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.

Massing

A 1977 issue of Japan Echo contains an article called “Hordes of Teenagers Massing” written by an NHK researcher named Fujitake Akira. He looks for answers to a question that had been plaguing society at the time: Why do youngsters mass in crowds and pursue the latest fads? Viewed with hindsight, this may seem like asking why water is wet, but Fujitake notes that this “youth massing phenomena,” which we now accept as a standard part of Japanese culture, was a “major change” for society in the 1970s.

One example of massing:

On May 4 at about 4:30 p.m., a group of petitioners assembled in force before the entrance to Yokohama City Hall. Their petition was to make Yokohama Municipal Cultural Gymnasium available to the Bay City Rollers for a concert in Yokohama. Consisting of about 100 girls, the group had collected 5,000 signatures which they asked to be able to present to Mayor Ichio Asukata.
The British rock group, which is scheduled to come to Japan again this autumn, has recently been riding a popularity of boom of almost unreal proportions. The Rollers’ fans are mostly schoolgirls between the fifth and tenth grades, with an average age of about 14. The ¥2,500 albums put out by the Rollers are, of course, selling like hot cakes.

Damn youngsters with their blasted Bay Cities and hot cakes.

If we concede that a majority of Japan’s significant “popular culture” is comprised of “youth-oriented consumer culture” (Sanrio, Gundam, video games, Pink Lady, etc.), then Fujitake’s article essentially pinpoints the beginning of what we know as Japanese pop culture to the mid-1970s. The 1960s saw amazing economic improvement for the Japanese nation, but individual consumption mostly involved bringing up the standard of modern comfort in the sphere of hardware (air conditioning, color TV, cars) rather than frivolous spending on “soft” cultural items. Instead of indulging in fashion and manufactured pop, college students in the 1960s flocked to the New Left since it was the most obvious and meaningful way to engage in social organization at the time. These kids did not prioritize accumulating “stuff” — outside of helmets and fighting sticks (ゲバ棒) needed to battle cops and ideological foes.

After the implosion of the Red Armies in the early 1970s, however, mass consumerism established itself as the new, friendlier vessel for the same socialization that the New Left had provided. Consumer products and information became a ticket to peer inclusion — i.e., if you owned the right product or knew about the right musical group, it was easy to find adoption into loose or formal organizations. Seventies’ teenagers may have still mobilized to present petitions to political leaders, but not to remove Japan from the defense umbrella of the United States as much as to open up Japan to the thrilling manufactured Scottish pop sounds of Rollermania.

Massing itself was not a brand new thing to Japan, but in the mid-’70s, children and adolescents suddenly became the driving force behind mass culture. As Fujitake writes, “One might even be inclined to say that what we are witnessing is no more than the spread to the younger generation of phenomena that had previously been the exclusive preserve of the adult generation.” For example, there may have been a very long tradition of reading and writing manga, but the 1970s youth embrace of that particular medium laid out the foundations of today’s entrenched manga culture. Fujitake calls ’70s teenagers the “comic book generation” — which suggests that comic book reading caused a generational split. He writes, “Some parents are somewhat scornful of the comic-book generation, or perhaps we should say that they disapprove of comic-book reading.” One problem with comic-books, he explains, is that they are a “private” media enjoyed alone. This breaks from the wholesome and communal nature of television, where the entire family sits around the set and chooses programming together. Just as ’50s rock’n'roll developed from American teenagers being able to listen to music away from their families on personal transistor radios, youth culture in Japan needed private and personal media outlets like the phonebook manga comics in order to properly develop.

Demographics

So why did Japanese youth culture explode in the 1970s? Appropriate economic conditions created the necessary discretionary income, media diffusion, and distribution networks to allow for a consumer society, but why did youth consumers make the best target customer for manufacturers?

In the mid-1970s, Japan was an extremely young country compared to its economic equals. In 1975, only 7.9% of the Japanese population was aged 65 or older. (For comparison, the rate for the U.S. was 10.5%, the U.K. was 14.0%, and Germany was 14.8%. Only South Korea had a lower rate at 3.6%.)

Those who began to have kids in the late ’60s and early ’70s had grown up with very little in the way of consumer luxuries and never experienced enough prosperity to know how to spend money on themselves. When the Japanese economy started putting real money in their pockets by the late 1960s, they chose to spend this money on their children rather than themselves. They hoped to provide their own youngsters with the pleasurable and comfortable adolescence they had not experienced in their own youth.

This value shift towards child-oriented consumption hit the fuel of a very large youth generation to create an army of young cultural participants. And due to an extremely limited set of media guides to products and services, kids all “massed” at the same events and stores. More and more companies were obviously happy to get into the youth market once they understood that this was the locus of consumer fervor in society. Soon youth culture had enough artifacts in circulation to really assert itself as a major part of the total market system.

Demographics Now

If demographics helped launched the Japanese pop culture explosion, how do the current conditions appear in comparison? Very, very gray. Japan’s elderly rate skyrocketed to 17.2% in 2000 — the third highest in the OECD. Predictions for 2025 expect it to push 28.9%, and recent extrapolations have the population reaching 36% elderly by 2050. More than a third of society will be over 65.

