neomarxisme

Let's face it: film is ugly. American mainstays Law and Order and 24 do little more than recall ancient relics of the inferior 20th century. Beta is the future. Japanese television has openly embraced majestic advances in cinematography - the brilliant harsh tones 2-3x the luminescence of real life! the green glow of indoor fluorescent lighting! the everpresent feeling that you are merely watching the output of cameramen filming actors somewhere in Tokyo! Can you even envisage the travesty of celluloid capturing the brilliant exaggerated overacting of Japanese talent?

On a totally unrelated note - video is cheap! Dirt cheap! allowing the Japanese broadcast companies to pass those savings back to... themselves!

For the last month, various business publications have been compiling master rankings of Japanese corporate salaries, and almost all of them agree that the highest paid domestic employees are in the television business. By Weekly Toyo Keizai's October 7th figures, a 30 year-old at Asahi Broadcasting should be reaping in more than 10 million yen a year ($85,000). A Fuji Television employee (#3) has a higher hourly rate than a Mitsubishi Corporation wonk (#4) or Dentsu ad man (#5).

For anyone who has ever wondered why Japanese TV has so many variety shows with a shoestring budget, the answer is now clear: superior programming would take away from superior salaries. We viewers are delighted with fifteen straight minutes of an overweight cat stumbling around (and then the eventual "quiz" section to kill more time) so that Mr. Tanaka at Nihon TV and his cronies can have that extra hour of entertainment at one of Ginza's top hostess bars. Just like Latin America and Eastern Europe, there is just no more money in the Japanese system to build the high-quality television programs that other developed nations export to the world. They need that hard-earned ad money to feed their wives and families.

Last month, top blogger Momus exuberantly celebrated C-ute - the new music group offering from idol factory Hello! Project (of oligopolistic management company Up Front Agency). Although he attempted to explain the social subtext through invoking the mystical Japanese dissolution of the individual from times of Amaterasu, the debate instantly descended into talk of "pedophilia." A reader protested this conventional view: "It's so fashionable to suggest girl bands are made to titillate creepies, but it's fairly obvious that these groups are targeted to young girls." So herein lie the terms: if this kind of idol pop is specifically targeted to middle-aged men, then yes, it probably possesses something akin to pedophilia. If targeted to young girls, then no.

Okay, so here is the backpage ad of the Oct. 23, 2006 issue of the free Japanese weekly Tokyo Headline. In no way is this a newspaper targeted towards young people - unless thirteen year-old girls suddenly want to see Iwo Jima epic Flags of Our Fathers and are longing to know the latest details of the Murakami Fund scandal. Tokyo Headline is reading fodder for middle-aged men with long commutes. Buying the backpage should be seen as nothing other than a direct appeal to this demographic. But seeing that this unmusical low-teen idol dreck no longer sells on the Oricon with the young kid market, selling directly to a well-funded and fanatical segment of creepy men may be the only remaining source of stable revenue. A real-life example of the marketing concept: the product follows the need. The girls involved may not be Christians thrown to the lions - more like Christians enticing the lions from behind the glass barrier of media protection. (And their parents get a cut.) But let's not ignore that the lions are ready and paying.

Something about the ad layout gives better window into the Hello! Project marketing intentions. The presentation and poses of the girls in boxes looks suspiciously similar to the portraits of the working girls found at the entrances of "image club" fuzoku brothels/pink salons in Tokyo's various Red Light Districts. The association is not coincidental. These girls of course cannot be purchased in a concrete way, but they allure in the same mode. LITTLE GIRLS FOR SALE - PICK ONE.

Momus would call my reading "sinister," but there is no morality in the marketing, friends. Many middle-aged men find the perfect model of women in fifteen year-old squeaky idols, and Hello! Project is there to provide them with the solutions to their problems. So let us stop pretending that these products are "targeted to little girls" and the big bad men keep hijacking the marketing message for their own deviant needs. Here is the market - with clearly defined buyers and sellers. Now what does that say about Japan?

