My cable company just added two more music channels, meaning I have six total music channels to be upset about. But I agree with those new Wieden + Kennedy ads: MTV blows me. For all those people who whine about “I remember when MTV played videos,” I challenge you to spend time watching a music video from start to finish. You are also probably remembering back when “pop music was good.”

Since the Japanese music market is melting down like a butterscotch sundae in a toaster oven on Venus, we are limited to singles that the genius marketing teams have determined interlock perfectly with collected consumer research. Besides Denki Groove’s videos for “Shonen Young” and “Mononoke Dance” (amazing punchline), the suits no longer greenlight anything approximating a “creative idea.” Spike Jonze would be outright rejected as an arrogant auteur for daring to come up with his own concepts. The Sukima Switches, Monkey Majiks, and Yamada Yu’s have taken over 100% — dragging J-pop into a dark hole between the poles of pop-punk and uta-hime barefoot female singers. Now the rock bands have to be salt-of-the-eath, the idols have to be unambiguously robotic, and the song titles have to stick to words that everyone knows like “Arigatou.” Seriously, can you imagine naming a song “Thank You” and then performing it in front of a camera and letting your record label show it to other people? “I Just Called to Say I Love You”? You think these kids read Keats or something?!

Objectively, however, I learn more and more about this elusive “youth generation” with every video. For example, the band Monkey Majik’s new single “Together.” Japanese youth apparently love hearing their own hack pop lyric conventions improperly coming out the mouth of Canadian English teachers. Monkey Majik are the musical equivalent of the giant posters of white people that decorate the façades of discount suit stores in the Japanese suburbs, but hey, those suit stores sell a lot of suits! Between MM, Jero, and Leah Dizon, North America seems to be the new recruiting ground for Japanese talent. The mirror phenomenon would be Japanese people moving to the USA and joining the American Enterprise Institute.

More seriously, the new Kato Miriya — sorry, Kato Miliyah — song “19 Memories” is probably our greatest possible window into the female Japanese psyche. First and most importantly, the song “samples” Amuro Namie’s “Sweet 19 Blues,” which only came out 11 years ago and is probably the worst Amuro Namie song of that era. Miriya must have heard from a friend that recent “Black Music” likes to “sample,” and immediately demanded that they sample her last single for her new one. But when they told her to sample an “old song,” she went all the way back to her roots in 1996, when she was 8.
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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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Part One: The Rise of the Avatar

The promise of virtual reality was built on a hardware revolution attempting to envelop individuals in three-dimensional, multi-sensorial experiences. By the mid-1960s, pioneers like Ivan Sutherland at MIT were designing head-mounted display systems and wired data gloves. In the late 1980s, a second wave of acolytes (including John Walker at Autodesk and Jaron Lanier at VPL Research) helped popularize this fascinating mix of science and science fiction. But beyond the goggles and the gloves, virtual reality never lived up to our initial expectations. When attention and capital shifted to supporting progress in networking and internet capabilities, virtual reality quietly shifted focus to educational applications, like simulations for the medical, military, and transportation industries. The dream that humans could be transported by technology into endless digital landscapes never fully evaporated: it found a strong ally with nascent computer gaming enthusiasts and game-based human proxies called avatars. Since their inception, avatars have evolved from simple line drawings to complex vector graphics imbued with much more than bits and bytes.

One of the first gamers to apply his competitive passion to the computer screen was Will Crowther. By 1973, Crowther was working for technology pioneer BBN — the company responsible for developing internet packet switching. In his spare time, Crowther enjoyed spelunking and rock climbing. He shaped these into Adventure (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure), an early computer game where a player moves through an imaginary cave using simple text commands and computer responses. In 1976 Don Woods at Stanford University’s artificial intelligence lab played the game and asked Crowther if he could enhance the experience. Together, they added code that let players pick up, use, or drop objects. They also included fantasy elements based on their shared interest in the classic role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). By having players interact with characters like dwarves, elves, and trolls, Crowther and Woods abandoned the real world and directed players into early immersive role play.

