2014: Plurality Power / W. David MARX
Japan — a country that once prided itself on a “new middle mass” of “100 million middle class” — now finds its direction from passionate minority factions rather than a set of shared mainstream values. In 2014, there is no mass majority in Japan, only powerful pluralities.

The LDP won the election after no one turned out other than their solid bloc of older voters. The right-wing maintained its ruling coalition thanks to the gains of another powerful minority — Kōmeitō, a political party that mobilizes the devoted believers of its affiliated religious group. On the other side of the aisle, the minority Communists grew their numbers — enough to introduce bills to the Diet floor.

In pop culture, there were a few relics of the mass culture era — Frozen and Yokai Watch — but these shared experiences were mostly limited to children. Adults only came together to share downers: complaints about higher taxes, debates over the effectiveness of Abenomics, accusations towards imaginary STAP stem cells. (Even the year’s preordained comedy catch-phrase “dame yo, dame dame” is all about saying “no.”) Otherwise powerful pluralities own the culture. In music, the idol cults continue to dominate the music charts through an aggregation of splintered factions. Even without cable TV, top dramas struggle to pull more than a 10% rating.

So why try to force 2014 into a single story of “national culture”? In the place of any manufactured holistic narrative, here instead are some of the fragments that defined our year.

Abenomics / Noah SMITH
This was a difficult year for Abe Shinzō and his Abenomics program. The economy’s signals are mixed — investment has picked up, but consumption and exports are still anemic. The Bank of Japan continues to buy financial assets at a record pace, the so-called “first arrow” of Abenomics. But with employment at a 15-year low, it’s not clear what else the BOJ can do. Of course, the BOJ is certain to keep purchasing government debt, as this is the only way to maintain Japan’s interest rates at a level low enough for the still-rising government debt to be sustainable. But monetary policy’s effectiveness in terms of boosting the economy is probably near its limit.

Meanwhile, the “second arrow” — fiscal stimulus — is long gone, and Abe’s 3% sales tax hike is widely credited with sending the economy into a sudden recession. Abe could conceivably reverse course and choose to engage in a massive fiscal stimulus, funded by printed money, if the BOJ would go along. But this seems unlikely for political reasons, and with the unemployment rate already low, the effect would likely be minor anyway; there just aren’t that many more idle hands left to put to work. At this point, Japan’s best hope for fiscal policy is treading a wise and careful middle path and avoid derailing the fragile recovery that began in 2013.

As for the “third arrow” — structural reforms — Abe has proposed a large number of bold actions but failed to get them passed so far. His hope, and the hope of reformers in general, is that Abe’s political capital from the recent election victory will allow him to make headway on the TPP, labor reform, corporate governance reform, and other difficult, unpopular neo-liberal measures.

Womenomics / Noah SMITH
There is one way, however, in which Abe may already be sparking deep and lasting change. This is the area of gender equality in the workplace — the so-called “Womenomics” program. Westerners have, by and large, been skeptical that a renowned conservative like Abe could be serious about fighting for gender equality. But the idea seems to have permeated the consciousness of Japan’s elite, including bureaucrats, business leaders, the courts, and the media. Even if many of the women-boosting reforms being pushed by Abe fail, a sea change may have occurred in the mindset of Japan, Inc. Already, companies are announcing voluntary quotas for women in management positions, government ministries are creating plans to make bureaucratic jobs more female-friendly, and courts are ruling in favor of victims of “maternity harassment.”

Devin Stewart of the Carnegie Council has been conducting a series of interviews with Japanese female leaders and business leaders. There is a distinct sense that the change in attitude is real and spreading, although of course much more needs to be done. And the legal measures Abe intends to introduce over the following year — changing the tax system to encourage two-income families, ending incentives for long overtime hours, etc. — seem less likely to encounter resistance from vested interests than the other structural reforms he has proposed.

In other words, Womenomics is still in its infancy, but there are signs that it’s for real.

Kanji of the Year / Matt TREYVAUD
The Kanji of the Year for 2014 was 税 — “tax.” Organizers and individual voters struggled to frame the choice as a reaction to a generally taxocentric year of news, but of course it really just won because everyone’s unhappy about the consumption tax rising to 5% to 8%. Reaction online has been muted and surly, suggesting that a lot of people voted for 税 because they thought they should rather than because they actually wanted it to win. It’s certainly a big comedown after the recent string of positive winners like 絆 “bonds” and 金 “gold”; in fact, there hasn’t been such a purely negative Kanji of the Year since 2007’s 偽, “deceit” (which, incidentally, made #9 this year too; 嘘 “lie” was at #3).

Shukatsu Schedule Change / Adamu KUN
For Japanese third-year university students, December is the start of the job-hunting process (shūshoku katsudō or shūkatsu in Japanese). This commences with research on companies and innumerable “information sessions” that count as pre-pre-pre interviews.

This will change with the graduating class of 2016: Companies have agreed not to begin recruiting activities until March of a student’s third year. Corporate members of the Keidanren agreed to these changes under pressure from the Abe administration, which is interested in encouraging study abroad, internships, and other initiatives that would help Japan adapt its economic model to the modern era.

As dry and bureaucratic as that all sounds, the implications are enormous — millions of Japanese college students will now have an extra six months to study, create, and live life without having to go through an overly long job search.

But let’s be clear — these changes (like much of Abenomics) do not represent a fundamental paradigm shift. In other words, measures like this are intended to strengthen the nation-state of Japan. What has not changed is the high-stakes, one-strike-and-you’re-out nature of the hiring system itself. People who for whatever reason miss out or fail to thrive within the system are effectively shut out of the best jobs Japan has to offer. Perfectly talented individuals who just happen not to fit the mold will still be relegated to the employment underclass.

Foreign Tourists Hit New High / Adamu KUN
Back in 2003, the Japanese government set the goal of attracting 10 million tourists per year to Japan by 2010. They did not make that deadline, but finally surpassed their target. In 2013 the number of visitors from overseas suddenly skyrocketed 30% from the previous year to 10.4 million and is likely to reach 13 million in 2014. The streets of Shinjuku are now clogged with (usually confused and lost) tourists.

What explains the turnaround? To be sure it happened well before plans to create better tourism infrastructure really came to fruition. Japan over the past few years has relaxed some existing barriers to visits from neighboring countries, but the weaker yen has probably done at least as much by nudging a trip to Japan into an affordable price range.

Now that the tourists are coming, it’s up to the local community to ensure they’re having positive experiences that they will tell their friends and relatives about. That includes Anglophone foreigners who live here: One of my New Year’s resolutions will be to be more proactive in helping clearly lost groups of tourists when I’m in an area I know well.

The Olympics: The Biggest Issue that Never Was / Nick DONEGAN
In 2013, Tokyo won its long-running Olympic bid on a platform of compact scale, centralized proceedings, increased efficiency, and a small budget. This year budgets ballooned from $1.5 billion to $3 billion while construction companies found themselves faced with another bidding process. The IOC asked Tokyo for a more decentralized affair and the rather-far-away-from-Tokyo prefecture of Fukushima requested a prominent role, but all the Japanese press reported on was the possible resurrection of softball and baseball as well as plans for the entertainment lineup. In 2015, however, the Olympics may become the biggest issue of 2014 that never was.

RIP: Yakuza Film Stars Takakura Ken and Sugawara Bunta / Brett BULL
Actors Takakura Ken and Sugawara Bunta, who died this year, are among those credited with bringing the yakuza film genre to the world. Many will remember Takakura Ken from Black Rain, in which he appeared opposite Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia as assistant inspector Matsumoto (“And I do fucking speak English”). But for years before that 1987 film, Takakura had already become one of Japan’s most prominent actors. He was cast by the likes of director Yamada Yōji (The Yellow Handkerchief) and appeared in a number of hard-boiled flicks by studio Toei in the 1960s (A Fugitive From The Past). His passing in early November narrowly preceded that of Sugawara Bunta, who rose to fame in the 1970s through Toei’s post-war Battles Without Honor And Humanity series. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, the films and Sugawara’s performances are frequently praised — notably by Quentin Tarantino — for projecting a realistic look at the underworld onto the screen.

An Obsession with Obscenity / Brett BULL
Japanese law enforcement repeatedly made headlines with its enforcement of Article 175 of the nation’s Penal Code, which restricts the sale and distribution of obscene materials (usually meaning renderings of non-obscured genitalia). On two occasions, Tokyo police arrested artist Igarashi Megumi (aka Rokudenashiko) for distributing image data of her vagina and publicly displaying a plaster replica of said organ. In Nagoya, police pressure forced an Aichi prefectural museum to cover up private parts in photographs of nude males contained in an exhibition. On the Internet, contributors to the video site FC2 Live came under scrutiny twice for streaming live porn segments without the use of a mosaic.

The End of Pink Japan / Brett BULL
1960s-era adult entertainment is in true decline. The Kantō area lost two more “pink” film theaters (one in Tokyo’s Shimbashi, another in Tochigi), leaving the number of theaters dedicated to the soft-core genre now at only 50 nationwide. Four decades ago, there were more than 1,000 venues. Things started to go downhill since the arrival of home video in the 1980s.

Another blow to anachronistic eroticism was the bankruptcy of legendary Rokku-za strip theater in Asakusa. Founded in 1947, the theater, which utilizes a stay-all-day for one price system, has hosted performances from a number of popular porn stars. News reports indicated that the theater has suffered from a substantial drop in attendance over the past decade. Given that the core demographic for both pastimes is the middle-aged male, Japan’s ageing population does not bode well for the survival of either.

Yokai vs. Yokai / Matt ALT
2014 may have been the year of the horse, but as far as the media industry was concerned it was the year of the yōkai — Yōkai Watch, to be precise. Often hailed as the “next Pokémon,” the series centers on a young boy who is able to see and harness monsters from Japanese folklore. As of December 2014, Yōkai Watch swept the worlds of video games (with five million copies sold of the latest installment “Yōkai Watch 2”), manga (it won the 38th Kodansha Manga Award), and toys (raking in 10 billion yen in sales while forcing Bandai-Namco president Ishikawa Shuko to convene a press conference to apologize for shortages.) But perhaps none of these victories was as symbolic as that of Yōkai Watch: The Movie. It opened domestically in mid-December and promptly trounced Disney’s Big Hero 6 — the antagonist of which, ironically enough, just happens to be named Yokai.

