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 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 TWBA 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?

Being halfway ’round the world and therefore chronically nescient of au courant vagaries in the common culture — in just one recent example, I hardly knew young troubadour Robert Kelly had now moved into making the operetta “Trapped in the Closet” — word has only now reached my Oriental covert about the jesters contriving their own brand of chortles with the Yacht Rock project.

This serial manages to tickle, mauger low levels of thespian prowess and shoddy aural reproduction. But naught for mere irony nor reference back to former jukebox platters of our salad days. We, my compatriots, have swam into a new ken (forgive me, Keats) of “Heracles comedy” in which jokes cease to be things within themselves, but mere reflections upon the preposterous and astounding efforts of the creators. Just as Colossus at Rhodes bewildered ancient Greeks solely through an intimidation of size, our delight with Yacht Rock must stem from the makers’ incredulous erudition about extremely unctuous popular songs (in their cant, “smooth”) verdant in the mid ’70s to the early ’80s — including such bygone hit-makers as Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, Toto, Hall & Oates, and Loggins & Messina.

Whether it be rockist sensibilities denouncing all deviation from the traditional neo-lyre/bass-lyre/kettledrum arrangement or an objective disapprobation of the songs’ hollow constructions, this genre has fallen out of favor, like Leon Czolgosz in Anarchist circles post-Buffalo, out of sight and mind, with nary a paladin coming forward to bequeath a posthumous legitimacy. First and foremost, unlike punk and prog and new wave, this Yacht Rock field created few scions in the fag end of the century. Not even a plash of this production vocabulary carried on into later musical evolutions, nor did bastards materialize to carry the tricot into the dawn without official blessing. A comparison to the “Soft Rock” of the ’60s may be apropos, but the Grover Cleveland beards, overall malaise of the stagflated political and social climate, and embarrassing transgressions of the movement’s alumni tend to put posterior eulogizing beyond the pale. (We now apperceive Kenny Loggins as the man sailing into the Top Gun “Danger Zone” — not as the dapper youngster on a docked yacht singing with Jim Messina.) For anyone with aught sense of risibility, Christopher Cross would be the butt of myriad jokes — if we could remember who in Hades he was!

Indeed I laugh at the queerness of the “smooth” oeuvres and their newfound classification — a celebration of our Linnean prowess to attribute sporadic cases of a terse past outbreak as a new strain of consumption, dengue, or impetigo. But moreover, I go goobers over the very idea of excess knowledge about the mundane, that someone out in the world would fashion and form plot details based on true-life Yacht Rock trivia — e.g., that Van Halen was produced by the Doobie Brothers’ producer, a morsel used in Episode Nine. Bully to anyone who can remember that Michael McDonald was mercilessly pommeled on SCTV and then employ this historical crumb to attribute human motivations for Toto “pacifying” Michael Jackson with “Human Nature.”

In our futurity, we may decline to relish craft, and instead, rejoice from these new International-Network wonders of the human spirit. Yacht Rock’s Toto may not be funny in toto, but the idea of such blithe dedication to forlorn music may keep us exulting in the morrow.

According to this Yahoo Japan news item, publisher Kodansha has ceased production of shojo manga by artist Suetsugu Yuki because the work contained plagiarized scenes from several of Inoue Takehiko’s comics. The rabble-rousers over at 2-Ch are credited with bringing attention to these illicit borrowings.

In the past, some have argued that Japanese culture has no inherent concept of “intellectual property” or cultural thievery, but this new development shows that companies at least behave as if artistic theft results in a loss of reputation. Before the internet, there was no outlet for critical discussion of these types of commercial transgressions; manga fans a mere decade ago had little to no resource for lodging audible public complaints about sloppy pakuri — especially with the mass media (most of them manga publishers themselves) rarely picking this kind of fight. In theory, businesses in Japan are supposed to be self-regulating, but now with the better access to open media, fans can take over this correction function and do it more efficiently than the industry.

Whatever the case, these stories and ever-stricter sampling laws make it hard to believe that artistic theft is not publicly understood as a “bad” thing in Japan. And once again, 2-ch steers the media dialogue into new directions.