Representatives of the necktie industry made an official appeal to Environment Minister Sakihito Ozawa to end Cool Biz — the campaign to cut greenhouse emissions by encouraging white-collar workers to work sans jacket and tie in the summer months to reduce dependence on air conditioning. The necktie lobby says it’s unfair to treat neckties as if they were the cause of global warming. They claim that summer sales are down 34% since Cool Biz started. They claim that their “necklace-tie” innovation failed to catch on. They also pointed out that PM Hatoyama campaigned with his necktie on, the association chairman emphasized that neckties bestow oan air of integrity (of course, Koizumi famously kept his off during the 2005 general election and won a similar landslide victory).

And as far as the short articles on the issue explain, it doesn’t look like the necktie representative even bothered to make much of a case, instead relying on an emotional plea to sympathize with the suffering necktie makers/sellers. But why force a good portion of the working population to cut off the circulation to their heads to benefit a mere 45 companies?

His argument isn’t even consistent. If he is advocating the end of Cool Biz, then why would we need those necklace-ties? If the necklace-ties are just an example of a failed attempt at innovation, then what is their alternative proposal for helping the country meet its Kyoto commitments? Whatever its faults, Cool Biz at least keeps thermostats higher and prevents people from wasting energy making neckties.

Even in a statement on its website, the association can offer no good reason for reversing the recommendation, aside from the fundamental unfairness of singling out neckties. You can feel the rage as they blame the government for “cultivating the image that the country can achieve almost all its CO2 emissions targets just by not wearing neckties.” They also mention they support the underlying goal of cutting emissions and are even a member of Team Minus 6, a coalition of groups signaling their commitment to helping meet the Kyoto goal of a 6% emissions cut vs. 1990 levels.

This isn’t the first time the necktie industry has tried to stop Cool Biz. Back in 2005 when the program began, the association sent a letter asking the cabinet to stop using the words “no necktie,” resulting in ample Internet ridicule not unlike this blog post.

And in 2007, members of the fashion industry ran a “Dress Up Men” campaign showcasing ways to stay cool while still wearing a suit and tie (with official support of METI, seemingly running at cross purposes with their environment ministry “rival”). At that point, Cool Biz was considered uncool enough to inspire an ironic Coca Cola commercial, but since then white-collar workers seem to be have reverted to following corporate dress codes like good worker bees.

One detail mentioned in the media is that the chairman handed Ozawa an official request. Sadly, we have no way of knowing what they said since this document is not on the web, but surely it’s some rehash of their website. It’s kind of amazing they are having such a hard time winning support for white-collar formality in Japan of all places. I’d have some sympathy for them if ties weren’t such a random, arbitrary accessory to begin with.

Another troubling undertone of this story: The premise that the government can turn Cool Biz on or off like a faucet. Sure, this movement started as a government initiative, but can’t organizations in Japan decide for themselves what makes proper office attire?

The minister made no promises but said he understands the need to “strike a balance.” Sure, unless Big Neckties control millions of votes or somehow know how to press the minister’s buttons, I can’t see this meeting getting them anywhere. If I were him, I would be mad at DPJ secretary general Ichiro Ozawa for approving this meeting. Since the new government came into power, all lobbying activity to MPs must be approved by the party headquarters. If people like this are getting through, maybe that’s a sign the environment minister isn’t exactly the most valued member of the cabinet.

While we weren’t looking, Cool Biz has suddenly become more vulnerable. In November, the Government Revitalization Unit recommended cutting the PR budget for Cool Biz in half. As far as I can see, the Environment Ministry does not even bother mentioning it in its FY10 budget requests (PDF). It’s possible that a silent majority is on the tie industry’s side. People don’t really seem to plan their wardrobes around Cool Biz, so when the season comes ’round it just looks like a bunch of salarymen who forgot to put their ties on. Some companies even wear special tags informing visitors that a special mission from the government is preventing them from showing the proper seriousness by wearing ties.

