I see this primarily as a conspiracy to solve Japan's under-consumption problem through the promotion of cabinets full of 5 to 8 thousand yen figurines. Ladies have been doing their part to prop up the economy with expensive handbags, but where the fellas be at? Well, if we can convince them that Chun Li is willing to sleep with them, they'll be at the otaku shop buying useless collectible crap.

There is an OL at my work which seems fairly "otajo" to me. She has hundreds of Star Wars figurines set up on her desk and surrounding book cases etc.

http://www.darkside.ru/band/1781/cover/3999.jpg

I just watched the video of that clip today. It really seems more like it was targeted at bringing women and their fecundity to the untouchable masses that haunt the arcades.
Accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, but I think the mainstreaming of otaku culture is not about exposing the masses to an interesting subculture, so much as dragging them back to regular consumptive patterns.

shit, I meant "dragging the otaku back to regular consumptive patterns".

that preview button looks nice, I might try using it sometime.

Momus once again showing us that "truth" is a dirty word for him. Evil, ethnocentric, imperialist, logocentric stuff, this truth thing. Hurray for textural truthiness, so much more fun!

Truth is obviously Marxy's big theme, truth and lies, with the emphasis on lies. And yes, the concept of truth does worry me. It implies the possibility of a "god's eye view", the one definitive correct answer. Both science and art doubt the possibility of such an answer, which is why only religious organizations title their magazines things like "The Plain Truth".

Applied to culture, this truth idea leads to articles entitled things like "your faked TV segment of the day", in which a society is reduced to a parade of deceptions. These articles accumulate like charges in a lawsuit. The jury is led towards a guilty verdict.

But that verdict, and that imaginary courtcase, is actually a much better model of how any society works: by theatre, rhetoric, persuasion, power, convention, consensus. We agree social values amongst ourselves, we do not discover them like pre-existing, universal laws or truths. This is why Leonard Cohen's title "Let Us Compare Mythologies" is intelligent and Sham 69's title "Tell Us The Truth!" is stupid.

(der, it's not Truth it's Thrut !)

"the one definitive correct answer. Both science and art doubt the possibility of such an answer,"

No. Where do you get this idea from? Or at least, this needs very strong qualifications. Science does give you a very well defined method for preferring one explanation over the other. Whether this amounts to saying that we get asymptotically closer to `the one definite correct answer' or not is irrelevant here. The point is that at any one time there is a good method for deciding between two competing claims.

Art may not know "the one definite correct answer", and cultural theory neither perhaps, but that's because it asks different questions. Leave science out of this.

theatre, rhetoric, persuasion, power, convention, consensus

I know that the following gets very close to a violation of Godwin's law (v2.0), but the first thing that comes into my mind when reading this is Colin Powel's performance in the security council: theatre, rhetoric, persuasion, power. (No consensus, but power rarely needs consensus.)

Giving up the concept of truth robs you of being able to say "sorry, mate, your claims all were untrue. There were no WMD."

Thrut, however, is indeed an evil concept. Boo for thrut!

Ha. Hit return too early, was still editing:

Anyway, there's a big difference between saying something is untrue (does not correspond to the facts) and saying someone lied (roughly: uttered something she knew to be untrue). Only the latter brings in intentional states, conventions, etc.

"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense

Of particular relevance here is Nietzsche's phrase "to a people", since we are talking, on this blog, largely of one people criticizing another people's illusions.

dear commentors.. my bullshit meter just fucking blew up. i mean, it totally exploded all over the place. the piece with the letters "hit" on it, is ironicly embedded now in my nice apple display.

and here, i had been thinking today, that possibly prince was the true, and only god of wank. luckly you all were able to get me back to my sense's... and prove me wrong. my hat's (yes multiple) off to you all.

THUS SPAKE TREVORTHUSTRA!

are we maybe crossing up "truth" with "factual misrepresentation"?

