Remember MiniDisc? The little square-shaped, muddy-sounding, smooth-playing media that made your standard Target-bought Discman feel as if you were walking around town with an ancient leaded-fueled turntable. The MiniDisc never caught on in the U.S., but the Japanese still won: Companies from that one island in the East controlled the entire portable market. If you wanted to see the edge of available technology in 2000, Biccamera in Shibuya was Consumer Mecca.

Then came the iPod. And within five years, “portable audio” became something that Japanese companies were really bad at.

But even after the iPod debacle, the Japanese and Koreans had one field in which they were absolute masters: the cell phone. Americans were literally forced by Sprint to use three-year old LG models. Guys in New Jersey pulled up friends’ numbers on tiny black-and-white screens while guys at the New Otani browsed a mini-version of the web in full color. Maybe the Motorola RAZR sold some phones in Japan, but c’mon: Media Skin, Marc Newson’s Talby? Compared to Japan, America looked like a third-world nation in terms of cell-phone standards.

Then came the iPhone.

Now you could argue that the full menagerie of Japanese phones still destroys the American selection or that Japanese phones can do neat things like receive broadcast television signals that the iPhone can’t. (Because I know you would never want to miss an episode of Waratte Ii Tomo.) Nevertheless, the iPhone — a single package — leapfrogs everything the Japanese market has to offer, especially considering the excellence of the user interface.

If we were smart, we would see this as the battle between multinational conglomerates instead of nations, but we won’t: The iPhone takes a serious bite out of the Japanese gross national cred on advanced cell phones. One product changed everything.

There is a recent Docomo commercial featuring hot actor Eita and some other guy showing off the latest and greatest function on a Docomo phone — get this, better yet, sit down — a motion-detecting boxing video game. Forget watching video libraries of films and TV shows on a wide screen, a WiFi-ready Internet device, and a revolutionary way to browse media archives, you can play a motion-detecting boxing game on a brand new Docomo phone if you set up your phone in a quiet room and punch near the screen. To be honest, that would have looked pretty cool if the other side of the world had not suddenly erupted with semi-religious technological progress.

(Wait, Marxy, are you considering the fact that Docomo has way more celebrity spokesmen than the iPhone? Fine, I admit it: Dentsu is way better at bringing together large teams of actors and actresses than the TBWA people.)

We can argue over small questions of functionality and design, but the Hype Machine in this Battle for Global Cool isn’t concerned with details. If someone asks, what’s the single coolest phone in the world today, would someone point to Japan or Korea? What would it take for Japanese phones to retake the title? Motion-detection curling?

A certain explanation about the rise of Japan Cool has wiggled its way into the conventional wisdom: The creative explosion in the 1990s that enabled the mass-exporting of Japanese popular culture to the rest of the world happened precisely because the Japanese economy went sour. The pundits employing this argument posit an inverse-relation between economic growth and culture. In other words, creativity increased once the Japanese stopped obsessing over economic expansion. A relatively eloquent version of this argument appears in Roland Kelts’ Japanamerica (180-181):

Younger Japanese had grown-up amid the wealth of the post-war Japan Inc. machine just as its cogs were starting to falter. But instead of stymieing them, the resulting slump actually cultivated their creativity. In a weak job market, graduates and dropouts alike had little to lose.

[redacted]

“The recession was enormously productive for [Japan's] counterculture,” says 2dk’s David d’Heilly. “Previously these people were at Dentsu cranking out Honda ad’s. Now they’re setting up their own indie fashion labels, or coding the Web, or doing other things that are closer to what they want to be doing.”

[redacted]

Novelist Haruki Murakami points to the role that adversity, albeit in a relatively mild form, played in fostering Japan’s less corporate cultural identity: “When we were rich in the 1980s, we weren’t producing any kind of international culture. But when we got poor again, we got humble. Then we became creative.”

There are very serious flaws to this reasoning. (The following points may seem familiar to long-time Néomarxisme readers, but we — learn — by — repetition.)

