Introduction

Kanikōsen 蟹工船, (The Crab Cannery Ship) has recently received much attention in the Japanese and foreign press for being one of the least expected publishing successes of 2008. Written in 1929 by Kobayashi Takiji 小林多喜二 at the height of Japan’s proletarian literature movement, the book tells the story of the eponymous cannery ship and its workers of northern Japan: their desperation, their wretched prospects, their exploitation at the hands of the bosses and the ruling class … and, eventually, what they do about it. Kobayashi later joined the Communist party and was tortured to death by the police in 1933, but the unpolished urgency and populism of his work has kept it in the canon — a cult classic subject to periodic revivals.

The first revival, of sorts, was in 1953 — the year after the Occupation ended — with the release of the film adaptation. Technically, the postwar boom had begun by this time; in practice, very little of it had trickled down to the general populace. The Red Purge of recent years had made it clear that Japan and U.S. leaders would not tolerate anybody trying to rewire the system. There was frustration and dissatisfaction in the air, and the release of Kanikōsen capitalized (!) on that.

But we know how things eventually worked out: Japanese industry and government working together managed to get enough citizens employed on agreeable terms that most of the previous dissatisfaction evaporated. Postwar Japan’s economic success was so great that the country came to be seen as a serious threat to the U.S. itself.

Then the bubble popped. Corporations restructured, cutting costs by relying more on contract employees (契約社員) or dispatch workers (派遣社員) and less on the seishain (正社員) — “true company members” — who had come to expect lifetime employment and other inconvenient things. Young people entering the workforce are faced with the choice of either taking these less desirable temporary jobs, sacrificing much of their personal life to compete for the few coveted seishain spots — or just not working at all. And so today you have an under-30 underclass which feels exploited and locked out of “real” adult society.

Working the register at 7-11 or answering phones in a Shinjuku high-rise may not be back-breaking labor, but the problems of “freeter” life are real: few opportunities to build a real career, patronizing and insulting treatment from people on the traditional career path, working the exact same job as the seishain but only receiving 40% pay and no chance to bounce to the management track, and growing uncertainty about whether they’ll be able to receive social security if and when they retire — despite the contributions deducted from their paycheck every month. This is the background against which the Japanese Communist Party is enjoying increasing interest from under-30s and the background against which Kanikōsen is enjoying its latest revival as a metaphor for modern Japan. People are responding once again to its vivid worldview: an undeserving but firmly entrenched ruling class who live luxuriously and hypocritically, an exploited working class kept hidden below decks, and tales of ill-specified external threats, used by the former to keep the latter in line.

Chapter 1

“Oi! We’re off t’Hell!”

The two fishermen leaned over the deck’s guardrail, craning like snails stretching out of their shells to view the ocean-hugging town of Hakodate. One of them spat out a cigarette he had smoked down close to his fingers. The cigarette tumbled and whirled as though clowning as it scraped its way down the tall side of the ship. The fisherman’s entire body stank of booze.

Broad-floating steamboats with bellies like fat red drums; boats still being loaded up, tilted precariously to one side as though someone were pulling at their sleeve; buoys like thick yellow chimneys and great bells; launches weaving between one boat and the next nimble as fleas; the chill murmur of the waves, bobbing with soot and chunks of bread and rotten fruit, like some unique fabric… Above the waves, smoke streamed before the wind, bringing the thick smell of coal. Every so often a winch’s rattle would carry across the water to echo nearby.

This was the Hakkōmaru, a crab cannery ship, and directly before it a sailboat with peeling paint was letting out an anchor chain from the a hole in the bow like a bull’s nostril. Two foreigners smoking wide-bowled matelot pipes could be seen running back and forth between the same two places like clockwork dolls. A Russian boat, no doubt. A surveillance craft assigned to Japan’s crab cannery fleet.

“I ain’t got a mon to my name,” said the fisherman. “Shit. Here.”

So saying, he moved his body closer to the other man’s. Then he grabbed the second man’s hand and brought it to his hips. He touched it to the pockets of the corduroy pants he wore under his hanten jacket. There seemed to be a small box in there.

The second man looked wordlessly at the first man’s face.

The first man giggled. “Cards,” he said.

On the boat deck, the captain was looking like a shogun, smoking a cigarette as he wandered about. When he exhaled, the smoke bent at an acute angle just past his nose before breaking up and drifting away. Sailors dragging their wood-soled straw sandals on the deck carried food buckets busily in and out of the forward cabins. Preparations were complete, and the ship was ready to leave.
Continued »

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

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

[redacted]

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

[redacted]

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

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

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

The Japanese stock market may have crashed in 1990, but the “Bubble Era” did not really end as a cultural period until around 1993. Even if we mark the “lost decade” as beginning in that year, it really took the sarin gas attacks and Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995 to deeply etch a more permanent shadow on the Japanese psyche. But despite these human tragedies and the clear descent into “不景気” (recession) by the mid-1990s, spending on import fashion still managed to reach its highest level ever in the year 1996. That’s because incomes did not start to fall until 1998.So fashion consumption was much more expansive in the middle of the 1990s than in the “rich” days of 1985-1991. (Although the market went into decline from 1997 on, the superbrands of LV and Gucci etc. continued to grow and grow up until recently.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem 4: The Creative Market was a Viable Choice

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

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

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

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

Solutions: So What Did Happen?

I think the better explanation is something like this:

1) The lifestyle demands that accompanied the Bubble Era led companies to build the prerequisite informational channels, retail infrastructure, and taste standards needed for a vibrant (consumer-based) creative culture. The era itself, however, did not yet have a surplus of artists who could locally produce world-class material. Economic conditions have a more direct influence on infrastructure more than just aesthetic mood — especially in Japan where the cultural markets were still under development.

2) The creators in the Bubble Era were children of a much less “privileged” era, and while the isolation from global standards worked perfectly well for some art forms such as anime and manga, those indulging in the hard-to-define “cool” sectors such as fashion and music could not produce enough materials that created an impression abroad. (Rei Kawakubo [b. 1942] and the YMO crowd [b. 1947-1952] are the most obvious exceptions.)

3) At least for the Ura-Harajuku and Shibuya-kei crowds, the most famous creators of the 1990s had used their Bubble years to indulge in niche foreign cultural products to a completely new degree (made possible by the infrastructure outlined in point 1), so by the time they hit an age where they could be cultural producers themselves, they had the know-how to make culture on a global level and could use the more sophisticated retail environments to achieve mass recognition.

4) Like almost all artists, the 1990s creators naturally reacted against what came before them. In their case, their movement away from the superficial nouveau riche tastes of the Bubble Era brought them (and their consumers) to more “artistic, creative” pursuits. These values worked well with the reactionary chic zeitgeist, but in the case of Shibuya-kei, for example, these value changes began way before the Bubble even ended.

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