I’ve got no specific, personal beef with Hiroshi Fujiwara — the man ultimately responsible for bringing A Bathing Ape, Undercover, Head Porter, Goodenough, AFFA, Visvim, Soph., Base Station, Neighborhood, Sarcastic, Real Mad Hectic, Original Fake, and Bounty Hunter into this world and ushering in the Golden Age of Underground Crossover in the 1990s. He has been rewarded handsomely for his promotions and innovations of Japanese consumer culture over the years, and everyone now concedes that the man is the coolest Japanese person to ever walk the Earth. I do not contest the general conclusions of that assessment.

Seeing his face on the cover of Tokion in June 2007, however, has a very clear subtext: this hazily-defined, yet specific cultural enterprise in which many of us are actively or passively invested has succumbed to total and utter contraction. Terminal decline! Messages and dialogue now depend on a constant stream of flashbacks stuck somewhere between nostalgia and amnesia. Hiroshi Fujiwara is only on the cover, because They/We have yet to find a modern day replacement.

Tokion knows fully well that there is nothing new to say about HF unless somebody suddenly decided after all these years to pry open the Pandora’s Box and start asking the hard questions about the mechanics behind his success. (For example, is nobody interested in pointing out the contradiction of a master capitalist and friend to wrestling dons un-ironically displaying portraits of Marx and Engels in his studio?) But no, HF’s the same-old tight-lipped magician — never betraying his fellow practitioners by revealing the nature of his marketing tricks. Unlike Nigo — the once Cornelius clone with Buddy Holly glasses who underwent a complete tenkō conversion into the Church of Hip Hop over the last six years — HF remains the same old mysterious HF. There is something comforting, however, in the dependability of his enigmatic existence. The only thing new about HF at this juncture is that intentionally-unglamorous thing on his nose — which would have kids lining up at pharmacies if “kids” still did that kind of thing.¹

Now I don’t blame Mr. Fujiwara for being on the cover. He’s not asking for more press — he’s just the target of the aimless media machine. The problems lie deep within the anachronistic cultural rules that still guide the hands of editors and other gatekeepers. We continue to live in the shadows of living giants like Fujiwara, and their massive and manifold successes set an impossible standard for newfound stardom. There is no new Hiroshi Fujiwara, and there will be no new Hiroshi Fujiwara. No one will ever pilot independent underground street clothing into a massive empire and a penthouse in Roppongi Hills again. Nike is not flying the head of FatYo! around in the corporate jet. So while everyone is waiting for the new Hiroshi Fujiwara, they have no choice but to put the actual Hiroshi Fujiwara #1 on the cover.

And you can’t just abandon Hiroshi Fujiwara, because he is currently the only living-and-breathing relic of the dream still integral to the foundations of the Tokion Weltanschauung — that historic-specific delusion that somehow niche tastes and DIY can cross over to mainstream success and fame. But at what point does Fujiwara cease to be a role model and start mutating into a symbol of cultural oppression from history’s past. I remember seeing “Kill Your Idols” on a t-shirt from one of the myriad brands in his orbit, but no one is actually reading the text: HF is the least likely icon to die of regicide.

Continued »

“Wait right there, young man! What do you think you are wearing?”
“Mom, Grandma got me this.”
“You think I am going to let you out of the house like that?”
“It’s clean. You just washed it. The other shirt is the stained one…”
“Where is the logo?”
“Mom, this is MUJI.”
“I got you a whole closet full of Louis Vuitton and you want to go out of the house in that and embarrass your father and mother after all we’ve done for you…”

Kids. They come out of the womb and immediately start killing your cool. They spit up and drool like they’ve never read a page from Emily Post. And the clothing…! I would rather give my BMW to charity than have my daughter wear Oshkosh B’gosh overalls.