Problem 1: The So-Called “Lost Decade” Saw the Greatest Consumer Spending on “Cool” in Japanese History

The Japanese stock market may have crashed in 1990, but the “Bubble Era” did not really end as a cultural period until around 1993. Even if we mark the “lost decade” as beginning in that year, it really took the sarin gas attacks and Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995 to deeply etch a more permanent shadow on the Japanese psyche. But despite these human tragedies and the clear descent into “不景気” (recession) by the mid-1990s, spending on import fashion still managed to reach its highest level ever in the year 1996. That’s because incomes did not start to fall until 1998.So fashion consumption was much more expansive in the middle of the 1990s than in the “rich” days of 1985-1991. (Although the market went into decline from 1997 on, the superbrands of LV and Gucci etc. continued to grow and grow up until recently.)

The Japanese music market followed a similar pattern. From 1989 on, consumers gobbled up CDs unlike anything ever seen before. The market kept growing until peaking in 1999.

General consumer spending may have taken a hit in the 1990s, but the “cultural markets” never had it better. Essentially, consumers had learned to live a certain consumer lifestyle in the 1980s, and they did not immediately cease spending on aspirational items once the Bubble ended. The only real change was the target of spending — values moved from a conspicuous consumption to more “cultural” means of discrimination. This aesthetic change, however, was part of a global phenomenon and did not happen in total isolation.

The creative markets were so big in the 1990s as to elevate the amounts of money on the fringes to a level of serious profit. Not only did tiny record labels like Escalator, for example, make livable sales for their artists in the mid-1990s, mega-labels like Sony used their massive profits to essentially subsidize the releases of niche musicians such as Yoshinori Sunahara and Supercar. The unprecedented market size and market diversity in Japan in the 1990s seriously questions Murakami’s idea of the Japanese becoming “poor” and suggests that the mass consumer expenditure on a wide variety of products was primarily responsible for the energy in pop culture.

Problem 2: The Salaryman-to-Creative Profession Transfer Has a Lag

The Japanese employment system is so rigid that those aiming for white-collar positions must start moving down the one-way path at the high school level. Those students who have chosen to go to art schools or trade schools instead of universities are not traditionally recruited by the most prestigious companies to enter as formal employees in the way that the phrase “Japan Inc” implies. They have already decided to forgo this career track.

Therefore, a sudden jolt to the economy and subsequent breakdown of the traditional white-collar dream in the early 1990s would not have had much direct influence on the graduates of this period. White-collar recruitment may have been slower in the mid-1990s, but those gunning most rabidly for a creative job at the beginning of the Lost Decade had already made that choice before knowing the downturn would transform into total stagnation. The first youths to have had time to readjust career plans to match the realities of the recession would not have reached career age until later in the decade.

Problem 3: The Oft-Cited “Creative Geniuses” of Japan All Decided to Be Creators Before the Bubble Collapsed

Welts names Takashi Murakami, Nigo, DJ Krush, Yoshimoto Banana, and Amy Yamada as Japanese artists who really brought attention to the high-quality of Japanese pop culture. For the moment, let’s accept this list as at least partially canonical. If we set the age of “occupational decision” to 20-22 (as is usually required in Japan), all of these individuals had already cast their die by the end of the Bubble. Nigo attended Bunka Fukuso Gakuin to study magazine editorial and dropped out to start working as a DJ and stylist. By the time he started Nowhere in 1993, he had already destroyed any chances at taking up a white-collar job — not that he cared.

The writers included in this list are too old to prove anything about the post-Bubble. Banana Yoshimoto grew up in an literary/intellectual family and hit the big time with her debut novel Kitchen in 1988. Amy Yamada — born in 1959 — began her career in the middle of the Bubble.

Takashi Murakami reached 22 in 1984 and spent the ’80s finishing a doctorate at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. DJ Krush very literally spent his youth in the yakuza. Needless to say, Dentsu wasn’t calling.

If you want to consider the Shibuya-kei guys, Pizzicato Five debuted in the mid-1980s, and Kenji Ozawa and Keigo Oyamada in Flipper’s Guitar had released three albums by the time the Bubble ended. Their fame in the mid-’90s was contingent on their prior success.

