neomarxisme

Can anyone be of assistance with a small procedural issue?

Graham pointed me to a recent Deux-Chanel thread (http://news19.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/newsplus/1157178684/) protesting the New York Times Japan-based correspondent Norimitsu Onishi's recent profile of prime-minister-in-waiting Abe Shinzo. The motley crew of posters found particular offense in this line:

Until a few years ago Mr. Abe was known among voters mainly for being the son of Shintaro Abe, a Liberal Democrat who almost became prime minister, and the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a cabinet member during the war, who was imprisoned as a Class A war crimes suspect but was never tried and who became prime minister in 1957.

More bias from Onishi, they claim, in that Abe is being placed in the "Class A war criminal" frame of his grandfather. Most right-wingers in Japan do not believe in "Class A war criminals" to start with - an arbitrary and imaginary tag created by occupying Americans. And to Kishi's credit - the Americans may have thrown him in jail, but they put him back on the streets pronto with his fascist and mob buddies and gave him some pocket money to start cracking Socialist heads and keep the Akahata from flying over Nagatacho. We Americans surely cannot call him a "War Criminal" if we Americans decided that he was the kind of decent folk who would win the Cold War for us at all costs. Is Werner von Braun the genius who got us to the moon or the guy who terrorized Brits with buzz bombs and supersonic missiles?

Much more moral clarity over on the thread, however, as posters want to know about this Japan-bashing writer Onishi. Apparently he is Korean-Japanese with Canadian citizenship. Comment 572 states 「大西は日本在住の、日本→カナダ国籍取った朝鮮人だよな。マジで殺されろ。」using a questionably-racist term for Koreans (朝鮮人) and then adding a cherry on top: "Seriously, he should be killed." The logic is clear: of course, he is bashing Japan, because he is #1 - not actually Japanese - and #2 - the Korean-Japanese live their whole life to bash Japan. Racial purity determines political outlook.

All this classy, high-brow banter reminds me of the other Deux-Chanel thread that picked up my blog. From what I gleaned, one of their goals is to make sure that everyone knows that Obara Joji - the killer of British hostess Lucy Blackman - is Korean-Japanese and should be addressed with his real Korean name (Kim Sung Jong), which I guess in their logic, exculpates the Japanese people from her murder.

Funny thing about Koreans: the government formally recognized all Koreans as Japanese during the Occupation of Korea. But once the Japanese lost the war and got their colonial holdings taken away, one of the first things the post-war government did was to rob all "Japanese" Koreans of their citizenship. Pensions for colonial Asians fighting for Japan were immediately cut. Blood ties get in the way of Imperialism, but become very important for post-Imperialism.

Ties to the wily, criminal Koreans also come in handy in the struggle against Communism. The Right's hero Abe - who needs to be protected at all costs from the evil eye of "fake Japanese" reporters (comment 268: 「偽日本人」) - happens to be best pals with the Unification Church of Korean anti-Communist stalwart and Christ-like messiah Rev. Moon. Kikko claims that the name of Abe's best-selling new book 『美しい国へ』(Towards a Beautiful Country) is very similar to the title of Kuboki Osami's book 『美しい国／日本の使命』 (Beautiful Country / Japan's Mission). Kuboki, by the way, was the Japanese chairman for the Unification Church and good friend to Sasakawa Ryouichi - boat gambling don, unrepentant fascist and honorary chairman of the Unification Church of Japan. Sasakawa, of course, was old "Class A War Criminal" cellmate to Kishi (along with mob boss Kodama Yoshio). Needless to say, Kishi was friends with the Church until his death.

Now Abe should have no need to shoulder the war sins of his father, but the fact that Abe is still very close with the Unification Church reminds us why a sense of history and family are important for looking at the next prime minister. As far as I know, he has never turned his back against his heritage, but is merely the latest vessel in a long-stream of a certain political school. Pointing such things out, however, could only be the work of Japan-loathing secret Korean agents. But not the secret Korean agents in the cult religion that we openly support.

vs.

Thanks to the red Columbia portable turntable that everyone owned around 1999 after vinyl became a luxurious and conspicuous waste far more classy than listening to 1s and 0s from smaller silicon discs with higher fidelity, my apartment has been mysteriously treated to the repeated playing of Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me." (I am pretty sure we got the LP for cheap at the same Karuizawa record store where I found The Monkees' Golden Story featuring Tanaami Keiichi's art, although it's one of those albums anybody on Earth could just have "around the house.")