The good people at work got me a 10,000 yen gift card to iTunes Music Store Japan for my wedding, but due to Sony's boycott and other various factors, I found myself mostly unable to spend this virtual loot on the available music. After purchasing a single Tangerine Dream album, I decided to hightail it to the Audiobooks and go with one of DJ Will Durant's bangers from the early daze, The Story of Philosophy - Part One. (Unabridged, suckas.)

Slipping into the Plato chapter (who never appeared in any of the Bill and Ted films since his name cannot be mispronounced), I could not help but notice a striking similarity between the ideals of government in The Republic and the political structure of Japan. Plato calls for a class of educated elites to rule, who spend their early days in athletic pursuits before moving onto deep intellectual/philosophical study and then competitive placement within a merit-based bureaucracy with meager pay and communal living.

Since the end of the war, Japan has essentially been a pseudo-democracy - with 60% of the power held by unelected career bureaucrats and the remaining bits held by elected Diet members. Almost without exception, the top bureaucrats (and many politicians) come from Japan's #1 institution of higher learning, Tokyo University (Todai) - specifically, the Law Department (法学部). Although they are not forced to live communally nor give up their children to the state like Plato's lusty vision, these bureaucrats take relatively lower salaries than their private sector peers. The idea is to put the brightest and most talented citizens in control of the government, thus working around the unpredictable and protean disposition of the masses. No matter what happens on the democratic side, these bureaucrats can skillfully steer the country onto the most "correct" course.

This idea, however, is not solely Platonic. The method of staffing the Japanese state closely resembles Confucian ideas on education. Confucius proffers an ideal system where students memorize "the Classics" and win access to government jobs by accurately spewing back the material. The aim is close to Pluto's: building a fleet of gentlemen to rule the state with their enhanced wisdom and benevolence.

The Japanese system looks very close to the ideal in its stern recruiting, but it is missing a crucial component of the formula: no one learns anything at university. Kids get the basics in middle and high school, focusing on three core subjects - Japanese, math, and English. Achievement is measured at 18, and the best and brightest matriculate to universities where they proceed to do nothing for four years. All education in the actual field happens in the first years of employment. Gaining a government job has little to do with what you did at college and more about where you went to college. Pedigree as a symbol trumps the achievement the symbol is supposed to represent.

Obviously, no actual government is going to resemble the fantasies of philosophers who - surprise, surprise - think that philosophers should rule the country. But why would the Japanese system take up the overall shell of the Platonic/Confucian system and then ignore the central meat inside. The point is that the most educated (not most promising) take up the reigns of the body politic. Why not have students spend four years in intellectual pursuits on top of binge drinking with their tennis circles, as is the norm in most other lands?

There is the oft-repeated vacation claim about universities, that Japanese students deserve a break between "examination hell" and the bland regularity of their remaining lives. But this would presuppose that universities were once difficult and have been toned down - a historical development I am unaware of. More importantly, Japanese companies dislike employees with prior experience or knowledge as they think overeducated students are a threat to a unified firm culture. Also in a seniority-based society, the education process most ideally would be stretched out over decades in order to make a natural hierarchy of wisdom and ability.

In some ways, the current Japanese system is a Confucian Hell - where promising youth never learn the universal wisdom of the past but instead take up a body of knowledge based on particular practical concerns of companies and government functions. No one hands down wisdom at any point in the current model. Basic skills are learned for diagnostic testing (semi-Confucian), then four years of vacation, then a lifetime of onsite vocational education. The Japanese system certainly creates a stability - but perhaps the wrong kind, stuck in slowly outmoded routines and traditions rather than more abstract philosophical ideals.

I criticize, of course, not because the Japanese system is broken or worthless, but because it is looms so near its aspirational ideals but pokes out the middle. The system is so bent up on its own protection that it essentially fears the challenge of that overeducated elite, who would in theory locate the hypocrisies and abuses of the structure and work to bring them back to the ideals. Wisdom may be secretly a threat to the status quo, which may have been Plato and Confucius' whole reason for advocating it.

