neomarxisme

On March 3rd of this year, ultra-mega pop star Utada Hikaru's mother - 60s folk singer Fuji Keiko (aka "Junko Utada") - was detained in New York's Kennedy airport for possessing over $420,000 in one-hundred dollar bills. She also had two boxes of checks from an ex-assistant who had recently been embroiled in troubles related to Australian "currency violations." Fuji did not adequately explain any of the mysterious circumstances of her belongings in the questioning. The money was "won from gambling," but all her casino receipts showed her magically receiving large amounts of chips without ever buying in and then cashing them all out when she left. She also claimed to be going to Las Vegas to give it all the money to a "foster home," but she could not provide the smallest detail about the organization.

Paying off gambling debts? Laundering money like a good Japanese music manager? International drug smuggling? The report opens up way more questions than it answers, and I had awaited further inquires by the Japanese media to see what was going on. The Japanese media, however, cannot be bothered to look into the leads. (Even this Mainichi Daily News English story on the subject was pulled down immediately.)

If it were not for the internet site The Smoking Gun, none of this would have come to light at all. The very low-profile Japanese coverage of the incident does little more than quote from the Smoking Gun report - adding either the obsequious and fictional compliment 「米国でも人気のポップス歌手、宇多田ヒカルさん」 "Pop star Utada Hikaru - who is even popular in the United States" or questionable assertions of total innocence 「結果的に、違法性はなかったと判断され、今月に入って現金の返却手続きが始まっているもようだ。」"Consequently, it was judged that there was no illegality, and this month, procedures for the return of the money have apparently begun."

This story strikes me as one the Japanese press will not touch with a stick. Way too many taboos involved: mention of the incident will piss off Utada's iron-fisted father and toy with the dangerously-accurate idea that the Japanese music industry is fundamentally built upon a base of tax-evasion and money laundering. And the mom herself, being a beloved pop star from the late 60s, probably still has ties to the traditional "strongmen" of music management who can pull some strings with the media world.

Will any of the financial mysteries of Fuji Keiko's arrest be solved? We will have to wait for the next Smoking Gun release, no doubt. The Japanese media can report on the TSG report, but going any further would perhaps open Pandora's Box.

Update 10/4: The weeklies have taken up the story. Shukan Bunshun offers: "Fuji Keiko - her marriage separation and casino-insanity - discovered from the forfeited 500,000 JPY." Shukan Shincho goes with: "The mysterious 49,000,000 yen incident: Fuji Keiko is lying." Isn't it nice to be a media organization without links to television channels dependent upon talent so that you can write freely about whatever you want?

While iMomus and Jeans Now properly dealt with Ben Anderson's Tokyo travel article in The Guardian last week, I had not taken a look until it popped up on my screen while searching for something unrelated earlier today. Obviously the novice Japan traveller is not going to produce the most cutting-edge piece about the city ever written and will generally follow the Western-Friendly Concierge Playbook (Page 1: Zakuro!), but paragraph two sort of took the story out of the realm of reality and into our Western collective-fantasy of hyper-cool neo-Tokyo c. 1998 CE:

Omotesando is also home to the cult clothing line Bathing Ape, the epicentre of Tokyo's youth culture. Armies of kids covered in its bright camouflage and shiny trainers wander round the four Bathing Ape stores all day and often camp out overnight on a rumour that a new top or trainer has just arrived. They get their hair cut at the Bape salon and eat off gold-rimmed china, especially made with the Ape logo, at the Bape cafe.

I do not mean to pick on Bape or single it out, but this whole paragraph is historical fiction, based on hearsay. I can promise you that neither Anderson nor anyone on their team - in this year 2006 - actually saw kids camp outside overnight or swarm to get their hair cut at the Bape salon and eat the Bape cafe. (Wait, did kids ever swarm to eat Bape and have a Bape haircut??) This is like doing a travel piece on New York and talking about "all the graffiti on the subways." ("I dunno, man. I mostly took cabs, but I asked a colleague about it and he said it was far out.") Was there a time when this observation was true about Bape and Omotesando? Sure. Is it really accurate to describe Omotesando as the "epicentre" of Bape rather than the central fashion headquarters for the nation? No, not in 2006 when everyone in Japan has moved on from a brand that topped the charts a full decade ago.

