“この紋所が目に入らぬか — kono mondokoro ga me ni hairanu ka? — Can you not see this crest?” This question, which marked the climax of well over 1000 episodes of long-running Japanese TV drama Mito Komon 『水戸黄門』, must now be answered in the negative.

On December 19, 2011, the final episode of this institution of Japanese television was broadcast by network TBS. After a 43 year run, the last outing drew a very average 13.9% rating and recent episodes in prime time have been lucky to break 10%. What an end for a show that routinely topped 20% and even cracked 40% for special episodes in the 1970s.

Mito Komon was a samurai travel tale in which an elderly lord and his various helpers visit every corner of Japan, taking in the local sights and rescuing the downtrodden. The title character is a heavily mythologized take on the life of Tokugawa Mitsukuni of the Mito domain, a 17th century lord and member of the dominant Tokugawa family. Historians regard him as important more for his campaign to locate and preserve historical documents than for the nation-spanning journeys and action-packed hijinks of the TV series. Japanese scholars have delighted in pointing out that we have no good evidence that Japan’s most storied TV traveller travelled much at all.

The current iteration of the TBS website describes Mito Komon’s fictional sojourns as yonaoshi tabi (journeys to fix the world). The yonaoshi term is most clearly associated with late Edo Period popular uprisings against official and mercantile corruption. What historians have pegged as a groundswell of popular resistance — from politically-motivated riots to the carnivalesque eejyanaika (ain’t it great?) dancing of the last years of the Shogunate — is in Mito Komon TV given over to the title character. An elite samurai near the center of power, Mito Komon uses his authority, manifested in the series’ famous mondokoro, the Tokugawa crest that none would dare defy, to right wrongs and see the wicked punished, “fixing the world” in the process.

Over the run of 43 years, Mito Komon’s most frequent opponents were akukan (“evil” government officials) who he and his loveable goons Kaku and Suke chastised on behalf of bright and cheery commoners whose encounters with authoritarian power come off as, if anything, slight inconveniences. Despite the glance it cast on the corruption of samurai bureaucracy, in this formula Robin Hood has all the power of the Sherriff of Nottingham. Those two have created narrative drama in hundreds of iterations by occupying very different social spaces. Their powers, roguish populism on one hand and the iron authority of the state and on the other, are seldom shared, however, outside of Japanese TV dramas and the dreams of political demagogues. In essence, Mito Komon becomes a sort of argument that the best person for taking care of the country’s change-resistant elites is a change-resistant elite who just happens to be made of better moral stuff. As a result, the series sidesteps anything resembling a structural critique of Edo realities — which included no small amount of arbitrary violence, exploitation of the peasantry, and brutal punishments — and gone is the potential for any of this to reach into the present as allegory.

As a look at the past, Mito Komon seems trite compared to other mainstream visions that sprung from the same postwar milieu such as Yamamoto Shugoro’s 1958 bestseller Akahige Shinryotan (Red Beard’s Clinic), brought to the big screen by Kurosawa Akira in 1965, which looks alternately at the lot of women sold into prostitution and corpulent lords looking for miracle cures for their gout or diabetes (Akahige’s miracle cure: stop eating) while ordinary townspeople go hungry. All the while, Akahige’s various versions still avoid the depths of preachiness plumbed by Mito Komon. One reason why that show lasted for 43 seasons and Akahige became a “classic” only dusted off by a hard core of knowledge consumers, it must be said, is its infinitely repeatable, never challenging historical formula. If the past is to be a site of easy identification and sappy nostalgia, it has to be kept clean.

Mito Komon’s is a status quo imagination, suited to times of optimism but not to a Japan where most have long since ceased to accept, even as fantasy, the idea that benevolent old men can sweep away public problems. Amid the vicissitudes of samurai representation, Mito Komon ceased to be relevant decades ago. With declining ratings, it managed until this year to maintain a core of nostalgia viewers. Of the hundreds of farewell comments on the TBS Mito Komon website a great number are by people taking the final episode as an opportunity for reflection. Memories of growing up watching the show with now long dead grandparents abound. The show was loved, but were these commenters watching every week?

