2008 was not the debut year for Watanabe Atsumu by any means. The 39 year-old actor and comedian was part of other comedy groups from 1991, notably Jarizumu, and his newer “Sekai no Nabeatsu” (世界のナベアツ) persona had enjoyed minor success in 2007 on shows such as Bakushō Red Carpet (爆笑レッドカーペット). But in the very end of 2007, Watanabe was able to introduce his gags to a new audience numbering in the thousands, even millions: Japanese families sitting around their kotatsu, snacking on mikan and mochi and watching manzai duo Downtown’s annual Batsu Game (罰ゲーム).

Matsumoto Hitoshi and Hamada Masatoshi — otherwise known as Downtown, the godfathers of modern Japanese comedy — may not have invented the batsu game, but they certainly perfected it. They’ve been running variations on the classic Japanese sadomasochist “punishment game” since 1990, but since 2004 their highest-profile punishment project has been the annual special Zettai ni waratte wa ikenai (「絶対に笑ってはいけない」, “You absolutely must not laugh”), also featuring the rest of the Gaki no tsukai ya arahen de!! (ガキの使いやあらへんで！！) team: Yamazaki Hōsei and Cocorico’s Endō Shōzō and Tanaka Naoki. On the special, which has been shown on New Year’s Eve since 2006, Matsumoto, Hamada, and the others are paraded through a themed setting — in past shows, an onsen, a high school, a police station, and a hospital — and confronted with funny situations. If they laugh, they are punished with a caning on the rear.

The producers gather a huge cast of comedians and celebrities to participate in this festival of complete madness. They all help surprise Ma-chan, Hama-chan and the others and ensure that they leave with sore asses. Every year little-known or forgotten comedians get a boost from the show.

In 2006 it was Shōfukutei Shōhei (笑福亭笑瓶), an older rakugo artist/comedian. He didn’t even need to show up in person — his introduction was enough to send the Gaki no tsukai members into hysterical fits.

The bit was so popular that Gaki no tsukai had Shōhei himself on the normal half-hour program in early 2007 to play a small set of batsu game events with them. It was a big break and Shōhei went on to make many more appearances on Japanese TV in 2007 than he would have otherwise.

At the end of 2007, Watanabe aka Sekai no Nabeatsu was the latest beneficiary. In his first appearance on Red Carpet as well as his appearance on the batsu game, he still wasn’t using his catch phrase “Omoro!” (オモロ, “kick ass”), but he proceeded to juice this along with his counting ippatsu gyaggu (一発ギャッグ, one-off gag/joke) for all they were worth all through 2008, expanding from multiples of three sounding like an aho (idiot) to multiples of five sounding like a dog and a host of other things. As is often the case with Japanese comedians, his target audience is elementary school boys.

He’s showed signs of moving away from his trademark gag to other bits , proving that he’s more flexible and creative than Hard Gay aka Razor Ramon, but we won’t know until next year if he has the staying power of a Kojima Yoshio.

Last year was supposed to be the final Zettai ni waratte wa ikenai batsu, but it was so popular that Nihon Terebi would have been fools to not make an offer. They have filmed another year’s installment, and six hours of footage, twice the running time of the past two years, will be shown on New Year’s Eve: our first chance to see which comedians will make it big in 2009.

Postscript

An astute 2 channeler noted that there isn’t much time left this year to take advantage of Sekai no Nabeatsu’s gag:

馬鹿だな、お前ら。
飲み会の時とかに、
「3の倍数と3が付く数字のときだけエロになります」
と言えば、女の子の身体を触り放題だぞ？
今年だけのネタなんだから、活用する方法も考えないとな

Benesse has published the results of their annual baby-name survey. Yui and Yūto are the top names for girls and boys respectively, just as last year, but since there are so many ways to spell both names, they do not actually top the “name + kanji combination” chart. That honor goes to Hiroto (大翔) and Aoi (葵), the latter most likely thanks to actress Miyazaki Aoi — inescapable star of Atsu-hime.

2ch nerds are basically OK with the kanji for Hiroto 大翔, although they don’t like the pronunciation to for 翔. For the record, however, it comes from tobu, “fly, soar”, and it dates back to a poem about Mt Fuji in the Man’yōshū: 飛鳥母翔毛不上 → tobu tori mo/ tobi mo noborazu → “Even the soaring of birds in flight does not reach [its peak]”. Suck it, haters.

And now the news for Kingdom Hearts fans. Sora as a boy’s name has risen in popularity for the fifth year running, up to #5. Meanwhile, Riku peaked at #4 in 2006 and has been falling since, and no-one ever liked Kairi.

Oh… and Saaya has also enjoyed a huge jump in popularity, from #141 to #76. I know someone who’s going to love that.

Candidates chosen for Japan’s new lay judge system: can imposed democracy foster real democracy?

At the end of November, almost 300,000 Japanese citizens received letters informing them that they may be called to judge their fellow citizens. After a series of mock trials starting last year, the letters marked one of the final steps in preparation for the “lay judge” system (裁判員制度) in Japan’s courts, set for full implementation in July 2009.

