On January 2, 1983, the Japanese Diet called upon the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association’s Ethics Committee Chairman for a frank chat about the conspicuous increase of sexual content in young women’s magazines. In particular legislators were concerned about Gal’s Life (Shufu no Tomosha), Kids (Gakushu Kenkyusha), Elle Teen (Kindai Eigasha), Popteen (Asuka Shinsha), Carrot Gals (Heiwa Shuppan), and Maru Maru Gals (Toen Shobo). These were relatively popular titles at the time, with Gal’s Life selling a half-million copies a month and Popteen right behind it at 350K.

The publishing industry did little in response, and so in February 1984, Mitsuzuka Hiroshi, the Deputy Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Research Council, spoke out in the middle of the Lower House Budget Committee, complaining about the plague of explicit sexual articles in girls’ magazines, which he called “instructional classes on sex.” Mitsuzuka took the struggle from the Diet floor to the media, appearing on TV shows to further indict the publishers. Prime Minister Nakasone also weighed in: “There’s a worry that the sexual depictions in certain magazines for young women may lead to crime” and then hinted that he would be open to legislative or otherwise administrative action against the publishers.

Results were swift. The day after Mitsuzuka’s Diet speech, publishers Heiwa Shuppan and Gakushu Kenkyusha announced they would discontinue Carrot Gals and Kids, respectively. Gakushu Kenkyusha was in a particular bind as it had a huge business in another highly regulated field: educational text books. Popteen meanwhile pledged a new editorial direction. Gal’s Life changed its name to Gal’s City to escape the increasing social stigma and took out all the dirty articles. This was apparently not what readers wanted, however: Sales dropped so violently that Shufu no Tomosha put the title out to pasture one year later.

What was this sexual content that the Liberal Democratic Party were so concerned about? Essayist Sakai Junko remembers Gal’s Life as chock full of “juicy stories that covered the rawer parts of girls’ lifestyle.” Gal’s Life provided a stark contrast to Magazine House’s olive — a title that imagined all Japanese teenagers wanted to imitate the “good sense and elegance of Parisian lycéenne.” While digging through old issues of Gal’s Life, Sakai discovers these article headlines:

• “Takada Namie’s Girl-Fight Dojo”
• “‘I’m sorry, baby’ — Abortion Experiences”
• “The Exciting Vacation Before We Got Secretly Married”
• “I’m not a prostitute! The Lifestyle and Outlook of Miho, who works at a Shinjuku massage parlor”

There are few images of Gal’s Life available online, and this cover from 1980 has much less controversial headlines (although it does sport the amusing promise “You won’t be an ugly girl (busu) if you read Gal’s Life!”) The general sense, however, is that the magazines had a constant stream of salacious articles for young women on sexual topics, all blanketed in a general atmosphere of “documentary” reporting.

In his book Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues), sociologist Namba Koji mentions a few articles in Gal’s Life such as “Gal Sex Report”, “Document: Love with a Man who Has a Wife and Children”, and “Comparison of Sex from Girls All Across Japan.” He then makes the obvious but crucial point that these are exactly the kind of articles one can expect from men’s magazines.

Framed this way, it is hard to understand the LDP’s crusade against “gal” magazines in the 1980s as anything other than patriarchal sexual hypocrisy. The issue is not “sexual content” itself in the market but who is partaking. As we all know, Japan does not have traditionally puritan attitudes towards sex, and conservatives had traditionally been the staunch advocates of legalized prostitution (against a coalition of women’s groups, socialists, and Christians who worked to outlaw it.) While the 1980s LDP may have been mostly removed from those particular 1950s battles, Mitsuzuka and company did seem bothered with idea that young women — maybe even from good families! — were speaking frankly about sexual experiences and trading tips.

To the LDP’s credit, 1984 was also the year the police started to crack down on an explosion of new sexual services. And perhaps the LDP was most concerned that these magazines explicitly targeted minors and intentionally or unintentionally worked to normalize sexual experiences outside of middle-class social expectations — dating married men, getting eloped, having abortions, working in the sex industry.

Most likely, however, is that the LDP were confused by a different principle all together: the rise of working-class yankii narratives in popular culture. Titles like Popteen and Gal’s Life were not intended for the ojōsama princesses of CanCam or the demure aesthetes of olive. In fact, these magazines built huge audiences by ignoring the slightly imagined, internationalized consumer world of good taste. Instead they spoke to the “real” lives of lower class yankii girls. While the data is not presently on hand, we can assume that working class teens in Japan — who have tended to marry at younger ages, are less busy with schoolwork, cram schools, and extracurriculars, and have less parental supervision — had more sexual experience than their Tokyo upper crust peers. This at least is the message that yankii women have tried to create for themselves in their own media. Starting with these 1980s magazines and carrying all the way to egg and Koakuma Ageha, there have been more explicit sexual articles in yankii/gyaru magazines rather than “good girl” magazines like an•an, non•no, With, or More. And moreover, the most salacious part of the magazine was often the “reader’s column” — where girls told endless and exaggerated sob stories of rapes, bullying, sexual promiscuity, dead boyfriends, and abortions. (I remember reading an issue of egg in 1999, right in the peak of the ganguro movement, that offered a guide to “How to Have Sex in a Car” as well as a particularly graphic reader about group sex in the ocean that involved sea shells.)