In sum, the 1990s saw the creative peak (ages 25-35) of Bubble-raised or Bubble-debut individuals rather than those shaped by the recessionary environment in their formative years.

Problem 4: The Creative Market was a Viable Choice

The aforementioned creators not only had chosen their career by the time the Bubble burst, but the creative markets were so strong in the early 1990s that choosing art over “white-collar life” was a perfectly rational economic choice. Instead of having “nothing to lose,” these artists had “everything to gain.”

There is also something insulting about the assumption that these highly motivated and talented individuals chose their careers only when the door closed to lifetime employment at a white-collar company. Whatever you think about Nigo, the man clearly did not set out to be a millionaire; he simply wanted to live a creative/celebrity lifestyle, and his pecuniary success was serendipitous.

Problem 5: Now with a Real Lack of Formal Employment, Where is the Creative Explosion?

Compared to the early 1990s, the job market now offers even fewer full-time seishain positions to young people. Part-time, contract, and temp workers have become the norm. Despite an almost universal understanding that the white-collar “Japan Inc” system only helps a minority of top-level university graduates, where are the armies of young people who have chosen art above all and have found success in both Japan and the West? Putting aside my pessimistic “termial decline” meta-narrative, very few critics in Japan or elsewhere see Gen Y in Japan leading a second creative explosion matching the 1990s. Some freeters may claim to be pursuing artistic dreams, but the evaporation of the consumer market for their work makes it difficult for them to establish their careers.

Solutions: So What Did Happen?

I think the better explanation is something like this:

1) The lifestyle demands that accompanied the Bubble Era led companies to build the prerequisite informational channels, retail infrastructure, and taste standards needed for a vibrant (consumer-based) creative culture. The era itself, however, did not yet have a surplus of artists who could locally produce world-class material. Economic conditions have a more direct influence on infrastructure more than just aesthetic mood — especially in Japan where the cultural markets were still under development.

2) The creators in the Bubble Era were children of a much less “privileged” era, and while the isolation from global standards worked perfectly well for some art forms such as anime and manga, those indulging in the hard-to-define “cool” sectors such as fashion and music could not produce enough materials that created an impression abroad. (Rei Kawakubo [b. 1942] and the YMO crowd [b. 1947-1952] are the most obvious exceptions.)

3) At least for the Ura-Harajuku and Shibuya-kei crowds, the most famous creators of the 1990s had used their Bubble years to indulge in niche foreign cultural products to a completely new degree (made possible by the infrastructure outlined in point 1), so by the time they hit an age where they could be cultural producers themselves, they had the know-how to make culture on a global level and could use the more sophisticated retail environments to achieve mass recognition.

4) Like almost all artists, the 1990s creators naturally reacted against what came before them. In their case, their movement away from the superficial nouveau riche tastes of the Bubble Era brought them (and their consumers) to more “artistic, creative” pursuits. These values worked well with the reactionary chic zeitgeist, but in the case of Shibuya-kei, for example, these value changes began way before the Bubble even ended.

So the logic is not “recession shifted resources and attention away from economic pursuits,” but “the economic boom of the 1980s created the infrastructure and human inputs required for the 1990s creative boom.” There was a value shift, but the creators who best represented this shift began operating within an anti-Bubble aesthetic before the Bubble even ended. Consumers may have found their message more compelling in a recessionary environment, but the artists themselves did not choose “creativity” over “white-collar career stability” because of the economic downturn.

If you haven’t read Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, you should — because he perfectly explains why SXSW doesn’t really work as an event for discovering new music:

A recent series of studies, titled “When Choice is Demotivating,” provide the evidence [that more choice is not better]. One study was set in a gourmet food store in an upscale community where, on weekends, the owners commonly set up sample tables of new items. When researchers set up a display featuring a line of exotic, high-quality jams, customers who came by could taste samples, and they were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one condition of the study, 6 varieties of the jam were available for tasting. In another, 24 varieties were available. In either case, the entire set of 24 varieties was available for purchase. The large array of jams attracted more people to the table than the small array, though in both cases people tasted about the same number of jams on average. When it came to buying, however, a huge difference became evident. Thirty percent of the people exposed to the small array of jams actually bought a jar; only 3 percent of those exposed to the large array of jams did so (19-20).