Some of my non-American readers may not fully grasp the enormity of yesterday's Democractic sweep of both Congressional chambers, so I have put together a list of pop culture metaphors that will no doubt help you put it all in perspective:

* The House and Senate are like Kid 'n Play, and they are both Democrats and are pajama-jamming at a House Party and a Senate Party as well.
* The House and Senate are now like Larry's brothers Darryl and Darryl from Newhart: both Democratic.
* The House and Senate are like the two arms of Turbo Teen's Brett Matthews, and when the electorate hoses him down with the hot water of democracy, they became two wheels greased with the power of the Democratic Party.
* The House is Michael J. Fox from Poison Ivy (1985), and the Senate is Nancy McKeon from Poison Ivy (1985). Summer camp commences and the whole place goes Democratic.
* The House and Senate are like the two candidates in the 1960 televised presidental debates, but they are both Kennedy.
* Number of Congressial chambers Democrats control: 2x the number of Martika number-ones.
* Congress is a Bactrian Camel, but both humps are filled with Democrats instead of resevoirs of fatty tissue (Republicans).

Ghostbusters 2.

Update: Whoa. That was fast. Somebody removed the insane vandalism almost immediately. Those lucky enough to have viewed the site in what turned out to be a very narrow window of time will no doubt agree that we were witness to something truly magical. Maybe the ephemeral delights of wikipedia vandalism are a wabisabi reminder of our place here on earth. We are like cherry blossom petals - so fragile, yet so beautiful.

If anybody was watching NHK around 10:45 last night, the fifteen-minute show 「あの歌がきこえる」("I can hear that song") started off with the host offering my wife and me a personalized wedding greeting. Our good friend Mr. Inui snuck our names into the script, which otherwise dealt with wedding toasts and the Nagabuchi Tsuyoshi song "Kampai."

I do not want to be too controversial or conspiratorial here - especially seeing that The Japan Times sends me work once in a while - but I cannot help but put two-and-two together: JT seems to dedicate a disproportionate amount of (positive) attention to religious sect Soka Gakkai and its unofficial political party New Komeito. Here is the top headline of the minute: "Soka Gakkai chief Akiya to step down." Objectively speaking, this does not appear to be a particularly important story for society at large and subsequently does not make Yahoo! Japan's top news of the moment. Also note that The Japan Times publishes sect leader Ikeda Daisaku's editorials on a regular basis. Recently they had a prominent obituary for Koshiro Ishida - a member of the Komeito whom I would be surprised to learn is well-known outside of the Gakkai community. On October 16, 2006, there was an unsigned editorial "Test of Komeito's ideals" which could have only been written for and by someone with vested interest in the party.

I decline any normative statements on SGI, Ikeda, and Komeito for the time being, but is there some kind of The Japan Times/Soka Gakkai connection we should know about? Is it coming from the editorial side? Are SGI members a large part of the readership causing a need for content to be tailored to their needs? Is this financial - like the Unification Church owning The Washington Times? Most importantly, is this going to mean a special pullout entertainment feature on the joys of Def Tech?

Ever since I first lived in Tokyo back in 1998, the concept of lines/queues has always been inextricably central to my understanding of Japanese consumer culture. I hate to keep retelling the story, but perhaps nothing was more pivotal to my life and career than waiting in line three hours at A Bathing Ape's Busy Work Shop Harajuku with hundreds of Japanese youth to buy an $80 red-and-white border shirt with a small Ape face tag on the sleeve. Three hours for a single piece of clothing? Sure, there are lines often in the U.S. for certain consumer goods (Tickle-Me-Elmos at Christmas et. al), but there seems to be such fundamental dissent against the idea in such a efficiency-obsessed, competitive society, leading to pushing-and-shoving, sour attitudes, and verbal sparring. How many freaks-outs and abject rage have I witnessed at the Burger King on Delancy St. at noon, and those lines were maybe ten people at max. On that fateful August day in Harajuku, the kids lining up failed to show any signs of discontent or annoyance. I can't remember much excitement on their faces, but I instantly became intrigued by their pleasant resignation to the situation.