I don't expect anyone to acknowledge "the one great truth", but making assertions contrary to established and agreed upon fact, especially in order to persuade people is not "theater". It's lying, and manipulating.

I think it's to Marxy's credit that he does conclude that the Stamen show may have been "trying to create a female otaku subculture". In other words, he's quite prepared (it seems) to see a fiction being the legitimate foundation for a fact (ie the Bible may be all lies, but the Christianity it creates has to be accepted as a fact). He's also quite prepared to see that the media do not just represent the world (with greater or lesser degrees of "accuracy"), they continuously create, produce and manage it -- something his great grandfather Karl Marxy put very forcefully: "HIstorians have merely interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it."

Blah blah blah.

I think my title for this was inspired by the headline of the 2-ch news piece, which included またやらせ発覚. The point is, after this natto scandal, everyone in Japan is on the lookout for faked TV news. This was a pretty minor example, but alerts are heightened.

Talk about natto, or talk about truth, but don't waste your time paddling in the shallows in between.

Natto is good for you, right? (We still don't know.)
Truth is good for you, right? (We still don't know. After all this blah blah blah!)

I'd like to see Momus being questioned by the police in the investigation of a murder he didn't commit.

Do you think if the police asked him if he committed the crime, he'd response with "What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms"

My guess is he'd drop the bullshit pretty quickly.

Nietzsche is ahead of you: a crime may indeed "seem firm, canonical, and obligatory" to you, but the definition of crime is subject to all the things Nietzsche lists in that passage. What is called a crime in one culture may well be called a custom in another. However, just because something is arbitrary and contractual, doesn't mean it isn't binding. So, naturally, I would try not to be naive; I'd try not to apply one culture's norms when I was across the border in another culture. That's only common sense, isn't it?

imagine that...people on TV making up shit to sell you other shit...
rest assured it happens the world over...

k. marx said: don't expect the 'truth' from any journalist working as an employee--
they're beholden to the interests of those that pay their salary...why would you expect
anything different.

trusting anything on television is so 20th century.

that said, tortured metacritiques as apologia for such TV nonsense is also pretty pathetic. (fitting, since the fake TV segment shtick itself has for so long been pathetic enough).

...Trevor, you don't like Prince?

"I'd try not to apply one culture's norms when I was across the border in another culture. That's only common sense, isn't it?"

That sounds nice, but.... Really? I see if we apply it to slurping sounds when you eat, or understanding a different sense of humor... but what about mysogyny or paedophilia? genocide?

There must be some "truths" or set of values you develop independantly of your culture? no? say "thats only common sense" where does this common sense come from?

-W

I think it's hard to claim that "yarase" is not a "crime" or a violation of protocol/trust/contract in Japan when everyone is up in arms about it and advertisers are pulling out, and shows are getting taken off the air.

Is natto good for you? Probably. Can you lose weight with it? Maybe not. Did they fake the evidence to claim as such? Yes. That's the problem.

I'm sorry to interrupt fellow commenter's Kulturkampf.

Marxy said:
"My guess is that the program was trying to create a "otajo" (otaku female) subculture, setting the scene with the breakthrough crossover of good-girl lifestyle magazine"

Boys and Girls, I introduce you new magazine from the industry heavy weight Kodansha started from November.
It's called "Beth"!

キャッチフレーズは”キレイ系オタク”なあなたのための新しい雑誌！

It's got manga,game,novella,cosmetics,diet(natto excluded)comes along with everything good 20something who just don't want end up as being a baby bearing machine would love.
Somehow the editorial created fictional character that personalize the magazine.Yes "Beth" is a pretty American college gal living in LA,who loves Manga and interested in everything Japanese!
from the magazine's site.
雑誌「Beth」に載っている情報は、Bethというひとりの女の子が
好きなものばかりを集めています。そんな彼女のプロフィールは

名前　Beth
年齢　21歳
特徴　アメリカ人キレイ系オタク
住所　ロス在住
職業　大学生
趣味　漫画が大好き、日本のことなら何でも興味アリ

(There is also a picture of "Beth"in the website.今ほど”リンク”の仕方がわからないのが悔やまれることはナイ！Go check it out yourselves!)