Cool Biz is great, despite the occasional setbacks (some offices get too hot). My only complaint is that it doesn’t last year-round. The government has no responsibility to promote one industry over another (unless it’s part of an ambitious industrial policy). So sorry tie industry, the planet and millions of neck take priority over your 45 companies. Unless the minister suddenly decides neckties are a vital national industry you are out of luck.

A translation of Mori Ōgai 森鴎外’s Honyaku ni tsuite 「翻譯に就いて」 (”On translation”), published in 1914 for a collection of essays by famous writers on literary technique.

ON TRANSLATION

Translation and fallacy

I have been asked to write something on translation for this book. It appears that I am considered a major figure among translators. Very well — but on the other hand, there are those who put it about that my translations are almost entirely erroneous, that I have no talent for translation, and that my translations have no value.

It has become fashionable of late for translators to bring their work to my home and have me write an introduction to it. Even those with no connection to me whatsoever come to make these requests. Some even admit that they do so despite reservations on their own part because the “vulgar masses” trust my introductions. Some only use my introduction after altering individual characters to meet some mediocre or even erroneous stylistic standards. It seems to me that many of those who request introductions from me are the very same people who claim to find errors in my own translations.

When I do examine some word or phrase identified as a flaw in one of my translations, I find myself in agreement only very rarely. Translation of novels and plays is not philological research. One’s work is not completed simply by translating each word individually and arranging the results in lines. And so complaints that words not in the original were added deliberately and accusations that words in the original were intentionally left out do not distress me in the slightest.

The real-life example of Nora

Complaints have been voiced of late about Nora, my translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Here I shall discuss two or three of the most ridiculous examples.

The term used for the boy whom Nora has carry the Christmas tree home I translated denbin 傳便. This is an error; it should rather be what was once called a kobashiri 小走, a “messenger boy” in the West of today — so I was informed, with a knowing look. But the first city in our country to have “messenger boys” was Ogura Kokura in Kyushu, and this is where the word denbin was first coined. Ogura is a queer place in general, and one which also saw the first appearance in Japan of the advertising pillars known as “Litfass columns” in the West. As for what a kobashiri might be, I do not know. In old Edo there were men known as tayoriya 便屋 ["letter carriers"], but these were not the same as denbin.

Writing of Nora’s house, I mentioned a zenbō 前房 [literally "front room"]. This is actually something like a corridor, people told me, or “a small sitting room by the genkan,” or the genkan itself. What’s more, they took care to preface these remarks with “in the houses of Norway…” That the zenbō is something like a corridor is true in all the countries of the West. Every country, more or less, has a word corresponding to zenbō, and I have used it with this meaning for some twenty or thirty years. To translate “door to the zenbō” as “door to the genkan,” as I was urged, would be rather odd. Genkan, they say, originally referred to the gate of a zen temple. In a personal home, it is the front entrance. There may be a door in the genkan, but surely not a door to the genkan. And as for “a small sitting room by the genkan,” such phrasing is sheer self-gratification.

Amedama and macaroons

The sweets that Nora eats I translated makuron マクロン. Write rather amedama 飴玉, I was told. Advice like this simply boggles the mind. Tins of almond macaroons have been shipped here in great number so that you may buy them at Aokido whenever you please. Reflect, if you will, on the difference in situation between a woman of the West eating a macaroon and a child of Japan eating an amedama. I recall one scene in a novel by someone-or-other wherein two female university students in Paris’s Latin Quarter munch on macaroons as they trade stories of heartbreak. To switch those macaroons for amedama, of all things — well, it would certainly be comical. The gist of such teachings is that item should appear in translation as appropriately chosen items unique to Japan, but as for myself, I strive to avoid things unique to Japan, the better to produce an extraordinary effect. Furthermore, we only consider here cases where there is an appropriate corresponding item. When uniquely Japanese and inappropriate items appear, the results are quite unbearable.

These past few days have been uncommonly hot. I have been unable to write anything worthwhile. Besieged nevertheless with demands to write, to write, I dashed off this trifle. Please be assured that no offense is intended.

