Well, it’s time again for the Tokyo gubernatorial election, and this year the vote is likely to be a referendum on three-time incumbent Ishihara Shintarō. You may be familiar with a few of the veteran politician’s recent statements. He called the Tohoku earthquake a “divine punishment” for Japan’s moral misdirection. Earlier in the year he made headlines after spewing bigoted comments towards the gay community, demanding publishers censor virtual child pornography in manga (without doing much to outlaw the possession of actual child pornography in his jurisdiction), and slagging on Japanese youth. One of his golden oldies was the statement in 2000 that sankokujin — an outdated and arguably offensive term for Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese living in Japan — would cause social unrest in the event of a major Japanese earthquake. There is not a lot to celebrate about the recent natural disaster, but the peaceful aftermath at least proved his prediction wrong.

Based on this kind of rhetoric, we should assume that Ishihara starts his day by standing in front of the mirror and dreaming up outrageous and ire-raising comments. (Or hey, he may, like top comedians, have a room of writers to think up edgy material.) Yet it’s hard to blame Ishihara for this behavior. His own life story has conditioned him to expect reward for malicious rhetoric. Ishihara — long before he became the figurehead of Japan’s grumpy old male contingent — was the legendary Bad Boy of the Post-War. Back in the 1950s, Ishihara was much more Dennis the Menace than Mr. Wilson. So while there may be much hypocrisy in Ishihara’s current call for a return to archaic Japanese values, we should remember that offending people with utmost confidence has always been Ishihara’s bread and butter.

Ishihara grew up in the posh beach community of Shonan, son of a shipbuilding executive. A classic example of the “wealthy furyo” (不良, “no good”), his stable background gave him the economic security to spend years absorbed in artistic appreciation and mild delinquency rather than nose-on-page study. He found his way into the prestigious Law Department at top public school Hitotsubashi University, where apparently “on a whim” he wrote a short novel called Season of the Sun 『太陽の季節』. He won the Akutagawa Prize for the work in 1955, which turned him into an instant literary superstar. The book instantly sold 300,000 copies, but the true full-fledged social phenomenon around Ishihara began when a film adaptation of the work hit theaters in 1956. A cult of personality soon grew around Ishihara and his brother Yujiro, a notoriously delinquent Keio student who made a cameo in Season of the Sun and then starred in the next Ishihara-penned film Crazed Fruit 『狂った果実』. Cultural critic Oya Soichi named the boys and their friends the “Taiyo-zoku” — The Sun Tribe, a pun on their beach-side lifestyle, the book title, and the post-war fallen aristocrats called “Shayo-zoku” (More on the etymology here).

The emergence of the Sun Tribe ran parallel with the birth of the “teenager” in other countries, although the scale and scope in Japan was much less significant than American Graffiti-era teenyboppers in the U.S. The distinction was also more explicitly philosophical than what was happening in the consumer paradise of America. Ishihara and his cohorts were triumphantly eschewing wartime values and embracing a new cultural milieu distinct from their parents. This idea is extremely clear in Season of the Sun.

The main character of the book is Tsugawa Tatsuya — a university student and boxing club member who enjoys womanizing at urban dance clubs and sail-boating out on Shonan Beach. While cruising for babes in Ginza one weekend in his finest suit, he meets the wealthy and intriguingly-decadent Eiko. She ends up stalking him at his boxing match and takes him afterward to the hospital in her own car (which needless to say, was not a “normal” thing for anyone to own at this point in the mid-1950s). Without going into all the gory details, Tatsuya and Eiko go off-and-on again throughout the short novel, pursuing flings to make the other jealous, and being generally mean to each other. The book ends with Tatsuya telling Eiko to end her accidental pregnancy with his child by abortion, but since he has taken so long to make his decision, she goes for a risky late-stage operation — and (spoiler alert) dies. In a fit of self-loathing, Tatsuya storms Eiko’s funeral in the final pages, shattering her portrait on the altar and yelling at Eiko’s family, “None of you understood!”

The story itself plays with the excitement of post-war teenage life, but in order to be entirely clear on his intentions, Ishihara provides long narrative paragraphs on his theory of youth mostly unrelated to the main plot:

If the adult world feared [youth] as a dangerous force, second only to communism, this fear was groundless. A new generation brought forth sentiments and a new code of morals, and these youth were growing up in such surroundings. They stood erect, like cactus, without looking down to see that they were blooming in bare soil.

