The new issue of Weekly Pureiboi offers us an epic dichotomy to titillate our senses: “Japanese Idols vs. World Sexy”

On the cover, the issue’s featured women are organized into two distinct groups:

The left-hand column makes sense: all four of the girls are Japanese race-queen/idol types with proper Japanese names. (Although “Leona” sounds like she could be half-Jewish.)

The right-hand group, however, is extremely problematic. Ignoring the fact that no one finds Paris Hilton “sexy,” Beyonce and Paris at least fit the most basic description of being global celebrities. Why then is purely Japanese actress and model Kuriyama Chiaki — the magazine’s cover model — part of “World Sexy”? This affiliation seems like an implicit acknowledgment that Kuriyama’s popularity stems solely from her appearance in Kill Bill. Objectively speaking, she does not fit the normal profile of a “hot girl” in Japan, and Pureiboi appears to feel the need to legitimize lust towards her from the perspective of popularity abroad.

Ozawa Maria’s inclusion in the “world sexy” group, on the other hand, boils down to question of nation-state being strictly defined through racial homogeneity. Ozawa is a 21-year old half-Japanese, half-Canadian porn star and Christian Academy in Japan graduate whose career is based exclusively in Japan. You may know her from such films as 2006′s Barely There Mosaic and 2007′s Popular Fashion Model Maria Ozawa Nakadashi Raped for 20 Consecutive Times! Ozawa is not especially known outside of the Japanese adult video market. Unlike Kuriyama, she has no feet on the global stage. Pureiboi consciously or unconsciously placed her outside of the “Japan” group only because she has what amounts to impure blood and semi-Western features.

So here, being a “Japanese idol” requires popularity originating in the Japanese market — unless you are half-Japanese, which makes “Japanese” categorization impossible. Even in matters of objectifying women, “Japan” remains so narrowly defined.

In the same way that I flocked to the Beatles because my brown hair naturally formed a rounded Beatles cut as an elementary school student, I found myself avidly watching the 1970s Japanese TV anime Ace wo Nerae! a few years ago when I lived in my former residence with cable TV, due almost solely to the fact that the female protagonist Oka Hiromi’s short curly hair resembles my post-pubescent wave. The animated series concerns young Hiromi — a first-year student at a Kanagawa-ken high school — who gets up the gumption to join her school’s tennis team in adoration of her idol — third-year campus big-shot Ryuzaki Reika aka O-Chofujin (which should be translated as something like “Mlle Butterfly”). Without any prior tennis experience, Hiromi is mysteriously thrust into the upper ranks of her team by her tough and mysterious coach Munakata. But with lots of hard work and perseverance, Hiromi finally reaches a close level to her hero O-Chofujin. Spoiler alert: the Coach totally dies.

Ace wo Nerae! is so beloved that the original manga has been made into two separate anime serials, and recently, into a cheesy live-action TV drama.

This classic story, however, is not merely about high-school girls playing tennis. The whole narrative acts as an allegory about Japan’s place in the world in the 1970s. The setting for the story resembles Yokohama — the trendy urban city where West most visibly runs up on East. Oka Hiromi represents Japan. She is physically small (a small island country), young (just “discovered” modernity in the 19th century), and inexperienced (yet to know the proper protocols of Western culture). Some may protest this patronizing view of Japan, but this was the way the Japan saw itself coming out of the 1960s. And if the geopolitical scene of the 1970s was a tennis game with specific rules and scoring, Japan was a rookie player with a lot of promise.

With her blond and luscious flowing hair, Ryuzaki Reika perfectly embodies the United States in its idealized form: the central locus of Japanese aspiration during this era. (Ironically, this particular context rewrites “Mme Butterfly” as the beautiful Western object of desire pursued by her Japanese admirers rather than the weak Oriental ready to be colonized.) Reika is tall, talented, rich, and beloved by her classmates. Although the narrative could end with this rich, blond girl getting her comeuppance from the scrappy yet determined protagonist, O-Chofujin never really pans out as a villain. In fact, she is extremely encouraging to Hiromi — a big sister if you will. There is a pleasant sororal bond, but it is inherently hierarchal.

