In the early 20th century, soil erosion plagued the American South, but luckily there was a cure-all available from the Far East: kudzu (from the Japanese word for “vine,” 葛 or kuzu). Farmers expected the plant to crawl graciously like a high-class ivy, but instead kudzu grew a foot a day until it covered the entire Southern landscape like a layer of green, leafy icing.

Curiously, I’ve never heard anyone talk about whether the introduction of kudzu actually solved the soil erosion problem, but we all now read the vine-landscapes as a quintessential part of Southern culture. Americans, however, are hardly as crafty as the Japanese and have yet to turn kudzu into powdered starch-based food products or clothing (葛布). We just keep the vine as the butt of a cruel landscape joke and a symbol for R.E.M.’s early career.

For all the lamenting, I’m not sure the trees hiding underneath the monster weed are so special and unique to start with. At least kudzu’s Imperial expansion gave the Southern United States a distinctive environmental appearance.

From Yuki, who got it from WTBW: The Japanese title (houdai) of American film Napoleon Dynamite will be Bus Otoko (“Bus Man.”) As Yuki points out, this new title has almost nothing to do with the film itself and 100% to do with the fact that there is a popular Japanese film/television show/internet hoax called Densha Otoko (“Train Man”). (Even the tagline is based on 2-ch typography!) In last month’s Cyzo, an article about the current “Virgin Boom” referenced ND as being “Bus Man” in Japan, but I was convinced at the time that the writer was making a bad joke.

I’ve meant to blog on Napoleon before, because I found it to be the most depressing movie I’ve seen in years. Everyone else I know thought it was “UNBELIEVABLY HILARIOUS!” but as someone who grew up in relatively crappy small towns, the characters’ pathetic lives hit a little close to people I’ve actually known. My sister snapped back at me, “Napoleon seems lame now but he’ll be the next Bill Gates!” There is absolutely no evidence for this. There are plenty of movies about misunderstood, smart nerds with potential — Lucas, for example — but Napoleon is the worst type of that totally worthless, unpromising nerd with very few redeeming qualities. His creativity seems to be mostly cribbed from RPGs — a fact that probably went over the head of anyone who’s never owned a 20-sided die.

I saw the film last December through an illegal Bit Torrent download, and I was very surprised to come home to Florida and find the “cool” shopping mall stores — i.e., the places with Doc Martens — selling Napoleon Dynamite T-shirts. Kids were most likely buying them for the irony factor alone, slipping them over their Korn T-shirts before beating the shit out of the “unpromising nerds” of their own high-schools.

I’m not sure what Japanese viewers would get out of this film, seeing that Americans just deep down love to laugh at the lives of rural lower middle-class orphans. But, film appreciation is not universal. Everyone I know who is Japanese or French loved A Life Aquatic, whereas all the American critical community seemed to walk away disappointed. I don’t get the sense that anyone in Japan went gaga over Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the way all my American friends did, so I’m not willing to put money on the Bus Man’s chances. If it becomes a huge phenomenon, however, we’ll perhaps know that this otaku boom is the real deal.

Often when I discuss questionable Japanese media practices, there’s a cry of “The same thing happens in America!” While this can be true, the reactions from the government and media are often very different. So let’s look at some recent articles about media misdoings.

Sony Pictures has settled their 2001 lawsuit in which they were prosecuted for inventing an imaginary Connecticut film critic — David Manning — to provide positive pull quotes for advertisements. The Los Angeles Superior Court charged that the company had attempted the “intentional and systematic deception of consumers,” and now Sony Pictures is paying out $1.25 million for the settlement.

Subtext: Critics are so crucial to an American film’s promotional campaign that a company invented a fake film reviewer to praise the studio’s less well-received films. Interesting American twist on the tale: They got caught and fined.

GM has ended their four-month boycott of advertising in the L.A. Times. The car company had decided to pull their ads after the newspaper’s constant criticism of their products and CEO, but after negotiations with the paper, GM has started placing ads again. The editor-in-chief at P.R.Week derided G.M.’s actions, saying, “A company that would expect these tactics to work is misguided. An editor that would agree to them is compromised. A P.R. professional that does not help the C-suite understand why these practices are wrong is a fool.”

A major American company pulls out sponsorship as a way to pressure a publications’ editorial department. What happens? They cannot sustain it for more than four months, and even the public relations world — whose sympathies are solely with big business and not consumers — strongly oppose the boycott practice.

Not exactly recent news, but The Source‘s constant Eminem bashing has lost them access to all Eminem-related rappers (50 Cent, etc.). The magazine’s vendetta against Eminem, however, seems to be directly related to the CEO David Mays’ relentless promotion of his white co-founder/Harvard roommate Raymond Scott’s rap career. In 1995, the magazine writers demanded Mays’ resignation for placing a very prominent article about Scott’s group Almighty RSO in the magazine. Failing to make Mays quit, the protesting staff members all left The Source.

Magazine editors quitting because the editor-in-chief is ordering content based on factors other than quality or importance of the artists themselves? Insane. What did these unloyal “editors” think they are anyway? Independent voices or something?