Last Thursday afternoon, I passed by the Omotesando Bape store and no one was in it. The weekends are surely different and I do not want to make my personal observation into the Law, but no matter: the fact that Ape has a lot of stores does not mean that Ape in 2006 is filling all of those stores with rabid first-tier customers.

But imagine how embarassing it would be to everyone to learn that Bape has seen better days.

The day I arrived, Vanity Fair was in town to interview Nigo, and I'd only just missed Natalie Portman and Stella McCartney, who both took him out for dinner.

What if Ito Misaki and Hamasaki Ayumi went to Los Angeles and chose to go out to dinner with Mickey Rourke? Needless to say, the Japanese media would have the reponsibility of protecting the honor of these two women by playing up Mickey Rourke's reputation, nudging the facts, going on hearsay and "rumour" to make him sound like the hippest (and strongest!) guy in town. Nigo is Nigo, and at this point, his fame is more about his fame than his actually selling clothes. But must we extrapolate some kind of fantasy 1999 scenario of his stores to live up to his legend? Are all travel writers doomed to go somewhere and fantasize their surroundings as those existent five years ago instead of sizing up the situation from a ground-level inductive perspective? Or should they read blogs by jaded locals totally myopic about the grand narratives bestowed on Japan from the outside world?

These did not quite make the cut.

Soul Asylum	Jesus Jones
Collective Soul	Family Ties

I try not to do too much cross-linking here at Neomarxisme, seeing that we cocoon members all read the same blogs, but I will make an exception for the venerable No-Sword's analysis of the new "erotic LOHAS" one-off Erokoto. After reading his post, I saw the actual mag in a bookstore, and unless you can read Japanese, you would be hard-pressed to find the difference between a normal "woman-as-vinyl-wearing-commodity fantasy" soft porn mag and this "enlightened, Green" version. Oh wait, I see it: the naked underwater girls are accompanied by the English text "Save the Ocean."

The magazine proudly continues the tradition of Japanese fashion and consumer culture being blissfully non-ideological: thank god no one has to give up their out-of-touch, collectively-imagined misunderstanding of the female species in order to adopt lifestyles to protect the fragile natural environment. Piecemeal progressivism: hemp sneakers with organic rubber sole created by twelve year-old slave laborers.

The choice quote from No-Sword:

I'm sure there were good intentions all round, and there are a few pages where women appear without the objectifying treatment, and just under half of the editorial staff is female &c. &c., but it is depressing to see so much of the same old male-centric approach to sex positivity, where women are expected to just sort of come along for the ride.

I understand the enticement for free-minded Americans to go pro-porn because of its automatic destructive opposition to that fun-hating, society-wrecking philosophy of Puritanism. But back to a point I have made several times before, why is porn liberating in Japan - where it has always been a part of the hegemonic, paternalistic system and not a movement away from it? Where it serves as a way to protect "virtuous women" - passing off the scourge of the male libido onto unimportant people's daughters. Just because you take the same lower-class, unhappy women nice enough to materialize their escape from consumer debt through baring all and put them in front of some trees and Shinto ornaments does not mean you have somewhere gone "beyond" the normal business. If you want the Japanese birth rate to increase and the country to move to a more Euro balance of work-life-and-earth, why don't you make a magazine about the sexiness of women who don't exist solely to please the whim of infantile men? Oh yeah, that's too much like real life: LOHAS and porn both as whimiscal dreams far from the groans of the concrete world.

I am on matrimonial hiatus until Tuesday.

Weird to find myself fondly looking back on the days of nonsense product Engrish, but there was a clean unity of absurdity in the text - something completely lacking in the copy gracing this French Shake cardboard dairy quart. For whatever reason, the explanation reads in a strange mix of romanized Japanese and English within a standard Japanese grammatical structure - much like the speech of the most hopeless bicultural students at American schools in Tokyo who have fallen between the cracks of mastering either language.

The box reads:

Milk ni Ranou,Satou,
Vanilla essence wo kuwaete
French style de tukutta oisii milk desu.

If this were Japanese it would be a normal sentence:

ミルクに卵黄、砂糖
バニラエッセンスを加えて
フレンチスタイルで作ったおいしいミルクです.

(By the way, French Shake is one of those short-lived seasonal drinks that pops up in Fall - and Spring and Winter - and as explained, is made from adding egg yolk, sugar, and vanilla essence to milk. I am generally a sucker for non-coffee dairy drinks.)

