neomarxisme

Since life is life for work and work is work for the State, vacation basically amounts to an affront against citizenship. "We give you these 10 paid vacation days with the promise that you never use them." Okay, no one ever actually says that, but oddly everyone collectively reads that message in the subtext. When someone high up in the command chain realized some years ago that quality of life has an inverse relation to per capita labor hours, Japan soon became a nation drowning in national holidays. The logic being, even in the Army, your captain does owe you an "At ease!" once in a while. And they can't bark orders to stand up unless you are sitting down.

In late April and early May, red letters start to multiply on the calender until coalescing into a massive holiday rollerskating jam called Golden Week. If you cleverly take off just two paid vacation days in the middle of the week (or work at the right industry where bosses tell you to stay home), that gives you nine days to go somewhere.

Thanks to this miracle of rational planning, a good bulk of the 127 million inhabitants of Japan all focus their yearly (non-hometown related) holiday desires upon this one near-fortnight. Space in hotels, airplanes, ferries, minshuku, pensions, B&Bs, museums, art galleries, remote islands, and outer space however, is limited. Adam Smith (not that Adam Smith but this guy I went to high school with) could tell you incredible demand for a very small supply raises prices, and guess what, costs for Golden Week travel are high enough to make a good Puritan or Confucian feel dirty and wasteful for even thinking about attempting to leave the neighborhood.

Due to short-sightedness and lack of motivation to overspend, I am going nowhere this year.

Monday's amazing weather, however, almost made up for my gripes against these artificial machinations to destroy Man's yearning for non-labor related self-actualization. We biked to Nogawa Park, which may just be Tokyo's least artificial and most verdant public recreation area. There is a pleasant river running through the park full of barefoot kids hovering with nets, hoping to catch small crawfish.

After biking ten minutes radially from a train station in Western Tokyo, you are pretty much in "the suburbs." Almost like a tree line on the mountains, the inhabitants' apparel suddenly ceases to find construction in world-class styling and first-tier brands. The wide-roads are filled with commercial ventures totally alien to the urban landscape - tire stores, Matsuya fast foods with parking spaces, crummy decaying used video stores, and Home Depots - all of which demonstrate the dominance of the automobile and the domicile in the spirit of this forgotten land.

On the way to Nogawa, we passed the Reversible Destiny Lofts, which I had wanted to check out for a long time. Despite the radiant glow of their pop coloring, they are almost hidden behind buildings on initial approach. You pass a drive-through McDonalds on your right, cross the street, and then the RDL circles and squares appear in the corner of your left eye - almost like the McDs fun park has relocated catty-corner and caught elephantitis along the way. As one could imagine, they are quite striking and imposing, but for whatever reason, almost none of the passersby stopped to take a deeper look. The location is mixed: there is some nice greenery at their back, but the entire complex directly faces a very busy highway in the middle of a concrete nowhere. The apartments seem to be at least half-populated at the moment, but the books and clothes in the windows looked more like the possessions of hip architectural students than of the elderly - a demographic which the architects originally planned as tenants to take advantage of the apartment's unconventional design in their battle against the inevitability of senility.

Like LOHAS, this kind of socially-progressive design is always in danger of being stripped-down and consumed as empty style in Japan, but at least the architects were nice enough to experiment out in the middle of nowhere instead of adding one more monument smack-dab in the center of Omotesando.

Am I underestimating or overestimating the difficulty required in procuring this particular stream of songs from early 80s? And not the "I Love the 80s" 80s, but the past mass hits with zero appeal to later media curators - not lucky enough to make it to punchline status. Like ELO's "Xanadu" but with less name recognition. Do they make CD collections of this genre? Is there a Usen channel dedicated to it? This must be a high-level management decision, because the bleached-hair pock-marked punk-rock clerks at this "recycle shop" could not possibly be responsible.