1. J-Pop: From Peak to Weak

I recently heard rumors from Japanese music executives that Japan has become the world’s largest market for recorded music. Consumers in the U.S. can no longer be suckered into buying $18 CDs. Meanwhile the loyal Japanese music fan still shells out ¥3,000 — this is not a typo: ¥3,000! — for the third “Best” album of their favorite artist, even though they already own every track. The trick of selling CDs as loyalty-proving “character goods” rather than musical content likely softened the decline for the Japanese music industry.

Despite this very relative success, however, the J-Pop market is a total cultural disaster. The best selling artists of the 21st century are the best selling artists of the 20th century — with a few local “hip-hop” faces and over-manufactured rock bands thrown in the mix for good measure. Any country where the non-idol, non-singer, non-entity Shibasaki Ko is a chart-topper means it’s all over. At least Johnny’s Jimusho acts — NEWS, Arashi, SMAP, etc. — are a weird freak subculture where young women lust over unremarkable, untalented yankii boys sent in from weird corners of the Japanese countryside. Seeing B’z in the top Oricon slot is just sad: Great, they’ve produced another featureless musical cog that their institutional consumers have already slotted into their provisional expense budgets. For the best-selling bands in Japan, fandom is all rote.

Few J-Pop songs are able to bring together ad hoc audiences of non-core fans. They are no “society-wide” hits — just bands playing the commercial game “Who has the most fans?” J-Pop was once about the “mainstream” — now it’s about isolated silos of people with specific mainstream tastes.

And there’s also the old people problem. The elderly make sure that the highest ranking music show every week is “NHK Kayo Concert” (NHK歌謡コンサート) — featuring old people music — rather than shows like “Music Station” or “Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ” that in the past helped bring in new genres and bands.

It wasn’t always this bad. Consider Sony back in 2000. Puffy had peaked at that point, but that epoch-making female duo released a killer remix project that year — on three vinyl records, natch — featuring Captain Funk, Malcolm McLaren, Fantastic Plastic Machine, and Cubismo Grafico. Supercar’s fanbase somehow grew despite their abandonment of melodic shoegaze rock for abstract techno. Denki Groove’s VOXXX came out in Feburary 2000 and contained probably the pinnacle track of J-pop’s clash with club culture: “Nothing’s Gonna Change.” Even Judy and Mary had a few labyrinthine melodies left in them.

A few years later, things were still okay at the company. The Yuki/Chara double-drummer side project Mean Machine was all girl power and no songs, but “Suu Haa” was a most brutal piece of candy. Tommy February 6 did the ’80s revival to an obsessive technical degree only possible in Japan — not to mention the perfectly-realized visual component and the inside jokes about alcoholism. J-Pop was alive and well… and this was just Sony!

Now Sony is creating things like throwback boy band East West Boys and gyaru singer Nishino Kana. They also keep milking the Judy and Mary template with derivative bands like Chatmonchy.

I was already feeling the angst about J-Pop’s future in 2003 (villains of the era: pornograffiti, Soul’d Out, Kick the Can Crew, the proliferation of Morning Musume side projects) but it ended up being a relatively good year. When Halcali debuted in 2003, I thought they were a Puffy-rip-off, but the debut album Bacon has managed to stand the test of time — mostly due to the ingenious premise of forcing two 15 year-old girls to “rap” over fun sample-pop beats. The strength, however, was the project’s roots in Shibuya-kei aesthetics: Shindo Mitsuo did a video, Scha Dara Parr did minimalist grooves, FPM flexed his old latin sampling muscles. The follow-up Ongaku no Susume was alright and had the drama of the Noda Nagi-Aida Makoto pakuri cover. Then Sony bought them and promptly ruined the entire fun.