Without much perspective on these class-clustered sexual mores though, one can understand elitist politicians seeing gal magazines lined up equally on a bookstore rack with those proffering middle-class consumerist values, easily falling into the hands of a girl who would otherwise read about Chanel suits and marrying guys from Todai. She would be ruined forever! This is almost the virgin-whore complex grafted onto government policy. Interestingly, however, one of the main readerships for the controversial gal magazines was likely normal middle-class girls who liked to giggle at the sex stories and make fun of the yankii narratives. Nakasone and Mitsuzuka may have not known that these titles also inspired mockery from the very girls they hoped to protect.

In the end, only Popteen survived the 1984 gal magazine massacre. The editors promised to clean up the content but then slowly brought back articles about sex techniques and teenage delinquent life when the Diet had moved on to other problems and scandals. It may have also helped that society went through a “sex boom” right after the Diet hearing. Akimoto Yasushi’s mass idol group Onyanko Club was suddenly on TV every afternoon singing about how “being a virgin is boring” and how high school girls needed to have sex with their math teacher to get good grades.

In the mid-1990s, however, Popteen eventually dropped the delinquent lifestyle stories and became a pure style bible for the kogyaru army. This may have ironically been key to the magazine’s longevity. Whether advertiser pressure or consumer demand, there seems to be less desire these days for Japanese magazines to do anything other than provide excessive product details on the latest clothing. Even when Koakuma Ageha takes up frank talk about domestic violence and hostess lifestyles, the idea is dealing with harsh realities rather than sensationalizing for girls who want to fantasize about adult activities.

Yet there appears to be latent demand in Japan for female-oriented stories of sexual exploits and tragedies, as evidenced by the rise of the keitai novel — which writer Hayamizu Kenro has linked directly to the “confessional” narratives of yankii ladies biker mag Teen’s Road. The Diet may have temporarily killed off the teenage delinquent narrative industry but they could not stifle all the curiosity.

Bonus trivia: When Mitsuzuka held up Popteen in the Diet, the page was open to an illustration by now famed media critic Miura Jun.

Namba, Koji. “Concerning Youth Subcultures in the Postwar Era, Vol. 5: ‘Ko-gal’ and ‘Urahara-kei,’” Kwansei Gakuin University Sociology Department #100, March 2006.

Namba, Koji. Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues) Chikuma Shinsho, 2009.

Sakai, Junko. “Girls’ Yankii Spirit.” An Introduction to Yankee Studies. Ed. Taro Igarashi, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2009.

Between infamously long work hours and personal identities grounded in corporate affiliation, Japan has usually been known for its labor rather than its leisure. This may be, however, exactly why the nation’s enduring obsession with golf is so conspicuous. Sure, golf is the most obvious athletic extension of Japan’s social priorities, but in recent days, the sport has an enormous legion of fans that expands far beyond the rigidities of workplace hierarchies. The game has grown and shifted together with society — providing a useful metaphor for understanding both the country’s emergence as an economic power in the 20th century and the downfall of the salaryman-dominated social system in the 21st.

Although now something approaching a cliché, the first images to emerge globally of Japanese golf culture told a slightly depressing story. Back in 1964, an infamous photograph appeared in Life of atomized salarymen at a three-story driving range hitting balls into the void. This etched a nearly permanent narrative for the rest of the world: The busy people of a very crowded Japan were trying to live out the fantasy Western lifestyle at any extreme. Scholar Marilyn Ivy wrote in the essay “Critical Text, Mass Artifacts” that the U.S. media portrayed Japan as “impossible, dehumanized productivity.” And in that framing, those now-iconic industrialized golf ranges surely looked like the key leisure activity of a “dystopic capitalistic” system (Ibid.).

Twenty-five years after that photograph, however, the idyllic towns of Hawaii and California greeted planeload after planeload of “Japan Inc.” businessmen as they headed out to play the areas’ most prestigious greens. The dream had been fulfilled — those practicing in that dystopic driving range were now enjoying the Great Outdoors shoulder to shoulder with the American elite. And when a Japanese businessman purchased the ultra-luxury Pebble Beach Golf Links on the California Coast for $700 million over the market price in 1990, Japanese golf suddenly became another facet of U.S. paranoia towards Eastern economic dominance.

But we all know what happened later: The Japanese economy collapsed in the mid-1990s, and the salaryman class lost its monopoly on social prestige. Golf was a core tradition of corporate warriors, and it therefore also suffered a reputation loss from its over-association with the dominant old-man contingent. The decline of golf, however, is itself history, and in recent years, the sport has been rehabilitated as a sport rather than a day of work outside of the office. And it is now open to almost all — not just old men with expense accounts but also young women on group dates.

Even with these changes to the player base, one thing remains constant: Golf has become as deeply-embedded in Japanese culture as green tea and baseball. There have been thousands of fads and trends involving foreign culture, but golf has weathered a full century of tremendous social change to still reign as a dominant sport. How did this one particular game of hitting a little white ball into a distant hole become so entrenched in the Japanese psyche?