Whatever the case, the corporate DJ collective know the perfect ingredients for ambiance. No matter if you are in Mobile, Alabama or Mitaka, Tokyo, there is no better music for browsing used furniture and refrigerators than Juice Newton and her ilk. We were looking for a dresser drawer, but I eventually wandered off to see what kind of overpriced yet cruddy musical instruments were on display and whether somebody had done me the favor of leaving behind the board game Stratego.

Past the rack of dusty men's sportcoats, but before the endless reams of soiled children's clothes, there is a big glass case filled with luxury handbags. The ordering corresponds to the unspoken hierarchy of status and popularity in Japan. First comes Louis Vuitton, which takes up a whole vertical section. Then comes Gucci, Chanel, followed by Coach, Prada (ouch!), and "Misc." You may be tempted to believe that this stock is mostly fakes because of parallels to the suspicious stock of similar stores in countries with more rational approaches to luxury goods, but with somewhere between 40-90% of all Japanese females owning a Louis Vuitton product, imitation goods are unnecessary for making sense of this mini luxury select shop within what is otherwise a mildewed warehouse of refuse.

At Tokyo suburban junk stores, you can buy the same black Chanel bag that Paris Hilton wore to her sentencing last week and also pick up some classic games for your Super Famicon.

The European luxury super-brands almost have it in their interest to send out an army of ground-staff to raid these locations and buy out all of their own products. Because the dolor brought on from these sad, overlit stores - middle-class Salvation Army shops without even the basic appeal of charity and property rotation - overpowers the magic and mystery of any and all luxury goods. These bags are not even afforded the charm of functionality and practicality. No one picking up a half-price Gucci wallet would experience the adrenaline rush of rewarded frugality. The brand images get sucked into the vortex of despair contained with the glass cabinets - a variety of abandoned dreams organized by conglomerate, rotting away in the clothing corner of a thrift shop in the middle of nowhere. LV's Monogram Multicolore may as well be an old version of Scrabble with the Q and the W missing.

I have a Canadian female friend who used to work at a foreign hostess club in Roppongi, and I invited her to write something about her experience. (I edited for grammar and length.)

I was backpacking through either Thailand or Cambodia - it's a blur at this point - when some British girl mentioned to me that I could make a lot of money being blond in Japan. Japan sounded equally Asian as Thailand (or Cambodia or Laos), so I booked a ticket for Tokyo Airport and then figured out how to get from the airport to Tokyo, which took me like three hours or something.

I ended up crashing on my college roommate's cousin's floor for a week before I finally got an interview with the club. My college roommate's cousin had mentioned that this whole "water business" of foreign hostessing was sketchy and sometimes dangerous. So I was a bit on edge during the interview. The manager's English and breath were terrible, and there was something very dark and depressing about the whole bar. When not trying to look down or up my dress (he had this kind of Galileo telescope thing), he kept staring at my roots to make sure I was really blond. He reached for something in his jacket and suddenly asked me, "You dye now?" and I started to freak out. (Turns out he was just scratching himself.) I explained that I had been naturally blond as a child but that most adult Western women become more brunette as they get older. He ominously told me, "Well, I hope you dye soon" and then handed me my punch-card. I was hired.

The job was boring. I would come in to work at around 8, and then the awful customers would start coming in. First of all, the customers were mostly Japanese men. Second, they were Japanese men without any sort of history with real life women. It was almost as if going to this club was a product of failure with Japanese women. They smelled bad and wore boxy black suits and wanted to talk about golf. The liked to sing John Denver at karaoke, and I don't like John Denver. I would always want to sing No Doubt or that one Adam Ant song, but they didn't have these in the karaoke machine.

One guy always came in and wanted to show off by reciting Pi to 6,000 digits. This would take three or four hours - before he finally gave up and went to the bathroom. He would always want us to join in, which was impossible for most of the girls, but this helped me learn to count in Japanese.

