neomarxisme

There is a very interesting article in Facta Online about the "Second Digital Divide." Among 20 year-olds in Japan, there is a serious split between those who access the net via personal computers and those who access (a proprietary and limited version of) the net via mobile phones. And as a result, the number of young people using the internet from computers has seriously fallen in the recent years.

This graph shows the breakdown of demographic usage of the internet. Over the last six years, almost all age groups have seen their share of total home PC access usage increase - except for 20 year-olds who have dropped from making up 23.6% to now only 11.9%. This current rate means that they make up an almost identical proportion of the total as 50 year-olds. Now some of this may be demographic (there are less young people), but the drop in usage share here is much stronger and more sudden than the decrease in demographic share.

There is a socioeconomic element behind this change. PCs in Japan are essentially a "white collar" tool, and freeter/blue collar workers use the keitai as their access to the internet. With many in their 20s failing to get into the extremely narrow door to a white collar career, PC usage experience may be dropping in parallel. (We also don't know how many white collar workers in their 20s are doing their net surfing at the office and have no interest at looking at a computer screen once they get home.)

Internet browsing capabilities on Japanese cell phones are getting better all the time, but clearly, there is a difference in technological progression on phones and computers. In terms of speed and screen quality, top-of-the-line mobile phones can finally do what a cheap computer has been able to do for years. The keitai will be stuck with a relatively tiny screen for a long time. The larger the screen gets, the more the phone will fail on the functional level of being a small object inserted into the pocket. Limitations on screen size, typing speed, and connection speed have led to a much more passive interaction with information compared to the consumers using a PC.

The author does not want us to blindly praise the "Mobile Wonderland" of Japan as a high-tech paradise. The rise of keitai has come at the expense of PC culture, rather than acted as an augmentation. The "thumb tribe" (親指族) - who primarily input text through the telephone numerical layout - show serious inexperience with using PCs and with typing on a real keyboard. They are "retrogressing" to a point where they have the pathetic PC skills of their out-of-date elders.

Apparently there have been 5700 recorded cases all across Japan of confused cell-phone users thinking that the number "110" included in the error message "We could not send your mail (110)" is a telephone number. The police - located at 110 on the telephone dial - are not amused. The author argues that PC users may not inherently understand error codes, but would not have believed that such a number was there to be called.

For a long time, technological progression was the story of standalone gadgets. Thanks to YouTube, Google, Flickr, Ebay, Mixi, and iTunes, this is no longer the case. Keitai can let you access the internet, but can only rarely let you experience the march of innovation in real time. The mobile phone acted as a nice patch to the gaping hole of weak internet usage in Japan at the turn of the century, but it will be interesting to see how long the device can really do the job and whether or not it caused more long-term problems than it aimed to solve. Beta may have been the future of video, but it quickly became history once the rest of the world jumped on the VHS bandwagon.

The Japanese government is setting up another task force to tackle the difficult issue of work-life balance. Experts will come together to figure out how working hours can be effectively curbed.

Any Western spectator of Japanese business life will immediately bemoan the absurdly long hours expected of company employees. Work may end at 6:30 at many Japanese firms, but punching the clock at 6:31 is like sticking your chopsticks straight up in the bowl of rice. In the past, there may have been a hierarchial duty to stay longer than your own boss or go out drinking with management, but even as that corporate culture fades into the past, you do not see new employees out the door at a decent hour.

Long hours, however, do not mean high worker productivity. In the past, Japan has fared worse than Italy on this measure, and we can unscientifically assume that the Italians are getting a leisurely riposo in there while the Japanese drones buy a convenience store bento and eat at their desks for 15 minutes.

So cutting working hours in Japan is ironically an attempt to increase productivity: the article states "companies could boost the productivity of their employees because they will try to finish work in a limited time and will work efficiently." Getting everyone home early could also lead to many positive social externalities, including more parental involvement in child-raising and less sleep deprivation in the general population. Objectively speaking, there are few downsides to limiting work hours. Perhaps the firms themselves lose huge amounts of free overtime hours, but this new plan promises to give them higher productivity in return.

Westerners immediately decry the madness if not the moral offense of workers slaving away at their companies until the wee hours of the nights. Liberal enlightenment ideas of the individual having free reign over his own self-definition tend to resent the concept of the "company man" - when individuals are reduced to inputs. Marxists believe that the worker must pursue a self-actualization that puts the fruits of his labor within his own hands and not the capitalist's.