As seen in most importation of Western culture in Japan, golf first entered the country directly through acts of foreign intervention. When Japan re-opened its borders in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the port cities flooded with Western businessmen looking to cash in on a new trade route. Since these men and their families mostly lived in sequestered communities with Western housing, they were also quick to install other institutions, such as churches and cricket clubs, that would replicate their lifestyles from back home. So it was quite inevitable that a foreigner would look out one day on a lush green Japanese valley and claim the land for golf.

In 1901 destiny called for Arthur Hesketh Groom, a Brit in the tea trade who was sick and tired of not having a good golf game in the 33 years he had been in Japan. He took it upon himself to construct a private four-hole course on Mt. Rokko, which two years later, he expanded into nine holes. Thus was born the Kobe Golf Club. In the May 19, 1903 issue of English newspaper Kobe Chronicle, Groom announced a golf tournament on his new course. Unsurprisingly, no Japanese players showed up, and in this nascent year, golf was exclusively a pastime of the expat scene. But by the following year, the now 18-hole Kobe Golf Club had 171 members, seven of whom were Japanese.

Once Groom proved that the sport could work on Japanese soil, golf spread throughout the country — but always at the hands of foreigners. A more winter-friendly course opened in nearby Yokoya in 1904, and two years later, Brits near Yokohama founded a course in Negishi. Native players slowly trickled in to the sport, sometimes as caddies of the Western players, but they were generally slow to become competitive members of this elite world. Japan’s first national golf tournament, which started in 1907, did not even have a Japanese contestant until 1916.

1918, however, was a big shift as Inoue Makoto became the first Japanese player to win his country’s makeshift national tournament. With this victory, golf started to show movements towards greater domestication. Of course the first Japanese involved in the golf scene were the sons of high-society families who had studied or worked in the West. Inoue had been posted at the New York office of his company and spent enough days and nights at New Jersey’s White Beeches Country Club to be crowned club champion for two years straight. Another famed early golfer Akaboshi Rokuro had picked up the sport during his time at Princeton.

These foreign-trained individuals acted as early golfing ambassadors, but soon they were joined by the nation’s less-globetrotting upper class. In 1914, 30 top Japanese businessmen — one of whom later became a cabinet secretary — came together to start their own golf course in Tokyo’s Komazawa area. In just two decades, golf had shifted quite nicely from the foreign elite to the Japanese elite. And this set a pattern common to most trend adoption around the world: The next-highest status group often attempts to imitate the highest-status group’s culture as a way to claim membership to the group above them. This “trickle down” of a burgeoning modern Japanese elite imitating the West was directly responsible for golf’s national expansion.

Right up until the end of World War II, golf increasingly became a well-integrated part of the privileged classes’ lifestyle. By 1940, there were 71 courses across the nation and around 110,000 total players. This was impressive growth from the days of Groom and his private course, but golf had hardly become a mass sport. Compared to other successful foreign imports such as business suiting and baseball, golf had not become anywhere near as common. The limiting factor was mostly financial: Buying golf balls and clubs would have taken up most of an average worker’s yearly salary. We can assume, however, that golf’s small, exclusive player base gave it universally understood associations with wealth and prestige. Golf was clearly the pinnacle leisure activity of Japan’s ruling class. This was true, however, of most modern consumer culture in the pre-war years: Only the urban elite could really participate.

World War II completely disrupted Japan’s old class system, however, and as a new, more egalitarian Japan emerged from the rubble of the Empire, golf had a new chance to penetrate more deeply into Japanese society. For the first few years of the post-war, U.S. soldiers reclaimed most of Japan’s golf courses for military usage, but in doing so, likely gave the sport further legitimacy as the sport of society’s top tier. Things got rolling again for Japanese golfers in the 1950s, as the U.S. returned the courses to private ownership, and the Japanese Golf Association re-opened its doors. In 1957 — the year after the government officially declared the “post-war” to be over — there had been an increase up to 116 courses with 18 million course visits. That same year a Japanese player Nakamura Torakichi won the international tournament Canada Cup (now World Cup) hosted in Japan and sparked what author Tanaka Yoshihisa calls the “First Post-War Golf Boom.” From 1957 to 1961, golf was red hot, as the top executives and managers of Japan’s burgeoning New Middle Class — arguably the new elite in a post-aristocratic Japan — flocked to the greens. With this huge demand to hit the links, an unprecedented number of new courses were constructed. It also helped that companies could claim golf — like boozing with hostesses and lavish dinners — as an entertainment expense. The more golf played, the less tax paid.

Throughout the 1960s, the number of courses continued to grow steadily. But this growth curve got a major kick during the “Second Post-War Golf Boom” of 1971 to 1974. Golf tournaments had begun to appear on TV in the late 1960s, and as a result, a much larger group of middle class workers began to take interest in the sport. This was also a time period when the Dankai Generation — Japan’s Baby Boomers — had entered the work force and began to settle into their careers. Golf’s association with the business elite in the late 1950s had sent the implicit message to younger workers that knowing how to play golf would become a critical requirement for future promotion. This was also the era when Japan’s pop culture really exploded: when consumers could afford to buy LPs, off-the-rack clothes, stereo equipment, and magazines. Japan had emerged from being the world’s manufacturing factory and started to actually spend some of its hard-earned wages on leisure and goods.