As Mito Komon bows out, historical representation in Japan is arguably more diverse than ever. Rightwing revisionism, which extends to the samurai past, has been widely discussed, but recent years have also seen the phenomenon of female fan communities “queering” samurai in just about every combination conceivable. Non-fiction tomes like Otome no Nihonshi (A History of Japan for Maidens, 『乙女の日本史』) complement trans-media phenomena like Capcom’s Sengoku Basara (Devil Kings) and its heroes that feed no end of dojinshi fantasies. This is not “progressive,” but it can be read as an interesting example of Japan’s fujoshi fangirls taking the edge off patriarchy’s historical roots by sublimating it to consumer culture. This has a more mainstream parallel in the manga and various drama and film versions of Ooku (The Shogun’s Harem, 『大奥』), a challenging piece of alternative history where women rule Japan and the servile and effete histrionics of what becomes of traditional masculinity grounds a look at gender roles as historically contingent, shaped by power relations and economics. Shirato Sanpei’s 1960s classic Kamui-den, the most ruthlessly political of all period manga, spawned a barely so-so 2009 film, but new printings of the manga and a hit series guide Kamui-den Kogi (Lectures on Kamui-den), which ties the patterns of historical exploitation laid bare in the original to today’s contingent laborers, speak to a niche renaissance in period manga revival which has also seen the recent reprinting of the works of gekiga iconoclast Hirata Hiroshi. The 2000s have not been kind to period pieces on television, but on movie screens, Yamada Yoji’s Tasogare Seibei (Twilight Samurai, 2002) and Miike Takashi’s Ju-san-nin no Shikaku (13 Assassins, 2010) share a hard critical edge and a willingness to look alternatively at the banality and brutality of much of samurai history.

Amid all of this, Mito Komon will likely only be missed by viewers who have clung to it for comfort in times of often unsettling change. There are plenty of alternatives, however, for audiences that want something more than the show’s vision of popular complacency. Ordinary Japanese do not need to wait for latter day samurai lords to save them, nor does history in popular culture have to be about longing for better days. It can also be about how to face the worse or imagine something better.

AKB48 took the top five slots on the Oricon singles charts this year, and its sister unit SKE48 took the #9 slot. Compared to the last few years, the AKB48 phenomenon has massively raised the number of records sold within the Top 10 — moving from a low in 2007 of only 4.3 million copies to now 9.5 million. And that growth was all AKB48. The “AKB48 Marketing Method” of encouraging fans to buy more than one copy each — known as AKB商法 in Japanese — evidently works!

The two other cult acts to take over the charts came from Johnny’s & Associates: boy band veteran Arashi (嵐) and brand new Kiss-My-Ft2, whose name sounds eerily like the broken part of an URL despite Johnny Kitagawa’s personal vendetta against this entire “Internet fad” that has been sweeping global culture.

The only other act on the singles charts is the kids behind the hit “Maru Maru Mori Mori!” — a novelty song that plays under the ending of a Fuji TV show. (Hear it here.) Children’s TV shows, such as moe-inspired “Cookin’ Idol I! My! Main!”, now all have this kind of digitized bubblegum sound that might as well be a sub-Nakata Perfume B-side. This particular song gets bonus points for existing outside of the relatively narrow idol-groupie world, but loses them immediately for sounding not so far from it.

While the music industry is probably patting itself on the back for strong singles sales from its top acts, notice that no one with a semblance of “musicality” can manage to sell singles in any meaningful numbers. Admittedly the album chart looks a bit better. Sure, Arashi and AKB48 took the top two spots, but there’s at least there’s some diversity beyond homegrown idol pop: two K-Pop entries Girls’ Generation and Kara, as well as people who write their own songs like Lady Gaga, Kuwata Keisuke, and non-threatening Sony group Ikimono Gakari.

If we time travel back to the distant year 2008, we can locate on the singles chart actual “bands” (apparently this is an old term for groups of musicians who wrote their own tunes and played “gigs” in “live houses,” sometimes with their own instruments) like Southern All-Stars or Mr. Children. This is no longer possible. The discrepancy here likely means that the singles market has become 100% dedicated to bands whose fans are either willing to pay whatever it takes for as few songs as possible (i.e., nerds, Johnny’s-obsessives) or too poor to buy albums (i.e., elementary school kids).

Since Oricon still plays the official role in society for determining what is “popular” despite the fact that purchasing music itself has become a slightly less-than-mainstream activity, J-Pop appears to be the complete dominion of idol groups and similarly infantile-sounding things. The only viable non-idol options are artists who have literally been around for decades — Kuwata, Amuro Namie, SMAP, B’z — powered by an army of ever grayer ex-young people.

This in part goes back to my “Great Shift” thesis, that “normal people” who used to like “music” stopped buying so-called “music,” so that only the loyal group fanatics are willing to shell out the money. Honestly if you don’t buy the group’s CD or two, you’re a terrible, horrible, sinful fan. And think about it: a decent, honest, devoted fan certainly doesn’t make a decision to buy the CD based on the quality of the music held within. That’s, I guess, for cynical people.

