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.

English / 日本語

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Tokyo may be the ultimate embodiment of “concrete jungle” — not just because of the incomprehensible sprawl, but also the large number of trendy homes, offices, and stores conspicuously using unadorned concrete exteriors. After seeing thousands of these buildings around town (especially in wealthy residential areas), we had a lot of questions: Does this conspicuous use of building material as a design motif serve a functional need? Is it merely a faux-functional design idea? Is it a trend from the 1990s? Is unadorned concrete the only alternative to those atrocious tiles?

We went to our neighborhood architect Keiji Ashizawa to get answers on the origins of these unadorned concrete buildings (コンクリート打ち放し) in Japan.

A gallery of concrete houses is available here. Photographs by Sean Wood.

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If you just leave the exterior in concrete (without adding tiling or bricks, etc.), it’s called “concrete uchihanashi/uchippanashi.”

When did these uchihanashi houses start to be built in Japan?

They have a long history. In 1923, Antonin Raymond built his own house in Azabu using concrete exteriors. This is said to be one of the earliest concrete exterior buildings.

Le Corbusier and Louis Isadore Kahn used this style a lot too. (see the Salk Institute and Chandigarh) They were superstars among Japanese architects in the past and still continue to be inspirational.

Azuma Takamitsu‘s “Tou no Ie” (「塔の家」, The Tower House) is famous in architectural circles, known as a perfect, urban concrete house. But the house has no insulation and no covering.

Ando Tadao is a follower of Le Corbusier. His work “Sumiyoshi no Nagaya” (「住吉の長屋」) had a huge impact on many Japanese architects. At first, he was building these concrete uchihanashi houses because they are cheap. In 1973, a house he built was rumored to have bad leaks in the roof. So Mr. Ando bought the house from the owner, and it’s currently the Tadao Ando Office.

Why are there so many of these houses and buildings now?

There are a cheap and easy choice for architects.

So it’s cheaper to make buildings with unadorned concrete exteriors?

Yes, it’s cheap, but if the interior is also concrete, it can get very cold…

Can concrete houses be built with insulation?

If the exterior is only concrete, most people will put insulation inside the building. But as you can imagine, lots of architects want to do both the exterior and interior as concrete uchihanashi. This creates an extremely strong spatial feeling, and at the same time, lets you assemble the building with simple details, making it easy to express the spatial intention. (For example, the Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church.)

But, concrete-only residential houses are well-known to very cold in winter and very hot in summer. That causes a lot of trouble, and the architect’s plans and the clients’ plans often clash.

However, concrete uchihanashi is often done for the interior and exterior for reasons of budgets. Also, the law requires houses built in urban areas to use a non-wooden building method, so there are times when you are forced to build in concrete for residences.

If you leave both the exteriors and interiors as concrete, it may be much cheaper, but the living environment suffers. Lately, construction methods where the exterior gets insulated (外断熱) have become more widely used. If you do that, you can use the concrete as heat storage.

Why does the concrete always have those circle ○ marks?

This link and link illustrate the process of pouring concrete. The circles are the byproducts of “separators” — parts used to secure the mold. But if you lay out the holes properly, you can get very beautiful concrete uchihanashi like Ando Tadao.

Have concrete uchihanashi houses become less popular in recent years?

Yes, you might say they are starting to be a bit “out.” Uchihanashi houses do not stand out much anymore. They are still cheap to make, but architects and clients are now looking for other materials because unadorned concrete is too popular.

What about other options for building exteriors besides unadorned concrete?

There are lots, like tiling and stucco.

Why do most developers/owners choose tiling?

The amount of money for a mortgage depends on the property value of the building. Developers of “mansion” apartments like to use tile exteriors so that the buyers can take out a big loan. Tiled exteriors signal a high property asset value to Japanese banks, more than unadorned concrete or even paint. So because of that, lots of apartments use tiled exteriors.

Do construction companies put pressure on architects to use concrete because it’s cheaper?

No. Rather, architects put pressure on the builders to leave the exterior in clean concrete. Actually, it’s pretty difficult to do this, so there has been lots of development in techniques for repair recently.

For example, there’s something called the Yoshida Method. The company mostly consists of painters, and they repair rough concrete to make it look like a nice concrete uchihanashi exterior. They employ art school students as part-time workers. If you use their technique, you can make any wall look like concrete uchihanashi.

You can also buy concrete uchihanashi wallpaper for normal interiors. It’s kind of dumb, but very Japanese.

Most normal buildings use tiles or plaster/stucco or paint the concrete exterior. Just leaving the concrete as is, it should be cheap, but lately, you need to either put a clear coating material (to keep the concrete clean) or repair it through things like the Yoshida Method. So it’s actually not as cheap as you think.

Remember MiniDisc? The little square-shaped, muddy-sounding, smooth-playing media that made your standard Target-bought Discman feel as if you were walking around town with an ancient leaded-fueled turntable. The MiniDisc never caught on in the U.S., but the Japanese still won: Companies from that one island in the East controlled the entire portable market. If you wanted to see the edge of available technology in 2000, Biccamera in Shibuya was Consumer Mecca.