Maze War

Maze War was developed by Steve Colley at NASA’s Ames Research Center, introduced around the same time as Adventure. A shooting game, Maze War had a three-dimensional graphic interface and, with the help of co-workers who linked two computers together, multi-player gaming capabilities. Most interesting was that on screen, players were represented as eyeballs — a rudimentary sort of avatar. Maze War spawned the development of other multi-player games, many of which were based on fantasy role play and the popularity of D&D. Inspired by these, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle — students at Essex University in England — developed the first multi-user text-based game in 1978. They named it MUD — “multi-user dungeon,” another nod to fantasy role play. Bartle described MUD as, “Originally little more than a series of interconnected locations where you could move and chat.” After several rewrites, MUD1 became highly interactive, providing a social network for like-minded gamers to battle monsters and create friendships, all within the context of a virtual medieval world. MUD1 became popular with students at Essex University and eventually with a global audience who could connect to the game through ARPANet. Just over a decade later, computer scientist James Apnes built on the success of MUDs with TinyMUD, a flexible virtual world that gave players the tools to build their own objects, rooms, and puzzles — a precursor to more complex worlds like Second Life. Technology professionals saw the success and rapid growth of MUDs in the 1980s as a turning point and recognition that virtual reality, with its bulky hardware and high costs, could not deliver the social or thematic experiences that audiences craved. It marked the ascendancy of software over hardware as the vehicle taking us into a virtual dimension.
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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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The following text originally appeared as the March 24, 2007 entry on economist Ikeda Nobuo’s personal blog. We have published this translation without the author’s express permission, and we accept all responsibility for any issues resulting from its publication.

At the second session in yesterday’s symposium, we talked about the antagonism between blogs and traditional media. People often say that rhetoric on the Net is “conservative” or that there are lots of “Net Right-Wingers,” but I don’t think this is true. Mr. Sasaki and I had the same opinion: this isn’t a confrontation between “Left” and “Right” but a confrontation between generations.

If you look at the comments left on this blog about the “comfort women” issue, you’ll realize that hardly anyone is thinking about the problem from the standpoint of apologizing for the Pacific War; most everyone is ideologically naive. In the “Okutani Reiko [bashing] festival” as well, opinions were overwhelmingly criticizing social stratification (格差社会) and left-wing. So the problem at hand is not “ideology.”

What these “anonymous majorities” share is a distrust of the traditional media. For example, the traditional media is unable to level criticisms against funding for organ transplants or prosecutors’ investigations of national policy. Blogs provide an Antithese to the mainstream media’s phony self-narrative and hypocrisy of being an “Ally of Justice” that can’t manage to speak out against subjects with which they have connections.

I am part of the second post-war generation, so I was educated by teachers in the [pro-Socialist] Japan Teacher’s Union, who praised the democracy of the new constitution. It was an era where [left-leaning newspaper] Asahi Shimbun and [progressive publisher] Iwanami Shoten wielded intellectual authority. Until high-school, I believed in an anti-war/pro-peace ideology, and since that followed in the field of sociology into Marxism, I participated in things like campus protests. The more you studied Marxism, however, the more you understood that it’s pretty worthless stuff. And that resulted in the leftist ideology losing its intellectual authority throughout the ’70s.

But there was a considerable lag between the leftists’ decline on an intellectual level and the workings of the real world. Politically, Tanaka Kakuei consolidated his socialist “1970 System,” and there was support for progressive local governments (革新自治体) to redistribute economic growth through the excessive scattering of welfare money (バラマキ福祉). This Social Democratic-like system reached its heyday in the 1980s. The patriarchal “Japanese Management Style” was praised all around the world as a guiding model, but in reality, it decreased Japan’s potential growth rate (productivity).

Then at the end of the ’80s, socialism collapsed, and then the Bubble burst. Right as leftist ideology disappeared, lavish social spending also became impossible. The internet appeared in that post-socialist world, so the “establishment” to be rallied against was no longer “American imperialism” or “monopoly capital” but the hypocrisy of the media’s anti-government pose (despite its parasitic reliance on the administration for broadcast rights and kisha club access) and pro-peace/pro-equality stance.

This kind of protest is not allowed to take place openly in Japanese society, so anonymity was required. The media will not acknowledge this fact either, so they just describe the protesting voices negatively as “Net Right-Wingers” and “cruel 2Channelers.” Of course, there are negative elements in the protests, but the old “student conflicts” were little more than pure violence. The difference is that the students embraced Marxism as an ideology and as a political faction; the Net rebellion has neither an ideology nor an organization.

Young people’s means of lodging a formal objection have therefore shifted from violence in the streets to debate on the internet; and the target of their protest has moved from the government to the media. In most cases, this kind of rebellion is simply young people venting their excess energy, but there is a possibility that youth can create something new if they can skillfully channel that energy. The American counterculture of 1960 led to innovations like the internet and GNU and transformed the nation during the Clinton-Gore administration. It would be a real waste for Japan if the energy of youth is just wasted on 2ch ranting.