Representatives of the necktie industry made an official appeal to Environment Minister Sakihito Ozawa to end Cool Biz — the campaign to cut greenhouse emissions by encouraging white-collar workers to work sans jacket and tie in the summer months to reduce dependence on air conditioning. The necktie lobby says it’s unfair to treat neckties as if they were the cause of global warming. They claim that summer sales are down 34% since Cool Biz started. They claim that their “necklace-tie” innovation failed to catch on. They also pointed out that PM Hatoyama campaigned with his necktie on, the association chairman emphasized that neckties bestow oan air of integrity (of course, Koizumi famously kept his off during the 2005 general election and won a similar landslide victory).

And as far as the short articles on the issue explain, it doesn’t look like the necktie representative even bothered to make much of a case, instead relying on an emotional plea to sympathize with the suffering necktie makers/sellers. But why force a good portion of the working population to cut off the circulation to their heads to benefit a mere 45 companies?

His argument isn’t even consistent. If he is advocating the end of Cool Biz, then why would we need those necklace-ties? If the necklace-ties are just an example of a failed attempt at innovation, then what is their alternative proposal for helping the country meet its Kyoto commitments? Whatever its faults, Cool Biz at least keeps thermostats higher and prevents people from wasting energy making neckties.

Even in a statement on its website, the association can offer no good reason for reversing the recommendation, aside from the fundamental unfairness of singling out neckties. You can feel the rage as they blame the government for “cultivating the image that the country can achieve almost all its CO2 emissions targets just by not wearing neckties.” They also mention they support the underlying goal of cutting emissions and are even a member of Team Minus 6, a coalition of groups signaling their commitment to helping meet the Kyoto goal of a 6% emissions cut vs. 1990 levels.

This isn’t the first time the necktie industry has tried to stop Cool Biz. Back in 2005 when the program began, the association sent a letter asking the cabinet to stop using the words “no necktie,” resulting in ample Internet ridicule not unlike this blog post.

And in 2007, members of the fashion industry ran a “Dress Up Men” campaign showcasing ways to stay cool while still wearing a suit and tie (with official support of METI, seemingly running at cross purposes with their environment ministry “rival”). At that point, Cool Biz was considered uncool enough to inspire an ironic Coca Cola commercial, but since then white-collar workers seem to be have reverted to following corporate dress codes like good worker bees.

One detail mentioned in the media is that the chairman handed Ozawa an official request. Sadly, we have no way of knowing what they said since this document is not on the web, but surely it’s some rehash of their website. It’s kind of amazing they are having such a hard time winning support for white-collar formality in Japan of all places. I’d have some sympathy for them if ties weren’t such a random, arbitrary accessory to begin with.

Another troubling undertone of this story: The premise that the government can turn Cool Biz on or off like a faucet. Sure, this movement started as a government initiative, but can’t organizations in Japan decide for themselves what makes proper office attire?

The minister made no promises but said he understands the need to “strike a balance.” Sure, unless Big Neckties control millions of votes or somehow know how to press the minister’s buttons, I can’t see this meeting getting them anywhere. If I were him, I would be mad at DPJ secretary general Ichiro Ozawa for approving this meeting. Since the new government came into power, all lobbying activity to MPs must be approved by the party headquarters. If people like this are getting through, maybe that’s a sign the environment minister isn’t exactly the most valued member of the cabinet.

While we weren’t looking, Cool Biz has suddenly become more vulnerable. In November, the Government Revitalization Unit recommended cutting the PR budget for Cool Biz in half. As far as I can see, the Environment Ministry does not even bother mentioning it in its FY10 budget requests (PDF). It’s possible that a silent majority is on the tie industry’s side. People don’t really seem to plan their wardrobes around Cool Biz, so when the season comes ’round it just looks like a bunch of salarymen who forgot to put their ties on. Some companies even wear special tags informing visitors that a special mission from the government is preventing them from showing the proper seriousness by wearing ties.

Cool Biz is great, despite the occasional setbacks (some offices get too hot). My only complaint is that it doesn’t last year-round. The government has no responsibility to promote one industry over another (unless it’s part of an ambitious industrial policy). So sorry tie industry, the planet and millions of neck take priority over your 45 companies. Unless the minister suddenly decides neckties are a vital national industry you are out of luck.

