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…

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.

On the plane bound for Nagoya in Summer 1996, my friend Dennis — who had been to Japan many times before — mentioned that there was a Japanese brand called Bitch Skateboards and the logo mark involved the international bathroom door symbol for Men pointing a gun to the head of the international bathroom door symbol for Women. To my seventeen year-old ears, this was the Holy Grail of Engrish: a whole host of products not only emblazoned with a “bad word” but a totally politically-incorrect logo to match. I spent a lot of time during my three weeks in Gifu Prefecture searching for Bitch goods, and for my first two weeks, my closest encounter involved snapping a blurry photo of a tiny tag on a backpack.

I finally hit the mother lode/motherload one day in a neighborhood clothing shop targeted towards teenage girls and soon became the proud owner of a Bitch Skateboards lighter and a ridiculous Bitch Skateboards retractable umbrella. (I liked the idea of using the latter in the U.S., because seriously, who is going to stop you on a rainy day to voice a complaint against the offensive language and imagery on your umbrella.)

In hindsight, I somewhat wince at the idea of brandishing Bitch goods, but I can promise you that my early endorsement was completely ironic. I was very confident that the brand was a misguided and unconsciously-misogynistic commercial venture dreamed up by non-Anglophones in Japan. Much to my chagrin, I later learned through the product tags that Bitch was based out of a city called “Los Angeles, California.” So now the joke was not linguistic mishap as much as licensing gone amuck. As time goes by, the situation has lost its initial humor, but there remains the enigma of how Bitch Skateboards came to take over the second-rate shopping centers of rural Japan in the mid-’90s.

The Internet is very good at solving these kinds of history mysteries, but a simple search came up with very little in the way of thorough explanation. This “Bitch Skateboards” is not the decks we’re looking for. The rise and fall of the brand unfortunately happened in the 1990s Black Hole of Japanese internet coverage.

Judging from the logos and some simple induction, I have deduced that Bitch started as a hostile parody to Girl Skateboards, and The Net seems to name Sal Rocco, Jr. at World Industries as the original prankster (He’s the guy who gave the name “Wee Man” to “Wee Man” of Jackass for those who like trivia). How this low-key parody ended up being licensed to CROWN F.G.CO., LTD in a deal brokered by TENACIOUS LTD. and then distributed through YUBISHA SANGYO CO., LTD is an amazing commercial adventure novel waiting to happen.

My guess is that somebody in Japan saw the graphics in an issue of Big Brother back in the day and immediately snapped up the license. The decision to use the logo on an extremely broad product line is odd — especially as there was much targeting girls out in the countryside, and not, say, urban skaters. I can state that the products were generally cheaply made. My umbrella rusted through within a year of use. (Karma probably also took its toll.)

Back in Tokyo in 1998, Bitch was still around, but rumors indicated that some controversy (Feminists!) caused the brand to rethink their offensive use of symbols. Unless I am imagining things, I saw one Bitch product with the man giving the woman flowers instead of a firearm. (Maybe, there is still some aggressive subtext here in the masculine discomfort with boyfriend duties.) A relatively recent logo I saw looks like a censored and deconstructed version of the original.

I can’t remember the last time I saw Bitch on store shelves, but I certainly have not seen it in a very long time. Besides the Yahoo! Japan Auction pages, the t-shirts only pop up on dubious European commerce sites. I do not bemoan its absence from the market, of course, but boy did that brand succeed wildly in Japan for being essentially a one-off joke on a rival team of skateboarders.

“There is a case to be made that the kogal image epitomized Japan’s hazily defined crisis of the 1990s at least as well as did layoffs by top Japanese firms,” writes David Leheny in his book Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, And Anxiety in Contemporary Japan. Although the kogyaru/kogal appeared too late and peaked too early to really sum up the entirety of the Lost Decade, Lehery is right that most would rather visualize the era through wild youth female subculture than gray old men losing jobs in corporate restructuring.

