neomarxisme

Massing

A 1977 issue of Japan Echo contains an article called "Hordes of Teenagers Massing" written by an NHK researcher named Fujitake Akira. He looks for answers to a question that had been plaguing society at the time: Why do youngsters mass in crowds and pursue the latest fads? Viewed with hindsight, this may seem like asking why water is wet, but Fujitake notes that this "youth massing phenomena," which we now accept as a standard part of Japanese culture, was a "major change" for society in the 1970s.

One example of massing:

On May 4 at about 4:30 p.m., a group of petitioners assembled in force before the entrance to Yokohama City Hall. Their petition was to make Yokohama Municipal Cultural Gymnasium available to the Bay City Rollers for a concert in Yokohama. Consisting of about 100 girls, the group had collected 5,000 signatures which they asked to be able to present to Mayor Ichio Asukata. The British rock group, which is scheduled to come to Japan again this autumn, has recently been riding a popularity of boom of almost unreal proportions. The Rollers' fans are mostly schoolgirls between the fifth and tenth grades, with an average age of about 14. The ¥2,500 albums put out by the Rollers are, of course, selling like hot cakes.

Damn youngsters with their damn Bay Cities and hot cakes.

If we concede that a majority of Japan's significant "popular culture" is comprised of "youth-oriented consumer culture" (Sanrio, Gundam, video games, Pink Lady, etc.), then Fujitake's article essentially pinpoints the beginning of what we know as Japanese pop culture to the mid-1970s. The 1960s saw amazing economic improvement for the Japanese nation, but individual consumption mostly involved bringing up the standard of modern comfort in the sphere of hardware (air conditioning, color TV, cars) rather than frivolous spending on "soft" cultural items. Instead of indulging in fashion and manufactured pop, college students in the 1960s flocked to the New Left since it was the most obvious and meaningful way to engage in social organization at the time. These kids did not prioritize accumulating "stuff" - outside of helmets and fighting sticks (ゲバ棒) needed to battle cops and ideological foes.

After the implosion of the Red Armies in the early 1970s, however, mass consumerism established itself as the new, friendlier vessel for the same socialization that the New Left had provided. Consumer products and information became a ticket to peer inclusion - i.e., if you owned the right product or knew about the right musical group, it was easy to find adoption into loose or formal organizations. 70s teenagers may have still mobilized to present petitions to political leaders, but not to remove Japan from the defense umbrella of the United States as much as to open up Japan to the thrilling manufactured Scottish pop sounds of Rollermania.

Massing itself was not a brand new thing to Japan, but in the mid-70s, children and adolescents suddenly became the driving force behind mass culture. As Fujitake writes, "One might even be inclined to say that what we are witnessing is no more than the spread to the younger generation of phenomena that had previously been the exclusive preserve of the adult generation." For example, there may have been a very long tradition of reading and writing manga, but the 1970s youth embrace of that particular medium laid out the foundations of today's entrenched manga culture. Fujitake calls 70s teenagers the "comic book generation" - which suggests that comic book reading caused a generational split. He writes, "Some parents are somewhat scornful of the comic-book generation, or perhaps we should say that they disapprove of comic-book reading." One problem with comic-books, he explains, is that they are a "private" media enjoyed alone. This breaks from the wholesome and communal nature of television, where the entire family sits around the set and chooses programming together. Just as 50s rock'n'roll developed from American teenagers being able to listen to music away from their families on personal transistor radios, youth culture in Japan needed private and personal media outlets like the phonebook manga comics in order to properly develop.

Demographics

So why did Japanese youth culture explode in the 1970s? Appropriate economic conditions created the necessary discretionary income, media diffusion, and distribution networks to allow for a consumer society, but why did youth consumers make the best target customer for manufacturers?

In the mid-1970s, Japan was an extremely young country compared to its economic equals. In 1975, only 7.9% of the Japanese population was aged 65 or older. (For comparison, the rate for the U.S. was 10.5%, the U.K. was 14.0%, and Germany was 14.8%. Only South Korea had a lower rate at 3.6%.)

Those who began to have kids in the late 60s and early 70s had grown up with very little in the way of consumer luxuries and never experienced enough prosperity to know how to spend money on themselves. When the Japanese economy started putting real money in their pockets by the late 1960s, they chose to spend this money on their children rather than themselves. They hoped to provide their own youngsters with the pleasurable and comfortable adolescence they had not experienced in their own youth.