(And by the way, when I say CD here, I mean “compact disc.” The Japanese music market is still majority physical sales rather than digital downloads, and in general the industry remains very bent out of shape about the decline in CD sales. I suspect some of this stems from the fact that the record labels often don’t own master rights, which means they only make money from distributing and selling plastic. Whatever the case, selling a CD is possibly the most anti-consumer thing happening today. How many people you see every day walking around with a Discman? Yes, you must buy a physical object from which you can’t directly enjoy the audio on your own 21st century audio device.)

Anyway — had one of J-Pop’s non idol groups put out a song that captured the heart of ~1% of the nation, that entity would have dominated the charts. This did not happen. None of the non-idol groups or individuals managed to break the half-million mark, even with their albums. Kuwata managed to squeeze over 400K with MUSICMAN. Think about it: only .33% of the Japanese public needs to support a music group that formed in order to create original music, rather than because their status and money starved parents signed them up for indentured servitude at a local jimusho. Yet none of these “hey we are serious musicians!”-type groups can even win the hearts of 1/3 of a percent of the population anymore.

Not that “bands” are really having a moment in the rest of the universe either. The Billboard chart in the U.S. is filled with Katy Perry and LMFAO (although many Top 40 songs do show up on snobby critics’ best lists). I don’t necessarily pay attention to American radio pop, yet I did know that Cee Lo Green track “Fuck You” because it’s made so that no one could possibly dislike it and everyone’s seen that video of the girls singing Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass.” Both of those songs are pretty decent singles from my narrow subjective point of view, but moreover, they seemed to have made a dent in wider society.

Meanwhile AKB48 is everywhere — and we mean everywhere — yet the musical component of this bikini collective is much more obscure. Sure the tracks are karaoke fodder, but the actual musical content of the top Oricon hits is otherwise confined to the rooms and headspace of hardcore fans. You can easily live an active life in Tokyo and never once hear any of these songs. Walk into a Tokyo store and sometimes you’ll hear AKB48, but you’re more likely to hear American Top 40 or some Usen station of 1980s power hits (“Private Eyes” etc.). Tsumari: The records with the “highest sales” don’t have “the most mindshare in the Zeitgeist.” Well, actually and sadly, these songs are the ones with the most mindshare, and today that means near nil in impact outside of the superfans.

But that’s what you get though when idol music — a promotional vehicle in audio format for a heart-warming young woman or 48 — is law of the land, and why it’s probably not worth paying attention to the Oricon singles charts as anything other than a measure of entertainers rather than musicians. This isn’t really an elitist argument. Again, go back a few years and you’ll find musicians who used to chart such as GReeeeN, Orange Range, and Kobukuro, who were far from being critical darlings but were non-idol music groups. Yet even these groups have faded into memory, enjoyed by only a tiny subset of human beings in Japan who like musical music enough to buy it.

I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to hear an actual live band play AKB48′s mega-hit “Heavy Rotation,” and stripped of the key video visuals of its diminutive singers in Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie kissing each other (which I am led to believe by the commenters here that this is what Japanese girls get up to all the time), I had a chance to listen to the song as a song. Certainly one barrier to liking AKB48 is the otaku-pleasing aesthetics, which by their nature, should surely churn the stomach of someone in my snobby taste culture. (Arama They Didn’t readers, this is a good time to note that we exist in parallel “taste cultures” and you shouldn’t be offended that I don’t like the music of your world, as you most certainly would not like most of the stuff habitating my iPod. You would think that Faust is “weird,” and you’d be half-correct, but I wouldn’t get all “butthurt” and spam your comment filter if you weren’t into that Rustie album.)

Anyway, stripped of the AKB48 aesthetics that make AKB48 AKB48, “Heavy Rotation” mostly just sounds like a set of textbook J-Pop musical conventions stacked up against each other. The semi-anonymous songwriter Yamazaki Yo (山崎燿) apparently spends his non-AKB48 time working on anime themes and such, and I guess for the Akihabara millieu, total stability in melodic and production convention are key. The audience demands as such.

For the longest time though, pop music was the place in society you always looked for innovation. That’s the paradox of pop: You want what you know but with a slight twist so you feel like you are enjoying novelty and social change. This held pretty consistently in J-Pop as well. There was a time when all idol music was orchestrated. Then suddenly it was all synthesized. The melodies in the 1990s also drastically moved away from demi-”Oriental” kayokyoku and took on hints of R&B. J-Pop changed.

And this is what makes J-Pop now so disappointing to people who like “music.” Sure it’s sufficiently entertaining and shocking that the kids are into something so overly and openly otaku-esque, but the music itself is a little too familiar. It’s not even really “retro” and fighting against modern convention. We’ve not just heard these songs before — we’ve heard them recently. The otaku took over culture, and it turns out they are the arch-conservatives of pop, who want everything to hark back to a more simple age… of three years ago.