Hell, everyone loves rebellious kids, and the kogals/kogyaru — with their tanned skin, scandalous skirt length, “loose” socks, mysterious argot, and alleged promiscuity — were perhaps the world’s most fascinating youth tribe in the 1990s. For foreigners looking at Japan from abroad, the kogal appeared to be empowered young women forming a revolutionary army against the patriarchal mores of traditional society. Some gawkers came for the the fashion innovation, and and some were mystified by the large numbers, but the kogals’ widespread popularity/infamy came mostly from the unbridled teenage sexuality at the heart of the movement. Maybe this is slightly unfair, but Punk:Music::Kogal:Sex. For many Japanese men, the kogal movement legitimized and updated a latent ephebophilia. When tales of enjo kosai (compensated dating) appeared in the media, it created a narrative where young women were willing participants in the Lolita fantasy as long as prices were high enough.

At this point, so much myth and innuendo surrounds the kogal phenomenon that it is worth going back and looking at their point of origin. According to egg magazine founder Yonehara Yasumasa, the first kogal were delinquent private school students (Aoyama Gakuin and Seikei listed as two main sources by Wikipedia) with rich delinquent boyfriends who cruised in the roving gangs of Shibuya called chiimaa (teamer). Their particular clothing style and gruff speech were intended to scare off lecherous old men.

What is important to remember at this stage is that the kogal were relatively rich and relatively attractive, and they were called “ko-gal (maybe from 子ギャル)” because they were imitating their older “gal” superiors at a precocious age. Their collective reason for rebellion was nothing particularly novel: They were your stereotypically bored (sub)urban rich kids who were ready to be adults but were stuck within the concrete confines of secondary education. So they acted out by having older boyfriends and sexualizing their uniforms.¹ The slightly darker skin may also have been a product of a psychological impulse to appear more sophisticated (or based on the natural tan of wealthy surfers) rather than the misconception that they had any association with or interest in African-American culture. The short skirt is also telling, because the previous style of rebellion had been the yankii practice of lengthening the uniform’s skirt — something much harder to pull off and without immediate sexual message. The kogals wanted to rebel, but they also wanted to show a little skin like their elder peers.

Mainstream kogals

By 1997, however, the commercial establishment began to catch up with the kogal movement and spread its gospel of fashion liberation out to the entire nation. Starting around 1995, chapatsu — brown hair — went from an act of juvenile delinquency to a mainstream style. Magazines then created the guidelines for openly constructing the “kogal fashion,” and middle-class girls rushed in to participate. Soon to follow came a less glamorous bunch of young women from the countryside who wanted in on the delinquency angle.

The male-dominated shukanshi did their part to twist the aggressive anti-Lolita of the original kogal look into a masochistic neo-Lolita fantasy. The “oyaji pranking” of “enjo kosai” — where girls would charge men ¥10,000 for a one minute date — became transformed into something more titillating: a slightly less-stigmatized form of child prostitution. The media attention not only sent middle-aged men out on the prowl to find these girls, but also gave many girls from the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder a convenient way to afford the consumer component of the gal lifestyle.

Ganguro kogal

Once the look peaked as a mass trend in 1999, the movement became more and more marked by its late-adopters. The extremes of the style — the ganguro and yamamba — took the slightly provocative “delinquent consumer subculture” (a mix between delinquent subcultures and consumer lifestyles) over the edge to aggressive confrontation. When egg became a consumer lifestyle mag for these delinquent girls, the clear difference in the group’s “morality” became reflected on the pages: issues featured tales of outrageous and casual sexual play and guides to “how to have sex in car” that would never fit in an issue of an-an (a magazine that still asks girls “which celebrity would you like to be bedded by” instead of “who would you like to bed?”) What had been a slightly new style and beauty aesthetic turned into Frankenstein costumes. The extreme character of the kogal movement post-’99 immediately displaced mainstream society’s original feelings of curiosity and lust with something new: massive antagonism.

In her essay, “Black Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls” in Bad Girls of Japan (Ed. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, 2005), Sharon Kinsella identifies and explores this widespread hostility against the late-stage ganguro kogal. Her essay lists quote after quote from the weekly male magazines disapproving of the youth look. Kinsella even finds female writer Nakano Midori (from “Yamamba,” Japan Echo 27, vol 1, Feb 2000) admitting, “In all honesty, I have seen very few girls sporting the style that brings me even close to thinking, ‘Without that makeup, she must be a beauty, what a waste.’” In sum, Kinsella writes that the girls are “an affront to the tastes of male readers.” Indeed.

