terrorized Shibuya. Interestingly, however, these kids were generally furyou - no-good'ers - from wealthy Setagaya-ku families, and they invented their own sloppy casual style based on an American-style preppie look (think loafers). Their wealthy furyou girlfriends were semi-dropouts from private high schools like Keio, who also developed their own rebellious alterations of school uniforms. But instead of lengthening skirts like yankii girls, they shortened them. The media eventually christened them "kogyaru," soon famous in the Shuukan Post for their rough language and brazen sexuality.
Since the kogyaru spawned at a time when fashion became subcultural, magazines such as Egg and Cawaii! were able to move in to codify the look and make it into a market. The first kogyaru were from elite families, but the fashion's rebellous edge became very attractive to lumpen lower middle-class kids looking for an escape. By the mid-90s, Shibuya was like a female-run Haight-Ashbury, littered with middle-school runaways, grotesque fashion witches ("the Yamamba"), and teenage kogyaru with babies called "yan-mama" ("yan" coming from "yankii"). When news of the kogyaru's schoolgirl prostitution (enjo-kousai) hit the national consciousness, the first response approached the problem like an extension of classess consumerism instead of lower-class teenage delinquency - "This could be anyone's daughter!" Perhaps this was true, but when a delinquent subculture had fully become a consumer lifestyle - sexual mores and all - no one knew whether to blame a certain group (like with past youth problems) or advocate society-wide campaigns ("Talk with your kids about compensated dating before your husband's coworker does!")
These days, the kogyaru fashion boom is over, but the look remains preserved within a small delinquent subculture. They still retain the organs of a consumer lifestyle - stores, magazines, clubs - but a comparison of Egg to Cutie instantly reveals that these are not just different exterior fashions chosen by similar girls, but radically different life-orientations. Egg casually talks about the best way to have sex in a car, while you can even barely find reference to boys in Spring.
Within the delinquent groups, the value system tends towards celebrating "authentic" behavior as a way to show solidarity with the other members. These groups do have a certain political content in so much as they are dropping out of society. Where Japan differs from the West, however, is that it has never had a large-scale Bohemian-type middle-class, educated artistic subculture like the Hippies or even something like Slackers. In an orthopraxical society, there's no God to justify "dropping out" - deviants don't leave, they're forced out, or catch on early that their future opportunities are nil. If the only condoned path to success is an upper middle-class one requiring constant study and delayed gratification, those who don't fit the mold unsuprisingly choose to make their own reward structures and cultural systems.
The rising number of friitaa could possibly be a sign that those involved with consumer lifestyles have attached a political content to their fashion and cannot easily give up their subcultural affliation to join the workforce and adult society. We've seen that "real" subcultures can become commodified, but can "artificial" subcultures drop out of society?
Finally, a breathmint that knows the opening set-up to backgammon. This would have been great for Singles Backgammon Nights in the mid 70s.
W56 DM 26 ML
| TOKYO JAPAN APRIL 8 2005 |
READERS OF NEOMARXISME BLOG
| THE INTERNET |
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| MARXY |
If you hate cherry blossoms, I would advise you to stay away from Japan this week.
 | The plot for the 1988 film Big is totally implausible. |
| Flaubert, for example, explores the question of representation of heterogeneity and difference, of simultaneity and synchrony, in a world where both time and space are being absorbed under the homogenizing powers of money and commodity exchange. 'Everything should sound simultaneously,' he wrote; 'one should hear the bellowing of the cattle, the whispering of the lovers, and the rhetoric of the officials all at the same time (263).' |
| - David Harvey The Conditions of Postmodernism, 1989. |
| In Murakami's view, the multifocal composition of a group of roosters on an 18th-century gold-leafed screen requires a viewer's eye to dart here and there, without providing a comfortable place to rest...The time-honored Japanese worldview, in other words, closely resembles the postmodern one, in which sensations and images rain down incessantly and you have no choice but to take it all in as it comes. |
| - Arthur Lubow - "The Murakami Method" The New York Times, 4/3/05 |
| Thus, in Japan, there are neither tradition-oriented old people adhering to transcendental values nor inner-oriented adults who have internalized their values; instead, the nearly purely relative (or relativistic) competition exhibited by other-oriented children provides the powerful driving force for capitalism. Let's call this infantile capitalism...In the manufacturing sector, for example, we may be able to say that Japanese engineers are cleverly manuevered into displaying a childlike passion whereby they are easily obsessed with machines. Further, in such a postindustrial area as advertising, people become carried away by word play, parody, and all the other childlike games of differentiation.