Tobias Harris of Observing Japan and I hit Showa Era-themed izakaya Hanbey for some Hoppy and discussion on Japan’s status as a liberal democracy. Ironically, Japan’s best change of becoming a liberal democracy is the removal of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

In little under one hour, our conversation tackles the upcoming election, the Democratic Party of Japan’s (DPJ) agenda, and whether Japan will become more liberal and more democratic in the future. (This podcast was recorded on July 23.)

Download: Politics at Hanbey: Marxy x Tobias Harris on Japan as a Liberal Democracy (mp3 no longer available)
General Néojaponisme Podcast RSS Feed: .rss

On February 20, 1909, French newspaper Le Figaro printed a piece called “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on its front page — written by a relatively-unknown 32 year-old Italian poet named F.T. Marinetti. (I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the full text.) The bombastic and incendiary tract sent shock waves through the European artistic community in its call for a total upheaval of preexisting artistic convention. The poet advocated the demolition of museums, libraries, and traditional morality. And in the ruins, Marinetti wanted to foster a new aesthetic called Futurism that would embrace technology and the modern psychology of the machine age, echoed in the famous line that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Although Picasso’s cubist paintings had ushered in the age of modern art years before Marinetti’s writing, the Manifesto articulated the Modernist ethos as a philosophy for all artistic pursuit, and in the process, provided a high-energy clarion call for the subsequent century’s avant-garde artists, social visionaries, trouble-makers, and all-around punks.

One hundred years later, Marinetti’s Manifesto no longer succeeds in épater les bourgeois, and many of its core ideas — once intended to stab directly into the eye of the aging establishment — sound like romanticized justifications for powerful forces of reactionary evil. The Futurists’ push to “glorify war” sounded righteous in the nationalistic atmosphere of the early 20th century but almost instantly became abominable as millions were slaughtered in the trenches of the Great War. Marinetti’s misogyny (”contempt for women”) and racism (comparing factory sludge to the breast-milk of a Sudanese wet nurse, for example) have not accompanied the arc of progressive Western society. Even Marinetti’s cavalier espousal of “the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness” takes on a sinister ring as we seek to hose down the conflagration of the Bush presidency. Marinetti is often roundly dismissed as a proto-Fascist. True, he was an early supporter of Mussolini. And even if we counter that the poet eventually felt betrayed by his old pal when Fascist Italy took on a necrophilic infatuation with ancient Rome, you can still draw a straight line between the idea of Futurist “cleansing violence” to Nazi and Fascist Europe. And in our new battle against environmental depletion, Marinetti is again on the wrong side of history. He loves industrial waste and factory exhaust — his verse potential PR copy for the defenders of polluters on K Street.

The Manifesto does, however, contain sympathetic and benevolent ideas, but these have lost their impact for a totally opposite reason. Futurism now suffers from its success: the last century has been Marinetti’s. The Italian poet’s revolutionary embrace of automotive beauty is no longer novel in the shadow of dime-store hot-rod culture and widespread SUV mania. Marinetti’s preference for youth and novelty has morphed into the central philosophical engine to consumerist culture. Creative destruction is not just for poetry, but guided American capitalism to international dominance. Technology has permanently nestled into creative culture and can no longer be cleanly removed. The power-drill pulse of gabba music, for example, would surely overshadow the wildest ambitions of Russolo’s intonarumori. Like all great cultural innovators, Marinetti has seen his legacy suffer by being successfully subsumed. His angry manifesto now graces a million creased textbook pages — the kind of yellowed volumes he would want drowned in a diverted Venetian canal.

And like all prophets, he was completely wrong about the future. The Manifesto does not make specific predictions, but Marinetti tied the particulars of the Futurist aesthetic to his own historical circumstances. The idea of cacophonous technology is pure nostalgia: ancient dynamos may have been ear-piercing, but our cornucopia of truely life-integrated personal gadgets make no external sound at all. Marinetti heard the future as a bang, but the art of product design has offered a century of softer and softer whimpers. Our latest and greatest vision of the future wants technology to design itself out of the picture: eco-consciousness is poised to erase the modern era with the same scorn as Marinetti feels for classical times.