Is it now cooler to write out explanations in romanized Japanese than in equivalent English? Is it cooler to write out katakana import words in their original English spelling than in romanized katakana? Is English "just foreign enough" for an nominally French product?

If there is one rule about product text in Japan is that there are no rules.

The linguistic ecology is either expanding or contracting, but I can't tell which.

Look, I know that people come up with the same ideas all the time. For example, I totally invented blowing on NES cartridges to get them back to working shape, but I can guarantee you that a few other kids on the West coast also invented it coevally. But this Cracked piece on "The Most Absurd Deleted Scenes of All Time" discusses the racist plot against asians in the deletion of the octopus scene from The Goonies. I laid out my age-old theory on this back in June of 2005.

Now perhaps the writer came up with this on his own, but if he were to search "Goonies octopus" on Google - a search engine that was in vogue at the time this Chris Kula was writing his piece - my blog post would be his #4 source and he would have no doubt been intrigued by the headline.

My life long dream has been to influence Cracked magazine, and if I have not already achieved this goal, you must admit I came very, very close.

Last Sunday, the bride and I went down to Shimoda at the bottom of the Izu Peninsula to stay at a fancy old onsen for a brief mini-honeymoon. Upon first glance, Shimoda has a low-rent tacky charm common to all small beach towns, whether Cocoa Beach or Lagos in the Algarve. But what sets Shimoda apart is its place in history: it is the location upon which U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry landed his infamous "black ships" in 1853 and opened up Japan with a little so-called "gunboat diplomacy." (Wait a minute - it's not! It's the location of a 1854 treaty that opened it as a port.)

Perry and his crew set up a consulate, opened up some ports, and forced Japan to sign what would become known as the "unfair treaties." The shame of Perry's strongarm invasion helped to dissolve the remaining legitimacy of the Tokugawa government, and one could claim that the hang-ups about the treaties snowballed into the inferiority complex behind Japan's 20th century imperial aggression. Looking back, the Perry episode could be viewed both as a cause for celebration - Japan was finally opened and started down the road towards modernity - or as the unwelcome entrance of arrogant, light-skinned cast members - things were a lot more "Japanese" before Perry barged in and ruined the party. Everything evens out at this point to something more "neutral" - a piece of colorful history and an excellent differentiating point (tourist-trap) for Shimoda. The greater conflict has nothing to do with interpreting history, but with challenging Kurihama for the title of the Most Important Perry-Related Town in Japan.

I ask the wife how the Japanese feel about Perry now: "He is just an interesting visitor to Japan - like Tama-chan." Tama-chan, of course, is the seal who mysteriously showed up in the Tama River some years ago. Perry in his current super-deformed state is about as cute as a pinniped, and the mean ole' black ships which once struck fear and terror in the hearts of 19th century Japanese have transformed into design patterns for leisure buses, cruise boats, and candy boxes. The great Commodore has gone from delivering stern letters from Millard Fillmore to delivering serious fun to the renkyu vacationers.

Shimoda's high-point is "Perry Road" - a strip of land along an old canal preserved from the mid-19th century. The ten-minute walk to Perry-land from the station is uninspiring and forgettable, but the actual historical area is fantastic. Many South Izu buildings share an interesting design pattern of white diagonal lines on black, and some of the old buildings have unique Western-inspired stone frames topped with traditional Japanese roofs that you rarely see in other places. Perry Road feels a bit like a tropical Kyoto, with sea crabs in the narrow canals and white cranes upon telephone wires. The irony is that the Japanese only preserved the old "Japanese" part of town in order to remember the history of an American who lived there.

Perry Road

Later staying in a creaky second-floor room in the Kanaya Onsen, I could not help but think about the high price premium we pay to experience "Japan" in Japan. One night for two in these ancient wooden buildings - where you can hear every movement of every single person in the complex at all times - would get you a super-deluxe room at a first-rate hotel in Tokyo. Sure, they throw in a king's feast of local seafood, but you are paying mostly for the ability to experience "the real Japan" - opposed to the soulless plastic of modern Japan and crisp bed sheets. As a pop culture fan, I always resented the automatic "Kyoto > Tokyo" logic of most tourists, but I have come around in recent years to enjoy a nice soak in a traditional onsen, comfortable slumber on the floor with simple futons, an afternoon nap on the tatami mats under the soft glow of natural daylight. We flock to Shimoda to experience the Japan that Perry encountered in 1853 and then head reluctantly back home to the Japan that Perry ended up creating in the years after his exit.