SXSW too has a large number of exotic, high-quality jams — 1300 to be precise. And most of these bands plays multiple times.

In three days, faced with somewhere around 900 options, I saw two bands total.

The Mae Shi, For Example

On Friday night, I went to see The Mae Shi‘s showcase gig. They played for only about 25 minutes, but it verged on life-changing. The boys started the gig spread into the crowd, and since the venue had a poor man’s version of stadium-seating, they started chanting their first song in unison all around us. Finally descending upon the stage, they rocked and socked — with brief costume changes but without annoying inter-song banter — until we were all rocked out.

Besides the fact that the Mae Shi is a totally swell band, once had 6000 MySpace friends before MySpace conspired to destroy their MySpace page, and had their unbelievably great new track “Run to Your Grave” on Pitchfork’s Forkcast recently, there could not have been more than 75 to 100 people at the show.

Austin is the “live music capital of the world,” and I am assuming “live music” to connote “rock bands with guitars” that play four-minute rock songs. I never got the feeling that art-rock is really a good match to the proceedings.

And Kiiiiiii

Which leads us to assessing the value of bringing Kiiiiiii to SXSW — a band who in my completely subjective, horribly biased, and subsequently worthless opinion are one of the shining stars of the Japanese indie music scene. They played first at Todd P.’s backyard party in the drizzle for an energetic gaggle of hipsters local and glocal (Brooklyn, represent), which went generally well and made a nice intro for Juiceboxxx to come on and start knocking over plastic chairs. (Did he get off from school to perform or was he playing hooky? Truant they’ll all say, quoth Milhouse.)

The Beauty Bar gig later that night was a mixed affair. Short on time, no sound checks allowed, maybe 100 people or so, but a strange mix of patrons. Some guy immediately stole a kazoo off the stage, tried to blow on it for 10 mins, failing to make any sort of noise, then pocketed it and started walking away, before I asked him whether “I could get that back.” I got it back. This is what managers are for.

Reviews were mixed.

“I got a chance to see “Kiiiiiii” on said birthday. It was very energetic and fun. I have thier DVD so I can get really drunk with friends and re-live the halcyon.” – “Edward”

“Yes, those two Japanese girls are energetic mad, and they sure do make a spectacle of themselves. But with one singer and one drummer and no support musicians, the performance was, at the very least, thin. The old fart in me appreciates method where madness is concerned, and Kiiiiiii pretty much tells method to fuck off. I left after 15 minutes.” – Musicwhore.org

“KIIIII: I can’t believe there was hype for this band. This was one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen. Japan’s gotta bring more than this.” – Bandwagon

Nothing, however, beats this pithy summary:

“We kicked off the festival by seeing a crazy Japanese band called Kiiiiii who were 2 harajuku girls that performed with guitar and drumas a-la White Stripes, and included strange covers of Boney M’s Brown Girl In The Ring and We Are The World in a style that was only slightly recognisable, but totally hysterical.” – Jude Adam

Kiiiiiii does not have a guitar player.

With 1300 bands, hype is critical as it is the sole guide for navigating the surplus of gig choices. Hype at SXSW, however, is not expanded through performance as much as aggregated and consolidated. In a sea of so many choices, there is nowhere to accidentally see a band and start loving them. You either love or hate whom you have already set out to see.

Before I left for Austin, my friend Nick S. mentioned it was “great” that Kiiiiiii had managed to get on the Crystal Castles bill, but shows at SXSW aren’t “shows” in any traditional sense, where patrons stick around and see the other bands. If a gig ends at x:40, you’ve got 20 mins to make it to the next venue to see the next band on your list or have a slice of pizza. I doubt anybody stayed around at Beauty Bar after Kiiiiiii, and even if the crowd sized stayed the same or increased, the Venn diagram would show a very small overlap between the crowds.

