Set-up

From Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals:

Many of the otaku today who consume adult comics and “girl games” probably separate [genital needs and subjective "sexuality"]; and their genitals simply and animalistically grew accustomed to being stimulated by perverted images. Since they were teenagers, they had been exposed to innumerable otaku sexual expressions: at some point, they were trained to sexually stimulated by looking at illustrations of girls, cat ears, and maid outfits. However, anyone can grasp that kind of stimulation if they are similarly trained, since it is essentially a matter of nerves. (89)

Punchline

Recent pictures of AKB48 (scroll down).

Popular culture may be imploding in Japan, but this has been good news for the otaku. With not much competition from the trend-minded consumer habits of normal human beings, the otaku have become the most influential player in the market. The few cultural breakthroughs of the last few years have come from this long-standing subculture’s deep psychological need to interact with people in mediated ways, from obsessing over idol collectives, making songs powered by vocaloids, collecting toys, anonymously writing online about their newest favorite anime featuring little girls, and following every moment of Cooking Idol Main.

To get a better sense of what is going on lately in otaku culture, Marxy of Néojaponisme sat down with Patrick Macias — editor of Otaku USA and author of such books as Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo — and Matt Alt — author of Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide and Ninja Attack!: True Tales of Assassins, Samurai, and Outlaws — in a cold basement, warmed only by the glow of an old kotatsu.

Listen to the hour-long discussion on the past, present, and future of otaku culture and what it means for us non-otaku.

Download: On Otaku: Marxy x Patrick Macias x Matt Altt
General Néojaponisme Podcast RSS Feed: .rss

Related Articles:
• Matt Alt translation of seminal 1980s article “What Kind of Otaku Are You”
• Matt Alt translation of seminal 1980s article “Can Otaku Love Like Normal People”
• Podcast with Patrick Macias on Japanese style and fashion: Harajuku Requiem
• Podcast with Patrick Macias on Japanese recessionary culture: The Tonkatsu Tapes

In the last half-decade, Tokyo shopping building Shibuya 109 has slowly but steadily taken back its place as the most central site of Japanese female culture. But in its recent reincarnation, Shibuya 109 has become the primary clubhouse for delinquent provincial girls to celebrate their own culture in the middle of the capital rather than a place to for the bridge-and-tunnel set to breathe in metropolitan values. And in general, the stereotypical 109 girl has always been obsessed with extremely local culture over anything with a hint of international flavor.

So how odd is it that in late November the giant poster for gyaru style bible Popteen gracing Shibuya 109 was taken down and replaced with a Christmas-themed illuminated advertisement for the Korean pop group Girls Generation (SNSD, 少女時代). This music group’s explosive rise over the last three months has become national news in both Japan and Korea and signaled the start of a second hanryu (韓流) boom for Korean pop culture. The first hanryu, of course, involved lonely 50 year-old Japanese women fawning over the idealized Korean gentlemen in Winter Sonata and boy bands like Toho Shinki (aka TVXQ). This time, however, it’s young Japanese girls flocking to formerly consumer-unfriendly, Korean-ethnic neighborhood Shin-Okubo to buy Girls Generation CDs and posters.

While the Shibuya 109 takeover is meaningful in terms of pop cultural hierarchy, we should note that the Japan-obsessed gyaru have not suddenly abandoned their heroes Hamasaki Ayumi and Nishino Kana to bow down to Korean goddesses who look nothing like them. From what I have seen, the core Japanese fans of Girls Generation have been “normal” girls without much subcultural leaning (black hair over chapatsu), and at least in my immediate circles, the Korean group has also attracted a few post-hipster girls looking for something to replace their semi-ironic appreciation of Arashi.

The Japanese idol factory, although subdued in recent days from the music market’s staggering decline, still manages to launch dozens of new young female singers and girl groups. So why have Japanese girls suddenly gone crazy for a nine-girl Korean act? The nationality aspect of Girls Generation’s success is certainly unprecedented, but that is not where the distinction ends. The Japanese industry has always told us that consumers like barely-trained, not-too-good-looking, off-pitch idols, but it turns out Japanese consumers may have wanted something completely different the entire time.

SNSD members sing and dance with a military precision. Their latest singles — produced mostly by European producers like DEEKAY and Alex James from Blur — sound slick and modern in comparison to the stagnant and repetitive J-Pop idol sound. Unlike sexy rivals KARA or hip-hoppers with ‘tude 2NE1, the Girls Generation girls are sweet and un-threatening, yet style icons with slender legs up to here. And some of the girls, especially Yoona, can be said to be more attractive than the average female, which used to be the reason these singers were called “idols.”