The Japanese line (行列 in local parlance) has always been an accepted part of the consumer landscape. Opposed to old tales of Eastern Europe and grandmothers enduring the bitter cold to line up for bread and borscht, the Japanese line up for access to exclusive products - most often fashion goods made intentionally rare by producer intention. Often though, the centralization of the media system and the obsessive adherence to the media message by consumers mean that some stores with no structure in place to deal with a mysterious massing of customers start getting hundreds of people one morning in search of their cream puffs. In the case of Ape, the problem was less of supply and more of physical restrictions of how many could fit in the store at once. In actuality, two of my three hours were waiting in line within the store. With only a small counter and one clerk, the sluggish transaction speed was the real source of slow down.

The ubiquity of lines in Japan, however, transformed the occurrence from commerce malfunction to visual sign of success. The Ape lines in Tokyo may have been a nightmare for the staff, but the queue started looming so large in the Ape legend that I caught the Osaka store in 2000 clearly limiting customer entry to two in the store at a time to create a conspicuous backup.

Whether real or artificial, the line to me was always a sign of energy in the consumer market, a symbol of youth's obsession with the culture around them. This energy was also exported: can you imagine a line at Supreme in New York without Asian faces?

Obviously, the Buddhist/consumerist perspective on lines would be much darker. R. put it succinctly in his comments about the PS3 "get" on Brad's blog: "The things you own end up owning you." Moreover, I met a semi-famous graphic designer years ago who had a collaborative shoe with one of the major sneaker houses, and he attended the first day of sales for his limited-edition kicks. He noted how pained everyone looked, how the kids appeared to be there out of duty/responsibility to their collection rather than a joyful curiosity towards the product at hand.

The word from the Playstation 3 lines seems to paint an even less jubilant portrait of where this consumer phenomenon is heading in Japan. Read the excellent report from Brad about obtaining a PS3 from the Yurakucho Bic Camera on Saturday morning. The store's lack of preparation and the lack of information about product quantities surely did not help, but the scene was hardly one of happy consumers lining up to get their hands on a dreamy toy. Most importantly, the main two parties present were Chinese adults and homeless men. Long dead are the days of nine year-old Slime-freaks waiting with their parents to get a copy of Dragon Quest II. The line in Japan has gone professional - and foreign. Bic Camera employees had to start making announcements in Mandarin.

Much is going to be made about the "dark side" of the PS3 lines, but let's be honest: this is Japanese consumer culture globalized and post-income disparity. Unclear if the Chinese present were working class immigrants day laboring for higher ups or whether they intended to sell back to the mainland, but can you imagine a similar massing of foreigners even ten years ago? Also, does anyone think that Mr. Tanaka at Tokyo Gas or Mr. Sato at Hakuhodo is paying homeless men to stand in line for them? Seeing that the market price of these machines is still higher than the set price, everything has descended into scalping - with grey-black market forces trying to hoarde the supply. Kotaku quotes "opportunistic Japanese businessmen" being behind things, but I kind of doubt these are white-collar salarymen pooling their money together. In the Kotaku comment roll, Brad identifies the homeless men's employers as organized crime, and this makes the most sense. Of course with Ape and all the old-style consumer queues, resellers were always a big part of the equation, but instead of sneaking in with bright-eyed children and trend-conscious teenagers, these arbitrage merchants have become the majority.

Lines are destined in Japan to be what they are elsewhere - unpleasant routines of consumer mechanics - where we give hours of our lives in competition to obtain things faster than our peers. Especially now with international auction markets on the Net, these events - which used to bring out the ideal consumers for fun photo ops and human-interest business stories - are now solely going to be a distribution structure for resellers. There was something "Japanese" about the cold social harmony of peaceful queuing, but when the stakes get this high, propriety and innocence will be pushed aside by the sinister forces festering underneath. Blame foreigners or globalization or the yakuza or capitalism in toto but the Japan-style queue is probably facing demise.

Around 80,000 PS3s went on sale Saturday, and at least 5000 instantly showed up on Yahoo! Auctions. Netizens are expressing serious distaste for the Chinese-yakuza-homeless arbitrage conspiracy and are already working together to fight back. First, they started bidding ridiculously high figures to destroy all chances of a smoothly-functioning auction process.

