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.

On February 20, 1909, French newspaper Le Figaro printed a piece called “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on its front page — written by a relatively-unknown 32 year-old Italian poet named F.T. Marinetti. (I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the full text.) The bombastic and incendiary tract sent shock waves through the European artistic community in its call for a total upheaval of preexisting artistic convention. The poet advocated the demolition of museums, libraries, and traditional morality. And in the ruins, Marinetti wanted to foster a new aesthetic called Futurism that would embrace technology and the modern psychology of the machine age, echoed in the famous line that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Although Picasso’s cubist paintings had ushered in the age of modern art years before Marinetti’s writing, the Manifesto articulated the Modernist ethos as a philosophy for all artistic pursuit, and in the process, provided a high-energy clarion call for the subsequent century’s avant-garde artists, social visionaries, trouble-makers, and all-around punks.

One hundred years later, Marinetti’s Manifesto no longer succeeds in épater les bourgeois, and many of its core ideas — once intended to stab directly into the eye of the aging establishment — sound like romanticized justifications for powerful forces of reactionary evil. The Futurists’ push to “glorify war” sounded righteous in the nationalistic atmosphere of the early 20th century but almost instantly became abominable as millions were slaughtered in the trenches of the Great War. Marinetti’s misogyny (“contempt for women”) and racism (comparing factory sludge to the breast-milk of a Sudanese wet nurse, for example) have not accompanied the arc of progressive Western society. Even Marinetti’s cavalier espousal of “the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness” takes on a sinister ring as we seek to hose down the conflagration of the Bush presidency. Marinetti is often roundly dismissed as a proto-Fascist. True, he was an early supporter of Mussolini. And even if we counter that the poet eventually felt betrayed by his old pal when Fascist Italy took on a necrophilic infatuation with ancient Rome, you can still draw a straight line between the idea of Futurist “cleansing violence” to Nazi and Fascist Europe. And in our new battle against environmental depletion, Marinetti is again on the wrong side of history. He loves industrial waste and factory exhaust — his verse potential PR copy for the defenders of polluters on K Street.

The Manifesto does, however, contain sympathetic and benevolent ideas, but these have lost their impact for a totally opposite reason. Futurism now suffers from its success: the last century has been Marinetti’s. The Italian poet’s revolutionary embrace of automotive beauty is no longer novel in the shadow of dime-store hot-rod culture and widespread SUV mania. Marinetti’s preference for youth and novelty has morphed into the central philosophical engine to consumerist culture. Creative destruction is not just for poetry, but guided American capitalism to international dominance. Technology has permanently nestled into creative culture and can no longer be cleanly removed. The power-drill pulse of gabba music, for example, would surely overshadow the wildest ambitions of Russolo’s intonarumori. Like all great cultural innovators, Marinetti has seen his legacy suffer by being successfully subsumed. His angry manifesto now graces a million creased textbook pages — the kind of yellowed volumes he would want drowned in a diverted Venetian canal.

And like all prophets, he was completely wrong about the future. The Manifesto does not make specific predictions, but Marinetti tied the particulars of the Futurist aesthetic to his own historical circumstances. The idea of cacophonous technology is pure nostalgia: ancient dynamos may have been ear-piercing, but our cornucopia of truely life-integrated personal gadgets make no external sound at all. Marinetti heard the future as a bang, but the art of product design has offered a century of softer and softer whimpers. Our latest and greatest vision of the future wants technology to design itself out of the picture: eco-consciousness is poised to erase the modern era with the same scorn as Marinetti feels for classical times.

And yet, the Manifesto can still be a useful corrective for any contemporary artist and writer and thinker, with applicable lessons for this deeply Futurist-inspired future. Despite the familiarity of the Manifesto’s convictions, I still swoon in its romantic energy. Even in translation, Marinetti’s prose jabs against familiar rivals with the speed of a master pugilist, almost proto-gonzo. Thank god for the historical detail of good newspaper placement, or otherwise he could be easily charged with unbearable pretension and self-indulgence. But it is exactly Marinetti’s choice of romantic idealism over cynicism that allows the text to still feel alive today. His belief in belief comes in stark contrast to our sour generation, who protest equally at no one and everyone, spit at meaning, conviction, and hope. Ha, you say: these “suspect” virtues recently elected a president! That may be true, but they are still fundamentally unwelcome in the corrosive culture of cool that permeates every part of the youth culture experience. We are stuck in a strange corner: worshiping the romantic idealism of the past while immediately tearing down anyone attempting a modern analog.

