neomarxisme

Which krautrock band is not available at Japanese rental chain Tsutaya?

1. Can
2. Neu!
3. Faust
4. Cluster
5. Guru Guru

Post your guesses in the comment area!

(How great is Tsutaya "5 CDs for 1000 yen" + laptop?)

Update: The answer is 1. Can. "Rory P. Wavekrest" from the Twin Cities is our winner. He will receive $5.00 in credit at the Neomarxisme.com Online Gift Shop. Thank you all for playing.

I forgot to post this last week, but Weekly Pureboi - my favorite mainstream source of jingoistic sexual objectification - warned readers of the "Three Threats" to the Japanese at the German World Cup, of which one was Neo-Nazis "hunting for Japanese supporters." Conservatism loves to justify its proactive and protracted anger through victimization. Oh, if only we could return to that fine era where Nazis and Japanese got along! The picture attached shows two skinheads marching - probably not for the preservation of their favorite bluebeat records.

• This morning, I discovered that someone had trashed the building guide outside of the yakuza front corporation. Turf war? No natural disaster could have done this damage: the metal sides were bent to hell, all the company placards ripped off. Like a car had jumped five feet into the sidewalk and rammed into the building facade. I am not sure whether this was a result of the Anna Miller's meeting or the precursor that I did not notice.

I have been following the Yoshihiko Wada controversy on Kikko's blog (click to see a visual comparison), but now the Japan Times is reporting in English on the topic. Long story short, an esteemed artist is being stripped of his awards for a work that completely and utterly rips off a painting by an Italian painter.

I bring this up not to suggest that Japanese artists are inherently thieves, but to knock out the final leg on the myth that "there is no sin in Japan against copying other artists' works." Crazy how human nature works, but people in Japan - like in many other countries - think it is unethical to copy directly from 1) contemporary artists 2) un-ironically or un-referentially 3) in the same artistic genre 4) and pass it off as your own. If there is any more debate to be had on this issue, that somehow the idea of "intellectual property" and "originality" is a Western conceit forced upon an unwilling Eastern populace, go for it in the comment section, but I am pretty much convinced that the massive increase in artists being busted for pakuri in recent days has little to do with the entrenchment of Western values and everything to do with the democratization of the media space thanks to 2-ch and blogs. You couldn't get "caught" for pakuri when the media blacked out all criticism of artistic works. Thanks to the Inter Net, now you can.

Being halfway 'round the world and therefore chronically nescient of au courant vagaries in the common culture - in just one recent example, I hardly knew young troubadour Robert Kelly had now moved into making the operetta "Trapped in the Closet" - word has only now reached my Oriental covert about the jesters contriving their own brand of chortles with the Yacht Rock project.

This serial manages to tickle, mauger low levels of thespian prowess and shoddy aural reproduction. But naught for mere irony nor reference back to former jukebox platters of our salad days. We, my compatriots, have swam into a new ken (forgive me, Keats) of "Heracles comedy" in which jokes cease to be things within themselves, but mere reflections upon the preposterous and astounding efforts of the creators. Just as Colossus at Rhodes bewildered ancient Greeks solely through an intimidation of size, our delight with Yacht Rock must stem from the makers' incredulous erudition about extremely unctuous popular songs (in their cant, "smooth") verdant in the mid 70s to the early 80s - including such bygone hitmakers as Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, Toto, Hall & Oates, and Loggins & Messina.

Whether it be rockist sensibilities denouncing all deviation from the traditional neo-lyre/bass-lyre/kettledrum arrangement or an objective disapprobation of the songs' hollow constructions, this genre has fallen out of favor, like Leon Czolgosz in Anarchist circles post-Buffalo, out of sight and mind, with nary a paladin coming forward to bequeath a posthumous legitimacy. First and foremost, unlike punk and prog and new wave, this Yacht Rock field created few scions in the fag end of the century. Not even a plash of this production vocabulary carried on into later musical evolutions, nor did bastards materialize to carry the tricot into the dawn without official blessing. A comparison to the "Soft Rock" of the 60s may be apropos, but the Grover Cleveland beards, overall malaise of the stagflated political and social climate, and embarrassing transgressions of the movement's alumni tend to put posterior eulogizing beyond the pale. (We now apperceive Kenny Loggins as the man sailing into the Top Gun "Danger Zone" - not as the dapper youngster on a docked yacht singing with Jim Messina.) For anyone with aught sense of risibility, Christopher Cross would be the butt of myriad jokes - if we could remember who in Hades he was!

