neomarxisme

Currently spending the night in Irving, TX - and let me tell you it was basically a miracle we could even get ourselves here. Fog killed five flights, and after killing time at Children of Men, I was very skeptical of us getting out to-day, but hey, here we are in Irving, TX. Last night, our flight got rerouted in midair and we got to enjoy the beautiful night-time bus ride between Panama City and the City of Five Flags.

The Lower Level of DFW courtesy van area was playing a strange mid-80s mix - first Depeche Mode, then New Order, and a The Jam song for good measure. Hey, this is the kind of magic that greets you in Dallas-Fort Worth and never stops. Nothing like tinny synths and verbed snares to get convention goers in the mood for the meet and greet.

I need to finish this blog post so I can get back to the Hillary Duff movie on TNT.

Back to my normal morning routine today and thus greeted with a banner ad in the trains for this cover story in weekly Spa! magazine: "Saturday-Sunday Emptiness Syndrome": you wake up and it's already evening, eagerly watch DVDs, desperately visit prostitutes, golf with the boss - why can't we be satisfied even if we relax or desperately make plans? (［土日が虚しい］症候群: 起きたら夕方、懸命にDVD鑑賞、必死で風俗通い、上司とゴルフetc．なぜ我々はゆっくり休んでも必死で予定を入れても満たされないのか)

Note the use of "我々" for "we" - which has the nuance of speaking to a large body of group members, especially seen in "We Japanese" (我々日本人). I get a sense that I am not really included in this target "we." But if we assume this "we" to be standard Japanese men, especially white collar workers who lose identity and purpose when not at the job, notice the ubiquity of "visiting prostitutes/patronizing sexual services" (風俗) mentioned in "our" behavior - a totally normalized action, little more than watching 24 - Season Two. Market sex becomes a quick remedy for modern ennui.

Things to discuss about the 2006 film Dreamgirls:

1. The return of Jaleel White to the world of entertainment.
2. They make a film about Motown and don't make a character based on Rockwell? I guess he will be the focus of Dreamgirls II.
3. Overall, the movie is the latest to fall into the trap of carobism. I first used this concept in reference to Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls: if you love chocolate (real girls in Harajuku), why surround yourself with fake Harajuku girls (carob)? One media work making a tribute to another media work in the same area is always in danger of being irrelevant from the start.

Dreamgirls is irrelevant from the start: let's make a big tribute to some of the world's greatest pop songs by writing vastly inferior Broadway musical rip-offs of the originals. Les Miserables is such an easier mission since the Hugo novel did not come with sheet music and you could pretty much go nuts with the idea of bread-stealing and revolution. Grease and Little Shop of Horrors did a bang-up job of pastiche - essentially writing new 50s pop songs within the extremely-limited formulas of the era.

DG - at least in this cinematic incarnation - seems reluctant to go into deep pastiche and instead relies on a long run of very New York composery show-tunes and torch songs crammed into slightly-modified versions of modern R&B. After seeing DG down in Miami, I jumped into the car and cranked up 102.7 oldies radio to immediately win some real Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson. Real Motown, first of all, is super tambourine heavy - which does not really match the production styles of American Idol dreck-pop. But most importantly, the melodies and rhythms of the early crossover Motown songs are masterfully simple. The beauty lies in the enormous melodies laid over accessible chord and beat structures. The DG musical composers cannot resist the sophisticated allure of Dmaj9-type over-complex jazz piano arrangements, and subsequently, couldn't write a AM radio pop song to save their lives. The film only makes the Hair team look even more genius: "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In", "Where Do I Go?", "Easy to Be Hard", and "Good Morning Starshine" not only work within their musical theatre context, they were all successfully covered by pop artists.

(There is also the irony that the film implicitly and explicitly acknowledges the importance of having African-American songwriters behind African-American performers, and yet all the songs in the musical are written by a white musical guy.)

As a historical meta-pop fan, I was generally disappointed that the musical production and mixing of the Dreamgirls material did not accurately reflect the old technological limits of their era. This seems to be asking for way too much, except that all the visual design in the film was very faithful to the original material. All the fictional "The Dreams" album covers look like old Motown record covers thanks to nice font matching and some blatant borrowings. Maybe there is no danger in recreating past visual styles when they are merely background props in the narrative, but the songs are unfortunately bound to be products that must sell in the contemporary music market. There is always going to be some unintentional coloring of the material with modern norms (check out the over-funked basslines in the 1979 film version ofHair), but Dreamgirls doesn't even seem like it's trying.

I can't help but think that the narrative would have been much more successful had they gone that extra mile in the music tech department and used all possible tools to aurally date the songs in their respective eras. If that means tambourine and Mariah Carey doesn't use tambourine, so be it. If this means mono in a stereo world, go for it.

This is Spinal Tap is a exemplar of this principle in action. "Gimme Some Money" is annoying early Beatles R&B in B&W, while "Listen to the Flower People" has the dippy lyrics, the indulgent sitar solo, and the fey harmony vocals of the Autumn of Love. The joke is ambiguous: either they are making general fun of the ridiculous changes in musical conventions over history or they are poking fun at Tap's mindless transformations into the norms of each particular social moment. But regardless, it works because we can perfectly date the fictional song's historical era solely from the production elements. Dreamgirls, on the other hand, fails to smell the glove.

Update: Since the whole point of this blog game is to invent annoying words and concepts to describe contemporary social phenomena, looky here: today's Gawker contains the line "It's like if someone preferred carob to actual chocolate." Carobism spreads, my friends.

I don't actually think they got that from me, but strange synergy on using carob as a metaphor for preferring the inauthentic. Maybe I wasn't the only five year-old traumatized by a mother going through a health food boom in the early 80s. I never really looked forward to eating the carob-covered raisins in my lunchbox meant as a "dessert," but I can finally cash in on the reference.