I will concede that “youth culture” may not exist in its current form in 50 years regardless of demographic change, but why should we assume that Japan’s manufacturers will continue to focus on children when children no longer make up a robust consumer segment? Even now, the conventional wisdom paints the retiring Baby Boomers as the real goldmine, and producers are shifting their strategies accordingly.

Interestingly though, luxury apparel companies and street fashion brands in Japan are all massively expanding their children’s lines based on the concept that the rich grandparent generation will concentrate spending on their few grandchildren rather than on themselves. This will keep money moving into youth products for a while, but instead of the 1970s strategy of hitting as many people as possible in the masses with inexpensive goods, producers are concentrating on the sale of expensive high-grade goods to a handful of elite kids.

Fewer youth also may lead to a more “adult” cultural environment, which is not necessarily a bad thing. That being said, Japan has spent the last forty years moving more and more ex-adolescents into the kind of infantile consumption originally developed for children. Before children took over consumer culture, the 1960s mainstream culture often relied on an elitist mix of serious subject matter. Magazines like Hanashi no Tokushu (「話の特集」) offered intellectual discourse, political philosophizing, guerrilla music, and avant-garde art/theatre all in one bundle. Popular and youth culture these days (including much of the counterculture) seems completely stripped of an explicitly intellectual element. Evangelion creator Anno Hideki recently was quoted in the Atlantic Monthly article “Let’s Die Together” as saying:

“I don’t see any adults here in Japan,” he says, with a shrug. “The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.”

This sentiment echoes Asada Akira’s idea of Japan being a state based on “infantile capitalism,” but regardless of whether Japanese society is adult enough or not, the truth of the matter is that Japan has a relative lack of infrastructure for producing “adult” popular culture. Between Pokemon, the Wii, crayon-colored Bape hoodies, and Naruto, etc., a vast majority of the Gross National Cool export success stories are either childish in target or childish in spirit. Japanese companies learned to make extremely innovative and exportable youth cultural products because of the conditions of their own market: a huge consumer base of young people and fierce competition for attention. The question is, will the Japanese manufacturers be able to retool their machines to make “adult”-oriented material or will they be able to provide the world’s children with products when there are barely any children in Japan to provide the test laboratory?

Maybe the key is the Nintendo DS — a product developed nominally for children with widespread usage amongst adults. So maybe culture has no demographic destiny. If adults themselves are a huge market for infantile products, the number of children has only minimal impact on the vitality of youth culture.

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.

Am I underestimating or overestimating the difficulty required in procuring this particular stream of songs from early 80s? And not the “I Love the 80s” 80s, but the past mass hits with zero appeal to later media curators — not lucky enough to make it to punchline status. Like ELO’s “Xanadu” but with less name recognition. Do they make CD collections of this genre? Is there a Usen channel dedicated to it? This must be a high-level management decision, because the bleached-hair pock-marked punk-rock clerks at this “recycle shop” could not possibly be responsible.

Whatever the case, the corporate DJ collective know the perfect ingredients for ambiance. No matter if you are in Mobile, Alabama or Mitaka, Tokyo, there is no better music for browsing used furniture and refrigerators than Juice Newton and her ilk. We were looking for a dresser drawer, but I eventually wandered off to see what kind of overpriced yet cruddy musical instruments were on display and whether somebody had done me the favor of leaving behind the board game Stratego.

Past the rack of dusty men’s sportcoats, but before the endless reams of soiled children’s clothes, there is a big glass case filled with luxury handbags. The ordering corresponds to the unspoken hierarchy of status and popularity in Japan. First comes Louis Vuitton, which takes up a whole vertical section. Then comes Gucci, Chanel, followed by Coach, Prada (ouch!), and “Misc.” You may be tempted to believe that this stock is mostly fakes because of parallels to the suspicious stock of similar stores in countries with more rational approaches to luxury goods, but with somewhere between 40-90% of all Japanese females owning a Louis Vuitton product, imitation goods are unnecessary for making sense of this mini luxury select shop within what is otherwise a mildewed warehouse of refuse.

At Tokyo suburban junk stores, you can buy the same black Chanel bag that Paris Hilton wore to her sentencing last week and also pick up some classic games for your Super Famicon.

The European luxury super-brands almost have it in their interest to send out an army of ground-staff to raid these locations and buy out all of their own products. Because the dolor brought on from these sad, overlit stores — middle-class Salvation Army shops without even the basic appeal of charity and property rotation — overpowers the magic and mystery of any and all luxury goods. These bags are not even afforded the charm of functionality and practicality. No one picking up a half-price Gucci wallet would experience the adrenaline rush of rewarded frugality. The brand images get sucked into the vortex of despair contained with the glass cabinets — a variety of abandoned dreams organized by conglomerate, rotting away in the clothing corner of a thrift shop in the middle of nowhere. LV’s Monogram Multicolore may as well be an old version of Scrabble with the Q and the W missing.