Nice info, Aceface.

I wonder if this is trying to attract both male and female readers.

Also note that magazines in Japan don't as much reflect pre-existing consumer lifestyles as create them.

Although this looks to me like Manga PLUS lifestyle rather than just lifestyle.

I like the idea though of "the pretty" manga fan. "If it weren't for Beth, I would have thought that only ugly girls read manga." And also, "I like manga, but I don't want to be thought of as ugly because I like manga. But now with Beth...!"

But there exists some small consumer lifestyle these magazines originate from. Like "Men's Knuckle" and "outlaw style" (aka effeminate goth biker cowboy style, which has been likely been around Japan for the last 2 or so fashion seasons). They just don't create a "Use Kitchenware as Jewelry" lifestyle magazine from nothing.

"effeminate goth biker cowboy style"
You hit the nail on the head with that one, John.
Aceface, with this blog, if you want to add a link it would seem you just need to paste the http address in, and it conveniently turns into a link for you.悔やめることはないけど "Knowing is half the battle" which I think is Marxy's point in calling attention to all this.
Here's the link for anyone else who's too lazy to search for it:
http://bethnet.jp/pc/

i am a prince fan. guitar wank is still guitar wank though. he's just extra good at it. what would you can screaming guitar solos?
prince is good shit though. the performace gave me chills. nice to see someone play live music on TV for a change (and be good at it).. but we're getting a bit OT yeah?

Right. Wank on...

The new"Beth"magazine continued:

I was mesmerized with the telling phrase when I saw the magazine's publicity decoration on the show window of the BOOKFIRST in Shibuya."Kirei kei Otaku"That was a killer.

"Also note that magazines in Japan don't as much reflect pre-existing consumer lifestyles as create them."

Well, What do you know."Beth" could be it,Marxy.

two thoughts:

Being chic,grown up,otaku with a career reminds me of the Annos.The DINKS couple of trendy Manga artist Anno Momoko and the Evangelion director Uber-otaku Anno Hideaki.Kinda Otaku Brangelina-like status they enjoy.The BOBOS,DENTSU may call them.
The Annos represent marriage do not necessarily means sacrifice your lifestyle for the family like the parents generation.An idea that strongly backs up low birth-rates in this country.A rather new trend.

And "Beth"character being American Japanophile and all that remind me of the traditional Japanese cultural renaissance formula,
"Letting gaijin guides Japanese to rediscover their own culture,making what is uncool,cool again".this date back to the times of Ernest Fenollosa and Japonism.

The hybrid of the new and old trend and ideas are behind "Beth".I think the editors certainly know what they are doing and the consumers they are trying to exploit.
It is interesting to see whether this "COSMO GIRL goes to Akihabara" style makes new trend in the industry.

"It is interesting to see whether this "COSMO GIRL goes to Akihabara" style makes new trend in the industry."

Well I wonder whether it's not about selling manga to Can Cam girls as much as making girls who would otherwise ABANDON manga in their adult life - because of the bad connotations and associations - think to themselves that they can combine a love of manga with being a socially-proper girl with socially-proper makeup.

"Letting gaijin guides Japanese to rediscover their own culture,making what is uncool,cool again"

At the end of Spinal Tap, when they are huge in Japan, no one in America would think that Spinal Tap then needed a reappraisal. But if Godard rediscovers America... Easy to see how the food chain is created.

Trevor, you need to upgrade to Bullshit Detector 6. I did and its made Momus's golden shovel antics much more bearable.

John, "feminate goth biker cowboy style" made my week. Thank you.