Through very hard work and dedication, Hiromi (Japan) is able to massively improve her standing on the tennis court. While she does not necessarily get to the point of easily beating her idol, she makes massive improvement and can play with the best. And with a clear distinction in social rank and age, there is no implied failure in the younger party being #2. There is competition between the two girls, but the goal is not domination over the other. The players are working together for their school’s victory rather than their own personal glory.

Underdogism

Japanese sports anime and manga are full of “diminutive underdogs” — visually small heroes battling it out against mythically large rivals and ending up as unlikely victors. Some of this is determined by the needs of the main viewers: Children want to imagine themselves fighting the evil forces of the world and identify directly with a tiny protagonist. However, I believe a big reason for the small and young Japanese protagonist comes from a national sympathy with the underdog.

Americans, however, also love the underdog. The “ragtag group of scrappy youth works hard to defeat powerhouse team” is the plot of every single American sports movie: Hoosiers, Bad News Bears, The Karate Kid, etc, etc. We Americans love underdogs so much that we even made a superhero called Underdog.

Japan and the United States may both root for the underdogs, but I think there is a big difference in how each culture approaches and justifies its own identification with the underdog. As a nation, the U.S. came into existence as the impossible rebellious underdog who defeated the world-encompassing British Empire. We still see references to this creation myth in the fact that the non-masked bureaucrats in Star Wars‘ Galactic Empire talk as if they won their Half Blue at Cambridge in the 18th century. Harrison Solo, on the other hand, might as well be using his script from American Graffiti to speak with his Rebel brothers.

Since WWII, however, the U.S. has clearly become the dominant power on the world stage, and now to be an “underdog nation,” American culture must emphasize the triumph of the little guy in society and not the exploits of the nation itself to make a legitimate underdog message. For example, the Iraq War is a whole lot of bullying on the U.S.’s part, but look at the guy who got us into it. I can imagine that Bush II was pretty much exactly like James Spader in Pretty in Pink during high school.

On the other hand, Japan finds its underdog cred at the nation state level. For a country with a long history of military and Confucian hierarchy, autocratic rule, government-condoned cartels, and zero successful popular revolutions, the scrappy little guy with crazy ideas has never really been a source of inspiration. As a nation, however, post-war Japan is the little engine that could. In his book A Genealogy of Japanese Self-Images, Oguma Eiji argues that Japan reinvented its own back story as a “peaceful agrarian island nation” after the War in order to shirk from the bigger questions of imperial aggression. Once this re-branding occurred and 1945 became Year Zero, Japan became the impossible underdog on the world stage, who out of nowhere grew to be the second-largest economy in the free world by 1968. In the 1980s, that little underdog looked like it was going to surpass its big brother the U.S.

Within this specific historical narrative, Japan’s underdog identity resonates most clearly at a nation-state level, but this is not far from a Confucian philosophical underpinning. The sympathetic underdog must be a symbol or representative of the nation-state/society itself rather than an individual actor who “deserves” the justice of victory against the system.

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Although a game created mostly for the American market, the classic NES title Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! well illustrates the Japanese nation-based underdog concept. There may have been programming issues that necessitated a tiny protagonist, but the ethnically-generic Little Mac is a itsy-bitsy boxer whom the player pilots through three circuits of enormous and scary villains. I should not have to remind you that all of the other boxers represent a single nation-state. I’ve never been to Hippo Island, but I can imagine that King Hippo also follows the pattern of the boxer embodying the stereotypes of his respective home. The French are weak, the Germans are WWI revivalists (born in 1945!), and Pacific Islanders are grotesquely obese. Indians practice some kind of special magic called “Hindu” that involves twinkling red crystals and teleportation.