Although growth of the golf industry petered off in the early 1980s, the Bubble Economy of 1986 to 1989 spurred the Third Post-War Golf Boom. This era had all the ingredients required to make an elite leisure activity more widespread: speculation-fueled wealth-generation, a currency doubling in value, and a broad culture of conspicuous consumption. The Bubble was the age of excess — the salaryman class living out all the fantasies of the post-war in glorious and excess detail. This meant drinking watered down Johnny Walker Blue Label every night in Ginza hostess clubs in black Armani suits. When it came to golf, companies suddenly had the cash to invest in prestigious country club memberships, corporate trips abroad to Hawaii, and other extravagant ways to tee off. With salarymen being the kings of society and golf being their leisure activity of choice it only made sense that the sport would loom large in the wider culture. Just as the brigades of corporate soldiers hit their paradise years of fancy golfing, this era also saw an influx of female golfers, who made up 20% of all Japanese players by the early 1990s.

Golf’s takeover of Japanese society continued to fit the trickle-down model quite nicely. In all of these golf booms, a roaring economy and greater spread of media brought a huge number of new players into the game. Golf has always been expensive in Japan; this is the country that introduced the idea of “green fees” on top of already-exorbitant sunk costs in country club memberships. And golf always had a strong association with the top echelon of society. So as incomes increased, more people had the disposable income to play golf, and they naturally wanted to play golf as a way to identify as a member of the society’s upper crust. At first this meant internationalized Japanese showing their worldliness by joining up foreign country clubs in their own country. Later this meant the top executives in the New Middle Class imitating the pre-war elite.

By the 1970s and 1980s, golf still had its prestige but lost its exclusivity. Ultra-bright driving ranges across Tokyo would be filled to the brim with white collar workers hitting balls into a net, as practice for the next time their company would pay for them to play 18 holes. And in the Bubble, Japanese became the most famous consumers of golf around the world, snapping up famed courses for unbelievable prices. In Singapore, for example, the Japanese expats joined country clubs at such a rate that the government had to pass a law preventing foreign players from being more than 30% of the total membership (Ben-Ari).

Golf’s growth trajectory in Japan’s miracle post-war should be no surprise, but there is something interesting in how golf managed to stay in the national imagination for so long. There was a time in the 1950s when everyone was obsessed with owning a rice cooker and refrigerator, but of course, these became commonplace in the 1960s and these humble dreams disappeared in their widespread attainment. Tennis boomed around the same time but petered out with the over-proliferation of college tennis clubs in the mid-1980s. Golf had the dual advantage of always being expensive and inaccessible even as incomes rose, as well as being a sport that did not necessitate youthful prowess. The richer and older you were, the more golf you could play. But the increase in players always outpaced the construction of giant courses, and this lack of supply always kept fees at a slightly painful level for the wider population, hence giving corporate entertainment budgets a critical role. Despite Japan’s great wealth, it was nearly impossible to actually play golf in this Bubble era peak. Players would have to reserve golf courses several months in advance as well as pay exorbitant green fees (Ben-Ari). Due to Japan’s tight geographical constrictions, golf became more exclusive the more it became popular. Compare this to the Louis Vuitton handbag, which started in a similar position of being only for the upper classes, and by 2005, was on the arm of every other girl in the subway. Golf’s natural barriers towards mass adoption strengthened its prestige.

With the Bubble’s collapse in the early 1990s, however, the holistic and dominant taste culture of the post-war male elite — whiskey, golf, dark serge wool suits with white shirts and dark ties — became an easy target for ridicule. Tastes had greatly diversified in the 1980s, and a new culture of aesthetic refinement (spurred in great part by the Saison retail empire) rejected the mainstream business-driven cultural world. Japan was no longer monolithic, and as the economy started to teeter and the salaryman became a sad sack in sack suit, golf was suddenly a punchline, more associated with men stained by stale cigarette smoke and coffee-stained teeth than regal men in natty dress breathing in the Great Outdoors. Golf went through some rough years in the national imagination, especially with the collapse of exclusive country clubs and exposure in many cases of funding from organized crime. By the 2000s, however, enough time had passed to give golf a second shot. Thanks to athletes like Tiger Woods, the sport would shed some of its older associations and be reborn as a class-neutral athletic endeavor.

Golf has always had a unique sense of style. With a lack of sustained physical movement inherent in the activity, dress could be relatively fancy compared to other sports. Okay, knee breeches and argyle may have been the height of “sporty” in the past, much like the white flannels of tennis players. Before the modern era, however, there was generally high propriety of dress for all occasions, and this extended to the golf course. Dressing up as “gentlemen” on the green was a natural part of the pastime for early players, and this past has been sewn into the sport’s reputation. Modern players may not take up the exact dress of their ancestors but they surely bask in the sense of decorum established centuries prior.