Her final analysis, however, takes a seriously wrong turn when she begins to blame the roots of the antagonism in profound racial prejudice. She objurgates, and boy does she objurgate:

Furthermore, commentary about the race, tribe, and skin color of girls, was sometimes entwined with a derogatory and pseudo-Darwinian commentary about dark-skinned girls, which implied that they were a kind of species or animal. Classified as dark-skinned primitives and animals, girls daring to wear black face and witch outfits sometimes became subject to a racist assault on their humanity.

Kinsella provides a couple of neat examples of this “racial assault” — Spa calling the kogal’s lack of morals a “Latinization” of Japanese culture, for example. But her analysis fails to recognize all the other reasons to dislike the late-stage kogal that likely have nothing to do with latent racism.

First, the charge that these girls were “dumb, dirty, and ugly” seems to match certain pre-existing conceptualizations of the girls’ placement within the standard high-school hierarchy. The girls who became the main recruiting base for the extreme kogal were not rich delinquents who dressed in designer bags, snuck out to clubs, and had college boyfriends, but those (lower class) girls who would be viewed as losers in the prism of their environment — neither smart enough to hold college aspirations nor cute enough to attract boyfriends or popular pals. The ganguro look offered them an escape from the hierarchy, in which they had already realized they were destined to fail, by letting them hide their true identities in costume and bond with girls in similar positions and values from all around the country. Commenting on the late-stage kogal costume, Kinsella guesses that “the main effect… is to frighten” and brings up Dick Hebdige‘s theory of subculture as “intelligent style”: Girls have invented their own uniforms in order to mark themselves in opposition to the values of mainstream society. But she is angered that, “society just merrily misinterprets [the look] as a form of animal coloring or tribal decoration.”

If the look is Hebdigian in form, however, the goal is precisely anti-social, and the kogals ended up winning the desired effect — total enmity from the mainstream.² Why Kinsella thinks society should respect the “intelligence” of the uniform, however, is unclear. More importantly, the early, mass-friendly kogal had provided older men a three-dimensional sexualized spectacle upon the streets of the city and tantalizing myths of easily acquiring their flesh for a small lump sum (where the girls themselves were understood to graciously remove moral boundaries and replaced them with market prices). The ganguro girls took the rebellious-yet-sexy movement of the original kogal and robbed it of its mass aesthetic pleasure. Kogals now looked scary, and to a certain degree, were less likely to be the “normal” daughters from private schools and more likely to be the “unwanted.” The kogals stole back the style from the fantasies of fathers and made it once more about themselves. To see where the conflict lay, Kinsella quotes a men’s magazine headline complaining about the infiltration of the ganguro look into their precious porn videos.

Knowing the intentional struggle manufactured by the fashion look, why would men’s magazines be supportive of the ganguro kogal? Adding in the obvious socioeconomic and regional bias — the new girls were neither urban nor urbane — these girls had absolutely nothing going for them outside of their subcultural participation. Kinsella oddly projects the responsibilities of academic anthropologists upon the Japanese media — organizations that clearly see themselves as arbiters of “conventional” values rather than sympathetic social analysts. While men may have felt robbed of convenient sexual fantasy, women on the other hand remained unimpressed with the girls they always saw beneath them in the classroom. Even now, I ask a Japanese female about the types who became late-stage kogals, and she answers, “The dumbest (一番バカ) and ugliest (一番ブス) girls in the class.” The word “dirty” (汚い) also comes up. Kinsella finds the same sentiment — “The allegation that witches and black faces were ugly and stupid, circulated widely and formed a base stereotype” — but then crams it into her shaky narrative — “underlying more intricate considerations of their hygiene and racial origins.” Do we dislike them because their skin color goes against traditional ideas of Japanese beauty and colonialist concerns? Or is it that many have misanthropic feelings that they are merely ugly, dirty, and dumb girls in outdated and unflattering makeup?