Indeed I laugh at the queerness of the "smooth" oeuvres and their newfound classification - a celebration of our Linnean prowess to attribute sporadic cases of a terse past outbreak as a new strain of consumption, dengue, or impetigo. But moreover, I go goobers over the very idea of excess knowledge about the mundane, that someone out in the world would fashion and form plot details based on true-life Yacht Rock trivia - e.g., that Van Halen was produced by the Doobie Brothers' producer, a morsel used in Episode Nine. Bully to anyone who can remember that Michael McDonald was mercilessly pommeled on SCTV and then employ this historical crumb to attribute human motivations for Toto "pacifying" Michael Jackson with "Human Nature."

In our futurity, we may decline to relish craft, and instead, rejoice from these new International-Network wonders of the human spirit. Yacht Rock's Toto may not be funny in toto, but the idea of such blithe dedication to forlorn music may keep us exulting in the morrow.

Currently, there is a parade of over forty sound-trucks blazing down the avenue, all chanting right-wing slogans in unison, successfully recreating the high-decibel aural terrorism on their first 120 albums. Police escort, of course, otherwise things may spin out of control and cause discomfort for the public. If "hell is other people's music," the deepest level of hell must be saved for the amplification of fascist politics in order to install fear in the common man.

Last Friday night, I saw a tiny left-wing demonstration in Shibuya, but the thing about people power is that the cast and crew actually show their faces, walk the walk as they talk the talk. And there were handicap people! And women! These ultra-nationalists hide behind machines, like Darth Vader. They could all be remote-controlled from some central base in Yamanashi, and we would never know.

Sorry to keep writing about the yakuza and the right-wing, but I keep running into them week after week. I guess I should just cower in fear like a good boy. God didn't make right-wing soundtrucks so we would question their impact on the political process. Unlike the rest of the world, trucks in Japan run on wa, not gasoline, so it is quite rude to be too inquisitive about the internal combustion process.

Update: - They're back at 6:30 and name-checking Horie! Ha. My guess is that they don't like him. Three trucks are turned perpendicular to traffic, right in the middle of an intersection, and the cops are just patiently trying to get them out of the way.

Rebranding, my friends. When the world gives you lemons, you change the meaning of the word "lemons" to have a positive meaning.

Long long ago, Old World powerhouse China liked to give somewhat unflattering names to the "civilizations" (Ha ha!) on their geographical fringes. The Han Chinese referred to the people living in modern-day Kyushu as "wa" (倭), meaning "dwarf." Once the Wa got their act together and started being regional players, they kept the "wa" sound - it's catchy - but changed the Chinese character to "和," which means "peace, harmony" (or the Nihonjinron concept for mystical Japanese "social harmony" that no one bothers to explore in more concrete, practical and structural terms.) Like if "America" meant "drooling frat jock" in Iroquois and somewhere in the 17th century, the New England Colonials told everybody it meant "awesome frat jock." Kind of.

Now that modern Japanese uses "和" as the one-character symbol for Japan and the Japanese language (besides 日), I would wager that a majority of Japanese do not know about the old 倭 "wa" - although maybe more know about the wa-switch than know that Colonel Sanders' first name was not "Colonel."

According to Wicked-Pedia, the North Koreans still pick on Japan by using the old 倭, but the increase of nutrition in recent years has made the Japanese "dwarf" tag less and less applicable. In a probably unrelated note, however, there seems to still be a Japanese obsession with extreme height. In last night's Japan vs. Australia World Cup match, they repeatedly referred to the Aussie striker Kennedy not by his name but as "194 centimeters." I know that pain.

