I’m not a particularly big anime fan for a variety of reasons (mostly petty snobbery). The only shows I’ve made an effort to watch are the “classic” ’70s and ’80s television series like Gundam — because it’s culturally relevant — and Macross — because it’s a goofy love triangle between an idol, a career woman, and a young, short Japanese teenage archetype trapped inside a mildly interesting space epic. Although somewhat marginal in Japan, Macross‘ U.S. release as Robotech was a huge milestone for Japanese cultural importation in America.

Before it hit our homes each afternoon, I doubt we ever saw a TV show where multiple main characters die-off in the course of the show. After enduring the depressing Buddhist saga of Gundam last year, I’ve decided to watch the original Japanese version of Macross to see what I was missing.

During my childhood, “Japanimation” was still considered a mildly retarded artform. My brother and sister used to crack me up by doing real-life impressions of Speed Racer‘s jerky motions. There’s something inherently hilarious about the fact that the characters never talk until they stopped moving. The other hallmark of this anime-bashing was that the characters’ lips never matched up to what they were saying. I had always imagined that this was simply because the English translation of Japanese dialogue would never fit the same mouth movements. Same problem with Kung-Fu: It’s just the nature of the beast.

What I’m noticing from Macross, however, is that the lips almost never matched the Japanese dialogue in the first place. In the worst cases, a character’s mouth will start moving a good second before the speech begins. Things have obviously improved in recent years, but I feel wiser now knowing that I wasn’t losing anything in the translation.

I just read the OECD Economic Survey on Japan from this year which highlights the “key economic challenges” facing the nation over the next decade. This sentence from the conclusion generally sums it up:

While the Japanese economy is in its best shape since the early 1990s, the basis for comparison — the weak economic performance of the last decade — does not set the bar very high.

This report estimates Japan’s future growth rates at the meager 1.3% a year, and Japan will only keep up with the other countries’ per capita income gains if it can maintain high working hours (already 8% above the OECD average), increase labor force participation rates (which the low birth rate is making difficult), and boost labor productivity to 2.5% (Japan’s labor productivity is infamously poor).

Japan’s per capita income has fallen to 75% of that the United States, even though the per capita incomes of other OECD countries have been relatively stable. Increases in private consumption will only follow gains in income, which means that consumerism isn’t likely to return to early ’90s levels anytime soon.

The report sharply criticizes the new Japanese employment practice of hiring temporary “non-regular” workers at much lower salaries and less job security. Apparently, there is little difference in productivity between the regular and non-regular workers, and non-regular workers have a difficult time moving to regular employment. In other words, the male elite students hired as permanent employees get 60% larger salaries for doing essentially the same amount of work as those with less prestigious backgrounds. This will obviously create a substantial income disparity in the future. On top of that, most skills come not from the educational system, but from firms’ in-house training, which means that non-regular workers seriously lack human capital.

Greater female participation in the workforce could be beneficial to the economy, but the fact that women make up 2/3 of the lower-paid, non-regular workforce is not providing economic encouragement for their mobilization.

Another interesting statistic: Workers aged 15 to 24 show a 10.1% unemployment rate and more long-term unemployment than the other OECD countries.

What does this mean for Japanese pop culture? Consumerism will most likely not be on the rise anytime soon, so I would doubt that the fashion, music, and media markets are going to boom in the next decade. There will, however, be a new class of wealthy youngsters, and if they max out their pocket money, this could create a visible class-based rift in cultural consumption. Until now, pop culture and semi-subcultural practice in Japan have been defined predominantly through consumption, but a possible saving stroke would be the shift from shopping/buying as the main youth activity to non-commercial producing/creating. Tradition suggests that this shift is unlikely, but I would not rule it out.

Many of you are familiar with the Star Wars motion picture franchise and the fact that the final episode — Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith — has opened in America to huge fanfare and even larger box office receipts. A quick scan of the international release dates will show that unprecedented technological progress, high consumer demand, and greater globalization have created a world in which all of God’s children can enjoy the saga of Anakin Skywalker within a mere two days of the U.S. release.

Except of course, Japan. Release date: July 9th.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Japan ain’t playing “the game.” She’s a dreamy rebel you can’t tame, playing by her own rules, and just because “everyone” is watching Star Wars on May 19th, doesn’t mean that Japan is going to do what everyone else is doing! She’s a loner, Dottie, a rebel.

Japan is apparently the only country in the world self-absorbed enough in its own Star Wars traditions to actually postpone the release — in this case, until the beginning of summer vacation. No one in the Japanese film distribution world seems to have had faith that the Force (“that ancient belief system!”) would bring kids to the theaters in May. So Japanese fans will have to wait, because they should be hard at work/school and not gallivanting at moving-picture nickelodeons!

Of course, this is just one more example of Japan refusing to follow the ever-greater trend of global cultural convergence. And if they want to punish their consumers in order to snatch onto petty control of their own traditions, more power to them! When I finally see Star Wars in July after hearing two months of nonchalant references to plot points on the Internet, I’m sure I’ll be ecstatic that Japan’s the kind of dude who runs on his own clock. They’re fighting the power, brother.