Then came the iPod. And within five years, “portable audio” became something that Japanese companies were really bad at.

But even after the iPod debacle, the Japanese and Koreans had one field in which they were absolute masters: the cell phone. Americans were literally forced by Sprint to use three-year old LG models. Guys in New Jersey pulled up friends’ numbers on tiny black-and-white screens while guys at the New Otani browsed a mini-version of the web in full color. Maybe the Motorola RAZR sold some phones in Japan, but c’mon: Media Skin, Marc Newson’s Talby? Compared to Japan, America looked like a third-world nation in terms of cell-phone standards.

Then came the iPhone.

Now you could argue that the full menagerie of Japanese phones still destroys the American selection or that Japanese phones can do neat things like receive broadcast television signals that the iPhone can’t. (Because I know you would never want to miss an episode of Waratte Ii Tomo.) Nevertheless, the iPhone — a single package — leapfrogs everything the Japanese market has to offer, especially considering the excellence of the user interface.

If we were smart, we would see this as the battle between multinational conglomerates instead of nations, but we won’t: The iPhone takes a serious bite out of the Japanese gross national cred on advanced cell phones. One product changed everything.

There is a recent Docomo commercial featuring hot actor Eita and some other guy showing off the latest and greatest function on a Docomo phone — get this, better yet, sit down — a motion-detecting boxing video game. Forget watching video libraries of films and TV shows on a wide screen, a WiFi-ready Internet device, and a revolutionary way to browse media archives, you can play a motion-detecting boxing game on a brand new Docomo phone if you set up your phone in a quiet room and punch near the screen. To be honest, that would have looked pretty cool if the other side of the world had not suddenly erupted with semi-religious technological progress.

(Wait, Marxy, are you considering the fact that Docomo has way more celebrity spokesmen than the iPhone? Fine, I admit it: Dentsu is way better at bringing together large teams of actors and actresses than the TBWA people.)

We can argue over small questions of functionality and design, but the Hype Machine in this Battle for Global Cool isn’t concerned with details. If someone asks, what’s the single coolest phone in the world today, would someone point to Japan or Korea? What would it take for Japanese phones to retake the title? Motion-detection curling?

World, you ready to envy? Your social superior Tyler Brule (add circumflex and accent aigu to the last word with your imagination) loves the new Roppongi super development project Tokyo Midtown. If you are thinking that Roppongi Hills was enough for this city — with its Starbucks, luxury hotel, Tokyo City View, J-wave radio station, and art museum — you are dead wrong. Tokyo Midtown offers visitors a completely different world: a five-star luxury hotel, a dramatic view of the city, an art museum, and a Starbucks complete with — get this — a radio station.

Those with a keen eye should have known that Tokyo Midtown was coming to Tokyo’s midtown. The Dentsu predictions for 2007 took the gamble to bet that Tokyo Midtown would be a huge media phenomenon — no doubt a self-fulfilling prophecy. Brutus has been doing a multi-part paid-for advertorial feature on the complex for months now. If you thought Tokyo was a great city before Mitsui Fudosan decided to show their rivals in aristocratic brinkmanship that they could do luxury Roppongi way better, go ahead and kill yourself. When you get to Heaven, surely it will be look exactly like Tokyo Midtown.

Now Mr. Circumflex Aigu could be right — Tokyo Midtown could be incredible — but whether the features are spectacular or not, at what point do we citizens of Tokyo cease to be impressed with the constant escalation of massive developments? At some point, the Japanese media was abuzz with breathless anticipation about Sunshine 60 — a now-yellowing complex built in East Ikebukuro by the Seibu brothers on the haunted land of Sugamo Prison. Mori’s Ark Hills was a huge deal when it opened, but now it’s just a pedestrian place where I get my library books and eat bland Subway subs with Rory P. Wavecrest once-in-a-while. Remember Roppongi Hills? That glorious glass-and-concrete tribute to capital accumulation did not just fade into semi-obscurity, but celebrated an acute comeuppance when the princes of the castle (Sir Horie and Sir Murakami) got busted for financial misdealings. At least its perimeter was host to social conflict.

Reading the supplied descriptions of these developments reminds me of the original plans for EPCOT — utopian “cities within cities” to house, feed, employ, and entertain select communities. With Roppongi Hills, however, Mori only let Japan’s recently-emboldened upper classes into the gates. The investment bankers and New Economy brats in the Hills office space can enjoy the highest-priced apartments, the most prestigious hotel, a host of exclusive restaurants, or just go to the Heartland bar and pretend they are not in Japan. We untidy masses are given the chance to save up our measly earnings so we may visit, grab a tall latte, enjoy the art museum, watch a movie, and buy some things at inflated prices as long as we go home quickly and do not bother the VIPs who live there.