Our protagonist may not be explicitly Japanese — the official Japanese guy even threatens to give Little Mac a “TKO from Tokyo (TYO)” — but he fits the Oka Hiromi pattern of going against all odds to make his way up the hierarchy. Not through inherent talent or strength — but through hard work and a good coach. You don’t see Soda Popinski strenuously biking near the Statue of Liberty at dawn, and maybe that’s why the giant pink Russian gets beat so easily by a pipsqueak in street clothes.

Whether with tennis or boxing, the Japanese have a history of creating the underdog within a direct or implied nation-state contexts. Only if the competition is between larger macro units of humanity — society, nation, family — should the underdog win. Compare this with the American narrative of Prefontaine — an athlete who abandons his own “unique” style of front-running to please the “common knowledge” of his coach only to lose the Gold Medal in 1972. The Pre is a tragic underdog in the United States context — he is the individual suppressed by the norm.

These examples basically tell us what we already know about how each society expects its members to relate to society. Japan: the individual pursues betterment of society through hard work and total dedication vs. United States: the individual pursues betterment of society by fighting for justice and innovation at the cost of social harmony. Underdogs may be universally loved, but they are not always the same breed of canine.

Famed Neomarxisme insurgent commenter alin wrote the following in our debate about Dentsu (literally, the world’s largest ad firm) the other day:

but see japan too is basically a minor country and I’m very politically motivated to support that in whatever way i can whether , whether it’s against ‘japan as number one’ sick japanese or americans who need a fictional arch-competitor in order to function.

While I do not agree with alin’s statement, I think he may have just hit at the very crux of the ongoing debate here: Is Japan a major country or a minor country?

If Japan is a major country — like the United States or Germany — we have obvious reason to show concern over unchanging political and economic systems in the face of serious social breakdown, the rise of rightism in the LDP, and the pervasiveness of organized crime, etc. If Japan is a minor country — like Portugal or Albania or Laos — constructive criticism would amount to little more than nit-picky bullying.

My thesis adviser Prof. Merry White once said something like, at the beginning of her academic career, studying Japan was considered to be “anthropology” because Japan was a third-class country, but when the economy bounced back, Japan research became “sociology” — the change from tribe to complex society.

Of course, the question of major/minor is interesting because Japan has straddled the line for the last 150 years. First, Japan was a backwater empire closed off from the world. By the early 20th century, however, “minor” Japan defeated “major” Russia and inspired the non-European world that a new era of fighting imperialism is at hand. Then Japan went so major that they invaded China in imitation of major countries, attacked the U.S., and became the strategic partner of übermajor Nazi Germany. When the war ended, Japan went back to being “minor” for twenty years — finally regaining the underdog sense of rising glory at the ’64 Olympics. Then Japan went from a “miracle economy” to a strong #2 to Japan as Number One to buying major U.S.’s major real estate. Then the Bubble burst, ten years of recession, a declining population… Does Japan want to gun it again to retain their major status or enjoy the gentle slide into minor territory?

From any rational perspective, Japan is absolutely a major country: the #2 economy, a larger population than any of the non-Russian European states, an important producer of electronic goods for the world at large, and a Top Five supplier of pop culture. A symbol of success in Asia, the Japanese model of economic development became successfully adopted in Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. But Japan’s retention to what is generally understood as a minor-to-major development state economic model is exactly the issue at hand: When will Japan’s economy start to work with the globalized “major” system? Japan has never had the foreign policy influence of a major country — mostly due to being stuck under the American security umbrella. Questions of constitutional revision reference the word “normal country,” but they are basically asking the same thing: When will Japan’s major status be reflected in the defense structure?

Going minor clearly has its advantages — responsibilities on the international stage tend to go away and everyone leaves you alone (actually worst case scenario, invades you). Nations, however, do not have to be military and economic bullies like the U.S. to be “major.” France holds on to its major country status due to its culture and tradition. Germany expertly combines economic superiority with a leading edge on progressive areas like environmental policy.