At the same time, this sense of gentlemanly propriety has made golf a difficult fit within the wider pantheon of sports. Take the case of Japanese Ur shoe-brand Onitsuka Tiger, which framed itself constantly in its early years as the ideal material companion to the Olympic tradition. In the spirit of athletic diversity, Onitsuka Tiger manufactured distinct shoes for every obscure sporting event and physical activity in the modern world from track to boxing to “baton twirling” to rugby to handball. Yet the company’s golf shoes were produced under a separate brand name — GOOD SHOT Golf Shoes. In the 1950s, these had a look that has been mostly forgotten today: clunky black nylon lace-up cleats with patches of white on the toe, something like a boat shoe’s angry uncle. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Onitsuka Tiger went back to the classic saddle shoe design that had become a key look for professional golfers in the 1920s. These stayed in basic whites, browns, and blacks, but later on in the 1970s, expanded into electric reds and yellows.

This kind of business-shoe adapted for the green is a vestigial remnant of golf’s ancestry. These days, global athletic brands have invaded and enforced a strict space-aged techno-savvy — a strong counterbalance to the old aristocratic fun of dressing up. No natural fibers are harmed in the production of modern golf clothes. Sunglasses must look like props from 1980s science fiction films. Even Brooks Brothers — the arbiter of traditional style in the U.S. — likes to encourage younger men to wear anachronistic pieces like rounded club collars to the office while suggesting a relaxed, “less formal” ensemble as the perfect golf wear.

This seems a direct sartorial consequence of golf’s re-imagination as an activity open to all. Democraticization is great for people but terrible for clothing. Formality of dress has always been a quiet tool of class society to clarify status, and it makes sense that dismantling the aristocratic conventions cooked into institutions means doing away with much of the costume. The new American work uniform — an over-sized dress shirt (with undershirt showing through the open collar) and a pair of giant Dockers — could easily be traced directly to belief in meritocratic egalitarianism. Theoretically-speaking, there could be creative fashion in a utopian democratic society, but fashion throughout history — at least what we consider “dressing well” — has almost always been correlated with imitation of the upper classes’ style rules.

Throughout the 20th century, playing golf was a badge of upward mobility — a chance to buy into an exclusive “Gentlemen’s game.” And certainly, dressing up was part of the appeal. The concept of dressing for “time, place, occassion” (TPO) has become a quaint anachronism — except, arguably, in Japan where it still guides most public dress. It makes sense therefore that while golf lost most of its aristocratic or upper class associations in Japan after becoming over-exposed within the salaryman class, the sport was able to make an impressive comeback with Japanese women around 2007 by adding back to the game a sense of TPO-driven dress.

Women’s sudden interest in golf was an unabashed trend conspiracy, mind you, with the golf industry paying out large sums to apparel companies and fashion magazines to directly target young women who had never once considered the idea of putting. They re-framed the game as part of the courtship process with (upwardly mobile) men, and hence, a new opportunity for women to dress up in a completely different set of (adorable) clothing, which they would need to go out and buy. An entire magazine Regina popped up to be the fashion guide for the female golf set.

Yet everyone won. While this has echoes of the industrial complex bending the behavior of citizens, the plot also says a lot about the nature of golf. This would not have been possible with ice hockey nor even basketball — sports that require putting a lot of incredibly specialized people in the same room. And ironically the democratic nature of golf in the 21st century also opened the door. Ladies circuit stars like Miyazato Ai have been an inspiration to Japanese women to get out there and show their athleticism. The dainty clothes were an appeal to some, but the entire female golf movement did encourage many women to take the sport seriously beyond the social dimensions.

Like so many traditions in the 21st century, golf has found a new strength and stability in its ability to signify many things to many audiences. The sport has been freed from its previous monolithic understanding as an exclusive leisure activity for elite men. Golf may no longer work in Japan as a universally understood symbol of economic progress, but the elements of prestige, leisure, and fine dress still resonate with larger audiences than before. Golf can be all things to all people. Businessmen still banter over distribution strategies while rescuing balls from the bunker, and two holes down, a young couple learns to play golf together as an unspoken sign of eventual matrimony. Golf has mutated over the years but these evolutions occur so that it can remain core to the Japanese DNA.

References:

All facts about Japanese golf history, unless otherwise noted, came from:

Tanaka Yoshihisa. Gorufu to Nihonjin. 『ゴルフと日本人』 Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1992.

Other sources:

Allen Guttmann and Lee Thompson. Japanese Sports: A History. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.

Eyal Ben-Ari “Golf, Organization, and ‘Body Projects’: Japanese Business Executives in Singapore.” The Culture of Japan Seen Through Its Leisure. Ed. by Sepp Linhart and Sabine Frühstück. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Marilyn Ivy “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan.” Postmodernism and Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989.

Back in 2009, I spent a few very busy weeks conducting, editing, and translating fifteen interviews with leading Japanese musicians, fashion designers, and photographers for the Onitsuka Tiger book Made of Japan. While the project was a great chance to get into the minds of individuals who shape contemporary Japanese culture, I also wished at the time that I could turn my attention at some point to the rich history of Onitsuka Tiger itself.

So earlier this year, in warm welcome from the company, Ian and I raided the archives of old catalogs and industry circulars in Onitsuka Tiger’s Tokyo office dating from the early post-war onwards. The photos, graphic design, and copy of these catalogs alone perfectly chart out the development of consumer culture in Japan. The two-color printing of 1960s’ materials, for example, looks identical to 45 rpm singles of that era. And by 1976, the catalogs were filled with foreign athletes with impressive moustaches — very much in the same mold as the first issues of era-defining men’s magazine Popeye.

