Raymond Fernand Loewy will always be remembered as a pioneering industrial designer first and foremost — his automobile designs for Studebaker and the Greyhound bus. His streamlined objects, incorporating motion lines and intimating motion through their composition, are still indelible symbols of classic American design.

Loewy was born in France in 1893, having studied engineering there and serving in the engineer corps from 1914-1918. After moving to America in 1919 he began a short-lived career in fashion illustration before shifting his focus to product design. At the time “brand marketing” was still a primitive science, and the concept of “industrial design” was unknown to the big corporations. Product “design” was simply left up to the engineers. It was Loewy’s high-minded intention to turn corporate perceptions around.

Ever the self-publicist, Loewy carried business cards emblazoned with the legend “Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.” Perhaps not as zippy as today’s catch phrases but it did the trick. Although he ran up against incredulity in conservative quarters, he gained the confidence of more forward-thinking executives who, struggling with increased competition in the aftermath of the Depression, began to see that good design could be a selling point. In many cases — for example, that of the Frigidaire refrigerator that Loewy designed for General Motors in the 1940’s — the companies saw sales skyrocket.

His accomplishments as a graphic designer are secondary in notoriety, though just as striking. In particular, his company’s logo design for Shell Oil and the ubiquitous Lucky Strike cigarette packaging are some of the best known examples of his work that carry on today, albeit in revised form.

However, it was another piece of Loewy’s cigarette packaging design that struck a chord in Japan — his project to redesign the packaging for Peace cigarettes.

Some of the first people in Japan to acknowledge the power of graphic design were the tobacco merchants in Meiji era Japan. From traditional woodcut print packaging to packaging utilizing elaborate design work and fine printing techniques, tobacco products from numerous merchants competed wholesale for public appeal. Coinciding with a marketing battle came an increased monopoly on the manufacture and sale of tobacco products — an increasingly limited number of companies offered their wares to the public in ever more elaborate packaging.

This came to a halt in the 1940s as World War II saw cigarette packaging become more reductive in both design and printing quality.

Loewy’s 1952 redesign of the packaging for Peace was a return to form for the Japanese tobacco market. Pre-war images of happy children and fireworks were eschewed in favor of an iconic, though oddly positioned geometric rendering of a dove in Loewy’s steamlined style. That the bird appears to be plummeting instead of flying upward is an odd stylistic choice, however it was elegantly rendered and the package has remained virtually the same since its inception.

What really caught the public’s attention was Loewy’s design fee for redesigning the ubiquitous brand. Unheralded in any sector of graphic design in Japan, the project fee for Loewy designing the packaging was a crisp ¥1,000,000 — a fortune at that time. The sheer amount had the nation atwitter and instantly skyrocketed public opinion of the work of commercial artists. Graphic designers and illustrators saw an increased perception of value in their work, as well as a noted increase in design fees in the years immediately following the Peace re-branding project. Other benefits in the Japanese workplace saw no such commensurate raised valuation, however, the elevated position of graphic design as a viable and valuable cultural practice through increased budgets for design was a boon for Japanese graphic designers.

It is worth noting this footnote in history in hopes of prominent designers working in Japan and abroad for the Japanese market making an effort to push both for an increase in client budgets and for a subsequent public disclosure of design fees. In a country where good design is considered both essential and integral to project success, design fees are estimated to be one-third to one-half of their analogs in North America and the Continent. Simultaneously, the social status of design workers continues to rise as the Japanese public becomes increasingly design-conscious and sophisticated in their design taste. Budgets, however, seem to be firmly fixed in place, though the global economic woes of late have taken their toll, as well.

Where is the modern-day Mr. Loewy now when we need him so desperately?

Fujoshi kanojo 腐女子 (”Fujoshi girlfriend”) is a new movie based on a blog by “Pentabu” that rode the original post-moe fujoshi boom to bestselling book status a few years ago. (Pentabu is currently blogging part 2.) I don’t have anything in particular to say about the movie itself, but the way it is being marketed is an excellent example of how the media misunderstands — or at least misrepresents — fujoshi.

Media treatment of the fujoshi concept has always been problematic. The root of the problem is, as usual, otaku culture. When the Akiban hordes first spread across the steppes of the mass media, triumphant cat emoticons unfurled, they brought their own women with them: maids, underground idols, voice actresses, cosplayers, and underage cartoon characters. That virtually all of these women were either personae played for cash or entirely imaginary did not prevent these ideals of womanhood establishing themselves in the public mind as a badly-needed feminine yin to Akibacentric otaku culture’s hypertrophied yanginess.

As a result, when media attention eventually turned to actual fujoshi, the elevator pitch — “They’re otaku, except girls!” — was more or less accurate (granting a broad reading of “otaku”), but the implications were misunderstood. If fujoshi were girl otaku, they must be the girls usually appearing alongside otaku in those TV specials and magazine articles, right? You know — the maids.

But no. As you might expect, although fujoshi and otaku often turn to the same texts for raw cultural material, they have very little to do with each other as cultural actors. There are fujoshi stores in Akihabara, but the main fujoshi center is in Ikebukuro — and it developed around a core of bookstores, not transistor hustlers.

“fujoshi syndicate”, a group of self-described “fujoshi OLs” from Tokyo (the only named member is one Ōta Maki 大田真樹) address this exact point in their recent book Naze, fujoshi wa danson-johi na no ka?『なぜ、腐女子は男尊女卑なのか？』 (”Why are fujoshi male chauvinists?”), discussing the cover of another book from 2007: Bokutachi no ki ni naru fujoshi 『僕たちの気になる腐女子』 (”Those fascinating fujoshi”), which also featured maid imagery on the cover.