Is this utopian capitalism?--is this the goal of the global trajectory of capitalism that broke down territorial boundaries as it stretched from the Mediterranean Sea up north across Europe out to the ocean, crossed the Atlantic, cross the United States, and finally traversed the Pacific?...Of course, it can never be anything like that: but this very negation must be uttered with a burst of laughter. And, we might add, after laughing, that it is a playful utopia and at the same time a terrible "dystopia." In fact, children can play "freely" only when there is some kind of protection...And this protected area is precisely the core of the Japanese ideological mechanism--however thinly diffused a core. (275-276) |
| - Asada Akira - "Infantile Capitalism" Postmodernism and Japan, 1989. Ed. Miyoshi and Harootunian |
| In | Five Minutes Ago | Out | So Out |
| Pope John Paul II | Terri Schiavo | Mitch Hedberg | Hunter S. Thompson |
| The Death of Marat | The Death of Marat | The Death of Socrates | The Death of Socrates |
| Heart disease | Cancer | Polio | Black Lung |
Get over the silly English - this logo is great. The "g" is from another planet.
...the N.Y. Times goes gaga over Murakami Takashi, conbini, and high-end Japanese fashion/design in their Tokyo Spring suppliment.
I don't want to go off on a diatribe against superflat (again), but I cringe at Murakami's tacit equation of a lack of "high art" and "low art" with a classless society. There's a quote in the article about the long history of museums within department stores, and while department stores have always been quintessentially middle-class social spaces, there's a huge discrepancy in who's just looking and who's really buying. Murakami's alliance with the Mori/Louis Vuitton crowd harkens back to the Bubble era where the media painted wealth - not talent or merit - as the ultimate democritizing force in society and the ultra-rich could stand alone in their privileged ability to obtain the right social capital. The concept of superflat may work within a conversation about aesthetics and art, but should not be extrapolated to represent the underlying principle of Japanese society or provide windowdressing for growing inequality.
My blog somehow is featured in this Sunday's L.A. Times Arts & Entertainment section (full-article for subscribers only - natch.) I'm depicted as an underwhelming wealth of information on "Japanese and American cultural differences" - a reference perhaps to my eight-part series on "What is the Deal with Chopsticks?" The best part is that the article concludes that the upbeat Onyanko Club song "O-yoshi ni natte ne TEACHER" and the dark "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police are essentially the same song, once-and-for-all proving my blog to be superfluous.
But who can say no to publicity?
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Tokyo's Setagaya-ku is unofficially the neighborhood of Japan's nouveau riche. The ultra-rich baseball players, entertainers, and business tycoons live in the American-style mansions arranged in a semi-circle around Den-en Chofu, but if you're part of the upper upper-middle classes who can afford to build a house within Tokyo's city limits, chances are you'll do it in the Setagaya-ku suburbs. Apartment complexes gravitate towards stations, so the land 20 to 25 minutes walking distance from a train stop tends to be snapped up for housing development, and since the only way to convienently access these territories is a car, they make perfect parking spots for BMWs and Benzes.
The odd thing about Tokyo's rich neighborhoods is that down the street from an enormous castle-like home is a decaying danchi apartment building. Subdivisions essentially don't exist, and even the expensive houses do not share a common aesthetic theme. The first two houses up above look like they've been pulled from Lake Forest, Chicago and the set from Total Recall, but sit right next to each other in Okamoto. Tokyo doesn't have ghettos (maybe Okubo), so there's no equivalent to "White Flight" and I would assume that the desperation to find usable land requires the new rich to build near less preferable neighbors.
Explanations of the disuniformity may veer towards proclaiming a postmodern chaotic expansion of "individual tastes" instead of domineering neighborhood-based aesthetic requirements, but after riding around enough, it becomes clear that the styles reflect trend waves opposed to any kind of homeowner choice. Unpainted, unadorned concrete houses were apparently the vogue a couple of years ago, and these litter the entire Setagaya area. Architectural styles, therefore, do not reflect personal preferences as much as act as a date-stamp for the construction period. Old-style Japanese houses are almost all old, and no one seems to build anything new in a faux traditional style.
The most striking thing about these areas is that nothing looks more than a decade old, and at least in my immediate neighborhood, anything less than perfect gets demolished to make way for ultra-functional square units, like the house pictured above. In the American suburbs (at least in the South), the wealthy tend to use established cultural codes of traditional revival styles (Tudor, ranch, Georgian) to display pecuniary success, but in Japan, the equivalent houses tend to function as a trend-based symbolic capital where the code is written in terms of contemporary standards. The relatively large size of these houses alone projects a wealth impossible for standard-grade white-collar workers, but I have only found a handful of houses that appear to have a easily-understood aesthetic message. These houses certainly are not subdued, but they are hard to read. And quickly become "dated."