The ganguro today still exist, of course, although relatively marginal and have not been “cool” for a decade now (at least, as dictated by the domestic fashion authorities.) They have boiled down to their most hardcore delinquent/leftover element.

Notes:

¹ The original kogal strikes me as fitting well in the “rich kid delinquent” archetype that Ishihara Shintaro and the Taiyo-zoku Sun Tribe set back in the 1950s and carried on through the Southern All-Stars surfer of the 70s.
² This puts the ganguro kogal in the mold of the normal yankii working-class rebellion archetype.

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.

Ever since I first lived in Tokyo back in 1998, the concept of lines/queues has always been inextricably central to my understanding of Japanese consumer culture. I hate to keep retelling the story, but perhaps nothing was more pivotal to my life and career than waiting in line three hours at A Bathing Ape’s Busy Work Shop Harajuku with hundreds of Japanese youth to buy an $80 red-and-white border shirt with a small Ape face tag on the sleeve. Three hours for a single piece of clothing? Sure, there are lines often in the U.S. for certain consumer goods (Tickle-Me-Elmos at Christmas et. al), but there seems to be such fundamental dissent against the idea in such a efficiency-obsessed, competitive society, leading to pushing-and-shoving, sour attitudes, and verbal sparring. How many freaks-outs and abject rage have I witnessed at the Burger King on Delancy St. at noon, and those lines were maybe ten people at max. On that fateful August day in Harajuku, the kids lining up failed to show any signs of discontent or annoyance. I can’t remember much excitement on their faces, but I instantly became intrigued by their pleasant resignation to the situation.

The Japanese line (行列, gyouretsu in local parlance) has always been an accepted part of the consumer landscape. Opposed to old tales of Eastern Europe and grandmothers enduring the bitter cold to line up for bread and borscht, the Japanese line up for access to exclusive products — most often fashion goods made intentionally rare by producer intention. Often though, the centralization of the media system and the obsessive adherence to the media message by consumers mean that some stores with no structure in place to deal with a mysterious massing of customers start getting hundreds of people one morning in search of their cream puffs. In the case of Ape, the problem was less of supply and more of physical restrictions of how many could fit in the store at once. In actuality, two of my three hours were waiting in line within the store. With only a small counter and one clerk, the sluggish transaction speed was the real source of slow down.

The ubiquity of lines in Japan, however, transformed the occurrence from commerce malfunction to visual sign of success. The Ape lines in Tokyo may have been a nightmare for the staff, but the queue started looming so large in the Ape legend that I caught the Osaka store in 2000 clearly limiting customer entry to two in the store at a time to create a conspicuous backup.

Whether real or artificial, the line to me was always a sign of energy in the consumer market, a symbol of youth’s obsession with the culture around them. This energy was also exported: Can you imagine a line at Supreme in New York without Asian faces?

Obviously, the Buddhist/consumerist perspective on lines would be much darker. R. channeled Tyler Durden in his comments about the PS3 “get” on Brad‘s blog: “The things you own end up owning you.” Moreover, I met a semi-famous graphic designer years ago who had a collaborative shoe with one of the major sneaker houses, and he attended the first day of sales for his limited-edition kicks. He noted how pained everyone looked, how the kids appeared to be there out of duty/responsibility to their collection rather than a joyful curiosity towards the product at hand.

The word from the Playstation 3 lines seems to paint an even less jubilant portrait of where this consumer phenomenon is heading in Japan. Read the excellent report from Brad about obtaining a PS3 from the Yurakucho Bic Camera on Saturday morning. The store’s lack of preparation and the lack of information about product quantities surely did not help, but the scene was hardly one of happy consumers lining up to get their hands on a dreamy toy. Most importantly, the main two parties present were Chinese adults and homeless men. Long dead are the days of nine year-old Slime-freaks waiting with their parents to get a copy of Dragon Quest II. The line in Japan has gone professional — and foreign. Bic Camera employees had to start making announcements in Mandarin to stop the line from getting out of control.