This value shift towards child-oriented consumption hit the fuel of a very large youth generation to create an army of young cultural participants. And due to an extremely limited set of media guides to products and services, kids all "massed" at the same events and stores. More and more companies were obviously happy to get into the youth market once they understood that this was the locus of consumer fervor in society. Soon youth culture had enough artifacts in circulation to really assert itself as a major part of the total market system.

Demographics Now

If demographics helped launched the Japanese pop culture explosion, how do the current conditions appear in comparison? Very, very gray. Japan's elderly rate skyrocketed to 17.2% in 2000 - the third highest in the OECD. Predictions for 2025 expect it to push 28.9%, and recent extrapolations have the population reaching 36% elderly by 2050. More than a third of society will be over 65.

I will concede that "youth culture" may not exist in its current form in 50 years regardless of demographic change, but why should we assume that Japan's manufacturers will continue to focus on children when children no longer make up a robust consumer segment? Even now, the conventional wisdom paints the retiring Baby Boomers as the real goldmine, and producers are shifting their strategies accordingly.

Interestingly though, luxury apparel companies and street fashion brands in Japan are all massively expanding their children's lines based on the concept that the rich grandparent generation will concentrate spending on their few grandchildren rather than on themselves. This will keep money moving into youth products for a while, but instead of the 1970s strategy of hitting as many people as possible in the masses with inexpensive goods, producers are concentrating on the sale of expensive high-grade goods to a handful of elite kids.

Fewer youth also may lead to a more "adult" cultural environment, which is not necessarily a bad thing. That being said, Japan has spent the last forty years moving more and more ex-adolescents into the kind of infantile consumption originally developed for children. Before children took over consumer culture, the 1960s mainstream culture often relied on an elitist mix of serious subject matter. Magazines like Hanashi no Tokushu (「話の特集」) offered intellectual discourse, political philosophizing, guerrilla music, and avant-garde art/theatre all in one bundle. Popular and youth culture these days (including much of the counterculture) seems completely stripped of an explicitly intellectual element. Evangelion creator Anno Hideki recently was quoted in the Atlantic Monthly article "Let's Die Together" as saying:

“I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”

This sentiment echoes Asada Akira's idea of Japan being a state based on "infantile capitalism," but regardless of whether Japanese society is adult enough or not, the truth of the matter is that Japan has a relative lack of infrastructure for producing "adult" popular culture. Between Pokemon, the Wii, crayon-colored Bape hoodies, and Naruto, etc., a vast majority of the Gross National Cool export success stories are either childish in target or childish in spirit. Japanese companies learned to make extremely innovative and exportable youth cultural products because of the conditions of their own market: a huge consumer base of young people and fierce competition for attention. The question is, will the Japanese manufacturers be able to retool their machines to make "adult"-oriented material or will they be able to provide the world's children with products when there are barely any children in Japan to provide the test laboratory?

Maybe the key is the Nintendo DS - a product developed nominally for children with widespread usage amongst adults. So maybe culture has no demographic destiny. If adults themselves are a huge market for infantile products, the number of children has only minimal impact on the vitality of youth culture.

A few years ago, I kept bugging my Japanese friends about the origin of the phrase "miihaa" (ミーハー) - which is used to identify young people who are overly starstruck towards celebrities, weak-kneed to anything popular, and oversensitive to trends. "Superficial" would be the simplest translation. One theory was that it was a Japanese pronunciation of "me her" but this made no sense to me.

But really, who needs friends when you've got Wikipedia?

"Miihaa" is a pejorative term targeted towards superficial women who are engrossed in low-culture like celebrities, sports, astrology, ghosts, and blood-types and who show no real interest in education or culture.

The term began to be used around the same time that Ooya Souichi [famed post-war journalist and critic] came up with his idea of 「一億総白痴化」 [literally, The Dumbing Down of One Hundred Million - a comment on the mass media's vulgarization of culture] in the mid-50s as television began to diffuse into society.

The term "miihaa" was born at the beginning of the Showa Era as an abbreviation of "Mii-chan" and "Haa-chan" (these words are said to come from the names "Miyo-chan/Hana-chan" which were common women's names at the time.) These women were also called the "Miihaa Tribe" [ミーハー族]. At the present, the word can also be used for men...The term is often used incorrectly these days to mean "Those who only become interested in something after it has become the talk of the public sphere (and picked up in the media, etc.)"

Over time, the word has retained its pejorative edge, but seems to have adapted to changes in the nature of elitism. At first, "Miihaa" was meant to disparage women who found too much interest in low culture and the mass media. The sex specificity is important here: the educated male elites no doubt saw the roots of this problem with mass culture in some deficient aspect of femininity. Or they rejected interest in the common culture as an improper fit with traditional female roles.