Now, they have gone to the next level: putting in a 1 yen bid followed quickly by a monstrous billion yen bid from a different user name. The second bidder's ID gets erased at the last moment - leaving the 1 yen bid as the winner. This guy wanted 150,000 yen for his valiant and brilliant arbitrage efforts. He got 149,999 less than that.

Search for "Playstation homeless" on Google News (in English): China Post, BBC, Virgin.net, Middle East TImes, Hong Kong's The Standard, and The Sunday Times all reported on the presence of homeless men waiting in line for the Playstation 3. No Japanese English-language news sources have picked up the story at this time.

Search for "PLAYSTATION ホームレス" on Google News Japan (in Japanese):Nothing. (Yes, I also tried "浮浪者" and "プレステ" etc.)

Kudos to Kotaku and Brad for reporting that greatly improved the bland narrative that would otherwise have emerged from solely Japanese sources.

Finally, an obituary for a cultural artifact I never liked to start with: Velfarre - Avex's inessential megaclub in Roppongi has contracted a severe case of reality and has two months to live. Apparently the fancy complex lost money from the start and had to move from "trendy" 4:30 am trance parties to pro-wrestling events in order to maintain some semblance of cash flow.

Avex no doubt started Velfarre to be the inheritor to the Juliana's disco crown. Velf came out of the womb in Dec. 1994 - just three months after the legendary Juliana's bit the dust that August. Avex can thank the Bubble-era disco boom for its entire existence, making a fortune selling "Best of Juliana's" CDs to boastful white collar workers with terrible no taste in music. So they open Velfarre to keep the Eurobeat fantasy alive, but by the time the first limos left the lot, it was clear to everyone Avex was just pulling a Weekend at Bernie's.

Sure, the VIP area probably played host to some major moments of J-pop production lore. According to legend, Komuro Tetsuya would ask unsuspecting girls to write down their favorite words on cocktail napkins and then throw the results - "Chase" "the" and "Chance" - into the chorus refrain of Amuro Namie songs. But perhaps, the failure of Velfarre to sustain the Eurobeat Rave Factory in Japan pushed Avex into going more strongly into the J-pop world. As I have theorized before, "As t —> infinity, all Japanese music becomes J-pop." In the case of Avex, Eurobeat begat TRF, Amuro, Max, etc. etc. and the company became the nation's largest record company as a result.

Okay, so Eurobeat died with the Bubble, only to make its way into being the main influence on late 90s pop music (Scatman John, too? Yes.) But since 2003 or so, we have been witness to a full-scale Bubble revival. Why did Velfarre not become a convenient meeting place for the Society for Creative Anachronism - Japanese New Rich Chapter who drive orange Porsches and buy their girlfriends who request Cartier watches Cartier watches? Maybe the sin of Existentism - still around in 2004 even though the best work was in 1994 (like Oasis)? More likely, I can imagine no time in Japanese pop culture history (or remember reading about a time in Japanese pop culture history) where music has meant so little to the overall culture. Eurobeat was tied to the Bubble at the hip. All products in the late 90s had their personal J-pop theme songs and vice versa. This kind of tie-up still exists, but no one is listening or checking the little note symbol in the lower left side of the screen. Mass culture barely has a soundtrack - okay, the song from the Fuyu no Sonata drama but you can't dance to it. Koda Kumi sells records, but she does not make songs that anyone actually hears.

I can only remember going to Velfarre once - maybe for a Moodman/Ukawa Naohiro event in 2003 - which is not exactly a reflection of the OL-bangs-LV-trancesynth-$$$-chapatsu culture the hall was raised to enshrine. Another relic of 90s culture dies in December, but this is just social restructuring, clearing the deadweight. The DOA club finally gets put in the morgue.

American PS3 Lines: fights, arguments, BB gun attacks, robberies - overall, slightly violent and rowdy.

Japanese PS3 Lines: relatively peaceful and good-natured from afar, but semi-sinister on closer inspection - with the mainstream media avoiding reports of anything that might crack Sony's corporate PR message or may open difficult questions about socioeconomic class.