The young unconsciously tried to destroy the morals of their elders — morals which always judged against the new generation. In the young people’s eyes, the reward of virtue was dullness and vanity. While the older generation thought it was growing ever more broad-minded, but actually grew narrower in outlook, the young looked for something broad and fresh to build on.

For all of the setting up adults as the “enemies” of youth, there is very little actual warfare in the novel. The book may have been most shocking in that all the young rich Japanese characters live in their own little world: hitting hostess bars and dance clubs, driving around in cars, sailing boats, staying at resort hotels, getting abortions. Parents do not appear as oppositional forces — actually, they barely appear at all. The single scene of inter-generational conflict happens in a scene at Tatsuya’s home, when the father is showing off his relatively-preserved physique and asks his son to try punching him in the stomach. The boxer Tatsuya delivers a crushing blow, knocking over the dad and making him spit up blood for days. The episode has obvious Oedipal symbolism, but the rest of the novel focuses more around the joyful absence of parental advisory rather than its overbearing shadow.

The idea of youth-gone-wild in Season of the Sun is clearly what made the novel so exciting to other members of Ishihara’s generation. Ironically, student leftists at the time proclaimed the novel as an anti-establishment manifesto, passing Season of the Sun around during the long waiting periods at the 1956 Sunagawa protests against the extension of a U.S. Air Force base. The book was “progressive” in the sense that it defended youth’s role as a key force for social change and generally advocated the dismantling of the prewar value system.

The Ishiharas were also dashing, wealthy playboys who inspired a generation of post-war youth wishing for a return to prosperity. Fashion critic Takeji Hirakawa explained to me: “This was an era when there were no Japanese heroes. The MP and soldiers were good looking guys and stole all the best women. Everyone knew that the Japanese needed Japanese heroes to really bounce back from the war.” The Ishiharas filled that role, proving to their fellow youth through cocksure success that Japan would no longer have to live in the shadow of America.

While this may seem like a very different philosophical background than the current Ishihara, I would argue that he never made a tenko conversion to the right. There are visible traces of conservative ideology even in his early writing.

Most obviously, Ishihara has smug certainty about his world and believes deeply in the myth of individuals fully in control of their own destiny. The characters of Season of the Sun seem completely oblivious to the fact that wealth affords them the freedom to be delinquent and carefree. The Tsugawa brothers maintain their own sail boats out at Shonan Beach in the early 1950s — an era when much of his fellow citizens had just recently stopped wearing their old wartime rags and worrying about where they were going to get the day’s food. The government only declared the apres guerre period over in 1956, a year when the Ishihara’s were already conspicuously living at a level that would be considered posh even today.

Building on this explicit denial of class, main character Tatsuya sees his own successes as triumphs of will against all odds rather than building upon a privileged background. For example, Tatsuya becomes a passable boxer without any real training. It’s his “enthusiasm” and natural skill — rather than hard work — that make him a competitive pugilist. In a similar tone, Ishihara’s younger brother Yujiro quipped to the press about his film career, “Whatever. I can quit doing movies whenever I want.” Ishihara Shintaro is a deep believer in the “myth of natural good taste” — that idea that members of the privileged classes are imbued with greater aesthetics or natural skills without realization of the opportunity and access to cultural capital that come with wealth.

While these ideas stay relatively mild within Season of the Sun, these attitudes have slowly evolved over the last 60 years into something more sinister: Ishihara’s complete lack of sympathy for people unlike himself. He personally overcame difficulty through a minimum of effort, so why can’t everyone else get their act together? Ishihara’s father died suddenly when he was still a student, yet he helped his family make ends meet — in part by becoming a famous writer. Penning an Akutagawa Prize-winning novel took him only a few days. It is exactly Ishihara’s victorious and charmed life — proven at an early age — that make him completely disinterested in those who have to actually work to succeed, or worse, will never succeed at all. He is the classic “self-made man” — who happened to start on a giant pedestal.

Yet this streak of fundamental conservative ideology is of course not what made him so hated in the 1950s. Ishihara was PTA Enemy #1. Together with women’s groups and educational committees, Japan’s Parent-Teacher Association railed publicly against the sexual content of Season of the Sun, which they spun into a broader movement towards stricter censorship on motion pictures. In the book’s most infamous sequence, the main character seduces his girlfriend by punching a hole in a sliding paper door with his erect penis. This did not go down well with the older set.