Work-life balance, however, is a completely loaded Western liberal concept because it creates a dichotomy between work and life - as if they are antagonizing forces. The Confucian-Statist philosophical underpinning of modern Japanese society assigns each individual a specific, unmalleable role and posits self-actualization as the loyal and perfect performance of that role. Conditioning of these beliefs starts early: young athletes choose to play one sport for their academic careers and do not change sports with the seasons like you see in other nations. Baseball players are baseball players. In general, Japanese people have one hobby, which leads to the famously maniacal dedication to certain "ridiculous" pursuits like competitive eating or obsession with a single fashion brand.

Since the Meiji Restoration, citizens of Japan have been able to choose their destiny and occupation without adhering to the strict Neo-Confucian caste system of warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants (士農工商) seen in the Tokugawa era. However, once the die is cast at 22 and the individual enters the company, corporate duty becomes "life." There may be other familial duties, but the general culture clearly places these as secondary - especially in a gender-divided society where women alone are expected to embody "family" and all its subsequent duties. The "firm as family" ideology may have been invented in the early 20th century as a convenient form of labor control (that echoes the "nation as family" rhetoric of the kokutai [國體]), but even without the idea of "family ties" creating corporate loyalty, there remains a fundamental Confucian understanding of one's place in the world being a fixed locus within Heaven's order and not a progressive position of man's choosing. These days the "family firm" belief is drying out with the rise of tenshoku (転職) mid-career company change. Workers may choose new masters once and a while, but once the movement is made, long hours remain a key part of the corporate life. Because again, corporate life is life.

Eradicating this belief will be extremely difficult - barring some kind of Romantic revolution. The number of freeters is apparently dropping, echoing the original analysis that these young people could not find full-time employment and were not willfully eschewing it. The low birth-rate and unwillingness to open up immigration do not help the drive for lower hours: the OECD estimates that productivity will have to increase and hours stay at current levels in order to make up for the smaller future workforce. Retirement will also have to be pushed back. State economic goals have almost always trumped individual rights in Japan, so I do not think the government will actually pursue a true course of "free time" that could cut into GDP growth. But more importantly, a large percentage of the population possesses a core belief that identity can only be attained through organizational dedication and that long-hours are a key part of that role performance. The government can mandate holidays, but they will have a real challenge to erase the base social ideology of at least the last two centuries. One can make the claim that these popular beliefs have their roots in elite social control, but even in that case, the elite will have to erase the effects of their massive success in completely legitimizing demands for worker duty.

If you think lower work hours will be a part of Japanese culture soon, you must be dreaming. And if you are dreaming, you are sleeping well. And if you are sleeping well, you are clearly not working enough!

As a decentralized locus to content creation and protean framework for aggregated cultural projection (at least in its post-structuralist reified construct, ignoring Farque's updated interjections), the Internet - or the "internets" as it is addressed by its most loyal participants - gives birth to a wide range of linguistic fragments that often come together under their own internal philological logic. Although this author understands the necessity of counteracting the perspective bias of luminational foundation outlined in Gibbner 1987, the following essay employs photogravuric evidence or at least its contemporary simulacrum to show the evolution of linguistic structures operating the online meme production praxis.

Now that we have scared away or over-impressed the basic reader, we can reclaim our use of the standard vernacular and get to the pictures. Let's go!

Fig. 1 - A dog.

Apparently starting in the Some Ghastly Thing forums, netizens have taken up the practice of writing words upon dog pictures. For whatever reason, cats do not make the cut - or the laugh. These dogs often speak in intentionally incorrect English - [sic]ism as first defined in Wandaroff 2004. The specimen above is interesting: the "hoth base" is a reference to the second film in the Star Wars series - Episode V. But note the representative use of the form - I am in your (blank), (blank) your (blank). What's odd here is that the dog - who apparently is mentally impaired due to being a dog - uses the correct form for "your" before then stumbling upon the "cooler" degenerate form "ur" in the second half of the sentence. We posit this innovation as deferred degeneration. To be honest, I am not convinced that a dog of this breed would understand what "d00dz" are, especially seeing that Great Pyrenees are known to have trouble distinguishing an "O" (the letter) with the zero "0" (the number), making this an imperfect example of the genre.