Maybe I have an allergy to fabric dyes and plastic packaging, but there was nowhere I despised more as a teenager than the local shopping mall. Being inside the giant complex always made me feel physically ill. When I finally discovered the joys of male fashion consumption in Tokyo at the end of my teens - a proto-metrosexuality that has morphed over time from searching for the perfect limited-edition t-shirt to checking lapel size on suit jackets - I had assumed that I would better appreciate some window-shopping at the local small-town mall, but a decade later, I still succumb to that foul psychosomatic illness upon stepping foot into Payless, Spencer's Gifts, and Dillard's.

This Christmas, I reluctantly stepped back into the same nauseating mall of my youth to take the wife on a sort of participative observation cultural study on the American South - with the secondary mission of finding some cheap shoes and jeans. The specific tastes of the local population seem to have slowly evolved with the time; "street wear" store PAC-SUN was blasting LCD Soundsystem instead of the Creed or Nickelback I had assume would be there, but the overall (middle middle class) "taste culture" has been stable.

So much to my surprise, when I poked in a no-name, no-sign, no-decoration hip hop shop/warehouse, I spied four styles of BAPE camo hoodies up on the wall. I didn't see the price, and I could only establish a vague sense of authenticity, but I had a serious introspective moment: almost a decade after stumbling onto A Bathing Ape in Tokyo as a "super secret limited-edition underground street wear company," here I am in a third-rate store in my local mall, looking at the same products. I'm not sure whether Nigo is intentionally broadening his distribution to supply the local urban dandies of Northwest Florida, but BAPE has arrived: from Harajuku to Everywhere.

At Barnes & Nobles, the manga and sudoku sections are battling among themselves for greatest amount of floor space. Kumon Method tutoring materials are making an inroad. Iron Chef America kept popping up on my TV. My parents have a Toto washlet. There is no denying it: Japanese pop culture has made incredible gains in the United States over the last ten years.

The deeper question then becomes: so what? To a certain degree, we have not seen a triumph of Japanese content over American content as much as an equalization of the market. For way too long, Japanese products just had no opportunity to win introduction into the U.S. - mostly due to the fact that no one in America had any idea what was going on in Japan and the total lack of infrastructure to sell Japanese "cultural" products to Americans not originally created for export. The Pink Lady disaster alone probably set back the idea of Japanese culture in America a decade. Walkmen and PlayStations could sell, but it was easy for the profiting parties to attribute this to the a-cultural properties of mechanical boxes. Or the fact that Mario and Luigi are essentially Italian guys - not 真里緒&類似.

Now Japanese pop culture is legitimately "cool" in U.S. - for being Japanese. The follow-up question in foreign policy circles has been: does this translate into greater power for Japan as a nation? A lot of individual companies - like publisher Kodansha and electronics/content provider Sony - have made some nice pocket change on U.S. sales, but how will pop culture become an instrument of national policy? Is the active pursuit of Japanese software (content) different than the active pursuit of Japanese hardware (machines)?

Douglas McGray got some significant attention for his 2002 summary of the situation in Foreign Policy, "Japan's Gross National Cool." The big idea is that this kind of pop cultural influence will translate into a "soft power" for Japan in international relations. I have been skeptical of the size and durability of the trend (so has this Japanese person), but I will admit that the article introduced the idea to a lot of otherwise serious people. I am not confident that the Japanese government actually understands the reason Japan is cool, but politicians are now making verbal overtures to promote Japanese pop culture as part of the national strategy.

Although the "cool power" concept is attractive for many reasons, not everyone is convinced there is much meat to the theory of its power. In his Japan Echo piece "The Limits of Soft Power" (originally 「ソフトパワー論の死角」in Wochi Kochi), Ogura Kazuo examines the problems with the actual effectiveness of pop cult's "soft power." Overall, he does not buy that this sort of "soft power" actually exists without the backing of "hard power": economics and politics. Religion, he notes, spreads most often through military conflict, not just on the strengths of its own ideology. Ogura notes, "Japan currently posses almost no hard power of the sort used in the international arena."

How can the state actually use the power of anime or manga in their interactions with other nation states? Who is allowed to exercise this power? "Even if the arts or scholarship have the potential to serve as one face of power, there remain serious doubts as to whether it is acceptable for governments to actually use them." This may be especially true when the best popular culture is made in spite of the hegemonic industrial system instead of because of it.

Most importantly, Ogura rejects the idea of cultural penetration meaning real national influence:

It may well be desirable for the sort of cultural content embodied in "Japanese cool" to spread naturally around the world through market forces or people's efforts, but this will not necessarily lead to an increase in understanding of Japan. Those on the receiving end of contemporary cultural activities either from or related to Japan, such as anime or fashion, are not necessarily aware of any Japanese connection. Indeed, we should bear in mind that linking culture to the state carries a high-risk of impeding, rather than promoting, the spread of cultural activities around the world.

I disagree that most users of Japanese pop culture don't realize the origin; a lot of this stuff gets an extra boost in preference precisely because it is Japanese. But I think the main point sticks: there is no clear link between somebody watching Hi! Hi! Puffy Amiyumi on the Cartoon Network and a greater success of the Japanese nation in the international arena. This is especially true since most of these items/products are altered to fit the tastes of the local market. As I have written before, the Puffy cartoon has little to do with Puffy the music group I knew and loved besides a loose usage of the two characters' names and occupations. For the most part, this cultural wave has mainly involved Americans taking all the clever ideas from Japan built up in twenty years of miscommunication, re-bottling them with local flavors, and selling them as a hybrid product. Even Bape moved from being Cornelius-compatable street wear to Pharrell-friendly hip-hop gear in order to succeed with their new American audience. As much as I am surprised Bape is sold in my local mall, I'm not sure it's really the same Bape I once enjoyed in the back streets of Harajuku.