The top tiers of Japanese society were starting to feel the very burn of inadequately class-identifying children’s apparel, and so media firm X-Knowledge has imported and localized the French children’s fashion magazine MilK. (I am not sure if you knew this, but all I’s in magazine titles must be lower-case — e.g., FRUiTS and CUTiE.) Maybe you can’t outfit your offspring in bespoke suits from Savile Row quite yet or don’t have the time to diamond-encrust your kindergartener’s randosel backpacks, but MilK Japon will give you tips on dressing your kids in APC, Paul & Joe, and Agnes B so they become one step closer in spirit to little beautiful blond children from the Continent.

MilK’s founder Isis-Colombe Combréas writes the following mission statement on the website for the French publication:

MilK, because we all feel something in common: nostalgic for our childhood. And here we are, new parents with a mission: to pass on a genuine education that also helps children to develop a taste for beautiful things. This transient moment, we want to live it together, like a hedonistic transition where each moment is an occasion to be an aesthete. Milk takes us on a modern journey through the world of childhood. Both the photographs and illustrations reveal our desire to discover together the still unexplored world of children’s fashion. From family way of life to the latest children leisure activities, all the new spheres will be explored.“Kidding” is born…surfing on today’s wave…and it’s Milk’s raison d’être.

Parents automatically instill their own aesthetic values, class-biases, and fashion sense upon their children, but MilK provides greater source material for the successful transmission of the parental taste culture. The French MilK, however, seems to approach the “aesthete” in the classic anti-nouveau riche disposition where “taste” (a rare and natural gift from the gods) trumps vulgar demands for brand labels and conspicuous luxury. The latest issue’s featured stories are freak-folkers CocoRosie, American director Sofia Coppola, environmentalism, and traveling to Cancun, Barcelona, Palm Springs, and La Landelle.

The Japanese version’s cover, on the other hand, seems to advocate a totally different kind of aesthetic lifestyle for children:

  • (The world has been eagerly awaiting) the debut of the Louis Vuitton kids Line
  • 100 kids chairs
  • An essay from supermodel Helena Christensen
  • Cool “adult” T-shirts for your kids
  • A silver egg has been born from Hermès.

No real surprise here, but MilK Japon pretty much reads like every other catalog-esque, advertorial-filled consumer guide in Japan. The editors seem to retain a certain portion of the less-boldly consumerist aspects of the French sister publication, but product information dominates the cover and reveals the central appeal to target readers.

Even though I grew up in relatively non-urban college towns across the lower-portion of the United States, I am not going to claim that there was some kind of “pure” classless youth fashion code that we can look back on fondly as an age of innocence. I regularly wore Polo shirts without the slightest consideration that this had an impact on my placement within the schoolyard social structure. MilK’s introduction of class and taste into the experience of childhood is not especially new, but is a sharp escalation of pre-existing behavior. Instead of pretending like we don’t outfit our kids in our own favorite brands and labels, MilK just clarifies the process so that producers and consumers can find themselves more easily.

Socioeconomic class was intentionally hidden in the post-War period, but this idea that taste-based distinction should begin in early childhood will make class much more obvious for a new generation of Japanese. Hopefully, however, the kids in LV and Hermès won’t have to go to school with the riff-raff whose parents don’t read MilK. Those dirty Pigpens wouldn’t appreciate their peers’ clothing nor understand the amazing capital accumulation of their parents anyway.

Most of the time, a majority of people on Omotesando road in the middle of the day are not shoppers but photographers, ready to pounce on the next stylish girl with pink hair coming out of Wendy’s with an S-sized frosty. Somebody, however, has to supply the massive amounts of street snaps in Japan’s monthly fashion magazines. (PingMag has an interview with some of these photographers here.)

At first look, these impromptu style portraits seem to function as a way for editors to capture “what’s happening on the the streets” and pass it along to their readers. Youngsters can then compare their own style against the “standard” implied in the pictures or nick ideas for their own wardrobes from the most stylish.