Fig. 2 - Three dogs.

This whole sentence may be a typo. I am not sure why young people would immediately refer to three dogs as "Bel [sic] Biv Devoe." Note the misuse of grammar: "R" being "are." One dog is wearing clothes, which to this subjective eye, does remind the viewer of Michael Bivins. Not to say he looks like a dog, but I think I remember him wearing that shirt. I do not exactly understand what is going on here, but I do believe that is the point.

Fig. 3 - A dog.

I believe "Invisible Saddle" is the name of a popular comic book, but more importantly, the dog does indeed look like he could be wearing an invisible saddle. Quite humorous!

Hello, everyone.

As written here, I have started to ply my blogging services for my employer at a bilingual blog entitled clast. At this new location on the internet, I will be writing very specifically about Japanese media, marketing, and consumer behavior. Some of the content may be old hat for loyal néomarxisme readers, but I hope you will keep your eye on it for future fun. Opposed to néomarxisme, the articles on clast will be decidedly more informative and absolutely less sarcastic.

I will continue providing antagonizing and often über-ironic critical judgments on the state of Japanese popular culture here at néomarxisme for the time being, although many essays that fall into the clast content framework may end up going to clast instead.

I have been promising a "big change" here at néomarxisme, and I can say that things are moving behind-the-scenes towards the planned total site rehaul. More on that as soon as details are available. The idea is to go much more bigger and broader, and I think it's going to be exciting,

Thanks for all the support and ideological passion and word reading over the last three years.

Sincerely,
Marxy (W. David Marx)

Tomorrow I am heading off to SXSW in Austin, TX as support staff for Kiiiiiii. Those coming down should check out u.t. and Lakin' play at Beauty Bar on Wednesday night (14th) at 8:00 and earlier in the day (4:00) at Todd P's showcase.

I will hopefully be able to post some reportage from the week in semi-real time.

This year, 1,300 bands are attending - an astounding number that makes navigation and curation a serious necessity for the conference attendee. Trusted expert on the American "indy" scene - Marxie - provides a list of "must-see" bands for your comfort and inclusion:

Arrived on time in San Fran, only to run into the logjam at immigration and customs, denied access to the original perfectly-planned flight and put on a new one that gets in six hours later - only after taking a detour through an entirely different city. I think it's fair to say that there is absolutely no reason we should believe that this airport hell is every going to go away. It's bad enough on a domestic flight schedule, but boy, add jetlag in the mix and it's like catching some terrible malady.

In the shop next door to the gate, a radio plays some 90s Adult Contemporary cover of "Save the Last Dance for Me" but it cuts in and out like some four year-old is toying with the volume knob. The whole floor also wobbles from something aeronautics-related.

Now the same kid - or bad reception - is cutting up "Achey Breaky Heart."

You almost never hear the phrase "Half the fun of travel is getting there" in regard to planes.

Finally arrived in muggy Austin late last night, the first wing of the bedhead-tattoo crew to infiltrate the armies of nise-Britney teens and other locals. The ridiculously long voyage may eventually pay off, however, as it forced me to go to bed at 1 (after enjoying a little Stuart/Colbear) and get up at 8. Jetlag usually forces me up at 5:30 or so.

Breakfast at 8:30. I was going to talk to you about the Texas-shaped waffle iron available at Texas-based hotels as being the sole positive contribution of the Bush administration, but our place had your standard dorm cafeteria waffle iron. Still delicious, so I guess I can do without the Texas-shaped iron - leaving the current president with little 0 pluses and infinity negatives.

Headed downtown to register, ran into old Tokion buds/bosses Adam and Lanha, had Mexican and limeades, then headed back and ran into old pal Justin. Rockstars are only slowly drifting in at this point, so the tone is decidedly "interactive."

Thunderstorms began around 1, and we went on a wild goose chase for a cellphone - choosing eventually to go around the SIM-card replacement (damn locked Vodaphone!) and go for pre-paid, the choice of terrorists everywhere. Now we are back at the hotel, with the nice view of Denny's.

I forgot how unbelievably pleasant and helpful the service sector is in much of the American South. I am sure you all can come up with some counterexamples, but we have been greeted with nothing but 100% friendliness.