And yet, the Manifesto can still be a useful corrective for any contemporary artist and writer and thinker, with applicable lessons for this deeply Futurist-inspired future. Despite the familiarity of the Manifesto’s convictions, I still swoon in its romantic energy. Even in translation, Marinetti’s prose jabs against familiar rivals with the speed of a master pugilist, almost proto-gonzo. Thank god for the historical detail of good newspaper placement, or otherwise he could be easily charged with unbearable pretension and self-indulgence. But it is exactly Marinetti’s choice of romantic idealism over cynicism that allows the text to still feel alive today. His belief in belief comes in stark contrast to our sour generation, who protest equally at no one and everyone, spit at meaning, conviction, and hope. Ha, you say: these “suspect” virtues recently elected a president! That may be true, but they are still fundamentally unwelcome in the corrosive culture of cool that permeates every part of the youth culture experience. We are stuck in a strange corner: worshiping the romantic idealism of the past while immediately tearing down anyone attempting a modern analog.

The word “futurism” now regrettably refers mainly to Alvin Toffler types, sober armchair sociologists trying to predict coming waves of complex patterns for an audience of Sunday afternoon dreamers and long-term stock analysts. Marinetti had no aims on Nostradamus, but instead, aspired to be a kamikaze pilot nosediving towards stale convention, walking the walk, dreaming of poetic suicide — and yes, counting the days until “younger and stronger men” would throw him “in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!” So what would Marinetti think of our rotting shell of a pop culture, still looking to its 1960s Old Masters, judging all success against the unrepeatable case studies of Lennon/McCartney, Zimmerman/Dylan, Keroauc, slouching against the canonical ideas of 20th century art under the legitimizing banner of post-modernist sampling and pastiche. Marinetti’s call for constant artistic progress still inspires! But alas, the irony: when we waste “the best part of our strength in a useless admiration of the past,” this time Marinetti is part of the problem. To love Marinetti is to bury him. You cannot just kill your idols, but you must also burn your “Kill Your Idols” T-shirt.

Calls for Neo-Futurism will go unheeded, and I doubt I will see a day when artistic manifestos are screamed to the world from the front pages of a major daily news publication. The Futurist Manifesto, in the end, never embodied an eternal, absolute, and ahistoric philosophy, able to be adopted afresh by every waking generation, but instead is merely a single, well-executed love poem to the future of Marinetti’s present — a grip of the razor edge and sharpened point, a vivid dream of routing a long list of gray demons and sagging enemies, an artistic mission to realize the perfect human community. Marinetti seems more charming in the haze of hindsight — a contemporary version would rightly feel like an obnoxious demagogue — but admit your admiration: who does not dream of standing on the world’s summit and launching once again an insolent challenge to the stars!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kato Tomohiro

Asō Tarō

Katsuki Ryo

As the kanji of the year suggested, 2008 was a year for change. Change, of course, was the message of U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama’s campaign, but in Japan, change seemed to mostly refer to the teledrama CHANGE, starring male idol Kimura Takuya as Asakura Keita — a schoolteacher pressed into political service after his politician father’s death (this is Japan, after all). The naïve and idealistic teacher is propelled to the premiership by the political fixers of the ruling party, who think his popularity can save their flailing organization. Naturally he rises above the murk of the political world and delivers change Japan can believe in.

The story could not be less connected to the reality of Japanese politics in 2008.

Japan started the year governed by Fukuda Yasuo, who spoke of the need for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to listen to the people. He, however, resigned as prime minister in September, speaking of how he was “different” from the people (which prompted a Japanese internet meme). His replacement Asō Tarō was elected LDP president — and with it, prime minister — by a landslide in the party’s emergency election. Mr. Asō — best known outside Japan for his manga obsession and his all-too-frequent gaffes — was able to convince the party rank-and-file (who rewarded him 134 out of 141 LDP prefectural votes) and the party’s Diet members that he was in touch with the Japanese people and that only he could restore public faith in Japan’s long-time ruling party.

This has not quite happened. Far from being in touch with the concerns of the Japanese people, Mr. Asō may be the most insensitive yet. He has been dogged by reports that he frequently spends his evenings drinking in luxury bars. He spoke poorly of doctors and the elderly, important constituencies in a rapidly aging society. These miscues, while crude, will probably not make or break the LDP in the next general election, but Mr. Asō’s inability to respond effectively to the gathering global crisis currently consuming Japan just may. As 2008 ends, Japan finds itself in recession once again, but the LDP has been hesitant in formulating a response. In large part this is because the Asō government is a prisoner of past decisions taken by LDP governments; namely, the government’s hands are tied by a national debt totaling roughly 180 percent of GDP — by far the largest debt/GDP ratio in the OECD. Mr. Asō is also suffering from the mistakes of his immediate predecessors: Abe Shinzo’s disastrous response to missing pensions records contributed to the LDP’s defeat in the 2007 elections for the Japanese Diet’s upper house. And Mr. Fukuda poorly managed the roll-out of a new health care system for citizens over seventy-five. Both have battered the LDP’s support among broad swathes of the public. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), already in control of the upper house, is poised to perform well in the next election, even in regions that have long been LDP strongholds.