Let’s start with the “face” of the book, its cover. The cover of Bokutachi no ki ni naru fujoshi is a girl in a maid outfit. — So at this point, it’s already failed. It’s true that there are a few fujoshi among the girls working in Akihabara’s maid cafes, but most of the staff there are not fujoshi but “Akiba girls” (アキバ系女子).

What are “Akiba girls”? By this we mean girls who love the anime and manga subcultures, but who also go to Akihabara to be made a fuss of. [...] They are otaku, but they don’t do the earthy “Let’s party, just us girls!” thing; they’re on good terms with male otaku too. One representative example would be Nakagawa Shōko (Shokotan).

In other words, otaku girls who wear maid outfits are not part of fujoshi culture, but rather Akiba culture. [...]

The syndicate then relate an apparently true story about how they once asked a maid cafe employee where they could find Messe Sanoh, a specialist retailer of woman’s video games, and that maid didn’t know: incontrovertible proof that she, at least, was no fujoshi.

The fujoshi syndicate actually spend more of Naze, fujoshi wa on this and other misconceptions of fujoshi by non-fujoshi (especially men) than they do on the title question. One argument they keep returning to is that the cosplaying, go-shujin-sama-ing media fujoshi addresses a deep psychological need within post-Bubble men. High salary, highly respected alma mater, and physical height: two of these three Bubble-traditional status markers are much harder to obtain than they used to be, and the idea of a secret caste of women — maybe there are some right there in your office! — who prefer the company of low-status, sensitive, intellectual types, and will even play along with their fantasies — this is bound to have appeal.

(Ironically, argue fujoshi syndicate, real fujoshi are just as status-conscious as ever, and have no interest in otaku as a rule. The syndicate traces this state of affairs to fujoshi reading material and its emphasis on status and power differentials as a source of eroticism.)

The argument here is not that there aren’t any otaku women who genuinely enjoy cosplay and Akiba culture, or that this is somehow inauthentic. Arguments about terminology and authenticity are a dead end. The question is to what extent the prominence given to these individuals impedes understanding of broader “fujoshi culture.” There is also arguably a political element involved: you can see this as the co-option of the idea of the fujoshi to reinforce sociosexual norms, the replacement of a uniquely female culture identity with one defined only in relation to male interests.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not a fair fight. As long as keen interests in fancifully-depicted gay romance and other distinguishing features of non-Akiba fujoshi don’t show up in photos, the media will always prefer the women dressed as frilly maids.

According to Japanamerica author Roland Kelts, Patrick Macias is “an American otaku and blogger extraordinaire.” More accurately, he is the author of multiple books in both English and Japanese and currently the Editor-in-Chief of Otaku USA. Mr. Macias was in Tokyo a few weeks back, and we met over a discount tonkatsu lunch to talk about the state of Japanese recession and the current yankii cultural takeover. Luckily, a recording device captured our dialogue (and my total inability to enunciate words or complete sentences).

So please enjoy the hour-long mp3!

Download: The Tonkatsu Tapes: Marxy vs. Patrick Macias on Japanese Recessionary Culture
General Néojaponisme Podcast RSS Feed: .rss

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!

“I come to Akihabara…” / “I came to Akihabara…”

Sunday, June 8, 2008. A man drives a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, killing three. He emerges from his vehicle and goes on a stabbing rampage that leaves four others dead before he is finally apprehended.

He tells police, “I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn’t matter who they were. I came alone.”

The Japanese media attempts to brand the perpetrator as a fan of anime and manga — an otaku. Fuji TV reveals that the killer, an impoverished 25 year old temp worker at an auto components factory, liked to sing anime theme songs at karaoke. A Tokyo newspaper headline blasts the “Evil Deeds of the Akiba Otaku.”

By the June 10th, the story goes worldwide. The Sydney Morning Herald labels the crime to be the work of a “manga enthusiast” and a “comic book killer.”

Yet real evidence is hard to find. The killer had only drawn a single manga style illustration in his high school yearbook. Police recovered a mere handful of items from his small apartment, including an assortment of anime and video games.

They number exactly seven in all, the same number as the “Akihabara Massacre” death toll.

On June 13, the Tokyo Public Safety Council indefinitely suspends the long standing Sunday hokoten tradition in Akihabara. The streets will be reopened to traffic and pedestrians will no longer be permitted free reign of Chuo-dori until further notice. Police presence (and the random bag checks they bring with them), is noticeably increased.

On September 24th, Japan has a new head of government: Asō Tarō. The international fan press is quick to dub him “The Otaku Prime Minister” on account of a widely reported love of manga.

Years earlier, he makes headlines by holding political rallies in Akihabara where he addressed the crowds as “My fellow otaku.”

October 26: the new PM returns triumphantly to the area and says, “I can cheer up when I come to Akihabara.”

He is also quoted as saying, “We’ve got to brighten up Japan. You’ll never pick up girls unless you have a bright attitude. So don’t be having a ‘Japan’s future is looking dim’ look on your face. Have a positive attitude if you wanna pick up girls.”

On December 7th, 2008 the Mainichi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun report that a 21 year old unemployed man suspected of murdering and dumping the body of a five year old girl in Toganeshi is an anime and manga fan. His room, decorated with posters from anime intended for young girls, also contains bookshelves filled with manga from the series Precure, Saint Seiya, and Bleach.

Only the Anime News Network website follows the story outside of Japan.

“This guy just killed Akihabara the way Charles Manson killed the Sixties. And we’re all under arrest now…” I wrote on my blog earlier this year. I still don’t know what I meant by that.

Kato Tomohiro

Asō Tarō

Katsuki Ryo