Now tracking down drums and resting up. Today is the calm before the storm. Or the thunderstorm before the storm.

Back in Japan. Fell asleep last night at 8 after reading John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War - which is good, but not good enough to keep me awake in such dramatic shifts of longitude. (Why didn't Jimmy Buffet ever make a song about the changes in attitude going West to East? Just because it didn't rhyme? Lame. I am never voting him Mayor of Margaritaville again.)

Woke up this morning at 4, which is what I get for going to bed at 8.

More on SXSW and eating something involving maple syrup every day for a week when my brain and body match up again.

On my flight to SFO from NRT, the communal movie reel (United 747s are still pre-personal TV screens) offered us a special treat before each film: a short clip of film critics Ebert and Roper (sans Ebert, unfortunately) reviewing the motion picture coming up next. But seeing that airlines cannot afford to purchase good films for their passengers, the non-Roper Ebert-replacement invariably gave the film a "thumbs down." (Roper likes everything.)

In a world with too many product choices, critics help us filter out the wheat from the chaff by providing commentary that we either accept/reject as expert opinion or views we trust on the hunch that the critic's tastes resemble our own. Stuck in an airplane with no choices in films other than the three pre-selected for our viewing, I do not know how important it is to know that Harold Ramis (guest critic) did not like Man of the Year. I mean, he was right - Robin Williams' faux-Jon Stewart jokes lacked satirical bite - but I am not sure what I gained out of hearing his negative impression right before I hunkered down to kill two hours.

Is American culture critical beyond the functional value of criticism? Or was this just a misplaced filler segment?

If you haven't read Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, you should - because he perfectly explains why SXSW doesn't really work as an event for discovering new music:

A recent series of studies, titled "When Choice is Demotivating," provide the evidence [that more choice is not better]. One study was set in a gourmet food store in an upscale community where, on weekends, the owners commonly set up sample tables of new items. When researchers set up a display featuring a line of exotic, high-quality jams, customers who came by could taste samples, and they were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one condition of the study, 6 varieties of the jam were available for tasting. In another, 24 varieties were available. In either case, the entire set of 24 varieties was available for purchase. The large array of jams attracted more people to the table than the small array, though in both cases people tasted about the same number of jams on average. When it came to buying, however, a huge difference became evident. Thirty percent of the people exposed to the small array of jams actually bought a jar; only 3 percent of those exposed to the large array of jams did so (19-20).

SXSW too has a large number of exotic, high-quality jams - 1300 to be precise. And most of these bands plays multiple times.

In three days, faced with somewhere around 900 options, I saw two bands total.

The Mae Shi, For Example

On Friday night, I went to see The Mae Shi's showcase gig. They played for only about 25 minutes, but it verged on life-changing. The boys started the gig spread into the crowd, and since the venue had a poor man's version of stadium-seating, they started chanting their first song in unison all around us. Finally descending upon the stage, they rocked and socked - with brief costume changes but without annoying inter-song banter - until we were all rocked out.

Besides the fact that the Mae Shi is a totally swell band, once had 6000 MySpace friends before MySpace conspired to destroy their MySpace page, and had their unbelievably great new track "Run to Your Grave" on Pitchfork's Forkcast recently, there could not have been more than 75 to 100 people at the show.

Austin is the "live music capitol of the world," and I am assuming "live music" to connote "rock bands with guitars" that play four-minute rock songs. I never got the feeling that art-rock is really a good match to the proceedings.

And Kiiiiiii

Which leads us to assessing the value of bringing Kiiiiiii to SXSW - a band who in my completely subjective, horribly biased, and subsequently worthless opinion are one of the shining stars of the Japanese indie music scene. They played first at Todd P.'s backyard party in the drizzle for an energetic gaggle of hipsters local and glocal (Brooklyn, represent), which went generally well and made a nice intro for Juiceboxxx to come on and start knocking over plastic chairs. (Did he get off from school to perform or was he playing hooky? Truant they'll all say, quoth Milhouse.)

The Beauty Bar gig later that night was a mixed affair. Short on time, no sound checks allowed, maybe 100 people or so, but a strange mix of patrons. Some guy immediately stole a kazoo off the stage, tried to blow on it for 10 mins, failing to make any sort of noise, then pocketed it and started walking away, before I asked him whether "I could get that back." I got it back. This is what managers are for.

Reviews were mixed.

