neomarxisme

A氏：「ねえ、E電に乗らない？」
B氏：「E電って、何？」
A氏：「まあ、いいやぁ。タクシィ！」

Five years into the 21st century and trends have become so fast-paced that they no longer make any sense. Our culture rusts immediately upon touching the air. The so-called trendy cafe feels dated the minute it opens. By the time the blueprints are drawn and the pillars erected, the table design, seat upholstery, and menu fonts have all become considerably outmoded.

We, fashionable individuals, must then retreat back to the basics, the teiban. So if you want a cup of coffee, there is nowhere better in Japan - nay, the world - than Lion in Shibuya - Tokyo's premier classical music kissaten.

Lion was originally built in the first year of the Showa Era (1926), but burned up in the WWII firebombing of Tokyo. They were miraculously able to restore it to its original design in 1950 - which appears to be based on a miniature 19th century European concert hall. Two gigantic, high-quality speakers are nestled in the altar area. Patrons sit in creaky wooden seats that all face the music. Tables are separated by high dividers - almost like we are riding on the Orient Express from Munich to Vienna.

The lights are low and the air smells of pipe smoke. Music is the main event, so talking is strongly discouraged. Waiters slip menus for their antiquated beverage selection - "milk egg," anyone? - onto the table, and orders are taken in whispers. The experience is a bit like going to church with all the text removed. When a piece ends, the manager will come on the intercom and announce the title, but otherwise, there is little noise to distract from the music.

Today, I enjoyed a milk coffee while listening to Mozart's delightful flute sonatas K10-K15 (written at the age of eight). Caffeine goes very well with the baroque harpsichord arpegiating at 100 miles per hour and the high-pitched toot-toot of the clavi organ.

The only downside to Lion is when people come in who don't know the Lions Club rules and start gabbing away like it was Excelsior. Things are so quiet that even hushed human voices can easily override symphonic grandeur. Perhaps this is an apt metaphor for Japan. Everything works in beautiful harmony until cluelessly outsiders pop in and start disobeying the orders.

Yoshi from OK Fred just sent me this news clip of a March 1995 NHK evening news report on "Shibuya-kei." (Note the male newscaster's hilarilously outdated reference to shibukaji - a late 80s clothing trend that had already been over for years at the time of the broadcast.)

The gist of the story is that HMV and Tower Records essentially created a new genre in the Japanese music market: Shibuya-kei was the first hougaku (Japanese music) to sound like yougaku (Western music). Until that point, most kids bought music strictly according to performances on network television programs, which are decided by organizational relations between the TV networks and artist management companies. Suddenly in Shibuya, buyers started recommending a host of unknown bands from tiny labels on the basis of subjective quality. Subjectivity on a mass scale breeds diffusion and chaos, but when centralized within two main stores in one area, this selection practice ended up creating large-scale, visible consumer patterns. For a short while, if Ohta Hiroshi liked you, you could suddenly sell 100K copies.

These days, Tower Records and HMV have taken on a supermarket mentality - almost anyone can "rent" floor space regardless of musical quality. These stores' buyers still probably make good selections, but there's too much clutter, too many options, too many branches, too much diffusion. In the end, this zaps away their taste-making authority. Pitchfork Media may be currently enjoying a similar level of power, but the level of their impact on the (fringe) music market depends upon their monopoly over authority. Too many Pitchforks means less mass commercial viability for bands.

Anyone else notice how much safer the streets are now that Horie is rotting away in a jail cell without being formally charged for a crime? If he were able to get out on bail, think about all the nasty stock fraud he would be surely committing!

We should really rethink this habeas corpus thing.