The word “futurism” now regrettably refers mainly to Alvin Toffler types, sober armchair sociologists trying to predict coming waves of complex patterns for an audience of Sunday afternoon dreamers and long-term stock analysts. Marinetti had no aims on Nostradamus, but instead, aspired to be a kamikaze pilot nosediving towards stale convention, walking the walk, dreaming of poetic suicide — and yes, counting the days until “younger and stronger men” would throw him “in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!” So what would Marinetti think of our rotting shell of a pop culture, still looking to its 1960s Old Masters, judging all success against the unrepeatable case studies of Lennon/McCartney, Zimmerman/Dylan, Keroauc, slouching against the canonical ideas of 20th century art under the legitimizing banner of post-modernist sampling and pastiche. Marinetti’s call for constant artistic progress still inspires! But alas, the irony: when we waste “the best part of our strength in a useless admiration of the past,” this time Marinetti is part of the problem. To love Marinetti is to bury him. You cannot just kill your idols, but you must also burn your “Kill Your Idols” T-shirt.

Calls for Neo-Futurism will go unheeded, and I doubt I will see a day when artistic manifestos are screamed to the world from the front pages of a major daily news publication. The Futurist Manifesto, in the end, never embodied an eternal, absolute, and ahistoric philosophy, able to be adopted afresh by every waking generation, but instead is merely a single, well-executed love poem to the future of Marinetti’s present — a grip of the razor edge and sharpened point, a vivid dream of routing a long list of gray demons and sagging enemies, an artistic mission to realize the perfect human community. Marinetti seems more charming in the haze of hindsight — a contemporary version would rightly feel like an obnoxious demagogue — but admit your admiration: who does not dream of standing on the world’s summit and launching once again an insolent challenge to the stars!

Unearthed outside of the city of Sano in Tochigi-ken, this portrait photography series documents Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taishō Periods.

The mustachioed romanizers of the Meiji period — from the Roman Character Association (羅馬字会) and their 1885 pamphlet “How to write Japanese in Roman characters” to Mori “Let’s just all speak English” Arinori — were the first to seriously make the argument that Japan’s writing system would be better abandoned than reformed. The idea was influential for the better part of a century among certain circles of Japanese society, and there’s still a Nihon Rōmaji Kyōkai (“Society for the Romanization of the Japanese Alphabet”, 日本ローマ字協会) in operation today. Shiga Naoya’s famous 1946 “Let’s all just speak French” proposal, however, was essentially the movement’s last hurrah.

1946, after all, was the year that the Ministry of Education announced gendai kanazukai (modern[ized] kana usage) and the tōyō (“general-purpose”) list of simplified kanji. These two changes swept away the most egregious archaisms and inconsistencies of written Japanese, depriving the Indo-Europhiles of the orthographic horror stories they were forced to fight against in the past. With only cerebral arguments on general principles left, groups opposing the kana-kanji-kana orthography faded into irrelevance as the Japanese economic miracle progressed.

But romanizers and modernizers were not the only ones who wanted to rebuild Japanese in the Imperial years. The Kanamojikai (カナモジカイ, “Kana Character Society”), founded in 1920 and still active, were inspired by the same issues — our children waste too much time learning kanji, our writing system doesn’t fit properly down linotype wires, etc. — but had, in a way, a more radical program than other groups worrying about these issues.

(There were no doubt many practical considerations behind the decision to spell “Rōmaji kyōkai” with as many kanji as possible — 羅馬字会 — not least the lack of public understanding at the time of how to read Roman characters, but dog food is dog food and someone has to take the first bite.)

The Kanamojikai’s aim was to convert the katakana syllabary into a form that that would let readers recognize words as gestalts, like readers of English and other alphabetic languages can. Kanji and hiragana were to be locked in the basement and never spoken of again.
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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.
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