With such a pop gem on my mind, I could not resist the inclination to write a bogus pretentious essay on the theme of the Rockwell song and Michel Foucault's Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison - tying together the works under the grand metaphor that society operates much like an panopticon with good behavior and compliance as a result of constant possibilities of authoritative supervision. This was going to teach you people how to laugh out-loud. You see - it is hilarious to analyze a "low culture" item (like Rockwell) within a framework of "high culture" (like Foucault).

These guys are also giants in their own right: imagine the boos, hisses, rescindment of invitations upon you spouting out Veblen, Weber, or Schumpeter with a fast, slick crowd, but drop some hints at rockstar Foucault and you are golden for a lifetime. This guy put academics on the map in the same way Rockwell established that African-Americans could do pop music.

But I surveyed the internet to make sure this grand Foucault-Rockwell idea had not been previously executed. Lo and behold, fright and discontent - someone already thought of this parallel and to make matters worse, the writer is also named Marx - a Professor of Sociology at some local technical school in Boston called M.I.T. (And I bet this guy wins extra points that his ancestors were actually named Marx instead of taking the name on accidentally at Castle Garden Immigration Depot because the young immigrant misunderstood the question, answering his first name "Max" with a heavy accent - and "Puznac" sounded "too Polish" anyway.)

So, no Foucault-Rockwell essay for any of you. Thanks, Prof. Marx.

While we are still on the subject of Rockwell, before never ever mentioning him again for the rest of our lives, I want to point out that the seeds of his doom were planted in the track listing of his debut album. Song #3: a cover of "Taxman" by the Beatles. Universally speaking, "Taxman" is a terrible song for anyone to remake, especially if you are trying to escape the fact that you are a rich, spoiled son of the music mogul who runs the label releasing your first album. "Taxman" is the kind of song that makes "hip" Republicans and conservatives swoon and was only marginally cool because the Beatles were cultural heroes, who happened to make a lot of money, and 95% of that money was being taken by "the Man" which happened to be a strongly-Socialist UK government. Doing "Taxman" as a virgin artist in the middle of the Reagan Era is decidedly less adventurous.

The "coolest" thing I have ever heard about taxes is a quote from my great-grandfather (the aforementioned fake Marx) who quipped, "All you have to do is pay 20% of your income and the government doesn't send in pogroms to burn your house down and rape your women?" He did not end that with "Whatta country!" but he would in the film remake.

If there is anything I have learned from viewing a non-stop television relay about the birth of a baby boy - you don't say! - to Princess Kiko, it is that television stations have exactly six pieces of stock footage showing the Imperial couple - 40% percent of which is the two riding in the back of a car.

Forgive me for yesterday's sloppy art history challenge. Truth be told, all I really wanted to do is something akin to what follows. Please accept this new version as the "real" one and remove the previous post from the Marxy canon.

Marxy

Great Quotes from Art History

"That's a spicy meatball!" - F.T. Marinetti Italian Futurist

As far as I know, Suntory comes out with a new coffee product every third or fourth day, but they got my attention with a set of new ads for Boss Begin! - a coffee for morning, no matter what time your morning begins. I am guessing that this may be the very first coffee ever to be used for a morning pickup, and I wonder how the chemistry has been altered to specifically take away the morning groggies. I am thinking caffeine is involved. According to their website, the coffee beans have seen an especially copious amount of morning sun. And those early rays go straight to you through the power of liquid energy transference.

But forget science for a minute, let's talk about society. The big red ads on the Ginza Line contain the following copy:

あなたの朝は何時ですか。

「午前３時です。」
朝の番組に出演中のアナウンサーAさん

「６時です。ここ１０年ずっと」
丸の内のサラリーマンDさん

「５時です。もちろん夕方の」
歌舞伎町ホストEさん

What time is your morning?

"3 A.M."
Announcer fron a morning TV show A-san

"Six. Every day for 10 years."
Marunouchi salaryman D-san

"Five. Of course, that's in the evening."
Kabukicho Host E-san

So we have three "morning scenarios" - the very early TV-show host, the standard salaryman going in at 9, and the "night worker" host. The first two are a respectible part of society by anybody's measure - the television celebrity greeting us every morning as we rise and the salaryman white-collar worker putting bread on our table. The inclusion of the host, however, is quite a development.

Hosts are young men with bad fake tans, poofed-up dyed hair, and cheesy suits with open collars, who flee their small villages at 18 for the glamourous world of satisfying women in the big city. Oddly, the first line of description in "host work" is always that these young men's main clientele is "bored, rich housewives" - when in actuality the vast majority of women patronizing host clubs to get their cigarettes lit, drinks poured, and figures endlessly flattered are women from the sex industry. In recent years, there has been a "host boom" and the media likes to report that single women from mainstream society are all going there in gaggles to hang out with men who look like over-browned members of a bad Kansai-area Sharan Q cover band, but I doubt these women make-up a majority.

