The following essay originally appeared as the June 22, 2011 entry on fashion consultant Kojima Kensuke’s personal blog “Professor Kojima Kensuke’s All-You-Can-Say.” We have published this translation without the author’s express permission as means to transmit leading Japanese opinions into English for a broader global dialogue.

I Can’t See Shibuya

The Saison Group — which led Shibuya culture in the 1970s and 1980s — no longer exists, and its remaining parts Seibu Department Store and PARCO lack the momentum they once had. The decline of Shibuya PARCO has hurt the entire Koen-doori (Park Street) area and killed off Jinnan Hill’s sprawl of select shops. Shibuya 109 was leading the neighborhood for a while, but even 109 has now seen its influence wane with the rise of fast fashion. It seems like Shibuya’s main avenue has shifted over to Inokashira-doori where all the foreign specialty brands are lined up.

Next Spring, the East Exit of Shibuya Station (in the remains of the Tokyu Bunka Kaikan) will see the opening of multi-purpose complex Shibuya Hikarie. This skyscraper will contain offices and a concert hall for musicals, and Tokyu Department Store will be in charge of the commercial space in the bottom floors. There’s a lot of talk that Hikarie’s commercial facility will become a temporary location for Tokyu’s Toyoko branch while Shibuya Station is closed for renovation, or maybe Tokyu’s flagship atop the hill at Shoto will just relocate there. Whatever the case it’s going to be a tenant-based facility. Ten years from now, after Shibuya Station is rebuilt, I assume ecute and Lumine will also show up.

PARCO is planning a renovation and big comeback, but I don’t think that’s going to bring Koen-doori back to life. And there’s no future for Shibuya’s Seibu Department Store as it stands today. There are always rumors that Tokyu’s flagship will close, and Tokyu Plaza — everyone’s already forgotten about it anyway. (Oh yeah and now that I think of it, there’s also that Shibuya Mark City in the back of the Inokashira Line.) So if nothing stops 109’s decline, Shibuya’s entire core charm will disappear. It’s unclear where Shibuya is headed as a shopping district.

While we are all waiting for the completion of Shibuya Station’s reconstruction and the new station-complex to open, the neighborhood’s shoppers will be lost to Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, or even Futago-Tamagawa and Ebisu. Shibuya is likely to decline rapidly. I, like always, have a hard time suggesting the best areas in Shibuya where companies should place stores. The completely uncoordinated plans of JR, Tokyu, PARCO, and Seibu mean that any revitalization will move at a sluggish pace. Shibuya is almost like a microcosm of contemporary Japan itself.

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 paraphrase a semi-OK-to-midding writer by saying: “Here’s to a year of savings, post-materialism, and finding new uses for all the tattered shirts you wore at age 18″.

American tech company Texas Instruments produced one of the first working prototypes of a transistor radio, but it was Japanese company Sony that turned the concept into a marketable product and spread it across the world. Similarly, Japanese scientists did not discover the semiconductor, but Japanese companies dominated the market in the 1980s, until the reemergence of Intel. For most of the 20th century, the stereotype was “the West invents, Japan perfects.” With TVs and cars, this adage still holds true today: Japan owns the high-end television market, and Toyota is looking like it will easily outlive General Motors.

NTT was the first company in the world to market a mobile phone, so maybe the previously-explained industrial dynamic is not relevant to the world of keitai denwa. Almost a full year after it’s initial release, the American iPhone finally made its well-publicized Japanese debut in mid-2008 — to a relatively tepid response. A lot of techy customers lined up in front of Softbank stores to buy the gadget, but I would not say that the iPhone has made much of a dent in the broader mobile phone “culture.” There were some complaints that the iPhone ignored Japanese users’ favorite features, but now that the software added “emoji” characters and the ability to attach a 1seg TV tuner, perhaps the phone can entice more mainstream users. I do not believe that the normal mobile phone customer — read: the normal Japanese person — necessarily will ever jump on the iPhone train. I suspect, however, that enough mobile users have seen or played with a real-life iPhone to know that this is the most fancy, luxury offering in the market. Certainly, Softbank and Apple want you to believe that.