Those interested in Japanese youth culture will encounter a very meager selection of published English literature on the subject. After glancing through Merry White's The Material Child, there's really nowhere to go but Speed Tribes - a 1995 anthology of "journalistic" vignettes written by aspiring novelist and future heroin-addict Karl Taro Greenfeld. The American author had moved to Japan during the Bubble era to teach English, but he was called to the pen by a compelling need to break the monolithic media message that Japan is a well-oiled social machine. His book aims to give voice to Japan's "Next Generation"

Greenfeld unfortunately squandered his big opportunity, and despite the nominally interesting subject matter, the book is more or else a masked autobiography. Each chapter revolves around a different archetype of social delinquent - yakuza, Korean drug dealers, porn stars, ultra-nationalists, hostesses - but the stories are identical. They all live a life centered around drugs and Roppongi and forgotten house 12"s with all gravity ultimately pulling everything back to Tokyo's eternally dreadful ex-pat scene. And when Greenfeld is not describing the people who inhabit his small social circles, his writing veers straight into fictional territory: playing the God Narrator and assigning motives, feelings, and desires to the wayward Japanese youth that all essentially echo the same hollow bad-boyism of the author. Perhaps Greenfeld is a sharp observer and empathetic soul to his lovable delinquents, but the myriad of Japanese errors in the book - the title itself is a poor man's translation of 暴走族 - question the degree to which he was able to fully absorb the meaning of his subjects' existence. Without hyperbole, Greenfeld introduces young people in Japan as "more adept at folding a bindle of cocaine or heroin than creasing an origami crane."

Reportage often straddles that thick yellow line between fact and fiction, but when Greenfeld swerves off the road of straight journalism, he forgets to use this technique to actually strengthen his arguments. While there is a case to be made for composites and embellished details, Greenfeld's obsessive self-projections marginalize the "characters" to the point of super-specificity. The girl who drops the half-dose of E and sleeps with the Australian model hours before meeting a geeky salaryman for a post-omiai date says very little about the modern Japanese woman and a lot about how Karl spent his Saturday nights.

From a historical angle, the book has become an accidental primary source for the last throws of Colonialism in Japan - a topsy-turvy world where Japanese men were bequeathing diamonds and Ferraris to Commonwealth hostesses in exchange for their flesh. A few years later, the most elite Japanese were no longer trying to outdo the foreigners under the same stale conventions, but stripping Westerners of their taste-making roles and rewriting the rules of the game. In Greenfeld's world, arrogant, high-society Tokyoites still party with the (automatically cool) foreigners in Roppongi discos. By 1998, all self-respecting Japanese had fled the area, leaving the ex-pats with their collective guide-book delusion that Roppongi was where Japanese hit the town on the weekends. Ironically, the tides have turned these days and Mori's palaces have reinvented the late 80s for a new shallow generation. But the vague nouvelle vague of foreigners in Japan today flocks to Nakameguro and Shimokitazawa - to absorb an authentic youth culture, not the hackneyed debauchery of Roppongi and Nishi-Azabu.

Thankfully, there are many excellent books on the market now that reduce our dependence on Greenfeld's writings. Sato Ikuya's Kamikaze Biker is an excellent ethnography of bosozoku and yankii, and Anne Allison's Nightwork does the same for hostess culture. Robert Whiting's Tokyo Underworld skillfully weaves a personal narrative about a foreign gangster into deeper issues of political intrigue and underground control in post-War Japan. In the user comment rolls of Amazon.com, readers ferociously debate whether the contents of Speed Tribes are fact or fiction. The good news is that it no longer really matters.

Things I've learned from watching clips on YouTube.com:

• The film Mask was not a live adaptation of the 80s cartoon MASK.
• I don't buy for a minute that Archie's voice suddenly becomes velveteen when he starts singing "Sugar Sugar".
• History has not looked kindly upon the New Monkees. (No clip available.)
• These guys were the real New Monkees.
• Would they ever cast the giant Mike Nesmith and the tiny Davy Jones together in a 21st century boy band? I'm sure Marketing would say that key demographics request height equalization.
• How is it that Crystal and Danica McKellar are sisters?
• The mystery is over: this is what Donovan looks like with a moustache.
• They can put a man on the moon and they can't get the sound to match up with the video?!

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer:

In his book Blowback, Chalmers Johnson suggests that all the 20th century Asian Communist movements found mass support in anti-Imperialist Nationalism, not ideological Leftism nor pro-Soviet leanings. There's that old story of Ho Chi Minh, dressed as Oliver Twist, going up to the Caucasian Headmaster at the Treaty of Versailles convention and asking, "Please, sir, can I have some liberal democracy?" They laughed in his face, and Uncle Ho got on the next train to Moscow. In the case of China, Mao rode to power on a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment, not widespread agreement with agrarian-adapted Marxist. No one likes being an Imperial subject, and most would rather go Red than lick the boots of second-rate Frenchmen.