Bonus comparision:

First Japanese PS3 buyer: Chinese man who cannot speak Japanese.
First American Wii buyer: a guy who legally changed his middle name to "Triforce."

Every story from my teenage years starts with a cassette tape but so be it: I had the entire audio track to the film Clerks on a Maxell Type II tape - with all the interstitial vocabulary words written in Uniball pen lettering as the "song titles." Great for road trips, and you could even play it for people who hadn't seen the movie since the content was almost 85% audio-based anyway. Once time I popped it in the tape deck of a van on a class trip up to Georgia, and I was very surprised the teach let us get all the way through the "snowballing" etc. Golden times: that level of authoritarian negligence would be lawsuit territory in this day and age.

In the late-mid-90s during the decline of the Alternative Nation, I turned my attention away from indie music and onto indie film. Young director Kevin Smith was the cinematic equivalent of Lo-Fi: DIY, self-financed, all for $25,000. Grainy B&W. Legitimately funny. Maybe I respected David Lynch et al. more than Kevin Smith, but Clerks felt like a movie that anybody could make - including me. Nothing is more exciting at 16 than the flash of possibility.

Of course, Clerks does not qualify as a perfect movie. In general, Smith shows little interest in actually using the possibilities of the film medium: he arranges actors and constructs visuals solely for creating wooden comic panels to illustrate his radio play. The acting is so literally amateur. But again: DIY, lo-fi. The mistakes are endearing, remember. But let's be honest: the film won me over immediately because it feels like what a clever teenager would put together as his fantasy high school play.

While trawling the torrent sea torrents last week, I ran into a DVD rip of Clerks II (The Sequel to Clerks) and felt compelled to illegally download it for free - that was the least I owed the director for three-to-four years of inspiration. Without really making an explicit attempt to do so, I have ended up seeing every other Kevin Smith film and found them all *blah* with the exception of Chasing Amy, which again, worked for me as a 17 year-old American teenager, so why not Clerks II.

I don't mean to spoil Clerks II for you, but it's bad. Really terrible, and I don't even care that it's a sequel to one of my favorite childhood movies in a Ghostbusters II / Meatballs II / Cruel Intentions II disappointment kind of way. No hyperbole: the acting quality falls somewhere beneath Japanese network television comedies. The jokes feel like cutting-floor material from 1994 - as if no one realized that the Internet made all overanalysis of nerd movies pedestrian about seven years ago. The direction is bland.... blah, blah, blah, read an actual review if you want more explication on the serious illness that plagues this film.

I would rather discuss something more fundamentally unsettling: the Kevin Smith Nightmare. The idea that you as a young creator could start out as a Horatio Alger type with a lot of promise and moxie, get the big break, receive access to huge budgets, real actors, color film, Jason Lee, make six other films, become a folk hero, have a pretty good cartoon made of your original movie, become such a revered face that you sit in for Roger Ebert, epitomize creative success for a whole generation, and then, make film after film that manifest nothing approximating artistic maturity or growth - if not becoming hostage to total descent into hackneyed retardation of your original material. And this is not, Musician Gets Worse As He Gets Old Syndrome. Catching the Kevin Smith Nightmare means our youthful shortcomings are permanent and not a result of our limited circumstances, and no matter how hard we try to move up and beyond, we just end up being worse and worse at what we nominally do best. And this is a scenario that could become a habitat for all of us "young creators waiting for the world to sweep us off our feet." Hard stats are unavailable, but one of every four could fall prey to KSN every year.

I remember a disgruntled filmmaker saying once: "For every Kevin Smith, there are 100 failures that go nowhere." Where do we go now that Kevin Smith was also a failure?