Meet The New Cool Japan, Same As The Old Cool Japan / Patrick ST. MICHEL
It was a good year for Japanese pop acts going viral through checking off all the classic “weird Japan” boxes. Idol-pop-meets-heavy-metal trio Babymetal’s “Gimme Chocolate!” racked up millions of YouTube views, and that momentum helped land shows in North America and Europe. Lady Gaga then invited the group to be the opening act during part of her North American tour, as was the Vocaloid avatar Hatsune Miku. In 2014, that holographic singer also performed on the Late Show With David Letterman, leading to a rush of tweets from confused regular viewers wondering what anime was doing on their TV.

Both achieved the same sort of gawked-at success in the West that many other Japanese media entities have managed in the YouTube age, one where the sheer WTF-ness of something (context be damned) surpasses actual appreciation. And it went the other way, too — Western artists such as Clean Bandit and Pharrell Williams used Japan and Japanese pop culture as backdrops for videos they released this year. As did Canadian singer Avril Lavigne, who found herself in hot water after her Harajuku-centric clip for “Hello Kitty” was accused of cultural appropriation.

Idols Actually Aimed At Women / Patrick ST. MICHEL
Up-and-coming idol-pop groups have appropriated nearly every subculture over the last few years. EDM club kids? Yep. Slightly chubby women? You bet. Steampunk? Sure, why not. Yet one of the year’s best selling outfits succeeded with a far more obvious theme — marketing to actual women instead of men. E-Girls, a 27-member-strong supergroup, signed to Avex, technically serving as the all-woman version of EXILE (hence the “E”). The group was a constant name on both the Oricon Charts and various digital rankings, and of course, an advertising staple.

Taking cues from the more mature-leaning groups in Korea, E-Girls presented an image and music that tried to relate to actual women rather than offer up an unsettling fantasy version of girls for male consumers. A poll late in the year found that they were the most aspirational idols for women in Japan. Nothing highlighted this better than the video for their top single of the year, “High School Love,” whereas dozens of idol units donned uniforms and played up the kawaii in a school setting, each member of E-Girls wore something different and danced confidently without infantilizing themselves.

The Year Idol Music Became Sort of Interesting / Devon FISHER
2014’s Oricon singles chart was entirely devoid of surprises, the top 50 almost wholly dominated by the trifecta of Johnny’s groups, EXILE Tribe and Yasushi Akimoto’s ridiculous girl groups, but in the margins of Japan’s idol-obsessed music culture something interesting happened. Exemplified by EXILE Tribe’s K-pop inspired E-Girls and the newly reconfigured Morning Musume ’14 (such a departure from previous generations that Hello! Project management saw fit to add the year to their name), all of a sudden the idol group sound was taking in influences from the Occidental realm of EDM; apparently the expiration date on the Onyanko Club sound has finally been reached. Yasutaka Nakata’s production for Perfume, once a dramatic departure from the ordinary, now no longer sounds all that far-off from the mainstream, and idol groups are all the better for it. If idols are going to completely dominate the realm of popular music anyways, might as well make sure that music is at least somewhat fresh.

Parupaganda / Ian LYNAM
On July 1, Prime Minister Abe announced a decision to reinterpret the Japanese constitution, allowing the Japanese military to support allied nations under attack. In short, this monumental reinterpretation legalized Japanese rearmament, outlawed by the post-war constitution. Within hours of the decision, a YouTube video featuring AKB48 Team A member Haruka “Paruru” Shimazaki (島崎 “ぱるる” 遥香) appeared online encouraging citizens to join the Japan Self-Defense Force (自衛隊).

In the Realm of a Dying Emperor / Jason G. KARLIN
Johnny Kitagawa, the founder and president of the talent agency Johnny & Associates (hereafter Johnny’s), is approaching the twilight of his control over the male idol empire he created. Since Johnny himself appears to be averse to anointing a new president, a succession dispute emerged within the organization and intensified in 2014.

Johnny’s realm is now divided between two factions. One is led by Julie Keiko Fujishima, who is Johnny’s niece. Her faction includes the groups Arashi, TOKIO, V6, and Kanjani Eight, among others. The other faction is headed by Iijima Michi, who has managed SMAP since their creation. Her faction consists of SMAP, Kis-My-Ft2, Sexy Zone, and A.B.C-Z.

In 2014, conflict between these two factions has grown so intense that is creating headaches for Japan’s networks and television program producers. Groups under Fujishima and groups under Iijima almost never appear together on the same music or variety shows. While not uncommon between rivaling labels, this degree of internal competition is unprecedented.The Japanese advertising and entertainment industries yearn for the coronation of a new empress.

Boyz Be Sexy / Jason G. KARLIN
On July 15, 2014, fans of the five-member Johnny’s idol group Sexy Zone were devastated to learn that the group would be re-organized into a three-member unit. Management split off the two youngest members to form a new group called Sexy Boyz.

Sexy Zone was born from disaster. The formation of the group originally was scheduled to be announced in May 2011, but due to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the group’s debut was postponed until late September 2011. At the time of their debut, they were the youngest group in the history of Johnny’s idols — the average age of the group’s members was 14.2 and the youngest was only 11. Though more than a few eyebrows were raised about the group’s naming, Johnny Kitagawa responded to criticism by explaining that he wanted “less beautiful boys (bishōnen) and more sexy.”

The two former members of Sexy Zone were combined with six members of Johnny’s Jr. to form the new eight-member idol unit called Sexy Boyz. Before the announcement of Sexy Boyz, an Internet search for the group’s name returned numerous blocked sites that would trigger browser warnings. Today, thanks to Johnny’s, a search for “Sexy Boyz” now safely leads to fan sites and news regarding the group’s activities.

Comedy Band Makes Salient Point / Patrick ST. MICHEL
Popular four-piece Golden Bomber is an “air” band (they pretend to play instruments live while a pre-recorded track plays) best summed up as the “clown princes of contemporary J-pop.” At this year’s Rock In Japan festival, they spent more time on gags and coating themselves in blue paint than performing. Yet Golden Bomber made one on-the-nose point this year — capturing the growing exhaustion with Japanese music promotions. For their August single “Rola No Kizudarake,” the physical single came with plain white cover art, and lacked any of the bonuses that have become a staple of Oricon-topping acts such as AKB48 and EXILE. It was a deliberate “specialization in music” experiment, one which found member Kiryuin lamenting how the current J-pop landscape moves the focus from the music to promotions such as handshake events. Many online agreed with him, and the single debuted at the number-two spot on Oricon… bested only by an EXILE single packaged with tickets to a “high touch” event.

Indie Music / Ian MARTIN
While 2014 was a typically dire year for J-pop in general, it was a marvelous year for brilliant Japanese music of absolutely no broader pop-cultural significance. Fukuoka quartet Hearsays’ In Our Time mini-album was seven cuts of the most gorgeous, shimmering, spine-tingling indiepop imaginable, while Oversleep Excuse’s Slowly Better was steeped in fragile, heartbreaking melodies, and Luminous Orange’s Soar, Kiss the Moon veered thrillingly between Stereolab-esque sophistipop, richly textured shoegaze, and intricate prog/math rock.

2014 also saw a blitzkrieg of raw, discordant postpunk/no-wave/skronk/junk with Panicsmile’s Informed Consent, synth-punk duo Hangaku’s raucous self-titled debut, an even more ferocious temper tantrum of a debut (also eponymous) by early Boredoms-style junk noise band Halbach, The Mornings’ Idea Pattern, Sonic Youth-influenced Nagoya band Free City Noise’s Leaving and Otori’s electrifying I Wanna Be Your Noise. On a rather more eccentric note, Tochigi-based duo Teashikuchibiru’s wonderfully titled Punch! Kick! Kiss! was easily the year’s best violin-and-acoustic-guitar-based folk/new wave/hip hop crossover album, and Umez snatched the prize for best J-pop/machine noise hybrid garage-punk (there’s more of it around than you might think).

Impressive albums also emerged from new wave old timers Convex Level, Sapporo-based indie-folk act Hasymonew, Fukuoka math rockers Macmanaman, intricately-worked Nagoya guitar pop trio Crunch, Tokyo new wave/krautrock band Buddy Girl and Mechanic, rounding off an abundant harvest of wonderful, weird, discordant, delicate and beautiful music with no commercial prospects whatsoever.

Twenty-five Years of Flipper’s Guitar / W. David MARX
In August 1989, Keigō Oyamada and Kenji Ozawa’s band Flipper’s Guitar released its first album Three Cheers for Our Side, unwittingly launching the Japanese music genre known as Shibuya-kei. I wrote in detail about four key Flipper’s Guitar songs over at Memories of Shibuya (one, two, three, four), but what is interesting to me is the degree to which Flipper’s Guitar introduced so many diverse influences to Japanese music… only to have them all be erased 25 years later. Nothing in the world of J-Pop now sounds like Shibuya-kei. The other thing is how far the bar has dropped: J-Pop is so domestically-oriented and incestual that we’re breathless when someone adds something vaguely Skrillex to the mix. We should not forget that Shibuya-kei was not just “Western music made by Japanese people” — it was obscure Western music made by Japanese people.

Shibuya-kei’s Quiet Comeback / Devon FISHER
With the scene having been kept on life support for most of the last decade, it seemed unlikely that the once-trendy sounds of Shibuya-kei would ever be making a comeback. But with Tower Records in Shibuya affecting a revival through their own T-Palette Records label, Shibuya-kei artists who had long since gotten used to irrelevance are making surprise appearances on the pop charts — penning songs for idol groups such as Negicco, granted, but nothing’s perfect. Old standbys such as Cibo Matto and Buffalo Daughter came out with albums this year, the former marking 15 years since the group’s previous full-length. A new generation of musicians are seeking credibility through posing with Maki Nomiya for instagram selfies, Yasuharu Konishi has his own idol group with the model duo Nananon, and little by little the best thing about Japanese music in the ’90s seems poised to reclaim its former glory. Perhaps Cornelius might even start writing “songs” again.

Manga of the Year / Matt TREYVAUD
Unita Yumi’s Aomiyuku Yuki 2 (「青みゆく雪」, 宇仁田ゆみ) is the long-awaited second (and final) volume of a story she began serializing in 2009. The title is an untranslatable pun on the names of the two lead characters, college students Sei (青) and Yukiko (雪子). Sei is the best and most honest representation of an adult learner of Japanese language that I’ve ever seen in a comic book. Instead of stereotypical tics or katakana “desu”s, Unita gives him a genuine, recognizable L2 Japanese of his own. Volume One ended with a cliffhanger: Can love overcome a language boundary? Volume Two adds an intra-Japonic twist to this question and then stands back and lets the characters sort it all out.