While hostesses are not supposed to be sleeping with their clients - unless he basically "buys her" for a very, very large amount of money - hosts are supposed to translate big monetary outlays at the host club into sexual favors. This makes hosts the prostitutes of prostitutes. Even if you are pro-prostitution from a women's lib angle, hosts should be your greatest enemy. While prostitutes may be "the world's oldest profession" and catering to a natural demand, there is no evidence that this is true for hosts. Sex business proprieters invented host clubs to get back the money they have to pay out to their female labor pool. They manufactured a "false need" for this host service and now get their labor expenses back as profit. Either that, or they are capitalizing on the fact that lower-class sex workers have a difficult time meeting men in the mainstream world and have to patronize host clubs for male companionship.

But this BOSS ad tends to put this host occupation into the same "normal" context as the other two. I recently talked to someone about how "contemporary Japanese culture worships the host," and she corrected me that "they are merely tolerated." As the economy changes from income determined by a strict hierarchy of "proper companies" to a free-for-all where the income result justifies the earning process, of course 23 year-old hosts have as much right to live the upper middle-class lifestyle as a 45 year-old middle manager. Hey, they may get up late for work, but their morning is identical in concept to your morning. They just have to bed way more sex workers than you do.

Just when I thought Autumn had finally joined us at the table and Summer was excusing itself to take a leave of absence, yesterday was barbs of yellow sun carving marks in your face in a murky swamp of maximum humidity. So what better occasion to get up at 8 a.m. and go to your Neighborhood Disaster Training.

In some fit of faulty reasoning, I had decided that (a) attendance at this event was mandatory (b) everyone in the 'hood would be there and (c) the whole thing would involve us arriving at the refuge site and then dispersing fifteen minutes later.

All of these assumptions turned out to be a product of my imagination, as we greeted the only people who bothered to show up: twelve elderly residents of our chou-me area. We also hunkered down for what would be a three-hour training session, starting with fire extinguishers, going to basic first aid, and then drifting off into defibrillating machines. By ten forty-five, I started to question whether this was the best way to spend a Sunday morning, seeing that the rest of the neighborhood certainly did not think so.

Civil society has always been relatively weak in Japan, and I would blame "the kids" for a lack of perspective on social responsibility but their parents were not there either. This is not really a unique "Japanese" problem, as illustrated by Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone - nobody anywhere anymore really feels like community, society, other people particularly deserve much of their time, especially in big cities.

In Tokyo, I find it hard to imagine anyone feels as if they have time to spare. I had to go out to Chiba on Friday, and I was reminded how long and dreary the daily commute is for a large chunk of metropolitan workers. They recently removed one train from the morning schedule of my "lightly packed" Inogashira Line and now it's wall-to-wall upon leaving Kichijoji. Even my relatively short ride wears me out before I even get to work.

Admittedly, my values and standards are a bit warped the lazy pace of the American South, where my dad would be home from work at 5:30 every night to eat dinner, but still, I get the feeling that getting up at 6 every morning and getting back to the house around 10 or 11 to take a bath and eat the cold remains of dinner on every week night would lead most everybody to treating the weekend as sacrosanct. Who in their right mind would give three hours to their local committee when they can barely give the same attention to their offspring? Local community (and kids, for that matter) will always lose out to the corporation: "No man can serve two masters."

Who shows up to these things? The retired. These kinds of events are like Field Day for the elderly. It's easy to say they "possess a heightened sensitivity towards civic duty that has been lost in recent generations" but really, their Sunday is like their Tuesday - they've got three hours any day of the week. This is why the elderly also set our political agenda.

We youngsters snuck off at eleven. Once I learned the proper location for fleeing my earthquake-savaged neighborhood, I needed to go home and get back to my dwindling moments of free time. I look forward to attending the next training session in forty or so years.

Last week, I attended a small talk with Miura Atsushi - author of best-selling book about the rise of downwardly-mobile Japanese youth 『下流社会』 (Karyuu Shakai) - on the topic "New Rich vs. New Poor." The New Rich make over 70 million yen a year and are generally much better people than you or me. Do you even have a car? These guys can afford to drive Benzes with automatic transmission. The Downwardly Mobile like manga and other stupid stuff that may be high on personal meaning but lack any sort of ability to separate you from the common jughead on the street. And I bet the New Poor tip very poorly - all puns intended, buddy.