The reality behind this media phenomenon, however, is not so clear-cut. I recently interviewed the managing editor at one of Japan’s longest-running and most prestigious male fashion magazines. The magazine ran a special feature on “snaps” for their May issue, and I asked him how they went about procuring the large number of images.

First, they ran an announcement in the back of the previous issue about where and when the street fashion shoots would be held in each of Japan’s major cities. This brought the magazine’s core readers out to the photographers, reducing the production team’s reliance on passers-by. Once shots came back to the editors, they selected photos based on the subject’s skill in appropriating and using the styles advocated in the magazine. By choosing specific styles from a pre-selected group, the editors were able to strengthen the validity of their own fashion message by demonstrating the prevalence of the magazine’s signature style out on “the streets” through this overwhelming and implicitly-objective photographic evidence.

I asked, are these fashion shots helpful to editors for discovering the next trends? In other words, do street snaps also function as a source of inspiration for fashion editors? No, it’s the opposite. Streets snaps allow editors to check to make sure that their wardrobe recipes end up being used by their target groups. For example, the magazine in question had been advocating wearing neckties with short-sleeve polo shirts for a year but had yet to see this combination out on the town. In the May street shots, however, kids had clearly adopted the style, and these photos helped ease fears in the editorial office that their message had not be in vain.

Obviously, a magazine like FRUiTS is a different animal — more interested in the artistry of fashion than facilitating the sales and consumption of it. (Last time I checked, FRUiTS did not offer brand names and prices next to the outfits like CUTiE.) Therefore, there is no real commercial agenda to guide the photographers and editors of FRUiTS into crafting photos towards a singular narrative. We should also understand that FRUiTS is not used in the same way as other fashion magazines. It is simply a collection of photos rather than a prescriptive magazine where readers demand a gentle voice of authority.

If editors from the mainstream fashion titles are selecting individual street shots with the intention of proving the widespread usage of their own advocated style, where does the bottom-up flow of tastes come into play in this process? Bottom-up implies that the elite and powerful will adopt and champion ideas from their “inferiors” and customers, but a majority of Japanese magazine editors do not go through the street snap production process with much room for inserting opinions, styles, and concepts that they do not already approve. At best, editors are using the photos to gauge the efficacy of their own message with reader tastes, but this involves consumers/readers saying “yes” or “no” to top-down styles rather than creating their own complex message and sending it up the food chain.

I do not mean to deny the existence of bottom-up taste flows in Japan — for example, the brands comprising the Tokyo Girls Collection are mostly designed by young women the same age as the consumers. But with the street snaps in the most widely-read fashion magazines, I find it hard to pronounce an equality of top-down and bottom-up flows once the real mechanics of the process have been illuminated.

For all those dirty old Japanese men who are sick of seeing that human chunk of Italian ham Girolamo Panzetta on the cover of their beloved Leon, the brand new magazine Zino gives you 73-year old journalist Tahara Soichiro slouching on a rooftop, drinking the bubbly, wearing a dozen different shades of off-white. The guy oozes sex the way that most men ooze ooze. This Ole Granddad is so over-sexed that he doesn’t even bother to look at the hot white woman in the bikini standing right in front of him. Either that or he was photoshopped into the setting.

Zino comes to us from Kishida Ichiro — the media maverick and lothario who helmed Leon until he was asked to leave last year. Generally speaking, the content in Zino seems to be identical to Leon — high-end gear for sketchy old guys. Lots of reptile skin and huge watches. Opposed to the self-imposed racial segregation of Leon, however, Zino actually uses a few Japanese men as models, adhering to the widely-held belief that dudes are dudes as long as they have stubble.

Readers may not be screaming out for two rival versions of the same magazine, but apparently advertisers cannot resist the idea of a magazine targeted towards single and lecherous rich men who spend their Sosekis on luxury items instead of on wives and the results of their procreation.