Does post-War Japan fit into this pattern of American anti-Communism vs. Communist anti-Imperialism struggle in Asia? Johnson makes an excellent case.

Point One: the New Deal wonks of the Early Occupation foster democracy and equality by supporting unions, a legal Japan Communist Party, land reform, anti-monopolism, etc., but fearing a Red Japan after the Fall of China, America takes a page from its standard play-book and puts the least egregious members of the Imperialist government back into power. A bit of: "They may be bastards, but they're our bastards." It only takes the LDP a mere decade to crown a former Class A War Criminal and mob-tied Kishi Nobusuke Prime Minister. From Johnson's perspective, the "Reverse Course" was a quieter Iran '53.

Point Two: the CIA financially supports the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party to give them an unfair advantage over the Socialist alternative. Meanwhile in Asia, the CIA gives backing to stalwarts of democracy like Syngman Rhee, Ferdinand Marcos, and a whole cavalcade of army generals. It is unclear, however, how much this backing actually helped the LDP win elections, seeing that the voting system was structurally stacked against the left-leaning urban areas from the start.

Point Three: those involved in the 1960 Ampo Treaty Riots were protesting the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty in a general mood of anti-Imperialism. The Leftist student leaders in Bund have always denied anti-Americanism as their main impedance for protest, but the millions of quiet supporters no doubt cared much less about Communist ideals and more about rejecting a future course of American toadyism. In spite of massive public demonstrations and wide animosity to the treaty's ratification, the LDP literally locked the Socialists out of the Diet and passed the bill. The LDP also hired yakuza thugs and Ultra-Nationalists to bust heads on the street and protect American dignitaries.

At the end of the War, the Japanese received their democracy from above and were told that they now held the power of self-determination. But when the country's voices opposed the Rightist party line, the LDP quickly bent the rules to reinstall order. Not even a decade had passed before the democratic experiment was exposed to be a sham. "Politics" was forever dead in Japan, with residual anger quieted by the rising incomes of the 1960s. One-party states have much more success when they increase the standard of living and do not "disappear" too many people.

The student group Bund dissolved after the Ampo riots failed to change foreign policy, and the student protesters of the late 1960s squandered their public support by going ballistic about minor campus incidents, destroying public property, amassing caches of Molotov cocktails, killing cops, hijacking planes, and lynching fellow comrades. After 1970, being "political" came to mean only explicit support of the LDP: mostly farmers, construction companies, gangs, shop owners, and everyone else who gets a direct Boss Tweed-style handout.

Academics are always convinced that the rebirth of Japanese politics is right around the corner, as if the DPJ will suddenly become a viable second party. But check the demographic breakdown: Japan's most educated white-collar workers are thoroughly apolitical and the working classes depend even more now on LDP pork barrel projects and protection for their job security in the post-manufacturing era.

The One-Party Japanese State is here to stay, but perhaps Japan can at least cut the American leash in the future, right? Unfortunately for the Pacifist Japanese masses, the LDP only presents two options: remilitarize with a nod to past Imperialist glories or maintain a Japanese pseudo-pacificism under the American protectorate. Politics could offer a third way, but thanks to the gifts of U.S. foreign policy, they don't have that here.

For as long as I can remember (c. 1998), the free smiles I received at Tokyo fast food outlets and convenience stores have beamed back from Japanese middle-class teenagers or freeter in their twenties with low ambition. The whole idea of having illegal workers in the back kitchens or immigrants at the cash register has essentially been unknown to Japan on a large scale.

But suddenly - and I mean literally, in the last three months - young Chinese men and women have become at least 10%-20% of service workers in restaurants and chain stores across Tokyo. Most of them are competent and relatively fluent in Japanese, and the only reason their nationality becomes apparent is the single kanji on their name-tag. The Yoshinoya down the street now has a Chinese cashier. I've been in the AM/PM under the live house Shibuya O-Nest when there were only Chinese workers. And it's not just the low-rent locations: many members of the wait-staff at the fancy buffet restaurant in the Keio Plaza Hotel are Chinese.