......"To say that the locker jokes are a 'Laugh-In' rip-off... that would be an understatement. The entire format and tone of this show hark directly back to the post-modern pop TV of the late 60s. You ever realize that every single opening monologue is about how unfunny the jokes are? But we have gone beyond breaking the Fourth Wall as a joke and onto using self-reference as an apology, an excuse. Do you understand the negative impact we are having on kids everywhere? Not only in Canada but America. A whole generation growing up to think that things are 'so bad, they are good.'"
......I could have never imagined Ross would go off like this. He always seemed so lower middle-class in the comfort of my home television. Kind of like Schneider from "One Day at a Time." And now, trying to make heads and tails of this... I was skipping school to be a cast member of this show. The last thing I needed was more book learning.
......"Hey, you! New kid! Stand in the middle of the set. Now I am going to ask you one question: what in the world was I just talking about?" Ross was now barking directly at me. I moved to the middle of the stage, as directed.
......"I don't know." Flinch.
......But nothing happened!
......"You see, you stupid brat. There's no such thing as being slimed. It's all special effects and gimmicks. Get out of my face."
......This was my Alice in Wonderland moment, where I eat the red pill and finally wake up from the spell of the evil witch. My eyes were open that day. No longer was Ottowa "my hometown" - it was the middle of the 20th century.
......"All you kids come here, thinking you'll be the next Alasdair, the next Christine, the last Lisa, eligible for placement on Hey Dude or Salute Your Shorts after your term expires. You're lucky to come out of here with your pride intact." The red-head kid to my left went on to become the older Pete from "The Adventures of Pete and Pete."
......Learning that Ross was, in fact, the actor Les Lye was also extremely difficult for me. Dipping my right foot out of childhood and into reality - it was not easy.
......Now that I am in my forties, a writer published in several languages, several PhDs from several prestigious Canadian universities, I will admit: our show was not a very good television show. But you know what, we DID do that on television. And they said it could never be done. We showed them, Barth.

Breaking news from Jean Snow: Relax Magazine will soon cease publication. This is the Bible going out of print, if Japanese teenage hipsters were Christians, and there were still Japanese teenage hipsters left. For anyone refusing to admit that Japan is no longer Pizzicato Five, bossa-nova cafes, A Bathing Ape, Puffy, skateboarding, graffiti, collaboration goods, Ryan McGinness art, toy collecting, old records forgotten in the West, taste-discrimination over capital-discrimination, ultra-advanced consumer culture, limited-edition sneakers, Mike Mills, Parco exhibitions, Hiromix the amateur photographer, Godard films, and Cornelius (but instead, Louis Vuitton leather, Roppongi Hills, tight white pants, brown haired Onee-kei, fancy suits with no ties, $200 dinners, Uniqlo, Orange Range, Densha Otoko, Hiromix the celebrity, fake beer, and CanCam), your dream is officially over.

Relax's monthly pages singlehandedly codified a certain international aesthetic style emerging out of the post-grunge 90s. Although launched a bit after the Shibuya-kei and Ura-Harajuku trends, Relax was the sharpest media of this unofficial movement, and further proved that Japan had more to offer in this curation/sampling based consumer-art than other countries. American kids used to buy the magazine even though they could not read the text, because no one else was going to list 300 obscure reggae records next to pictures of adorable girls and Mark Gonzales art. (And even though it was targeted to boys, the publication apparently had mostly girl readers, which gave the book a post-sexual harmony hovering between male informationitis and female peaceful tenderness.)

Of course, the world moved away from this aesthetic and onto less product-friendly art, and Japanese youngsters moved away from $300 monthly allowances and interest in the outside world. Relax in response reinvented itself as an anti-consumer "lifestyle journal" focusing on health, travel, and eco-sustainability. These are all neat and commendable topics, but they don't move records, or t-shirts, or double-name camo jackets, nor do they tell you what to wear to your date on Saturday night or how to get girls in bed and what to do with them once you have gotten them there (the way that Popeye could). Japan's most popular fashion magazine at the moment is CanCam, selling something like 500,000 copies a month. If one million young females are moving in that direction, there is no way one million young males would have the time to glance through something like Relax without totally and completely falling off the track towards sexual conquest.