That being said, the prime minister who has most profoundly impacted today’s LDP is none other than Koizumi Junichiro. Mr. Koizumi’s term as prime minister ended in 2006, but his impact continues to the present. Mr. Koizumi waged open war on the “old” LDP — the party of public works pork, postal patronage, massive koenkai (politicians’ personal support groups), and government-by-factions and zoku giin. He sought to reform the party and the cabinet to strength the position of the prime minister, while changing how Japan spent money on public works in order to undermine what he called the “opposition forces” — i.e., LDP politicians of the old school. The battle over postal privatization tied together all of these threads.

But Mr. Koizumi left before he could complete his project to remake the LDP and nation. And in doing so he may have dealt a death blow to the LDP, perhaps as he intended.

Mr. Koizumi left an LDP torn into pieces. His electoral coattails created a strong reformist bloc within the party: the so-called Koizumi children. At the same time, however, Mr. Koizumi’s departure emboldened the opposition forces, who under Abe, Fukuda, and Asō have worked to reverse or stall further structural reforms and isolate the reformist bloc within the party. Divisions within the LDP is mirrored in the public at large. In urban districts, where Mr. Koizumi enjoyed great success — and where a number of the Koizumi children have their seats — voters are dismayed by the backsliding in the LDP and will likely turn back to the DPJ in the general election required to be held by September 2009. In less populated districts, however, voters are aggrieved over Mr. Koizumi’s reforms, having watched influxes of money from Tokyo dwindle and waited for the government to do something to reverse the precipitous decline of Japan outside Kanto. (Given the demographic makeup of rural Japan, these voters are undoubtedly also alarmed at government mismanagement of the health and pensions systems.) These dynamics contributed to the DPJ’s 2007 victory — Ozawa Ichirō, the DPJ’s president, is a product of the Tanaka Kakuei machine that fortified LDP rule in these areas, and he ably exploited the dissatisfaction of both urban and rural voters.

The civil war within the LDP may also finally be coming to a head. As 2008 reaches its denouement, the LDP’s reformists — who have grown ever more discontent at their isolation within the party and fear for their electoral lives if they run under the banner of Mr. Asō — may finally be prepared to break with the LDP. Watanabe Yoshimi, a leading Koizumian and a crusading administrative reform minister under Abe and Fukuda, has openly criticized Mr. Asō’s leadership and suggested that he may try to topple the government and form his own party. Other prominent reformists have criticized Mr. Asō, suggesting that Mr. Watanabe might be able to lead enough reformers out of the party to strip the government of its parliamentary super-majority and trigger a general election.

In short, while it appears that Japan experienced no change whatsoever, 2008 has indeed been a year of change. Not merely a change of prime ministers, but a change in the comparative standing of the LDP and the DPJ. Decay could be considered change as well. It is far from clear how the LDP’s current crisis will resolve. 2009 may bring monumental change to the political system: the LDP breaking in half, a new reformist party’s becoming the key to forming a government, the DPJ winning power in a landslide.

One way or another, Japan needs political change. The latest economic downturn will only exacerbate the problems already facing Japan. It will make it all the more difficult for the government to provide pensions and other social services. It will delay the government’s efforts to pay down Japan’s national debt to more sustainable levels. It will swell the already swollen ranks of Japan’s temporary workers, who now constitute nearly a third of the labor force. And it will do little to encourage younger Japanese to marry and start families. Contrary to the political philosophy of TV drama CHANGE, changing leaders — or ruling parties — will not make these problems go away. Even Mr. Koizumi, the closest Japan has come to a truly dynamic leader, was forced to compromise in his desire for reform. Change is difficult, and it will not emanate solely from Nagatacho.

Voting the LDP out of power, however, could still be an important first step in changing Japan by making its political parties more accountable to the public and stimulating new ideas for how to solve the growing list of problems that darken Japan’s future. Rather than placing blind hope in the “Japanese Obama” — whoever that might be — or a particular party, the Japanese people should strive to build a more responsive, transparent, and accountable democracy. That would truly be change.