All in all, Kiiiiiii got a blip on the radar by showing up to SXSW — mainly from placement in the massive list of 1300 bands and subsequent discovery by myriad bloggers. Whether the actual performances did anything for macro-promotion, I have no idea.

Japanese Cool

JETRO — the Japan External Trade Organization and government organ — threw a party on Thursday of SXSW week called the “Matsuri-Japan Bash” to nominally support the exportation of Japanese music to the rest of the world. I certainly salute the idea, but they sided with the Japan Nite event, which is a non-curated, pay-to-play showcase. Any Japanese band with $6000 to spend (on top of the $1000 in airfare for each member), can be a part of the famous Japan Nite.

Since nobody behind this operation seems to have any idea to bring Japanese bands with some semblance of appeal to American indie rock audiences and instead let big labels throw them some bands, we got a weird mix of newcomers, old-timers, and garage bands on holiday. HY are light poppers from Okinawa and favorites of 18 year-old Japanese female college students who “like” “music.” Go!Go!7188 are kind of a sub-Shiina Ringo rock band from Toshiba/EMI about whose existence I had completely forgotten. No one Japanese I know will consider Sony’s six-girl teenage ska band Oreskaband an actual band and not an elaborate marketing scheme. In case you didn’t get enough horns, Pistol Valve — an all-girl teenage brass band — came along as well.

I know I am being snobby and selfish here, wanting Japan to present a well-curated hipster cool instead of putting forward “pay-to-play” as a national cultural trait. And hell, some guy who actually took the trouble to see Kiiiiiii — a non-Japan Nite band — thought that “Japan’s gotta bring more than this,” so I doubt I can speak for all American fans of the Japanese music. But with this national-sponsorship of Japanese gross national cool, I am still troubled that the aesthetic mismanagement of selecting the “representatives” has no led to a degeneration of the “Japan” brand — maybe not for the audiences, who I am sure enjoyed the young teenage sound of an all-girl ska band — but for Japanese artists themselves. If anybody had bothered to say, how do we promote Japanese bands in the US, they would have called Shugo Tokumaru, who probably would have gone to SXSW and ignored Japan Nite for a better showcase with no national-affiliation and support from the official trade bureau. Dear Bureaucracy, maybe the best way to promote Japanese music abroad is to not get involved at all.

While iMomus and Jeans Now properly dealt with Ben Anderson’s Tokyo travel article in The Guardian last week, I had not taken a look until it popped up on my screen while searching for something unrelated earlier today. Obviously the novice Japan traveler is not going to produce the most cutting-edge piece about the city ever written and will generally follow the Western-Friendly Concierge Playbook (Page 1: Zakuro!), but paragraph two sort of took the story out of the realm of reality and into our Western collective-fantasy of hyper-cool neo-Tokyo c. 1998 CE:

Omotesando is also home to the cult clothing line Bathing Ape, the epicentre of Tokyo’s youth culture. Armies of kids covered in its bright camouflage and shiny trainers wander round the four Bathing Ape stores all day and often camp out overnight on a rumour that a new top or trainer has just arrived. They get their hair cut at the Bape salon and eat off gold-rimmed china, especially made with the Ape logo, at the Bape cafe.

I do not mean to pick on Bape or single it out, but this whole paragraph is historical fiction, based on hearsay. I can promise you that neither Anderson nor anyone on their team — in this year 2006 — actually saw kids camp outside overnight or swarm to get their hair cut at the Bape salon and eat the Bape cafe. (Wait, did kids ever swarm to eat Bape and have a Bape haircut??) This is like doing a travel piece on New York and talking about “all the graffiti on the subways.” (“I dunno, man. I mostly took cabs, but I asked a colleague about it and he said it was far out.”) Was there a time when this observation was true about Bape and Omotesando? Sure. Is it really accurate to describe Omotesando as the “epicentre” of Bape rather than the central fashion headquarters for the nation? No, not in 2006 when everyone in Japan has moved on from a brand that topped the charts a full decade ago.