Our humble web journal has always been dedicated to the intersection between Japan and global culture, and in these catalogs, Ian and I were excited to find the story of a local company working tirelessly to position its Japanese technical know-how as the material means to international athleticism. Beyond today’s kneejerk embrace of the Olympics games as a glorious sponsorship moment, founder Kihachiro Onitsuka seemed obsessed with the wider conceptualization of the Olympic tradition — the celebration of global diversity in the opening ceremony, the huge variety of competitive games, the jet-setting descent of VIPs upon world capitals, the modernist virtues. As part of that Olympic framing, the company overtly and tirelessly referenced the games in catalogs and shoe names, and more broadly, built an Olympian-scale product strategy that offered specific shoes for every possible athletic activity — from marathon, track, volleyball, yachting, and baton twirling. (They also made a “referee shoe” at some point.)

Onitsuka Tiger asked Ian and I to work on essays related to these catalogs, and Ian has also produced two new fonts Kirimomi Swash and Kirimomi Geometric Sans (download here) based on the catalogs’ old lettering work. We will also be publishing two essays. I wrote a piece on the history of golf in Japan, based on glancing through materials on Onitsuka Tiger’s golf shoe brand GOOD SHOT and some solid library time. Until now, I had never looked much at the history of Japanese sports but I was intrigued to find that the pattern of importation and adoption echoes the model seen with other kinds of Western culture coming to Japan. (Hint: It’s “trickle down.”)

Ian meanwhile looked at the development of Onitsuka Tiger’s visual identity in the context of Modernism, both the chronologically-defined art movement and the broader idea of 20th century social development. The visual tone of Onitsuka Tiger’s early ads and catalogs encapsulate and document the recent history of typography in modern times.

So stay tuned as we roll out these essays over the next month.

The impending Soyuz launch of JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa to the International Space Station brings back memories of some of Japan’s less storied spacemen. Let’s turn the clock back a few years to…

Stardate 2006. Livedoor entrepreneur Daisuke “Dice-K” Enomoto pays $20 million to Space Adventures for a ride on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station. He then announces his attention to forgo all the customary science experimentation during his time in orbit and instead cos-play as Char Aznable and build Gundam model kits. Sure, it sounded ridiculous at the time, but perhaps in hindsight Enomoto was making a grand statement on the rise of Akihabara and anime culture on the global stage.

Yet in an equally fitting metaphor for the rapid rise and fall of Japan’s “gross national cool,” Enomoto’s otherworldly otaku aspirations never got off the ground. Unceremoniously bounced from the program for vague medical reasons, he spent the next half-decade in decidedly Earthbound courtrooms in a vain attempt to reclaim the huge sum he paid to the American space-tourism company.

Although Enomoto may certainly go down in history as Japan’s greatest failed space tourist, he can’t hold a beam-saber to Akiyama Toyohiro — Japan’s first astronaut and a living monument to the excesses of Japan’s Bubble Era.

In 1989 — as a festive celebration of its 40th anniversary — Japanese TV station TBS decided to pay the Soviet Union somewhere between $12 and $14 million to send a reporter up to Space Station Mir. Heavily promoted and sponsored, the idea was to boost the second-run station’s image by beaming back a series of nightly week-long specials from orbit: Nihonjin Hatsu! Uchuu e (“The First Japanese in Space!”)

Think about this for a second, because it’s difficult to fathom from our standpoint abreast two decades of straight economic stagnation. A Japanese TV station — and not even the top station — had enough cash floating around to buy themselves into a Cold War superpower’s space program. Japan would finally send a man to space, and it would be a commercial enterprise funding the entire thing. The Soviets meanwhile had scored a Cold War PR coup, even going so far as to bump up the flight date to pre-empt NASA and ensure that the first Japanese into space flew on a Soyuz rather than a Shuttle.

Once the program started in earnest, Soviet flight doctors winnowed down a pool of hundreds of applicants from the broadcaster’s employees to two final candidates: Kikuchi Ryoko, a 26 year-old camerawoman whose hobbies included mountain climbing, cycling, and skiing, and Akiyama, a 48 year-old senior editor whose hobbies appeared limited to chronic overtime and a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit. Given the era, the final decision shouldn’t come as any surprise. Akiyama was an ideal “every man” in a society where middle-aged men essentially called all the shots. Thus it was that a chain-smoking, over-the-hill salaryman came to carry the entirety of TBS’ multimillion dollar investment on his shoulders.

Somehow Akiyama had what it takes to make it through standard cosmonaut training, a process on which the Soviets refused to compromise for safety reasons. And on December 2, 1990, he rode into orbit aboard Soyuz TM-11. TBS of course broadcast the entire thing, cutting between images of Akiyama’s nervous wife and a Marxist-chic control room filled with cartoonish, medal-adorned Soviet generals shaking hands. The Japanese government meanwhile maintained an almost stoic silence about the whole affair. Japan’s Powers that Be were undoubtedly none too pleased at seeing their nation’s momentous first steps into space being made on a Soviet rocket boldly festooned with the logos of an electronics maker, a credit card company, and a sanitary napkin manufacturer.

