This week’s Shukan Bunshun (8.2.07 edition) has a story by writer Ochi Yoshiko (越智良子) called 「どこがいいの？」今どきの美女論 examining the mysterious popularity of models Ebihara Yuri (”Ebi-chan”) and Oshikiri Moe, singers Koda Kumi and Hamasaki Ayumi, and Miss Universe Mori Riyo. The first article reiterates the fact that no one in Japan has anything but total antagonism towards Mori Riyo, so we can leave her out of this discussion. (Damn you, America and Donald Trump).

With the other women, however, the older generation and a great deal of Japanese men have serious problems comprehending why these particular stars are popular. Out of the remaining four, Ebi-chan is the only one with any real appeal to men, but at the end of the day, even her fame is primarily the product of female admiration. Ochi names these women 「下積り美人」— something to the effect of “bottom of the barrel beauties.”

Ochi comes to the conclusion that contemporary girls like “imperfect” celebrities who have reached physical beauty only through hard work and determination. Even the Koda Kumi fan interviewed for the piece acknowledges that Koda is not an “orthodox beauty” but has worked her ass off to become “pretty.” Same goes for the CanCam girls Ebihara and Oshikiri who have shown that apparel expertise, make-up techniques, and hair curling voodoo complete the woman more than her raw material. These stars suggest that contemporary Japanese women want idols who look similar to themselves, thus creating a comfortable myth that anyone can overcome natural flaws to reach the top. Sympathy now trumps simple adoration.

Guys, on the other hand, still like the natural girl who doesn’t look like she’s trying so hard. This was true with Hirosue Ryoko and now explains the popularity of Nagasawa Masami. Girls may admit that Matsushima Nanako is as elegant as they come, but they are totally disinterested. She can’t teach them anything about struggle. For the exact same reason, third-world despots looked to Stalin and not Kaiser Wilhelm the Second.

I find it hard not to draw some general socio-psychological conclusions from this trend. The emphasis on gambaru — doing one’s best — opposed to natural talent echoes the Japanese post-war national mythology. But in opposition to the static Confucian view of the world, Japanese women now seem to be hesitant to blindly accept their social-betters in a pre-determined hierarchy. They want style and beauty leaders who can be imagined to represent them and thus prove the possibilities of upward-beauty-mobility. If I can become Ebi-chan through effort, there is no reason why I too cannot become #1 like Ebi-chan. This seems to reflect a much more American democratic-capitalist “can-do” spirit of self-betterment through determined effort, rather than a Confucian-statist belief that low social position should be embraced and higher-ups worshiped unconditionally. Is this further proof that the onset of socioeconomic disparity has shaken faith in a static universe? Everyone is aiming for the top, and these girls are dragging down the quality of their idols to make sure they can get there themselves.

Forget metaphor, let’s just say out loud what I know you are thinking: the defeat of Takeru Kobayashi at the 2007 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest signals the end of Japanese global dominance.

But how unfair: American Joey Chestnut took the title away from the long-time champion only after stealing eating techniques that Kobayashi invented.

Again, we see the same pattern: the Japanese create original conceptual innovations, and the Americans appropriate these and profit from small incremental innovations upon the Japanese ideas. Kobayashi — coming out of an incredibly creative Japanese education system — invented the “Solomon technique,” and now those brain-dead zombies from the United States have stolen it and used their massive advantages in thuggish physique to beat the Genius at his own game. Kobayashi must have been thinking about this when he very literally threw up a little in his own mouth.

First, hot dogs, next steel production. Will karma catch up to Americans or will they be allowed to keep profiting off the innovations of others?

Naporitan spaghetti may have began its existence as a distant relation to thick and hearty Neapolitan ragus from the Old Country, but in its contemporary Japanese form, the recipe calls for a vulgarity on par with the high crimes of American junk food. Pasta noodles are joined with slices of hot dog and drowned in an ocean of tomato ketchup. (Older recipes may call for catsup in place of the ketchup.) Upon hearing of this monstrous concoction, a good Italian would probably immediately saunter off to absolve himself at confessional; those who dare eat the dish risk a long term in purgatory.

Despite its culinary blasphemy, Naporitan perfectly represents a certain taste culture in Japan. All puns intentional here, because there is a general aesthetic surrounding the standard menu of Showa-era coffee shops. The proprietors of the trendy cafes that began to sprout up in the 1990s purged this pasta style from their menus to make room for the faux authentic sauces that go well with caffe lattes and caramel teas and bossa nova. The Naporitan only lives on at places like Kamiya Bar in Asakusa.