Another guy used to come in and recite "e" - the natural log digit or whatever - and he would get in a battle with the Pi guy. This was a big source of stress The Pi guy was "my guy," and the e guy was this Russian girl's guy. This Russian girl hated me, and the e guy started to like me, because he thought I liked to have digits read to me, which I don't, even to this day. So the Russian girl starts to totally hate on me, because the e guy and the Pi guy are fighting for me very openly. In the end, they both got over me and started to like this bimbo from New Zealand. Once they made amends, they would read off together the 3,000 digits of if you subtracted e from Pi. All I remember is that it starts out 0.4233.

After a while, the whole thing became very tedious. The money was not that great, and Japan had no beaches or anything.

For a long time, I have been writing about pakuri - the unprincipled use of creative elements from someone else in a similar context as the original without self-acknowledgment of the borrowing. There remains a loud minority contingent who believes that there is Western bias underlying any judgments against pakuri. I have countered this with examples of a Japanese gallery threatening to sue a record label for pakuri of their exclusive images, the Japanese net community criticizing Japanese singers for pakuri, and the mainstream media criticizing a Japanese painter for ripping off a Western painter. Now, we have a more interesting case: a Western band re-creating a work from a Japanese photographer for the cover of their DVD without acknowledgment of the original work.

As stated in this Mainichi article, photographer Miyamoto Ryuji is very upset about New Order's pakuri of his photo "Tokyo 1995."

The photographer said he would have accepted the similar photograph if it had been properly labeled.

"If they had used expressions clearly stating that it was a parody, I would have accepted it," Miyamoto said.

The photo in question.

I am not going to claim that there is a universal artistic morality about borrowing and sampling, but this episode illustrates the following two things. One, there is an unofficial code of conduct in the art/culture game. When not referencing "master works" or art that everyone basically knows, there is a general demand for some kind of public recognition - whether in the credits or in the title or in some other accompanying document. Otherwise, the "victim" is going to be upset and probably find approval in the court of public opinion.

Two, I don't think Japanese artists are any less upset about being blatantly copied than Western artists. Confucian or other traditional Japanese ideas about "creativity" may have promoted the idea of copying as a means of learning, but I don't think this philosophy is strong enough to excuse when one professional copies another. I believe the large amount of pakuri in Japan in the past was related less to that blob called "culture" and more to the fact that almost no one ever got caught due to an information gap between Japan and the world, and also, and the lack of criticism in the Japanese media that would point out these stories. Now with the internet, not only can Western artists find where they have been copied and Japanese audiences can complain about theft, but now Japanese artists can see exactly where they have also been pakuri'd.

For the last two week, an army of perky girls in white uniforms and white vinyl boots have taken over the streets of Minato-ku. They stand next to your local tobacco merchant or cigarette machine and pass out free samples of their sponsor: Kent. As I assuming they are telling customers, Kent cigarettes are brand sponsor of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and they offer a very smooth, masculine flavor of what later turns out to be lung cancer.

Now you patriots out there may dislike Kent - seeing that it is a brand from the evil imperialists of British American Tobacco, descending upon the Japanese nation and creating legions of addicts. Might as well be the Opium War 2007.

If you want to help Japan, smoke the Japan Tobacco (JT) brands like Cabin, Camel, and Mild Seven instead. The Japanese government still owns a 50% stake in JT, meaning that the central government directly profits from your purchase of specific tobacco products.

Let's be frank: anybody who stops smoking is essentially a traitor. Look me in the eyes, LOOK ME IN THE EYES, and say to me, yes, I can selfishly choose my own livelihood and health over State goals of economic growth. I knew you couldn't. Now go beat up that guy who is telling everyone that tobacco causes heart disease. He is not good for stock prices and economic security.

I saw some of the Kent girls sneaking off with some Marlboro Menthols. Don't trust their siren call! They are not only conspirators against their own countries: they stab their own brands in the back!

For all those dirty old Japanese men who are sick of seeing that human chunk of Italian ham Girolamo Panzetta on the cover of their beloved Leon, the brand new magazine Zino gives you 73-year old journalist Tahara Soichiro slouching on a rooftop, drinking the bubbly, wearing a dozen different shades of off-white. The guy oozes sex the way that most men ooze ooze. This Ole Granddad is so over-sexed that he doesn't even bother to look at the hot white woman in the bikini standing right in front of him. Either that or he was photoshopped into the setting.