News broke yesterday that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s 11-month investigation into radio payola has resulted in a $10 million dollar settlement from Sony, with similar arrangements with the other labels to follow.

Everyone is “outraged” of course, but fighting payola is like crushing spiders — they lift up some rocks once in a while, valiantly stomp the offenders, and then go back to pretending like it’s not a naturally occurring state of affairs. The practice became a federal crime in the 1950s after the major labels complained to the government about independent labels bribing their way onto the scene — paying the DJs was the big boys’ game plan, and they didn’t like these new kids using the same tactics. So, the direct payment of a third-party gatekeeper for playing a song became illegal, which let the major labels invent a much more capital-intensive, complicated payola system involving “independent consultants” that continued the same game while keeping out smaller labels lacking the necessary “promotion” budget. (For more, see Fredric Dannen’s book Hit Men.)

The music industry is extremely unstable: What will “hit” is almost completely unpredictable and the companies involved must scurry around trying to figure out how to match consumers’ wildly fickle and protean tastes. The easiest way to stabilize the market is to secure exposure. Consumers don’t usually buy songs they’ve never heard, and with lots of plays on the radio or on MTV (which for you youngsters out there, used to play music videos), simple musicians become “stars” overnight to even the most passive, casual listeners/viewers.

So, payola is a natural thing for companies to pursue, but in the other corner, there’s the “odd” American liberal idea that the airwaves should be for the people, whether owned by a private or public company. Federal prosecutors do not normally pursue payola cases, but there is an ethical and legal precedent that bribing DJs and cultural intermediaries is a bad thing, and I would assume that most Americans agree with this principle. This current case proves again that the United States government takes pop culture seriously, and they should: Movies, magazines, songs, and images are not only big business, but define our identities, shape social discourse, and end up becoming explanatory agents for the world around us.

Meanwhile in Japan, there is no concept of “payola” or widespread consciousness of the practice, seeing that direct payment for the exposure of songs is a standard, semi-legal part of industry. The Japanese government has never shown much antipathy towards cartels — the dust is so thick on the Anti-Monopoly Law of 1947 that you can hardly read the text — and no one particularly thinks that media outlets should be under different guidance than supermarkets. If Coca-Cola can pay for an end-aisle display at a grocery, why can’t Sony buy time for Puffy on J-Wave?

But this attitude of Japanese policy-makers resembles another theme of Japanese society: Pop culture is rarely taken seriously. And that’s crazy, seeing how vibrant popular culture is in Japan. Some of this is that Japan’s pop culture market is relatively new, and I assume that the old men who run the country couldn’t possibly see the importance of a bunch of silly, frilly things primarily consumed by women and children (especially since you’re supposed to give up all interests in these frivolous matters after becoming a shakaijin).

Now that the Japanese “contents” industry is a ¥20 trillion market, JETRO and the think tanks are starting to look at pop-cult with a more serious eye, but if the bureaucrats and politicians continue to support oligopolistic industries and suppress competition as part of a national economic strategy, I doubt there would be any precedent on which to go after payola.

While the American government is hardly a noble knight for killing the occasional exhibition beast, as a liberal American distrustful of big business and collusion, I do agree with the anti-payola law. Payola ultimately benefits the firms with the most capital and acts as an entry barrier to smaller companies with innovative ideas. Creating a record costs almost nothing, but getting it played evidently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, plasma televisions, drugs, prostitutes, and exotic vacations. But that’s all over now, right?

Update: Here is an interesting pro-payola article from Slate.com that brings up a lot of similar points. I am hesitant to agree with his overall idea that consumers can perfectly counterbalance industry collusion through their purchase power. Even if we all hate Celine Dion and don’t buy her records, she’s still a “star” if played on the radio a million times in the major markets, and a lot of other companies will use that artificially frequent radio play as a guide for their own organizational decision making. If successful, payola creates fake stars, who eventually create a distortion in the cultural code.

A couple of additional points from watching Top Gun on Japanese T.V.:

1) Lyric Translation: Most Japanese films will translate the lyrics to background music in scenes without proper dialogue. So when Maverick and Kelly McGillis are finally having “carnal knowledge,” the bottom of the screen is filled with the italicized translation of the lyrics to “Take My Breath Away.” I find this quite interesting in that we native viewers tend to unconsciously take in the words of background music, and I’ve never considered whether they are actually crucial for understanding the plot. So seeing them explicitly printed on the screen struck me as odd at first, but I can understand why they may be necessary, or at least, why viewers may want to see what is being sung.

(By the way, the gated-reverb snare drum of “Take My Breath Away” essentially sums up the entire 1980s.)

2) Immediate Credits: When new characters pop on the screen, the Japanese subtitlers take it upon themselves to label them. For example, when “Iceman” shows up for the first time, the screen says 「アイスマン」, and then get this: under it, they write the actor’s name (ヴァル・キルマー). This goes back to the idea of commerce taking great precedence over art in Japan. How could one enjoy a foreign film without knowing immediately who the actors are? Personally, I can’t imagine finding Goose funny without knowing he is portrayed by Anthony Edwards, late of ER fame. I feel sorry for the Americans who had to sit through the entire film wondering whether that was indeed Tom Skeritt playing Viper. (It was!)