As much as I take guff for it, I shed few tears for Relax or Shibuya-kei, but I do wish that something as sophisticated and world-class would appear on the mainstream Japanese popular culture scene. Art in Japan has gone back underground to certain extent, but it feels like Alternative in 1995, where bands got kicked off Sire and then were not really "Indie" but just "washed-up." So much under-the-radar art at the moment still operates in the Relax mold: the obsession with products and sales, the attempts to please the same masters, the similar self-framing. Indie bands pass out consumer surveys about their tunes. Art galleries have DJs.

There should be no surprise that Relax is folding in the current Japanese climate, but let us take this moment to remember how important its cultural codification was for boosting the image of Japan in the West. That wave still rolls across the globe. Does anyone think the CanCam wave will be half as fun?

Item: New York's Jacob the Jeweler is arrested on drug and laundering charges. Where will Nigo go now for his bling? Is this end of bling-bling Nigo and the beginning of Lohas Eco-Nigo? Also, America arrests cultural icons who do have shady financial deals with crime syndicates!? Whatt a country!

Item: I am out of Japan for the weekend on family matters. A little one is becoming a member of the Episcopal church - perhaps the most Confucian form of Christianity. All ritual and good hymns, very low on dogma. You'd like it.

Item: You know what Jews are good at? Making money. And when they are not sending their pre-taxed income off to the Elders of Zion, they are teaching Japanese goyim how to make some cash and lead happy lives. For the last several months, Ken Honda's book ユダヤ人大富豪の教え 幸せな金持ちになる17の秘訣 (they suspiciously leave out the "Jew" part of the English title: The Millionaire's Philosophy for a Happy Life) has been massively popular here in Japan. Next, matzo ball sushi?!

I got back in town yesterday, after a weekend of eating Grillades & Grits and passively aiding the American assault on all unique global cultures. A day at the beach + a sunscreen mishap = red, red shoulders which prevented me from going into the local tattoo parlor and getting those full-ink sleeves like the dude from RATM.

Japan is so "in" in America that my local Albertson's sells Golden Curry.

Also, Scooby-Doo Sudoku? The sudoku whirlwind is still blowing strong - so strong, in fact, that the trend seems to have returned from the dead here in Japan. What I don't quite understand, however, is how they can still be popular when anyone who has done a year or so of sudoku, making their way up to the Ultra Ridiculous class of puzzles, will know that the puzzles do not get more fun or more "challenging" - they just require more and more busywork and a serious attention to detail. You do little more than block off boxes with only two options for an hour and then finally stumble upon the one square that will set off the entire grid like a mousetrap. Most of your time is spent in the erasing process. And yet, Americans love this new sexy brand of deductive reasoning. A better blogger would tie this trend into the Iraq War.

TEPCO came to my new apartment this morning and installed the Internet, so hopefully this will bolster my blogging in the coming weeks. Lately, I have had to leave work and check into an Net Cafe every ten minutes to read my comments and edit out the vowels.

Forget the noise terrorism and the anger and the political distortions of Ultra-Nationalists - let's talk about the tunes.

Oh, so very square.

First: the prerequisite pentatonic scales - because the Imperial nation-family (國體) believes in an austerity of note-saving and probably agrees with my 10th grade English teacher that "sad things have more artistic gravity than happy things."

Second: the vaguely Prussian/Germanic orchestration - because grand military majesty is not the sound of one-hand-clapping and shamisen and taiko drum polyrhythms, but millions of Japanese marching lockstep towards modernity in the Meiji era.

This brings us to an important point: the Ultra-Right in Japan does not want to "get back" to pre-Western, pre-modern Japan; whether intentionally or not, their clarion calls hark back to the Western-influenced Modern Japan - that electric era when a bunch of old men got together and flattened out all regional customs, sundry superstitions, and local variations to pave the way for one monolithic idea of "Japanese culture." If our local Armchair Fascists were into the Edo era instead, they'd all be chugging sake and sayin' "Ee ja nai ka" and partying in the streets and sleeping with their neighbors' wives. Instead we get intolerable Prussian military marches with sour Oriental melodies - because men look good in uniform and Empire-building was the owning-a-Ferrari of the early 20th century. But all this subsumed Germanic obduracy is hilarious now: if some new set of trucks rolled down Omotesando-doori protesting the death of Frederick II, no one would be able to aurally distinguish them from the uyoku.