Over the last several decades, however, the term has become sex-neutral. The problem implied in "miihaa" has shifted from a general problematic interest in low culture to the callousness of being interested in a specific pop culture item solely because it is popular. In other words, consumer culture itself is no longer a problem: the offense stems from a lack of personal judgment about the value of the item in question. There is now an "elite" way to consume that is one-step ahead of the public (世間) and a "mass" unsophisticated way to consume that puts the social participation aspects of consumerism/fandom ahead of the personal definition aspects of consumerism/fandom.

(Update: This site has "me her" as a possible derivation, but it's less convincing than Mii-chan/Haa-chan)

It often feels like a majority of people on Omotesando road in the middle of the day are not shoppers but photographers, ready to pounce on the next stylish girl with pink hair coming out of Wendy's with an S-sized frosty. Somebody, however, has to supply the massive amounts of street snaps in Japan's monthly fashion magazines. (PingMag has an interview with some of these photographers here.)

At first look, these impromptu style portraits seem to function as a way for editors to capture "what's happening on the the streets" and pass it along to their readers. Youngsters can then compare their own style against the "standard" implied in the pictures or nick ideas for their own wardrobes from the most stylish.

The reality behind this media phenomenon, however, is not so clear-cut. I recently interviewed the managing editor at one of Japan's longest-running and most prestigious male fashion magazines (I am unfortunately not at liberty to reveal where at the moment, but I may be able to in due time.) The magazine had run a special feature on "snaps" for their May issue, and I asked him how they went about procuring the large number of images.

First, they ran an announcement in the back of the previous issue about where and when the street fashion shoots would be held in each of Japan's major cities. This brought the magazine's core readers out to the photographers, reducing the production team's reliance on passers-by. Once shots came back to the editors, they selected photos based on the subject's skill in appropriating and using the styles advocated in the magazine. By choosing specific styles from a pre-selected group, the editors were able to strengthen the validity of their own fashion message by demonstrating the prevalence of the magazine's signature style out on "the streets" through this overwhelming and implicitly-objective photographic evidence.

I asked, are these fashion shots helpful to editors for discovering the next trends? In other words, do street snaps also function as a source of inspiration for fashion editors? No, it's the opposite. Streets snaps allow editors to check to make sure that their wardrobe recipes end up being used by their target groups. For example, the magazine in question had been advocating wearing neckties with short-sleeve polo shirts for a year but had yet to see this combination out on the town. In the May street shots, however, kids had clearly adopted the style, and these photos helped ease fears in the editorial office that their message had not be in vain.

Obviously, a magazine like FRUiTS is a different animal - more interested in the artistry of fashion than facilitating the sales and consumption of it. (Last time I checked, FRUiTS did not offer brand names and prices next to the outfits like CUTiE.) Therefore, there is no real commercial agenda to guide the photographers and editors of FRUiTS into crafting photos towards a singular narrative. We should also understand that FRUiTS is not used in the same way as other fashion magazines. It is simply a collection of photos rather than a prescriptive magazine where readers demand a gentle voice of authority.

If editors from the mainstream fashion titles are selecting individual street shots with the intention of proving the widespread usage of their own advocated style, where does the bottom-up flow of tastes come into play in this process? Bottom-up implies that the elite and powerful will adopt and champion ideas from their "inferiors" and customers, but a majority of Japanese magazine editors do not go through the street snap production process with much room for inserting opinions, styles, and concepts that they do not already approve. At best, editors are using the photos to gauge the efficacy of their own message with reader tastes, but this involves consumers/readers saying "yes" or "no" to top-down styles rather than creating their own complex message and sending it up the food chain.

I do not mean to deny the existence of bottom-up taste flows in Japan - for example, the brands comprising the Tokyo Girls Collection are mostly designed by young women the same age as the consumers. But with the street snaps in the most widely-read fashion magazines, I find it hard to pronounce an equality of top-down and bottom-up flows once the real mechanics of the process have been illuminated.

"Wait right there, young man! What do you think you are wearing?"
"Mom, Grandma got me this."
"You think I am going to let you out of the house like that?"
"It's clean. You just washed it. The other shirt is the stained one..."
"Where is the logo?"
"Mom, this is MUJI."
"I got you a whole closet full of Louis Vuitton and you want to go out of the house in that and embarrass your father and mother after all we've done for you..."

Kids. They come out of the womb and immediately start killing your cool. They spit up and drool like they've never read a page from Emily Post. And the clothing...! I would rather give my BMW to charity than have my daughter wear Oshkosh B'gosh overalls.