For the last four years, I have felt that the gears of Japanese fashion cycles have ground to a rusty halt, but now it is spelled out for all to see: the November issue of Vingtaine boasts the headline article 「３年後でもおしゃれな服」"Clothes that will still be fashionable three-years later." Back when the Japanese economy kept expanding and incomes were high across the board, it was almost a virtue to spend money on things that would be absolutely unusable in one year's time. 「消費は美徳」they used to say - directly mixing national plans for economic growth with Confucian morality. They whole fun of "o-share" was keeping up perfectly with artificial trends invented by our style superiors.

The misleadingly-titled Vingtaine is mostly read by women in their late 30s, although the large body of young foreign models makes it look a bit younger. If anybody has money to burn in Japan these days, it must be fashionable women in their 30s, who either have decent jobs or are married to men with decent salaries. But how optimistic about their economic future could they be if they are requesting clothing that is "trendy" yet a middle-term investment.

To a certain extent, trend cycles have become so fast in the 21st century that they have exceeded the threshold of relevancy. But this desire for permanently-chic apparel seems to be a head on the same Hydra that brought us the rationalistic obsession with Louis Vuitton bags - $2000 is not so bad if the leather bags never break, never go out of style, and can be worn daily. If one is to buy fancy things in Japan now, they must not be frivolous purchases for the moment, but a step in building up a base of belongings to be used over the next decade. Blouses and skirts are pianos, not toothbrushes. Data shows that the Japanese economy is now "in the longest post-war expansion," but this does not translate into optimism with the Japanese Street.

Let's stop all this "decline of Japan" talk: Japan is just normalizing. The country had way too many young people and too few old people, so now that the wrongs have been reversed, Japan has the highest proportion of old people and the lowest proportion of young people in the world. If you are a specialist in nursing home care or other geriatric social services, the path to Japan is paved in gold. Everyone else: take some time to realign your interests. I recommend gateball and putting sugar on your tomatoes.

What a no-child-left-conceived Japan no longer needs is superfluous theme parks, and one of the latest victims is Jungle Park - a tropical wonderland up on the cliffs of Irozaki at the very bottom of Izu Peninsula. Do a little search on You Tube's Google service for "Irozaki," and all the helpful guides will tell you to check out the Jungle Park on your way out to the lighthouse shrine. The unanimous suggestions to visit make me think the park's closing was a sudden and recent affair.

The park looks to have been closed for at least a year, but has yet to be dismantled. At the moment, the territory is just partioned off behind a rope and a "no trespassing" sign. Sneaking in is no challenge for the curious. Everything seems to be left exactly as it was the day it closed: grasses overgrown over paths, wheelbarrows left filled with dirt, tiki pavillions slowly decaying. The park used to proudly feature giant, high-ceiling greenhouses filled with tropical plants, and no one has bothered to do anything with these once-grand buildings. They still contain various wild tropical trees bearing strange fruits that drop and rot on the floor. Other plants break out windows in their stretch for sunlight.

Going inside the greenhouses was seriously creepy. Bees were so furiously buzzing around branches that I was sure the movement was wild squirrels left in their former habitat to transmit rabies to the unwelcome. Surely some disfigured gardener tends the grounds - yelling at tresspassing teenagers in the eerie slur of Bell's palsy, brandishing a plow in one hand and a dirty water bucket in the other. Before we could encounter either sight, however, we hightailed it out - with the following pictures as evidence of our strange journey inside the belly of the beast.

Last month, I attended a talk with an ex-bigwig from Seibu Mizuno Seiichi and downwardly-mobile market expert Miura Atsushi, and they discussed how the Tokyo University students of yore were terrible dressers. Back when Japan was a well-oiled machine built from top-to-bottom for the sole purpose of manufacturing-led export-based growth, Tokyo University (Todai) was the elite of elite institutions - training the government bureaucrats who essentially hold all of the political power and then retire into cush board positions at the country's top firms. They had the career prospects, but in karmic exchange, lacked an eye for fashion and self-presentation. Spending the first sixteen years of your life in total pursuit of memorizing population statistics, dates, and other meaningless numbers required for spartan testing does not exactly make you a ladies man, let alone have the time to track down the latest digs from Van.