Take this in for a second: the idea that a non-Japanese phone would be the most impressive model in the Japanese market is pretty staggering. Until the iPhone’s debut, Japan and Korea produced the most highly-advanced and elegant phones on the planet, hands-down. Sure, Japan lost its total domination of video game systems and portable music devices in recent years, but they still had a two-year advantage on phone functionality. The iPhone leap-frogged out of Cupertino and ruined the whole game. 1seg is the last weapon in the Japanese arsenal, and you have to love watching daytime “wide-shows” to care about that.

Now if the old “copy-cat” narrative of Japan held, we would probably see Japanese companies all clamoring to put out their own iPhone clone. So far we see very little movement in this direction — especially compared to Korean phone makers LG and Samsung, who are clearly biting a few nice features from Apple. Softbank’s Touch Diamond X04HT steals a bit of the touch screen magic, and Docomo has its PRO series HT-02A that even features iPhone-esque little icons at the bottom of the screen. But these phones do not perfect the iPhone idea: they just tack the most obvious features onto the old paradigm. And this is after a full year of being able to reverse engineer the sucker and develop a copy. So are Japanese companies incapable of making a phone with both elegant industrial design and user interface? Isn’t this the country of “timeless craftsmanship” and Zen and beautiful gardens, and therefore, world-class engineering prowess?

I am sure there are more intelligent opinions on this topic, but my gut feeling is that there are two reasons for a lack of iPhone one-ups. First, there seems to be a prideful refusal to admit that the iPhone is such a big leap ahead. Sony refused to make an iPod-like device for several years, and even now, they are not really putting their heart into making a rival product. Japanese companies may have fallen under the weight of their own success: for the last twenty years, they have been the premier electronics giants — with no one to copy but themselves. Going back to the scrappy underdog “copying” of the 1950s feels a little… post-war.

Hubris, however, is more of a subjective judgment than a primary motivator. The main reason probably has more to do with the Japanese phone industry having a lot of entrenched interests in the current system. Let’s face it: a nation of iPhones would be a financial disaster to the monopoly powers. All that money poured into i-mode would just be wasted. Imagine if users could browse the normal web and not some proprietary network. Oh, the humanity! Instead of being charged ¥10 every time you look up some crappy text-only page on a tiny screen, you could borrow someone’s WiFi and look up things on real-deal Google — for free. And God, imagine the moral horror of downloading applications from a free market of independent developers.

Okay, okay, I am a sarcastic partisan, but I, like many, miss the days of being blown away by the Japanese tech lead. Going to Yodobashi Camera now is still visiting a alternate future, but not necessarily a brighter one.

Japanese companies had a good run as skilled copycats. They also had a good run as the global tech leaders. This current stage of making second-rate laggard products at high prices does not seem like a good long-term position. Sony is “entertaining the future,” but maybe they should start entertaining the present. I don’t really need a mp3 player that randomly rolls around on the ground, but I find my iPod Touch useful.

2008 marked five years since the opening of Roppongi Hills — a massive office/residential/retail complex in downtown Tokyo, completed after 17 years of planning by heavyweight developer Mori Building. Roppongi Hills became the most powerful architectural symbol of early 21st century Koizumi-era economic promises, but after a combination of scandals, bankruptcies, and high rents, its reputation has been scorched — to the point where some wonder if the entire development is cursed.

When Hills opened in 2003, the Koizumi era was in full swing. “Structural reform” and “deregulation” were buzzwords. The economy was in recovery from the IT bubble recession. And the lineup of initial tenants — including many big names in IT and finance: Lehman Brothers, Son Masayoshi’s Yahoo! Japan, Mikitani Hiroshi’s Rakuten, and Horie Takafumi’s Livedoor — promised to lead Japan in a new economic direction. Today, Lehman Brothers has experienced one of the most damaging bankruptcies in world history, and almost all the former headline tenants have left the building. What happened?

Back in the Hills heyday, no one embodied the possibilities of the new economy more than Horie Takafumi — an abrasive, unapologetically casual… okay, “slob” visionary, Tokyo University dropout, and tech entrepreneur. But he was just one of the so-called Hills-zoku (“Hills tribe”) — nouveau riche businesspeople known as risk-takers, aggressively capitalist, technology driven, casual, and lavishly rich. Horie took Livedoor, a web portal that came into being just as high-speed Internet was becoming the norm in Japan, and transformed it into a market player through a series of rapid-fire acquisitions funded by stock-split schemes and backed by pure bravado and aggressive public relations. He was quite successful at inserting himself into the public zeitgeist through his blog, books, and TV appearances, earning himself enough begrudging respect to get Livedoor accepted into business association Kedianren and run an ultimately doomed campaign for a parliamentary seat (backed by Koizumi).