But it was the third Sun Tribe film The Punishment Room 『処刑の部屋』 that really raised ire. (The novella on which it is based, by the way, is mere sensationalistic violence lacking any literary depth. Avoid.) There is a scene of men spiking girls’ drinks with sedatives to later rape them, and many teenage criminals who attempted similar things told authorities that they got the idea from the movie. Although mild in comparison, the media also devoured a subsequent story about a girl deciding to drop out of high-school after taking up the anti-social message of the film. Parents of all stripes hated Ishihara. While feminists disliked Ishihara’s violent, sexual misogyny, older conservative men had a fit over the Ishihara brothers’ boastful disobedience. They blamed the rise of the Sun Tribe on the formal outlawing of legal prostitution. They argued, if men had a legal sexual outlet for these violent urges, Japan would be free of menacing groups like the Sun Tribe.

But this is Ishihara’s problem today: His outrageous behavior as a youth — which was fresh and probably warranted in the 1950s — still informs his current personality. Shintaro got gray but he never mellowed out nor became self-aware. When he calls for censorship of art, he does not remember that once people much like him now called for the censorship of his own art. But moreover, we should understand him in control of his personality. He is not a “loose cannon,” accidentally saying things he later regrets. He likely thinks that success of his endeavors requires raising the ire of groups to which he does belong.

The question now is whether enough Tokyo voters will decide that Ishihara finally went too far in blaming the earthquake victims. The most likely scenario sadly is that his usual voting bloc will stumble out of JRA Wins en masse and cast some shochu-drenched ballots to make him governor one more time.

Reference works:

Shintaro Ishihara. Season of Violence. Transl. John G. Mills, Toshie Takahama, and Ken Tremayne. Rutland & Tokyo: Tuttle, (1966).

Kosuke Mabuchi. Post-War History of the “Tribes”. Sanseido, 1989.

John Nathan. Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Across Editorial Desk. Street Fashion 1945-1995. PARCO, 1995.

Preface: “Why do so many Japanese people make the two-finger ‘peace sign’ in photographs?” is one of the perennial What’s Up With Japan questions. Sadly, the answer given usually derives from a half-assed Google search in which most of the pages found are just quoting Wikipedia anyway.

This article attempts to summarize what is reliably known about the matter at the present time, with links to related information online where possible. Readers are invited to add any evidence of their own, including verifiable sources, in the comment thread.

Part A: V for “Victory”

A1. V-sign for “Victory” (Europe): Promoted by various Allied groups during WWII to symbolize local cognates of “victory.” Gestural V-sign made famous worldwide when adopted by Winston Churchill.

A2. V-sign for “Victory” (Japan, post-war): Churchill-style V-sign hypothesized to have been introduced into Japan by Allied occupation. Evidence scarce.

A3a. V-sign for “Victory” (Japan, pre-Bubble): Enters popular consciousness in late 1960s via baseball manga/anime Kyojin no Hoshi 『巨人の星』 (“Star of the Giants”). Hero Hyūma believes father has not come to say goodbye at train station as he departs for Kōshien, but father appears at last moment and throws up V. Hyūma recognizes it as “the V-sign of victory!” (“Shōri no V-sain!“) and resolves to win.

A3b. V-sign for “Victory” (Japan, pre-Bubble): In 1969, creators of girl’s volleyball manga Sain wa V 『サインはV』 (“V is the sign”) are inspired by A3a to drench product in V-sign — like early hip-hop producers taking only best part of drum break and repeating over and over. Sain wa V adapted into live-action drama and, like Kyojin no Hoshi, became leading hit in ongoing “sports grit” (スポーツ根性, スポ根) boom. Meaning of V-sign is spelled out in opening lines of theme song: “V, I, C, T, O, R, Y/ Sain wa V!”

A3b-supplement. Comment from Jimbo Shirō 神保史郎, writer of original Sain wa V manga:

I respected [Kyojin no Hoshi writer] Kajiwara Ikki. He was the sort of writer I wanted to become. The scene in Kyojin no Hoshi when Hoshi Hyūma is about to set off for Kōshien, and then his father appears and thrusts out that V-sign made a big impression. In a meeting with the editors, I suggested that we call our new story V Mexico, since the Mexico Olympics were coming up and all. After a lot of debate, we decided that Sain wa V was more straightforward and worked better. (Source: Inose Naoki 猪瀬直樹’s Mikado no kuni no kigōron 『ミカドの国の記号論』 (“Semiotics in the land of the Mikado”), 1991.)