So with all these rare gifts, Girls Generation have worked to tap a latent demand in young Japanese consumers, finally providing the aspirational superwomen who have long been buried under the needs of gyaru’s “just like me” icons and the otaku’s desire for helpless — and intentionally not too attractive — little girls.

In Korea, Girls Generation were originally marketed to men. This may seem unbelievable, but Korean males have evidently have fallen pray to the weird fetish of enjoying attractive, slender, and sexy women in contemporary outfits and chic haircuts.

The new dominance of idol collective AKB48 on the music market suggests that the Japanese male music consumer has been infected with a quite different disease. This giant 48-girl group, formed in 2005 but reaching peak popularity this year, is the latest brainchild of pop Svengali Akimoto Yasushi. This is the man who brought you the ’80s spectacle of mass girl group The Onyanko Club — a huge number of wholly uncharismatic young women whom he had sing unabashedly dirty lyrics for a snickering male audience. So Onyanko started the “idol collective” trend, but we didn’t hear much from the concept until Morning Musume and all its various spinoffs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet Musume’s producer Tsunku’s spin on it was to take out the direct sexuality and make it infantile and creepy, theoretically to make it marketable to a young female audience. The idea of very average looking girls, however, stayed core. (Or more likely, a truly exceptional looking idol becomes a model and solo artist, and all the agency leftovers are formed into collectives to provide the management company a paycheck.)

The Morning Musume empire flamed out at some point after monopolizing the charts for a few years, but AKB48 has worked to bring the idol collective into the 21st century by targeting it almost exclusively to the otaku male. The genius marketing idea of AKB48 was to take the girls directly into the heart of Japan’s last remaining dependable consumer group — the otaku in Akihabara — and through daily shows at the theater there, make the men fall in love with them (and just maybe, then buy several dozen of the same CD single to boost sales.) AKB48 thus had to tone down the high-school sexcapade lyrics “I want to have sex before my friends do” and “we really shouldn’t be doing this before class, teacher” of Onyanko, but compared to Morning Musume, Akimoto pulled the lever marked “Eroticism” up a few notches on the mixing board when no one was looking.

The end result is that there is not very much content in the AKB48 oeuvre beyond the super-deformed sexuality. In order for the otaku to not get too confused, the songs had to stay close to the highly-synthesized and bouncy anime theme song genre. And the girls had to fit the stereotypical “little sister” mold of modern day moé. The music is a casualty of the process: the songs are a zombie rehash of J-Pop conventions without any distinguishing characteristics.

The AKB48 videos — recently freed up for wide viewing on YouTube — do not work hard to cover up the “let’s seduce 37 year-old nerds with diminutive young girls” angle. The video for “Ponytail to Shushu” has a two-minute, music-free Austin Powers inspired preamble with the girls stripping off their clothes but miraculously saved from exposure to the audience by camera-blocking props. Finally a chihuahua comes in and chases them into the shower, where they all get drenched — in slow motion. Then a song starts, and the male viewers rewind and watch the locker room scene frame by frame to see if they can’t catch a stray sliver of a breast somewhere. Oddly parts are filmed at a direct low angle (“dog’s eye view”) — a kind of anti-Kubrick vertical squashing to emphasis the girls’ stocky legs and miniature frames.

Likely by accident, the girls of AKB48 have turned out to be much better looking than those of Morning Musume. Maeda Atsuko probably was never in the running for a solo career but passable as the “cute one.” The nerd blogs, however, have been confused that AKB’s Itano Tomomi has turned into a full-scale babe. It must be plastic surgery, they exclaim, not understanding the basic biology that 19 year-old women just tend to be more attractive than 12 year-olds. This just happens to go against their entire dogma that women over the legal age “smell bad” and “become hideous monsters” after their teen years.

The Chosun Ilbo took note of the J-idols vs. K-idols battle in its September article “Why Japanese Girls Go Mad for Korean Girl Bands”. No one can resist explaining the entire thing through the widening gulf between Japanese men and women’s sexual idealization.

Girls Generation’s all-powerful management company SM Entertainment suggests, “Japanese girls who’ve had enough of Japanese girl bands that strictly appeal to men’s protective instincts seem to take bolder Korean girl groups as a role model.”

