Tokyomango: Summary of Joi and Lisa’s session about Japanese obsessions at Foo Camp

Joi Ito and Lisa Katayama are two of the most influential voices on Japanese culture for a global audience, but I was a bit troubled by some of their analysis of otaku for the O’Reilly Foo Camp.

In trying to explain the obsessiveness of otaku culture, they were quick to whip out “cultural explanations” — Zen Buddhism, the Tokugawa caste system, and ukiyo-e. Apparently Japan, despite massive social changes over a thousand years, has somehow retained the same “spirit” over time, which oddly manifests not in the middle of society, but in its strangest marginal outcast subcultures.

The danger of using the blunt “culture” explanations, however, is that it neglects to look at the actual and specific mechanisms which maintain or change culture. In most cases, these mechanisms are political or economic, and values shift according to structural situations. And most importantly, those within the system are often actively fighting against it. For example:

For generations, people have been taught to be happy perfecting their role in society, without necessarily viewing social or financial gain as a measurement of their success—it’s the shokunin culture in which focusing on one job allows one to obsess with abandon until they reach perfection on a very local level.

During the Tokugawa era, the rigid class system attempted to keep society stable by dividing society into four classes (five if you count the burakumin). At the bottom of society, however, the merchants actively worked against the system by pushing further and further with financial success. And you can make a case that this uneven financial gain of those at the bottom of the caste system led to the system’s downfall. Furthermore, when this class system was abolished in the Meiji Restoration, there was a huge rush of farmer’s and merchant’s sons successfully increasing their station in life — despite some kind of eternal Japanese “taboo” against this. In other words, there is no straight line of social stratification from the 17th to 21st century, and plenty of people have fought against the pre-determination of social class.

The real question, which these issues do little in addressing, is why otaku in particular tend to go to extremes of perfection. Surely there are cultural factors at work, but this kind of behavior is almost universal for subcultural units: in which participants tend to push further and further within accepted codes in order to show dedication to the group. There were surely British mods in the ’60s who were identical to otaku in their obsession with mastering their subcultural language of fashion signifiers. Some factors of Japanese culture make this more extreme, but there must be something about the unique social position of the otaku — and their birth in the high consumer years of a mature post-industrial capitalist economy — that serves as the best explanation.

Lisa mentioned that, when she was interviewing people for her 2D love story in the NY Times magazine, several sources likened the ability to fall in love with a body pillow to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness training.

I am sure if I openly loved an inanimate object, I too would be desperate to justify that love with some kind of ancient Japanese spirituality. I am not sure, however, that we are supposed to take this self-diagnosis seriously. Is there a way to demonstrate a path between these Buddhist values and a fringe sexual subculture? How did the pillow-humper access these Zen Buddhist principles? Are they just in the “ether” of Japanese society? Then why doesn’t everyone hump pillows? Again, the question about the otaku is less about their adherence to Japanese values, but their reason for anti-social and mostly frowned-upon behavior.

But this one bothered me the most:

While young Japanese people might have the outward appearance of rebellion, the majority follow a certain set of social rules. They will probably wait in line to get on the train just like any other good citizen. For example, Joi once bumped into a guy wearing a button that said “fuck off and die.” The guy promptly bowed, apologized, and walked away.

Note that the button did not say “Fuck Off and Die” in Japanese. And Joi did not run into a yankii guys who told him「死ね!」. The fact that the button was in English explains everything.

Now, I am sure the guy wearing the button generally understood the meaning of the statement, but we have to think about the actual mechanics of foreign culture importation in Japan. Punk culture —from which the button’s attitude comes — came to Japan explicitly through consumerist mass media in the late ’70s and early ’80s, mostly marketed to and read by the upper middle classes. This process automatically tends to purge the signifier of its original meanings and turn it into pure “fashion.” The media in which the message was spread in general does not spread or advocate a real “punk” view of society. Punk kids — whether in the UK or US “punk” mold — have always been primarily drawn from the consumer classes, and this consumer activity is correlated with higher placement in the social ladder. This ironically means that punk attitude has a real social risk for those most likely to buy punk fashion.

Japan’s real punks — the yankii, the bosozoku — are not a part of this consumerist world and embrace a “punk” attitude as part of their lifestyle. They would not bow to you if you accidentally bumped them.