Zino comes to us from Kishida Ichiro - the media maverick and lothario who helmed Leon until he was asked to leave last year. Generally speaking, the content in Zino seems to be identical to Leon - high-end gear for sketchy old guys. Lots of reptile skin and huge watches. Opposed to the self-imposed racial segregation of Leon, however, Zino actually uses a few Japanese men as models, adhering to the widely-held belief that dudes are dudes as long as they have stubble.

Readers may not be screaming out for two rival versions of the same magazine, but apparently advertisers cannot resist the idea of a magazine targeted towards single and lecherous rich men who spend their Sosekis on luxury items instead of on wives and the results of their procreation.

And if you are thinking, hey, Zino is just "fronting," check out the inside-cover ad: Hermès, baby. You can't even afford to talk to guys who work in the Hermès stock warehouses.

Zino's motto is "リッチを誇るな、センスで光れ！" - "Don't be proud of being rich, dazzle 'em with your good sense." Nobody embodies these words better than Mr. Tahara Soichiro - that guy is as hot as the goddamn sun.

The new issue of Weekly Pureiboi offers us an epic dichotomy to titillate our senses - "Japanese Idols vs. World Sexy"

On the cover, the issue's featured women are organized into two distinct groups:

The left-hand column makes sense: all four of the girls are Japanese race-queen/idol types with proper Japanese names. (Although "Leona" sounds like she could be half-Jewish.)

The right-hand group, however, is extremely problematic. Ignoring the fact that no one finds Paris Hilton "sexy," Beyonce and Paris at least fit the most basic description of being global celebrities. Why then is purely Japanese actress and model Kuriyama Chiaki - the magazine's cover model - part of "World Sexy"? This affiliation seems like an implicit acknowledgment that Kuriyama's popularity stems solely from her appearance in Kill Bill. Objectively speaking, she does not fit the normal profile of a "hot girl" in Japan, and Pureiboi appears to feel the need to legitimize lust towards her from the perspective of her popularity abroad.

Ozawa Maria's inclusion in the "world sexy" group, on the other hand, boils down to question of nation-state being strictly defined through racial homogeneity. Ozawa is a 21-year old half-Japanese, half-Canadian porn star and Christian Academy in Japan graduate whose career is based exclusively in Japan. You may know her from such films as 2006's Barely There Mosaic and 2007's Popular Fashion Model Maria Ozawa Nakadashi Raped for 20 Consecutive Times! Ozawa is not especially known outside of the Japanese adult video market. Unlike Kuriyama, she has no feet on the global stage. Pureiboi consciously or unconsciously placed her outside of the "Japan" group only because she has what amounts to impure blood and semi-Western features.

So here, being a "Japanese idol" requires popularity originating in the Japanese market - unless you are half-Japanese, which makes "Japanese" categorization impossible. Even in matters of objectifying women, "Japan" remains so narrowly defined.

Item One:

Finally, Business Week has gotten to the bottom of this "Cool Japan" thing. A bit of their expert analysis:

For the last couple of decades, Japan has been far better known as a super-efficient manufacturer of autos, machine tools, wide-screen TVs, and super-computers than as a bastion of hip. Yet this decade, both former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and the current one, Shinzo Abe, have identified the competitiveness of the country's cultural exports as a huge priority.

Go on...

Some of Japan's cultural exports seem to hold definite appeal abroad. J-Pop stars such as Chage and Aska, and pop diva Ayumi Hamasaki, have sizable followings across Asia.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. The secret to Japan's exportable "hip" in three amazing words: Chage and Aska.

Ten years since its inception, the "Japan Cool" article at this point is a Mad Libs template - just fill in whatever Japanese cultural item is currently doing well in the market. ("actress Rinko Kikuchi won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role as a troubled deaf girl in Babel, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu." etc.)