There should be no doubt that AKB48′s primary audience is Japanese otaku men (the high-earning salaryman has little time for this dilly-dallying). Yet as the group grew in popularity, they did attract a base of 12 year-old girls who look up to the group as peers. The same thing happened with Onyanko. In classic Japanese style “patriarchy marketing,” you first sell to men’s libidos and then young women will eventually figure out that they are also required to follow. Girls Generation messes up this whole process, however, by offering an alternative that appeals directly to young women — and also, scares the living daylights out of otaku. (I can imagine an otaku nightmare where those Korean Rockette legs chase them through Akihabara and kick them into submission.)

Whatever the case, we now have (at least) four parallel tracks of J-Pop, none of which intersect nor come together to form informal conglomerations of “mass market hits.” Otaku and elementary school girls have their S/mileage, AKB48s, and SKE48s; gyaru have their one-step-from-mizu-shobai “trauma-kei” Eurobeat Avex stars; backwater teen girls have their Johnny’s idols; and so-called “normal girls” in their late teens and 20s have awoken as consumers to embrace Girls Generation. Needless to say, none of these acts are “musicians,” and creating “good songs” is not really part of the business plan. Sexual longing has always played a big part in pop music, of course, but it seems now that it’s the only remaining reason why someone would shell out ¥3000 for a CD. Good at least to see the market opening up a bit to offer a diversity of options for aspiration.

Isozaki Ken’ichirô 磯崎憲一郎. Tsui no sumika 『終の住処』. 2009.
Winner of the 141st Akutagawa Prize for early 2009.

The title story is the winner: a novella that could be translated “Final Dwelling.” Personal hobby-horses first: It’s lacking many of the markers of A-Prize bait. It’s not a first-person narrative, and it doesn’t represent a hitherto overlooked subculture. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s innovative. The story examines, broadly speaking, the travails of the middle-aged salaryman. In this it feels older than old. So old it’s new? Are oyaji the new gyaru?

None of the characters are named. The story follows kare (“he”) from the point of his marriage to tsuma (“[his] wife”) to, essentially, his retirement. They’re both over thirty when they marry, and they seem to have stumbled into it with no great enthusiasm, because it was time to get on with their lives. Later we figure out it must have been the early 1980s when they married, which explains the greater pressure on over-thirties to marry (it’s still there today, but perhaps not as strong).

Almost immediately, he begins to feel estranged from his wife. She has mysterious mood swings. He never tries too hard to figure them out, and they remain unexplained. He drifts into affairs, and at one point is ready to leave his wife for his mistress when his wife announces she’s pregnant. So they stay together. Not that it anything changes. In fact, at one point they go for eleven years without speaking to each other. Not to mention, he keeps having affairs. Curiously generic affairs, though, even the one with the girl in the sunglasses, who he feels is his perfect woman. She’s his ideal, but this relationship doesn’t go much of anywhere either.

Meanwhile we also follow his career. He works for a pharmaceutical company, in sales at first. We follow his challenges at work — long hours, little success — against a backdrop of the Japanese economy from the ‘80s to the present. From about halfway through the novella, the historical markers get pretty specific, and we go through the Bubble years into the long period of stagnation. The climax of the novel involves the unnamed man, an executive now, going to the U.S. to engineer a hostile takeover of an American pharma firm. It takes him years, but he accomplishes it and finally gets to go home.

The third strain of the novel comes into play now. Before he goes to the U.S. he had decided to build a house for his family. The narration goes into uncharacteristic detail on the process. But then he gets called away. When he comes back, at the end of the novella, he’s finally ready to settle down and enjoy the new house. But when he arrives he finds that his daughter, his only child and reason for living, has grown up and moved away — to America, of all places — without telling him.

So this is the “final dwelling” of the title: an expensive, well-built house inhabited only by himself and his wife, who are all but strangers to each other. Now it’s just them, and as the last paragraph of the story tells us, it’ll be just them until they die. Which won’t be long now. The End.

What’s going on here? Two features of the story, I think, point to its aims.