The deeper issue at hand is that until recently, Japan lacked a widely-recognized "safe" set of traditional styles (in Japanese: 定番). There is all sorts of play with imported cultural and subcultural themes and strict adherence to current trends, but there's nothing like what Polo and mock-Georgian brick homes are to America. I get the sense that losing the war delegitimized anything too traditional; kimonos etc. became both reactionary and old-fashioned, but with fashion and architecture, there's no middle passage between very old and brand new. (Vintage and subculture seem to be escaping rather than navigating.) For a long time, following the very latest trend was a Japanese young person's only strategy for avoiding isolation, but this instability of kids getting in over their heads - 14 year-olds wearing Comme des Garcons - eventually resolves in the establishment of a safe, but plain set of cultural codes. In the fashion business at least, Muji and Uniqlo are filling in that open market, and I get the sense that the next two decades will see trend cycles continue to slow down and affect only those on the cutting edge like in the other major post-industrial societies. A no-growth economy and gathering cultural confidence should create demand for a New Traditional aesthetic. Let's see how the market responds.
 | When I was eight, I would wake up every morning listening to my brother's cassette-deck/alarm play "Swan Swan H" and "Superman" from R.E.M.'s Life's Rich Pagent, and I consider these two songs to be the keystones of my musical foundation. And so you can undersand my surprise when upon listening to "Superman" today, I realized for the first time that the sped-up voices at the beginning are in Japanese. This whole life-path has been subliminally planned from the beginning. |
 | The new cover of street fashion magazine Smart (miniature picture on left) shows "ultra-hip" "fashion" "mogul" Nigo with... embarassing American "punk" "rock" "band" Good Charlotte?!? This cover alone proves about 80% of the points I try to make on my blog. I'll give it to Nigo for going international and "chillin'" with Jay-Z, but what should I think about a Japanese magazine embracing the shame of the American pop music scene two years after the U.S.? |
So as most of you may suspected, yesterday's post was a prank coordinated in advanced with Momus. Otherwise, I would have not been so bent on alliteration and aggrevating vocabulary. If anyone ran out to the local library to check out books by C. C. Gargel, I apologize for inventing his existence.
Although I haven't exactly gone to the Momus side (I'm probably more distrustful of Postmodernism than ever), I bought a bicycle yesterday and have very much enjoyed getting out into the new fiscal year and warm weather. Tokyo is too big for a pedestrian town and too condensed for car/train travel, so the bicycle gives you access to a lot of hidden spots otherwise inaccesible. In an hour-ride between Meguro-ku and Setagaya-ku yesterday, I found a half-dozen legitimately insane landscapes, and I think this blog can improve its scope a bit if I can capture these in pictures.
In sum, I still think Japan is up to the same tricks, but I'm excited on new ways to explore and document the ground view.
I admit it: an endless winter pinned me down, hours trapped in front of the computer or buried in books, and in this pit of overanalysis and abject paranoia, I abstracted Japan into a soulless sprawling mess. Browse the blog below: behind badly-behaved bears, backroom blacklisting, bias and bigotry, Big Brother, B-boys, Bape bashing, "Baby Blue" vs. Bacon, baroque Bach bricolage, baritone ballads, bilinguality, Beekeepers, Brill Building bandwagoneering, bastardized Bourdieu bunseki, Bush bitterness, and belaboured bilabial ballyhoo, there's a guy stuck in his room, in desperate need of some fresh air.
After some days outside to bask in the sunny splendor of Spring and a new school year, there's one thing that suddently fills my mind: Momus is right.
This idelogical change was probably inevitable over time, but lately I've been reading a tome called Postmodernism as Hedonic Spectacle by C.C. Gargel, which has an especially good section on the failures of Modernism - yes, My Modernism, the one that I love so dearly. I'm keen now to the fact that Marxist/avant-garde social critique does necessarily lead to authoritarian government, Rietveld's Schroeder house is just a big piece of furniture, and half-a-dozen other reasons why my usual emphasis on socio-economic structures is just an outmoded "meta-narrative."
And with this new baptism into Postmodernism - I've "seen the light" as they are wont to say - I've finally crossed over into where Momus is coming from: Japan has shed the baggage of obdurate, banausic Modernist critique so ideally and perfectly that whether we like it or not, this sleek island nation is the future. And complaining about certain parts is to advocate cultural ablation.
So I'm off for another wonderful day in Postmodernism where the cherry blossoms bloom, the Expo trains zoom, and the future of mankind is palpable.