The top tiers of Japanese society were starting to feel the very burn of inadequately class-identifying children's apparel, and so media firm X-Knowledge has imported and localized the French children's fashion magazine MilK. (I am not sure if you knew this, but all I's in magazine titles must be lower-case - e.g., FRUiTS and CUTiE.) Maybe you can't outfit your offspring in bespoke suits from Savile Row quite yet or don't have the time to diamond-encrust your kindergartener's randosel backpacks, but MilK Japon will give you tips on dressing your kids in APC, Paul & Joe, and Agnes B so they become one step closer in spirit to little beautiful blond children from the Continent.

MilK's founder Isis-Colombe Combréas writes the following mission statement on the website for the French publication:

MilK, because we all feel something in common: nostalgic for our childhood. And here we are, new parents with a mission: to pass on a genuine education that also helps children to develop a taste for beautiful things. This transient moment, we want to live it together, like a hedonistic transition where each moment is an occasion to be an aesthete. Milk takes us on a modern journey through the world of childhood. Both the photographs and illustrations reveal our desire to discover together the still unexplored world of children’s fashion. From family way of life to the latest children leisure activities, all the new spheres will be explored.“Kidding” is born…surfing on today’s wave…and it’s Milk’s raison d’être.

Parents automatically instill their own aesthetic values, class-biases, and fashion sense upon their children, but MilK provides greater source material for the successful transmission of the parental taste culture. The French MilK, however, seems to approach the "aesthete" in the classic anti-nouveau riche disposition where "taste" (a rare and natural gift from the gods) trumps vulgar demands for brand labels and conspicuous luxury. The latest issue's featured stories are freak-folkers CocoRosie, American director Sofia Coppola, environmentalism, and traveling to Cancun, Barcelona, Palm Springs, and La Landelle.

The Japanese version's cover, on the other hand, seems to advocate a totally different kind of aesthetic lifestyle for children:

  • (The world has been eagerly awaiting) the debut of the Louis Vuitton kids Line
  • 100 kids chairs
  • An essay from supermodel Helena Christensen
  • Cool "adult" T-shirts for your kids
  • A silver egg has been born from Hermès.

No real surprise here, but MilK Japon pretty much reads like every other catalog-esque, advertorial-filled consumer guide in Japan. The editors seem to retain a certain portion of the less-boldly consumerist aspects of the French sister publication, but product information dominates the cover and reveals the central appeal to target readers.

Even though I grew up in relatively non-urban college towns across the lower-portion of the United States, I am not going to claim that there was some kind of "pure" classless youth fashion code that we can look back on fondly as an age of innocence. I regularly wore Polo shirts without the slightest consideration that this had an impact on my placement within the schoolyard social structure. MilK's introduction of class and taste into the experience of childhood is not especially new, but is a sharp escalation of pre-existing behavior. Instead of pretending like we don't outfit our kids in our own favorite brands and labels, MilK just clarifies the process so that producers and consumers can find themselves more easily.

Socioeconomic class was intentionally hidden in the post-War period, but this idea that taste-based distinction should begin in early childhood will make class much more obvious for a new generation of Japanese. Hopefully, however, the kids in LV and Hermès won't have to go to school with the riff-raff whose parents don't read MilK. Those dirty Pigpens wouldn't appreciate their peers' clothing nor understand the amazing capital accumulation of their parents anyway.

This guy. I've got no specific, personal beef with Hiroshi Fujiwara - the man ultimately responsible for bringing A Bathing Ape, Undercover, Head Porter, Goodenough, AFFA, Visvim, Soph., Base Station, Neighborhood, Sarcastic, Real Mad Hectic, Original Fake, and Bounty Hunter into this world and ushering in the Golden Age of Underground Crossover in the 1990s. He has been rewarded handsomely for his promotions and innovations of Japanese consumer culture over the years, and everyone now concedes that the man is the coolest Japanese person to ever walk the Earth. I do not contest the general conclusions of that assessment.

Seeing his face on the cover of Tokion in June 2007, however, has a very clear subtext: this hazily-defined, yet specific cultural enterprise in which many of us are actively or passively invested has succumbed to total and utter contraction. Terminal decline! Messages and dialogue now depend on a constant stream of flashbacks stuck somewhere between nostalgia and amnesia. Hiroshi Fujiwara is only on the cover, because They/We have yet to find a modern day replacement.