Old-Timey Album of the Year / Matt TREYVAUD
I’m not going to make any claims for its status as great art, but I didn’t run across another album all year that was as much fun to listen to as “Nee kōfun shicha iya yo”: Shōwa ero-kayō zenshū 1928-1932 (『ねえ興奮しちゃいやよ』 昭和エロ歌謡全集 1928~32), a compilation of “ero[tic] kayō” from the early Showa period. Erotic march enthusiasts especially will want to pick this one up, as it includes not only the “Ero March” but also the “Ero-ero March.”

Popular Reference Work of the Year / Matt TREYVAUD
Kinsui Satoshi (金水敏) has been working the yakuwari-go 役割語 (“role language”) beat for more than a decade now, exploring why fiction is full of old professors calling themselves washi and rich young women exclaiming yokutte yo even though no-one has said those things in real life for decades. The Kinsui-edited Yakuwari-go shōjiten 〈役割語〉小辞典 (“A small dictionary of role language”) is aimed squarely at a general audience, and as such, offers only very brief summaries of the sociolinguistics of gonsu, batten and the like, but this also allows it to fit in more citations from fiction and manga.

The End of Gyaru Magazines / W. David MARX
Last year I admitted being wrong about a “permanent gyaru dominance” in fashion. Japan’s famously gaudy women have been slowly disappearing from Shibuya, or more likely, showing up in front of 109 in completely reasonable clothing. This year, the End of Gyaru became conventional wisdom with the closing of core publications egg, Koakuma Ageha, and BLENDA.

The demise of the first two came after the publishers ran into major financial trouble. BLENDA, on the other hand, is part of more established Kadokawa Haruki, but even it went away. One can imagine that the decline of actual gyaru has gutted the advertising budgets of gyaru-targeting businesses. International luxury brands have to advertise somewhere, so the existence of LVMH guarantees that there will always be a Spur or Brutus. But subcultural magazines live and die by the health by the smaller scale businesses that cater to them. They go down with the whole ecosystem.

That being said, magazines are not necessarily required for youth culture anymore, especially for the so-called “delinquent subcultures.” The gyaru are no longer in Shibuya, but they’re out there. After merging with yankii in the late 1990s, the gyaru style is primarily a provincial one, and we can imagine strong gyaru communities, heavy make-up, and bright pink, crystal-studded tracksuits outside of the capital. And maybe things are not as dire as they look: Koakuma Ageha is coming back. Japan’s thousands of kyabajō still need style guidance.

Comme des Garçons and Frozen / Team NÉOJAPONISME
A few weeks ago, Sam Byford of The Verge tweeted this photo of Comme des Garçons’ Aoyama flagship store — with illustrations of Elsa and Anna on the window — and asked, “ummm what has happened to comme des garcons.” Yes, Kawakubo Rei’s fiercely avant-garde brand has made a Frozen collection. From the nicest, least critical, “Hey, Adrian, let’s stay friends!” perspective, CdG does these kinds of collaborations all the time with mass market brands — H&M, Speedo, Nike, Fred Perry, The Beatles, Star Wars. But Frozen? Is Kawakubo Rei trying to prove that she can place a halo of coolness on anything in the entire world? For 2015, we hope that Comme des Garçons the company — once a paragon of experimental apparel — can locate some more inspirational standards in collaboration partners. The world does not need Hypebeast pages on CdG x Duck Dynasty, CdG x AXE Body Spray, CdG x Maeda Atsuko, CdG x Liberal Democratic Party, etc., etc….

Azuma Hiroki Goes Global / Brett FUJIOKA
In the world of Japanese criticism, Azuma Hiroki’s new book, General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google, received an English translation. The book takes a look at the ways social media could potentially reshape (or rethink) modern democracy in the near future. In Japanese, Azuma published another book on a similar subject matter — “Dark Tourism.” The work received air time on Japanese television and attracted attention from video game developer Hideo Kojima.

2013: A New Hope / W. David MARX
This website shall reward no high fives to Prime Minister Abe Shinzō (especially after his Yasukuni visit), but we will admit that the Abe Regime Redux successfully implanted a hypnotic suggestion, both in Japan and overseas, that the Japanese economy may be heading towards its long-awaited recovery. Looky, looky — the Nikkei cracked 16,000! Of course the skepticism index grows in parallel. Normal Japanese people suspect that the Abenomics momentum will not deliver higher wages, and herein lies a threat of serious sugar crash. At no time was the air more pessimistic about the future than in the mid-2000s when people heard constantly in the media about a “growing economy” and yet saw no changes in their bank accounts.

Putting aside Abenomics, however, there were some exciting hints that Japanese society is under transformation. Between Fukushima and the abominable new secrecy law, there is real potential for a semblance of political debate returning to popular culture — even if the mainstream media refuses to be the host. The rise in smartphones and web literacy means that the Japanese Internet may soon become a true reflection of the national experience rather than an exclusive meeting ground of anonymous, angry, right wing-sympathetic idol-lovers. And Puzzle & Dragons and Line are not just hit apps: the companies behind them are answering Japan’s long call for more entrepreneurs.

Times remain perilous, but fortunately, with less faith in the establishment, the Japanese people are striking out to save themselves.

Economics and Politics / Noah SMITH
Abe has been riding the wave of popularity from Kuroda Haruhiko’s program of monetary easing, but the success of that policy is mainly just a rebound from the deflationary hole which Japan dug itself into after the 2008 crisis. To boost growth in the longer term, Abe is going to need to tackle the thorny issue of structural reform, which he is unlikely to do, given the havoc it will wreak on the Japanese social contract.

Meanwhile the Japanese opposition is splintering once again. This is only natural; the LDP has a nationalist ideological core that keeps it glued together, while Japan’s liberals have no such central idea or group around which to coalesce — especially after a defeat. As long as liberalism has no central organizing principle in Japan, the LDP or something like it will continue to reign with only short interruptions.

The Secrecy Law is a clear product of this new political order. The fragmentation of the Japanese opposition, combined with the brief spurt of economic optimism created by monetary policy, made this terrible law possible. Given the inertia of Japan’s politics, it is doubtful that this loss of freedom can be undone without major political upheaval. The only silver lining will be if the law galvanizes a grassroots liberal movement in Japan.

Kanji of the Year / Matt TREYVAUD
The 2013 Kanji of the Year was 輪, “ring,” as in Olympics (五輪), because of course. Of course. Some voters were all, oh, you see, the much-discussed TPP promises to turn the Pacific rim into a big ring of trade and blah blah blah — come on, man. Even 五, which just means “five” and is the other half of the Japanese translation of “Olympic Games,” made it to 14th place, ahead of 税, “tax”. See you in 2020, 五!

A Shift in the Great Shift / W. David MARX
The central idea of my long 2011 essay “The Great Shift in Japanese Pop Culture” was that otaku and gyaru subcultures’ current dominance was not a cyclical trend but instead the result of structural changes in society. To wit, lower levels of youth culture consumption forced the industry to cater almost exclusively to highly-dedicated subcultural groups and ignore mainstream or sophisticated tastes.

The events of 2013 completely challenged this thesis. At some point in the last few years, the gyaru look essentially disappeared. The front of Shibuya 109 is full of women who look almost… normal. Meanwhile the once influential gyaru-o newsletter men’s egg closed up shop. Working class kids from the countryside who wore outrageous things in the past have significantly mellowed. Meanwhile the shrinking of the total youth market means that the fashion industry needs to further collapse subcultural barriers to make one big “youth culture” with very few hard edges. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is working hard to be both Harajuku and Shibuya — although it’s unclear whether these neighborhoods will continue to signify a clear difference in fashion.

At the same time, mainstream consumers are growing tired of otaku antics, fueled in part by normal people’s looming takeover of the Japanese Internet. From here on, culture will be born on the open web and thus recenter around something other than 2ch. In this scenario, otaku will keeping demanding infantile cartoon females to soothe their psychological pain but the rest of society will no longer have to watch.

Peak AKB48 / Ian MARTIN
For years now, idol music has made a mockery of the Oricon singles charts, but 2013 was a new low, with AKB48 and their sister clones accounting for half of the top 30 singles of the year and boy bands from Johnny Kitagawa’s thousand-year reich accounting for most of the rest (Exile, Southern All Stars, and Linked Horizon were the only intruders in this idol love-in).

An AKB48 single will sell ten times an Oricon number one from other weeks, somewhat from the Dentsu-machine’s cross-marketing media saturation. The primary driver, however, remains encouraging consumption patterns among fans that have nothing to do with music and everything to do with the dutiful purchase of silicon discs as if they are character goods. The AKB48 cult has essentially gamified the groups, allowing fans to “play” through their consumption levels.

This system, however, encourages fans to see idols as their personal property, which naturally leads to terrifying penance rituals like Minegishi Minami’s concentration camp cosplay head-shaving. These rituals help keep fans engaged, but the Minegishi incident — along with Shukan Shunbun catching top AKB48 manager Kubota Yasushi having a sleepover with member Kasai Tomomi and then manager Togasaki Tomonobu merrily deploying “prostitution” as his alibi for being seen taking young girls to a love hotel — provided the weary public with some very concrete examples of AKB48’s once abstract ickiness.

The objective evidence suggests that AKB48 jumped the shark this year. Google Trends shows a very clear decline for AKB48 searches, and with the top members from the group’s glory days going solo, 2014 could be the year that consumers finally force the media-industrial complex to move on to something else. The question is, what in the world will replace them?

Japanese Indie Music / Ian MARTIN
The idols and best-of albums on the yearly charts suggest that the mainstream music market is stuck in an ‘80s-’90s fug of golden era nostalgia, but the indie scene also harked back to the old days in its own way. My Bloody Valentine’s long-awaited follow-up to Loveless gave the Japanese shoegaze scene a shot in the arm, with the lineups of the Yellow Loveless tribute album and the Japan Shoegaze Festival revealing a level of diversity (although not always of quality) that is less the scene that celebrates itself and more the scene that celebrates absolutely bloody everything.

Indiepop of a definitively ‘80s variety was all over the place as well, with groups like Wallflower, Homecomings, Elen Never Sleeps, The Moments, Ykiki Beat, Boyish, and Hearsays putting out new releases, many of whom on Fukuoka label Dead Funny Records. While the shoegaze scene tends to use the past as a springboard towards creating something of their own, indiepop is increasingly unaware of the genre’s ’80s roots and draws more from contemporary overseas acts like Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Veronica Falls, and French Films.

Other music that impressed in 2013 included Buddy Girl and Mechanic’s excellent self-titled debut as well as a magnificent new album by Melt Banana. And notably, there was a new Capsule album Caps Lock that represents some of the most interesting and promising work Nakata Yasutaka has done in years — and a welcome relief from the frequently overbearing nature of his output over the past few years.