The Internet’s J-Pop true believers have a good point though — why waste time thinking about this music that I clearly don’t like. We should spend our energy cheering on the underground or the talented or the talented underground. But think about it — I like music, I live in Japan — I should therefore be interested in the nature of “music most popular in Japan.” What’s interesting, however, is that it’s not just fussy music fans like me that are disappointed not to find their own reflection in the mass culture mirror — it’s anyone who’s not an idol fan nor someone who got into their favorite band 10-30 years ago. I want to give the otaku a thumbs up for effort and go find some other artistic field to show interest in, but honestly-speaking, I’d like it even more if the Japanese music industry offered something for the rest of us too.

The association of the word kizuna with the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami feels so natural now that it comes as no surprise to see 絆, the kanji spelling of kizuna, acclaimed as 2011′s kanji of the year. The negative expression of the same year-view, 災 wazawai, had less than half as many votes, so where did the association for kizuna come from, and how did it become so meaningful to so many?

One of the earliest high-profile promoters of the “kizuna” concept was Watanabe Ken and Koyama Kundō’s kizuna311 site, launched less than a week after the earthquake with an English statement introducing the word to the world:

In the past few days, the media has brought attention to the world of earthquake and devastation, much foreign press has warmly applauded our orderliness and solidarity under the catastrophic circumstances, and has encouraged us to recuperate from the calamity.

And from reading these reports, we have come to realize that we have great assets. We Japanese can take pride in our kizuna, the solidarity that binds us.

To overcome this painful catastrophe, we must find a way to unite and find our kizuna among people.

By April 11 Prime Minister Kan used “kizuna – the bonds of friendship” as the title for his letter of thanks to the international community (note that the English phrasing appears in the Japanese version of the letter) without referring to or explaining the concept in the text at all.

Simple, powerful, and easy to pronounce worldwide, the word “kizuna” became a sort of anti-brand: an explicitly inclusive and community-oriented identity open to anyone. Everything from charity drives for orphans to Nadeshiko Japan‘s World Cup victory was celebrated as an expression of “kizuna.” The word itself will no doubt fade back into obscurity in time, but, in retrospect, it may turn out to have been the banner under which another facet of Japanese identity was polished up and turned to face the world.

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).

In the final installment of the series (Parts One, Two, Three, Four), we look at the export possibilities for Japanese culture when the “most popular” goods and works are increasingly being made by and for marginal subcultures without obvious analogs overseas.

Part Five: The Difficulty of Exporting Marginal Subcultures

Marketing guru Kawaguchi Morinosuke’s recent book Geeky Girly Innovation: A Japanese Subculturist’s Guide to Technology and Design posits that corporate Japan needs to take more guidance from otaku and gyaru. There is an important point to this — these are now the most influential and powerful groups in Japanese pop culture and should not be ignored out of snobbery. And maybe their obsessive spirit has applicable lessons for industry management. Yet we should not be naive about this either in a wider context: the products actually made within these subcultures are increasingly losing their resonance overseas.

Until now, you could divide Japan’s successful consumer exports into three groups:

(1) technological/industrial goods like cars and electronics
(2) kids’ products like video games, toys, comic books, and pens/stationary
(3) sophisticated cultural goods like fashion brands, indie music, and literature.

Other than automobiles, Japan has lost its edge on high-tech goods. Korean rival Samsung has almost singlehandedly taken over the space once monopolized by Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, and Sharp. And with the decreasing number of children, greater competition from the U.S. on video games, and a general move away from gadget culture, Japan is also struggling to export kids’ products. Meanwhile most of Japan’s successful cutting-edge culture exports — Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Shonen Knife, The Boredoms A Bathing Ape, Comme des Garçons, Hiromix, Murakami Takashi — came from a scene that has ceased to be high-profile in Japan.

This last category, while minor in terms of actual sales, did a lot of the legwork for boosting the Japan “brand” in the 1990s, especially among the cultural elite in the U.S. and Europe. The reason is simple: the artistic works spoke the language of upper middle-class aesthetes overseas. Furthermore these artists made an easy match with the West because they played with iterations of ideas originally created in The West: avant-garde art and fashion, street culture as defined by US/UK, punk rock, lounge music, etc. In general, the successful products and artistic works had something “universal” (i.e., “Western”) at their core, which made them more easily exportable. Overall Japanese culture found warm reception where the consuming groups in the West were similar to the Japanese creators in class position and values. We take for granted that Miyamoto Shigeru’s art-school tastes appealed subconsciously to the richer American youth who bought up the NES in droves during the mid-1980s.