I'm not sure whether a law changed, whether the immigrant population is exploding, whether the decrease in young people has kicked into the labor market, whether the perceived economic upturn has created jobs for skilled Japanese labor, or what exactly happened in late 2005, but the exception has now become the rule. Immigrant labor has exploded onto the Japanese landscape.

And the impact of this trend on my daily life? Zero. Perhaps the "o-kyakusama wa kamisama" (The Customer is God) concept of service surplus will be difficult to maintain, but I've had Chinese workers speak to me in more keigo than I get with the bored Japanese punks at 7-11. And I don't need the service surplus to start with. Maybe I can do without the American cynical and surly cashier culture, but if I don't get a deep bow on my way out the door of Lawsons, I don't ask for a refund on my Snickers.

I have to admit that it is a bit exciting to see non-Japanese workers operate in real, non-segregated Japanese society. Of course, there are the Bangladeshis who run my favorite Indian curry joint and the Iranians selling carpets, but this new class of foreigners are working in a very Japanese environment selling a very Japanese service. They are not doing something a Japanese worker cannot do; non-Japanese are now performing the exact same tasks as Japanese, and this form of social participation can make successful assimilation possible.

Despite U.N. advice to increase immigration, Japanese politicians have called for a cautious approach to their coming labor crisis. The hard rhetoric may be a cunning solution, however, as it calms the public about drastic social change while the environment moves slowly and naturally towards a more immigrant-inclusive direction. People may hate "immigration" in the abstract, but I don't think they mind Ms. Shu down at Matsuya.

Valentine's Day is not an actual red-letter day, but I decided to take a mini-vacation out in Mitaka-shi, eating chocolate cake, watching The Electric Company and various Michael Jackson videos (Have you ever worn a pointy red vinyl outfit to the movies?) - all of this much to the chagrin of my various employers. When I started receving urgent calls from Thailand on my cell phone about axial compressive force-related translations, I knew that my disappearance was a bit poorly-timed.

After learning about the letter C and the sound OW, I remembered that I should be watching the Winter Olympics instead of DVDs. Our options were unfortunately limited to speed skating trial runs or women's curling. The latter is the butt of one million Olympic jokes, subject to decades of the most obvious, hackneyed, cliche attacks. But curling appeals to me, as I am a member of the 微妙族 (bimyouzoku): someone who intentionally likes minor things over major things due to both an undying curiosity and an unconscious need for self-differentiation. There are various degrees of this malady: going to Portugal instead of Spain, liking Isn't Anything over Loveless, brown eggs over white ones, yellow watermelon over red, imaginary long-term Lyme disease instead of health, becoming the dictator of the Central African Republic and not the dictator of Chad.

So I found myself elated to watch a pre-taped women's curling match between Russia and Japan. In some ways, curling fully deserves to be the recipient of so much wrath: the procedure, scoring system, and action are generally incomprehensible to the layman, even after watching an entire match. More than a sport, curling is a Newtonian physics experiment on inertia and kinetics taken into the competitive arena. Surely these players are masters at altering the speed and angles of the stone, but I think it is fair to say that the athleticism resembles snooker more than extreme snowboarding.

Cut back to the studio, and the Japanese announcers resort to pre-written comments to explain what the hell just happened ("If this were baseball, you could say that they lost on a last inning grand slam...."). Then they flash to their ever-growing wall of faxes sent in by fans wishing success for the Japanese national team. There are immaculately drawn speed skater portraits, cute letters from kids, dozens of Miki Ando-related materials. Then the camera scans to all two of the curling support faxes. The first one appeared to have been dashed off in under a minute: a rough sketch of a curling stone with the words "curling gambare" in sloppy handwriting. Sadly, the penmanship did not look like it originated from the hands of a child. The other was an asymetrical line drawing of the team members, suspiciously created with the same marker line thickness.

These pathetic faxes made me feel sorry for the Japanese women's curling team. Let's face it: we do not show adequate love to the curling community. We now feel a duty to send our own faxes, especially knowing that they will put just about anything up on that studio wall. Low competition, you say? This is a job for the 微妙族！

Update: On tonight's broadcast, they featured an authentically adorable fax from a teenage girl with one of the women's curling team members wearing a curling stone as a hat. The fever is spreading.