So the reason that “rebellious-looking” teens follow the set rules is because they have imported a “rebellious” look as a look. Otherwise, their values are aligned with other members of middle-class society. This explanation that “punks are really polite,” however, only accounts for middle class teens. Working-class delinquent teens, who are not officially パンク系 but are punks in the broadest sense, are less likely to follow social rules.

I don’t mean to suggest that nothing in Japan can be explained by cultural heritage, but there are always enough exceptions and breaks in the straight timeline to warrant closer scrutiny. Furthermore, Japanese people themselves tend to use cultural tradition as a way to justify their own actions. This is basically true everywhere in the world. In the U.S., conservatives and liberals constantly fight over who has the most accurate interpretation of the Constitution and the Founding Father’s values. It’s officially our job to not take culturalist claims at face value, or at least, to discover the engines and pathways that make culture continue throughout time. Some of the otaku’s behavior is very Japanese. But in the end, they probably have little or nothing to do with Zen Buddhism.

At 1000 yen for 150 quickly-digested pages, Ishii Hiroyuki 石井裕之 and John W. Culver’s book on “black cold-reading,” Aru nise-uranaishi no kokuhaku あるニセ占い師の告白 (“The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic”), was an ironic presence on the shelves earlier this year. A book with the stated purpose of teaching its readers to recognize and resist emotional manipulation, advertised with “Banned from sale?!” (発売禁止！？) in large print plus a tiny “Pick it up before it is!” (になる前に手にとってください！) alongside — not to mention the sister volume on “white cold-reading” released at the same time for the same price — well, you could be forgiven for concluding that the first lesson is to wait for it to turn up on the 105-yen shelves at Book Off.

There’s nothing wrong with the content of the Confessions. The writing is purple but not labored. The account of Culver’s early psychic wood-shedding is pointless fluff, but the sentence-by-sentence breakdown of a sample cold-reading session is a decent introduction to the topic. The most interesting thing about the book, though, is that one of its authors doesn’t exist.

“This book,” Ishii explains in the first sentence of the introduction, “Is in the form of a translation of John W. Culver’s ‘The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic’ [...] but, in fact, this is a work of fiction by myself, Ishii Hiroyuki.” He goes on to explain (or claim) that this was one of his first ideas for writing about cold-reading (a term the katakana version of which, incidentally, Ishii appears to have trademarked), rejected by the publisher for being too “provocative,” but that he has decided to revive the idea in the hopes that it will help shock Japan out of its ongoing susceptibility to fraudulent spiritualists and ore ore scams.

Ishii is not the first Japanese author to fake a foreign nationality. Inukai Yūichi 犬飼裕一 has argued that pretending to be a foreigner in order to criticize Japanese society is “a tradition” in Japan. One of the best-known examples of this trend is Yamamoto Shichihei 山本七平, who used the pen name “Isaiah Ben-Dasan” in the 1970s to publish the Nihonjin to Yudayajin 『日本人とユダヤ人』 (“The Japanese and the Jews”) and attack Honda Katsuichi 本多勝一’s Asahi Shimbun series on the Asia-Pacific War. A few years later, Fujishima Taisuke 藤島泰輔 began his twenty-volume-plus Fushiji no kuni nippon 『不思議の国ニッポン』 (“Wonderland Japan”) series under the name “Paul Bonet.”

There are differences. “John W. Culver” is pure glamour: a fake psychic in the U.S., land of celebrity, and crime is a good if unadventurous hook. “Ben-Dasan” and “Bonet” were partly about glamour too, but more importantly, they were meant to suggest objectivity — “I have no particular stake in any Japanese culture war; here is what I think.” Ishii cheerfully reveals the truth about “Culver” in his introduction, while Yamamoto reportedly did not ever fully admit to being “Ben-Dasan”: one’s show business, the other’s sock puppetry.

Either way, it’s disappointing that Ishii decided to pound on a blue-eyed straw man like that. Surely Japan would have been better served by an exposé on cold-reading within its own borders.

The cover of Amélie Nothomb’s Tokyo Fiancée, translated by Alison Anderson for Europa Editions, depicts the only two characters in the novel: the author and the Rising Sun. They sit facing each other; Nothomb looks back over her shoulder at us, and the Rising Sun looms behind her, perfect, opaque, and blotting out everything else.