Japan once had a jury system similar to the United States, beginning in 1923 in the era of so-called “Taisho Democracy” until it was eliminated during World War II. Under the postwar judicial system, a panel of three professional judges hears serious criminal cases as the prosecutors and defense make their arguments. At the end of the proceedings, the judges make the decision on whether the defendant is guilty and also decide the sentence.

After the war, GHQ officials working on Japan’s constitution considered re-instituting the jury system but refrained at the insistence of the Japanese. The law contained a passage that a later introduction of a jury system would not be ruled out, however.

This history laid the groundwork for the conclusions of a 1999 government council on legal system reform, which advocated the passage of laws to create the lay judge system without the need to amend the Japanese constitution.

The new lay judge system will add six citizen judges (aka “lay judges”) to the mix for trials of serious crimes, such as murder and arson, heard in Japanese regional courts. The lay judges will be called to sit with the three professionals and participate actively in the proceedings, questioning witnesses from both sides and considering evidence. The professional judges will make judgments on the law, such as what evidence may be considered, and provide legal explanations to the lay judges, but the actual decision and sentencing will be made by a majority vote of all nine judges.

While on the whole, large-scale public participation in the court system marks a tentative step forward for Japanese jurisprudence, the lay judge system has been enormously controversial on many fronts, including a lack of justification or demand for the reform, the inability for defendants to refuse a trial by lay judges, to the wasteful spending of providing daily stipends for the lay judges.

Some of these criticisms are technical, but I think they mainly stem from the fact that the system was more or less foisted on the Japanese public from the top-down. Unlike Western countries, whose jury systems developed over centuries of conflict between rulers and the ruled, Japan’s lay judge system was invented over a matter of years among Tokyo elites, led by the Kasumigaseki offices of the courthouse bureaucracy.

A recent NHK special on the subject starkly revealed the public’s anger over the introduction of a system they had basically no say in creating. At one point during a live debate between experts and laypeople, one man accused the government of allowing itself to be reformed in reaction to US demands (the US seems to have taken an interest in some reforms proposed by the original panel, but the lay judge system itself appears 100% homegrown). A suggestion that the system be put on hold to allow for more public participation generated shouts of approval from almost everyone in the room.

The true negotiations over how this system will work appear to have taken place between the government, attorneys’ groups such as the Nichbenren, and US groups interested in Japan such as the Mansfield Foundation. Looking at the commentary at citizen media site JANJAN, a typical question raised is why the government is so intent on rushing ahead with this new system.

Underscoring the challenge of introducing democracy from the top down, a December 2006 opinion poll found that a full third of respondents would not want to serve as lay judges even if required by law.

To promote the new system, the government hired advertising giant Dentsu among others to position the system as a move forward for Japanese law. In a wide-ranging campaign, promotion of the jury system has manifested itself in a serial drama, a video game, and literally dozens of hastily drawn “image character” mascots. The profligate spending became a target for criticism in 2006, when the Supreme Court was found overpaying for ad agencies’ services and rigging town hall meetings with planted questions.

But despite the sloppy and dishonest promotion, could a jury system have come about any differently in modern Japan? Japan has been effectively a one-party state run by its bureaucratic class since the end of the War. The public, generally middle class, well-off, and treated justly, is generally so removed from the legal system as to have little interest in it at all. The development of the Internet as a forum for debate has given interested citizens a new voice, but so far its power has been limited.

All in all, I am hopeful that this system will prove a net positive. Despite the doubts of people such as those quoted by the New York Times who worry that harmony-loving Japan will simply go along with the prosecutors each time, I have confidence that most participants will take the task seriously. And every person chosen for jury duty will likely experience a serious wake-up call that national policy can affect their everyday lives.

This piece is published in collaboration with writer Nick Sylvester and his blog Riff Market. For those wanting more background on how we came to write this extremely long essay together, please read Nick’s more extensive introduction here.

Gregg Gillis, a 26-year-old college graduate who likes pop music and owns a laptop, became Girl Talk in the first year of the 21st century. Taking cues from Britney Spears’ self-positioning circa 2001 — when she was famously “Not a Girl, Not Yet A Woman” — Gillis is not a DJ, but not a traditional musician either. With the aid of computer editing software, he creates danceable sound collages that often incorporate over 15-20 audio sources: namely, popular and less popular rock, rap, dance, and electronic songs, no era or genre excluded. The sources are mostly recognizable, and his songs — Gillis calls them “songs” — carry the force of nostalgia but are reconfigured and “mashed up” enough so as to sound fresh and new and free of the groan that collects when somebody insists on playing all four minutes and seventeen seconds of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” at the holiday party. With Girl Talk, we get that blissful moment of recognition without having to suffer through the next three minutes and thirty seconds remembering exactly why it hasn’t been Hammertime for more than a decade now.