Tokion knows fully well that there is nothing new to say about HF unless somebody suddenly decided after all these years to pry open the Pandora's Box and start asking the hard questions about the mechanics behind his success. (For example, is nobody interested in pointing out the contradiction of a master capitalist and friend to wrestling dons un-ironically displaying portraits of Marx and Engels in his studio?) But no, HF's the same-old tight-lipped magician - never betraying his fellow practitioners by revealing the nature of his marketing tricks. Unlike Nigo - the once Cornelius clone with Buddy Holly glasses who underwent a complete 転向 conversion into the Church of Hip Hop over the last six years - HF remains the same old mysterious HF. There is something comforting, however, in the dependability of his enigmatic existence. The only thing new about HF at this juncture is that intentionally-unglamorous thing on his nose - which would have kids lining up at pharmacies if "kids" still did that kind of thing.¹

Now I don't blame Mr. Fujiwara for being on the cover. He's not asking for more press - he's just the target of the aimless media machine. The problems lie deep within the anachronistic cultural rules that still guide the hands of editors and other gatekeepers. We continue to live in the shadows of living giants like Fujiwara, and their massive and manifold successes set an impossible standard for newfound stardom. There is no new Hiroshi Fujiwara, and there will be no new Hiroshi Fujiwara. No one will ever pilot independent underground street clothing into a massive empire and a penthouse in Roppongi Hills again. Nike is not flying the head of FatYo! around in the corporate jet. So while everyone is waiting for the new Hiroshi Fujiwara, they have no choice but to put the actual Hiroshi Fujiwara #1 on the cover.

And you can't just abandon Hiroshi Fujiwara, because he is currently the only living-and-breathing relic of the dream still integral to the foundations of the Tokion Weltanschauung - that historic-specific delusion that somehow niche tastes and DIY can cross over to mainstream success and fame. But at what point does Fujiwara cease to be a role model and start mutating into a symbol of cultural oppression from history's past. I remember seeing "Kill Your Idols" on a t-shirt from one of the myriad brands in his orbit, but no one is actually reading the text: HF is the least likely icon to die of regicide.

For countless years, you have forsaken traditional gears and brakes. You have weathered insults after insults: "Yo, where's your gears, baldy?" You have envied your friends who can pedal backwards with no effect on propulsion. You have repeatedly watched Quicksilver to the detriment of personal relationships. You are the lone fixed gear bicycle rider, and I know, it's been lonely.

I bring gospel, my friends: you are no longer alone. Over the last year, "fixies" have become extremely popular with early adopters and other respected people on the left side of the Rogers curve. There is no longer a reason to be ashamed of your blue-chrome frame with gravity-defying handlebars that you have been hiding in your attic since the Clinton Administration. I recently went to a Stussy store launch in Shibuya, and the lawn outside was littered with dozens upon dozens of fixed gear bicycles. Finally, these hardened young men, who have no doubt been riding fixies for decades, have summoned the courage to announce their choice of bicycles to the world: yes, I ride a fixie and you can no longer treat me as a second-class citizen!

The daring rider may bemoan such safety in numbers, but we all know that the fixie trend has absolutely nothing to do with image, fads or fashions. This is about bravery - the bravery required for the common man to embrace the vehicles of the velodrome set. The bravery required to look at a Schwinn retailer in the eye and say, no more, grandfather.

So I proclaim: your time has come. This is not the low-rider bicycle boom for the 21st century - this is the single most important change in the way we think about mobility and there will be no turning back. When you see me riding my clunky Peugot Metro around town, push me off into a muddy ditch and scream, "To hell with cachet! Like the Thane of Glamis, I strike thee down and proclaim a freedom for my people!"

Sometime in my junior year of college, either Harvard Business School or Harvard Law School - I forget which one and am too lazy to Google - threw a conference on digital rights management and music with sponsorship from such amazingly long-lived and influential companies as Riffage.com and EMusic.com. They invited musicians Chuck D and They Might Be Giants to be special panelists, and a few of the artists in attendance gave a special concert at the Cambridge House of Blues with entrance limited to conference registrants.

My suitemate Phil somehow scored tickets to this special show and graciously invited me to come along. I had spent years 15 to 17 trading bootleg TMBG Dial-a-Song tapes across the early Internet and yet had never managed to see them perform live. Even though I was far from the throes of TMBG fandom at age 21, I was hardly going to say no.