But times have changed. The two men noted that kids at elite institutions these days are not only good at the book-learning but up with fashion, good with people, and killers with the ladies. (Or, gasp, are ladies.) Welcome to the rise of the hypermeritocracy - where the elite excel at everything.

This change in meaning of "elite" fits perfectly with the new employment system based on merit-based career promotion - which is either ruining or saving Japanese capitalism. Graduating from a top-tier school may get your foot in the door, but your pedigree alone will not guarantee you access to the top level positions within your own firm.

The data bears this out. In President magazine's October 16, 2006 cover story on "Universities and Career Success" (「大学と出世」), they ranked universities on how many of their graduates become executives at leading companies. Over the last twenty years, things have drifted from a country ruled politically and economically by Todai graduates to one where private university graduates (especially Keio, Waseda, and Chuo) lead the pack. The following table from President illustrates this well.

Not only have the private universities completely overtaken the national universities (Tokyo and Kyoto), less of the premier companies' executives are from the best universities in total. Either the elite university students are going into non-listed companies or the listed companies are promoting by merit - which may not match up perfectly to the university affiliation won through first-rate test-taking ability at the age 18. The new corporate system looks to be generally less elitist than the old Japanese system. Of course, rich parents would find it easier to get their dumb children into Keio through the escalator system, but these kids will not succeed in their companies without actual effort. And it's not like Tokyo University admissions were that "fair" to start with. The juku system that requires expensive private tutoring to pass entrance exams makes the whole idea that "anyone can get into Tokyo University" a crock.

As the economic system of promotion-by-talent gets nearer the American system, elitism based on academic pedigree also declines. This echoes the American business world, where most CEOs did not attend Ivy League schools (only 10% of the Fortune 500). So now that promotion will be based on a large set of skills - smarts, charisma, social awareness - it only makes sense that the most elite schools are starting to see "hypermeritocratic" kids fill their classrooms. The economic system no longer rewards the eggheads and bookworms, so why should the elite colleges be creating them?

JR Kyushu has created highly-effective print advertisments for their current "Kyushu Destination Campaign" featuring the world's cutest small white dog (some kind of Shiba-ken mix, perhaps? a Kyushu-native kishu inu) making his way to all of the southern island's greatest attractions. I have been looking for web versions of these ads over the last couple of weeks to no avail, but thanks to the hard work of individuals on this this hatena page, I finally found the official online gallery. I highly recommend taking a peek.

Now that Cornelius (Oyamada Keigo) is finally releasing his new album after five years of quiet laboratory work and being the Japanese Music World's Greatest Dad¹, everyone is suddenly interested in taking another look at Shibuya-kei as background to how Oyamada can release an album of aimless electro-acoustic tinkerings and automatically make the media world go into a frenzy. Subsequently, I was invited to write a piece in today's Japan Times about the movement to go along with their Cornelius interview (most likely because Momus turned it down.) If you have read my "Legacy of Shibuya-kei" pieces (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), the content of today's article should be very familiar to you.

Recruit's free-paper R25 had the same idea as the Times, and their new issue - which can be picked up off the floors of rush-hour subways starting today - has a "long interview" with Oyamada. Oddly, they spend the entire interview talking about his original activity with Flipper's Guitar rather than the new album. But since the magazine is about "stimulating" men in the business world, and the article is most interested in Oyamada's anomalous success as somebody who never cared about success. A very 90s idea, indeed.

Things I learned from the R25 interview:

* Oyamada used to be in a Jesus and Mary Chain and Cramps cover band in high school, and none of his fellow students had any idea what was going on.
* Oyamada was in the hospital recovering from a traffic accident when he first heard about the success of the first Flipper's album Three Cheers for Our Side.
* After FG broke up, the first thing Oyamada did was music for hair care product TV commercials (I knew he did print ads for Uno.)
* He never really took his business seriously until signing to Matador in the U.S. and going abroad.