Some may assume the famous Kamiya Bar is nothing more than a tourist trap, but the drab interior quickly quiets any doubts about authenticity. There appears to be no functional windows, and bright lights give the middle finger to all designer theories of dim ambiance. Asakusa locals sit within the unremarkable infrastructure and down round after round of the in-house brandy-esque liquor Denki Bran at ¥260 a pop. Seating is family-style, making Kamiya Bar one of the rare places in Tokyo where you must sit next to strangers and make an effort to befriend them. In a city dominated by cliquish izakaya, clinical cafes, and gimmicky ice bars, Kamiya Bar gives Tokyo a Hofbrauhaus on the Sumida.

Although Kamiya Bar has roots in the late 19th century, the menu and atmosphere have not budged since 1970. This may reflect the fact that Asakusa seems incapable of possessing a young generation. Even if kids exist and tag along to local festivals, the spirit of the neighborhood resides on the side of the grey-haired. Asakusa is completely untouched by the Parco vs. Laforet Wars of Sophistication that changed the face of West Tokyo over the last two decades. meaning essentially that Kamiya Bar does not intentionally “preserve” a Showa aesthetic as much as the patrons seem incognizant of the major changes on the other side of town.

Without falling into the trap of declaring Kamiya Bar more “real” than someplace like Idée Cafe, I will say that Kamiya Bar offers something completely different than Tokyo’s normal mission of providing the world’s largest set of life-sized simulacra. A night at Kamiya Bar is an inimitable experience. You can drink a frothy cappuccino or a Glenlivet on the rocks anywhere in the world, but there is only one spot for chilled glasses of spicy Denki Bran.

Since life is life for work, and work is work for the nation, personal vacation days basically amount to treason. “We give you these ten paid vacation days with the promise that you never use them.” Okay, no one ever actually says that out loud, but oddly everyone collectively reads the exact message in the subtext.

Then someone high up in the command chain realized some years ago that quality of life has an inverse relation to per capita labor hours. The national government thus started drowning the population in national holidays. The logic being, even in the Army, your captain does owe you an “At ease!” once in a while. And they can’t bark orders to stand up unless you are sitting down.

In late April and early May, red letters start to multiply on the calender until coalescing into a massive holiday rollerskating jam called Golden Week. If you cleverly take off just two paid vacation days in the middle of the week (or work at the right industry where bosses allow you to stay home), it gives you nine days to go somewhere.

Thanks to this miracle of rational planning, a good bulk of the 127 million inhabitants of Japan all focus their yearly (non-hometown related) holiday desires upon this one near-fortnight. Space in hotels, airplanes, ferries, minshuku, pensions, B&Bs, museums, art galleries, remote islands, and outer space, however, is limited. Adam Smith could tell you incredible demand for a very small supply raises prices, and guess what: costs for Golden Week travel are high enough to make a good Puritan or Confucian feel dirty and wasteful for even thinking about attempting to leave the neighborhood.

Due to short-sightedness and lack of motivation to overspend, I am going nowhere this year.

Monday’s amazing weather, however, almost made up for my gripes against these artificial machinations to destroy Man’s yearning for non-labor related self-actualization. We biked to Nogawa Park, which may just be Tokyo’s least artificial and most verdant public recreation area. There is a pleasant river running through the park full of barefoot kids hovering with nets, hoping to catch small crawfish.

After biking ten minutes radially from a train station in Western Tokyo, you are pretty much in “the suburbs.” Almost like a tree line on the mountains, the inhabitants’ outfits suddenly cease to be constructed in world-class styling from first-tier brands. The wide-roads are filled with commercial ventures totally alien to the urban landscape — tire stores, Matsuya fast foods with parking spaces, crummy decaying used video stores, and Home Depots — all of which demonstrate the dominance of the automobile and the domicile in this forgotten land.