As reported on 2-ch's Itai News Blog, Kinki University in Osaka is telling juniors they must take a job right outside of graduation in the traditional "shinsotsu saiyou" (新卒採用) system. Why? "Because there are no second chances." (「２度とチャンスはありません。」) What about becoming a freeter? "Your life will come to nothing." (「フリータやニートになっては，人生台無しです。」) Surely, waiting to apply a year or two after college, you could still get a job based on your qualifications, right? "Dead wrong. Society will not accept you. Why? Because those who did not start working right outside of graduation are leftovers and defective merchandise." (「卒業してからでも大卒の資格で何とかなるわ…と思ったら大間違いです。 社会は受け入れてくれません。 何故なら，新卒で就職出来ていない人は落ちこぼれであり，欠陥品だからです。」)

All of the 2-ch commenters of course agree with this harsh analysis, and the message does not conflict with the standard understanding of Japanese education/employment systems. Let's face it: perfectly ordered society and second-chances are total opposites. The only way to enforce order is to guarantee that those going around the determined path will be permanently punished. The kid doesn't even get the chance to cry "wolf" the first time? Problem solved. Taking a year off to study for Tokyo University exams is one thing, but taking a year off to think about what you would like to do for the rest of your life... might as well be treason.

As much as the post-Bubble period was host to greater "Americanization" of the economy, the rigid employment system is facing no serious challenge. In fact, with more and more companies creating two distinct classes of "regular" and "non-regular" workers, the shinsotsu system becomes crucial for determing who gets to join the upper classes and who gets to receive the same limp salary for 30 years - within the same companies, even. Successfully making it to a four-year university in the first place means you have access to a possible corporate track job, and clearly, Kinki U. does not want to see their young get swept out into the harsh winter colds from which there is no return.

One of Prime Minister Honest Abe's big ideas for Japan is the "second chance initiative" for failed businesses. Students, however, may not be afforded that luxury. At least they will know at 22 whether their lives are total failures or not. Most people have to wait 40 years to find that out on their own.

One day you are married to one of the most iconic pop stars of the decade, and the next day you are the punchline of week-old jokes. This could have been any one of us.

marxy
beaus in disarray
creation-centre
#ctr-ac

a six-song ep of new music available for free download at web label creation-centre in 192 kbps aac/m4a and 128 kbps mp3 formats

1. intro to

Volume setting enthusiasts: please take into consideration the fact that the initial synthesized bass is the loudest single object on the following audio suite.

Take up arms and walk with pilgrims
To leave evil in our hind
Mauger lack of bold encumbrance
Victory our hearts shall find

- Non-traditional Episcopal hymn

"Cotillion" (coming soon!)

Set your pace today by walking to the other side
And waltzing on the other side, she says to me
You dance like your were born in three-four time
And so I hold her tight (She is probably right)
I was never very good at foxtrotting anyway

2. did you know exactly what i had in mind?

did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?
did you know exactly what i had in mind?

3. the level one

Hennessy - Tennessee
astounded - confounded
irony - pity

"So don't belong to what you're not and roll out all hot on the town with the world in your crown while your beau's in disarray."

4. several pieces

a. Gulliver
b. Jennifer
1. soapbox chorus
c. Oliver
2. soapbox chorus

5. we won't be sold (second verse)

Previously on Marxy:

Looking at the past (1)
but the past (1) we know has all be redacted (A)
They all overreacted (A)
And we're still paying today (B)
History (C) has taught us that the world is always repeating (D)
The most self-defeating (D)
Trends of an earlier age (E)

Looking up (1) cause (1) is where we're (A)
The light's bent and (A)
And the colors are fading (B)
The (C) that brought us here was solved so we're humbly (D)
Glory is (D)
As we exit the (E)

6. my learned little princess

樺美智子 (1937-1960)
(music David Marx c. 1997, revised lyrics Marxy 2004)

Monday nights at 9? Nodame Cantabile. Not gonna front like I ever read the manga (manga?) or even that I manage to keep up with the show every week, but yes, I sometimes watch one television show in the Japanese television "golden time" prime time hours. Like a lot of Japanese dramas, the show gets a bit of energy from its dedication to adapting manga (Japanese comic book) timing and direction to real-world moving visuals: some tiny gags only last 18 video frames and as hypothesized they use a dash of CG to recreate the nonviolent hyperviolence of the original manga (漫画). Another highlight is fake German Maestro Franz von Strezeman (played by professional ham Takenaka Naoto) who speaks fluent Japanese in an impossible Italian-esque manner of overstressing the second-to-last syllable as in "dekimaSHIta."