Miura has carved out a market niche for himself recently by becoming the expert on the cultural effects of income inequality, with three new books published already this year. One of which is a book dedicated to looking at class-consciousness in young women『上流な私？下流な私？』("Upper-class me? Lower-class me?") which is kind of like "Betty or Veronica?" for a more stratified century. I am reading through it at the moment, and there is something that bugs me: most of these pundits sound as if they are talking about "class" as something one chooses upon adulthood. There is still a dangerous assumption that "all Japanese are middle-class" but some of these equally middle-class kids get so wrapped up in music and art and an avoidance of persona-crushing social responsibility that they fall off the high-income track and end up eating pre-packaged ramen five times a week. That recent OECD report on Japan shows quite clearly that there are lots of people in Japan not only in relative poverty but in absolute poverty - and yes, even in close proportion to the United States. The quote-unquote real poor, however, do not get much attention from these books or lectures because they are not doing anything interesting with their pocket money.

Despite that major complaint, Miura's books are really interesting for understanding how a once "(upper) middle-class" consumption ethic is breaking into subcultural groups based on class positions. He also looks at love and marriage, seeing that a woman's only chance to escape a life of lower middle-class is not, I dunno, getting a full-time job and moving up the corporate ladder yourself, which is still difficult in Japan - "(in a shrill voice) You ethnocentric boar! That would upset Japan's tender Shinto balance! Stop pushing your Western values of equal opportunity on a country that has progressed beyond your simple understanding of gender relations!" "Okay, okay. Sorry. How did you break into this sentence of my blog?" - but marrying a man with a healthy salary and his own underlings.

As I was saying with the "goukon" boom, this reality means that class aspiration determines women's fashion to a certain degree. One of Miura's observations is that most Japanese girls know how to be attractive to the opposite sex - following the simple instructions of「モテ系」 - and thus escape the 下流 curse, but yet cannot go through with the Can Cam routine because it is totally embarrassing and immodest.

He also has a ridiculous little side story about why "temp workers" can no longer meet their prospective hubbies on the job:

In the past, the ideal OL (office lady) - whose work was "making tea and copies" - could not do her job very well. It would be a problem if she could not do anything at all, but if she could do it too well, she lost a certain kind of cute charm.

So, when things would sometimes pop up in her work that she did not understand, she could just say, "Ooh, I don't get it!" When she said that, a capable man (boyfriend material) would come rushing over and teach her how to do it. And love would sprout for the two. Well, this kind of pattern was typical (although it is rumored that if a non-cute OL said "Ooh, I don't get it," no one would help out.)

That being said, this "I don't get it" is not tolerated for (modern) temp workers. If they say, "Ooh, I don't understand," they get fired. What's more, they are only at the company for a short time. So it is difficult for love to sprout with temp workers. (p. 42-43)

If you cannot win a man's heart by being bad at your job, I don't understand how women have any sort of chance to move up to the upper classes.

For those keeping score (and hopefully listening on the sly), I released my debut (mini)album Kyoshu Nostalgia back in January 2005. I essentially finished the album back in November 2003, so it was an antsy, drawn-out process waiting to get it all cleaned up and ready to go to market. This lag, however, cannot hold a candle to my sluggish progress with the new work.

Waiting for Kyoshu to be released, I took the summer of 2004 to pump out a large number of demos and by the end of the year had finished a rough draft of a new album - right as my debut came out in round plastic form. Early on, I decided that I wanted this new project to avoid any "fake" (virtual, sampled) instruments and actually use live recordings, so I went into a studio to track drums with my drum hero Mike Blaugrund in Brooklyn in September 2005. Then all of my files were transferred to my mixing engineer in Queens, and I went back to Tokyo to redo all the bass parts to match the new drum tracks, etc. To get a sense of my pace, I took about a month to practice all the bass parts before I even committed them to hard drive space. I also added two or three new songs to give the album more of a conceptual framework.

After a year of the album being in non-mixed limbo, I am coming close to completing all the grunt work on my side - lots of boring adjustments and fixes that will make the album about 5% better than the original demos - and then the real mixing goes into full gear, which for my albums and their "conceptual panning" and unwise attempts to recreate early stages of technological progress, may take a while. I can say that in terms of audio fidelity, the demos were already legions beyond Kyoshu, although I still seem to leave a crust of bedroom atmospherics on all of the tracks.

Looks like I have a superfantastic label lined up, but there are at least three artists in line in front of me. I guess the currently-untitled Neomarxisme II will come out around February 2007. These album things take awhile. For me at least.