Someday our kids will ask us, where were you when Japan beat Italy in women's curling at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics? And I will say, I was watching it live on television. Then someone will pipe up, did you have satellite NHK or something? And I'll say, yes, it's a long story.

A side note to the jubilation: both the Italian and Japanese curling coaches mainly speak to their players in English. The Japanese coach is evidently Japanese-Canadian. That kind of know-how only comes from the maple leaves.

Update: Then they lose to the Swiss, and I have to start blogging actual content again!

Japan Today - I mean, "crisscross.com" - had a curious article yesterday about the Japan Olympic Committee being flooded with angry calls wondering why Japanese athletes were not winning more medals at the Torino Olympics. I'm not sure 70 telephone complaints in a nation of 127 million really necessitates a news story, but this army of J. Arthur Cranks is symptomatic of a slowly brewing backlash against the Winter Olympics. After all the hype and the special menu items at McDonald's, the Nipponese Athletes have yet to win a single medal. And to make matters worse, if Japan were somehow able to buy off Estonia's three Gold medals and Croatia's 1 Gold and 2 Silvers, they would still have less bling than long time rival South Korea.

The always sexy, always angry Weekly Playboy screams out in this week's edition: "The Torino Olympics are too boring!" blaming "un-transparent scoring standards, rules that keep changing, and representative athletes who fail to live up to expectations." The editors are livid and someone has to take the blame: "Those responsible, step forward!" (They also warn in the next headline that the recently expanded lower classes in Japan will become violent and take revenge on the rich.)

The Winter Olympics can be a fun romp, but there are so many obvious flaws that as soon as things turn sour, all the fundamental problems are conveniently "discovered" for incessant nitpicking: too many white people, too many obscure sports invented by white people, too much ice and snow. Maybe the marketers deserve blame for making this biannual congregation for international goodwill into an opportunity to sell limited-edition knick-knacks. And maybe the television stations should be slapped on the wrist for turning us all into jingoistic monsters re-obsessed with the 20th century notion of basing support on personal affiliations to nation-states.

But a "backlash" against the Winter Olympics can only exist when people fail to consider that the Games are essentially an interesting collection of ridiculous sports. What were the Weekly Playboy editors really expecting? Did the luging not live up to their own personal standards? Were the young girls of the women's curling team supposed to beat out the forty year-old married professionals from the European powerhouse nations? Were the female snowboarders not supposed to break into a self-written rap when asked about their medal chances by television reporters?

If Japan won a medal or two, would the proceedings still be so boring?

Yesterday I got a frantic email from a Japanese music connoisseur in New York who had heard wild rumors that a new law will ban the sale of all vintage synths in Japan come April 1st. Surely this would result in music stores selling their Korg MS-20s and Roland Jupiter-8s for pennies in their panicked rush to comply with the updated rules, right?

Indeed, the Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law (Denan/電安法) goes into effect on April 1st of this year and makes the sale of all electrical appliances manufactured before 2001 illegal. In recent days, English information on the subject has brought the issue to greater prominence on the international stage. Even in Japan, the news has been a big shock to everyone besides those fans of industrial bureaucracy who constantly check up on the METI homepage. Loud cries of outrage are erupting from the otaku world, Akihabara electronic junkies, and YMO's Ryuichi Sakamoto.

The law itself seems to be a quiet protectionist legislative action hoping to help domestic manufacturers by removing increased competition from used equipment. The first time I saw Ebay in the mid-90s, I couldn't help but imagine the pro-environmental possibilities: instead of buying new goods, future consumers will just constantly trade around existing products. I have never seen statistics on whether the increased flow of information about used goods on Internet auction sites reduces demand for new products, but it seems possible. I can't imagine the Denan law really has anything to do with consumer safety: there were no amazing technological revolutions in toaster manufacturing between Spring 2000 and Spring 2001.

So the bad news is that a lot of old goods may be taken off the market, which will probably raise prices on new goods. More stuff made, higher prices, customers lose options.