So, does Japan reform in order to catch up to the other “major” countries? Does Japan proudly sink into “minor” obscurity? Do you protect Japan’s minority status as a way to protect the streams of diversity contained within? Do we analyze as compared to other “major” countries in order to understand the barriers that prevent Japan from reaching its economic and strategic goals? Is Japan having it both ways by feigning to be a minor underdog while being #2?

Discuss.

On a tip from the good people at Mutantfrog Travelogue, I ran across this link to a New York Times Magazine about the the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project’s “America Against the World”:

The book’s authors, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, also note that “poll after poll finds the Japanese to be the most pessimistic of people, expressing far less satisfaction with their lot in life than might be expected given their relatively high per capita incomes. Yet, compared to other Asians, the Japanese are, like Americans, highly self-reliant and distrustful of government and, like Europeans, secular. It is the Japanese public, not the American public, that is most exceptional in the world.”

Whether it be the myriad sex surveys or recent IT usage data, Japan is quite often totally off the map compared with the rest of the world. Most other countries, despite drastic inherent cultural and religious differences, seem to be facing convergence in economic, social, and technological arrangements, but Japan still moves towards the Globalized Universal at a snail’s pace. This is great in the macro — for global cultural diversity and sources of alternative perspective — but perhaps bad in the micro — doesn’t Japan deserve to have lower consumer prices and lower work hours in the near future?

The proudly-outlying Japan provides a nice antithesis to Momus’ idea of pompous universalism: “the belief that, as Paul McCartney sings in ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ ‘people are the same wherever we go.’” America is the obvious stronghold of pompous universalism (PU), and Momus description of PU-related crimes — “bringing democracy to the Middle East at the point of a gun, market liberalisation to countries with centralised state control, or human rights to China along with a stack of Bibles” — are all pointing a big middle finger to the 50-star flag.

So what do we make of Japan’s stubborn refusal to believe that anything in its society has much resemblance to anywhere else in the world? Pompous particularism: the belief that cultures are so unique as to exclude oneself from any real global conversation.

Both concepts may be myths, but realities set them up as easy traps to fall into. Americans can turn on the TV to watch humans from all continents lining up to eat prefab fast foods and tear down Communism for blue jeans and rock’n'roll. In the same way, the Japanese do have extremely unique customs and cultural practices, and the linguistic isolation tends to create a very small echo chamber. But both fallacies have led to more bad than good. American transgressions have been destructive and obvious, and Japanese PP has been mainly invoked as a mercantile tool that keeps power, information, and profits within the hands of elite cabals.

This is not to say that Japan should throw tradition aside and start eating Taco Bell, but the mass refusal to even put oneself on the same conceptual plane as the rest of human society may at some point get in the way of embracing technological progression. My philosophy has always been that Japan should take on the better parts of modern global society as a way to protect its cultural heritage against the amoral whirlwind of American-style capitalism. Michael Porter’s idea is that the most successful Japanese companies already work in the same way as other internationally competitive firms around the globe and that the unproductive sectors’ multi-layered distribution systems never helped anybody. All that “this logistics system is based on Shinto” has always just been an excuse to keep prices high and certain pockets lined with yen.

I watched the 6pm NHK news on Saturday night: five minutes on the death of former PM Ryutaro Hashimoto followed by a one-minute story on kids playing soccer in the mud in Saga-ken. Then there was a story on installing bells in rural train lines up in Aomori. I feel a bit numb to Japanese difference these days, but the provincialism of the newscast suddenly blew my mind: Japan is different. There could be a strong case that the “local news as national news” angle does create good things like social cohesion, but with Japan’s GDP guaranteed to shrink in the coming years, the question is whether Japan becoming less and less of a market resembling other nations will make it essentially irrelevant to the rest of the world.