I have been recently listening to the mp3 demos in my preferred sequence order, and I have to say that I really, really like what I have. Instead of breaking song structure conventions so brazenly like last time, the experimentations are more internalized and natural. Choruses and verses are still smashed together from different galaxies, but this time, the juxtaposition itself takes on a meaning. I also let the songs breathe a little more - breaking my four-minute rule - but they deserve the extra time. Other clues to the sound: less soft rock, more raw synth sounds, less cluttered production, way more harpsichord, real piano, more melodic repetition, a overarching lyrical theme, better Japanese lyrics, more punch, way more guitar.

Since this will not be coming out for a while, I have decided to do a free EP based on outtakes and scraps that did not make the final cut - mostly removed because the songs did not mesh with the overall flow. Getting these disparate parts to fit into an EP, however, has been a challenge, and I ended up recording three new songs to get everything to work. I hope to get this out within the month on creation-centre.com, and although it is substantially more low key and minimal than the new album, I think it should be an interesting twelve minutes worth of music. I implore you to listen when the time comes.

I am not sure any single magazine has seen so many reincarnations in the last few years than Tokion. Started in 1996 by two Americans living in Japan - Lucas Badtke-Berkow and Adam Glickman - the bilingual magazine went from being an oversized, overgrown zine primarily covering the Japanese cultural explosion of the late 90s to being a glossy "national geographic for the pop culture generation."

The interpretation of the latter statement became a point of contention between the two founders once Adam moved to L.A. to publish the magazine in America: Lucas and the Japan team started moving more and more into "soft" themes like animals and travel, where Adam's interest lay more in the burgeoning street culture and graffiti art scenes. Once Tokion U.S. trucked the whole operation to the Lower East Side in New York, the focus mismatch was so great as to cause formal dissolution. For a couple of issues in 2001, there were two Tokions with completely different content published on opposite sides of the world.

Then the Japan-based Tokion morphed into Paper Sky - a travel-culture magazine only published in Japan. Tokion in the U.S. became more and more engulfed in the excitement of post-'01 "Downtown New York" and thematically moved away from Japan. As an editor and writer there at the time, my job was to do the token Japan article every issue to keep a bit of the old spirit alive, but in general, we were having trouble finding a steady stream of new artists and creators coming out of Japan. From what we heard across the sea, the cultural wave of the late 90s had reached its peak and new things still seemed to be radiating from the already famous. Tokion (U.S.) eventually got rid of the Japanese text to make more room for articles and look more proper to distributors. This was a difficult decision: even though no one actually read the Japanese text, most of the readers liked seeing it on the page.

In 2003 things got confusing again as Tokion (U.S.) opened Tokion Japan in Japan using a lot of the original Tokion staff who did not fly over to Paper Sky. (I will spare you the human drama related to the original split.) For the most part, the new magazine was just a direct translation of the American version with some inconspicuous local features. Then last year, the rights to Tokion Japan were sold to Infas Publishing, making it a sister publication to Studio Voice and Ryuukou Tsuushin. Then in a surprise move, Adam Glickman sold the American Tokion to another company, meaning that both Tokions are presently owned by separate parties who have little to nothing to do with the original founders. Quite a testament to the original brand image that other people would come in and want to continue on the legacy.

As the American version dropped beloved design guru Deanne Cheuk's revolutionary layout and focused more and more on mainstream Western creators, the content no longer had much obvious appeal to Japanese readers. Now free from the chains of history, Infas has decided to scrap the original template for Tokion Japan and begin again. So debuting last Saturday: the first issue of the all new Tokion Japan.

Old Tokion purists will no doubt question the whole operation from the start: these are not "Tokion" people behind the magazine. But I am quite intrigued by the gust of fresh air. In fact, the new magazine seems to hark back to the old spirit behind the first issues - a group of youngsters bringing a distinctly individual editorial eye to the world around them. The new voice of Tokion is French Tokyo-resident Cyril Duval, who acts as both Fashion Director and mascot model. Having the staff on the cover of the magazine may strike some as being a bit narcissistic, but Lucas B-B could almost be credited with starting the tactic back with his ubiquitous appearances in the early issues.

Overall, the content seems to focus on high-fashion, artsy sides of consumer and cultural life - half-fashionista catalog, half-profiles, and half-fashion spreads (You got a problem with 3/2?). In fact, the new magazine lacks the straight interview style of past Tokions (although they include some translations of the latest Tokion (U.S.) content in a little booklet). Another fun feature is a close-up on luxury items from LV, Gucci, and all the other usual suspects - but Cyril has chosen the most extravagant and ridiculous goods from these brands' collections and displayed each item individually upon the page in an ironic celebration of luxury's gratuitous existence.