Shiina Ringo’s 2003 Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana (named after three things that all have the same semen smell) is easily the J-Pop album of the decade — if it can be considered J-Pop. Listening recently, it hasn’t aged as well as I would have hoped, and the songs are not her strongest. No one, however, has ever pulled off such conceptual framework and dense production. The opener “Shukyo” and closer “Soretsu” appear at first to be about religion and death but are respectively, meta statements on the constrictions of the Japanese music industry and the challenge of original creation. Many sensible people will find lyrics like「不條理を凝視せよ」to be out of the realm of good taste but this is real innovation and progression above the everyone else’s「抱きしめたい」poison banalities.

2. Japanese Indie Scene: The Old Guys

What happened with “indies”? Here I mean the old confrontational, progressive, internationally-minded indie artists — not the farm league major label mainstream pop bands who now dominate the genre.

Things were super hot over at Escalator and Trattoria as the new century broke. Cubismo Grafico’s bedroom house music peaked with Mini (2000) and Untitled (but one wish (2002). Citrus’ Wispy, no mercy — arguably the best 10 minutes of music ever produced in Japan — also hit the shelves in 2000.

The rest of the decade was not a good one for this subculture. Shibuya-kei decided it was over being Shibuya-kei, and everyone went in different directions. The album that defined the post-Shibuya, “Nakame-kei” sound was Tomoki Kanda’s landscape of smallers music. The sound was gentle and atmospheric, void of any cultural references, heavy beats, or foreign samples. Cornelius followed the same deconstructed course with the stripped-down and song-free Point (2001) and Sensuous (2006). Kahimi Karie went free jazz, then even drowsier. Yoshinori Sunahara abandoned his Pan-Am obsession and degraded-sample grooves for the relentlessly cold and slow Lovebeat. Then he disappeared. Citrus broke up, and Emori took almost seven years to make his abstract bossa-nova chanson landscape of Yoga’n'ants. Salon Music’s output was also relatively “Nakame-kei” but New World Record in 2002 was a great set of sonic experiments. Escalator completely threw away its unique brand of sample pop to become Japan’s answer to the techno-punk Electroclash — a total disaster other than the incredible Yukari Rotten album of 2004.

But there was ultimately an economic component to the “good indie” collapse. The vinyl market bottomed out very quickly after its peak in 1999. Quintessential Shibuya-kei record stores Zest and Maximum Joy both closed in 2005. The magazine Relax dropped the whole “My most obscure 100 records” column and then promptly folded. Beikoku Ongaku put out its last issue in 2005. In a panic, retro-lounge hound Fantastic Plastic Machine reinvented himself as an Avex-friendly house DJ who could command the floor at ageHa. Pizzicato Five’s Konishi Yasuharu started working with Johnny’s Jimusho. A generation who was rewarded monetarily for sonic experimentation suddenly wasn’t being rewarded at all. This was not encouraging.

So the Shibuya-kei scene faded away, but those were all old guys anyway, in their 30s, past their prime, looking to create some kind of stable income stream through music. What about the artists born in the Aughts?

Things started relatively well, mostly thanks to two labels: Vroom Sound and Usagi-Chang.

Vroom had the edit-frenzy of Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, the immaculately produced bossa pop of Petset, and the bedroom funk of Fab Cushion. The PSB tracks that hit in 2003, “fiddle-dee-dee!!!” and “starship 6″ (aka “打ち込みで派手な曲”) are still, hands down, the most revolutionary pop music pieces of the last decade. Both utilize the full potential of hard-disc recording to cut between thousands of samples in a single minute, to do away with traditional song structure, and take the listener close to the edge of the speed of light. The album that finally followed cartooom! in 2004 had its moments but felt like a pop compromise on the PSB premise. Hayashibe of PSB is busy doing commercial background music last I heard.

Petset meanwhile produced its masterpiece mini-album Sound Sphere in 2003, recorded in lush 8-track tape with vintage instruments, textured guitar strum, a Rhythm Ace drum machine, double live drummers, harmony boy-girl vocals and a sentimentality that somehow avoided being too twee. Both PSB and Petset, however, have basically retired from the thankless Japanese indie scene. Petset’s last EP Flow Motion,Feather Light was a slight wrong turn into sterile digital synths.