"I got a chance to see "Kiiiiiii" on said birthday. It was very energetic and fun. I have thier DVD so I can get really drunk with friends and re-live the halcyon." - "Edward"

"Yes, those two Japanese girls are energetic mad, and they sure do make a spectacle of themselves. But with one singer and one drummer and no support musicians, the performance was, at the very least, thin. The old fart in me appreciates method where madness is concerned, and Kiiiiiii pretty much tells method to fuck off. I left after 15 minutes." - Musicwhore.org

"KIIIII: I can't believe there was hype for this band. This was one of the worst performances I've ever seen. Japan's gotta bring more than this." - Bandwagon

Nothing, however, beats this pithy summary:

"We kicked off the festival by seeing a crazy Japanese band called Kiiiiii who were 2 harajuku girls that performed with guitar and drumas a-la White Stripes, and included strange covers of Boney M’s Brown Girl In The Ring and We Are The World in a style that was only slightly recognisable, but totally hysterical." - Jude Adam

Kiiiiiii does not have a guitar player.

With 1300 bands, hype is critical as it is the sole guide for navigating the surplus of gig choices. Hype at SXSW, however, is not expanded through performance as much as aggregated and consolidated. In a sea of so many choices, there is nowhere to accidentally see a band and start loving them. You either love or hate whom you have already set out to see.

Before I left for Austin, my friend Nick S. mentioned it was "great" that Kiiiiiii had managed to get on the Crystal Castles bill, but shows at SXSW aren't "shows" in any traditional sense, where patrons stick around and see the other bands. If a gig ends at x:40, you've got 20 mins to make it to the next venue to see the next band on your list or have a slice of pizza. I doubt anybody stayed around at Beauty Bar after Kiiiiiii, and even if the crowd sized stayed the same or increased, the Venn diagram would show a very small overlap between the crowds.

All in all, Kiiiiiii got a blip on the radar by showing up to SXSW - mainly from placement in the massive list of 1300 bands and subsequent discovery by myriad bloggers. Whether the actual performances did anything for macro-promotion, I have no idea.

Japanese Cool

JETRO - the Japan External Trade Organization and government organ - threw a party on Thursday of SXSW week called the "Matsuri-Japan Bash" to nominally support the exportation of Japanese music to the rest of the world. I certainly salute the idea, but they sided with the Japan Nite event, which is a non-curated, pay-to-play showcase. Any Japanese band with $6000 to spend (on top of the $1000 in airfare for each member), can be a part of the famous Japan Nite.

Since nobody behind this operation seems to have any idea to bring Japanese bands with some semblance of appeal to American indie rock audiences and instead let big labels throw them some bands, we got a weird mix of newcomers, old-timers, and garage bands on holiday. HY are light poppers from Okinawa and favorites of 18 year-old Japanese female college students who "like" "music." Go!Go!7188 are kind of a sub-Shiina Ringo rock band from Toshiba/EMI about whose existence I had completely forgotten. No one Japanese I know will consider Sony's six-girl teenage ska band Oreskaband an actual band and not an elaborate marketing scheme. In case you didn't get enough horns, Pistol Valve - an all-girl teenage brass band - came along as well.

I know I am being snobby and selfish here, wanting Japan to present a well-curated hipster cool instead of putting forward "pay-to-play" as a national cultural trait. And hell, some guy who actually took the trouble to see Kiiiiiii - a non-Japan Nite band - thought that "Japan's gotta bring more than this," so I doubt I can speak for all American fans of the Japanese music. But with this national-sponsorship of Japanese gross national cool, I am still troubled that the aesthetic mismanagement of selecting the "representatives" has no led to a degeneration of the "Japan" brand - maybe not for the audiences, who I am sure enjoyed the young teenage sound of an all-girl ska band - but for Japanese artists themselves. If anybody had bothered to say, how do we promote Japanese bands in the US, they would have called Shugo Tokumaru, who probably would have gone to SXSW and ignored Japan Nite for a better showcase with no national-affiliation and support from the official trade bureau. Dear Bureaucracy, maybe the best way to promote Japanese music abroad is to not get involved at all.