Like many others before and after him, Gillis found his success after the indie music website Pitchfork Media bestowed positive reviews upon his third album, 2006’s Night Ripper. “Pittsburgh native Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up,” wrote reviewer Sean Fennessey. “As an illegal art form, it’s surprising no one came along with an idea like this sooner.” The review came out on July 17 — so maybe the summer heat kept the typically spot-on Fennessey from remembering John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, the all-stolen-sample recording from 1985.

Either way, for Pitchfork and many others, Girl Talk raised the bastard-pop bar. He was not just playing two songs on top of each other like 2ManyDJs or Freelance Hellraiser, nor was he playing two songs next to each other in an anything-goes free-for-all DJ set a la Optimo or Erol Alkan. Instead Gillis is something of a surgeon, scalpeling out drum breaks from one song, vocal melodies from another, a guitar riff from another, and stitching them into some danceable semblance of a new song. These Frankensteins were emblematic of the indie-rockcentric Pitchfork’s growing appreciation for Southern rap, modern pop, and dance music too, so it was no surprise when the site took the opportunity to award Gillis’s album Best New Music, its highest honor — to celebrate Girl Talk was, in a way, to celebrate the site itself.

Around that time, Gillis hooked up with the Chicago-based Windish Agency. He quickly began touring the world with his sweaty dance parties. He had a well-blogged reputation for inviting people on stage to dance with him as he huddled over his computer, triggering his samples live, and soon he became a festival headliner. A career in music firmly established, soon Gillis quit his Pittsburgh day-job as a biomedical engineer. And now Gillis is at the point fame-wise where MTV News is more than happy to run a story about his last show, to take place on December 21, 2012. That date counts for the end of the Mayan calendar — believed by some to be the day the world will end. For a guy who plays others people’s music, more or less, Gillis is not doing so bad for himself.

I’LL BE YOUR WHATEVER YOU WANT

Girl Talk, to his immense credit, is an avatar of the most important musical-technological developments and music-industrial complications from the last decade: (illegal) music hyper-consumption in the face of record industry meltdown; the blurring of distinctions in major and indie labels; the plumbing of indie cool; an indie-rock about-face towards “selling out”; an unprecedented participatory music culture, a next-next-level fan club. (i.e.: It’s not enough just to go to the shows, or buy the t-shirts, or track down the seven-inches.) The mega-fans are remixing their favorite songs, lacing them with dance beats and synthesizer presets, posting their remixes on their blogs, commenting on those of others. Even if there were precedents for these complications, the 21st century form of mashups is a very palpable convergence: an internet-mediated, meta-pop moment.
Continued »

“I come to Akihabara…” / “I came to Akihabara…”

Sunday, June 8, 2008. A man drives a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, killing three. He emerges from his vehicle and goes on a stabbing rampage that leaves four others dead before he is finally apprehended.

He tells police, “I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn’t matter who they were. I came alone.”

The Japanese media attempts to brand the perpetrator as a fan of anime and manga — an otaku. Fuji TV reveals that the killer, an impoverished 25 year old temp worker at an auto components factory, liked to sing anime theme songs at karaoke. A Tokyo newspaper headline blasts the “Evil Deeds of the Akiba Otaku.”

By the June 10th, the story goes worldwide. The Sydney Morning Herald labels the crime to be the work of a “manga enthusiast” and a “comic book killer.”

Yet real evidence is hard to find. The killer had only drawn a single manga style illustration in his high school yearbook. Police recovered a mere handful of items from his small apartment, including an assortment of anime and video games.

They number exactly seven in all, the same number as the “Akihabara Massacre” death toll.

On June 13, the Tokyo Public Safety Council indefinitely suspends the long standing Sunday hokoten tradition in Akihabara. The streets will be reopened to traffic and pedestrians will no longer be permitted free reign of Chuo-dori until further notice. Police presence (and the random bag checks they bring with them), is noticeably increased.

On September 24th, Japan has a new head of government: Asō Tarō. The international fan press is quick to dub him “The Otaku Prime Minister” on account of a widely reported love of manga.

Years earlier, he makes headlines by holding political rallies in Akihabara where he addressed the crowds as “My fellow otaku.”

October 26: the new PM returns triumphantly to the area and says, “I can cheer up when I come to Akihabara.”

He is also quoted as saying, “We’ve got to brighten up Japan. You’ll never pick up girls unless you have a bright attitude. So don’t be having a ‘Japan’s future is looking dim’ look on your face. Have a positive attitude if you wanna pick up girls.”

On December 7th, 2008 the Mainichi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun report that a 21 year old unemployed man suspected of murdering and dumping the body of a five year old girl in Toganeshi is an anime and manga fan. His room, decorated with posters from anime intended for young girls, also contains bookshelves filled with manga from the series Precure, Saint Seiya, and Bleach.

Only the Anime News Network website follows the story outside of Japan.

“This guy just killed Akihabara the way Charles Manson killed the Sixties. And we’re all under arrest now…” I wrote on my blog earlier this year. I still don’t know what I meant by that.

Kato Tomohiro

Asō Tarō

Katsuki Ryo