Usagi-Chang, on the other hand, was a short lived phenomenon but managed to invent an entire new genre of “pico pico” or “pico pop” — a term Trevor from Music Related and I are still convinced we invented. (I am pretty sure we stole it from a Japanese reviewer in hindsight.) Usagi-Chang will be always remembered as the guys who discovered YMCK — led by an ex-metal cover band member who pushed Nintendo 8-bit pop into jazzy chord progressions and squirted every possible sound out of that old chip. For me, the real Usagi-Chang heroes were MacDonald Duck Eclair — easily one of the most under-appreciated bands of the last decade. Both short short and The Genesis Songbook are masterworks of songwriting and production: As if Atari Teenage Riot composed a John Hughes soundtrack with a cast of Japanese café kids. The Genesis Songbook in particular is refreshingly noisy and aggressive — with points that seem to push the kitsch of bad ’90s J-pop into weird avant-garde composition. And even the bossa nova tracks match the mood. Usagi-Changs’ other artists Aprils, PINE*am, Misswonda, and Sonic Coaster Pop were all pretty solid. Hanger-ons Sylvia 55, Hazel Nuts Chocolate (the faux lo-fi years), Strawberry Machine, and Eel were also fun. Uinona were the only melodic punk band who had a foot in the old indie spirit.

Unfortunately, however, the energy got sucked out of the movement around 2006. Being in the 21st century Japanese indies scene is a thankless job — especially when the only people vocally championing you are penniless foreign bloggers who procure all their music from Rapidshare. Your best friends are nice enough to pay ¥3,000 to see you play in hostile clubs, but this doesn’t really get you anywhere. But the problem was, selling out after 2005 was not even an option. The only real artistic solution was to get more weird, but the record labels did not want to go further into debt and no one really had the heart. Most of this generation had seen the Shibuya-kei guys succeed both financially and critically at making interesting indie music and wanted to follow that path.

As of 2010, this particular entire indie scene has basically imploded, with zero new records from almost anyone. Capsule — who became the face of this scene somehow thanks to Yamaha’s advertorial largesse — are still hanging on, thanks to Nakata’s success with Perfume. They started the decade as a Pizzicato Five clone and then moved towards Daft Punk when that didn’t work. They are not so much a band as an industrial concern: 12 albums in seven years!!! — all of which have been brick-wall mastered to destroy your ears and stereo and soul.

4. Shugo Tokumaru: My Vote for the Messiah

The real star of Japanese music in the Aughts was Shugo Tokumaru. Shugo not only produced the three best albums of the entire decade but built up a legion of fans both Japanese and foreign. His Tokyo concerts sell out. He makes music for Mujirushi Ryohin (MUJI) and NHK. He shows up in kids’ shows. He is closer than anyone to following the old Shibuya-kei model of broad indie success.

2004’s Night Piece is deceivingly simple. It’s a quiet album. There are rarely drums — almost like he was secretly recording the songs in his room after his parents had gone to sleep. There are glimmers of what was to come: the sped-up guitar antics of “Paparrazi,” the bassy psychedelics of “Lantern on the Water,” the toy instruments of “Funfair.” By 2006’s L.S.T., all of those ideas were mashed into a super prog-pop freak-out with moments of Shins-like clarity drifting between squeaky toy box rhythms and lysergic black holes. Tokumaru claims that “L.S.T.” wasn’t a pun on LSD and his name, but I don’t believe him.

2007’s Exit, however, is listening to a man fully in control of his art. He reigns in all of the previous “excesses” to create songs that sound like charming pop concoctions to the average person but reveal a multi-layered, fourth-dimensional Rube Goldberg of arrangement on further listen. Tokumaru loves to make dueling pianica lines in 7/8 and has probably figured out how to use steel pan in the least annoying way since the instrument’s inception. “La La Radio” is the kind of full out pop symphony that would send Brian Wilson back to his therapist, containing more ideas in five and a half minutes than the entire J-Pop industry was able to come up with in ten years. Even “Button,” with its easily digested J-indie melody is clanky and bizarre.