World, you ready to envy? Your social superior Tyler Brule (add circumflex and accent aigu to the last word with your imagination) loves the new Roppongi super development project Tokyo Midtown. If you are thinking that Roppongi Hills was enough for this city - with its Starbucks, luxury hotel, Tokyo City View, J-wave radio station, and art museum - you are dead wrong. Tokyo Midtown offers visitors a completely different world: a five-star luxury hotel, a dramatic view of the city, an art museum, and a Starbucks complete with - get this - a radio station.

Those with a keen eye should have known that Tokyo Midtown was coming to Tokyo's midtown. The Dentsu predictions for 2007 took the gamble to bet that Tokyo Midtown would be a huge media phenomenon - no doubt a self-fulfilling prophecy. Brutus has been doing a multi-part paid-for advertorial feature on the complex for months now. If you thought Tokyo was a great city before Mitsui Fudosan decided to show their rivals in aristocratic brinkmanship that they could do luxury Roppongi way better, go ahead and kill yourself. When you get to Heaven, surely it will be look exactly like Tokyo Midtown.

Now Mr. Circumflex Aigu could be right - Tokyo Midtown could be incredible - but whether the features are spectacular or not, at what point do we citizens of Tokyo cease to be impressed with the constant escalation of massive developments? At some point, the Japanese media was abuzz with breathless anticipation about Sunshine 60 - a now-yellowing complex built in East Ikebukuro by the Seibu brothers on the haunted land of Sugamo Prison. Mori's Ark Hills was a huge deal when it opened, but now it's just a pedestrian place where I get my library books and eat bland Subway subs with Rory P. Wavecrest once-in-a-while. Remember Roppongi Hills? At least that glorious concrete tribute to capital accumulation did not just fade into semi-obscurity, but celebrated an acute comeuppance when the princes of the castle (Sir Horie and Sir Murakami) got busted for financial misdealing. At least its perimeter was host to social conflict.

Reading the supplied descriptions of these developments reminds me of the original plans for EPCOT - utopian "cities within cities" to house, feed, employ, and entertain select communities. With Roppongi Hills, however, Mori only let Japan's recently-emboldened upper classes into the gates. The investment bankers and New Economy brats in the Hills office space can enjoy the highest-priced apartments, the most prestigious hotel, a host of exclusive restaurants or just go to the Heartland bar and pretend they are not in Japan. We untidy masses are allowed to save up our measly earnings so we may visit, grab a tall latte, enjoy the art museum, watch a movie, and buy some things at inflated prices as long as we go home and do not bother the VIPs who live there.

Not to be outdone, Mitsui Fudosan have now spent their billions to recreate the exact same experience a couple of blocks away, and as good consumers, we will throw away our Roppongi Hills lust and direct our eyes on even more concrete arranged in an even more-exclusive and awe-inspiring way. "Midtown-zoku": a buzzword coming to a media outlet near you soon.

In an economy very literally centered around constant expansion through construction and real-estate development, we would be silly not to expect a Tokyo Midtown and even sillier not to expect Mori and his millions to take revenge at a new location in a few years' time. This game between ancient royal families is a constant cycle and the central driver of Tokyo urban planning. Might makes right. Value is determined by simple addition. Bigger is better. No time for renovation or conservation. Destroy the community of Shimokitazawa to build an amazing new highway. Flatten the old yakuza drinking holes of Roppongi so that yakuza-backed construction agencies can get some new employment.

Build, use, discard, Tokyo.

Contemporary Japanese idol expert Santos26 over at Idolizing St. Anna is reporting that 13 year-old Irie Saaya - who rose to fame in the nether regions of the internet as a bikini-clad elementary schoolgirl student with a prodigious bust-line (whom I have written about here, here, and here) - is taking a job as a (fully-clothed) host on an NHK educational program.

Now this leads to an interesting ethical question about the State's public television station - the height of media legitimacy - choosing to use an idol who rose to fame in a not-so-fantastic, "barely-legal" sexual subculture. On the one hand, Ms. Irie can use this opportunity to escape from the shady and marginal ersatz-porn "low-teen idol" market and become a mainstream celebrity. On the other hand, the producer undoubtedly made this choice based on full-knowledge of her infamy - if not solely because of it - and in essence, the selection is telling the growing cadre of what the Shukan Post calls "idiot parents" who sell their daughters to the wolves to pay for expensive "idol lessons," yes, having your elementary school daughter in tight bikinis and doing sexy poses for use on a semi-underground pay-site is indeed a perfect way to launch their careers as celebrities. Saaya, however, is more "talented" than these other girls, so maybe she will shine as the exception-to-the-rule. By the time we finish up this debate, she will be a legal adult and make all this chattering irrelevant.