RIP Tsutsumi Seiji (1927-2013) / W. David MARX
Why do retailers in such a fundamentally conservative culture like Japan frequently champion the world’s most creative, innovative, and iconoclastic artists? Tsutsumi Seiji, who passed away late this year, embodied the answer to this question. Tsutsumi did not just play a key role in the expansion of Japanese consumer society, but made sure that it developed in interesting directions.

As an inheritance consolation prize from his father, Tsutsumi took control of the family’s second-rate department store Seibu. Importing French designers and holding grand art exhibits, Tsutsumi turned Seibu into a cultural powerhouse and then spun its financial success into the broader Saison retailing group — namely, fashion building Parco, DIY-shop Loft, import record store Wave, avant-garde fashion boutique Seed, and the back-to-basics Mujirushi Ryohin (MUJI). Tsutsumi was an enlightened despot among capitalists; a theoretical thinker and respected poet/writer, he once explained to shareholders his business strategy “as a Baudrillardean exercise in embrace of simulacra and parody.” He made Saison a patron for the world’s great talent: The PARCO theater, for example, opened with a performance from avant-garde dramatist Terayama Shūji.

Tsutsumi personally set the highest levels of taste for Japan’s fast-moving, sophisticated consumer society. Sadly, the Japanese economy over the last decade has not been able to sustain the advances Tsutsumi made, as stores and brands head towards lowest common denominators to sustain sales. The lingering brilliance in retailing, however, can be directly traced back to Tsutsumi.

(To learn more about Tsutsumi, read either Architects of Affluence or the more gossip-y The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan’s Richest Family.)

RIP Yamazaki Masayuki (1945-2013) / W. David MARX
In the early 1970s, Harajuku was a quiet neighborhood like any other residential area of Tokyo, with a small creative class clustered around a café called Leon. In 1972, bar owner and Elvis aficionado Yamazaki Masayuki of famed grimy Shinjuku bar Kaijin 20 Mensō opened a new watering hole called King Kong down the street from Leon. Its success led to more bars, and in 1975, Yamazaki opened a new shop off Meiji-doori called Cream Soda to sell vintage 1950s clothing he picked up in London. The store struck gold, sparking not just a boom for retro Greaser fashion in the American Graffiti mold but also launched the distinctly Japanese business of scooping up second-hand American garments and selling them at huge markups back in Tokyo. Yamazaki made millions from selling American delinquent style to teens, culminating in the multi-level Pink Dragon store on Cat Street that still stands today. The rockabilly boom faded in the mid-1980s, but as Yamazaki’s great legacy, Harajuku still stands today as Tokyo’s center of youth culture.

RIP Hayashida Teruyoshi (1930-2013) / W. David MARX
The 1965 photo book Take Ivy clearly demonstrates the degree to which Japan has acted as the unofficial archivist of Western popular culture. Americans in the 1960s never thought to photograph, document, and annotate the campus styles of university students any more than they thought to produce books about other everyday things such as traffic lights, Howard Johnsons, or silverware. As part of a team from clothing brand VAN Jacket and magazine Men’s Club, photographer Hayashida Teruyoshi visited six Ivy League campuses in May 1965, and his images became the Take Ivy book. Between web scans and a U.S. reprint in 2010, his snaps from the voyage have been traded around the American cognoscenti as the definitive guide to classic American style. Hayashida was only vaguely aware of his recent fame overseas, but after his death, he should forever represent the beginning of Japan’s importance in reverently chronicling global culture.

RIP men’s egg (1999-2013) / Patrick MACIAS
men’s egg magazine (never capitalized) fought the good fight for bad taste, beginning in 1999 and finishing on a very sad day in November 2013. The gas, it seemed, had finally gone out of a screaming, howling fourteen-year streak that straddled the pre-millennial generation of dark-tanned sidewalk surfer dudes to the post-apocalyptic gutter playboys of the Center Guy tribe.

A magazine designed as spin-off from egg magazine proper — designed for girls and still in print, it should now be noted — men’s egg was rude, funny, and possessed of a clinical myopia that assumed that the Shibuya ward was the only place in the world that really existed and actually mattered. Ostensibly a fashion and lifestyle periodical, the pages were thick with fear of the opposite sex, and plenty of anxiety about sex itself. With that came the constant reassurance that the worst obstacles could always be overcome with the right pickup lines and the correct consumer choices (depending on who the advertisers were that month).

The exact cause of men’s egg death is unknown, but the usual suspects — low circulation, the decline of the print magazine, and a sluggish specialized men’s fashion market — probably didn’t help. Maybe it was time for everyone associated with the scene to just grow up and graduate already (Hot gossip: I know of one guy who spent 2013 experiencing partial hair loss over the stress associated with modeling for men’s egg, running his own brand, working as a host, and who knows what else).

When I got the news that the magazine was going away, two quotes from two friends came immediately to mind. They may seem really simple, or even unrelated, but that’s the way real hard truth sometimes shows up at the end of the year. “Work aimed at young people in Japan is quite difficult,” says one. “I feel sorry for today’s kids. They don’t have money to spend on stupid clothes anymore,” says another. But as long as there is a Tokyo and a Shibuya with trash-strewn streets acting as incubators of sorts, I’d like to think that there will always be eggs.

The Year in Murakami Haruki / Daniel MORALES
2013 was the year that Murakami Haruki became a super-duper star equally in all parts of the world. Not only was his April novel Colorless Tazaki Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage Japan’s best-selling book, even the publication of a single short story in Japanese drew the attention of the international press.

“Drive My Car: Men Without Women,” published in the December Bungei Shunju, concerns a stage actor Kafuku who has to hire a driver after a DUI. The driver turns out to a be a younger woman named Watari Misaki in whom he feels comfortable confiding his solitary life as a widower. Between this and the English translation of the very strange “Samsa in Love,” published in The New Yorker in October, Murakami has had a strong year, returning to his roots and focusing less on writing long, “comprehensive” novels.

Amazon Bestsellers / Matt TREYVAUD
Fully half of Amazon’s top 10 bestselling books this year were by either Hyakuta Naoki or Ikeito Jun. In fact, apart from Murakami Haruki (in at #2 for Colorless Tazaki Tsukuru etc.), they are the only two authors of fiction in the entire top twenty. We also got two Kankore books, some game guides, and various books promising improved communication: better handwriting, better speaking, better interactions with your doctor. Oddly, the best-selling book in the “foreign books” (洋書) category is… the Rider-Waite tarot deck?

Anime Movies / Matthew PENNEY
2013 saw the release of two Ghibli films — Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) and Kaguya Hime no Monogatari (The Tale of Princess Kaguya) — perhaps the final feature-length movies in the respective careers of anime titans Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao. Both films have moments of brilliance, but both also have problems that hold them back from the top tier of the Ghibli canon. In Kaze, Miyazaki may have been true to his vision of Zero fighter designer Horikoshi’s struggles, but the love story felt forced and makes female lead Nahoko into a sort of prop in the engineer’s tale. Miyazaki is renowned for sketching young heroines full of vitality and potential but has never shown how one gets from that state to actual adulthood. Nahoko in particular lacks agency and ends up as simple fodder for the tragic climax. Takahata’s Kaguya carries on his experimentation with animation technique, but at well over two hours it loses some of the concise archetypal force of the folktales on which it is based.

While Kaze and Kaguya may be strong films by great directors, it is Shinkai Makoto’s Koto no Ha no Niwa (Garden of Words) that may stand as the most confident anime film of 2013. Koto is a short film at 46 minutes and does not move much beyond the themes and experiments with style and tone of Shinkai’s earlier films like Byosoku Go Senchimetoru (Five Centimeters Per Second), but it is a fine return to form after the visually brilliant but narratively cluttered attempt to do a Miyazaki-style adventure film in Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo (Children Who Chase Lost Voices).

Anime TV / Matthew PENNEY
2013 is the best year for anime TV of the last five thanks to excellent examples of many anime genres. Action series Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) has established a strong presence in Japanese popular culture despite (because of?) an absence of the saccharine and sexploitative elements that keep most recent anime in the otaku ghetto. The reworking of zombie / monster, 99% dystopia vs. 1% utopia, and high-flying hero tropes in Shingeki show that in a crowded international action-thriller market, Japanese manga and anime can still show us something fresh. For “slice of life” Uchoten Kazoku (The Eccentric Family) stands out for the warmth of its storytelling and its incredibly detailed depiction of Kyoto — perhaps the best representation of a real environment in anime history. The robot anime Suisei no Gargantia (Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet) echoes past greats like Mirai Shonen Konan (Future Boy Conan) and Gunbuster but also appears as a breath of fresh air in a genre that still creaks under the weight of the legacy of introspective and not infrequently grim Evangelion. At 13 episodes, it is perfectly paced and effectively weds elements of space opera, futurist thinking about artificial intelligence, and the classic anime eco-fable. The comedy series Watashi ga Motenai no ha do Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui (No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!) is another standout. The hilarious exterior provided by voice actress Kitta Izumi’s brilliant performance is frequently peeled back to reveal a poignant look at adolescent fear of others and the self-defeating fantasies which are a dark side of otaku experience.

My pick for the best anime TV series of 2013 is drama Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil). An experiment in rotoscoping by Nagahama Hiroshi, known for his work on Mushishi which stands as one of the great achievements of small screen anime. Aku no Hana improves on the manga with its constricting, decayed representation of a small Japanese town, enhanced sense of realism, and fantastic score. Finally, the deliberately stupidly insane Kill la Kill defies genre pigeonholing (and good taste) but is relentlessly entertaining and yet another memorable series from what was an excellent year in TV anime.

Attack on Titan / Matt TREYVAUD
After four years building steam, Isayama Hajime’s Attack on Titan made the leap from manga to anime this year, immediately becoming a worldwide hit and spawning endless arguments about whether the protagonist’s surname is spelled “Jaeger” or “Yeagar” (not to mention baffled posts on Chiebukuro asking whether “Attack on Titan” is really an appropriate translation of 進撃の巨人). Titan‘s refreshingly non-sexist attitude drew particular praise, and its mysterious setting has inspired endless allegorical interpretations: The titans are China! No, the walled, doomed city is Japan! Me, I prefer to see the titans of the early chapters as stand-ins for colonialism, War of the Worlds style.

Typography on the Web / Ian LYNAM
In June, telecommunications giant SoftBank announced the purchase of Fukuoka-based FontWorks, one of Japan’s leading type foundries. The acquisition neatly mirrored events in American telecommunications over the past few years, notably Adobe’s buy up of the Typekit webfont service in 2011. Softbank and FontWorks were strategic business partners since 2011, having worked together to develop FontPlus, SoftBank’s proprietary webfont service. (The official explanation in the merger document is that “SBT believes that we are able to establish system which enables us to utilize mutual corporate resources rapidly and effectively, and it will make further progress on our service deployment combining ‘creativity’ including the Web-font service and ‘technology.'”) The acquisition reifies Softbank’s aggressive interest in web technologies and an expansion from mere mobile communications to more developed aspects of mobile computing. The ¥1,760 million purchase belies SoftBank’s outlook for the future of web-based typography in Japan.