This relative smattering of fame has not gone to Tokumaru’s head at all. He still sticks to his guns about being a terrible interview — saying nothing, but too polite to tell you that he doesn’t really want to talk about his music until the very end. He’s also a good barometer for whether anything interesting is happening in the J-indie world. When I ask if there are any good bands, he usually says, “No.” And he means it. When he says he likes Nhhmbase, that meant they were great. And they were great.

5. Honorable Mentions and Dishonorable Discharges

Otherwise, there were a lot of well-meaning guitar bands out there, whom we can pretty much ignore. Everyone still wants to sound like The Blue Hearts. I am sure these bands have lots of fans and stumble into some relatively solid songs, but so what? As much as we all laugh at ’80s soulless over-digital pop music, at least it sounds like ’80s music. Rock music of the 2000s could barely muster anything remotely signature — and I’m not just talking about Japan. I love the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” but I am sure it would have been a hit in 1995 too. So, yes, every song with full-crank Autotune will have to be re-engineered in the future to take out that hideous vocal effect, but at least when we hear it, we will remember the cultural nadir of the Paris Hilton decade. When I hear 175R, I will be like, “Wow, 1997!” and then, “Who was 175R again? Was that a Hi-Standard side project?”

Honorable mentions for the decade go to Afrirampo for managing to do the Osaka freak-out on a Sony marketing budget. I would love to go in detail about the genius of Kiiiiiii — especially the genius of (not my wife) Lakin’ as a song-writer — but I would rightly be accused of nepotism. DJ Codomo has hit upon one of the more unique soundscapes of the decade — toy-synth micro-funk? — but is not someone we can rely on to provide giant epic tunes. Oorutaichi makes music that I literally cannot wrap my head around, which is never a bad thing. Rip Slyme had a few good joints, like “Joint.” m-flo’s EXPO EXPO also had its moments, and they deserve credit for taking J-Pop in directions it clearly did not want to go. OOIOO’s Taiga was a grand culmination of the band’s past experimentation. Yura Yura Teikoku used the August to move into legendary status.

6. The Prospects for Japanese Indie Music Before We Are All “Left Behind” in the Coming Rapture

Here in 2010, the entire infrastructure for good indie music has completely been wiped out, and those who were once our greatest hope to “save” Japanese music have retreated into doing things more rewarding than commercial music — eating, breathing, sleeping, throwing things against other things, counting clouds, quietly reading, personal hygiene. I still do not buy the idea that economic calamity was good or will be good for Japanese pop music. There will surely be some decent musical artists in the next ten years, but they will have a much harder time getting started, being heard, winning fans, and selling records. The pre-Flipper’s Guitar “indie scene” was tiny, inconvenient, and relatively inconsequential. We romanticize it now only because Flipper’s Guitar exploded and led to giant visible scene later in history. As much as we want to believe that music is a “pure” artform that can exist without a market framework, we still unconsciously value market success when it comes to judging albums’ relative importance.

This decade taught us that selling records has never just been a commercial act but a social one as well. More records sold meant more fans, more people to share the music with, more cultural touch-points, more physical spaces to go where those records are sold or the music is played live. To a certain degree, the corporate pursuit of money in a bullish market created a strong environment for good Japanese music. Without this commercial structure, Japanese music will likely retain a creative value, but we will no doubt find it less “valuable” without its communal value. The money is not coming back, so we have to figure out how to cherish music without the ingrained prejudices of the 20th century.

The latest in a series of graphic design tools for Néojaponisme readers: a number of red, white, and black patterns based on Modern Japanese graphic design from the 1950s.

These patterns are free to use for non-commercial applications. (For commercial applications, please contact us for a license.)

The patterns are provided in Illustrator CS3, Illustrator CS, and Adobe PDF format. You can download a zipped file containing all three formats here.