Some of you may still be outraged by the drug- and nudity-based exploits of 20 year-old American actress and singer Lindsay Lohan, and for those of you who say, "Yes, that's me," I urge you to sit down immediately. For in Japan, young stars are up to a level of debauchery and delinquency that shakes the whole foundation of society.

Kago Ai - the 19 year-old infantile idol and last recognizable face of the crumbling Morning Musume/Up Front Agency empire - has been forced out of the entertainment business. Her transgression? Getting caught smoking in public for the second time. You see - the legal age for igniting and inhaling the tobacco leaf is 20 in Japan. Had she been in her second porn film, that would have been perfectly legal.

(In case you feel the need to immediately change Kago's page on Wikipedia, you can rest assured that somebody's already taken care of it.)

Kago has also been dating a 37 year-old man, which does not look especially good for a young idol singer in her position. Had she been a real first-tier star, she would be one of the many secret lovers of her 65 year-old talent agency boss and would only be kicked out of the entertainment world once he discarded her for someone much younger. Cigarettes and a disrespectful, non-organizational outlook on love took years off of Kago's career.

ZAKZAK sees her last career move as becoming an "Akiba-kei" (Akihabara-based) idol. Apparently getting thrown to the geeks is the lowest rung on the ladder.

In the same way that I flocked to the Beatles because my brown hair naturally formed a rounded Beatles cut as an elementary school student, I found myself avidly watching the 1970s Japanese TV anime Ace wo Nerae! a few years ago when I lived in my former residence with cable TV due almost solely to the fact that the female protagonist Oka Hiromi's short curly hair resembles my post-pubescent wave. The animated series concerns young Oka Hiromi - a first-year student at a Kanagawa-ken high school - getting up the gumption to join her school's tennis team in adoration of her idol - third-year campus big-shot Ryuzaki Reika aka O-Chofujin (which should be translated as something like "Mlle Butterfly"). Without any prior tennis experience, Hiromi is mysteriously thrust into the upper ranks of her team by her tough and mysterious coach Munakata. But with lots of hard work and perseverance, Hiromi finally reaches a close level to her hero O-Chofujin. Spoiler alert: the Coach totally dies.

Ace wo Nerae! is so beloved that the original manga has been made into two separate anime serials, and recently, into a cheesy live-action TV drama.

This classic story, however, is not merely about high-school girls playing tennis. The whole narrative acts as an allegory about Japan's place in the world in the 1970s. The setting for the story resembles Yokohama - the trendy urban city where West most visibly runs up on East. Oka Hiromi represents Japan. She is physically small (a small island country), young (just "discovered" modernity in the 19th century), and inexperienced (yet to know the proper protocols of Western culture). Some may protest this patronizing view of Japan, but this was the way the Japan saw itself coming out of the 1960s. And if the geopolitical scene of the 1970s was a tennis game with specific rules and scoring, Japan was a rookie player with a lot of promise.

With her blond and luscious flowing hair, Ryuzaki Reika perfectly embodies the United States in its idealized form as the central locus of Japanese aspiration during this era. (Ironically, this particular context rewrites "Mme Butterfly" as the beautiful Western object of desire pursued by her Japanese admirers rather than the weak Oriental ready to be colonized.) Reika is tall, talented, rich, and beloved by her classmates. Although the narrative could end with this rich, blond girl getting her comeuppance from the scrappy yet determined protagonist, O-Chofujin never really pans out as a villain. In fact, she is extremely encouraging to Hiromi - a big sister if you will. There is a pleasant sororal bond, but it is inherently hierarchial.

Through very hard work and dedication, Hiromi (Japan) is able to massively improve her standing on the tennis court. While she does not necessarily get to the point of easily beating her idol, she makes massive improvement and can play with the best. And with a clear distinction in social rank and age, there is no implied failure in the younger party being #2. There is competition between the two girls, but the goal is not domination over the other. The players are working together for their school's victory rather than their own.