So Phil and I walked over to the House of Blues and are greeted with an empty room filled with around 150 law dorks. With plans for a late-night show in Brooklyn the very same night, TMBG go on first - at like 6:30 pm - an hour before anyone really thinks about enjoying music. Oddly, only about 40 of these law dorks are the kind of dorks who like They Might Be Giants. I am conflicted about the atmosphere: on one hand I love that I am watching They Might Be Giants play the kind of tiny venue usually rented for funky wedding parties or drunken alumni blasts where ex-young men from semi-secret societies get up on stage and jam, but I also feel bad for They Might Be Giants since this must be the smallest and least gratifying gig they have played since the mid-80s. John F barks at the soundman the entire time about his monitors, because seriously, what are we all doing here?

After 45 minutes of going through the motions, TMBG file off stage, and the conference folks all head back to the bar to get MC hammered. The next band are some white Southern guys I have never heard of - Spoon. Who's Spoon, right? I am not sure why they were at this conference in the first place, or in Cambridge, or asked to play with TMBG, but soon they are on stage and start playing away like this is SXSW and we care. Even with the dimmed lights and the bass waves vibrating the air, the entire audience remains at the back of the room near the alcohol. Not a single person returns to the stage nor even bothers to turn around and dignify the band by facing forward. The guys are playing song after song, and literally, not a single person comes within a 2 meter area of the stage. (Hey, I don't know who these dudes are either.) Britt Daniel starts to get visibly irate and offers an honest plea to the crowd in the way back: Hey, you guys should listen. We are a really good band. No one heeds his orders, and they eventually finish their set. I spent the entire time trying to figure out how they were going to use a phrase sampler sitting on top of an organ, which ended up being used solely on one song and inaudibly at that.

Spoon departs as quietly as they came in, and the crew sets up two turntables: DJ Spooky is in the house. That Subliminal Kid - a man who is aptly and un-ironically labeled "the world's most pretentious man" by Momus - had been around campus a year before when he gave a "lecture" at the Carpenter Center for our most elite semi-hipsters in the VES department that literally proceeded like: "Using your hands as an instrument... Manipulating the media... Tactile... like... Valentine de Saint-Point... Futurist Manifesto... Here let me show you (Five minutes of scratching) This record is really rare. I am going to pass it around." I think he was nervous and could not find the mental strength to create any sort of arguments out of his silver-tipped bullet points, but the whole thing involved more pointless name dropping and lightweight obliqueness than a Bible thrown off a cliff.

So Paul Miller comes on, and the law school guys are pumped. They have spent the last two hours ignoring Spoon and getting their drunk on and they are ready to party. Everyone collects around the stage, and within minutes, Paul Miller drops on "Pump Up the Volume" by M/A/R/R/S to huge applause and high anticipation. But in signature DJ Spooky style, he decides to do all sorts of illbient dubby echo shit to the track, making it totally and completely undanceable. The conference attendees, however, are either complete Philistines who don't understand why this is like Valentine de Saint-Point or just too ethanol'd out to care, and they just start getting DOWN to Pump Up the Volume..ume..ume..ume..ume..ume.......emu... emu... EMU.. ume... wicca-wicca. Like drink in one hand, bad white guy frat party, knees-forward, butt-out jammy dance to ridiculously over-theoretical music noise.

After about 10 minutes of this, I had to go home.

TOKYO: About 100 Japanese governing party lawmakers denounced the Attack on Pearl Harbor as a fabrication on Tuesday, contesting American claims that Japanese soldiers launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1941.

The members of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party said there was no evidence to prove the aerial assault against the Hawaiian naval base, then known as "Pearl Harbor." They accused Washington of using the alleged incident as a "political advertisement."

Nariaki Nakayama, head of the group created to study World War II historical issues and education, said documents from the Japanese government's archives indicated that about 240 people were killed - about one-tenth of the more commonly cited figure of 2400 - in the 1941 attack. The U.S. says that 2,400 people were killed and 1,178 wounded.

Historians generally agree that the Japanese Navy launched the preemptive strike to wipe out the American fleet in one fell swoop.

Nakayama said the study, which was initiated in part because this year is the 66th anniversary of the battle, determined there was no violation of international law.

Toru Toida, another member of the group, demanded that photographs portraying the Japanese military in a negative light be removed from U.S. war memorials.

"We are absolutely positive that there was no attack on Pearl Harbor," Toida said.

A certain explanation about the rise of Japanese Cool has wiggled its way into the conventional wisdom: the creative explosion in the 1990s that enabled the mass-exporting of Japanese popular culture to the rest of the world happened precisely because the Japanese economy went sour. The pundits employing this argument posit an inverse-relation between economic growth and culture. In other words, creativity increased once the Japanese stopped obsessing over economic expansion. A relatively eloquent version of this argument appears in Roland Kelts' Japanamerica (180-181):

Younger Japanese had grown-up amid the wealth of the post-war Japan Inc. machine just as its cogs were starting to falter. But instead of stymieing them, the resulting slump actually cultivated their creativity. In a weak job market, graduates and dropouts alike had little to lose.