In the English-speaking world, “Santa Baby” has been the go-to Santa-as-lover song for ladies since Eartha Kitt’s original 1953 version. The lyrics propose, slyly but unmistakably, that the dynamics of a hypothetical relationship with Santa, while grotesque, would nevertheless be topologically conjugate to the norms of postwar US gender relations.

Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree for me.
Been an awful good girl, Santa baby,
So hurry down the chimney tonight. [...]

Think of all the fun I’ve missed,
Think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed,
Next year I could be just as good,
If you’ll check off my Christmas list [...]

Santa honey, forgot to mention one little thing: a ring.
I don’t mean on the phone, Santa honey…

Having located a potential lover of unlimited means, generosity, and kindness, the narrator of “Santa Baby” reveals herself as a true Homo economicus. Through both double entendre and frank bargaining, she outlines her terms: material comfort in exchange for exclusivity of erotic access, socially legitimated by marriage. The erotic frisson — still felt by many today, to judge by the unbroken stream of cover versions — arises from the directness. There will be no dating, no manipulation, no need to work around the rules of propriety: bring enough boxes from Tiffany, and you can “trim my Christmas tree” tonight.

What is the equivalent in Japan? I put it to you that it is “Koibito ga Santa Claus” (”My Lover is Santa Claus”) by Matsutōya Yumi. Originally released on her 1980 semi-concept album Surf & Snow, it became a monster hit a few years later as the theme song for Watashi o ski ni tsuretette! and has been the Christmas pop song in Japan ever since.

In “Koibito ga,” the narrator recounts an episode from one Christmas Day in her childhood on which a glamorous next-door neighbor claimed to be expecting a visit from Santa at eight o’clock (sharp).

“Chigau yo, sore wa ehon dake no ohanashi”
Sō iu watashi ni wink shite
“Demo ne, otona ni nareba, anata mo wakaru, sono uchi ni [...]
“Koibito ga Santa Claus, se no takai Santa Claus…”

“No way, that’s just a story from picture books”
I said, and she replied with a wink:
“When you grow up, you’ll understand too, one day [...]
“My lover is Santa Claus, a tall Santa Claus…”

“Many winters” later, the “glamorous neighbor” long gone, the narrator recalls this exchange and hints at her own imminent enlightenment. The song is about the awakening from childhood innocence, excitement and impatience for the passage into adulthood. The contrast with the knowing come-ons of “Santa Baby”, its playful yet fundamentally cynical take on gender relations, could not be starker. At the root of these differences is the approach to Santa himself.

In “Santa Baby,” Santa remains unchanged as a concept. Although it is not explicitly stated, there is no reason to believe that this Santa is not the jolly, toy-distributing, entirely asexual figure of childhood fantasy. It is these characteristics which enable the narrator to access the outer limits of her utility curve, grossly distending the expected pattern of a romantic relationship. (If the narrator went on to date and buy gifts for a sexy elf behind Santa’s back, it would be Honda Tōru’s “Akahori System” in its purest form.)

But in “Koibito ga,” Santa is the one who changes. Present-bringing is included as only one of his characteristics, but the fact that he is “tall” — that is, conventionally attractive — is repeated twice, and what the narrator seems to be looking forward to most is the excitement and knowledge of the outside (which is to say, adult) world that he will bring.

Nevertheless, the references to whirlwinds and cities of snow ensure that the song remains firmly grounded in fantasy, if you will — unlike, say, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” where Santa is forced into the real world so completely that he ends up just being Dad. (The fact that the glamorous neighbor’s Santa suddenly “took her to a distant town one day” is a highly realistic outcome for a postwar salaryman Santa, though, and might be a nod at the drab realities of domestic life that lie beyond the thrill of young love.)

Does this represent a greater Santaic fluidity in Japanese culture, perhaps owing to the tradition’s shallow roots here? Or is Santa’s transformation into a trim, handsome suitor an unsurprising result of Christmas being hijacked by lovers?