Kiss me Kappa / Matt ALT
After the short-lived fad for pouty, come-hither “duck mouth” expressions peaked in 2010, domestic and foreign media scrambled to identify other facial trends without much success (an even shorter-lived fad for “sparrow face,” notwithstanding.) We finally have a new contender: “kappa mouth,” which takes its name from the flatulent, frog-skinned, bird-beaked yokai with a penchant for sticking slimy fingers into swimmers’ colons. It involves rolling in the lips and pushing down to create a shallow V. Pundits are suspiciously silent as to whether the naming refers to the yokai’s beak, or rather the expression one assumes after having a slimy finger stuck into their backside.

The Year Nothing Happened / W. David MARX
We should all feel blessed that Japan did not see any further tragic natural disasters this year, but at the same time, the widely-desired, post-earthquake national resurgence was not exactly forthcoming. If the last decade saw an explosion of recessionary culture in Japan, 2012 suggested that even this recessionary culture could be on the wane, leaving us a true social vacuum. To have culture, people have to participate in society; to have political change, people have to vote and organize; to have global economic success, companies must make products that the world wants.

None of this happened, however, and in its place, we got nothing new. Instead of a more terrible AKB48-like thing, we got just slightly less AKB48. Instead of extreme political change, the disheartened electorate voted for a return to LDP rule.

A decade ago there was something slightly interesting in the long decline: How would a truly advanced country handle poor economic prospects, fatal demographics, and dwindling global relevance? But now in 2012 we’re too familiar with the very process of decline. We all know that 2013 will just see a little more slouching in the same direction — more nothing. And while the stakes are getting higher and higher for this great nation to turn things around, the stakes for any individual action, field, or event could not feel any lower.

Nothing really happened in 2012, but for your reading pleasure, here are a few things that transpired this year.

Tokyo Skytree / Matt ALT
Even if you don’t appreciate the architecture (or the neato circular pulsing at night), any fan of Japanese entertainment has to pay the Tokyo Skytree a certain grudging respect, if for no other reason than that it serves up its lifeblood — a stable high-definition television signal. But there are two big strikes against the Skytree. In a city filled with perfectly free observation decks (like those of the the iconic Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building), it’s hard to imagine forking out ¥2,000 a head for an elevator ride. But more importantly, every Tokyoite knows in their heart of hearts that the Skytree isn’t really part of the skyline until it gets smashed to pieces in a giant monster movie.

The Election / Adam RICHARDS
Through some weird twist of fate, Abe Shinzo and his long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party regained control of Japan’s messy political system, giving Abe of all people a second stint as prime minister. For three years, the rival Democratic party attempted to forge a new direction for the country but were mired in disagreements on which direction to take, a series of petty scandals, mismanagement following the March 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster, and a mixed bag of policy decisions. The most lasting of these unpopular policies was to pass a consumption tax hike together with the LDP, in a deal that also kickstarted talks to fundamentally revise Japan’s social safety net protections.

So when Prime Mnister Noda called a snap election as part of said deal, a disappointed electorate returned the LDP to power in resounding fashion. The returning Abe administration has taken on a decidedly bolder policy agenda than when he first came around in 2006, when he tried unsuccessfully to maintain the positive momentum of the Koizumi years. Now his first priority is ending deflation, seemingly at all costs, enlisting former PM Taro Aso as finance minister to keep the bureaucrats from meddling. Once that’s out of the way, he wants to revise the constitution; not to change the pacifist Article 9, at least at first, but to lower the threshold for triggering a referendum for proposed revisions from a 2/3 Diet vote to a simple majority. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Abe will manage to stay in office long enough to do any of this.

Nuclear Protests in Japan / W. David MARX
In 2012, there were many protests against nuclear power in Japan. The DPJ government did nothing concrete in response to these protests, and then the most pro-nuclear political party — the LDP — won back power.

Ishihara Shintaro Trolls the Planet / Connor SHEPHERD
If you think Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintarō’s most entertaining days are behind him, last summer he raised the bar for global-scale trolling with his offer to buy the Senkaku Islands from the Japanese private citizen who owned them. There is ostensibly no practical reason why Tokyo would want or need some unpopulated islands hundreds of miles away from the city, so when Ishihara raised ¥1 billion from some friends to purchase them, we can assume that he did so for no reason other than to anger the Chinese, who want the islands for their awesome hypothetical oil and gas. And it worked — the Chinese got angry! And by essentially forcing the Japanese central government to buy them before he could, he single-handedly caused a significant international incident. Seriously, this guy is a pro.

Operation “Sue-my-datchi” / Matt ALT
2011’s disaster relief “Operation Tomodachi” marked a rare high point in the often strained relationship between Japan and the US military. Late this year, however, eight crewmen from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan announced a lawsuit against TEPCO for exposure to radiation, demanding $40 million in compensation and punitive damages. Let’s get this straight: A group of men serving aboard a floating arsenal packing not one but two nuclear reactors and ostensibly engaged in rescue operations, are suing the very country they were trying to assist in the midst of a disaster. One might hope they’d donate any winnings to those who actually lost families and homes, but given the chutzpah needed to even raise a suit like this, it’s probably too much to wish for.

Grandma Went to Jail / Nick DONEGAN
While much is made of Japan’s graying population and the perceptions of filial respect shown by its youth, 2012 saw the elderly turn towards a new activity: crime. With a strangely “understanding” white paper from the Ministry of Justice, and the number of rather gruesome incidents starring the gentile grand-figure, 2012 was a banner year for showcasing granny’s true skills with a knife. With the overall crime rate on the decline — by the National Police Agency’s estimation, at 5.8% per year — and the world economy on the possible brink of recovery, perhaps we will look back on 2012 as “just a phase” in the high-stakes, rebellious, and attention-seeking world of the Japanese pensioner.

Macabre Murder Factory Flies Under the Radar / Adam RICHARDS
Over a period of decades, one woman orchestrated a criminal operation specializing in the systematic kidnapping, torture, defrauding, imprisonment, and murder of perhaps dozens in Hyogo Prefecture’s Amagasaki. Before her arrest this year, Sumida Miyoko would hire thugs to storm the house of an intended target family, subdue them, and proceed to keep them in captivity as she gradually emptied their bank accounts and took ownership of their property. To aid her reign of terror, she would force children to beat their parents while other family members watched. She maintained an apartment full of human doghouses, some of which were on the balcony to keep people for bad behavior during the winter. At least one died from injuries sustained there, while other victims were found in states of extreme starvation, many beaten severely and one with scars making her all but unrecognizable. One daughter of a victim family caught Stockholm Syndrome, became a key accomplice, married Sumida’s son, and had a child.

The grisly details do not stop there, but after reading about this story I had to wonder why on earth isn’t this the Crime of the Century? Perhaps because it highlights so many of the embarrassing systemic problems of Japanese society — police inertia (police refused to intervene on behalf of multiple victims), a lack of neighborly concern, the shocking ease of defrauding Japan’s various bureaucratic systems, etc. Sumida recently killed herself in prison, deftly avoiding justice in a final bit of police bungling that sends a fitting message for those of us living here: When the rules aren’t well enforced, as is so often the case in Japan, it’s the bullies and monsters that will have the upper hand.

Japanese Electronic Maker Doom / Nick DONEGAN and Adam RICHARDS
2012 was one of the most disastrous years for the bloated electronics industry since its inception. Sharp, Panasonic, and Sony started the year off with bad news but thoughtful hopes — selling off factories to Chinese investors, realigning product foci, and even looking to create new product lines! — but ended up reporting losses totaling to ¥1.23 trillion ($15.3 billion). The massive investments failed to pay off, and now Sharp, the most cash strapped of the once-mighty giant manufacturers, looks increasingly likely to end up mostly a parts supplier for Apple. With Sharp supplying iPhone and iPad panels, Sony making the camera sensors, and a small army of smaller manufacturers making many other components, the Japanese electronics industry as a whole seems fated to lack compelling products of its own, forcing it to occupy the less glamorous and less profitable role as the world’s ultra high-tech parts maker.

Japan Keeps Buying US/UK Tech, Nobody Cares / Connor SHEPHERD
Here’s something you might not know: Over the past two years, companies from Japan have been buying all kinds of high-tech companies in the United States and Britain. At the tail end of 2010, social-games giant DeNA bought the American mobile game shop ngmoco for a WTF-level $400 million, and that kicked off a crazy chain of Japanese companies gobbling up US and UK assets (look how many companies mentioned in this article are high-tech), ending with Softbank buying Sprint and HR/classified ad giant Recruit snapping up jobs-listing startup Indeed.com for you-know-what’s-cool-a-billion-dollars (allegedly, not much about this deal is transparent). Despite all this, no part of these deals made any headway towards complicating the general narrative of Japan’s decline.

The Rise of Smartphones / Adam RICHARDS
2012 was undisputedly the year of the smartphone. I bought an iPhone in late 2011, and it has made me curious about what devices my fellow Tokyo commuters are using. Over the past 12 months there has been a remarkable shift. Initially there were maybe one or two smartphone users vs. traditional feature phones in Tokyo, and now the ratio is reversed. I almost feel pity for people who have not opted for a smartphone at this point. By 2013 a clear majority will have them, giving them access to the “real” Internet (and not bastardized versions for feature phones), often for the first time.

Internet Rage Flourishes / Adam RICHARDS
For years now, the mainstream media’s response to — and hence the elite’s general impression of — the Internet was to see it as a threat, prompting all manner of scare stories even as the general population found its own uses for it. And politicians made sure to have a presence there but seldom would turn to it for either policy advice or a source of popular support. In 2012, however, Internet rage became much more visible in public discourse. Earlier this year a scandal erupted on the Internet when it was found that a popular comedian’s mother was fraudulently receiving welfare benefits. Not surprisingly, the right wing Internet communities (by far the most visible on the Japanese web) railed against what they saw as an unworthy program that gives cash to the undeserving. What was surprising, however, was that the political class — both then ruling party DPJ and opposition LDP — reacted to the scandal with measures aimed at responding to their concerns. One might be tempted to praise politicians for joining the modern age as it were, but net right wingers are mostly out of step with the general public (not to mention good policy). The question now is whether new PM Abe will be as eager to please what he sees as a core constituency.