I find it interesting how non-informative the magazine is - unlike oppressive monthly art bible Studio Voice, the new Tokion goes down the Western route and teaches you very little about how to be "in" yourself.

The cover story is on bag designer Asa. He is half-Japanese, raised in Woodstock, NY, but now lives in Tokyo. The next issue will apparently focus on OK Fred's Audrey and Yoshi, and in general, the magazine seems to be interested in exploring and exposing Tokyo's "international scene" representin the word "glocal" (global + local). This intention strikes me as a big departure from the original magazine. Lucas-era Tokion was about two Americans in the middle of a Japanese underground explosion, raising flags of solidarity with Nigo and Cornelius in celebration of the small scene they found themselves embroiled in. Eventually, they helped export this culture to the rest of the world by being some of the first to translate it over to English and place the creators' faces at every Tower Records from Berkeley to Providence. Lucas and Adam did not become heralds of their respective scene because they "got there first" as much as they got there at all. In the mid 90s, foreigners living in Tokyo were mostly leftovers from the heady finance days of the 80s, and very few had any interest in the local pop culture. Lucas and Adam were the godfathers of an entire generation who grew up respecting (non-anime) Japanese culture as internationally relevant, and now, almost anyone living in Tokyo for these cultural reasons lives in their wake.

The new Tokion is not so much about this messianistic mission of exporting Japanese cool, but looking at the local culture arising from the contemporary mix between foreigners and Japanese. In some ways, the magazine could be seen as a report on "what happened in the 21st century" after the initial Tokion project succeeded. My only concern is whether "we foreign Tokyo residents" are actually so interesting or dynamic to warrant such coverage. Tokion Japan does not ignore Japanese creators to solely focus on the ex-pat fashion world, but the latter may end up providing a baseline view of the "glocal" culture. I tend to forget how much things have changed since the days when "foreigner in Japan" automatically meant "Gas Panic, Hiroo, English teaching," and I should be authentically pleased with the character of foreigners here now: interested in mole-like submersion into the soil, trying to pick up Japanese as the "universal standard" of local communication. But I still get hung up on the "white skin privilege" - that we foreigners tend to make good magazine fodder not because of our skills but because of our visual association with the locus of pop cultural creation and decision-making in the West. (Hip hop has extended this privilege to those of African heritage, but any brown and yellow shades of skin originating from less rich countries still remain in "case by case" limbo.) Are Europeans and Americans being featured because we are actually interesting or because we resemble the interesting type who are forging into new directions overseas?

But readers are not dumb, and the success of Tokion Japan will eventually depend upon how interesting Tokyo inter-racial, inter-national "glocal" culture actually is. But, hey, if Yoshi and Audrey are the prototypes for a new Japan and a new Tokion, then count me in.

(photo courtesy of Jean Snow until the official site goes up)

There has been a "Miracle on Route 246" - at least, so goes the ad copy. Zaboo: the new onsen spa located smack in the middle of Tokyo, conveniently located across the street from once-trendy mega-complex Roppongi Hills. Thanks to some 50%-off tickets procured from work, Team Neomarxisme went down to check it out.

For suckers without discounts (i.e., the target customers), entrance to the urban hot spring will cost you 4000 yen PLUS a 550 "membership fee," and yes, you must become a member. "Reflexology" and other treatments will set you back another 5000 yen or so a pop. A cold draft beer at the bar, thankfully, is only 600 yen.

The clientele is primarily women, and mostly young OLs at that. This means the Men's Bath is relatively empty, but its small scale belies low expectations of male participation. There is one large, very tepid pool (50% hot spring water). There is a "cave bath" which seems to have been carved out of real rock, but again, only barely warm enough. Hiding myself in the corner of the cave in 39.8 C water, I felt a bit like a bathing ape in lukewater. There is one hot bath, the size of a small jacuzzi.

The bilingual sign above this bath reads something like, "Hot bathing is a favorite of the Japanese." I glanced at the English, and thought, "Yes, that is true. Thank you for the cultural explanation to help guide my experience as a foreign visitor." Then I noticed the Japanese text was exactly the same: something like 「日本人の好みの熱の湯」, providing the Japanese clientele with some much-needed anthropological self-analysis. No surprise to see such messages, of course, but it is another reminder of how much Japanese companies find it necessary (or at least in their best interest) to explicitly "sell Japaneseness." Once companies and the media helpfully provide the correct images of nationality, consumers would be verging on traitorous behavior not to partake. I like hot baths too, of course, but a dip unfortunately does not reinforce my sense of national belonging. I just get clean and feel refreshed afterwards. Also, according to the sign, bathing stimulates my "sympathetic nerve." (An observation courtesy of the Nihonjinron University Dep't of Science, no doubt).