Part B: V for “Peace”

B1. V-sign for “Peace” (USA): Exact origins unclear, but seems to date from 1960s’ U.S. counterculture, and in particular, anti-Vietnam War (= pro-peace) sentiment. Gradual dilution to symbolize solidarity in struggle against The Man as well as simple “peace.”

B2a. V-sign for “Peace” (Japan): As elements of counterculture spread to Japan, so does V-sign. Adopted by student radicals of late 1960s as well as relatively apolitical followers of foreign fashions. (Possible inspiration for A3a?)

B2b-supplement. Many sources cite Japanese popularity of Janet Lynn, U.S. figure skater and heartwarming dojikko, during and after the 1972 Sapporo Olympics as likely inspiration, claiming that she was often shown in the Japanese media flashing the peace sign. No evidence located.

Part C: V for “Cheese”

C1. V-sign in photographs: “Victory” (?) (Japan): Current oldest known example in poster for 1960 film Oku-man choja 『億万長者』 (“The Millionaire”) clearly shows Nakahara Hitomi 中原ひとみ making V-sign and smiling at camera. (Discovery credit: Kepel-sensei.)

C2. V-sign in photographs: “Peace” (Japan): In 2007 episode of Downtown DX, Inoue Jun 井上順 claims to have popularized V-sign in photographs via 1972 Konika commercial, in which he ad-libbed use of the V-sign by photographed persons, inspired by anti-war movement.

C3. V-sign in photographs: “Cheese” (Japan): All sources agree that by 1980s, use of V-sign in photographs was unremarkable and spreading slowly up the age scale.

Part D: Conclusions and unresolved questions

D1. Timeline synthesized from information above:

• V-sign becomes powerful, positive gesture during WWII
• Use of V-sign as part of photography pose dates back to at least 1960
• Revitalization of V-sign as counterculture “peace” sign in ’60s/’70s coincides with period in which Japanese youth was both interested in U.S. youth culture and had means to import its artifacts and habits
• However, early connection to “victory” was not forgotten: use of V-sign to mean “victory” had extremely high visibility in youth-targeted media around 1970
• Thus, at this time, “victory” and “peace” meanings may have reinforced each other, raising profile of gesture still higher. (E.g. Inose suggests that Kajiwara was inspired to write Kyojin no Hoshi V-scene by strong media presence of V-flashing anti-war demonstrators.)
• Meanwhile, rising incomes and many Japan-based camera makers meant more photos by non-professionals → space for photography folkways to develop (encouraged by camera companies, e.g. Inoue Jun’s CM story)
• Post-1980, gesture has lost emotional resonance and becomes part of “camera pose,” eventually to develop into modern variations that flatter face shape, emphasize eyes, highlight nail art, etc.

D2. Further questions:

• Could long /i/ sound in “peace” have made it particularly attractive to photographers looking for a hipper version of “cheese”?
• To what extent can the in-photo popularity of the “peace” sign, whatever its origins, be attributed to its nature as a widely recognized performance, protecting the subject from visual capture at an awkward or vulnerable moment? (cf pouty MySpace poses, throwing the horns, etc.)
• No relation to U.S. bunny-ears photo prank? (Would one not expect such horseplay to be much more common than bombastic Churchillian V’s among occupying GIs?)
• Did GHQ in fact use mind control or genetic engineering to impose “peace” sign on Japanese nation, as reportedly hypothesized by Igeta Seiichi (aged 17)?

Ozu Yasujirō. Terayama Shūji. Mizoguchi Kenji. Just a few of the legendary directors whose cinematic oeuvres we cheerfully ignore on our way to the screwball comedies and yaksploitation flicks. No more pretending: it is time to acknowledge — nay, revel in — the pleasures of… Lowbrow Classics of Japanese Cinema.

The obvious follow-up to our holiday coverage of ’80s ski classic Watashi wo Ski ni Tsurettete! — the Orient’s answer to Hot Dog…The Movie, if you will — is its official follow-up from creators Hoichoi Productions: Kanojo ga Mizugi ni Kigaetara 『彼女が水着にきがえたら』. A proper translation of the Japanese would result in the relatively sexy “When she changes into her bathing suit…” but alas, they stuck on their own blander English title: Urban Marine Resort Story. Between the original Japanese wording and the ad campaigns, viewers probably expected gratuitous and invasive close-ups of starlets prancing around in skimpy bikinis. What they got is something as austerely unerotic as the phrase “Urban Marine Resort Story.”