Much is going to be made about the “dark side” of the PS3 lines, but let’s be honest: This is Japanese consumer culture globalized, post-auction sites and post-income disparity. Unclear if the Chinese present were working class immigrants day laboring for higher ups or whether they intended to sell back to the mainland, but can you imagine a similar massing of foreigners even ten years ago? Also, does anyone think that Mr. Tanaka at Tokyo Gas or Mr. Sato at Hakuhodo is paying homeless men to stand in line for them? Seeing that the market price of these machines is still higher than the set price, everything has descended into scalping — with grey-black market forces trying to hoard the supply. Kotaku quotes “opportunistic Japanese businessmen” being behind things, but I kind of doubt these are white-collar salarymen pooling their money together. In the Kotaku comment roll, Brad identifies the homeless men’s employers as organized crime, and this makes the most sense. Of course with Ape and all the old-style consumer queues, resellers were always a big part of the equation, but instead of sneaking in with bright-eyed children and trend-conscious teenagers, these arbitrage merchants have become the majority.

Lines are destined in Japan to be what they are elsewhere — unpleasant routines of consumer mechanics — where we give hours of our lives in competition to obtain things faster than our peers. Especially now with international auction markets on the Net, these events — which used to bring out the ideal consumers for fun photo ops and human-interest business stories — are now solely going to be a distribution structure for resellers. There was something “Japanese” about the cold social harmony of peaceful queuing, but when the stakes get this high, propriety and innocence will be pushed aside by the sinister forces festering underneath. Blame foreigners or globalization or the yakuza or capitalism in toto but the Japan-style queue may be facing demise.

One of the key presuppositions of this blog is, “For the last five years, Japanese mainstream pop culture has gotten progressively more boring and less stimulating,” to which many answer:

1. Yes! The innovation and spark of the 90s is gone!
2. No! Your head is stuck in the past and you are missing the stunning glory of today!
3. No! You are deluded and have no idea what is actually going on!
4. No! You are looking in the wrong fields. Culture is not just music and street fashion!
5. No! You are a hater!

Every month or so, I start toying with ideas 2-5 and ask my Japanese friends to fill me in on everything I am missing. They never come up with much of anything: They either shrug in resigned apathy or call me later on my cellphone to announce that they are so bored with things that they don’t leave the house and I have been talking to thin air the entire time. This gently nudges me towards 1 again. Then I have dinner with my friend and his arty 19 year-old date who tells me “the 90s were the era for me!” which kicks me back into the 1 position.

For a minute at least, let us presume that the “Pop Cultural Decline” idea is at least valid — viewed from a specific subcultural perspective held by many readers of this blog and general non-anime fans of Japanese culture. Some evidence:

1. All cultural industries in total nosedive, even with increased exports.
2. Koda Kumi — probably the most unattractive, uncharismatic, untalented idol to ever grace the island of Japan. And she is #1, as if all girls decided they wanted to worship stars worse than themselves on every possible criteria other than “fame.” Her success proves that Avex has the power to do unnatural, evil things: make rivers flow backwards and turn dogs against their masters.

So far, I have proffered the following explanations for the current malaise:

1. Demographics: smallest percentage of young people in population since WWII (and perhaps, ever?), so companies are moving away from teen-targeted product marketing
2. Economics: decrease of teenage allowances and increase of phone bills has led to reduced spending in the cultural markets of magazines, music, manga, books, and films
3. Information: reduced influence of magazine editors and other “curators” interested in importing “elitist” Western ideas and products into Japan
4. Psychology: a cohort of teenagers who only know economic downturn and have never grasped an interest in consumer spending, which until now, has been the fundamental action of Japanese pop culture
5. Class Dynamics: the rise in income inequality has created the need for middle classes to focus on status-displaying consumer items rather than taste-displaying consumer items

This WaiWai summary of a piece in R25 seems to open up another explanation:

6. Cyclical history: culture moves in (increasingly-shorter) cycles, and Japan is currently stuck worshiping the gaudy, hollow Bubble Era

Those quoted in the article seem to look back fondly upon the Bubble — which they never experienced as adults — because:

1. You were rewarded like a king for just showing up
2. The job market was un-selective and grossly overcompensating
3. Booze and hostess bars
4. Anybody with a paycheck got access to “exclusive” clubs

I can safely say that the cultural artifacts of the Bubble Era account for plus or minus 0 percent of what the rest of the world loves about Japan. Juliana’s and “bodicon” and the hack Roppongi demimonde chronicled by Karl T. Greenfeld never held much appeal to anyone who did not directly participate. Even our ’90s Japanese heroes like Takahashi Jun and Oyamada Keigo spent their Bubble years in underground clubs and small record shops sheltering themselves from the terrible pageant of wealth set to Eurobeat and bad bangs.

If you have the words “Gordon Gekko” tattooed on your lower back in katakana, the Bubble was for you. Otherwise, it was a cultural nightmare, an apocalyptic after-school special bemoaning the Third Deadly Sin. This was an era of tasteless nobody salarymen flush with cash, nonchalantly ordering $250 bottles of foreign whiskey every single night and then drowning out the executive flavor with ice water. They look back fondly on ’89-’91 solely because they can remember the feeling of clutching all that cash, losing up to ¥100,000 a night just because it was hard to eat and hold all those ¥10,000 bills at the same time. Everyone else in the entire world on the Bubble era: *shrug*

So, now we have to deconstruct the Bubble akogare of today’s youth. Essentially, they are dissatisfied with:

1. A tight job market
2. Low salaries
3. Performance-based pay
4. Expectations of hard work

Recession has scarred the psyche into ignoring anything other than the aspiration for a high cash flow. And what would our fair youth do if they had money? Spend it on booze and hired girls.

And here come the bangs!

This Bubble lust also explains why hosts are so such a central part of the popular conscious of the moment: They get to dressed up in awful late ’80s fashions and bad tans and make a healthy salary from boozing and chatting with ladies (from the mizu shobai world). It’s as if the host profession perfectly combines the work and play of the Bubble Era into one lifestyle. If only mom and dad weren’t Waseda graduates from Jiyugaoka! If I had moved to Tokyo from some farm village in Saga, I would be host #4 in no time!

No part of this disposition lends itself to “let’s celebrate the arts” or “let’s use our hard-earned baito money to explore difficult artistic ideas.” Much like the Bubble, the more worldly Tokyoites seem to be going back underground, setting up their own subcultural communities, Moodman throwing parties in abandoned hospitals in Chiba. But this group cannot take pride in its permanent outsider legacy. They are not the radicals of the Natural Law Party, but more like the Reform Party in 1996 — an opposition in decline, glory days long past, like fans of Hall and Oates in ’92. Success was our greatest curse.

If this is all actually cyclical, the Bubble Revival should end relatively soon, although things feel too early for a real celebration of the ’90s. I don’t think this is all cyclical though — in five years, broke twenty-somethings are still going to want money for nothing and chicks for free (forgive me, Dire Straits). Maybe their bosses will stop bragging about the “T-backs” at Juliana’s though and start talking about how they once saw Ozawa Kenji on the subway.

All in all, one cannot expect much from a population enamored by the greed and banal debauchery of the Bubble Era. I am sure things “were crazy” but they also said that about being at Altamont. Remember: Richie Rich stank like a skunk. You don’t get clean in that bath of coins.

Breaking news from Jean Snow: Relax Magazine will soon cease publication. This is like the Bible going out of print, if Japanese teenage hipsters were Christians, and there were still Japanese teenage hipsters left. For anyone refusing to admit that Japan is no longer Pizzicato Five, bossa-nova cafes, A Bathing Ape, Puffy, skateboarding, graffiti, collaboration goods, Ryan McGinness art, toy collecting, old records forgotten in the West, taste-discrimination over capital-discrimination, ultra-advanced consumer culture, limited-edition sneakers, Mike Mills, Parco exhibitions, Hiromix the amateur photographer, Godard films, and Cornelius (but instead, Louis Vuitton leather, Roppongi Hills, tight white pants, brown haired Onee-kei, fancy suits with no ties, $200 dinners, Uniqlo, Orange Range, Densha Otoko, Hiromix the celebrity, fake beer, and CanCam), your dream is officially over.