There is a "finish sauna" (フィンランドサウナ) which is good for wrapping up the experience.

All in all, the facilties were nice, I guess, but nothing spectacular. Compared to a super-duper "real" onsen out in the countryside that will set you back around 750 yen for entry, even 2000 at Zaboo was a bit excessive for the value. Nothing about the no-frills package screamed luxury. Clearly the price is more of a way to quality control customers than either a free-market price or a reflection of costs - and I get the sense that we will see a lot more of this in the "income disparate" future Japan. With no jolly middle class, you have to aggregate only rich people (or the well-behaved pretend rich) to guarantee a "clean crowd." For 2000 yen, you may get the occasional 50 year-old woman who would normally go to a local sentou public bath. As it stands now, the spa probably gets well-to-do business people and their wives/mistresses as well as young women who live at home and have too much excess income to start with. No gangsters allowed entry - which is rather disrespectful seeing that they own Roppongi.

The quality of the hot water is passable (gooey enough), but nothing spectacular. The most disappointing thing, however, is not the quality of the services/facilities, as much as getting out of the baths feeling relaxed and refreshed and then having to step back into the reinforced-concrete tundra of Tokyo, catch a double-capacity Murakami-illustrated bus back to Shibuya, and wade through 500 people in Tokyu Food Show to get your supper. The charm of the countryside baths is that you take a peaceful dip then can proceed straight to your tatami mat room dressed in yukata, eat your dinner, have some sake, and fall asleep on a comfy futon. In this sense, Tokyo onsen is a bit doomed from the start.

Thanks to Google's cache, I found a 2000 interview with Japanese philosopher and critic Asada Akira, which is probably one of the most interesting things I have read on Japan in a long, long time. Included are a concise history of Japanese leftism, literature, criticism, architecture, philosophy, and "infantile capitalism." Asada came to fame in the early 80s when the then 26-year old published a best-selling book on post-modernism - Structure and Power - that everyone bought but few read. Only in Japan could Althusser be consumed like a pair of Salvadore Ferragamo shoes.

And while we are semi-legally digging into the archives of New Left Review, I recommend this sympathetic early-70s article about the 1960s Japanese student movement.

In the middle of the 1990s, beer alone made up something like 75% of the liquor market in Japan. No surprise, really: most everyone around the world loves a cold tall one no matter whether the occasion is celebrating a rise in mutual fund portfolio value or suppressing the despair of losing a white-collar job to restructuring. Despite the fact that Japanese beer is excellent across-the-board, Japanese consumers have recently abandoned it in droves for fake "beer-flavored" malt-beverage substitutes: happoshu and fake-happoshu "third-category beer." These fake beers now command about 25% of the alcoholic beverage market.

This is taste deflation in action: consumer budgets go down and sales of inferior goods go up. Pure-and-simple. (This has now led to a market gap at the top exploited by Suntory Premium Malts, but we will leave that topic for a different day.)

Fashion, however, has been different. These are not items that you put in your body - ultimately just individual, selfish choices - but represent your social status and hierarchial ranking to society at large. Thanks to rising consciousness about socio-economic strata, the major European superbrands - Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Burberry, Christian Dior, and Hermes - have dominated the Japanese fashion scene for the last decade. But instead of being able to go head-to-toe in one brand like the 80s - or even mid-90s - young women can only afford to go generic for the shirts and skirts and "class it all up" with a $2000 bag. But whether the appeal of these brands is "rational" (dependable and classic!) or "aspirational" (Roppongi Hills/Paris Hilton plastic-fantastic!), paying $2000 or more for a bag has been the de facto standard for a very long time. Maybe this year it's Chloe and not LV, but still, time to take out a loan.

But watch out super luxury: last week's issue of Weekly Toyo Keizai featured a long story on "The Coach Miracle." Many members of what used to be called the "middle-class" are now happy to buy a $400-$500 bag instead of shelling out for a $2000 one. Although the accompanying pictures to the article illustrate a much less fashion-forward, less glamorous crowd, Coach's growth in the Japanese bag market is unquestionably strong: currently a 9% share, above Gucci, Hermes, and Chanel (LV is still 25%, natch).