If conservatives in the U.S. had soundtrucks, they would probably do a loop of "Sweet Home Alabama" and the Charlie Daniels Band's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Without blinking, both Democrats and Republicans would unwittingly run out of the house after the DJ-mobile, get drunk, sing along, and then somehow end up electing Bush for a third term. These gunka don't let you have any fun while you're setting back the political clock 100 years.

Thanks to the Internet and improved distribution channels, there seems to be very little Japanese product not making its way over to the West these days. And for the melon pan, Pocky, panko bread crumbs, and Mitsuya cider that Japan provides to United States, America sends its hottest items in return:

1. The Game by Neil Strauss.

The English subtitle is "Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists" as if rock critic Strauss is less interested in the techniques of hitting on girls and more interested in the sociology/psychology of those wielding the know-how. The Japanese subtitle, on the other hand, is pretty explicit in the book's intention: 「退屈な人生を変える究極のナンパバイブル」(The Ultimate Pickup Bible for Changing Your Boring Life). Now I am sure many British and American guys have successfully deployed the pickup chicanery featured in the narrative, but the Japanese marketing cuts to the chase and sells a bit of life-changing snake oil.

I don't, however, see the implementation of The Game being so smooth in the Japanese social scene. Based on what I skimmed from Nick Sylvester's controversial Voice cover story, most of The Game™ involves approaching women and asking them ridiculous questions like, "My friend wants to buy a rare endangered mongoose that kills lawn snakes, and we want to get a female opinion on it" in order to start up a conversation. This works well in the Western-style standard pub or bar, where you have large groups of people milling around in loose formation. Popping your head into closed-off izakaya silos to ask such a question, on the other hand, would invite mostly blank stares.

The classic way to meet girls in Japan is goukon （合コン） where a multiple number of men pre-arrange a group date with an equal number of women. The Game™ would give no advantages in this setting since girls are already provided. Japanese men could use these techniques to pick up girls on the street or in tachinomi bars, but maybe it is The Game™'s second-stage tactics that have more cultural crossover. My guess is that dating advice is contingent on environmental factors. I just can't place the American sleezy smugness of asking an unfamiliar girl "Do you wanna kiss me?" in this particular climate.

2. 1 Night In Paris

For a while, the CanCam-type, OL-targeted "good girl" fashion magazines in Japan tried to make Paris Hilton into a young feminine rich fashion hero, and more than one Louis Vuitton-wearing, chapatsu girl I know (with ambitions of becoming a TV announcer) was a big fan. What a fun blonde lifestyle! Jetting around the world! Celebrity! Paris has a pet chihuahua, which automatically puts her close to the hearts of many young, single Japanese women with unconscious status-aspiration. Females outside of the mainstream plurality, however, would repeatedly tell me that Paris Hilton struck them as being "不潔" (unclean), although revelations of her vulgarity did not seem to be appearing in the Japanese media. They just had good intuition.

But on the NEW shelves at your local friendly Tsutaya: 1 Night in Paris, the infamous leaked sex tape. No Internet trading for the Japanese - the DVD is right next to copies of Pierrot le fou at mainstream video rental stores. Hoorah for America 2004.

Products come and go in Japanese convenience stores at a bewildering velocity. One day you pick up a delightful pint of old-fashioned French Style Milk Seeki, and a week later, this new product is gone forever - a total existence so brief that it almost completely fails to enter our collective memories or get tangled in the branches of the Internet. Some new goods are seasonal - cherry blossom-themed snacks, etc. Most are not very good and deserve to disappear quickly. Nonetheless, high-speed, short-term products are now a standard institution of the Japanese retail experience.

Critics have always railed against the commercial system for manufacturing "trends" with the expressed purpose of forcing consumers to buy new baubles and gadgets to keep up with artificially-evolving social norms. But the Japanese snack market is not about planned obsolescence: in fact, this kind of production schedule is terribly unprofitable for the manufacturers involved. A successful mass market firm making only one type of candy bar would win huge profit margins in the resulting economies of scale. If producers had perfect control of the market, I doubt they would choose constant product development and short product life-cycles over stability and monotony.

So where did this system come from?