And if you are thinking, hey, Zino is just “fronting,” check out the inside-cover ad: Hermès, baby. You can’t even afford to talk to guys who work in the Hermès stock warehouses.

Zino’s motto is “リッチを誇るな、センスで光れ！” — “Don’t be proud of being rich, dazzle ‘em with your good sense.” Nobody embodies these words better than Mr. Tahara Soichiro — that guy is as hot as the goddamn sun.

Update, September 2008: Zino sadly ceased publication a few months ago.

On the plane bound for Nagoya in Summer 1996, my friend Dennis — who had been to Japan many times before — mentioned that there was a Japanese brand called Bitch Skateboards and the logo mark involved the international bathroom door symbol for Men pointing a gun to the head of the international bathroom door symbol for Women. To my seventeen year-old ears, this was the Holy Grail of Engrish: a whole host of products not only emblazoned with a “bad word” but a totally politically-incorrect logo to match. I spent a lot of time during my three weeks in Gifu Prefecture searching for Bitch goods, and for my first two weeks, my closest encounter involved snapping a blurry photo of a tiny tag on a backpack. I finally hit the mother lode/motherload one day in a neighborhood clothing shop targeted towards teenage girls and soon became the proud owner of a Bitch Skateboards lighter and a ridiculous Bitch Skateboards retractable umbrella. (I liked the idea of using the latter in the U.S., because seriously, who is going to stop you on a rainy day to voice a complaint against the offensive language and imagery on your umbrella.)

In hindsight, I somewhat wince at the idea of brandishing Bitch goods, but I can promise you that my early endorsement was completely ironic. I was very confident that the brand was a misguided and unconsciously-misogynistic commercial venture dreamed up by non-Anglophones in Japan. Much to my chagrin, I later learned through the product tags that Bitch was based out of a city called “Los Angeles, California.” So now the joke was not linguistic mishap as much as licensing gone amuck. As time goes by, the situation has lost its initial humor, but there remains the enigma of how Bitch Skateboards came to take over the second-rate shopping centers of rural Japan in the mid-’90s.

The Internet is very good at solving these kinds of history mysteries, but a simple search came up with very little in the way of thorough explanation. This “Bitch Skateboards” is not the decks we’re looking for. The rise and fall of the brand unfortunately happened in the 1990s Black Hole of Japanese internet coverage.

Judging from the logos and some simple induction, I am pretty sure Bitch started as a hostile parody to Girl Skateboards, and The Net seems to name Sal Rocco, Jr. at World Industries as the original prankster (He’s the guy who gave the name “Wee Man” to “Wee Man” of Jackass for those who like trivia). How this low-key parody ended up being licensed to CROWN F.G.CO., LTD in a deal brokered by TENACIOUS LTD. and then distributed through YUBISHA SANGYO CO., LTD is an amazing commercial adventure novel waiting to happen.

My guess is that somebody in Japan saw the graphics in an issue of Big Brother back in the day and immediately snapped up the license. The decision to use the logo on an extremely broad product line is odd — especially as there was much targeting girls out in the countryside, and not, say, urban skaters. I can state that the products were generally cheaply made. My umbrella rusted through within a year of use. (Karma probably also took its toll.)

Back in Tokyo in 1998, Bitch was still around, but rumors indicated that some controversy (Feminists!) caused the brand to rethink their offensive use of symbols. Unless I am imagining things, I saw one Bitch product with the man giving the woman flowers instead of a firearm. (Maybe, there is still some aggressive subtext here in the masculine discomfort with boyfriend duties.) A relatively recent logo I saw looks like a censored and deconstructed version of the original.

I can’t remember the last time I saw Bitch on store shelves, but I certainly have not seen it in a very long time. Besides the Yahoo! Japan Auction pages, the t-shirts only pop up on dubious European commerce sites. I do not bemoan its absence from the market, of course, but boy did that brand succeed wildly in Japan for being essentially a one-off joke on a rival team of skateboarders.