Underdogism

Japanese sports anime and manga are full of "diminutive underdogs" - visually small heroes battling it out against mythically large rivals and winning. Some of this is determined by the needs of the main viewers: children want to imagine themselves fighting the evil forces of the world and can identify directly with a tiny protagonist. However, I believe a big reason for the small and young Japanese protagonist comes from a national sympathy with the underdog.

Americans, however, also love the underdog. The "ragtag group of scrappy youth works hard to defeat powerhouse team" is the plot of every single American sports movie: Hoosiers, Bad News Bears, The Karate Kid, etc, etc. We Americans love underdogs so much that we even made a superhero named Underdog.

Japan and the United States may both root for the underdogs, but I think there is a big difference in how each culture approaches and justifies its own identification with the underdog. As a nation, the U.S. came into existence as the impossible rebellious underdog who defeated the world-encompassing British Empire. We still see references to this creation myth in the fact that the non-masked bureaucrats in Star Wars' Galactic Empire talk as if they won their Half Blue at Cambridge in the 18th century. Harrison Solo might as well be using his script from American Graffiti to speak with his Rebel brothers. Since WWII, however, the U.S. has clearly become the dominant power on the world stage, and now to be an "underdog nation," American culture must emphasize the triumph of the little guy in society and not the exploits of the nation itself to make a legitimate underdog message. For example, the Iraq War is a whole lot of bullying on the U.S.'s part, but look at the guy who got us into it. I can imagine that Bush II was pretty much exactly like James Spader in Pretty in Pink during high school.

On the other hand, Japan finds its underdog cred at the nation state level. For a country with a long history of military and Confucian hierarchy, autocratic rule, government-condoned cartels, and zero successful popular revolutions, the scrappy little guy with crazy ideas has never really been a source of inspiration. As a nation, however, post-war Japan is the little engine that could. In his book A Genealogy of Japanese Self-Images, Oguma Eiji argues that Japan reinvented its own backstory as a "peaceful agrarian island nation" after the War in order to shirk from the bigger questions of imperial aggression. Once this rebranding occurred and 1945 became Year Zero, Japan became the impossible underdog on the world stage, who out of nowhere grew to be the second-largest economy in the free world by 1968. In the 1980s, that little underdog looked like it was going to surpass its big brother the U.S.

Within this specific historical narrative, Japan's underdog identity resonates most clearly at a nation-state level, but this is not far from a Confucian philosophical underpinning. The sympathetic underdog must be a symbol or representative of the nation-state/society itself rather than an individual actor who "deserves" the justice of victory against the system.

007-373-5963

Although a game created mostly for the American market, the classic NES title Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! well illustrates the Japanese nation-based underdog concept. There may have been programming issues that necessitated a tiny protagonist, but the ethnically-generic Little Mac is a itsy-bitsy boxer whom the player pilots through three circuits of enormous and scary villains. I should not have to remind you that all of the other boxers represent a single nation-state. I've never been to Hippo Island, but I can imagine that King Hippo also follows the pattern of the boxer embodying the stereotypes of his respective home. The French are weak, the Germans are WWI revivalists (born in 1945!), and Pacific Islanders are grotesquely obese. Indians practice some kind of special magic called "Hindu" that involves twinkling red crystals and teleportation.

Our protagonist may not be explicitly Japanese - the official Japanese guy even threatens to give Little Mac a "TKO from Tokyo (TYO)" - but he fits the Oka Hiromi pattern of going against all odds to make his way up the hierarchy. Not through inherent talent or strength - but through hard work and a good coach. You don't see Soda Popinski strenuously biking near the Statue of LIberty at dawn, and maybe that's why the giant pink Russian gets beat so easily by a pipsqueak in street clothes.

Whether with tennis or boxing, the Japanese have a history of creating the underdog within a direct or implied nation-state contexts. Only if the competition is between larger macro units of humanity - society, nation, family - should the underdog win. Compare this with the American narrative of Prefontaine - an athlete who abandons his own "unique" style of front-running to please the "common knowledge" of his coach only to lose the Gold Medal in 1972. The Pre is a tragic underdog in the United States context - he is the individual suppressed by the norm.

These examples basically tell us what we already know about how each society expects its members to relate to society - Japan: the individual pursues betterment of society through hard work and total dedication, United States:the individual pursues betterment of society by fighting for justice and innovation at the cost of social harmony. Underdogs may be univerally loved, but they are not always the same breed of canine.