Sight unseen, Japan’s first truly contemporary art fair opens tonight. Scheduled on the same week as the Art Fair Tokyo, the 101 Tokyo Art Fair forces the megalopolis into its first Tokyo Art Week.

The world looks to Tokyo for what’s next, casually ignoring that what is there now consists of a tangled and underdeveloped infrastructure. It’s akin to many folks’ experience of moving to Tokyo and learning that it actually takes months to even get an internet connection installed. Compared to Basel and New York, Tokyo is a relative village of hovels when it comes to fine art as a commercial system.

On the macro scale, there is a severe lack of support unparalleled in other first world nations. No zaibatsu has a contemporary (or even modern) collection of note, and there is a complete lack of consumer awareness regarding fine art, though magazines like Brutus and Art-It have slowly been attempting to educate their readers about art history and the contemporary milieu. On the micro level, most Tokyo apartments lack adequate systems to actually hang art and real-estate agents charge exorbitant fees to plug holes in walls. There is a complete lack of a support network for emerging artists age 20 to 30 who more often than not leave their art careers in the dust in order to pursue a regular paycheck.

What has been present is an art fair that is more akin to a trade show than an art fair in both look and spirit. The Art Fair Tokyo would do well to look at the 101 interlopers as a source of inspiration. In lieu of a hodgepodge, non-curated mishmash of different genres, eras, and stuffed walls of the work that hasn’t sold for the year, 101 Tokyo offers another option. Namely, it’s a cultivated, highly curated sampling of exhibition spaces. Each gallery involved with 101 is permitted to show three artists maximum, and only new work is exhibited. The 101 Tokyo organizers are committed to educating their audience. They have gone as far as offering two separate seminars on art investing in Tokyo’s market in both English and Japanese, as well as a seminar on Collecting Art in the Context of Wealth Management.

There are other aspects of 101 Tokyo that are quite a change from the other gig in town. The fair is a stark contrast — the Director is an artist, and the crew running the fair is genuinely excited about visual work. All are young, a 32 year-old being the eldest, and they are decidedly international. 101 Tokyo stands as a series of events of inclusivity, something that must be cultivated if contemporary fine art as a commercial sector is to grow into something viable in Tokyo. They even have parties where you can shake your ass and even potentially get laid by someone your age whom you enjoy talking to about contemporary aesthetics with — more than can be said for elsewhere.

As purportedly over-invested in design and architecture as Tokyo is (which is debatable and a whole lot of lip service to say the least), contemporary fine art in Tokyo could really use a kick in the pants. With luck, 101 Tokyo will deliver a decent bruise.

Harajuku is the Disneyland of global youth culture. Just as the Magic Kingdom has spacially-divided “Lands” to represent different parts of the human imagination (Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, etc.), Harajuku has Punks browsing at Vivienne Westwood, Mods shopping for authentic surplus army parkas, Skinheads scuffing up their red Docs on the curb in front of Londsdale, clean-cut 21st C. Hip Hoppers laying down Fukuzawas for some Ice Cream, Skaters at Stüssy, college Preps bouncing between Lacoste and Ralph Lauren, ’60s girls with decal eyes storming Courrèges, and Paris-dreaming Art Students in deconstructed garb floating down the hill from Comme des Garçons. This one Tokyo neighborhood has more stores dedicated to youth street fashion than anywhere else in the entire world. And not only does Harajuku singlehandedly preserve dead subcultures, the district has created some of the most unique fashion looks of the last two decades: namely, Decora-chan/Hyper-Cutie Punk (as seen in FRUiTS) and Gothic Lolita. No matter how much attendance declines in the next decade due to anemic Japanese birth rates, Harajuku has secured an almost-permanent place as one of the Seven Wonders of the Pop Culture World.

In light of this, an entire book on the Harajuku neighborhood is almost criminally overdue, and we are blessed that fashion writer and editor Tiffany Godoy finally delivered with her colorful new work Style Deficit Disorder. Godoy — probably one of the very few Westerners to ever have worked as a real-deal editor for a real-deal Japanese art or style magazine — hits all the most critical points for understanding the historical development of this youth culture sanctuary. Japanese fashion critic Hirakawa Take, KERA editor Suzuki Mariko, and Honeyee.com boss Suzuki Tetsuya pop up to provide short essays of macro-level analysis, but the book mostly tells the story of Harajuku through photographs and short profiles. Godoy offers introductions to the most important people, places, and brands — from the Central Apartments (locus for the birth of young independent brands in 1970s), Yacco Takahashi (Japan’s first stylist), brand Bigi, An•An’s original model Kaneko Yuri, seminal high-fashion magazine Ryuko Tsushin, New Wave band The Plastics, Comme des Garçons, iconic Takarajima magazine CUTiE, stylist Sonya Park, hyper-cute brand Super Lovers, beyond-weird street couture label 20471120, original A Bathing Ape graphic designer Skatething, and over-hyped, under-stocked Ura-Harajuku brand Bounty Hunter. SDD somewhat lacks an overarching narrative to link together these encyclopedic references, but redeems itself by addressing topics that have never seen the daylight of English: in particular, Rockabilly brand Cream Soda and iconic punkish designer and Godmother to Ura-Harajuku, Ohkawa Hitomi from Milk. For anyone who wants to know the whos and whats of the neighborhood, I highly recommend the book. (Reactions will be divided on the in-your-face graphic design.)

Style Deficit Disorder greatly succeeds at its goal of laying out the facts behind Harajuku’s development. The subtext, however, may be even more interesting. By taking a step back and doing a meta-reading, the book allows us to glimpse into the organizing myths the West has built up around this sacred fashion neighborhood. The Harajuku of SDD’s introductory chapter is quite literally the most amazing place on earth: masses of youth successfully fighting to create their own trends at a “grass-roots” level in the face of an increasingly-irrelevant global fashion market pushing industry-decided clothing on a rigid seasonal basis.