Last Thursday afternoon, I passed by the Omotesando Bape store and no one was in it. The weekends are surely different, and I do not want to make my personal observation into the Law, but no matter: the fact that Ape has a lot of stores does not mean that Ape in 2006 is filling all of those stores with rabid first-tier customers.

But imagine how embarrassing it would be to everyone to learn that Bape has seen better days.

The day I arrived, Vanity Fair was in town to interview Nigo, and I’d only just missed Natalie Portman and Stella McCartney, who both took him out for dinner.

What if Ito Misaki and Hamasaki Ayumi went to Los Angeles and chose to go out to dinner with Mickey Rourke? Needless to say, the Japanese media would have the responsibility of protecting the honor of these two women by playing up Mickey Rourke’s reputation, nudging the facts, going on hearsay and “rumour” to make him sound like the hippest (and strongest!) guy in town. Nigo is Nigo, and at this point, his fame is more about his fame than his actually selling clothes. But must we extrapolate some kind of fantasy 1999 scenario of his stores to live up to his legend? Are all travel writers doomed to go somewhere and fantasize their surroundings as those existent five years ago instead of sizing up the situation from a ground-level inductive perspective? Or should they read blogs by jaded locals totally myopic about the grand narratives bestowed on Japan from the outside world?

I am not sure any single magazine has seen so many reincarnations in the last few years than Tokion. Started in 1996 by two Americans living in Japan — Lucas Badtke-Berkow and Adam Glickman — the bilingual magazine went from being an oversized, overgrown zine primarily covering the Japanese cultural explosion of the late ’90s to being a glossy “national geographic for the pop culture generation.”

The interpretation of the latter statement became a point of contention between the two founders once Adam moved to L.A. to publish the magazine in America: Lucas and the Japan team started moving more and more into “soft” themes like animals and travel, where Adam’s interest lay more in the burgeoning street culture and graffiti art scenes. Once Tokion U.S. trucked the whole operation to the Lower East Side in New York, the focus mismatch was so great as to cause formal dissolution. For a couple of issues in 2001, there were two Tokions with completely different content published on opposite sides of the world.

Then the Japan-based Tokion morphed into Paper Sky — a travel-culture magazine only published in Japan. Tokion in the U.S. became more and more engulfed in the excitement of post-’01 “Downtown New York” and thematically moved away from Japan. As an editor and writer there at the time, my job was to do the token Japan article every issue to keep a bit of the old spirit alive. But in general, we were having trouble finding a steady stream of new artists and creators coming out of Japan. From what we heard across the sea, the cultural wave of the late ’90s had reached its peak and new things still seemed to be radiating from the already famous. Tokion (U.S.) eventually got rid of the Japanese text to make more room for articles and look more proper to distributors. This was a difficult decision: Even though no one actually read the Japanese text, most of the readers liked seeing it on the page.

In 2003 things got confusing again as Tokion (U.S.) opened Tokion Japan in Japan using a lot of the original Tokion staff who did not fly over to Paper Sky. For the most part, the new magazine was just a direct translation of the American version with some inconspicuous local features. Then last year, the rights to Tokion Japan were sold to Infas Publishing, making it a sister publication to Studio Voice and Ryuukou Tsuushin. Then in a surprise move, Adam Glickman sold the American Tokion to another company, meaning that both Tokions are presently owned by separate parties who have little to nothing to do with the original founders. Quite a testament to the original brand image that other people would come in and want to continue on the legacy of what is basically a niche title.

As the American version dropped beloved design guru Deanne Cheuk‘s revolutionary layout and focused more and more on mainstream Western creators, the content no longer had much obvious appeal to Japanese readers. Now free from the chains of history, Infas has decided to scrap the original template for Tokion Japan and begin again. So debuting last Saturday: the first issue of the all new Tokion Japan.