Video Games / Matt ALT
2012 marked Microsoft’s decision to abandon the Tokyo Game Show. Many pundits spun the move as yet another symptom of the Japanese game industry’s decline. Others spun it as yet another example of Japanese gamers’ traditional disdain for the fetishistic first-person violence of American shooting games. But the real story was about the rise of mobile gaming aggregators like Gree and DeNA, whose floor displays dominated those of traditional Japanese console game developers in terms of both size and bombast. Their apps are wildly popular in Japan, but can they crack the foreign marketplace?

Japanese Game Developers / Jean SNOW
The world gaming community has not been kind to Japanese game developers in recent years. In response, a majority of the games being produced in Japan overly cater to the home audience, leaving the rest of the world looking to the West for their gaming entertainment. Not a good thing for the Japanese gaming industry, considering the impact gaming has in today’s culture (see iOS gaming and blockbuster launches of the latest iteration in the Call of Duty series) and especially sad considering that many a longtime gamer was raised on Japanese-produced titles and consoles. But as 2012 comes to a close, there are some signs — like RPG king Square Enix aggressively releasing titles on iOS and Android — that all may not be lost.

The Pop Music Charts in 2012 / Ian MARTIN
At the end of every year, chart organisation Oricon publishes its rankings of the best-selling music of the year, and for the past few years the singles charts have been congealing like a scab around mass idol collective AKB48. This year they and their sister groups accounted for twelve of the top twenty, with the other eight positions taken by boy bands from the stable of the more established evil organisation in pop Johnny & Associates. Meanwhile the album charts were dominated by “best of” repackagings of older artists like Matsutoya Yumi, Yamashita Tatsuro, Exile, and Mr. Children, who held both of the top two positions with their “Micro” and “Macro” compilations. K-Pop was largely absent from the rankings, although KARA and Girls’ Generation continue to be reasonably strong sellers. With singles largely existing as a means for fans to display their love for idols, albums seemingly an exercise in nostalgia for a gradually ageing fanbase, and either the industry or the market turning away from overseas influences, the future looks pretty dismal for the Japanese pop mainstream.

Shugo Tokumaru — In Focus? / W. David MARX
The sweeping and majestic guitar strums of 2010’s Port Entropy took Japanese genius songwriter-producer Shugo Tokumaru from international Pitchfork darling to the heights of indie fame in his home country, complete with his songs plastered under TV CMs for blue-chippers Sony and JAL. With his new In Focus? Tokumaru could have easily gone full-out, feel-good J-Pop, but instead took a step back to his daring, experimental roots — resulting in what is easily the year’s best Japanese record. His eclectic instrumentation may have been further neutralized into a mellow mix, but peppy, peppy songs like “Katachi” and “Down Down” took Tokumaru to new places with fully danceable rhythms and tight pop structure. The whole thing is held together with the glue of cartoonish micro set pieces, weird time signatures, inventive vocal melodies, sped-up munchkin background vocals, and 1960s vocal jazz references. Really, what other miracles could we possibly want from this musical Messiah?

Best Indie Albums / Ian MARTIN
Aside from Shugo Tokumaru, the indie and DIY scenes continued to release a wide array of great music under the radar. Fukuoka all-girl indie supergroup Miu Mau released the News EP on CD/R, with a combination of chunky synths, sweet harmonies and spindly, flat, metallic guitars wandering over tunes ranging from the lo-fi Shibuya-kei of “Neon Sign” to the retro-futurist new wave Asiatica of “Mirai no Classic.” Another all-girl three-piece Fancynumnum put out the more densely layered No Now, bringing mantric krautrock beats and textures together with kayōkyoku-like melodies. One of the most extraordinary albums of the year was minimalist psychedelic post-punk band Extruders’ Pray, a live album recorded in a Buddhist temple and released as a CD/R in a brown paper bag, while at another extreme Half Sports showed that 1980s styled guitar pop doesn’t have to be gloomy and affected with the raucous, ramshackle Slice Of Our City providing moment after moment of joyous power pop. Finally, one of the most category-defying and downright odd albums of the year was Kumamoto band Doit Science’s Beefheartian splatterfest Information, with its off-kilter melodies, disorientating collision of rhythms, and wide-eyed diversions into barbershop.

No Dancing / Ian LYNAM
June saw a handful of protests to the recent renewed enforcement of a 1984 addition to the Entertainment Business Control Law that bans dancing in music venues and clubs with less than a 66 square meter floor. Since 2010, Japanese law enforcement agencies have gone out of their way to crack down on dancing in small clubs in Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Osaka. With ten raids in 2010, twenty-one in 2011, and an as-yet undisclosed, yet potentially higher number in 2012, the government is doing its absolute best to uphold an archaic law. The odd thing is that the law was originally instituted in 1948 to crack down on prostitution. As for the reasoning in the contemporary context, the jury is still out.

Jail Time for Downloading / Ian LYNAM
Both houses of the Diet passed a law that added punishments to pre-existing anti-piracy legislation in June of this year, and it came into effect in October. Draconian in nature due to the sprawling range of content and lack of clear definition, this new legal framework, in essence, means watching pirated content or making a backup copy of a DVD can get you up to two years in prison or fines up to ¥2 million. (Don’t worry, Tsutaya fans — ripping CDs is legal.) A key (if untested) loophole that has been discerned thus far is that the viewer must be aware of their pirate action’s illegality. The law requires a rightsholder to identify and report violations themselves, and so far no one has been arrested. All the same, tech-savvy Japan residents would be wise to watch their digital backs.

Sony Music Japan on iTunes / W. David MARX
Sony Music Japan — one of Japan’s biggest music labels — finally put its domestic catalog on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The lesson here is that Japanese companies can’t stop history or progress, but they can delay for a very long time.

Adrian Favell vs. Nara Yoshitomo / W. David MARX
Earlier in 2012, British sociologist Adrian Favell published an academic look at the rise of Japanese contemporary art titled Before and After Superflat. There was little notice in Japan until a translated version of his chapter on Nara Yoshitomo “as a businessman” hit the desk of… Nara Yoshitomo. The aging punk rocking artist took to his Twitter account to vent his spleen (calling Favell lots of not nice things, including “会ったこともない外人”) and denouncing the article as being factually inaccurate. The controversy boiled down to Favell’s challenge of Nara’s image as a “naïve” pure painter; Nara did not like being called “consummate slacker CEO” — at least the “CEO” part. Most interestingly, this controversy created a wave of people in the Japanese art world who rushed to defend Nara against the evils of foreign academic analysis.

Modern Times / Ian LYNAM
It’s been a big year for Tokyo-based Taiwanese-American photographer Patrick Tsai. After an upset at the Canon “New Cosmos of Photography” competition, he went on to have his first monograph Modern Times published by boutique photo publishing house Nakarokusha. A slew of exhibitions in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Nara, and elsewhere followed, as well as being picked by Time Magazine’s for its best photo books of the year. Modern Times is now being displayed in the art/photography sections of every major bookstore in the country at present — a rarity when most foreigners’ work is valued as an import. Tsai has managed to cultivate a body of work that is deemed worthwhile during their his time spent domestically in Japan.

Takamine Tadasu’s Solo Show / Darryl Jingwen WEE
Almost two years after the fact, Takamine Tadasu presented one of the more nuanced responses to the aftermath of 3/11 by casting a penetrating eye on parts of the Japanese psyche that are often neglected, shrugged off, or willfully ignored. Highlights of his show at Art Tower Mito included a room littered with shambolic reams of paper filled with xenophobic, jingoistic hate speech and bulletin board ephemera, and revolving LED signs that churn out the trite hyōgo slogans that festoon every street corner and public transportation facility in the country. The deft spatial composition of this show that straddles theater set and conceptual, text-based art, combined with a finely balanced sense of irony — as well as fortuitous timing hot on the heels of a rather disappointing election — makes this a highlight of the past year in contemporary art.

Goldblatt in Delight Shock about Murakami Loss / Matt TREYVAUD
Not only did Murakami Haruki not win the Nobel Prize this year, actual winner Mo Yan‘s English translator Howard Goldblatt was reportedly “delighted that the other Asian titan, Japanese author Haruki Murakami […] didn’t win.” The sentence ends “… when so many other Asian writers get so little attention in the West,” which, okay, admirable sentiments we can all get behind, but still — ouch, man. Next year’s winner will probably just hire a small child to point at Murakami and laugh. (Goldblatt’s Granta interview is also worth reading.)

The Return of the King / Matt TREYVAUD
Ten years after delivering a Tale of Genji for people who like commas and poetry, Royall Tyler has graced the world with a The Tale of the Heike for people who like line breaks (and homework). Fans of tales about premodern Japanese entities with two-syllable names might also want to check out the translation of the Ise Monogatari Tyler banged out in the interim with Joshua S. Mostow.

New Books about Old Music / Matt TREYVAUD
In the world of comics, Amyū’s Kono oto tomare! 『この音とまれ!』 took on the monumental task of making koto music cool (mainly by putting very little actual koto music in the story).On the other hand, 2012 did also see the republication of jiuta master Tomiyama Seikin I’s 1966 Seikin: jiuta shugyō 『清琴 地うた修行』 (as the meat of Jiuta/sōkyoku no sekai『地歌・箏曲の世界』) and Okamoto Chikugai’s Shakuhachi zuisō shū 『尺八随想集』, so the news was not all bad.

Best Action Manga of 2012 / Matthew PENNEY
Yūyami Tokkotai (Twilight Suicide Squad) by Oshikiri Rensuke is a real seinen original that combines high school club stuff, gags, hand-to-hand combat with a ridiculous sense of impact, and some genuinely creepy J-horror scenes that borrow equally from the 1990s and 2000s hits (Ring, Audition, Ju-on) and classic films based on Edogawa Rampo and Yokomizo Seishi novels. Moving deftly between parody and homage and driving almost immediately into a single-arc story that at ten volumes is already foreshadowing a tight and timely conclusion, Yūyami Tokkotai stands out from the many similar series on the market that are ponderously drawing out their stories past thirty volumes and beyond any artistic credibility.

Meanwhile Hunter x Hunter is a series that due to juvenile early arcs and a long hiatus has not built the international fan-base of Shonen Jump brethren Bleach and Naruto. Creator Togashi Yoshihiro, best known for his work on Yu Yu Hakusho, is a experienced creator and in 2011-2012 has successfully introduced a darker tone along with artistic experimentation in the fight scenes — characters take on the form of Buddhist statues and one protagonist’s lines become almost calligraphy-like as he powers up, a far cry from the usual (and increasingly sterile) speed lines and flaming auras.