In the past, Americans looked over the seas and assumed that Japanese voraciously eating McDonalds and proudly wearing blue jeans were somehow closer to understanding democracy, liberty, and the role of Protestant individuals in society solely in that act of consumption. The proponents of Japanese pop-cult soft power make the same mistake in their misinterpretation of superficial appreciation as potential for deep impact. Change and influence are difficult with popular culture - especially when the real "meat" of the culture often resides in the "hard" structure (of economics, politics, education, ritual etc.) at its cradle.

Take the iPod, which in the United States brought significant changes in music distribution, listening culture, and social interaction. When we talk about the "iPod revolution," we are not really talking about what the iPod itself did, but the direction that the entire culture has been moving around the device. The iPod is just the symbol, or at best, the catalyst for these changes. Apple's device has sold quite remarkably in Japan as well, but you are not going to see anyone in Japan speak to its massive social import in the same way, because it was a superficial introduction to the market. The Internet just has not transformed Japanese society, media culture, and consumer behavior as strongly as it has in the United States, and one product alone - despite its popularity - can only make limited change on a foreign society.

For all my naysaying about the GNC, I do strongly believe there is one area in which Japanese pop culture has made a big impact: the increase in foreigners living in Japan or studying Japanese because they are interested in the culture, rather than looking for personal economic gains in Colonialist relapse. Pop cult is not the largest driver of immigrants to Japan (a vast majority are still Asians looking for more economic opportunity), but the nature of Western foreigners living and visiting Japan has drastically changed over the last decade. More non-natives speak fluent Japanese than ever before, because there now exists an inherent desire for many to go deeper into the culture instead of just expecting the Japanese to adhere to our colonialist standards.

So, Japan has succeeded in bringing a significant number of Westerners to Japan in wide-eyed admiration of the local culture, most of whom now speak Japanese and could play a large key in explaining the nation to the rest of the world. They could also help increase the quality of production in Japan by bringing companies closer to global standards. The next question is then, what is Japan currently doing with these people? Anyone looking at the job market here knows full well that there is still very little established infrastructure for "us." Teaching English remains the dominant position for the Japan-curious immigrant, and almost all of the other major jobs involve bringing foreign skills/services to Japan - essentially importing needed tech skills rather than grooming cultural ambassadors. If Gross National Cool has created this positive effect of attracting bright young people to Japan, shouldn't the goal of soft power be the effective usage of this new group? Or is the point just to get kids in local malls to buy Sanrio gumballs and fake Bape?

Let's keep this intro short. We gave six profoundly-good authors a profoundly-devious challenge: could they write a novel only using a single letter? Behold the 21st century masterpieces produced in response.

From Linda Feldman:

A.

From Yukichi Murakami:

I.

From Roman le Havre:

I.

From Olaf Johnson:

Å.

From Olaf Johnson, Jr.:

å.

From renown sci-fi writer Jerry Libins:

Ø

Runners-Up:

From Lisa Lisa:

A.

From our editorial assitant Mr. Youllog:

I.

I have recently learned that on December 13, 2006 Oricon - Japan's analog to Billboard in the United States and top music industry ranking chart provider - filed a civil suit against freelance writer and music critic Ugaya Hiro in Tokyo District Court for damaging the ranking chart's "honor and credibility" through a quote used in a April 2006 issue of Cyzo (Saizou) magazine. Oricon is demanding 50,000,000 JPY ($416,666) in compensation from Ugaya.

The article in question - 「ジャンーズは超VIP待遇？事務所とオリコンの蜜月関係」(Johnny's gets super VIP treatment? The honeymoon connection between Oricon and the management companies) - appeared in the same issue in which my article on jimusho/TV collusion appeared.

For reference, this is the quote:

In Japan, Oricon was the only hit chart to exist for a long time, so their statistical accuracy has been excessively valued. First of all, Oricon puts reservation copies in its count. There is a high probability that there are dummy reservations in there - that somebody reserved a copy and then later canceled the reservation. If the words "Oricon Debut #1" get used, you can later use that as promotion. I have also heard from multiple record company employees that "you can manipulate the Oricon numbers to a certain degree." Oricon is a mysterious organization to start with. They assert that they use "Oricon's unique statistical methodology" but almost never clarify those methods. In a normal statistical survey, you detail the methods publicly, so it's natural that you emphasize that there is no room to insert doubts about the [survey's] credibility. If you don't do that, it's like as I am saying, the statistical reliability is low.

Oricon is not suing Cyzo nor its publisher Infobahn, only the freelance writer quoted in the piece.

Ugaya is claiming that this lawsuit is an intentional intimidation for the following reasons:

1) Even if he wins, he will owe around 7 million JPY in legal fees. This is enough to financially ruin a freelance writer.

2) This is the first case of this kind where the company did not sue the writer or the publisher of the piece. Ugaya had no role in creating or writing the article. He was merely interviewed by the Cyzo editors, and his statement was summarized into the quote.

3) Oricon has not responded to the allegations in print, despite the fact that Oricon publishes more than five magazines. They also have yet to demand correction or retraction of the article.

4) The President of Oricon - Koike Suguru - has publicly announced that he would like for Ugaya to "shut up" and would drop the case if Ugaya publicly apologizes and admits his mistakes.

5) The actual contents of Ugaya's quote are an "open secret" within the music industry.

Ugaya's website can be found here http://ugaya.com/. He is the author of several books on Japanese music, including the very informative 『Jポップは何か』(What is J-Pop?). He is asking supporters to write to Oricon here (Step Roppongi-nishi, 6-8-10 Roppongi, Minato-Ku, Tokyo 106-0032, Phone:81-3 (3405) 5252, Fax 81-3 (3405) 8189.