I guess I should describe the nominal plot holding together this full-length product placement extravaganza: two rich men battle over women and honor on the seas of mythical Shonan in yacht and sailboat, respectively. These old fellers have a tradition of playfully stealing women off the boats of the other. On one luxurious yacht outing with regally-perverted “Bad Guy” Yamaguchi (Ibu Masato), two members of this holiday weekend’s Team Chattel — virgin Tanaka Mariko (Watashi wo Ski ni Tsuretette!‘s Harada Tomoyo) and whore Ishii Yasuyo (Itoh Kazue) — get separated from friends on a SCUBA dive (complete with a ten-minute choreographed DPV-swimming scene) and end up discovering the location of a lost Korean War plane, which we later find out is filled with riches. (The superficial friend Yasuyo notes that she could buy a Chanel suit, a Bulgari watch, and an Audi with that kind of money.) When they finally surface, the girls are miraculously rescued by sailboat “Good Guy” (I forget his name) and his young sidekick Yoshioka, played by nearly-heterosexual Oda Yuji. Mariko and Yasuyo are then whisked via helicopter back to Yamaguchi’s boat by the Good Guy’s seventh wife, who apparently is happy playing accessory to his crazy woman-stealing adventures on the high seas.

Later, Yamaguchi’s yacht — the Amazon — is host to a semi-formal cocktail party (I guess Team Chattel brought a wide array of dresses for the three-day weekend.) As everyone is pairing off and settling into what should be a very, very long make-out session, the Good Guy sailboat team comes with a rubber motor boat and steals away Mariko and Yasuyo. Bad Guy Team Jr. pursue in matching uniforms on jet skis. Finally, the gum boat hits the shore Face/Off-style, and then: Exit Pursued by a Personal Hydrofoil. Bad Guys run into obstacles Speed Racer style, and then things unfortunately return to the airplane plot. Soon hordes of Chinese Mafia wearing identical black suits with red lining are storming upon Tokyo to find the location of this plane and its riches. They also pursue our heroes in jet skis. They are willing to use any wretched means to get the treasure — except actually kill any of the main characters with the deadly weapons they brandish.

I don’t want to ruin the end of the movie, but let’s just say that it reaches dénouement with giant harpoons. The main couple also finally consummate their budding relationship with an underwater stunt-double SCUBA kiss.
Continued »

After the television series Superdimensional Fortress Macross debuted in Japan on October 3, 1982, the fantasy lives of Japanese geeks would never be the same. Originally conceived as a slapstick parody, Macross eventually evolved into an iconic sci-fi drama brimming with now-classic anime stereotypes: the introverted protagonist who’s a total klutz with the ladies, apocalyptic imagery, grand space battles, and the first portrayals of transforming robots that felt realistic. As one of the very first anime productions created by and for hard-core fans, the success of the series played a major role in defining and legitimizing the otaku as a consumer demographic. (A demographic, incidentally, that never tires of gleefully pointing out that the premier episode of Macross contains the very first use of the eccentric second-person pronoun “o-taku” [お宅] in an anime.) Most importantly, the series and its subsequent theatrical follow-up offered an updated take on the relentless rehashing of the Japanese World War II narrative: consumer culture as an antidote to militarism.

The basic plot: in the far-flung year of 1999, a massive, uninhabited spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin crash-lands on the fictional South Ataria Island located in the Ogasawara Island chain. The continually-warring nations of the Earth lay down their arms to study and rebuild the mysterious craft, code-naming it “Super Dimensional Fortress 1” for its apparent ability to “fold” space-time. Exactly a decade later, the once quiet island is home to a bustling metropolis of scientists, soldiers, and workers who are involved with the SDF-1 project. Although the re-construction effort for the ship was ostensibly funded by a global organization called “UN Spacy,” the social culture on-board the space fortress is unmistakably Japanese. The bridge crew is staffed by a bevy of energetic and uniformed office ladies, overseen by an absentminded, pipe-smoking ojiisan named Captain Global, while the ship is defended by all-male squadrons of stalwart “Valkyrie fighter” pilots who are portrayed with salaryman-esque dedication to their jobs and “country” (i.e., the SDF-1 itself).