While Japan and the USSR found a new friendship in this surreal moment of capitalist excess, Japan-bashing Western media gleefully portrayed Akiyama as a spaceborne stooge. They cast the hapless space tourist as a “whiskey-swilling idiot” and “anti-hero” while cherry-picking his most inane observations for translation. This proved none too difficult a task: “Hokkaido looks like a yummy piece of kelp!” was one of his more memorable quips.

It’s entirely possible that Akiyama had a more intellectual repartee planned, but he spent the vast majority of the flight plagued by space sickness so severe that one of his fellow cosmonauts remarked that he “hadn’t ever seen a man vomit that much.” Although he gamely made his way through his daily scheduled broadcasts and conducted vague experiments on the adhesive properties of tree frogs in zero gravity (criminally overlooked by the Ig Nobel Committee), today the consensus abroad seems to be — perhaps uncharitably — that he “did not have a very productive flight.”

Then again, Akiyama’s sojourn was never about the Right Stuff. It was about the Right Ratings, a PR stunt of the sort that could only have originated in a smoky Bubble-era boardroom. But even from that standpoint, the flight seems to have been only a middling success, with viewership quickly dropping off after the initial excitement of the launch and docking at the station. And even more sadly, the flight barely made a dent in the collective Japanese memory, evaporating like wisps of liquid oxygen wafting from a rocket on its launchpad. No films, no manga or anime, and not even any books (save those written by the man himself) chronicle Akiyama’s ascent into the heavens.

It’s hard to imagine a nation’s first spaceman so thoroughly disappearing from the pop-cultural record. But in the final analysis, perhaps Akiyama was a little too everyman to become a hero. His first words in space were a less than charismatic “Is this live?” and final words after touchdown, a Homer Simpson-esque “I want a drink and a smoke.”

Deep-pocketed space tourists like Dice-K aside, the “salaryman spaceman” has been replaced today by the likes of Mamoru “Mark” Mohri (who would have been Japan’s first astronaut had the Challenger disaster not delayed his flight by five years), Furukawa, and other full-time professionals groomed by JAXA and trained by NASA. Indeed, Japan now has a full cadre of badass pro astronauts who have inspired society with their space experiences.

And what of Akiyama? Increasingly disillusioned with life at TBS, he quit shortly after his return from space, reinventing himself as an author and organic shiitake mushroom farmer in Fukushima. Forced to evacuate in the wake of the disaster, Akiyama recently went on record speaking out against the government, Tepco, and the mass media. Not incidentally, he also touched on the “media perception gap” between foreign and Japanese press.

This recent appearance aside, Japan’s charter member of the Association of Space Explorers all but slipped from the radar in recent years. Although Akiyama appeared several times over the years as a freelance TV commentator in various capacities, for the most part he withdrew from public view after his heavily televised jaunt into the Final Frontier — a fitting symbol for a Bubble that didn’t exactly pop but slowly faded away.

Despite the valiant efforts of Mori Building and Mitsui Fudosan to class up Tokyo’s Roppongi area with mega-developments in the last decade, the neighborhood remains deeply divisive. At best, it’s a nocturnal playground disproportionally populated with the city’s foreign residents. At worst, it’s a nocturnal playground disproportionally populated with the city’s foreign residents. The hood’s spatial layout does not help things either: a giant highway floats above the main drag and plunges the streets into perpetual darkness. Meanwhile the Don Quijote junk store and Hard Rock Cafe may be some of the more memorable local architecture.

But let us forget the lamentable Roppongi of today and travel back to a brief period in the early post-war when Roppongi was the hottest neighborhood in Tokyo — thanks to some extremely wealthy young Japanese.

Tokyo’s youth culture had a rough start in the immediate days after the Second World War. First there was destruction, poverty, and mass hunger. But even when life became sustainable, youth were not a driving cultural force. Around 1950, there emerged the après-guerre tribe of boys with “regent” pompadours and aloha shirts who spent all their food money on pomade in imitation of Occupation soldiers, but they were mostly ignored as delinquent punks. And when Ishihara Shintaro’s Sun Tribe invented the “teenager” for Japanese society, they made their splash in Tokyo’s nearby beach towns rather than in the city itself. At the end of the 1950s, Japan’s largest city had yet developed a neighborhood set aside for youthful frolic. Ginza was still the forefront of cool, but intended for adult usage. In a brief moment in the very late 1950s and early 1960s, however, Roppongi took on this role as one of the first centralized locations where its mass popularity could be attributed to the presence of youth.

Before the war, Roppongi was an eerily quiet neighborhood populated by foreign embassies, bases for the Imperial army, and aristocratic mansions of the zaibatsu families. The plaintive sound of military trumpets would waft through the air in the evening. The firebombing of Tokyo, however, destroyed around 70% of the buildings in Roppongi, and after the war, the U.S. military reclaimed the Imperial bases for their own use. But this American presence created a new economy, and in just a few years, Roppongi transformed from a quiet backwater into a quiet night-life spot with an upscale American crowd. The area served officers rather than enlisted men, and this made a big difference in the level of decorum.