One of the enduring mysteries of Japan is the origin of the language. Besides the clearly-related Ryukyuan languages (not dialects) spoken in Okinawa and the other islands stretching from south of Kyushu to Taiwan, no other contemporary language resembles Japanese enough to easily claim a genetic relationship or common origin. Some familiar with both Japanese and Korean may balk at this, since the contemporary forms of the two languages share much vocabulary and a similar grammar, but the lexical resemblance is due to an enormous number of Chinese loan words, and the grammatically similarities are typological attributes, which alone cannot be used to prove a common origin. When you compare Old Japanese and Old Korean, there is almost nothing in common.

Many have been eager to call the quest off and cast Japanese as a language isolate - a classification that syncs well with larger ideas of the "uniqueness" of the people and nation.¹ The Japanese, however, must have come from somewhere on the Asian continent, seeing that scientists and archaeologists now agree that the "Japanese" culture is more related to the Yayoi race who came to Japan in 400 B.C. rather than the Jomon culture existent in Japan from 10,000 B.C. (The aboriginal Ainu, on the other hand, are probably related to the Jomon - at least its northern expansion.)

Over the last century, linguists have set out expeditions in many areas of our rich global linguistic diversity to find Japan a a proper brother or cousin. The most accepted theory of recent years points towards a connection to Korean and the inclusion of both languages in the Altaic family of languages: Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic (Manchu). For a while, Japanese theoreticians preferred the "Southern Theory" which posits Japan as a Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language (due to some simple sound similarity and a love of word-duplication), but this has fallen out of favor due to an almost complete lack of hard evidence. Some believe in a "mixed language" between the Altaic and Austronesian strains, but very few types of these languages are accounted for on the globe. And out on the extremes of possibility, the venerable Ono Susumu of Tokyo University started seriously pursuing a connection between Japanese and the Dravidian languages in India. Right.

Although a general lack of hard evidence makes all speculation equally suspect, the current theories have enormous problems or place the genetic relationship between the two languages so far back as not to really matter much. For example, scholar Hattori Shiro puts the Japanese-Korean split back at least 4,700 years. The Altaic theory sounds plausible in principle, but there is very little connecting Japanese to Korean, let alone Korean to Tungusic or Turkish to Mongolian. Besides the much-vaunted "vowel harmony" and "agglutinative grammar," there are only a few known lexical similarities, and these may be from borrowing rather than genetic divergence.

Indiana University-Bloomington linguistics professor Christopher Beckwith's relatively new tome Koguryo: The Language of Japan's Continental Relatives offers a fascinating and plausible solution to the enduring origin puzzle. From around 100 B.C. to the 7th century A.D., modern day Korea was divided into three kingdoms: Koguryo, Shilla, and Paekche. The three states were eventually unified under Shilla in 668, and the modern Korean language originates from the language spoken in Shilla. Koguryo and Paekche, however, had different languages which are posited to be related to each other. Scholars thus make two groupings of Korean peninsula languages: the Han² languages - spoken in Shilla and among the subjugated class in Paekche - and the Puyo-Koguryoic languages of Koguryo, Puyo (another Northern Korea state), and Paekche's ruling class. The latter family is now totally extinct and probably made a minor impact on modern Korean. The lack of written records and remaining vocabulary items from these languages make it difficult to learn much about the nature of the "Koguryoic" family.

There are, however, two sets of Chinese records that list words from the Koguryo language. Beckwith identifies thirteen words ("Archaic Koguryo") contained in a 3rd century Chinese record about the language of the Koguryo people. The second record is the Samsuk Sagi, the "Three Kingdoms of Korea" work that includes a record of a king in 755 changing all the place names in Korea into Chinese. The older toponyms in the Koguryoic areas do not resemble modern day Korean, and despite some controversy of whether the names were given by the Koguryo people or by other peoples populating the area before their arrival, Beckwith shows that a match between these and the Archaic Koguryo lexical items strongly suggest that the toponyms are from the "Old Koguryo" language. For many of these Koguryo place names, the record shows a Chinese transcription of the word's pronunciation as well as a meaning for the word. Beckwith identifies around 130 distinct Old Koguryo words from this document.

Scholars have known about these Koguryo lexical items for almost a century now, but the main problem has been reconstructing the proper Chinese pronunciation of the era in which the words were transcribed. There have been many improvements upon this knowledge in recent years, and Beckwith employs this new understanding of old Chinese to reconstructing many of these Koguryo words with more accuracy than before.

For examples of the close relation of some Koguryo words and Old Japanese, download this 2-page PDF. Almost all scholars agree that the language contained in this "Koguryo" set looks much like Old Japanese. Roy Andrew Miller - who is famously convinced that Japanese is an Altaic language - believed these words to be Proto-Japanese from Wa people who were living on the peninsula. There, however, is no evidence of a Proto-Japanese/Wa conquest in Korea that could have caused a change in place names. An important side note, which Beckwith emphasizes in the paper, Korean words look absolutely nothing like the Koguryo vocabulary, and the weakness of this connection puts the Japanese-Korean relation theory in doubt.