A couple of years back, my mother bought a homemade bread-maker, and since then she has enjoyed baking bread for her family and friends. She spends the week before Christmas running around town, delivering homemade Christmas stollen to her friends. The breadmaking experience is highly-rewarding and fun for both my mother and everyone else involved. Yet my mother has never once said: I think I’d like to sell this bread on the open market.

Meanwhile in the world of music, Garage Band and slightly more sophisticated software have leveled the playing field for making “professional-sounding” music. No longer do guitar players need to go to all that trouble to recruit other members or gig around or go into expensive studios — making a finished CD can be done without leaving the bedroom. Techno music conveniently legitimized electronic sounds in the ’90s, so now even the indie kids are happy to drop the bassist and drummer and add in TB-303s and TR-505s. No one exemplifies this spirit better than Tokyo’s pico-pico scene whose sound is a fully mechanical version of guitar pop without the need of plural human participation. As the recording technology gets cheaper, there are more indie bands on the market than ever, which leads to the question: Why do we need to sell our indie music when we don’t try to sell our indie bread?

Pop music is a mix between product and art, but we are often blind to where these definitions come into play. Behind Top 40 songs is a successful product/information distribution network that remains closed to indie musicians. In the same way that our homemade bread cannot become a nationally consumed product, our indie music will almost never become a top ten hit — even though music today requires less and less physical distribution.

I fully applaud the breakdown of traditional barriers towards music production, but I fear that the information overload of too many bands is creating too much dependence on media authority and distribution systems.

When the Cold War ended in the early ’90s, America searched quickly for a new enemy, and as large-scale military battles were also instantly outdated, an economic villain was the obvious answer: Japan! The CIA went so far as to collect Japan scholars to create an anti-Japan report now known as “Japan 2000: DEFCOM 1,” which was quickly disowned by its authors after being leaked to the press. During this period, President Bush I flew over to Japan and delivered a message from Detroit, “Buy more American cars!” before vomiting all over the Japanese delegation.

For the first couple of years after the Bubble burst, Americans continued to write about Japan under the specter of possible economic defeat. Rising Sun is the embarrassing fiction and cinematic contribution, but meanwhile in the political section of your local library, there were book titles screaming The Coming War with Japan (by George Friedman and Meredith Lebard). Even Chalmers Johnson’s insightful 1994 Japan: Who Governs? deals heavily with trade issues and Japan-U.S. tension in a tone predicting future confrontation.

A decade later, no one’s writing books about diabolic Japanese economic mercantilism. Actually, no one seems to be writing anything about the Japanese economy outside of its decline, its possible globalization, and its history. Very few people still believe in a full Japanese economic recovery, and even contemporary issues like the Japanese refusal to buy diseased U.S. meat don’t get Americans out hitting Yoshinoya gyudon with baseball bats. Japan never changed their economic policy to please the U.S., but after 13 years of economic stagnation and the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector, nobody cares anymore. Guys from Goldman Sachs are no longer reading Way of the Samurai for management tips. The hot areas in Japanese Studies are soft issues like pop culture, race, sex, and consumerism. American scholars no longer write books about how the Japanese education system can teach Americans a few lessons, like Merry White’s The Japanese Educational Challenge.

We are in the midst of a widespread Japanese pop culture boom, and there’s never been so much good-will towards Japan from the rest of the world. (Except for Japan’s East Asian neighbors who’d like Japan to stop praying for the souls of Japan’s war criminals.) And as much as the demonizing of Japan was ridiculous and counterproductive, there was a subtext of admiration: Hate stems from jealousy. Tensions have cooled, and the U.S. has bigger plans in other regions for economic Imperialism. Even though Japan is still essentially the world’s second largest economy, the perceived threat has evaporated. How fickle, American fear and loathing!

Editor of Wired, Chris Anderson, wrote an interesting explanation of three different personality types in trend forecasting:

1) position people who judge where something is at the moment
2) velocity people who judge something compared to past size
3) acceleration people who judge something on its rate of growth

He links the sensational “endism” to type 3 and excuses this kind of analysis in the following way:

We at Wired…live in the whiplash world of acceleration space, where tiny fluctuations in trend velocity can either be blips or the beginnings of the next big thing. We’re pretty good at telling one from the other, and thus I think our occasional endism is seen as the effective rhetorical device it is. Industries really do crumble and reshape, and it’s our mandate to spot the signs first.

I’m often “endist” on the fate of Japan’s cultural industries. To be sure, from a “Position” analysis, Japanese pop culture is all swell, but from the other two perspectives, there are problems about. If you believe religiously that culture has absolutely no connections to social structures and moves in some kind of cosmic cycle, I can’t convince you that industry conditions shape the ways in which funds are allocated to artists and distributed. But if we do take structural growth into consideration, things have seen better days.