Item Two:

How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community

A "troll" -- someone who comes onto an online community looking to pick fights -- has two victory conditions: Either everyone ends up talking about him, or no one talks at all.

Jeez, we've never had someone like that here before!

The Japanese economy only grew 0.6% in the January-March quarter. Other than the restructuring and suicide, the long 90s recession included a pleasurable indulgence in "recessionary chic." The decade acted as a time to reflect and to expurgate the excesses of the Bubble Era. But now that the economy is again "booming," everyone expects compensation for their long sacrifice in the form of the bigger paycheck, the bigger car, the brighter sun - none of which have really materialized. Whether true "recovery" is upon us or not on a macro scale, consumer spending hasn't budged, and no one but the top tier of oligarchs and their charlie hustle recruits are having very much fun.

The Japanese organized crime syndicates have chosen this period of disappointing results to explode in gun violence - killing mayors, cops, loved-ones, and fellow gangsters. The ultra-genius Statist plan to condone the institutionalization of crime in order to assure a stability and secrecy of felony only works when the valiant knights of dishonor decide not to employ all the handguns they have amassed over the years outside of their closed-off world. I do not personally think the government has the guts to cut out the cancer festering inside their own guts at this particular point in time, but whether there is a final showdown or not, the yakuza and yakuza pensioners are signaling to the world that they would be happy to explode in an orgy of violence and take every man, woman, and child down when their time comes. They feel cheated: The State promised them social stability, but this dream has evaporated for them too.

The promises of globalization have failed to produce an outstanding economy in the short term, and now an angry eye turns to a proxy fight with its by-products - especially, multiculturalism. Leah Dizon, of all people, has become a symbol of this discontent. For a while, the weekly magazines were obsessed with her secret Japanese conversational ability, but now Naispo has gone to the outer limits of paranoia in the conviction that Ms. Dizon is actually Japanese. The author of the previous post makes a good point that Japanese elderly conservatives cannot wrap their minds around a non-ethnic Japanese female succeeding in Japan on the same level as native Japanese women and learning to speak passable Japanese so quickly. The conspiratorial narrative of her undercover identity appears to be more soothing to the nation than the implications of the non-fiction. National myths and cultural conditioning are much easier to discard when there is gold on the other side of the obstacle course.

Breaking news here, and I don't know if or when it will hit the stations, but apparently a 50-something Osaka gangster with a gold watch and an expensive handbag walked into Softbank headquarters in Tokyo earlier today and told the receptionist "call Son Masayoshi right now, because I'm going to cut him with a knife."

For some reason, Mr. Son declined to come down, and when they told the gangster that they would call the police, he heartedly welcomed the move. Cops came later and took him away.

I don't speak "yakuza" but this sounds like some kind of weird messaging to me. Crazy guys act a bit crazier, so my guess is that there is some kind of rationale behind this action.

Update: The guy apparently showed up in a white Benz and threw 300,000 yen on the floor in 10,000 yen bills while he was shouting to the receptionists.

Naporitan spaghetti may have began its existence as a distant relation to thick and hearty Neapolitan ragus from the Old Country, but in its contemporary Japanese form, the recipe calls for a vulgarity on par with the high crimes of American junk food. Pasta noodles are joined with slices of hot dog and drowned in an ocean of tomato ketchup. (Older recipes may call for catsup in place of the ketchup.) Upon hearing of this monstrous concoction, a good Italian would probably immediately saunter off to to absolve himself at confessional; those who dare eat the dish risk a long term in purgatory.

Despite its culinary blasphemy, Naporitan perfectly represents a certain taste culture in Japan. All puns intentional here, because there is a general aesthetic surrounding the standard menu of Showa-era coffee shops. The proprietors of the trendy cafes that began to sprout up in the 1990s purged this pasta style from their menus to make room for the faux authentic sauces that go well with caffe lattes and caramel teas and bossa nova. The Naporitan only lives on at places like Kamiya Bar in Asakusa.