This artificially narrowed focus does not make the novel a bad one. Nothomb is refreshingly unafraid of the thin line between clever and stupid, leading to such entertainments as this:

I blessed whoever it was who had invented engagements. Life has its share of trials; a mechanism of fluids allows us, all the same, to make our way through them. [...] Yes, I shall irrigate you, lavish you with my riches, refresh you, appease your thirst, but how can I know the course my river shall follow: you shall never bathe twice in the same fiancée.

She also reveals herself to be a perceptive and insightful observer — but only of herself. Every other character in the novel is a cardboard cutout whose personality derives from some essentialist stereotype or other. Nothomb’s fiancé Rinri, for example, literally cannot pour himself a drink without inspiring a Crichton-grade Japanological analysis. When he insists on washing himself at the sink, it is because he is unwilling to “sully the waters of the honorable bathtub”; when we learn that he has “traveled a great deal — and always alone, without a camera” — Nothomb is careful to note that this makes him “not typically Japanese.” Most unfairly of all, she even projects the same attitudes onto Rinri himself, such as in this medievally sparse exchange:

“Have you already brought your lady love here?”

“I have no lady love.”

“Have you ever had a lady love?”

“Yes. I did not bring her here.”

I was thus the first lady to have the honor. It must have been because I was a foreigner.

Before long we come to understand that Tokyo Fiancée is not the intense face-to-face character study you might expect of a novel about getting engaged in a foreign land. Rather, it is a carefully edited slice of one person’s interior life as they sort through some issues of their own. (Note that the action overlaps the period covered by Nothomb’s earlier Fear and Trembling — it’s hard to blame her for being self-indulgent on the weekends if that’s what her weekdays were like.)

Other characters generally feel even more phoned-in than Rinri. Exceptionalist, boorish U.S. expats; Rinri’s patronizing, cruel mother; an undifferentiated mob of gold-toothed classmates from Singapore. At the extreme of this trend are figures such as the one described only as “a Canadian girl” who gravely warns Nothomb that “these marriages” produce “the most awful children”:

“What on earth are you talking about? Eurasians are magnificent.”

“But dreadful. I have a girlfriend who married a Japanese guy. They have two children, six and four years old. They call their mother weewee and their father poop.”

I burst out laughing.

“Maybe they have their reasons,” I said.

“How can you laugh? And what if it happens to you?”

“I don’t think I’ll be having kids.”

“Oh. Why? That’s not normal.”

I walked away humming a song by Georges Brassens in my head: “No, those good folk sure don’t like it / When you head off down a different path…”

Typical Canadian! Always trying to tie down the restless Belgian soul with their rules and regulations. Fortunately, Nothomb has a companion on her smug voyage down that different path: Japan, played here by Mount Fuji itself.

Mute but friendly, the mountain is drawn more vividly than any of Nothomb’s human interlocutors, partly because of its folk-links to her early childhood (spent in Japan, though far to the west). The encounters between writer and mountain are of greater emotional consequence than her entire relationship with Rinri.

Italy’s Corriere della Sera, according to the book’s back cover, praised Nothomb for the “profound relationship she has with Japan, with its symbols, its stereotypes, its archetypes.” But this is also her greatest flaw: she is so invested in archetypes and symbols that she never breaks through to the reality they abbreviate. Some passages seem almost to acknowledge this, like this meditation on Mount Fuji:

The volcano is a sublime invention that you can see from almost everywhere, so much so that at times I took it for a hologram. I’ve lost count of the number of places on Honshu that offer a superb view of Mount Fuji: it would be easier to count the number of places from which you cannot see it. If nationalists had wanted to create a unifying symbol, they would have had to build Mount Fuji. It is impossible to gaze at it without feeling a sacred, mythical tingling: it is too beautiful, too perfect, too ideal.

Except at the foot, where it resembled any old mountain, a sort of shapeless lump.

Similarly, while the notion of koi inspires a mini-essay on varieties of amorous experience (all rooted in national character, natch), more pedestrian words like osshaimasu are casually misspelled. (Seriously — neither Nothomb, nor her editor, not Anderson, nor Anderson’s editor could be bothered checking out how to spell the words they use?)

Ultimately, this extreme disregard for the grain-by-grain trickle of experience precludes any real insight into it. Tokyo Fiancée is pleasant and generous, but never amounts to more than the tale of a European born in Japan and a Japan born in Europe.

