For a long time, I have been writing about pakuri — the use of creative elements from someone else in a similar context as the original without self-acknowledgment of the borrowing. There remains a loud minority contingent who believes that there is Western bias underlying any judgments against pakuri. In other words, they believe that the Japanese do not consider pakuri to be a bad thing.

I have countered this with examples of a Japanese gallery suing a record label for pakuri of their exclusive artistic images, the Japanese net community criticizing Japanese singers for pakuri, and the mainstream media criticizing a Japanese painter for ripping off a Western painter.

Now, we have a more interesting case: a Western band re-creating a work from a Japanese photographer for the cover of its DVD without acknowledgment of the original work.

As stated in this Mainichi article, photographer Miyamoto Ryuji is very upset about New Order’s pakuri of his photo “Tokyo 1995.”

The photographer said he would have accepted the similar photograph if it had been properly labeled.

“If they had used expressions clearly stating that it was a parody, I would have accepted it,” Miyamoto said.

An image of the photo in question is available here.

I am not going to claim that there exists a universal artistic morality about borrowing and sampling, but this episode illustrates two things. One, there is an unofficial code of conduct in the art/culture game. When not referencing “master works” or art that everyone basically knows, there is a general demand for some kind of public recognition — whether in the credits or in the title or in some other reference. Otherwise, the “victim” will likely be upset and may look to find justice in the court of public opinion.

Two, I don’t think Japanese artists are any less upset about being blatantly copied than Western artists. Traditional Japanese ideas about “creativity” — Confucian or otherwise — may have promoted the idea of copying as a means of learning, but I don’t think this philosophy is strong enough to excuse the times when a professional artist copies another. I believe the large amount of pakuri in Japan in the past was related less to that amorphous blob called “culture” and more to the fact that almost no one Japanese ever got caught due to an information gap between Japan and the world. (And also, the lack of criticism in the Japanese media that would point out these stories.) Now with the internet, not only can Western artists find where they have been copied and Japanese audiences can complain about theft, but now Japanese artists can see exactly where they have also been pakuri’d.

On the left below is an image currently used in Marui (OI) department store’s Christmas campaign. The model is Ikeuchi Hiroyuki, who plays the lead role in a special tie-up short drama series available on the Marui website. The story 「クリスマスの約束」(The Christmas Promise) deals with fixing broken music boxes, making cake, and absolutely, positively finding love on Christmas Eve. Actually, it’s a pretty non-commercial message for what is ultimately a commercial advocating the general purpose consumption of items. Although Christmas in Japan is a “romantic holiday” — opposed to the “family holiday” emphasis in the U.S. — both advocate material exchange as close communication. The difference is that lonely Americans rarely try to desperately put together a family to properly celebrate, whereas it’s a running joke that Japanese girls work hard to meet boys in the Advent season lest be alone on the Eve night. (Many guys then get the tsukaisute treatment come New Years.)

Ikeuchi’s portrait now towers over Shibuya, and I couldn’t help but notice that his overall posture and expression strike a strange resemblance to the promotional poster for 2005′s The 40—Year—Old Virgin. What an odd thing to inflict pakuri upon. Or is there something universally endearing about dippy-looking men wearing collared shirts and looking to the viewer’s upper left with a blithe, toothy smile?

Every story from my teenage years starts with a cassette tape but so be it: I had the entire audio track to the film Clerks on a Maxell Type II tape — with all the interstitial vocabulary words written in Uniball pen lettering as the “song titles.” Great for road trips, and you could even play it for people who hadn’t seen the movie since the content was almost 85% audio-based anyway. Once time I popped it in the tape deck of a van on a class trip up to Georgia, and I was very surprised the teach let us get all the way through the “snowballing” etc. Golden times: that level of authoritarian negligence would be lawsuit territory in this day and age.

In the late-mid-’90s during the decline of the Alternative Nation, I turned my attention away from indie music and onto indie film. Young director Kevin Smith was the cinematic equivalent of Lo-Fi: DIY, self-financed, all for $25,000. Grainy B&W. Legitimately funny. Maybe I respected David Lynch et al. more than Kevin Smith, but Clerks felt like a movie that anybody could make — including me. Nothing is more exciting at 16 than the flash of possibility.

Of course, Clerks does not qualify as a perfect movie. In general, Smith shows little interest in actually using the possibilities of the film medium: He arranges actors and constructs visuals solely for creating wooden comic panels to illustrate his radio play. The acting is so literally amateur. But again: DIY, lo-fi. The mistakes are endearing, remember. But let’s be honest: the film won me over immediately because it feels like what a clever teenager would put together as his fantasy high school play.

