Today is the 23rd, and I don’t have to tell you that the 23rd is the sale date for the most popular women’s fashion monthlies. Oh, CanCam, your 560 pages last month could hardly hold me over for thirty-one painful days!

I went over to the JJ site to check out the contents and noticed something odd about the cover. Just a white box with the logo? I had assumed this was a temporary solution to some sort of design problem, that the proper cover image would be up in no time. But I went over to the bookstore and noticed something extraordinary: Kimura Takuya from SMAP on the cover, sandwiched between two of the normal JJ models. (See the actual cover here.)

So the blank image was no mistake at all! Again we see the draconian and utterly ridiculous Johnny’s Jimusho policy towards images of its stars used on the internet. Yes, JJ can use Kimura Takuya on its cover, available in newsstands across the land, but no, JJ cannot use its own cover image on the internet to promote the issue. Otherwise, people on the internet may be able to figure out what Kimura Takuya looks like. Or they will be so mollified by a tiny 155 x 193 pixel jpg that they’ll cease buying those 3″x5″s of Kimutaku at idol shops in Harajuku. Or Johnny’s is just so controlling that they even don’t let their talents hang mirrors in the company dorm lest light reflect upon a surface and portraits be viewed without proper payment.

At a decade circulation low of 175,634 copies a month, JJ needs some sort of gimmick to get back in the game, and the Faustian bargain of Johnny’s involvement is a surefire way to move paper. Johnny’s in return gets some nice promotion for Kimura’s newest Hero film opening in September. So Kobunsha can use Kimura’s image to boost JJ sales, but not show evidence of this collaboration on the Internet, where evil dwells and the 21st century naturally eradicates anachronistic and feudalistic business practices propping up the current oligopoly. Johnny’s Jimusho has seen the future, and their genius solution is to completely avoid it.

Rumor has it that Japan’s most beloved female singer Koda Kumi is dating Japan’s most talented dance group vocalist Nakai Masahiro from Japan’s most lovable replacement for Hikaru Genji — SMAP.

Now this confuses me a bit, since I was operating on the gossip that Koda Kumi was determined to get married by the age of 25 and had a long-term “non-celebrity” boyfriend who manages some sort of drinking establishment. If I had set myself a date for marriage at 25 and had only a few months left to go, I would probably stick with the boyfriend of four years and not switch over to a slave to an entertainment agency that does not let any of its employees get married (unless, of course, they knock up someone famous. Retirement and death are also acceptable excuses for matrimony.)

Not to mention that the timing on the Koda-Nakai romance is suspicious when viewed from the angle of organizational relations. Here again, Avex and Johnny’s Jimusho have come together to make a model romance and thrust their stars into the pages of gossip weeklies. Last time they tried this, they got seven whole years out of the relationship between Hamasaki Ayumi and TOKIO heartthrob Nagase Tomoya. This ended about a month ago, so in my delusional paranoid understanding, a meeting was called, two candidates were chosen and the management companies sealed the deal with a handshake: Kuu-tan, meet your new fictional beau. Nakai, go ahead and tell your friends about this.

The great thing about these mock relationships is that they don’t get in the way of real sexual priorities. Even if Nakai goes off and does what he wants, it’s not like magazines would dare write a story about the girlfriends of SMAP members. If Johnny’s Jimusho Youth Brigades get photographed at a wild sex party, the press will graciously black the eyes out to secure deniability. I mean, Hamasaki Ayumi didn’t let her faux relationship to Nagase get in the way of her real engagement to Futura 2000′s son back in 2004.

With so much of this celebrity gossip being a mix between press releases on one side and completely unreliable sensationalism on the other, I find it very difficult to tell which stories I am supposed to believe for the artist’s sake and which I am supposed to ignore. Long story short, we public have no real allies in this information war. For a long time, there has been a defense of the Japanese news system that important investigative stories do come out, just not in the newspapers or on TV. Most famously, a weekly shukanshi broke the Lockheed Scandal rather than the mainstream media. Great: Information cannot be completely controlled, but if I was an elite trying to keep reigns on power, I would be overjoyed that any non-approved, non-press club information could only find a home in totally unreliable magazines that mix investigative reporting, intentionally leaked stories, naked women and pure fiction.

So I guess I am going to keep believing that this Koda-Nakai thing is a total hoax, because that is equally believable as the alternative.

Bonus Topic: Did anyone ever see the MTV show about Misono — Koda Kumi’s little sister? The premise was that she had gotten so fat that her management company refused to promote her music, so she went on a diet to lose weight to win her career back. Turning lemons into lemonade, that management company helped make the humiliating exercise of forced dieting into an extremely dignified reality TV show. She apparently gained all the weight back, because just maybe, she has naturally has an endomorphic body type and the weight wasn’t a problem to start with. But may I suggest that she has no real hereditary claims to automatic pop success anyway? Her equivalent in the world of homicide would be the little brother of the guy who claimed he killed Jon Benet.

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, Visvim, 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 new-found 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.

¹ On Saturday, I passed by the Ice Cream/BBC store in Harajuku, and about 15-20 kids were lined up. How many people were they letting into the store at a time? 1. One! And you wonder why it looks like there is a line outside…

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 been 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 Fukuzawas 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.