Relax‘s monthly pages singlehandedly codified a certain international aesthetic style emerging out of the post-grunge 90s. Although launched a bit after the Shibuya-kei and Ura-Harajuku trends, Relax was the sharpest media of this unofficial movement and further proved that Japan had more to offer in this curation/sampling based consumer-art than other countries. American kids used to buy the magazine even though they could not read the text, because no one else was going to list 300 obscure reggae records next to pictures of adorable girls and Mark Gonzales art. (And even though it was targeted to boys, the publication apparently had mostly girl readers, which gave the book a post-sexual harmony hovering between male informationitis and female peaceful tenderness.)

Of course, the world moved away from this aesthetic and onto less product-friendly art, and Japanese youngsters moved away from $300 monthly allowances and interest in the outside world. Relax in response reinvented itself as an anti-consumer “lifestyle journal” focusing on health, travel, and eco-sustainability. These are all neat and commendable topics, but they don’t move records, or t-shirts, or double-name camo jackets, nor do they tell you what to wear to your date on Saturday night or how to get girls in bed and what to do with them once you have gotten them there (the way that Popeye once could). Japan’s most popular fashion magazine at the moment is CanCam, selling something like 500,000 copies a month. If one million young females are moving in that direction, there is no way one million young males would have the time to glance through something like Relax without totally and completely falling off the track towards sexual conquest.

As much as I everyone thinks I am always in constant withdrawl about these social changes, I actually shed few tears for Relax or Shibuya-kei. But I do wish that something as sophisticated and world-class would appear on the mainstream Japanese popular culture scene. Art in Japan has gone back underground to certain extent, but it feels like Alternative in 1995, where bands got kicked off Sire and then were not really “Indie” but just “washed-up.” So much under-the-radar art at the moment still operates in the Relax mold: the obsession with products and sales, the attempts to please the same masters, the similar self-framing. Indie bands pass out consumer surveys about their tunes. Art galleries have DJs.

There should be no surprise that Relax is folding in the current Japanese cultural climate, but let us take this moment to remember how important its cultural codification was for boosting the image of Japan in the West. The Relax wave still rolls across the globe. Does anyone think the CanCam wave will be half as fun?

Those interested in Japanese youth culture will encounter a very meager selection of published English literature on the subject. After glancing through Merry White’s The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America, there’s really nowhere to go but Speed Tribes: Days and Night’s with Japan’s Next Generation — a 1995 anthology of “journalistic” vignettes written by aspiring novelist and one-time heroin-addict Karl Taro Greenfeld. The American author had moved to Japan during the Bubble era to teach English, but he was called to the pen by a compelling need to break the monolithic media message that Japan is a well-oiled social machine. His book aims to give voice to Japan’s “Next Generation.”

Greenfeld unfortunately squandered his big opportunity, and despite the nominally interesting subject matter, the book is more or else a masked autobiography. Each chapter revolves around a different archetype of social delinquent — yakuza, Korean drug dealers, porn stars, ultra-nationalists, hostesses — but the stories are identical. They all live a life centered around drugs and Roppongi and forgotten house music 12″s with all gravity ultimately pulling everything back to Tokyo’s eternally dreadful ex-pat scene. And when Greenfeld is not describing the people who inhabit his small social circles, his writing veers straight into fictional territory: playing the God Narrator and assigning motives, feelings, and desires to the wayward Japanese youth that all essentially echo the same hollow bad-boyism of the author. Perhaps Greenfeld is a sharp observer and empathetic soul to his lovable delinquents, but the myriad of Japanese errors in the book — the title itself is a poor man’s translation of 暴走族 — question the degree to which he was able to fully absorb the meaning of his subjects’ existence. Without hyperbole, Greenfeld introduces young people in Japan as “more adept at folding a bindle of cocaine or heroin than creasing an origami crane.”