What we have not seen, however, are good consumer comparisons overseas to the psychologically tortured Japanese subcultures like contemporary otaku or the yankii/gyaru. Mass market anime like Naruto and Gundam are relatively easy to export as they were built for “normal” youth. That cannot be said about moe titles that are meant to satisfy older men obsessed with two-dimensional elementary school girls. Similarly, no gyaru clothing brand has more retail stores overseas than the avant-garde Comme des Garçons, despite gyaru clothing’s huge business in Japan and CDG’s highly-limited audience. At least from what we have seen from the big subcultural moments in the last decade, the culture of Japan’s marginal pluralities is almost unexportable.

Let’s look again at AKB48 on YouTube — a global site where anyone can watch videos from anywhere else around the world. Based on the public viewership data for “Heavy Rotation” and other AKB48 videos, the vast majority of views for AKB48 come from the group’s domestic fan base. In other words, no other country than Japan contributes to AKB48’s multi-million view count despite the fact that the videos are available worldwide and AKB48 is the overwhelmingly dominant group in Japanese pop at the moment. AKB48’s seemingly-massive popularity in Japan make them the number one favorite for J-Pop exportation. Yet no one non-Japanese is watching their videos — even in light of a “Japan Cool” wave and the popularity of YouTube all around the world. Compare AKB48’s videos to the insight map for “The Boys” by Girls Generation (SNSD) in Korea, who have had massive success in Japan and whose YouTube stats show a very wide global audience.

In most countries with growing economies, educated upper-middle class consumers still spearhead the consumer market. They have the most disposable income and the most interest in cultural exchange. And those consumers, whether it’s Taiwan or the U.K., are the ones most likely to be willing to follow and purchase foreign cultural items.

Currently, however, the most conspicuous Japanese culture of otaku and yankii represents value sets with little connection to affluent consumers elsewhere. Most men around the world are not wracked by such deep status insecurity that they want to live in a world where chesty two-dimensional 12 year-old girls grovel at their feet and call them big brother. The average university student in Paris is likely to read Murakami Haruki and may listen to a Japanese DJ but not wear silky long cocktail dresses or fake eyelashes from a brand created by a 23 year-old former divorcee hostess with two kids. Overseas consumers remain affluent, educated, and open to Japanese culture, but Japan’s pop culture complex — by increasingly catering to marginal groups (or ignoring global tastes, which is another problem altogether) — is less likely to create products relevant for them.

This is not to say that the emergence of otaku and yankii culture is insignificant for Japan. This wave has finally given material and cultural expression to pockets of society that had a hard time voicing their experience in the past. The rich Tokyo elite enjoyed a disproportionately high influence over national culture for decades, and now the two marginal groups have taken the elite’s place in dominating the direction of pop. When it comes to “fairness” and democracy, this is the least elitist that Japanese culture has ever been. But we have replaced one kind of distortion with another, and we still should not confuse these subcultures’ tastes with being truly “mainstream.”

One of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter’s teachings is that companies that are competitive overseas come from domestic markets where they have local competition and must learn to please demanding local consumers. The more advanced the consumers, the more advantage a company has in eventually exporting its products when other consumers catch up. Apple’s success with the iPod came from the product’s direct targeting of tech-savvy American college students and former college students who had massive libraries of mp3s stuck on computers and wanted to take them out on the streets. Girls Generation worked to best other idol groups in Korea through highly skilled dancing, singing, and a song library purchased from European producers.

Japan’s consumer market meanwhile is becoming increasingly dominated by technological and cultural laggards. The peak “Japan Cool” came at a time in the 1990s when the average Japanese was intentionally or inadvertently consuming highly sophisticated culture, and the pressures to please them gave Japanese companies the training to be globally competitive. Cultural producers tried to one-up each other in coolness.

Japanese companies now face a true crisis: Appealing to the most powerful consumers in Japan will lead them away from tastes and values that can be easily exported overseas. AKB48 may be opening vanity branches in Taiwan and Jakarta, but will the world inherently be interested in an idol group meant to please a small group of men’s reactionary attitudes towards women and desire for songs that ignore the last twenty years of musical change? And as we’ve seen with the success of K-Pop in Japan, companies cannot automatically protect the domestic market against invasion. When the mainstream consumers do see something they like, that reflects their values in a way that otaku and gyaru content does not, they pounce. But until they reawaken as a consistent consumer force or rebuild cultural online to be less centered around product purchase, we are likely to stay within the current situation — where marginal subcultures rule the school.