The article also emphasizes the wide effect of Oyamada's aesthetic sense (審美眼) on Japanese youth culture, and the context makes it clear that Flipper's Guitar was one of the first popular musical acts in Japan to explicitly reference obscure Western bands that were not even big in their home countries. Oyamada gives the impression that he himself was very surprised that the music industry would care about what they as total music nerds were doing in their spare time:

I was influenced by really small English indie labels, and I was active in a tiny scene that probably didn't even make up 100 listeners all across the country. So I never thought that the music I was doing could become a job. I was pretty sure we were all otaku and that itself was fun. So even if the record companies started to talk to us, I didn't think more of it than "Oh, they have some weird people over there too." We just thought about putting out one album for posterity's sake. (記念に一枚)

This historical picture paints pre-Flipper's Japan (circa 1988) as something completely different than what exists now. Did Flipper's Guitar singlehandedly bring the widespread love of obscure foreign indie and underground culture to the Japanese pop economy, or was it just the soundtrack for a coeval broad consumer movement? Seeing that Flipper's did a large part in introducing so much to their legions of fans, I find it hard to remove them completely from the cause-and-effect. Surely the media environment was right for a diversification in aesthetic sense from the monolithic (and boring) Bubble tastes, but Oyamada was the guy who jump-started the whole phenomenon.

Yet there is something dangerous about using this narrative in a recruitment-related magazine in 2006. On one hand, the Oyamada story is great for illustrating that Japan's true heroes are those who are more interested in pleasing their own fickle tastes than doing everything in the least-common-denominator mode to reach eventual business success. I hope, however, that the kid who plays bass in his Green Day-tribute band doesn't get the wrong idea about employment being an natural extension of indie nerdism. Cornelius succeeded because Japan had the world's most vibrant, wealthy consumer culture and was primed for someone with superior taste to lead them to the world standards for cool. But the country already completed that march to the extremes a decade ago, and now the powers-that-be are trying to shepherd everyone back to more easily-understandable local festivals (which conveniently keep money and power in their hands). No one ever again will succeed like Cornelius - at least for a very long time.

I am pleased to see Shibuya-kei being treated as an important historical era. And as much as I do not think his latest album is as inspiring as his earlier output, I think Cornelius' success in the 90s gives him legitimate right to live out the rest of his years as a venerable war hero.

¹ - When I lived in Sangenjaya, I would frequently pass the King Ape playing with his son Milo.

Not to get all nostalgic and maudlin, but I remember a time when ecoparasitic novelty site Gawker.com used to point their rusty scabbard towards the foibles of real life celebrities, or at least the Hiltonites who stand upon a shaky tautology of their own fame. But with a daily 30-post minimum, Team Gawker needed to lower the limbo stick - I know, let's go around jamming ballpoint pens into the necks of those who write about famous people in famous magazines. Now picking on the mainstream media is a bit too 2006, so it is time to to bring out the big guns and point them about 45 degrees under the floorboards: normal people. Wait, before we do that, we are getting word that fake-satirist Nick Sylvester apparently is copyediting pieces for a website - we will let you know which one as soon as possible.

But back to real people. I know, let's call them "douchebags." Interns, college students, young employees, young lawyers - anybody and everyone - if they have ever done something embarrassing in their youth, I dunno, pretentious behavior, hollow boasting, acting self-important out of a profound sense of insecurity, you know, the stuff young people do? Let's take advantage of the fact that our modern age of Internet living produces a paper trail and then provide our readers with examples of these young people douchebags' "douchebaggery." Then we can collect an even larger readership and sell that to our advertisers, who thankfully, also want to reach the "we hate sadly deluded normal people" demographics.

There was something grossly unsatisfying about attacking celebrities. We may find such glee in securing their public humiliation, but that same night we got a peek at a candid upskirt, they go in their fancy cars to fancy bars and get to drink these kinds of Grey Goose we haven't even heard of. (Those big round icecubes too, I bet.) At best, we can only bring down the aggregate benefits of fame to 0! Zero! I have been waiting twenty-five years to get to 0!

Attacking real people on the other hand - who do not even choose to be famous or have their past private materials be subject to wide readership - that is where the gold is. These guys start at 0, and our swivel chair roundhouse kick knocks them down a couple of legions. That will teach you to email your friends in a casual manner, normal people. We're just sorry that the ever-increasing speed of information on the Net will make your public embarrassment only last a few measly days. By the way, do you have any annoying friends that you can introduce us to for next week?

Listen, Gawker. When I was a kid, there was the guy in my class who made up all this stuff. Way more than Aleksey Vayner. In fact, I am pretty sure this guy claimed to have kicked Vayner's ass at both real and virtual kickboxing. (This was pre-Virtual Reality, mind you.) I can send you some notes he wrote to me once about having a computer that could play Super Mario Bros. back in 1990. And I am pretty sure his mother wrote the paper on the U.S. Civil War that won him first place in the 5th grade essay contest. What do you say? Call me?