Back in the Néomarxisme days, one of the first major debates was the state of Japan’s “postmodernity”: whether Japan perfectly embodied the ideal postmodernist society, and therefore, was the best place to look for clues to our global future. In his newly-translated book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals
(originally published in 2001 as 『動物化するポストモダン―オタクから見た日本社会』), professor and critic Azuma Hiroki (東浩紀) deconstructs this self-association with postmodernism in Japan, arguing that the idea of a “postmodern Japan” has more to do with 1980s’ narcissism than proper theoretical conclusions. (Wikipedia links added by editors.)

Theories of postmodernism emerged in France in the 1960s, spread to the United States in the 1970s, and were imported into Japan in the 1980s. Postmodernism is a complex and difficult discourse that grew out of an amalgamation of structuralism, Marxism, theories on consumer society, and critical theory. Its circulation was thus largely confined to universities. In Japan, however, it was acclaimed outside universities in the mid 1980s as a fashionable mode of thought for the younger generation, but then subsequently forgotten together with the era. As a fad in theory, Japanese postmodernism was often referred to as “New Academism.” Even after postmodernism (i.e., “New Academism”) disappeared from Japan, theories on postmodernism remained a subject of study in English language universities throughout the world and affected subsequent academic trends. As I have written on these differing circumstances in an earlier essay, I ask those who are interested to consult that text. In any case, what is important here is not really the content of the theories of postmodernism but the fact that in Japan this highly complex body of thought turned into a kind of faddish media frenzy.

As a few critics at the time have already pointed out, this postmodernism fad was connected to the narcissism that permeated Japanese society in the 1980s. The discourse on postmodernism popular in Japan at the time was unique in the way it deliberately confused and intermingled questions over what encompassed “postmodernism” and what encompassed “Japaneseness.”

The claim endorsed by postmodernists at the time went something like this: Postmodernization refers to a process that occurs after modernity. However, Japan was never completely modernized in the first place. Until now this has been considered a defect; but as we progress to a new stage of world history from modernity to postmodernity, it rather promises to become a benefit, because this nation, never fully modernized, is easily able to embrace the process of postmodernization. For instance, as modern perceptions of humanity never fully penetrated Japan, it can adapt to the collapse of the concept of subjectivity with little resistance. In this way, Japan will emerge in the twentieth century as a leading nation boasting a fully matured consumer society and technological prowess…

Whereas modernity equals the West, postmodernity equals Japan. To be Japanese is thus to be standing at the forefront of history. Historically, this simplistic formula could be conceived as a repetition of the claims of the prewar Kyoto School that Japan was able to “overcome modernity.” Concurrently, it was also a direct reflection of the economic climate of the times. In the mid-1980s, in direct contrast to the United States, which had been suffering a protracted period of economic tumult since the Vietnam War, Japan suddenly stood at the zenith of the world economy, having entered a period of short-lived prosperity that would end in the bubble economy.

Postmodernists in Japan during this time elected to draw on the work of the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Nothing better expresses the reality of Japanese postmodernists’ desires than this choice. As I explain further in the following chapter, Kojève is known for ascertaining two different types of possible social formation in the postmodern era: the animalization of society as seen in the U.S. model and the spread of snobbery as illustrated in the Japanese model. In this regard, Kojève is oddly sympathetic towards Japan, and he predicts that the Japanization (or snobbery) of Westerners will prevail over Americanization (or animalization). In the eyes of Japanese in the 1980s, the prosperity of the times no doubt signified that we were heading toward the realization of this prospect.

Phrased another way, the prosperity of the 1980s enabled Japanese society to forget superficially the existence of its complex towards the United States, which we have examined. “Now the United States has been defeated! We no longer have to speak about the penetration of Americanization in Japan but rather must consider the advancement of Japanism in America!” The rise of postmodernism as an intellectual fad was supported by a climate that produced such claims. This same set of factors in turn aided the spread of otaku culture. The image of Japan that obsesses otaku is in fact no more than a U.S.-produced imitation, yet the atmosphere described above was the very thing that conveniently allowed people to forget about these origins. (16-18)

The latest in a series of graphic design tools for Néojaponisme readers: a number of red, white, and black patterns based on Modern Japanese graphic design from the 1950s.

These patterns are free to use for non-commercial applications. (For commercial applications, please contact us for a license.)

The patterns are provided in Illustrator CS3, Illustrator CS, and Adobe PDF format. You can download a zipped file containing all three formats here.