[redacted]

"The recession was enormously productive for [Japan's] counterculture," says 2dk's David d'Heilly. "Previously these people were at Dentsu cranking out Honda ad's. Now they're setting up their own indie fashion labels, or coding the Web, or doing other things that are closer to what they want to be doing."

[redacted]

Novelist Haruki Murakami points to the role that adversity, albeit in a relatively mild form, played in fostering Japan's less corporate cultural identity: "When we were rich in the 1980s, we weren't producing any kind of international culture. But when we got poor again, we got humble. Then we became creative."

There are very serious flaws to reasoning. (The following points may seem familiar to long-time Néomarxisme readers, but we - learn - by - repetition.)

Problem 1: The So-Called "Lost Decade" Saw the Greatest Consumer Spending on "Cool" in Japanese History

The Japanese stock market may have crashed in 1990, but the "Bubble Era" did not really end as a cultural period until around 1993. Even if we mark the "lost decade" as beginning in that year, it really took the sarin gas attacks and Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995 to deeply etch a more permanent shadow on the Japanese psyche. But despite these human tragedies and the clear descent into "不景気" (recession) by the mid-1990s, spending on import fashion still managed to reach its highest level ever in the year 1996. In other words, fashion consumption was much more expansive in the middle of the 1990s than in the "rich" days of 1985-1991. (Although the market went into decline from 1997 on, the superbrands of LV and Gucci etc. continued to grow and grow up until recently.)

The Japanese music market followed a similar pattern. From 1989 on, consumers gobbled up CDs unlike anything ever seen before. The market kept growing until peaking in 1999.

General consumer spending may have taken a hit in the 1990s, but the "cultural markets" never had it better. Essentially, consumers had learned to live a certain consumer lifestyle in the 1980s, and they did not immediately cease spending on aspirational items once the Bubble ended. The only real change was the target of spending - values moved from a conspicuous consumption to more "cultural" means of discrimination. This aesthetic change, however, was part of a global phenomenon and did not happen in total isolation.

The creative markets were so big in the 1990s as to elevate the amounts of money on the fringes to a level of serious profit. Not only did tiny record labels like Escalator, for example, make livable sales for their artists in the mid-1990s, mega-labels like Sony used their massive profits to essentially subsidize the releases of niche musicians such as Yoshinori Sunahara and Supercar. The unprecedented market size and market diversity in Japan in the 1990s seriously questions Murakami's idea of the Japanese becoming "poor" and suggests that the mass consumer expenditure on a wide variety of products was primarily responsible for the energy in pop culture.

Problem 2: The Salaryman-to-Creative Profession Transfer Has a Lag

The Japanese employment system is so rigid that those aiming for white-collar positions must start moving down the one-way path at the high school level. Those students who have chosen to go to art schools or trade schools instead of universities are not traditionally recruited by the most prestigious companies to enter as formal employees in the way that the phrase "Japan Inc" implies. They have already decided to forgo this career track.

Therefore, a sudden jolt to the economy and subsequent breakdown of the traditional white-collar dream in the early 1990s would not have had much direct influence on the graduates of this period. White-collar recruitment may have been slower in the mid-1990s, but those gunning most rabidly for a creative job at the beginning of the Lost Decade had already made that choice before knowing the downturn would transform into total stagnation. The first youths to have had time to readjust career plans to match the realities of the recession would not have reached career age until later in the decade.

Problem 3: The Oft-Cited "Creative Geniuses" of Japan All Decided to Be Creators Before the Bubble Collapsed

Welts names Takashi Murakami, Nigo, DJ Krush, Yoshimoto Banana, and Amy Yamada as Japanese artists who really brought attention to the high-quality of Japanese pop culture,. For the moment, I accept this list as at least partially canonical. If we set the age of "occupational decision" to 20-22 (as is usually required in Japan), all of these individuals had already cast their die by the end of the Bubble. Nigo attended Bunka Fukuso Gakuin to study magazine editorial and dropped out to start working as a DJ and stylist. By the time he started Nowhere in 1993, he had already destroyed any chances at taking up a white-collar job - not that he cared.

The writers included in this list are too old to prove anything about the post-Bubble. Banana Yoshimoto grew up in an literary/intellectual family and hit the big time with her debut novel Kitchen in 1988. Amy Yamada - born in 1959 - began her career in the middle of the Bubble.