Look carefully at this snapshot taken of the small train station in Rendaiji (a stop above Shimoda in the Izu Peninsula). To the right of the microphone sits a Boss SP-202 - a phrase sampler with big soft plastic buttons that light up orange when you press down. (Click on the photo for a close-up). You may know him as "Dr. Sample." Although the SP-202 was originally designed for music (or its cousin "DJing"), the train station employees use the "instrument" to trigger the appropriate announcements for incoming trains. Perhaps train stations all over Japan are using samplers, but I was delighted to see it being employed in such a way and could not help to think that finally someone found the perfect usage for this otherwise troublesome product.

You see, the SP-202 started life as an entry-level sampler for that wave of kids in the late 90s who were defenestrating guitars and sinking $1200 into Technics 1200s. Back when I was interning in Tokyo in 1998, I used to scour the instrument district of Ochanomizu and became instantly enchanted with the little black box. I was coming into this whole "electronic music" thing from a long high-school tenure with a four-track recorder and guitars, and what I liked about the SP-202 was that you could play it like an instrument (I used to be scared of MIDI). I eventually picked up the sampler and the brother drum machine (the totally radical DR-202 with preset "drum'n'bass" beats and a great amount of ever-present white noise) and headed back to America to try to make sample-pop akin to that of my heroes in Shibuya-kei.

Much to my delight, I saw both Buffalo Daughter and Cornelius use the SP-202 on stage later that year. Cornelius famously used to pass one out to crowds to play (but with all the effects options covered by a big plastic bubble, natch).

So as a prop in a futuristic Japanese band's performance, the thing was fantastic. Sitting down to write songs with it, however, was a whole different challenge. As I and 10 million other kids discovered around 2000-2002, there was something seriously limiting about that "DJ culture" thing - we get these fancy turntables and mixers so that we can... play other people's music? Also, a big flaw - a phrase sampler is not the kind of sampler that lets you actually make electronic music. The SP-202 only really lets you record loops at less-than-CD-quality with no precise way of editing the loop points. Polyphony is also very limited, so you can't play more than two samples at once. But most importantly, if you are a songwriter who likes "chord changes" (I know, very old-fashioned), writing melodies over sample loops is like hiking in a very small box.

After a while, I figured out that the SP-202 had one purpose: triggering wacky vocal samples. (In hindsight, this is all that Buffalo Daughter and Co. were doing with it). But these train guys found an even better use: triggering useful train announcements. And nobody on the train platform cares if the samples are only at 31.25 kHz.

Sometimes I fall prey to the hubristic notion that I am close to "understanding Japan," and then something like this comes along and knocks me back to zero.

Back up a minute, and take another look at yesterday's link to the "Weird Japanese Video" on YouTube that looks to be a daily fitness video/English lesson from the early 90s (judging by the haircuts.) My intelligence network correctly identified these as Zuiikin' English - a late-night Fuji TV show from 1992, and therefore, a parody rather than what we were all secretly hoping it was: a totally misguided attempt at educational programming.

This video completely played into my (perhaps, our) preconception that "Japan is crazy" and that the Japanese would make this kind of material with a straight face. When I showed this to Japanese friends, they also bought into the idea that the video was real and pricelessly ridiculous. Zaniness is still integrally bound up within the national image of Japan - even, apparently, for the Japanese.

Originally, I was going to write this post about how Japan media content is visibly and palpably less crazy now, but that we Westerners, through the power of YouTube, will be able to raid the huge archives of unseen Japanese footage to keep us occupied for another decade or so as to prolong the concept of Japanese Wacky. The surprise turn is that the Japanese also recognize the kitsch value of their past, and moreover, were so cognizant of their frequent botched attempts at dealing with Western culture that they could satirize it in real time.

And here: this final episode straddles the line between Nihonjinron and parody of Nihonjinron.

Also, I am like three months late on this whole thing, but mostly because I do not own the Internet.

At State Fairs, they have those "Put Your Picture on a Magazine" booths and 350 lb. fathers-of-three walk away with a personalized "Dwayne Wins the Superbowl" cover of Time (or Timely). I was pretty sure this hilarious convention didn't exist in Japan, but looky here: some very mediocre-looking girl made herself a fake Pinky cover in a mall somewhere and the editors of the real Pinky accidentally used it for the front of their 12/06 issue. Wait, wait, my bad, that's just Koda Kumi... She's a popular idol singer in Japan. I forget the reason why.