"But if Godard rediscovers America... "

Just remind me of Molly Ringwald in Godard's "king Lear".What ever happened to her now?
She was sort of otaku-hippie sort of character,huge pop icon when I was in the States.
"Pretty In Pink" and all....
I'm gonna drown myself deep into 80's nostalgia now.

aceface you're my hero here. (the reason probably is that you seem to be the only one to hold some actual ground in the stuff discussed - everything else looks to me like abstracts and disconnected systems and hierarchies of interpretation)

-- the traditional Japanese cultural renaissance formula,

there's quite a bit of that happening right now, say this issue of brutus a few weeks ago
http://www.brutusonline.com/brutus/issue/index.jsp?issue=608

-- Also note that magazines in Japan don't as much reflect pre-existing consumer lifestyles as create them.

marxy i wonder why when i basically say the same thing , just less patronising, to yr previous post you strike back with a dose of, well, moronic cynicism , deadly enough to get my demission.

I'm not really someone who posts to this thing regularly, and maybe I'm taking the whole thing too seriously, but...

Isn't the Fuji TV in question here part of the same company which publishes right-wing revisionist textbooks and books that claim that Japanese imperialism was a good thing? Is that something we should endorse based on cultural relativism? Is it a insouciant postmodern attitude? Or does it just show that cynicism and nihilism are useful to conservatives?

Of course relativism can serve conservatives -- Nietzsche was utilized by the Nazis, and relativist arguments have been employed by fundamentalist Christian groups in the US to get Creationism set on an equal footing with Evolution in schools.

The mistake is in saying that because things are relative, they're all as good as each other, and we can therefore have no personal values. Relativism is not nihilism. It's just a refusal to hype one's subjective values (or one's cultural values) up to the level of objective (or trans-cultural) ones.

But if you do want to be objective and transcultural, be aware that the argument you've just advanced against Fuji TV damns The Simpsons too -- brought to us, as it is, by a man with a powerful right wing revisionist agenda all of his own, as you can hear in this excellent BBC documentary:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/radio4/rhnav/choice/mon/t1/-/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/veryspecialrelationship

Dear Momus,

Please try harder. At this rate you have become a chliche of yourself, a pomobot like what might have been on Futurama, a show both brought to you and cancled by your favorite bete noir.

Yours Truely,

Chris_B

I should have been more clear. My point was that Fuji TV is cynical and nihilistic: not that you were being cynical and nihilistic.

And yeah, Fuji TV is a lot like FOX. So what? They're both pretty loathsome companies.

This is not about the unforgivable sin of lying about natto to the Japanese public. It's about the consistent contempt for fact which most powerful conservatives seem to have in common, in Australia, the US, and Japan. That is a political issue, not a cultural one. If it feels truthy, it's the truth. What's more, if FOX news and Kobayashi Noriyoshi have one thing in common, it's that point of view.

Oops, make that Yoshinori.

BRUTUS does that all the time ,alin.
I also bought the copy,trying to read the latest of Otomo"AKIRA" Katsuhiro.Kinda depressing to know he now become the left over of the 80's.
When I was in NY as a kid with my family,My now dead father used to take us to the Rockfeller Center where there is Kinokuniya NewYork locates.
They opened in the spring of '81,just as we arrived.The place was a full of Manga and Japanese anime related magazines and I,as a 12year old felt just like at home in Kichijyouji.
Recalling back, that was the golden age of Manga and Anime and the genesis of otakus.I've always wanted to go back home to be part of the wave.
My biggest discovery at the KKNY was Otomo's 気分はもう戦争"Urge for war,Hard on".Manga about fictional Sino-Soviet war and sort of hyper deconstruction of chinese classic "The journey to the west",Only in the manga the leading characters are trio of a Japanese far right student from Kokushikan ,a Japanese far left student from Yokohama city Univ.and an American mercenary fighting for Afghan mujihadeens who discharged themselves at the wake of Soviet invasion to China.They become volunteer of People's Leberation Army and walk all across Eurasia to the battlefield in SIno-Soviet border.Along with this main synopsis,in between there are episodes related to confused Japanese reaction inserted like Robert Altman movie.As I finish reading that I felt pretty much distressed to go back to Scarsdale where the cultural product of the Reaganite America"The Red Dawn"was showing in the nearby theater.
Japan was cool back in those days.....
Otaku may enjoy their heyday but their craze are not much for me right now.