One of the classic Nihonjinron responses has been something like "Japan experiences four distinct seasons, and Japanese people thus desire constantly changing product lines in response to these climatic changes." This does not make sense, as (1) not all of Japan has four distinct seasons the way that Tokyo does and (2) culture based on the idea of seasonal change would be cyclical and not hyper-progressive. Instead of always wanting a completely new soda every month, the Japanese, according to this logic, should want the same Pear Soda to appear on shelves every October.

By chance, I discovered that the book Can Japan Compete? - by power-nerd HBS prof Michael E. Porter with Hirotaka Takeuchi and Mariko Sakakibara - offers a few clues to the problem at hand. The authors examine the non-international competitiveness of many Japanese business fields. In the chocolate sector, for example, almost none of the brands have any success outside of the Japanese market despite massive domestic production. While the regulations leading to a low cocoa butter content take some of the blame, the authors also point a finger at the convoluted distribution system:

Although the industry began to address product proliferation in 1992, companies still maintain huge product lines. Compare Morinaga, which has 60 brands (after cutting more than 100), with its successful foreign rival Mars. Mars competes in 120 countries with only 40 brands. Japanese manufactures still introduce between 100 and 120 new items every year. One of the drivers of this meaningless product proliferation is Japan's peculiar distribution channels, which expect each company to introduce a fresh lineup of products almost every month to maintain its shelf space allocation (80).

So according to their explanation, the short supply of shelf space in retail outlets causes pressures for wholesalers to force producers to provide them with new products that will win attention from retailers. Most of the big display areas in convenience stores do tend to be used for new products, and I can understand why wholesalers would not be excited just to throw a Snickers bar in a slot within the candy corner. They make money from slim margins on large sales, and so they demand manufacturers to make new things to catch eyes, win floor space, and move goods - an easy position, seeing that they are not the ones who have to bear the grunt of product development costs.

Consumers are now used to this cavalcade of minorly-altered products. As a friend says, "if you are going to get a snack to eat, it should be fun. And nothing is more fun than a new product." I can understand that logic. If consumers are happy to have chaotic product options, this system may skillfully appease consumer curiosity, but the ultimate buyers may not be the largest driver of the proliferation speed. That is to say, they are passively accepting the system as is, but not directly pushing companies towards faster and faster unveiling of new products.

Porter et. al also look at apparel, which has a similar manufacture/distribution pattern with chocolate: the major firms make large product lines that change constantly in order to win department store space. The "Onward Way" system of distribution started by Onward Kashiyama in the 70s reduces risk for department stores by selling clothing on consignment (86). This means full returns, no discounting or "50%-off sales," and department store expectations for constantly changing product. These too would lead to fast pace changes in order to correspond to retailer needs, and consumers would grow accustom to the speed without specifically demanding it.

In terms of dry goods, short-term product success does not seem to have an immediate impact on the next lineup. Whether something sells or not, it disappears. And we hardly know whether something went away a home-run king or a strike-out - especially without seeing the losing team on the Reduced rack. If anything, huge product success would actually slow down the process, as producers would rush in to make more shipments of a hit good and hold back new products for a later date.

Compare this to the culture industry, where low sales are a sign of artistic failure, where ranking charts and box office numbers publicly announce winners and losers, where critics and writers comment upon flops and hits, where artists' creative freedom and career prospects are determined by current success. When the Japanese music industry lost one-third of its value in five years, trends halted to a stop: new artists aren't being launched to market and even the new artists with moderate sales look like failures compared to their big brothers and sisters. Here bad business slows down trends.

Product proliferation in foods, however, will probably move on despite market size or consumer tastes, because retail and distribution pressures require a constant flood of new products to secure limited shelf space. Porter recommends that Morinaga and Meiji narrow their product lines according to an actual marketing strategy targeting specific users, but I am not sure anyone is taking that advice. Whether product-line-limiting Western-management becomes widespread or things continue to move at a lightning pace, horde your Glico Caramel Cream - for you never know what tomorrow holds.

(Does it not sound so much cooler to state "the super-techno cyberpunk Shinto Japanese like speed" as a reason for high-paced product proliferation rather than explaining the upstream pressures of distribution and retail organization? I find "distribution" to be one of the most boring words in the English language. 流通 is equally dry.)

A photograph of a photograph.