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?

There is a very interesting article in Facta Online about the “Second Digital Divide.” Among 20 year-olds in Japan, there is a serious split between those who access the net via personal computers and those who access (a proprietary and limited version of) the net via mobile phones. And as a result, the number of young people using the internet from computers has seriously fallen in the recent years.

This graph shows the breakdown of demographic usage of the internet. Over the last six years, almost all age groups have seen their share of total home PC access usage increase — except for 20 year-olds who have dropped from making up 23.6% to now only 11.9%. This current rate means that they make up an almost identical proportion of the total as 50 year-olds. Now some of this may be demographic (there are less young people), but the drop in usage share here is much stronger and more sudden than the decrease in demographic share.

There is a socioeconomic element behind this change. PCs in Japan are essentially a “white collar” tool, and freeter/blue collar workers use the keitai as their access to the internet. With many in their 20s failing to get into the extremely narrow door to a white collar career, PC usage experience may be dropping in parallel. (We also don’t know how many white collar workers in their 20s are doing their net surfing at the office and have no interest at looking at a computer screen once they get home.)

Internet browsing capabilities on Japanese cell phones are getting better all the time, but clearly, there is a difference in technological progression on phones and computers. In terms of speed and screen quality, top-of-the-line mobile phones can finally do what a cheap computer has been able to do for years. The keitai will be stuck with a relatively tiny screen for a long time. The larger the screen gets, the more the phone will fail on the functional level of being a small object inserted into the pocket. Limitations on screen size, typing speed, and connection speed have led to a much more passive interaction with information compared to the consumers using a PC.

The author does not want us to blindly praise the “Mobile Wonderland” of Japan as a high-tech paradise. The rise of keitai has come at the expense of PC culture, rather than acted as an augmentation. The “thumb tribe” (親指族) — who primarily input text through the telephone numerical layout — show serious inexperience with using PCs and with typing on a real keyboard. They are “retrogressing” to a point where they have the pathetic PC skills of their out-of-date elders.

Apparently there have been 5700 recorded cases all across Japan of confused cell-phone users thinking that the number “110″ included in the error message “We could not send your mail (110)” is a telephone number. The police — located at 110 on the telephone dial — are not amused. The author argues that PC users may not inherently understand error codes, but would not have believed that such a number was there to be called.

For a long time, technological progression was the story of standalone gadgets. Thanks to YouTube, Google, Flickr, Ebay, Mixi, and iTunes, this is no longer the case. Keitai can let you access the internet, but can only rarely let you experience the march of innovation in real time. The mobile phone acted as a nice patch to the gaping hole of weak internet usage in Japan at the turn of the century, but it will be interesting to see how long the device can really do the job and whether or not it caused more long-term problems than it aimed to solve. Beta may have been the future of video, but it quickly became history once the rest of the world jumped on the VHS bandwagon.

In the January 2007 issue of Wired there is an article “Love Train” about our favorite “true love story” 「電車男」(Densha Otoko). Writer Brian Ashcraft gets a special interview with the “man” behind the phenomenon. Not in person, of course. Observe:

Some say he’s real, others insist he was cooked up by some clever 2Channel posters. The book’s publisher, Shinchosha, agreed to set up an email interview with Train Man, but acted as an anonymizing go—between.

“I don’t think I could’ve done it without 2Channel,” writes Train Man, who says he’s still dating the pretty girl. So far, his life hasn’t changed much: He works at the same company, visits Akihabara, buys comics, and watches anime. And, of course, he still posts about stuff like videogames on 2Channel. Once an otaku, always an otaku.

An anonymous email interview arranged by the publisher? Why was I ever skeptical of this story at all?! Besides the myriad reasons to doubt the Train Man story offered on the Japanese Wikipedia, I find it most hard to believe that couple are still together and “dating.” He better marry that girl soon. It’s not like a totally fabricated fairy tale happens to you every day.

Also, our man appears to have been totally taken on the licensing contracts: a best-seller, a film, a hit drama, etc., etc. and he still works “at the same job.”

If the Train Man is fake (and c’mon, is there any evidence that he exists other than the word of the stakeholders profiteers?), serious balls on Shinchosha to basically make up responses and send them to an American magazine as authentic.

Famed Astronaut Rolf von Ostrauch once quipped in his hilariously-stereotypical German brogue, “The Earth looks so quaint once you’ve been [sic] the moon.” If the PS3, Wii and Xboxx360 are the 新世代ゲーム (next—century consoles) they are cracked up to be, God should be currently painting a thick chalk line between those lucky few who have experienced the future and those laggards who are free to plug as many PS2′s into the wall sockets inside their caves as they please but fundamentally will never understand tomorrow today. On Tuesday, I played a Wii for the first time, and #$’(!”#’%#(%#%’(! #’(!”$FHD(#! $(!#$( — a phrase I can proudly say will make no sense to any of you yet to embrace the leather grip of the Wii controller. (For those longtime Wii players out there, sorry for all the cursing.)

The game I played on Tuesday — something involving pumping juice at rabbits from Ubi — was alright and all, but I realized how boring it will be to play the catalog of old NES titles on the Wii. Remember when games had austere titles wasting no words other than a one-word description of the actions involved? Baseball, Tennis, Golf, Pro Wrestling? Even Ten—Yard Fight feels like a leap of imagination in comparison. Somebody from Rockstar should have the balls to call the next GTA just Adventure instead of GTA: Good Morning, Heavy Metal Valley or whatever it will ultimately be.

The point is, Wii lets you purchase these old-timey games and play them on your HDTV (not in HD format). This is boring. This makes the gamer go back to the crusty old barnacle days of yore when kids sat down and played games motionlessly other than slight use of the arm and hand. WE ARE OUT OF THE CAVE NOW, Nintendo. (Sorry, I had my earphones in.) We are out of the cave, Nintendo, and we want these games adapted for full-body usage.

So, I recommend the following: all these “vintage” games should show a young boy about 8, who looks pretty much like me at age 8, sitting in the basement on the floor, eyes focused on a slightly old/broken TV playing Baseball. My Wiimote will be used exclusively to control the boy’s movements that control the game actions in Baseball.

If you want to make it really challenging, make the refresh rate on the real TV and meta-TV different so that it’s hard to see exactly what is going on.

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.