KYON2,Prince,Molly Ringwald,Otomo Katsuhiro....
Thanks to you all constantly kick me back into the cocoon of 80's nostalgia while I'm doing all my best to come back to the reality....

Someguy:
Fusousya is a part of Fuji Sankei group and they do make revisionist textbook,But they also publish Spa! which has certain liberal taste within the editorial policy.Kobayashi was a liberal for couple of years(in fact he was known as radical liberal manga artist for most of his career).He decided to withdraw his "Gomanism Sengenゴーマニズム宣言”.Because of the fight with the editorial chief at the time,who Kobayashi thinks irrespopsibly liberal.So Yarase in Fuji TV
has little to do with political stance,but Big station outsource researches to outside small production.You may want to read an article on Shyukan Post： テレビ下請けスタッフが大暴露！
「下流の怒りを聞いてくれ」
「過密労働」「搾取」「薄給」「丸投げ」「服従」…
これがやらせを生む局員との「地獄の格差」だ！

『発掘！あるある大事典Ⅱ』（フジテレビ系）の捏造問題は、ある制作会社のあるディレクターが、たまたま起こしたものではない。背景には、捏造してでも仕事をこなさねばならぬ、下請け業者の追いつめられた立場があったのではないか。テレビ界の「格差社会」は、それほどまでに酷い。

Reading this Anyguy understand this could happen to any station.

Aceface, do you like Urasawa's "20th Century Boys" and "Pluto?" So sad that Otomo, true genius of his generation, has been reduced to doing a Cup Noodle product placement vehicle. What's the story there? Surely he's not hurting for cash? Is "Freedom" any good? Thanks, by the way, for answering all my questions on that anthro thread a while back!

http://www.amazon.co.jp/ニッポンのマンガ―AERA-COMIC/dp/4022744030/

Features a peek inside the "Beth" offices on p.130, and an article on declining manga sales on p.71. Shonen Jump in particular has been in a nosedive! Is that why they're doing (what is, in my mind, questionable) cross-promotion with Pureboi?

Brown:
Well I thought about writing on Nitobe(destined to be a long one) but I felt I was already hijacking Marxy's post for much too long in spite of him kindly encouraged me to do so.We'll type about it next time our moderator got piss off with another Nihonjinron book.

Urasawa Naoki:
I enjoy "PLUTO"(have'nt read "20th century boys" yet.)Astro Boy's revival has been tried for several occasions in the past two decades,but never met with a real success.
Japanese word meaning for "adapt" is 換骨堕胎.removing the bone and using the fresh.Kinda creepy sounds but well put for "PLUTO".So Urasawa's venture is real accomplishment.I think.
You do know that Otomo Katsuhiro was said to be the most imitated manga artist of his time and the title had long been that of Tezuka Osamu/When Otomo was working on"AKIRA",he kept telling his assistants to read Tezuka's works when designing composition and form,but on the other hand Tezuka Sensei was extremely jealous of Otomo's pictorial technique and had a strong complex that his works are outdated/Urasawa Naoki was mocked by Otomo worshippers as petty mimic of the early Otomo's works.
Right?
By the irony of fate,Otomo is down and Urasawa is up now.Considering these minor episodes,I think "PLUTO"was not just a challenge for Urasawa but also a revenge to his critics back then.But I have a feeling Urasawa will not going to make any followers like the two maestros.
And for Otomo... FREEDOM?Forget it.His new film?I'm not going to watch it.