While trawling the torrent sea torrents last week, I ran into a DVD rip of Clerks II (The sequel to Clerks) and felt compelled to illegally download it for free — that was the least I owed the director for three-to-four years of inspiration. Without really making an explicit attempt to do so, I have ended up seeing every other Kevin Smith film and found them all *blah* with the exception of Chasing Amy, which again, worked for me as a 17 year-old American teenager. So why not Clerks II.

I don’t mean to spoil Clerks II for you, but it’s bad. Really terrible, and I don’t even care that it’s a sequel to one of my favorite childhood movies in a Ghostbusters II / Meatballs II / Cruel Intentions II disappointment kind of way. No hyperbole: The acting quality falls somewhere beneath Japanese network television comedies. The jokes feel like cutting-floor material from 1994 — as if no one realized that the Internet made all over-analysis of nerd movies pedestrian about seven years ago. The direction is bland…. blah, blah, blah, read an actual review if you want more explication on the serious illness that plagues this film.

I would rather discuss something more fundamentally unsettling: the Kevin Smith Nightmare. The idea that you as a young creator could start out as a Horatio Alger type with a lot of promise and moxie, get the big break, receive access to huge budgets, real actors, color film, Jason Lee, make six other films, become a folk hero, have a pretty good cartoon made of your original movie, become such a revered face that you sit in for Roger Ebert, epitomize creative success for a whole generation, and then, make film after film that manifest nothing approximating artistic maturity or growth — if not becoming hostage to total descent into hackneyed retardation of your original material. And this is not, Musician Gets Worse As He Gets Old Syndrome. Catching the Kevin Smith Nightmare means our youthful shortcomings are permanent and not a result of our limited circumstances, and no matter how hard we try to move up and beyond, we just end up being worse and worse at what we nominally do best. And this is a scenario that could become a habitat for all of us “young creators waiting for the world to sweep us off our feet.” Hard stats are unavailable, but one of every four could fall prey to KSN every year.

I remember a disgruntled filmmaker saying once: “For every Kevin Smith, there are 100 failures that go nowhere.” Where do we go now that Kevin Smith was also a failure?

I have been following the controversy about artist Wada Yoshihiko‘s alleged artistic theft on Kikko’s blog (click to see a visual comparison), but now The Japan Times is finally reporting on the topic in English. Long story short, an esteemed artist is being stripped of his awards for a work that completely and utterly rips off a painting by an Italian painter.

I bring this up not to suggest that Japanese artists are inherently thieves, but to knock out the final leg on the myth that “there is no sin in Japan against copying other artists’ works.”

Crazy how human nature works, but people in Japan — like in many other countries — think it is generally unethical to copy directly from 1) contemporary artists 2) un-ironically or un-referentially 3) in the same artistic genre 4) and pass it off as your own. If there is any more debate to be had on this issue — that somehow the idea of “intellectual property” and “originality” is a Western conceit forced upon an unwilling Eastern populace — go for it in the comment section, but I am pretty much convinced that the massive increase in artists being busted for pakuri in recent days has little to do with the entrenchment of Western values and everything to do with the democratization of the media space thanks to 2-ch and blogs. You couldn’t get “caught” for pakuri when the media worked to black out all criticism of artistic works. Thanks to the Inter Net, now you can.

A couple of weeks ago, my professor invited me and the other grad students out to Ryogoku to watch a rakugo performance. For those unfamiliar with the artform, rakugo is a traditional type of long Japanese comic monologue dating from the Edo period. Performers sit on a small pillow in front of the audience and retell an established set of stories — generally, word-for-word. Although the ochi (falling) at the end of the story is akin to the punchline in the Western sense, devoted fans already know how things turn out and evaluate the performance on the individual’s storytelling technique and articulation. Rakugo performers sometimes write their own material but not usually until becoming a certified master of the art. In general, new stories are not a dominant part of the overall experience.

This was my first time I had seen rakugo in about a decade. I could somewhat navigate the arcane language this time around but unfortunately still lack the necessary familiarity with Edo period urban cultural references to create an adequate context for the ha-ha. With Japanese drama like Noh, you can sit back and enjoy the music and movement without understanding the “dialogue.” Non-textual clues, however, don’t get you very far in rakugo: there is almost nothing besides the performer talking in various voices and making the occasional Michael Winslow sound-effects of eating crunchy food. Watching rakugo as a foreigner is maybe as difficult as a non-native English speaker watching a Colonial-era proto-Seinfeld perform at the Ye Olde Improv.