Some may assume the famous Kamiya Bar is nothing more than a tourist trap, but the drab interior quickly quiets any doubts about authenticity. There appears to be no functional windows, and bright lights give the middle finger to all designer theories of dim ambiance. Asakusa locals sit within the unremarkable infrastructure and down round after round of the in-house brandy-esque liquor Denki Bran at ¥260 a pop. Seating is family-style, making Kamiya Bar one of the rare places in Tokyo where you must sit next to strangers and make an effort to befriend them. In a city dominated by cliquish izakaya, clinical cafes, and gimmicky ice bars, Kamiya Bar gives Tokyo a Hofbrauhaus on the Sumida.

Although Kamiya Bar has roots in the late 19th century, the menu and atmosphere have not budged since 1970. This may reflect the fact that Asakusa seems incapable of possessing a young generation. Even if kids exist and tag along to local festivals, the spirit of the neighborhood resides on the side of the grey-haired. Asakusa is completely untouched by the Parco vs. Laforet Wars of Sophistication that changed the face of West Tokyo over the last two decades. meaning essentially that Kamiya Bar does not intentionally "preserve" a Showa aesthetic as much as the patrons seem incognizant of the major changes on the other side of town.

Without falling into the trap of declaring Kamiya Bar more "real" than someplace like Idee Cafe, I will say that Kamiya Bar offers something completely different than Tokyo's normal mission of providing the world's largest set of life-sized simulacra. A night at Kamiya Bar is an inimitable experience. You can drink a frothy cappuccino or a Glenlivet on the rocks anywhere in the world, but there is only one spot for chilled glasses of spicy Denki Bran.

This Jay Leno commercial boldly uses the massive insecurity of Americans in the late 80s/early 90s about losing the technology war to the Japanese to sell a new flavor of tortilla chips.

These days, of course, America exports all crunch-related labor overseas. And computers can no longer speak in Brooklyn-accents.

Back in the 20th century, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, "People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath."

Personally-speaking, I prefer the environmental-friendly shower to the daily soak, and I would not dare get my fingers inky from the ye ole grey sheets (unless it's the 繊研新聞). That being said, I realized recently that I use the Internet in basically the same kind of pattern as McLuhan's newspaper readers. I have my custom news feeds in my trusty RSS reader, and I very much dislike when anyone bothers me in the sacred forty-five minutes every morning that it takes to scan all of the links screaming out with new information. Like many of you young people, the Internet plays the most important activity of my morning routine.

But once that routine is over, the Internet basically loses all appeal. Who goes home after a long day of work and reads the newspaper? After spending 9 to 10 hours at work staring at a computer, the last thing I want to do in my few free hours is do anything involving a computer. Email and chat etc. all get tainted by the fact that they are located in the same heat-emitting media framework as our neo-newspaper. Once I get out of the bath, I don't need to get back in for another day.

The "new (non-work related) blog project" that will replace this rusty old Neomarxisme is making some progress - a server! a design! a programmer! To be honest, I am very excited about the new [WORD]isme.com, and the fancy layout makes this blog look like it's just a huge white field with a title at the top. There have been some complaints lately about html not working in the comment rolls and the XML acting up, but seriously, who buys a new muffler for a car they are hoping to abandon?

As part of the move, I am going through all my old archives to see what lives and what goes to live on a farm in a different state. With 821 posts over almost three years, this project alone is taking a very long time. The raw content needs better organization and categorization, but it's fun to look back and count typos. (A certain kind of post wins the category name "Ongoing Bickering.")

Due to these two reasons (and the aforementioned post that I dislike being in front of a computer in my off hours), my blogging may be sporadic over the next month. I apologize in advance, but promise you that I am not "going away" permanently.

That being said, I find myself reading a lot of books these days, and this usually spurs me into essay-writing mode. I just finished a good one about Japanese prehistory and am now hitting some academics on Japanese consumers/savers.

Also, my record - I make music - should be coming out in September, and there is still some work to be done on that.