Old Tokion purists will no doubt question the whole operation from the start: These are not the original “Tokion” people behind the magazine. But I am quite intrigued by the gust of fresh air. In fact, the new magazine seems to hark back to the old spirit behind the first issues — a group of youngsters bringing a distinctly individual editorial eye to the world around them. The new voice of Tokion is French Tokyo-resident Cyril Duval, who acts as both Fashion Director and mascot model. Having the staff on the cover of the magazine may strike some as being a bit narcissistic, but Lucas B-B could almost be credited with starting the tactic back with his ubiquitous appearances in the early issues.

Overall, the content seems to focus on high-fashion, artsy sides of consumer and cultural life — half-fashionista catalog, half-profiles, and half-fashion spreads (You got a problem with 3/2?). In fact, the new magazine lacks the straight interview style of past Tokions (although they include some translations of the latest Tokion U.S. content in a little booklet). Another fun feature is a close-up on luxury items from LV, Gucci, and all the other usual suspects — but Cyril has chosen the most extravagant and ridiculous goods from these brands’ collections and displayed each item individually upon the page in an ironic celebration of luxury’s gratuitous existence.

I find it interesting how non-informative the magazine is — unlike oppressive monthly art bible Studio Voice, the new Tokion goes down the Western media route and teaches you very little about how to be “in” yourself.

The cover story is on bag designer Asa. He is half-Japanese, raised in Woodstock, NY, but now lives in Tokyo. The next issue will apparently focus on OK Fred‘s Audrey and Yoshi, and in general, the magazine seems to be interested in exploring and exposing Tokyo’s “international scene” represented in the word “glocal” (global + local).

This intention strikes me as a big departure from the original magazine. Lucas-era Tokion was about two Americans in the middle of a Japanese underground explosion, raising flags of solidarity with Nigo and Cornelius in celebration of the small scene they found themselves embroiled in. Eventually, they helped export this culture to the rest of the world by being some of the first to translate it over to English and place the creators’ faces at every Tower Records from Berkeley to Providence. Lucas and Adam did not become heralds of their respective scene because they “got there first” as much as they got there at all. In the mid ’90s, foreigners living in Tokyo were mostly leftovers from the heady finance days of the ’80s, and very few had any interest in the local pop culture. Lucas and Adam were the godfathers of an entire generation who grew up respecting (non-anime) Japanese culture as internationally relevant, and now, almost anyone living in Tokyo for these cultural reasons lives in their wake.

The new Tokion is not so much about this messianic mission of exporting Japanese cool, but looking at the local culture arising from the contemporary mix between foreigners and Japanese. In some ways, the magazine could be seen as a report on “what happened in the 21st century” after the initial Tokion project succeeded. My only concern is whether “we foreign Tokyo residents” are actually so interesting or dynamic to warrant such coverage. Tokion Japan does not ignore Japanese creators to solely focus on the ex-pat fashion world, but the latter may end up providing a baseline view of the “glocal” culture. I tend to forget how much things have changed since the days when “foreigner in Japan” automatically meant “Gas Panic, Hiroo, English teaching,” and I should be authentically pleased with the character of foreigners here now: interested in mole-like submersion into the soil, trying to pick up Japanese as the “universal standard” of local communication. But I still get hung up on the “white skin privilege” — that we foreigners tend to make good magazine fodder not because of our skills but because of our visual association with the locus of pop cultural creation and decision-making in the West. (Hip hop has extended this privilege to those of African heritage, but any brown and yellow shades of skin originating from less rich countries still remain in “case by case” limbo.) Are Europeans and Americans being featured because we are actually interesting or because we resemble the interesting type who are forging into new directions overseas?

But readers are not dumb, and the success of Tokion Japan will eventually depend upon how interesting Tokyo inter-racial, inter-national “glocal” culture actually is. But, hey, if Yoshi and Audrey are the prototypes for a new Japan and a new Tokion, then count me in.

Update: This version of Tokion Japan folded, only to be resurrected as a different Tokion Japan at INFAS which seems to come out randomly if at all. Meanwhile in the U.S., Nylon Holdings bought the American Tokion license in early 2009 and then renamed it Factory in late 2010.