Takashi Murakami reached 22 in 1984 and spent the 80s finishing a doctorate at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. DJ Krush very literally spent his youth in the yakuza. Needless to say, Dentsu wasn't calling.

If you want to consider the Shibuya-kei guys, Pizzicato Five debuted in the mid-1980s, and Kenji Ozawa & Keigo Oyamada in Flipper's Guitar had released three albums by the time the Bubble ended. Their fame in the mid-90s was contingent on their prior success.

In sum, the 1990s saw the creative peak (ages 25-35) of Bubble-raised or Bubble-debut individuals rather than those shaped by the recessionary environment in their formative years.

Problem 4: The Creative Market was a Viable Choice

The aforementioned creators not only had chosen their career by the time the Bubble burst, but the creative markets were so strong in the early 1990s that choosing art over "white-collar life" was a perfectly rational economic choice. Instead of having "nothing to lose," these artists had "everything to gain."

There is also something insulting about the assumption that these highly motivated and talented individuals chose their careers only when the door closed to lifetime employment at a white-collar company. Whatever you think about Nigo, the man clearly did not set out to be a millionaire; he simply wanted to live a creative/celebrity lifestyle, and his pecuniary success was serendipitous.

Problem 5: Now with a Real Lack of Formal Employment, Where is the Creative Explosion?

Compared to the early 1990s, the job market now offers even fewer full-time sei-shain positions to young people. Part-time, contract, and temp workers have become the norm. Despite an almost universal understanding that the white-collar "Japan Inc" system only helps a minority of top-level university graduates, where are the armies of young people who have chosen art above all and have found success in both Japan and the West? Putting aside my short-sighted and pessimistic "termial decline" meta-narrative, very few critics in Japan or elsewhere see Gen Y in Japan leading a second creative explosion matching the 1990s. Some freeters may claim to be pursuing artistic dreams, but the evaporation of the consumer market for their work makes it difficult for them to establish their careers.

Solutions: So What Did Happen?

The Néomarxisme line has always gone something like this:

1) The lifestyle demands that accompanied the Bubble Era led companies to build the prerequisite informational channels, retail infrastructure, and taste standards needed for a vibrant (consumer-based) creative culture. The era itself, however, did not yet have a surplus of artists who could locally produce world-class material. Economic conditions have a more direct influence on infrastructure more than just aesthetic mood - especially in Japan where the cultural markets were still under development.
2) The creators in the Bubble Era were children of a much less "privileged" era, and while the isolation from global standards worked perfectly well for some art forms such as anime and manga, those indulging in the hard-to-define "cool" sectors such as fashion and music could not produce enough materials that created an impression abroad. (Rei Kawakubo [b. 1942] and the YMO crowd [b. 1947-1952] are the most obvious exceptions.)
3) At least for the Ura-Harajuku and Shibuya-kei crowds, the most famous creators of the 1990s had used their Bubble years to indulge in niche foreign cultural products to a completely new degree (made possible by the infrastructure outlined in point 1), so by the time they hit an age where they could be cultural producers themselves, they had the know-how to make culture on a global level and could use the more sophisticated retail environments to achieve mass recognition.
4) Like almost all artists, the 1990s creators naturally reacted against what came before them. In their case, their movement away from the superficial nouveau riche tastes of the Bubble Era brought them (and their consumers) to more "artistic, creative" pursuits. These values worked well with the reactionary chic zeitgeist, but in the case of Shibuya-kei, for example, these value changes began way before the Bubble even ended.

So the logic is not "recession shifted resources and attention away from economic pursuits," but "the economic boom of the 1980s created the infrastructure and human inputs required for the 1990s creative boom." There was a value shift, but the creators who best represented this shift began operating within an anti-Bubble aesthetic before the Bubble even ended. Consumers may have found their message more compelling in a recessionary environment, but the artists themselves did not choose "creativity" over "white-collar career stability" because of the economic downturn.

From Roland Kelts' Japanamerica (157):

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when anime and manga fans in Japan were meeting one another at domestic conventions, they began to recognize one another's faces, though they did not know each other by name. By way of greeting, they said, "ota-ku," roughly meaning "hey, you," though with the more formal, less casual intimations of the French second-person address, "vous." In American English, it might be more like, "Hello there, sir." In 1983, when Japan's economy was beginning its monumental rise, journalist Akio Nakamori wrote a serialized magazine story, "The Investigation of Otaku," explaining the term to common readers. Japan's manga/anime-obsessed nerds and geeks, he wrote, address one another by the following term: "Ota-ku."

"Ota-ku" = 大田区?