If the Japanese (Wa/Yayoi) and Koguryo/Paekche peoples are truly related, how in the world did they get all the way through the Korean peninsula and down to Japan which there is no record of happening? They didn't. Based on the work of Gisaburo N. Kiyose, Beckwith proposes a somewhat radical immigration narrative for the Wa. He puts the original Koguryoic homeland in Liao-Hsi (present day Liaoning) on the coast of Northeast China. Once the Chinese put pressure on this racial group, the more nomadic and warlike Puyo-Koguryo peoples (who had already split from the Wa at this point) made their way up to Korea and Manchuria. The Wa - who were mostly fishermen and farmers - left by boat to Korea, Kyushu, and the Ryukyuan islands at the same time. Archaeologists have artifacts that show a connection between the Yayoi culture and the culture of that period on the peninsula, and Beckwith suggests that this does not necessarily mean a voyage from settlements in Korea to Japan but a simultaneous settlement of both areas. He also re-emphasizes that no traces of this farming culture can be found in Manchuria or North Korea - which would be critical to proving Japanese came from Northeast Asia as the Altaic family theory would suggest.

Is there evidence for the proto-Japanese presence in China? First of all, Beckwith identifies a set of "native" Japanese words clearly derived from Chinese - with ume (plum) and uma (horse) being the most obvious. (Plums and horses are not even native to the Japanese archipelago.) Furthermore, the Mongolic Hsien-pei captured "people from Wa" in 178 A.D. near the present day Lao-ha River in China, meaning the Proto-Japanese still lived in China during the Yayoi period. In the original accepted theory that continental Koreans came to Japan to spread Yayoi culture, they came by boat. Why could the Wa have not originally come to Korea, Japan, and the Ryukyu islands by boat from somewhere other than the Korean peninsula?

Surely trained linguists and archaeologists will be able to find holes in Beckwith's theory that I do not see (here's one criticism), but the closer resemblance of Japanese to Koguryo than Shilla-based Korean puts a serious dent into the basic idea that the Japanese and Korean peoples are "related." For example, in Jared Diamond's essay on the roots of the Japanese people, he comes to the conclusion that:

As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

Beckwith's theory pretty much puts the Japanese and Koreans as distant relatives - cousins at best and definitely not the "brothers" as Diamond would like them to be. Even if Koguryo and Paekche peoples were subsumed into the "Korean people," they did not add much to the linguistic tradition. Beckwith talks about the fact that Koguryo may have been going extinct even before the fall of the kingdom since so many of the inhabitants spoke a Han Korean language. Once T'ang China took over Koguryo, they exiled many of the Koguryo people to the middle of China to die off there.³ At best, the modern day Koreans have a minority strain of Koguryo in their DNA and language. The means that the Japanese people's cousins - Koguryo and Paekche peoples - happened to be the uncle in a big Korean family mostly made up of Han peoples. The Wa, therefore, have no blood relations to the Shilla side of the family and were never themselves "continental Koreans." Before and after the fall of Paekche in 660, many Paekche elites fled to Japan. In fact, one-third of the nobility in Nara (in the Nara period) was "foreign" - which I assume to mean Paekche Koreans. Although this complicates the "racial purity" of the Japanese today, this still does not make the Japanese people directly related to the majority ancestor of Koreans.

Beckwith's theory may not be the definitive account, but it gets closer to placing the Japanese people's origin in the correct zone of the East Asian continent and helps break the age-old myth of the "isolated language." The theory, however, creates greater historical questions regarding the link between the Japanese and Korean people. The Japanese are only "Korean" in a broad sense (related to peoples of the Korean kingdoms), but almost totally unrelated the primary ancestors of the modern Korean people. Since the "brother" argument may now fail in our attempts to pressure the two countries to take up better relations, I guess we should just ask them to get along for the 1,000 other legitimate reasons.

Turns out the whole Natto Diet introduced on Hakkutsu! Aru Aru Daijiten 2 (発掘！あるある大辞典）that sparked a national selling panic on natto (fermented soybeans) was based on fabricated data. Oops.

There's been an ongoing debate upon this blog about whether news/informational television programs have an ethical standard to report fact rather than fiction. And the pro-fiction faction often states that the audience is smart enough to make a decision about the veracity of the information on their own.

Well, here was the test; would the audience break the entertaining natto puzzle, that this diet provided nominally for their own health and well-being, was a complete fraud? Judging by the run on natto all across the country, looks like viewers believed the groundless claims emitting from their most trusted television box. The halo of authority tends to make things sound pretty solid.

It is still unclear as I write this why the truth has come out in this certain case, but it's hard to see this data fabrication as an "exception to the rule": this is the rule that got caught.

Like a majority of these programs on Japanese television, the content is determined less by producers objectively scouring developments in the health world and more about pleasing commercial and industrial sponsors. One week the soymilk lobby gets a "soymilk!" segment, and the next week the radish crowd gets a "radish!" segment. Parsley? That's scheduled to become very good for you around late 2008. You can keep calling me crazy, but perhaps commercial interests should not determine the content of health information. (Same goes for America - start calling corn syrup a drug, people. Sorry, Iowa.)

"There is a case to be made that the kogal image epitomized Japan's hazily defined crisis of the 1990s at least as well as did layoffs by top Japanese firms," writes Prof. David Leheny in his book Think Local, Fear Global: sex, violence, and anxiety in contemporary japan, and although the kogyaru/kogal appeared too late and peaked too early to really sum up the entirety of the Lost Decade, I would personally rather visualize the era through wild youth female subculture than gray old men losing jobs in corporate restructuring.

Hell, everyone loves rebellious kids, and the kogals - with their tanned skin, scandalous skirt length, "loose" socks, mysterious argot, and alleged promiscuity - were perhaps the world's most fascinating youth tribe in the 1990s. For foreigners looking at Japan from abroad, the kogal appeared to be empowered young women forming a revolutionary army against the patriarchal mores of traditional society. Some gawkers came for the the fashion innovation and and some were mystified by the large numbers, but the kogals' widespread popularity/infamy came mostly from the unbridled teenage sexuality at the heart of the movement. Maybe this is slightly unfair, but Punk:Music::Kogal:Sex. For many Japanese men, the kogal movement legitimized and updated a latent pedophilia. When tales of enjo kosai (compensated dating) appeared in the media, it created a narrative where young women were willing participants in the lolita fantasy as long as prices were high enough.