He undertook brazen attempts to leverage his way into a media empire, bold moves that made many powerful enemies in Japan’s business community — notably Yomiuri Shimbun president Watanabe Tsuneo. After an unsuccessful attempt at purchasing a pro baseball team, he tried a backdoor method of entering the broadcasting industry by exploiting loopholes in after-hours stock trading regulations, although ultimately thwarted by a court decision. His critics claimed that while many of Horie’s tactics followed the letter of the law, they trampled all over the Japanese “business culture” of unstated rules and careful, back-channel negotiation. Prosecutors placed on his scent eventually arrested him under a flurry of charges, including spreading false rumors, submitting false reports, and accounting manipulation.

The January 16, 2006 raid on Horie’s residences, a symbolic message to the investment community of what would not be tolerated in modern Japan, sent the stock market into a free-fall that earned its place in history as the “Livedoor Shock.”

Horie’s fall from grace marked the beginning of a long slide for Roppongi Hills’ image. Fellow tenant Murakami Yoshiaki — head of an aggressive buyout fund that exploited the president’s contacts as a former METI bureaucrat — was arrested in 2006 for insider trading allegations stemming from a conversation held with Horie. Almost three years later, Murakami and Horie continue to live in Roppongi Hills as they fight their respective legal battles, but the perceived glamor of their locale has all but evaporated.

As Prime Minister Koizumi’s term headed to a close in late 2006, worries that Japan faced growing income disparity — fanned both by reality and the many opponents of Koizumi’s neo-liberal agenda — changed the prism in which Roppongi Hills was viewed. The office complex came to be known as a symbol of the amorality and unfairness of global capitalism and became synonymous with the negative aspects of the structural reform movement.

Heading into 2008, many of the complex’s big tenants’ five-year leases came up for renewal, and some, such as Rakuten and Livedoor, decided that the now-moot image boost from locating in Roppongi Hills no longer justified the high rent. Rakuten is now in Shinagawa, while Livedoor, forced to fundamentally rework its business after the Horie scandal, has since relocated to Kabuki-cho in Shinjuku. Another former tenant, employment agency Goodwill, suffered its own spectacular fall from glory as it became clear that it was exploiting day laborers and the boss was cavorting with lots of young idols. And with the worsening of our newest financial crisis, Lehman Brothers has become the latest casualty. The last time this author checked, tourists could be seen taking photos next to the big Lehman Brothers sign just outside Hills’ main building.

Last year, Mitsui Fudosan opened Tokyo Midtown, a similar complex just down the street from Roppongi Hills. In essence, the complex seems determined to recapture the magic of Roppongi Hills but without the troublesome controversy that comes with snuggling up to start-up companies. Along with design, media, finance, and law firms (with a good dose of foreign capital), landmark tenants at the new complex include well-respected companies that actually “make things” — such as video game/fitness equipment maker Konami and film/copier juggernaut FujiFilm-Xerox. Goodwill ended its run as a Midtown tenant, but so far the complex has not garnered a reputation for corruption. Recent additions to the Tokyo skyline include Akasaka Sacas, home to TV station TBS and Hakuhodo, while other developments planned include reworked historical landmarks such as the Tokyo Central Post Office and Kabukiza in Ginza.

But these more conservative projects are unlikely to define their age as Roppongi Hills did. Despite the supposed curse and all the invective directed toward it, Roppongi Hills exuded not just lavish wealth and self-indulgence, but ultimately, economic growth, inspiration, and hope for the future. Whether or not Horie was a fraud, the zeitgeist bubbled with the sense that a new economy was brewing and entrepreneurship could be a new path for young graduates. Even women seemed to have opportunity in this new world, as underscored by the once-stellar reputation of Horie’s PR representative Otobe Ayako. While a series of regulatory incentives aimed at spurring the long-stagnant economy have instigated a massive glut of both residential and commercial construction in this city, the endless construction of new buildings without much regard for where the tenants will come from makes me worry that the decline of Roppongi Hills may just mark the slow death of Tokyo’s last good idea.