The story starts on the day of the SDF-1’s official launching ceremony. Now re-christened the “Macross,” apparently in reference to its huge size, the ship is about to take its maiden flight under human control when the island comes under attack. An enormous fleet of alien invaders appears in the skies over the city, intent on reclaiming its lost property. During the confusion, the rookie crew activates the SDF-1’s as-yet untested Hyperspace Fold Drive, sending the ship to the edge of our solar system along with a huge chunk of the city, island, and ocean. Although temporarily safe from enemy attacks, the fold drive “folds in on itself” and vanishes during the process, stranding the ship in deep space with tens of thousands of civilian refugees on-board.

The situation of the Macross could be seen as an apt metaphor for the shock and sense of drift Japan must have felt at the end of World War II. The inhabitants of the SDF-1 end up reacting in the same way as the families of the animators nearly four decades earlier: by rebuilding. Before long, “Macross City” has been almost perfectly reconstructed within SDF-1’s cavernous interior. The city inside the SDF-1 is microcosm of Tokyo life as seen through the eyes of the show’s young creators. Romance blossoms in video game arcades while giggling ladies linger over panty purchases at lingerie shops. The streets are lined with toy stores, restaurants, and nightclubs. Fans queue for the concerts of comely teenage idol-girl Lynn Minmei, whose fluffy tunes tackle close-to-home issues like “zero-G love” and flirting with fighter pilots. Nary a nursing home, hospital, supermarket, waste-treatment plant, garbage dump, or anything remotely outside the scope of a teenage or twenty-something otaku’s interest makes an appearance. Many anime are set in vaguely-defined foreign locales. Not Macross: the portrayal of life aboard the SDF-1 is almost defiantly Japanese, an attempt by the creators to re-cast the narrative of Japan’s role in World War II within the context of their own comfortable modern consumer lifestyles.
Continued »

Ozu Yasujirō. Terayama Shūji. Mizoguchi Kenji. Just a few of the legendary directors whose cinematic oeuvres we cheerfully ignore on our way to the screwball comedies and yaksploitation flicks. No more pretending: it is time to acknowledge — nay, revel in — the pleasures of… Lowbrow Classics of Japanese Cinema.

The year was 1987. Thanks to the Bubble Economy, Japan was awash with money, gadgets, and van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” The Onyanko Club had broken up but the first Final Fantasy was still a month away. Japanese pop culture was poised, waiting to pounce on the next big fad — preferably one that involved conspicuous consumption.

Enter Watashi wo ski ni tsuretette! (『私をスキーに連れてって』, official English title: Take Me Out to the Snowland!). The plot’s core values of love, friendship, and company loyalty converged with up-to-the-second consumerism and product placement to create an irresistible tonic for the optimistic Bubble generation. Not only did Watashi wo! kick off a mammoth ski boom that’s arguably still going strong, it’s credited with popularizing an in-flight catalog’s worth of electronics — from CB radio to waterproof cameras. The characters live in a world supersaturated with material goods, wanting for nothing. The bar scene where friends taunt the hero may appear at first to be a cliché, but when the friend’s mockery is delivered through a sampler-synthesizer he just happened to have on hand, you know that you are somewhere special.

So Watashi wo! is a wonderful time capsule — but does it still measure up as entertainment? Oh yes. Mikami Hiroshi is handsome and believable as earnest young salesman Yano Fumio, and Harada Tomoyo is in fine idol form as his romantic foil — shy, conservatively-dressed, and just incompetent enough to make Yano’s impromptu ski lessons appropriate. Mikami’s friends are rowdy in a wholesome way, and his antagonists (particularly Takenaka Naoto) are deliciously fiendish. Non-skiiers may feel that the story drags towards the end — with the tacked-on final race against time/advertisement for ski equipment — but this itself is just more enticement for audiences to become highly-involved and highly-consumptive skiiers.

One more thing about Watashi wo! that sends it into classic status: this montage of goof-off skiing tricks over Yuming‘s milquetoast-rock holiday masterpiece “Koibito ga Santa Claus.”

“When you’re an adult, you’ll understand too, one day… my lover is Santa Claus!” The words of Yuming’s “trendy o-nee-san who lived next door” ring out in shopping malls across Japan every December. If you want more insight into the curious mixture of innocence and materialistic eroticism these lyrics possess, you could do worse than to see them in context, in Watashi wo ski ni tsuretette.