For some reason, the producers were able to escape the trap of using the yakuza-backed oligopolistic jimushos' talentless talents and actually have a pretty able cast of film actors to play the leads. In order to recreate the cartoony overexaggeraton of the manga (the static version of anime), the director presses his actors to their limits of real life mannerism. But "overacting" "well" is not so easy. Most of the time I don't buy it - it just looks like non-intentional overacting and not like stylized performance - but I have started to notice it's not just the actors' problem in a lot of the cases.

On a total subconscious, non-snob level - as a Westerner accustomed to at least two-and-a-half decades of American television and the occasional BBC import - my brain fails to build up a fourth wall around the actors under the standard conditions of Japanese audio and video quality. My cognitive channels interpret the mediated information as a bunch of actors acting out a slightly amateurish play and being filmed with someone's Beta camera and the footage going out on the airwaves without any attempts to filter the colors down to more "attractive" or film-like settings. Moreover, the sound seems to be recorded in live settings and not closed sets, and so you can hear the same hums and buzzes that populate real life. Ironically, the sound is too "real" to project a fantasy reality. I am no audio engineer and cannot explain the technical settings of why Japanese TV sound is at a lower quality than what is seen in Japanese commercials and films etc., but most people will just instinctively sense something verging on the amateur. Our brains are hardwired to pick up technological difference.

Some weeks ago, I made a (weak) case that money was not the central constraint of Japanese TV quality, but reading through Coates and Holyroyd's Japan and the Internet revolution yesterday, I found this tasty blockquote:

Despite marked success in other areas of digitized entertainment - most notably anime - Japanese television is decidedly low tech. Game shows operate on 1950s-style North American stages, with few of the bells and whistles that dominate American productions. Television news is particularly intriguing in this regard. News hosts often hold up hand-held graphics to illustrate their stories, or use a pointer and wall-board to provide detailed information. Production values are mediocre by western standards, and there is little evidence of the availability and use of advanced digital technologies and computerized production techniques. The gap between western and Japanese television production is likewise evident in televised sports, which are low-key, offering limited camera angles with few gimmicks from the announcing booth.

The issue with television is more complicated than this summary suggests. Japan has the technological capacity to do a great deal more. In fact, many of the key components in television production in other countries are made in Japan. Sony, Hitachi, Matsushita and others are world-leaders in digital imaging and produce many of the world's editing suites. It is puzzling, therefore, that this technology is not used to full effect. The television companies have substantial revenues (and a captive market, as cable services have made few inroads in the country) and very large audiences. It is choice, rather than resources or ability, which results in the low-key, low-tech television programming. That decision, in turn, appears to rest on the Japanese respect for simplicity in the domestic sphere; the country does not demand American-style reporting of baseball or soccer, is not overly impressed with glitzy high-production value game shows, and is comfortable with the homey, accessible 'feel' of the vast majority of the mainstream television programming.

(Bold mine, and for the record, the book is a pretty "rah-rah/Japan-will-bury-us-in-their-advanced-keitai-future" work and not the kind of pessimistic track you all expect me to champion.)

So let's break down what we know:
1. Japanese television has no technological barriers to improved content (i.e., they have the resources on hand)
2. Japanese television has no financial barriers to improved content (i.e., TV in Japan is one of the most profitable industries in the country.)
3. Japanese companies are intentionally producing low-quality content

I think we can all agree on #1 and #2, so Number Three is where the argument begins. Here are the common rationales to explain the situation:
1. Abilities: Japanese television creators are incompetent in creating better quality content due to lack of skill/craft in using resources.
2. Consumer Pull: Japanese TV watchers want low-quality content and TV channels are creating content to their wishes.
3. Producer Indifference: Japanese television channels have a captive market, little competition from cable or satellite sources, and generally stable market stares, and therefore, have no real incentive to increase the quality of their content.