Now I hate to be judging celebrities on their personal appearance and natural attractiveness, but we are working within an industry that strips all artists of any original personality traits and rights to creative exploration in order to market them as commodities. And we consumers have been asked to not look too critically at voice talent or songwriting skills and just take the record companies at their word regarding the artists' overall cultural value. But there is no way we can avoid judging these commodities on physical appearance if that is the one remaining criteria up for debate. I and many others are going to naturally question how this particular subpar star got to where she is, seeing that there are thousands of decent-looking, no-talent girls in the industry to choose from who would be happy to sing unmemorable Eurobeat songs for the dwindling CD-buying public. The Machine, however, has decided in eerie Lynchian fashion that "This is the girl," and we will have to sit through a storm of magazine covers and TV specials until "they" find someone else or she foolishly breaks up with her production office CEO beau.

On a slightly related note, I saw prepackaged idol Matsuura Aya on "Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ" last night where she halted the conversation and told some new Yoshimoto female manzai group to their faces, "You guys just aren't that funny" which was incredibly tactless but kind of right on. Idols are not supposed to be so honest nor critical nor wiseasses. What is going on in this country?

Anecdotal reasons why Krautrock is great:

1) Either Kraftwerk or Kraftwerk II on the Ginza Line: I continued to "listen" two or three minutes after it ended, thinking that the high-pitched buzz of the subway was the album.

2) Accidentally hit pause on some Can track and was pretty sure for thirty seconds or so that the abrupt silence was part of the song.

3) Listened to the entirity of Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht only to discover that I had put the CD in upside-down.

In the seventeenth year of my salad days (Thousand Island, for the most part), I spent a very boring summer driving around in a 1983 silver Volvo station wagon, listening to the records pictured above: The Shins' Chutes Too Narrow and Rilo Kiley's The Execution of All Things. Something about 8th-note ride cymbal hits matches perfectly with cruising around the Southern United States. In 1996, my humble hometown finally got itself an "Alternative" radio station, which was a godsend for learning about new music: I strongly remember first hearing "Friends of P" on a battery-powered radio-flashlight during the long blackout from Hurrican Opal.

Radio, however, cannot hold a brief candle to that warm glow of hi-bias cassette tapes blasting out of 80s car speakers, a kind of amorphous audio blob unrestrained by crisp hi-end - a triumphant victory of mid-range and hiss.

By the summer of 1996, we were already seeing the Decline of the Alternative Nation: instead of epic grunge, we had one-hit wonders of grunge lite, the precursors to Third Eye Blind. I doubt the four words Green Apple Quick Step mean anything to anyone anymore, but bands like this made up a long list of second-tier non-mainstream acts with a single good song: The Refreshments, Letters to Cleo, Primitive Radio Gods, The Caufields, Sleeper, maybe even the Phunk Junkies. Definitely Hum.

The Shins and Rilo Kiley fit well into this mold: catchy songs, rough but simple production, earnestness. The Shins brought a bit of a 60s and home recording into the mix. RK, on the other hand, were so of the time - the alternachick voice, guitars instantly growing in size through a stompbox smash, dueling high-guitar parts over ride cymbals, distorted voices, songs too long for their own good, the regalness of depression, sing-along choruses. I find it odd today how much the melodic structure of "Bad Day"-type inocuous mainstream pop borrows directly from that post-Alternative framework. Is it just all Linda Perry's fault or a sign of real stagnation in Top 40 musical progression outside of hip-hop?

No matter, why listen to today's indie pop when you can go back and hear better and more original versions from the mid-90s? The Shins and Rilo Kiley don't sound like 1996 - they are 1996. And 1996 was much better the first time, when I was out mowing the lawn, enduring the eventual abrupt cut off of last songs on 45-min side Maxwell tapes with hand-written labels, drinking blue powerade, and spending the $1 of the $10 I earned that sweaty morning on a 9 pm viewing of a recent blockbuster at the discount second-run theatre. Driving home afterwards, you better believe I rewound the tape to the beginning of side A, and there goes "Kissing the Lipless" - sitting in the car until the end of "Saint Simon" even though I had arrived back home minutes earlier.