Reportage often straddles that thick yellow line between fact and fiction, but when Greenfeld swerves off the road of straight journalism, he forgets to use this technique to actually strengthen his arguments. While there is a case to be made for composites and embellished details, Greenfeld’s obsessive self-projections marginalize the “characters” to the point of super-specificity. The girl who drops the half-dose of MDMA and sleeps with a Australian model hours before meeting a geeky salaryman for a post-omiai date says very little about the modern Japanese woman and a lot about how Karl spent his Saturday nights. (And actually, his later admission of serious drug addiction in this era should cast a long shadow over his ability to truly write a level-headed account of contemporary Japan that lived up to journalistic ethics.)

From a historical angle, the book has become an accidental primary source for the last throws of Colonialism in Japan — a topsy-turvy world where Japanese men were bequeathing diamonds and Ferraris to Commonwealth hostesses in exchange for their flesh. A few years later, the most elite Japanese were no longer trying to outdo the foreigners under the same stale conventions, but stripping Westerners of their taste-making roles and rewriting the rules of the game. In Greenfeld’s world, arrogant, high-society Tokyoites still party with the (automatically cool) foreigners in Roppongi discos. By 1998, all self-respecting Japanese had fled the area, leaving the ex-pats with their collective guide-book delusion that Roppongi was where Japanese hit the town on the weekends. Ironically, the tides have turned these days and Mori’s palaces have reinvented the late ’80s for a new superficial generation. But the vague nouvelle vague of foreigners in Japan today flocks to Nakameguro and Shimokitazawa — to absorb an authentic youth culture, not the hackneyed debauchery of Roppongi and Nishi Azabu.

Thankfully, there are many excellent books on the market now that reduce our dependence on Greenfeld’s writings. Sato Ikuya’s Kamikaze Biker: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan is an excellent ethnography of bosozoku and yankii, and Anne Allison’s Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club does the same for hostess culture. Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan skillfully weaves a personal narrative about a foreign gangster into deeper issues of political intrigue and underground control in post-War Japan.

In the user comment rolls of Amazon.com, readers ferociously debate whether the contents of Speed Tribes are fact or fiction. The good news is that it no longer really matters.

About two months ago, our favorite Japanese consumer-lifestyle magazine Relax did a special feature on “peace,” which our favorite Scottish musician/critic Momus called in a recent comment on this blog, “quite admirable.” I agree there is something positive about dedicating space to world peace and anti-nuclear proliferation instead of limited-edition sneakers, but the issue asks the question: Can “peace” be a lifestyle choice devoid of political underpinnings?

As this Relax hit the stands, Japanese voters were gearing up to go to the polls, and while postal privatization was the primary issue, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party has recently been showing explicit interest in altering the “Peace Constitution” to remilitarize Japan, antagonizing China and Korea with visits to the nationalistic Yasukuni shrine, and continuing the use of Japanese Self-Defense Forces in the American Iraq War. So, voting against the LDP would be an extremely easy way to “give peace a chance.”

Relax, of course, cannot bring politics into the “Peace” issue. For fear of upsetting advertisers, readers, and the Magazine House higher-ups, the concept must remain a form of laid-back consumer lifestyle and not an anti-social or political rally point. I salute Relax for not doing an issue on “Yasukuni O-share” but I wonder how much credit one deserves for wearing a black-and-white “WAR IS OVER if you want it” t-shirt one month and then forgetting to actually “want it” at the next election. At this moment in time, Japan is closer to rearming than it has ever been, and motivated youth voters could actually use the democratic outlets available to them to send a message to the Neo-Nationalists in the majority party.

Perhaps we cannot expect the media to really work towards peace, and they may be limited in action to collecting fashionable artists to do exclusive pieces on the subject. “Rock the Vote” and other American youth-oriented political programs were hardly enough to bring down the warmongering Bush presidency. I very much doubt, however, that a German magazine would dedicate an issue to “Pacifism” and not mention the War (WWII or Iraq) nor political action. I have no doubt that a majority of the Japanese public wants to maintain a peaceful existence, but I fear that just wearing the concept like a warm scarf is not enough to change the minds of those who hold the ultimate decision-making power.