At this point, so much myth and innuendo surrounds the kogal phenomenon that it is worth going back and looking at their point of origin. According to egg magazine founder Yonehara Yasumasa, the first kogal were delinquent private school students (Aoyama Gakuin and Seikei listed as two main sources by Wikipedia) with rich delinquent boyfriends who cruised in the roving gangs of Shibuya called chiimaa (teamer). Their particular clothing style and gruff speech were intended to scare off the lecherous stares of old men. What is important to remember at this stage is that the kogal were relatively rich and relatively attractive, and they were called "ko-gal (maybe from 子ギャル)" because they were imitating their older "gal" superiors at a precocious age. Their collective reason for rebellion was nothing particularly novel: they were your stereotypically bored (sub)urban rich kids who were ready to be adults but were stuck within the concrete confines of secondary education. So they acted out by having older boyfriends and sexualizing their uniforms.¹ The darker skin may also have been a product of a psychological impulse to appear more sophisticated rather than the misconception that they had any association with or interest in African-American culture. The short skirt is also telling, because the previous style of rebellion had been the yankii practice of lengthening the uniform's skirt - something much harder to pull off and without immediate sexual message. The kogals wanted to rebel, but they also wanted to show a little skin like their elder peers.

Mainstream kogals

By 1997, however, the commercial establishment began to catch up with the kogal movement and spread its gospel of fashion liberation out to the entire nation. Starting around 1995, chapatsu - brown hair - went from an act of juvenile delinquency to one of a means of mainstream style. Magazines then created the guidelines for openly constructing the "kogal fashion," and middle-class girls rushed in to participate. Soon to follow came a less glamorous bunch of young women from the countryside who wanted in on the delinquency angle.

The male-dominated shukanshi did their part to twist the aggressive anti-lolita of the original kogal look into a masochistic neo-lolita fallacy. The "oyaji pranking" of "enjo kosai" - where girls would charge men 10,000 yen for a one minute date - became transformed into something more titillating: a slightly less-stigmatized form of child prostitution. The media attention not only sent middle-aged men out on the prowl to find these girls, but also gave many girls from the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder a convenient way to afford the consumer component of the gal lifestyle. Those who couldn't cough up the cash just used magic marker for their eyebrows instead of makeup.

Ganguro kogal

Once the look peaked as a mass trend in 1999, the movement became more and more marked by its late-adopters. The extremes of the style - the ganguro and yamamba - took the slightly provocative "delinquent consumer subculture" (a mix between delinquent subcultures and consumer lifestyles) over the edge to aggressive confrontation. When egg became a consumer lifestyle mag for these delinquent girls, the clear difference in "morality" became reflected on the pages: issues featured tales of outrageous and casual sexual play and guides to "how to have sex in car" that would never fit in an issue of an-an that still asks girls "which celebrity would you like to be bedded by" instead of "who would you like to bed?." What had been a slightly new style and beauty aesthetic turned into Frankenstein costumes. This extreme character of the kogal movement post-'99 immediately displaced mainstream society's original feelings of curiosity and lust with something new: massive antagonism.

In her essay, "Black Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls" in Bad Girls (Ed. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, 2005), Sharon Kinsella identifies and explores this widespread hostility against the late-stage ganguro kogal. Her essay lists quote after quote from the weekly male magazines disapproving of the youth look. Kinsella even finds female writer Nakano Midori (from "Yamamba," Japan Echo 27, vol 1, Feb 2000) admitting, "In all honesty, I have seen very few girls sporting the style that brings me even close to thinking, 'Without that makeup, she must be a beauty, what a waste.'" In sum, Kinsella writes that the girls are "an affront to the tastes of male readers." Indeed.

Her final analysis, however, takes a seriously wrong turn when she begins to blame the roots of the antagonism in profound racial prejudice. She objurgates, and boy does she objurgate:

Furthermore, commentary about the race, tribe, and skin color of girls, was sometimes entwined with a derogatory and pseudo-Darwinian commentary about dark-skinned girls, which implied that they were a kind of species or animal. Classified as dark-skinned primitives and animals, girls daring to wear black face and witch outfits sometimes became subject to a racist assault on their humanity.

Kinsella provides a couple of neat examples of this "racial assault" - Spa calling the kogal's lack of morals a "Latinization" of Japanese culture, for example. But her analysis fails to recognize all the other reasons to dislike the late-stage kogal that have nothing to do with latent racism.

First, the charge that these girls were "dumb, dirty, and ugly" seems to match certain pre-existing conceptualizations of the girls' placement within the standard high-school hierarchy. The girls who became the main recruiting base for the extreme kogal were not rich delinquents who dressed in designer bags, snuck out to clubs, and had college boyfriends, but those girls who would be viewed as losers in the prism of their environment - neither smart enough to hold college aspirations nor cute enough to attract boyfriends or popular pals. The ganguro look offered them an escape from the hierarchy, in which they had already realized they were destined to fail, by letting them hide their true identities in costume and bond with girls in similar positions and values from all around the country. Commenting on the late-stage kogal costume, Kinsella guesses that "the main effect... is to frighten" and brings up Dick Hebdige's theory of subculture as "intelligent style": girls have invented their own uniforms in order to mark themselves in opposition to the values of mainstream society. But she is angered that, "society just merrily misinterprets [the look] as a form of animal coloring or tribal decoration."