Not to be outdone, Mitsui Fudosan have now spent their billions to recreate the exact same experience a couple of blocks away, and as good consumers, we will throw away our Roppongi Hills lust and direct our eyes on even more concrete arranged in an even more-exclusive and awe-inspiring way. “Midtown-zoku”: A buzzword coming to a media outlet near you soon.

In an economy very literally centered around constant expansion through construction and real-estate development, we would be silly not to expect a Tokyo Midtown and even sillier not to expect Mori and his millions to take revenge at a new location in a few years’ time. This game between ancient royal families is a constant cycle and the central driver of Tokyo urban planning. Might makes right. Value is determined by simple addition. Bigger is better. No time for renovation or conservation. Destroy the community of Shimokitazawa to build an amazing new highway. Flatten the old yakuza drinking holes of Roppongi so that yakuza-backed construction agencies can get some new employment.

Build, use, discard, Tokyo.

The Japanese government is setting up another task force to tackle the difficult issue of work-life balance. Experts will come together to figure out how working hours can be effectively curbed.

Any Western spectator of Japanese business life will immediately bemoan the absurdly long hours expected of company employees. Work may end at 6:30 at many Japanese firms, but punching the clock at 6:31 is like sticking your chopsticks straight up in a bowl of rice. In the past, there may have been a hierarchical duty to stay longer than your own boss or go out drinking with management, but even as that corporate culture fades into the past, you do not see new employees out the door at a decent hour.

Long hours, however, do not mean high worker productivity. In the past, Japan has fared worse than Italy on this measure, and we can unscientifically assume that the Italians are getting a leisurely riposo in there while the Japanese drones buy a convenience store bento and eat at their desks for 15 minutes.

So cutting working hours in Japan is ironically an attempt to increase productivity: the article states “companies could boost the productivity of their employees because they will try to finish work in a limited time and will work efficiently.” Getting everyone home early could also lead to many positive social externalities, including more parental involvement in child-raising and less sleep deprivation in the general population. Objectively speaking, there are few downsides to limiting work hours. Perhaps the firms themselves lose huge amounts of free overtime hours, but this new plan promises to give them higher productivity in return.

Westerners immediately decry the madness if not the moral offense of workers slaving away at their companies until the wee hours of the nights. Liberal enlightenment ideas of the individual having free reign over his own self-definition tend to resent the concept of the “company man” — where individuals are reduced to inputs. Marxists believe that the worker must pursue self-actualization that puts the fruits of his labor within his own hands and not the capitalist’s.

Work-life balance, however, is a completely loaded Western liberal concept because it creates a dichotomy between work and life — as if they are antagonizing forces. The Confucian-Statist philosophical underpinning of modern Japanese society assigns each individual a specific, unmalleable role and posits self-actualization as the loyal and perfect performance of that role. Conditioning of these beliefs starts early: Young athletes choose to play one sport for their academic careers and do not change sports with the seasons like you see in other nations. Baseball players are baseball players. In general, Japanese people have one hobby, which leads to the famously maniacal dedication to certain “ridiculous” pursuits like competitive eating or obsession with a single fashion brand.

Since the Meiji Restoration, citizens of Japan have been able to choose their destiny and occupation without adhering to the strict Neo-Confucian caste system of warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants (士農工商) seen in the Tokugawa era. However, once the die is cast at 22 and the individual enters the company, corporate duty becomes “life.” There may be other familial duties, but the general culture clearly places these as secondary — especially in a gender-divided society where women alone are expected to embody “family” and all its subsequent duties. The “firm as family” ideology may have been invented in the early 20th century as a convenient form of labor control (that echoes the “nation as family” rhetoric of the kokutai [國體]), but even without the idea of “family ties” creating corporate loyalty, there remains a fundamental Confucian understanding of one’s place in the world being a fixed locus within Heaven’s order and not a progressive position of man’s choosing.

These days the “family firm” belief is drying out with the rise of tenshoku (転職) mid-career company change. Workers may choose new masters once and a while, but once the movement is made, long hours remain a key part of the corporate life. Because again, corporate life is life.

Eradicating this belief will be extremely difficult — barring some kind of Romantic revolution. The number of freeters is apparently dropping, echoing the original analysis that these young people could not find full-time employment and were not willfully eschewing it. The low birth-rate and unwillingness to open up immigration do not help the drive for lower hours. The OECD estimates that productivity will have to increase and hours stay at current levels in order to make up for the smaller future workforce. Retirement will also have to be pushed back.

State economic goals have almost always trumped individual rights in Japan, so I do not think the government will actually pursue a true course of “free time” that could cut into GDP growth. But more importantly, a large percentage of the population possesses a core belief that identity can only be attained through organizational dedication and that long-hours are a key part of that role performance. The government can mandate holidays, but they will have a real challenge to erase the base social ideology of (at least) the last two centuries. One can make the claim that these popular beliefs have their roots in elite social control, but even in that case, the elite will have to erase the effects of their massive success in completely legitimizing demands for worker duty.

If you think lower work hours will be a part of Japanese culture soon, you must be dreaming. And if you are dreaming, you are sleeping well. And if you are sleeping well, you are clearly not working enough!