What about the supposed good news: cheap synths? A glance at the Five-G website does not indicate that the vintage synth community is on the verge of collapse. They pledge to uphold the new law and will stop selling non-PSE compliant synths on commission, but otherwise, things are overpriced as normal. Some low-level, pedestrian models like the Yamaha DX-7 and Yamaha CS-10 have a special "Denan Sale Price," but the fancy Moogs and Sequential Circuits still cost a half-year's rent. I have no idea if their merchandise is somehow exempt from the law or whether they will just go on with their business until they get caught, but none of the synth stores seem to be directly affected quite yet.

All in all, this Denan fiasco strikes me as another Japanese bureaucratic policy aimed at helping the large electronic conglomerates at the expense of the consumers. But at least we can sleep easier at night knowing that our old rice cookers and box fans won't randomly explode and endanger our fellow countrymen.

Radio MXUT returns to the Internet with a new frantic mega-mix podcast based on the theme of "electricity." Over the course of 49 minutes, hosts marxy and u.t. (Kiiiiiii) bring you twenty-five energetic musical selections: obscure pico pico Japanese electro-pop, digital beats, analog blurts, vintage electro-rock, and a "mashup" of (Lil') Bow Wow and Architecture in Helsinki - delivering the final nail in the coffin for that early Aughts trend. Contractually-obligated pun-laced copy: Radio MXUT deliver another shocking selection of current material! T.G.I.Faraday! File: mp3 Feed: .rss feed

Credits: marxy - amperes, volts, mixing u.t. - ohms, coulombs, narration

Track list after the jump.

A long time ago, the Mori company tore down an old Christian church on the corner of Meiji-doori and Omotesando-doori to build the mecca to Japanese alternative teenage girl fashion - La Foret - thus solidifying Harajuku's image as the Coolest Place on Earth. Now fresh from giving mobs of greedy, superficial 20-somethings the reigns to Japanese culture in mega-complex Roppongi Hills, Mr. Mori has decided to tear down some other old things in Harajuku and build Omotesando Hills - a somewhat fancy shopping mall appealing to a completely different group of rich people. For the last five years or so, the once-stylish Harajuku neighborhood has been naturally gravitating from the 90s hidden hipster street-wear shops to enormous stores for European luxury brands. Slowly but surely, Japan is losing its status as a unique fashion enclave.

And for those who think Roppongi Hills does not create enough invidious distinctions, this month's Cyzo reports that the old Air Force base in Roppongi is being converted into $50,000-a-month luxury apartments (managed by Ritz-Carlton). The project is expected to cost even more than Mori's dinky nouveau-riche mall. Eat that, Mori.

Last Saturday, I saw Doravideo open up for dueling two-girl prog-pop units M.A.G.O. and Kiiiiiii at Shinjuku Red Cloth . The drummer pictured on the left has MIDI-triggers hooked on to his drums that carry signals through fancy Max/MSP programming to effect various video clips. On their Kill Bill routine, for example, the drum hits call up Tarantino's celebration of bloody limbs and create subtle musical sequences from the accompanying sound effects. Most of Doravideo's footage is copyrighted material, so they can't sell their DVD on the open market. But they might just throw a disc in for free if you buy an (overpriced!) 2000 yen sticker.

Apart from the amazing hi-tech video triggering, the content itself is also pretty explosive. There are some neat pieces that cut up Zatouichi and other old movies, but the two-man team mostly engage in some pretty heavy political and critical commentary. While creating a new musical composition from a video clip of jazz pianist Ayado Chie, a message scrolling at the bottom of the screen bashes the performer as a modern blackface artist only respected by clueless music fans out in the countryside. Several times, their footage made fun of the emperor's daughter Sayako and her husband. Before Doravideo even went on, their live schedule was projected on a screen featuring the Crown Prince Naruhito superimposed on top of a dozen fully naked Western porn models clutching machine guns. Another disturbing clip showed an amateur home video of National Tax Office employees taking an onsen vacation, getting sloppily drunk, and sexually harassing prostitutes on taxpayer dollars.

Despite the "un-Japanese" venomous messages, the performances captured almost everybody's undivided attention for the whole half-hour. Doravideo look like they are going to have a big year ahead of them.