This “Harajuku Myth,” as I understand it, is comprised of five statements:
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A mini-documentary about sexual assault on the Tokyo subway.

(If you have trouble viewing video in our lightbox player, please go directly to the video here.)

Directed by Ian Lynam
Research by Ariki Rie
Featuring Ito Aki
Music by Copy (courtesy of Audio Dregs)

The cover story in the February issue of Takarajima 『宝島』 is titled 「バカ化する若者」— “Youth are Becoming Idiots.” The small print above the title states 「”ゆとり”チルドレンが日本を滅ぼす！」You see, our idiot Japanese children — spoiled by the less rigid “yutori” education established in the early 1990s as a way to bolster individualism and creative thought — are ruining Japan. Tough to be a kid in Japan these days: you are not only stupid, you’re a traitor.

Takarajima, however, is hardly broaching a new topic. Earlier this year, Japanese critic Uchida Tatsuru’s latest book 『下流志向──学ばない子どもたち、働かない若者たち』」 (my trans: Aiming Downward: Kids Who Don’t Learn, Youth Who Don’t Work) got some attention, another in a long series of “下流” titles about the (semi-voluntary) descent of middle-class kids into the pits of lower-class hell. The basic idea that the younger generation has failed “society,” however, goes back even further — one of the few constant themes in 20th century Japanese social criticism. Maybe the radical young soldiers in the 1930s who assassinated liberal politicians and demanded greater power for the Emperor proved themselves good kids in a warped sense, really living up to the ideals of the Imperial Rescript on Education. But ever since then, young people have basically dropped the ball generation after generation: juvies, hippies, bikers, consumerists, whores. Youth of the 1980s were derisively christened 新人類 (shinjinrui, The New Breed) — almost as if to say, these kids’ rotten values must be the result of genetic dysfunction and devolution, like overbred mini-chihuahuas.

So like every cohort in the past, the current batch of Adults are ripping into their own offspring, regretting the Whitney Houston Principle that “Children are our future.” The cast of guest authors at Takarajima, however, are not suffering from mere moral outrage. They have objective measure on their side!

Famed management consultant Ohmae Kenichi starts things off by noting that Japanese 20-somethings do not sufficiently feel urges for material things. They no longer desire cars (this is supported by lots of data and a panicky auto industry). They do not buy computers, and their share of total web users has dropped from 23.5% in 2000 to 11.9% in 2006. They are not interested in international affairs apart from the occasional vacation abroad. They have low expectations for the future, nil ambition, and not enough wrath to make any challenges to an economic system that puts all the nation’s assets into the hands of their elders. With such low salaries and pitiful future earning potential, young men find it too sadistic to ask for their girlfriend’s hand in marriage — especially when women can live a life of luxury under their parents’ auspices.

Ohmae makes a particularly good point that the weakened consumer power of youth in Japan has forced manufacturers to re-gear their marketing and merchandising to suit older customers. (This is evidenced already in the fact that almost no youth-oriented products made the “Hit Products of 2007” guide in Nikkei’s newspaper Marketing Journal.) Since most material needs are manufactured or at least greatly influenced by the commercial complex, companies ignoring youth essentially amplifies the problem of their insufficient materialism.
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My friend pulled some truly punk rock ingenuity, learned from years of bunking down with crusties and sketchy West Coast kids. In MacGuyver-like fashion, he injected a nearly-parched inkjet cartridge with rubbing alcohol in order to coax out enough ink to print both of our invites to the Nike SB Nothing But the Truth video premiere. Even though I didn’t witness my friend’s feat of Yankee can-do spirit, his simple retelling ended up being the most interesting event of the evening.

Located amongst love hotels and gauche rock clubs, the theater used for the video premiere is a stark futurist slab with concrete façade — a venue more inclined towards reprints of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent than commercial skateboard hype. Apart from the extravagance of Nike’s promotional crew renting out a theater in Shibuya, there wasn’t as much flash and pop as I expected. Nothing like the Shanghai premiere with ramps, several of the SB team, and a bouquet of scantily-attired girl-hires. Maybe the budget had already been blown on the video itself, and the remaining green would get further cashed out in RMB rather than yen. That’s casino capitalism doubled down: marketing and venture commerce + faddish extreme sports = bloody consequences for bad judgment.

The subdued crowd of style-fiends in expensive denim and fitted T’s with requisite 59 caps and unscratched boards seemed nonplussed by the chic theater, and this indifference hung thick in the auditorium air. Two kids sat quietly beside me, rocking a pair of expensively-swooshed windbreakers cut and patterned from a 1980’s steroid-muscle beach aesthetic. They murmured “hot” or “amazing” or “scary” as key moments of physical jeopardy and triumph blazed across the screen.

Skaters in the video rocked-and-rolled and proved street credentials with tricky flips done switch over (requisite) gaps or big flips over handrails to waiting embankments. The filming relied on pre-lit environments and careful choreography while the edits were fast and clean. It left the skaters sanitized and ironically unremarkable in their consummate displays of rare skill. Nike SB has labored to infuse their brand insurgency with legitimacy, but their image-crafting gets in the way of actually revealing how skaters perform split-second miracles through careful calculation and control. Besides Chet Childress’ scenes and a few sequences shot on scarred and barely-ridable concrete highway barriers, the skating itself was mostly a series of predictable set-pieces which belie the risks and intensity of finding spots and dialing them in.
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