On the way to Nogawa, we passed the Reversible Destiny Lofts, which I had wanted to check out for a long time. Despite the radiant glow of their pop coloring, the apartments are almost hidden behind other buildings on initial approach. You pass a drive-through McDonalds on your right, cross the street, and then the circles and squares of Reversible Destiny appear in the corner of your left eye — almost like the McDs fun park has relocated catty-corner and caught Elephantitis along the way. As one could imagine, they are quite striking and imposing, but for whatever reason, almost none of the passers-by stopped to take a deeper look. The location is mixed: There is some nice greenery at their back, but the entire complex directly faces a very busy highway in the middle of a concrete nowhere. The apartments seem to be at least half-populated at the moment, but the books and clothes in the windows looked more like the possessions of hip architectural students than of the elderly — the latter a demographic which the architects originally planned as tenants to take advantage of the apartment’s unconventional design in their battle against the inevitability of senility.

Like LOHAS, this kind of socially-progressive design is always in danger of being stripped-down and consumed as empty style in Japan, but at least the architects were nice enough to experiment out in the middle of nowhere instead of adding one more monument smack-dab in the center of Omotesando.

World, you ready to envy? Your social superior Tyler Brule (add circumflex and accent aigu to the last word with your imagination) loves the new Roppongi super development project Tokyo Midtown. If you are thinking that Roppongi Hills was enough for this city — with its Starbucks, luxury hotel, Tokyo City View, J-wave radio station, and art museum — you are dead wrong. Tokyo Midtown offers visitors a completely different world: a five-star luxury hotel, a dramatic view of the city, an art museum, and a Starbucks complete with — get this — a radio station.

Those with a keen eye should have known that Tokyo Midtown was coming to Tokyo’s midtown. The Dentsu predictions for 2007 took the gamble to bet that Tokyo Midtown would be a huge media phenomenon — no doubt a self-fulfilling prophecy. Brutus has been doing a multi-part paid-for advertorial feature on the complex for months now. If you thought Tokyo was a great city before Mitsui Fudosan decided to show their rivals in aristocratic brinkmanship that they could do luxury Roppongi way better, go ahead and kill yourself. When you get to Heaven, surely it will be look exactly like Tokyo Midtown.

Now Mr. Circumflex Aigu could be right — Tokyo Midtown could be incredible — but whether the features are spectacular or not, at what point do we citizens of Tokyo cease to be impressed with the constant escalation of massive developments? At some point, the Japanese media was abuzz with breathless anticipation about Sunshine 60 — a now-yellowing complex built in East Ikebukuro by the Seibu brothers on the haunted land of Sugamo Prison. Mori’s Ark Hills was a huge deal when it opened, but now it’s just a pedestrian place where I get my library books and eat bland Subway subs with Rory P. Wavecrest once-in-a-while. Remember Roppongi Hills? That glorious glass-and-concrete tribute to capital accumulation did not just fade into semi-obscurity, but celebrated an acute comeuppance when the princes of the castle (Sir Horie and Sir Murakami) got busted for financial misdealings. At least its perimeter was host to social conflict.

Reading the supplied descriptions of these developments reminds me of the original plans for EPCOT — utopian “cities within cities” to house, feed, employ, and entertain select communities. With Roppongi Hills, however, Mori only let Japan’s recently-emboldened upper classes into the gates. The investment bankers and New Economy brats in the Hills office space can enjoy the highest-priced apartments, the most prestigious hotel, a host of exclusive restaurants, or just go to the Heartland bar and pretend they are not in Japan. We untidy masses are given the chance to save up our measly earnings so we may visit, grab a tall latte, enjoy the art museum, watch a movie, and buy some things at inflated prices as long as we go home quickly and do not bother the VIPs who live there.

Not to be outdone, Mitsui Fudosan have now spent their billions to recreate the exact same experience a couple of blocks away, and as good consumers, we will throw away our Roppongi Hills lust and direct our eyes on even more concrete arranged in an even more-exclusive and awe-inspiring way. “Midtown-zoku”: A buzzword coming to a media outlet near you soon.

In an economy very literally centered around constant expansion through construction and real-estate development, we would be silly not to expect a Tokyo Midtown and even sillier not to expect Mori and his millions to take revenge at a new location in a few years’ time. This game between ancient royal families is a constant cycle and the central driver of Tokyo urban planning. Might makes right. Value is determined by simple addition. Bigger is better. No time for renovation or conservation. Destroy the community of Shimokitazawa to build an amazing new highway. Flatten the old yakuza drinking holes of Roppongi so that yakuza-backed construction agencies can get some new employment.

Build, use, discard, Tokyo.