First, the protagonist’s extreme passivity. The members of the A-Prize committee who supported this story seem to have been impressed by this, that the protagonist just kind of meanders through his life, watching, not participating (that’s how Ikezawa Natsuki put it). You can see this in his relationship with his wife: his only effort to understand her is a half-hearted attempt to find out if she’s having an affair. She’s not, he relaxes, and that’s as far as it goes. He doesn’t try to, you know, talk to her. That said, I’m not sure I agree that he’s totally passive. It’s more like he’s on autopilot, taking action only when it’s demanded of him, like when he has to perform the hostile takeover, or when he reaches the stage in his life and career when it’s appropriate for him to build a house. Then he does act. But never in a way that goes beyond the bounds that have been set for him. He never jumps the tracks, kicks over the traces, ignores the carnavi.

Second, we have the fact that nobody in the story is named. This contributes to the somnambulistic air of the story, but it also makes the protagonist into Generic Salaryman, a stand-in for all the company men of his generation. His wife is not an individual either, but Generic Mrs. Salaryman. Same goes for his boss, his daughter, his mistresses.

To me, the brain-dead pointlessness of the protagonist’s life, combined with his utter facelessness, suggest that what Isozaki’s after here is a good old-fashioned poke at the bourgeoisie. Salaryman = cog in the capitalist machine = alienation from one’s own feelings = mindless consumption to compensate = lingering dissatisfaction = dying alone. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that critique, but it’s hardly a fresh one. It’s been decades since that perspective alone was enough to make a story worth the reader’s while. If this story had appeared in, say, 1959, it would have made sense. But in 2009 it just feels, well, old-fashioned. An oyajiesque critique of oyaji.

What I’m saying is that even the reader most sympathetic to Isozaki’s message (if he’s doing what I think he’s doing) is probably going to want more from the story than that. Character, plot, style: some kind of novelistic pleasure. But this story offers very little in that regard. By opting for generic characters rather than specific, the author denies us the opportunity to understand why someone would live like this, or its effects on a real person; we’re always gazing down at kare from above. By adopting passivity as the organizing principle, the author is neutralizing plot as a source of interest. In fact, in the very first paragraph the narrator tells us that the protagonist and his wife are going to stay together for decades in an unchanging relationship, meaning we know the end from the beginning.

And style? This was tricky. By and large, Isozaki’s prose is undistinguished and occasionally awkward. But now and then he lapses into some nice description. (I liked his evocation of the Illinois prairie in winter). And at times he seems to be gesturing toward parody — he throws in exclamation points here and there that made me feel he was trying for a laugh at the main character’s expense, at least.

At those times I found myself wishing he’s gone farther toward humor. It would have been cruel humor, bourgeoisie-baiting, but at least it might have made the story entertaining. As it is, I do think there’s a parodic element here, at least I hope so. The protagonist’s travails — the eleven years he goes without speaking to his wife, the fact that he’s totally unaware that his daughter has moved out of the house, the way his boss tells him to execute the takeover or his life will have been a failure — are too exaggerated to be taken seriously. They have to be a parody of the kind of salaryman concerns you see in things like Shima Kôsaku. But they’re a parody with little humor, in fact little animating emotion of any kind.

That was my first reaction to the main story “Tsui no sumika.” Now, here’s why I liked the extra stories.

“Penanto” (“Pennants”) is the name of the one in this volume. The title refers to an image in the first of the story’s three segments: a boy sneaks into an older boy’s room and sees the walls covered with souvenir pennants. The old fashioned kind, with the careful embroidery. They’re all pointing the same way, and they make him feel like he’s in the midst of a school of fish or something.

It’s an arresting image. This story has a few of them. But they’re in the service of something pretty abstract. That first segment culminates in the boy hearing a noise in the wall, tearing it down (!), and finding a snake’s sloughed-off skin, glowing silver behind the wall.

The second segment concerns a middle-aged salaryman who loses a button from his coat. He finally finds it in a diner he’s never been to before, where an old woman tells him it’s been waiting for him. The last segment concerns a boy (probably different from the first one, but because nobody in this story has names either, we can’t be sure) taking a walk in the woods, encountering another boy, finding an ant-lion.

It’s pretty clear that this story is supposed to work on a semi-abstract level: dream logic or magical realism (Ikezawa invoked Garcia-Marquez in talking about “Tsui no Sumika”). And it almost works. I don’t know what they add up to, if anything, but I think I can see the mood Isozaki’s trying to create.

But in the end, I don’t think this story succeeds. If you’re going to abandon character and plot in favor of poetic imagery, then your images themselves have to be pretty powerful. And it helps if your prose is flawless. Isozaki doesn’t quite have these bases covered yet. The images here aren’t consistently striking, not like they need to be, and while there are some nice passages in this story, his writing doesn’t have the polish and precision this kind of exercise requires.