Best “Artistic” Manga of 2012 / Matthew PENNEY
Maruo Suehiro’s Binzume no Jigoku (Bottled Hell) shows that the ero-guro master continues to grow as an artist. In the title adaptation of Yumeno Kyusaku’s 1928 novella, Maruo brings alive a natural environment that is equally beautiful and terrifying, mirroring perfectly the combination of sexual desire and horror that tears at the protagonists — a shipwrecked adolescent brother and sister. Where Maruo once went for licking eyeballs, he now maintains his transgressive style with symbolism and understatement. Even better, the volume also contains a number of shorts that show he can still summon the old grotesquerie on cue.

Also, Yukimura Makoto’s Vinland Saga is finally beginning to hit the thematic highs of the author’s past hit Planetes. Yukimura uses an old Norse setting to deal with slavery and structures of power and hints that his version of the push to the “new world” is rooted in utopian anarchism.

Fukushima Manga / Matthew PENNEY
There have been over a dozen volume length manga dealing with the March 11, 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi meltdown. The most challenging is Imashiro Takashi’s Genpatsu genma taisen (the title combines “genpatsu” — nuclear power — with the name of the series of novels about a psychic invader from deep space that became the famous/infamous 1983 anime move Harmagedon) which captures the anger felt by many readers while looking critically at the political economy of nuclear power in Japan.

Kobayashi Yoshinori’s (yes, that Kobayashi Yoshinori) Datsu-Genpatsu Ron (On Abandoning Nuclear Power) makes a strong critique of Japan’s nuclear industry from the Right, asking why the public should be asked to pay month after month to electrical monopolies while still picking up the tab to the tune of hundreds of times the company’s stock value if something goes wrong. Kobayashi, of course, believes that while nuclear power is a no-no; nuclear weapons are where Japan should be looking. On the whole, this volume is less deliberately offensive than most of his work and certainly shows a shadow of the mid-1990s Kobayashi who was held to be an adroit progressive before Sensōron (On War) blew everything up.

The most powerful manga on the 3.11 disasters deals with the tsunami rather than the nuclear crisis. The twenty-first volume of Kusaka Riki’s Helpman! (a reference to elder care “helpers”) looks at the quake and inundation of Tōhoku communities from the point of view of the elderly and care workers. Over half of the total dead were 65 or older and hundreds of elderly died in shelters in the days and weeks after the crisis. Helpman! draws attention to this side of the tragedy, which was often homogenized as a “national” or “regional” experience, without losing the sharp affective high points of a mature seinen style. Helpman! is a underrated series that keeps getting better and shows that mainstream manga magazines (in this case, Evening) continue to explore new possibilities for the medium.

The end of 1981 saw the debut of a new women’s fashion magazine in Japan called CanCam. The name was curiously derived from the phrase “I can campus” and nominally targeted at female college students. Publisher Shogakukan created CanCam as a response to the popular magazine JJ from rival Kobunsha, which had arrived in 1975 and ushered in the “new traditional” (nyutora) boom in women’s fashion.

2011 thus marks the 30 year anniversary of that fateful January 1982 issue of CanCam, and while the magazine has seen a major decline in sales after the departure of iconic model Ebihara “Ebichan” Yuri, it is remarkable that this particular magazine of conservative Japanese fashion has stayed alive and relevant for so long, especially in lieu of recent days’ intense media churn.

Since CanCam put together a 30th anniversary issue and I got my hands on the debut issue for ¥105 in Nakano Broadway, I thought it would be useful to compare the two and see what has changed in the last three decades for the nation’s ojosama.

January 1982
The front cover, just as today, screams “Come On, Join Us!” — yet at the time, this call to arms was meant for an extremely limited set of women. In 1982 CanCam was not a media guide for a specific “consumer lifestyle” or fashion sub-group, but arguably, to an elite social class.

The issue’s main article “New City Formal ‘82 Manifesto” jubilantly suggests that readers dress in formal suits not just at “ceremonies” but as daily wear. Young women were expected to master the Louis Vuitton bag and a ¥480,000 Chanel suit — or its cheaper clone — as a complement to Western-style hotel lunches, airport visits, club house invites, theater, and something called “trad parties.” These idealized CanCam women do not just eat at hotels with other rich women once in a while but have a deep connection described as a “hotel life.” There is also an entire section on “what to wear to your après-ski disco party.” And these female college students apparently should know how to cook a Christmas chicken and other ultra-American dishes.

Yet despite CanCam‘s culture of the young madame, there was a certain level of cultural sophistication expected that you would never see in today’s likeminded magazines. There is an interview with former Happy End singer and “city pop” icon Ohtaki Eiichi as well as Chinese landscapes from famed photographer Shinoyama Kishin.

The overall effect is a magazine full of 21 year-old women who look middle-aged. At the time, Japan had spent a few years in the aforementioned nyutora boom. This was the country’s answer to American “preppie,” directly reflecting the culture and style of the nation’s most wealthy residents. The idea was to dress like women from good families in Kobe or Yokohama, shopping at their small shinise stores that had clothed the elite for decades. The initial issues of CanCam offered a guide to this unadulterated upper class dress, with absolutely nothing that could be considered “subcultural” influence. The magazine’s men meanwhile look like they were shipped in from a Spring semi-formal at Cornell: navy blazers, gray flannels, and red rep ties. If all fashion is indeed costume, the idea here was to look wealthier and older than your years — although not in a vulgar nouveau riche way. (A reminder: This is a few years before the Bubble economy.) The title of the issue’s hair guide could not make this message any clearer: “I want to look like an adult.”

This all boils down to the age-old “traditional” clothing ethic of TPO (time, place, and occasion) — coined by Ivy League-style instigator Ishizu Kensuke. But in this, CanCam connects its consumer focus to broader society. The editors were saying, you need to buy these things in order for you to properly participate in these activities at these locations with these worthwhile people. Not all the readers could necessarily replicate the lives of Japan’s affluent, but it says a lot that Old Money was the aspiration of the time.

By the middle of the first issue, however, CanCam suddenly admits that the fashion pages were a parochial fantasy, and that real women of the early 1980s dressed in a more casual and gaudy style. Suggestions for winter coats involve a “surfer” (?) variant that is just a varsity jacket. There is an article about vintage shopping in Osaka, where people are, gasp, wearing sweatsuits and bold primary colors. These glimpses of the real Japan show the degree to which the CanCam world was mostly imaginary, or at least, idealized and extrapolated from a tiny set of existing college students at the top private schools.

Ironically, this magazine, openly obsessed with Western culture, sees its biggest style antithesis in the actual American college students the editors encounter during a visit to “American campus life.” Every single student is in jeans and sweatshirts, co-habitating with their long-haired boyfriends in ragged apartments. (Surprise appearance from one time punk rocker, one time Harvard freshman, and now radio host Morley Robertson!)

Some bonus anachronisms:

• A brand called “Gay togs” — Jeans for Gals
• A call-out for Boz Scaggs’ Hits!
• The inside cover ad is Shiseido using a model who looks like a Flash Gordon extra — thus predicting the techno-pop future that Japan would subsume Japan in the mid-1980s

January 2012
The January 2012 issue of CanCam (out in November 2011, natch) celebrates thirty years of publishing from the time of the fateful first issue. Although it spends most of its time celebrating the cult of CanCam rather than the lives of CanCam girls, there is enough material to see stark comparisons of how dramatically things have changed in the last 30 years.

First and foremost, the CanCam look has taken on heavy elements from gyaru culture. The style of CanCam has been known recently as o-nee-kei — “big sister style” — after the original 1990s kogyaru who grew up and became older, classier role models for the younger gyaru. These were the kogyaru who came primarily from upper to upper middle-classes — before the great “yankii-fication” of gyaru that happened in the late 1990s with ganguro. Yankii references, however, have slipped into any style related to gyaru aesthetics, so the pure upper-crusty-ness of the original CanCam has taken on lots of new signifiers that would have made the young madames of 1982 blush red like the beets in their New Otani salad.

This is most obvious in the preferred hairstyle — a pleasant golden brown — which would have gotten you expelled from private school back in the day. The Chanel-inspired tweedy suit still makes appearances, but alongside gaudy leopard print and phones bejeweled within every centimeter of their lives. Bags have teddy bears attached. The good news is that no one would confuse these women for being 40. They look their age, and more importantly, they look like they are having fun.

The original CanCam oddly spoke of a “campus life” while showing all the things women should be doing off-campus at hotels, airports, and private establishments. The new CanCam, however, has completely dropped the pretense that the readers are college students. The audience does include college students, but is mostly young Tokyo clerical workers of various class backgrounds. Most importantly they are not women living in the pockets of their parents, and so prices are more down-to-earth than the Chanel obsessions of 1982. In fact some of the clothing choices are actually cheaper than those presented in the original issue, despite 30 years of nominal inflation. The main section has entire outfits for around ¥20,000, which would have only bought you the left shoe of an Italian pair thirty years earlier. Tiffany & Co. makes an appearance but it’s jewelry for daily wear — not a single suit you’re likely to only put on once every few weeks.

CanCam also ceased its over-reliance on Western associations to create value and meaning. Although the typical CanCam-like magazine tends to use Tokyo’s more Western looking backgrounds for photoshoots, this particular 30th anniversary issue puts the models in intentionally Japanese places — a sento bath house, the downtown Asakusa neighborhood. They do visit Northern Europe as part of a Tintin advertorial, but the girls have been relieved of the impossible mission that everyone in Japan needs to suddenly become American.

Ultimately CanCam has given up being a newsletter for a specific social class in Japan, but instead, a highly welcoming consumer lifestyle that anyone can join. The issue’s front pages do the neat trick of dressing up idols from different genres, such as Momoiro Clover Z and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, into the CanCam style. The girls, despite their usual personas, look utterly plausible as mini-Ebichans, thus emphasizing the degree to which anyone can arbitrarily choose to buy into the style. There are no barriers to entry.

As a trade off, however, the magazine had to completely drop all reference to wider society. The clothing is suddenly an end to itself, rather than specific tools to fit with certain times, places, and occasions in a social calendar. Perhaps there is greater economic incentive to turning a magazine into a shopping catalog rather than a manners manual, but this also reflects the degree to which all girls in Japan now can find their styles on a magazine rack and their clothing in a major shopping complex. When everyone is invited to the consumer market and aspirations towards old wealth are over, explicit elite codewords and narratives get in the way and must be removed.