This will sound cartoonishly Marxist, but 75% of our admiration with Japan may have been a secret obsession with capital. It’s not that they have crazy cartoons and fashion: It’s because they have the money to go into super original directions. Japan should certainly approach convergence on its own terms, but if the rest of the world moves along in the same direction and our consciousness changes to match the times, we may find ourselves less interested in Japan’s version of contemporary culture: the fear that all artistic industries suffer an Orange Range-like descent into hell.

I have been worried about the rise of “Internet culture” in Japan, but the current Japanese You Tube craze thankfully had a mere two or three month lag with the States, compared to three years with the iPod. This is ideal convergence: same technology, different applications. Same with Wikipedia: instead of being a useful online encyclopedia, the Japanese version often acts as a reserve of taboo, secret information. Want to know the Kano sisters‘ real names? You aren’t going to find that in a magazine, but now you can with a computer. (The truth is, however, that these technologies are cracking media cartels and making Japan a bit more like the West, no?)

Almost all of the debate on this blog goes back to this particularism vs. universalism dichotomy: If you believe that Japan is so particular it cannot be changed, then as Momus says, Pompous Universalism becomes “a form of Cultural Imperialism.” If you believe in the universality of economic structures and their predictable effects on human behavior (the fundamental belief of both Marxism and Capitalism), then Pompous Particularism is just a protectionist excuse for opening a real dialogue. Japan is different — which global polling now puts this into objective data — and the deviation will probably continue for a long while. But we have to ask, where does embrace of uniqueness stop being a positive source of diversity and start becoming intentional self-isolation?

For as long as I can remember (c. 1998), the free smiles I received at Tokyo fast food outlets and convenience stores have beamed back from Japanese middle-class teenagers or freeter in their twenties with low ambition. The whole idea of having illegal workers in the back kitchens or immigrants at the cash register has essentially been unknown to Japan on a large scale.

But suddenly — and I mean literally, in the last three months — young Chinese men and women have become at least 10%-20% of service workers in restaurants and chain stores across Tokyo. Most of them are competent and relatively fluent in Japanese, and the only reason their nationality becomes apparent is the single kanji on their name-tag. The Yoshinoya down the street now has a Chinese cashier. I’ve been in the AM/PM under the live house Shibuya O-Nest when there were only Chinese workers. And it’s not just the low-rent locations: Many members of the wait-staff at the fancy buffet restaurant in the Keio Plaza Hotel are Chinese.

I’m not sure whether a law changed, whether the immigrant population is exploding, whether the decrease in young people has kicked into the labor market, whether the perceived economic upturn has created jobs for skilled Japanese labor, or what exactly happened in late 2005, but the exception has now become the rule. Immigrant labor has exploded onto the Japanese landscape.

And the impact of this trend on my daily life? Zero. Perhaps the “o-kyakusama wa kamisama” (The Customer is God) concept of service surplus will be difficult to maintain, but I’ve had Chinese workers speak to me in more keigo than I get with the bored Japanese punks at 7-11. And I don’t need the service surplus to start with. Maybe I can do without the American cynical and surly cashier culture, but if I don’t get a deep bow on my way out the door of Lawsons, I don’t ask for a refund on my Snickers bar.

I have to admit that it is a bit exciting to see non-Japanese workers operate in real, non-segregated Japanese society. Of course, there are the Bangladeshis who run my favorite Indian curry joint and the Iranians selling carpets, but this new class of foreigners are working in a very Japanese environment selling a very Japanese service. They are not doing something a Japanese worker cannot do; non-Japanese are now performing the exact same tasks as Japanese, and this form of social participation can make successful assimilation possible.

Despite U.N. advice to increase immigration, Japanese politicians have called for a cautious approach to their coming labor crisis. The hard rhetoric may be a cunning solution, however, as it calms the public about drastic social change while the environment moves slowly and naturally towards a more immigrant-inclusive direction. People may hate “immigration” in the abstract, but I don’t think they mind Ms. Shu down at Matsuya.