What’s interesting is that there’s enough commonality of tone with the first story to make me wonder if he wasn’t trying for a dreamier effect there, too. That is, maybe the salaryman-existentialism wasn’t intended to be as overriding as it is. Or maybe I’m making too much of that aspect of the story.

In the English-speaking world, “Santa Baby” has been the go-to Santa-as-lover song for ladies since Eartha Kitt‘s original 1953 version. The lyrics propose, slyly but unmistakably, that the dynamics of a hypothetical relationship with Santa, while grotesque, would nevertheless be topologically conjugate to the norms of postwar US gender relations.

Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree for me.
Been an awful good girl, Santa baby,
So hurry down the chimney tonight. [...]

Think of all the fun I’ve missed,
Think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed,
Next year I could be just as good,
If you’ll check off my Christmas list [...]

Santa honey, forgot to mention one little thing: a ring.
I don’t mean on the phone, Santa honey…

Having located a potential lover of unlimited means, generosity, and kindness, the narrator of “Santa Baby” reveals herself as a true Homo economicus. Through both double entendre and frank bargaining, she outlines her terms: material comfort in exchange for exclusivity of erotic access, socially legitimated by marriage. The erotic frisson — still felt by many today, to judge by the unbroken stream of cover versions — arises from the directness. There will be no dating, no manipulation, no need to work around the rules of propriety: bring enough boxes from Tiffany, and you can “trim my Christmas tree” tonight.

What is the equivalent in Japan? I put it to you that it is “Koibito ga Santa Claus” (“My Lover is Santa Claus”) by Matsutōya Yumi. Originally released on her 1980 semi-concept album Surf & Snow, it became a monster hit a few years later as the theme song for Watashi o ski ni tsuretette! and has been the Christmas pop song in Japan ever since.

In “Koibito ga,” the narrator recounts an episode from one Christmas Day in her childhood on which a glamorous next-door neighbor claimed to be expecting a visit from Santa at eight o’clock (sharp).

“Chigau yo, sore wa ehon dake no ohanashi”
Sō iu watashi ni wink shite
“Demo ne, otona ni nareba, anata mo wakaru, sono uchi ni [...]
“Koibito ga Santa Claus, se no takai Santa Claus…”

“No way, that’s just a story from picture books”
I said, and she replied with a wink:
“When you grow up, you’ll understand too, one day [...]
“My lover is Santa Claus, a tall Santa Claus…”

“Many winters” later, the “glamorous neighbor” long gone, the narrator recalls this exchange and hints at her own imminent enlightenment. The song is about the awakening from childhood innocence, excitement and impatience for the passage into adulthood. The contrast with the knowing come-ons of “Santa Baby”, its playful yet fundamentally cynical take on gender relations, could not be starker. At the root of these differences is the approach to Santa himself.

In “Santa Baby,” Santa remains unchanged as a concept. Although it is not explicitly stated, there is no reason to believe that this Santa is not the jolly, toy-distributing, entirely asexual figure of childhood fantasy. It is these characteristics which enable the narrator to access the outer limits of her utility curve, grossly distending the expected pattern of a romantic relationship. (If the narrator went on to date and buy gifts for a sexy elf behind Santa’s back, it would be Honda Tōru’s “Akahori System” in its purest form.)

But in “Koibito ga,” Santa is the one who changes. Present-bringing is included as only one of his characteristics, but the fact that he is “tall” — that is, conventionally attractive — is repeated twice, and what the narrator seems to be looking forward to most is the excitement and knowledge of the outside (which is to say, adult) world that he will bring.

Nevertheless, the references to whirlwinds and cities of snow ensure that the song remains firmly grounded in fantasy, if you will — unlike, say, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” where Santa is forced into the real world so completely that he ends up just being Dad. (The fact that the glamorous neighbor’s Santa suddenly “took her to a distant town one day” is a highly realistic outcome for a postwar salaryman Santa, though, and might be a nod at the drab realities of domestic life that lie beyond the thrill of young love.)

Does this represent a greater Santaic fluidity in Japanese culture, perhaps owing to the tradition’s shallow roots here? Or is Santa’s transformation into a trim, handsome suitor an unsurprising result of Christmas being hijacked by lovers?