This is fine, of course. But one worrying thing is that the de-emphasis of “occasion” seems to also have removed the men from the magazine. CanCam in 1982 is full of guys in Ivy style, loitering around at some parent-funded disco party. In the modern CanCam, however, men almost never appear. The January 2012 issue does have a “Xmas date” section but you barely see the men. Christmas feels like complete obligation: Oh that day every year where I have to go out with my boyfriend. (Interesting the men look like members of EXILE rather than A students.) Meanwhile there are triumphant images of a flamboyant “kirakira” party scene and a year-end bonenkai that feature no men at all. The CanCam world has become almost exclusively homosocial — perhaps another influence from the yankii-fication of gyaru culture.

During the 2005 Ebi-chan — the peak of Japan’s second wave nouveau riche culture — CanCam did promise its readers that they could meet a doctor if they only wore the right shade of peach. But when no one ended up meeting doctors or tie-less entrepreneurs who would carry them over the threshold of Roppongi Hills Residence, that particular dream imploded. Hence came the rise of magazines ViVi and Sweet — style for girls who want to impress other girls. CanCam now reflects this slightly depressing sexless present, and maybe it has to. Japan’s lack of children stems from a lack of marriage which stems from falling salaries and job prospects for young men. The idea of over-promising an easy path to marriage with affluent men has become a cruel hoax. So the editors dropped the whole “men” thing and now celebrate those years when young women can be young women. “Come on, join us!” — just don’t expect to meet any guys.

Last time we saw that the tastes of upper and middle-class “mainstream” consumers dominated Japanese pop culture from the post-war to the end of the 1990s. This time we will explore the most important cultural change of the last decade: the greater proportional power for marginal subcultures. Mainstream consumers, for the economic and demographic reasons given in Part One and Part Two, have ceased to consume with the same force as before and thus have lost their “voting power” within pop culture.

Part Four: The Rise of Marginal Subcultures

The drop in cultural markets has been almost perfectly pegged to the decline in incomes. Middle class consumers are buying less, and when they buy, now go for cheaper or risk-free products. Within this environment, we could expect marginal subcultures to also have curbed consumption. Yet they did not! And their steady buying into their own cultural niches has made huge changes in the tenor of Japanese pop culture.

Yankii and otaku: Consumption as pathology

The yankii and otaku have never traditionally been blessed with high incomes nor high future earning potential, and in pure homo economicus terms, should be cutting back even more than middle-class consumers. We must understand, however, that for the otaku, yankii, and gyaru, shopping is not merely a form of leisure nor has it even been an attempt to buy into a larger society-wide consumerist message. These groups use consumerism as a therapeutic solution to their psychological and social problems.

The otaku spend their time as avaricious collectors of goods and trading information with other otaku. In shunning away from mainstream standards of sociability, sexuality, and career success, the act of maniacal consumption becomes their raison d’être. They cannot relate with other people if not commenting upon these cultural goods. Culture — most of which must be purchased and enjoyed as object (even when it is just physical media holding content) — is the great satisfier of their deepest desires.

The gyaru, in comparison, put a high premium on social networks and romance. Yet there is a certain pain at the heart of gyaru culture. In his book Keitai Shosetsu-teki (“Cell Phone Novel-esque”), author Hayamizu Kenrou calls the basic aesthetic mode of gyaru literature — cell phone novels, Hamasaki Ayumi lyrics — “trauma-kei” due to its emphasis on overcoming personal tragedy. When I interviewed Nakajo Hisako, the editor-in-chief of Koakuma Ageha, in 2009 I asked, “Why do gyaru spend so much time on their clothing, hair, and makeup?” She answered, “Because we are not cute. If we were cute, we would just wear a white T-shirt. We have to work hard to look good.” There is an obvious logic to this: The gyaru’s transformation into golden curly hair and heavily painted faces is an escape from their normal selves.

Like Nakajo suggests, gyaru culture looks as it does precisely because they are not “blessed” girls (Nakajo’s words). And this means gyaru must spend on clothing, hair treatments, and makeup in order to achieve the desired self-image. Beyond this desire to look like someone else (and basically like everyone else in their peer group), there is also the social demand to show allegiance to a wider gyaru subculture by donning its uniform. To be a gyaru means dressing like a gyaru — no exceptions.

Marginal groups’ up their voting power in the consumer vacuum

The end result is that the otaku and yankii have an almost inelastic demand for their favorite goods. They must consume, no matter the economic or personal financial situation. They may move to cheaper goods, but they will always be buying something. Otherwise they lose their identity. While normal consumers curb consumption in the light of falling wages, the marginal otaku and yankii keep buying. And that means the markets built around these subcultures are relatively stable in size.

So as the total market shrinks, the marginal groups — in their stability — are no longer minor segments but now form a respectable plurality in the market. In other words, if otaku or yankii all throw their support through a specific cultural item, that item will end up being the most supported within the wider market.

The clearest example of this is AKB48. With the letters AKB in their name, this group of girls was unequivocally marketed towards older males based in the Akihabara otaku culture. Compared to past mass market groups such as Speed, the girls are intentionally chosen and styled to look like elementary schoolgirls and lyrically address older men with direct sexual references. (See the “cat-eared brothel” video for “Heavy Rotation” and the unambiguous “love knows no age” lyrics for “Seifuku ga jama wo suru.”)

The mass idol group regularly has an “election” (sousenkyo) where fans try to vote their favorite girl to Number One. Buying certain AKB48 CD singles gives the fan a vote in the AKB48 election, which thus incentivizes otaku to buy multiple copies of the CD to increase their “political” power. The CD is thus no longer a means of listening to music but a way to influence the future of AKB48. This has created a legion of fans who buy dozens and hundreds of the same AKB48 CD or even 5500 copies. There are now doubts about that story’s authenticity but it basically was an exaggeration of an existing principle. Regardless, the marketing strategy of AKB48 does encourage the purchase of multiple goods, thus amplifying the buying power of nerds beyond their small numbers. This means as a consumer bloc, the AKB48 otaku fans can rival the non-otaku consumer base.

This otaku bloc strength, as well as other niche’s dedicated buying, can be seen through the music charts. In 2010 only three artists made the Oricon best-selling singles market — AKB48 and a Johnny’s Jimusho group Arashi. (At this stage, you can almost argue that music fans of Johnny’s groups are themselves a conspicuous cult rather than a mass market phenomenon.) Only two artists taking the entire singles market is unprecedented in Japanese musical history. In the previous decade, the average number of artists in the top ten was 8.2. The best explanation is that mainstream consumers stopped buying music, even single song downloads, so the favorite acts of marginal subcultures now appear to be the most popular.

Otaku and gyaru: winners by default

This principle demonstrates how AKB48 became an unlikely “mainstream” phenomenon. Despite AKB48 being so clearly marketed towards a niche audience, their success in a declining market has made them perceived to be the most popular in the entire market. Therefore 2010 and 2011 saw AKB48, with backing from advertising monolith Dentsu, doing advertisements for mainstream brands and chains such as 7/11. (Lawson’s has now countered with a nerd-drooling K-On! campaign.) With no major competition from more mainstream-oriented idols and groups, they became the obvious spokespeople and magazine cover girls — thus amplifying their fame more.

In the case of gyaru, there are larger numbers of gyaru than otaku, meaning that the gyaru can just consume their standard number of items and still dominate the market. Before I mentioned that the extremely “normal girl” fashion magazine non•no once sold close to a million copies per issue in 1996 at the peak of the publishing market, which was once far above the 310,000 copies for hardcore yankii/gyaru magazine Popteen at the same time. Around 2009, however, non•no dropped to a mere 180,000 copies a month while Popteen was still hovering around 310,000. Gyaru are still consuming fashion, and therefore need fashion guides to tell them how to do so. “Normal” girls have generally lost interest in clothing and do not need fashion guides as much. So in this collapse of the mass market, a magazine representing a marginal taste has become one of the best-selling.

With the yankii and otaku culture being so proportionally conspicuous in the market and mainstream and avant-garde styles being so minor and invisible, the once marginal looks have a greater legitimacy for less engaged consumers who mostly just desire socially-acceptable styles. As a result, gyaru and yankii fashion have had a strong moment over the last five years, leading to large-scale booms in things once unfathomable such as “hostess fashion.” University students at elite schools like Keio are likely to have hairstyles reminiscent of yankii hosts. Films and books with obvious yankii narratives, such as Rookies and cell phone novel Koizora, became huge national hits in 2009. Gyaru singer Nishino Kana is one of the few well-selling artists on Sony (formerly known for alternative musicians Supercar, Puffy, and Denki Groove). And even former “arty” magazines like CUTiE have moved towards the gyaru style, and the fiercely indie girl mag Zipper put gyaru icon Tsubasa Masuwaka on the cover. There is no popular female style that does not see a little influence from the yankii side of gyaru culture.

Not truly “the most popular”

While otaku and yankii cultures are enjoying a new cultural influence in their deep commitment to consumption, we should not forget that these groups do not make up any kind of actual societal consensus. The masses may be consuming parts of their culture, but these groups are at best pluralities rather than majorities — dominant in the market but nowhere near 50% of tastes.

For example, if you look at the sales numbers for the #1 single of 2010 — “Beginner” by AKB48 at 954,283 copies — this would not have been enough copies to make the top ten from the years 1991 to 2000, when the wider public bought CDs in droves. In 2001, it would have ranked in at #10 — a successful hit for a niche, but not the symbol of J-Pop for the era. The population of Japan in the last ten years has not dropped enough to make this smaller number of sales proportionally relevant — just less people are purchasing music.

AKB48’s narrow popularity becomes very clear when the group appears on television — a medium that continues to have a mass audience (although disproportionally elderly viewers.) Maeda Atsuko had been repeatedly voted the #1 member of AKB48, and yet her recent drama Hanazakari no Kimitachi e (Ikemen Paradise)saw extremely low ratings (episodes around 6%). AKB48 variety show “Naruhodo High School” has drawna dismal 4.5%.

AKB48 have also been extremely popular on YouTube, which skews towards a tech-savvy male audience in Japan. And yet a song like “Heavy Rotation”— at over 50 million views — has nearly one-third “thumbs down” votes. This is an extremely high amount level of dislikes compared to other music videos on the site.

So AKB48 are the most conspicuous music group in Japan at the moment with the highest record sales and highest number of appearances, but they should necessarily be considered a “mass” phenomenon with widespread fans across multiple segments. The group has captured the strongest plurality in the market, and companies have mobilized around them in desperation. If Dentsu could sponsor a different hit idol group with an even broader fan base, they would. But ironically, no one other than AKB48 or Johnny’s Jimusho groups have the sales or market legitimacy to work in the context of mass market advertising. Marginal groups are now feeding and over-influencing the remnants of the mass market just as counter-consumer once did.

Next time, we look at whether marginal subcultures can produce goods that are easily exportable.