If the look is Hebdigian in form, however, the goal is precisely anti-social, and the kogals ended up winning the desired effect - total enmity from the mainstream.² Why Kinsella thinks society should respect the "intelligence" of the uniform, however, is unclear. More importantly, the early, mass-friendly kogal had provided older men a three-dimensional sexualized spectacle upon the streets of the city and tantalizing myths of easily acquiring their flesh for a small lump sum (where the girls themselves were understood to graciously remove moral boundaries and replaced them with market prices). The ganguro girls took the rebellious-yet-sexy movement of the original kogal and robbed it of its mass aesthetic pleasure. Kogals now looked scary, and to a certain degree, were less likely to be the "normal" daughters from private schools and more likely to be those "unwanted" in the standardized high school hierarchy. The kogals stole back the style from the fantasies of fathers and made it once more about themselves. To see where the conflict lay, Kinsella quotes a men's magazine headline complaining about the infiltration of the ganguro look into their precious porn videos - ugh!

Knowing the intentional struggle manufactured by the fashion look, why would men's magazines be supportive of the ganguro kogal? Adding in the obvious socioeconomic and regional bias - the new girls were neither urban nor urbane - these girls had absolutely nothing going for them outside of their subcultural participation. Kinsella oddly projects the responsibilities of academic anthropologists upon the Japanese media - organizations that clearly see themselves as arbiters of "conventional" values rather than sympathetic social analysts. While men may have felt robbed of convenient sexual fantasy, women on the other hand remained unimpressed with the girls they always saw beneath them in the classroom. Even now, I ask a Japanese female about the types who became late-stage kogals, and she answers, "The dumbest (一番バカ) and ugliest (一番ブス) girls in the class." The word "dirty" (汚い) also comes up. Kinsella finds the same sentiment - "The allegation that witches and black faces were ugly and stupid, circulated widely and formed a base stereotype" - but then crams it into her shaky narrative - "underlying more intricate considerations of their hygiene and racial origins." Do we dislike them because their skin color goes against traditional ideas of Japanese beauty and colonialist concerns? Or is it that many have misanthropic feelings that they are merely ugly, dirty, and dumb girls in outdated and unflattering makeup?

The ganguro today still exist, of course, although relatively marginal and have not been "cool" for a decade now (at least, as dictated by the domestic fashion authorities.) They have boiled down to their most hardcore delinquent/leftover element. The dark-skinned and often-tacky "gal" style still lives on in mainstream magazines like JJ, although the code word is now "o-nee-kei (Big Sister)." I am sure they even hate the ganguro girls.

Before the internet could assume its fundamental duties of myth-busting and old-wives-tale-wrastlin', there was a rumor going around that Nintendo meant to call the gorilla from landmark game Donkey Kong "Monkey Kong," but the "M" got changed into a "D" along the way. I see the logic: DK is a "monkey" and not a "donkey" (but he is an ass, regardless. Try the veal.) Or perhaps, game creator and green-mushroom=1UP-innovator Miyamoto Shigeru found the word "donkey" in a (completely worthless) dictionary as a synonym for "dumb."

Snopes debunks the stuffing out of both theories and explains that Miyamoto picked "Kong" from "King Kong" (but not King Kong, legally speaking) and "Donkey" to "convey a sense of stubbornness." I also seem to remember quotes from Nintendo that they wanted to make the character a ridiculous and laughable version of King Kong.

So, what word acts as an antonym to the grace and divine providence represented by a king? A donkey makes sense looking back onto the problem, but why pick a donkey out of all the second-class creatures that could possibly denote the opposite of a king?

In Japan, almost everyone is familiar with the old story - "The King's Got Donkey Ears" (王様の耳はロバの耳）- which comes from an unnecessary add-on to the King Midas "everything I touch turns to gold" myth. A god gives King Midas donkey ears to visually mark the king's idiocy, only his hairdresser knows, Midas tells him not to tell anybody, the hairdresser digs a hole and whispers his secret into the ground, some people unfortunately hear the information from the reeds in this location, the rumor spreads, and Midas wants to kill his hairdresser in revenge but decides against it, because he's a reformed monarch now. Moral of the story: yes, hairdressers are gossip-hounds, but reeds are much, much worse about spreading rumors. I had never heard of this story before coming to Japan (and Japanese sites seem to inaccurately ascribe it to Aesop), but I often see the title referenced and have yet to meet a Japanese person unfamiliar with the fable. (937,000 Google hits.)

The name of this myth perfectly sets up the "King - Donkey" binary. The King gets goofy looking donkey ears until he starts acting with a little more class. So if you are going to make an opposite of King Kong, what do you name the guy? Donkey Kong. (And what do you name his son? Donkey Kong Jr. And what does he teach? Donkey Kong Jr. Math. And who plays that game? Absolutely no one.)

Now I don't think Miyamoto wanted to specifically reference the fable in his creation of the ape character's name, but I can't help thinking that the widespread familiarity with that story made the donkey an obvious animal of choice when looking for a polar opposite of "king." But then again, this is a guy who thinks you should get more fireworks if you end your level run with 1, 3, or 6 seconds on the clock. There's no fable-based precedent for that creative decision.

This "slightly bonkers" blog gets a fair amount of net traffic, but not because of my illuminating insight on Japan nor my biting wit. As far as my stats suggest, everyone mostly drops in to gawk at the pictures of elementary school bikini idol and crossover-child-semi-porn celebrity Saaya Irie. Japanese entrepreneurs may have been the first ones to suspect men like to look at pictures of near-naked fifth-graders, but apparently the consumer demand is global. Unfortunately for Saaya, her "musical group" Sweet Kiss disbanded before they could ever put out any music. My guess is that everyone is following her every move to get hints on the nature of her future musical output - the prodigious F-cup breasts are just a side distraction.