When compared to comedy in the West, rakugo differs not just in terms of format, but in the core philosophy behind the humor. Rakugo is orthopraxical comedy: performers deliver well-known scripts line-by-line, attempting to reconstruct a “perfect” reading. Only masters with hierarchical stature can make additions to the canonized form.

Across the seas, rakugo’s cousin — American stand-up — is meanwhile orthodoxical comedy. Besides old-timey Vaudeville, brand new material is a basic requirement for a stand-up comedian. Whereas rakugo gains its legitimacy with links to the past — kimonos, antiquated language, formal “Japanese” gestures — American comedians like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Mitch Hedberg secured their place in the cultural history books by breaking taboos and innovating on past methodologies.

Viewed from a certain perspective, the rakugo audience comes to enjoy clichés, hear stories they already know, and giggle at punchlines that were hot stuff two-hundred years ago. Although it may be unfair to compare a “classical” artform to cutting-edge pop culture, comparing cliché usage in rakugo and recent American comedy is a fairly illuminating undertaking.

The half-hour Comedy Central show Stella — starring Jewish-American The State alumni Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, and David Wain — has a unique comic language that can best be described as a lexicon of schizophrenic comedic material built upon an absurdist grammar. Although the Monty Python comparisons are somewhat deserved, Stella‘s better jokes are not just illogical wackiness for the sake of absurdity. The show relies on the classic Dada/Surrealist technique of compressed time but only to create a large number of opportunities for the show’s red meat: the ironic explorations of bad movie clichés and well-worn dramatic conventions.

In a scene from the second episode “Campaign,” for example, Michael Showalter gives David Wain an apologetic friendship make-up speech that snakes from frat brother heart-to-heart to bad Degrassi Jr. High Canadian accents to faux-Scottish solidarity (“Are we still mates?”) to a disinterested airhead departure — all in the span of thirty seconds. In “Paper Route,” the three protagonists cycle through a laundry list of terrible job interview clichés in order to secure morning newspaper delivery work — including the well-worn line, “My greatest weakness is that I care too much…? Is that a weakness?”

But opposed to specific parody (like most of their feature film Wet Hot American Summer) the sharpest humor in Stella transcends the cheap reference joke (i.e., “This one thing looks like this other thing I know.”) and reveals the stupidity of minor artistic and cultural forms that have never before been specifically codified as “convention.” For example, when the three protagonists mend their broken friendship after becoming emotionally distanced, their serious conversation soon morphs into a late-night rap session on metaphysics:

MIB: I’m spiritual, but I’m not…. “religious.”
MS: I know there’s something out there, but I don’t know if I want to call it “God.”

These aren’t specific references to bad movie dialogue as much as they are pitch perfect recreations of hackneyed teenage conversations. Faux insights on God may seem like an obvious target for ridicule, but the following riff hit eerily close to home for me. As the three become stranded in the forest with no hope of returning to civilization, they chat about David’s wonderful meals:

MIB: You know what it is? You’re really good in the kitchen.
DW: I learned it from my mom years ago.
MIB: It doesn’t matter. You should develop it. It’s wonderful.
DW: I’d love to develop my piano. That’s what I wish I could do…
MIB: Well, that you have a gift for.
DW: Stop it.
MIB: You do, you have a really musical ear.
DW: Well, I tool around a bit.
MIB: David, you can play any popular song just by listening to it one time.
DW: You know what it is? I know chords. But put a piece in front of me, and I can’t even…

Stella‘s humor takes dialogue, themes, cultural moments, and artistic techniques verging on cliché status and pushes them all over the edge. The specific combination of methods may be new, but the show follows from a long history of using humor as a way for culture to clean house. Before you can build something new, someone has to point out the parts of the structure needing to be junked and gutted. Whether it’s exposing politicians as hypocritical boobs or questioning the use of narrative flashbacks, Western humor is not so much progressive as destructive. Stella does not have the mind-twisting fourth-level brilliance of the best Mr. Show sketches (“The Audition”, “Pre-Taped Call-in Show” and “Young People and Their Companions” in particular), but the three comedians manage to keenly uncover a lot of cliché conventions that would normally still be festering under the surface.

Jumping back to rakugo, I certainly don’t have enough grasp of the experience to form a meaningful judgment about the art in general, but I suspect my Western-influenced need for comedic destruction is fundamentally incompatible with full enjoyment. For starters, the elderly and I very rarely find the same things funny, and Japanese old people love rakugo.

In America, comedy is rock’n'roll: Down with homework! Don’t trust anyone over 30! Rakugo and the entire idea of inter-generational humor presupposes that social ideals and norms are stable and conservative. In the world of rakugo, clichés are not things to be burned at the stake, but they represent what is funny now and what has always been funny — from the beginning of the world to the end of time.