Important to note that Coach is not seen as a classic luxury brand, but an "accessible luxury" (アクセシブル・ラグジュリー). Much more Polo than Prada in terms of cachet, with prices to match. More America than Europe - almost never a good sign of things to come.

Surely there are strategic business decisions and changes in fashion/taste that explain Coach's rise, but one cannot help but think back to simple economic realities: buying a $2000-$3000 bag is a bit of an extreme investment at this point in time for a large class of people who have moderate incomes and little chance at wage raises. "Accessible" means having a "nice" bag and money left over to live life with the bag you just bought. And since boys do not care about brand labels anyway, why bother?

If Japanese men can accept that their 21st century life will involve the daily imbibing of vile forms of fake beer, why can't women come down from fantasy land and stay within the price ranges of their budget limitations? With the economy moving as it is, taste deflation for middle-mass fashion is bound to happen at some point, and with LV being so overexposed, the time has never felt better for going "one-rank" down. But I doubt things will stop at the Coach level. Bape destroyed the fashion market for men by making "fashion" into t-shirts and jeans, which ultimately opened the market for Uniqlo. If Coach says that "dressing up" can be mid-level luxury, then there goes the neighborhood.

Rock'n'roll not only brought the youth generations of the 50s and 60s together, but the original set of songs continued to be the rallying cry for teenage estrangement for decades to come. But now that "modern rock" is rarely more than a revival cast production of sounds exactly twenty years prior or slight tweaks on the 90s alternarock format, it would be hard to claim the crunch of an amped guitar and the gunfire of a snare roll carry the same weight of cultural import. Hip hop has kind of knocked the wind out of rock by being the one pop format of the moment constantly blazing towards innovation. ("You," as one Net-friendly rapper proclaimed, "are going to be blazed." I am paraphrasing.)

Certainly here in Japan, rock is dead as a cultural movement - at least in the way that inspired most of the creators currently in their 30s and 40s. When you talk to a Jun Takahashi or Nobu Kitamura (from Hysteric Glamour), you get the sense that they found fashion through an intense passion for Western rock. Hip hop has had a weird history in Japan: appreciation started in both working class circles and as an offshoot of the trendy Tokyo punk scene. Sometime around 2000 though, things went straight bling; instead of "respectfully" working around the margins of black culture, kids just plunged right into straight imitation. Investors became bullish about skullcap futures. High school kids started crucifying themselves in homage to Puff Daddy's profound metaphor for public criticism in the Nas "Hate Me Now" video.

Six years later, Japanese hip hop still has a certain vitality - at least compared to the "I like music","Oh, what kind of music do you like","Oh, all types" of the rock scene. Select shop United Arrows was smart enough to catch on that there would be splintering within the genre - with some local gangbangers growing out of their oversized sweatsuits and wanting to "tighten up" their image. So just this month they opened the select shop Liquor, Woman, & Tears a couple of doors down from Undercover in Aoyama. Interesting store name: kind of linking the rugged masculinity (read: misogyny?) of hip hop with the classic aesthetic ideals of enka. My gut feeling is that the action order should be "woman --> liquor --> tears" but I didn't see the market research that went into the naming. (By the way, while walking to LW&T today, I glanced into the other nouveau-bling store - BAPE - and there were literally more staff members than shoppers.)

The store's windows are covered in black ruffled blinds, and the atmosphere kind of goes for a subdued, graceful bling - a little bit like Rivington Club. Yes, LW&T have 3,750,000 JPY watches from Jacob the Jeweler ("Wasn't he just arrested?" I ask, leaving tact at the door), but they are displayed right next to jars of pasta sauce made by an Italian mob family. Clothes generally play it on the conservative side - sweaters, corduroy jackets, Supreme puffy vests, ascots. There's your odd leather motorcycle jacket and velveteen Fila track suit, but as the clerk explained, the main concept is "just-fit hip hop" - ushering in an Usher upscale look for the "kids" in da "clubs." Fat gold chains are supposed to go with rainbow turtle neck sweaters. They also have a glass case of expensive jewelry that will help sparkle up your look if things get too L.L. Bean Vermont winter. All in all, kind of mid-70s low-key pimp meets Howard U. frat preps. A Different World for Tokyo. The budget-limited can just pick up a Malcolm X t-shirt and a fake mink stole.

I asked the guy in the store, "Is this a temporary shop?" Oh, no. His 50-year old superior shouted in response, "This will be around for 50 years!" Rock had its 50 years, and now hopefully crying about chicks while crunk will get its own half-century. I am not the hip hop audience, but I sure hope they understand their historical mission.