The neighborhood also had some of the city’s laxer entertainment laws, so establishments could stay open until dawn. Roppongi became the destination after the destination. When bars in Ginza closed up at 10pm, you could always ride over to Roppongi. And even when the Americans wrapped up the Occupation and headed back to the U.S., the neighborhood retained a distinctly foreign and cutting-edge atmosphere. Roppongi was the only place in town to get a decent hamburger or slice of pizza.

The Roppongi of this era was sprawling and incredibly dark. There were no department stores, no walls of flashing neon signs, no movie theaters, no famed landmarks. There wasn’t even a main street. You had to know where to go before you got there, because no one would be on hand to direct you. Even when the glowing-orange Tokyo Tower rose up over the area in 1958, Roppongi proper stayed completely undeveloped. Edward Seidensticker described Roppongi of this era as “the darkness at the foot of the lighthouse.” More critically, Roppongi was inaccessible by train — meaning you basically had to own a personal car or hire a taxi to get out there. By practice, this made the neighborhood an exclusive playground for Japanese with money to burn.

The mysterious atmosphere, however, was just the thing to attract young Japanese celebrities, actors, members of the film and media industries — and wealthy youth. With many TV studios built nearby, actors would finish their daily appearances and head to Roppongi watering holes to finish the day with their attractive colleagues. As for the “kids,” famed novelist Nosaka Akiyuki described those who haunted Roppongi around 1958 as “Mostly students at [elite private university] Keio, sons of corporate presidents or ex-government ministers, with about ¥300,000 a month in pocket money. Some of them owned six cars.” Needless to say, this level of “pocket money” was about 20x the standard monthly wage of a recent college graduate. Later on, almost like a post-war “Brat Pack,” young celebrities who called themselves the Yajukai — “Wild Animal Committee” — started to party in Roppongi. Soon being a part of this social group became a near prerequisite for entry into the entertainment world.

The youth congregation eventually became conspicuous to the wider society, and the media dubbed the revelers the Roppongi-zoku (六本木族) — the Roppongi Tribe. This media scrutiny promptly ended the exclusivity. When news reports of this Roppongi Tribe started to appear on TV in the early 1960s, a wave of middle-class teenagers descended on the Yajukai’s favorite watering holes, forcing the original Tribe members to abandon Roppongi for less crowded spots. The media-reading followers meanwhile treated Roppongi as a guidebook excursion: walking the very long hike from the nearest trolley stop, dancing the new dodonpa step at night club with a Filipino band, and eating exotic cuisines like spaghetti.

While this second Roppongi-zoku wave amplified the neighborhood for a few years, the entire Roppongi boom came to a complete halt in February 1962, when an angry mobster slashed the face of Yajukai member and half-Japanese singer Jerry Fujio in a bar brawl. In response to the fracas, the police moved in and purged the young set from the area’s nightlife spots. By 1963, the Roppongi Tribe boom had completely petered out. Roppongi would continue to be a mecca for dancing and adult fun, but never again lead Japan’s youth culture.

Although short-lived as a youth subculture, the Roppongi Tribe did demonstrate a few critical patterns that would become standard in the development of Japanese post-war youth culture. First, like the Sun Tribe, the original group were exclusively rich kids who abused the social freedom of their privilege. They not only possessed the spending money to pursue leisure at every turn but were able to move independently of media guidance. They didn’t follow trends — they started them. But once the ever-growing media discovered their fashion style and favorite hangouts, a rush of eager teenagers from the new middle class would follow in their steps. In response, the rich delinquents would move on to a new neighborhood. This pattern, not coincidentally, closely follows the classical model of “top-down” fashion diffusion, where middle-class imitation forces the upper-classes to perpetually move into new styles and trends.

Second, police crackdown became the common denouement to any explosion of youth culture in Japan. Law enforcement would quietly listen to neighborhood complaints about kids running amuck, but they would not immediately make arrests. They instead would wait until a high-profile incident justified a wide sweep of the area. This let subcultures thrive and cultivate for a while — before being completely dissipated and forgotten. An identical police crackdown also ended the Miyuki-zoku preppies who congregated in Ginza.

These two outside threats of mass culture and law enforcement would rain on Japanese kids’ parade throughout the post-war, but conflict can be an important cultural engine. Sick of being imitated, cutting-edge teens would think of new styles to distinguish themselves from the growing middle-class masses. And they would be forced to establish new hangouts when the police gave them too much grief. Although police was also a strong foe to youth subcultures in the United States and the United Kingdom, Japanese law enforcement kept a much keener eye on their nation’s youth for a much longer period than seen in other countries. And they would go as far as to make public statements about what was and wasn’t proper fashion. For example when Rudi Gernreich’s topless bathing suit went on sale in 1964, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police made an announcement that wearing the bathing suit “violated the law” — despite the fact that only a handful were sold in Japan (Chimura). Sure the Japanese authorities were overbearing, but this constant supervision would keep youth on their toes — always moving around and changing up their styles.

Kosuke Mabuchi. Post-War History of the “Tribes”. 『「族」たちの戦後史』Sanseido, 1989. (Most of the information in this article about the Roppongi-zoki comes from this work, pages 87-109.)

Edward Seidensticker. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake Harvard University Press, 1991.

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

Michio Chimura. Post-War Fashion Story 1945-2000. Heibonsha, 1989.