I am not personally interested in this "low teen idol" boom sweeping Japan, but like many, I can't ignore the societal implications. For a while, Cyzo and their contributor Shinsan Nameko had a story on the market almost every month. In one of the interviews with a participant and her mother, the wannabe idol talked about how doing photos where you "accidentally can see panties" or featuring the "hand-bra" were not really for 12 year olds - but okay when you are 15. Off camera to her friends: Mom won't let me do anything! Dad!!!!! Is it okay if I do 手ブラ shots?!

The other day, I innocently followed a link to a story about accusations of racist manga from the 2-ch "Itai" News blog and found myself looking at a banner ad for http://www.imouto.tv/ - your one-stop source for "only elementary school and middle school girls" posing in swimsuits and spreading their legs in gym shorts. For those unfamiliar with Japanese, "imouto" (妹) means "little sister." The site brags that all of its models are under 15 (U-15限定).

The pricing structure for access works exactly like members-only hardcore pornography sites, and the payment system suggests the target market is an older clientele. (I doubt kids are asking their parents for the funds to join up.) The poses, costumes, and general atmosphere are almost identical to normal Japanese pornography - except for the two small pieces of bikini cloth that the pesky legal system requires. (Puritans!) For those into looking behind the curtain, the domain is registered to an "Eichi" based at the same address of Miracle Studio in Ebisu.

Now, I don't want to suggest that this site is mainstream. My guess is that it generally attracts those with a sociopathic attraction to prepubescent girls, and judging by the ad placement on an Akihabara otaku-focused site, serious trouble dealing with women in what we call the "legal zone" (O-18 in industry-speak) who make up the vast majority of females in Japan. While Saaya Irie's Weekly Playboy-produced photo book tried to convince the mass T-n-A audience of the virtues of the newly-emerging neo-pedophilia market, this "not-porn" porn site at imouto.tv is the newly-emerging neo-pedophilia market.

My biggest question about imouto.tv is, where are these girls coming from? Who in the world thinks this is their daughter's "big break" to bigger things? Now I can see a parallel with the ultra-creepy low-teen beauty pageants breaking out like a rash upon the North American heartland, but at least in that case, girls are competing for some kind of prize. They are not posing in swimsuits on a "members-only" site targeted towards socially-dysfunctional men. I don't think we are really missing any context here - anyone Japanese or otherwise can guess what imouto.tv is about within five seconds of gander time. Wouldn't inclusion on this site now would lead to a relatively big scandal for an actress/singer in the future?

The only advantage of peddling young flesh now - besides the big payout to the enterprising parents - is if the girl was determined to be a gravure idol in the future. This way, her fans could escalate with her into a more profound high-school career. But honestly speaking, wouldn't these guys stop being interested when things hit 16? There is nothing scarier than girls who know trigonometry. To the true U-15 fan, college girls may as well be mountain hag zombies who eat your brains. (Not to mention the overpowering 加齢臭!)

The thing no one ever says about gravure though is that it's no one's first choice. The girls are all aspiring actresses and musicians who are not talented enough or connected enough to get cast in anything, so their production company pushes them to pose in bikinis and get filmed walking gleefully in slo-mo. Some girls have crossed over these days - MEGUMI and the anomalous, yet ubiquitous Hoshino Aki (ancient at 29) - but most girls stay in gravure or worse. (Maybe sometime we can talk about the high-class brothels set up across Tokyo staffed by the unpopular girls in major talent agencies so they can pay for their singing and dancing lessons.) The U-15 cadets are also probably aiming for world-domination in the guise of singers and actresses, but somebody (with an eye on revenues) has decided this questionable proto-gravure is the way to go for an early start. Now their struggle towards celebrity is yours to enjoy for 3000 yen a month.

1. An Update on the Natto Diet scandal

As written in this Japanese article, the revelations that producers of the television show Hakkutsu! Aru Aru Daijiten 2 completely fabricated scientific-sounding results in order to prove the veracity of a fantastical and fictional diet based on fermented soybeans have brought a large number of people out of the woodwork to discuss past improprieties in creation of sequences for the program. A woman who participated in a "eating redbeans makes you really good at the abacus" segment was nonplussed that she was not allowed to see her test results, which never even made it on television to back up the conclusion anyway. Turns out the lemon makes you skinny, lettuce makes you sleepy, and wasabi makes you younger segments all were created to provide entertaining television rather than accurate health information.

Now, I get personally offended when the adventures and exploits of idols in variety shows are clearly scripted and not "reality"-based (I used to be a big fan of 学校へ行こう！」 and felt cheated when I realized everything on there was not "spontaneous"), but the Japanese people generally are willing to give TV a pass when the lies are contained within ridiculous entertainment programs. Hakkutsu! Aru Aru Daijiten 2, on the other hand, was much respected, and the total devastation of credibility arising from these incidents has spread to doubts about all health-related programming. Now everything is suspect. Whether this will lead to greater consumer skepticism over the long run is unclear, but I don't see producers having any reason to not go back to fabricating results after the scandal blows off unless there is some kind of oversight - whether political (FDA-type body) or non-political (Consumer Reports-like media). If all non-news shows have no qualms about bending reality to fit the story line, why should the health programs feel any different about their work?

I feel most sorry for the kids who had refused to study for their abacus exams due to the assurance of a red bean binge beforehand properly propelling them towards safe passage.

2. Question 1

Would you enjoy watching Carrot Top, Leah Remini, Lee Majors, and Jaleel White (in the "Urkel" character even today in 2006) all competing in party games for an hour? If you said, yes, you would love the vast majority of Japanese TV. (Plus the guest stars: Today on "Ii Tomo"... Mark McGrath!?! Great to have you back!)

3. Question 2

Would you buy a car if the television commercial used the same Beta camera quality as normal Japanese TV shows?