In Part One and Part Two, we looked at how decreasing incomes, a declining birth rate, increased spending on phone bills, and the lack of cultural relevancy for the Internet have all led to shrinking markets for cultural goods like fashion, music, books, magazines, manga, and TV. In this installment, we examine how these changes affect the makeup of consumers within the cultural markets — a shift from mainstream consumers to mostly marginal subcultures.

Part Three: Mainstream Consumers vs. Marginal Subcultures

The collapse of spending on popular culture in Japan makes the country an important laboratory for understanding how a “cultural ecosystem” of consumers, producers, distributors, media, trend-spotters, and advertisers operates when market activity decreases. In this context, we must first look at the degree to which middle class consumers made up and then retreated from markets for cultural goods.

The rise of middle class consumers

After World War II, Japan’s entire economy was in shambles and spending focused exclusively on the basics for survival. By the late 1950s and through the late 1960s, however, a buoyant consumer culture emerged for upper middle class salaryman and business owning families. In the mid-1970s, the Japanese economy had undergone its “miracle” and now a broader Japanese middle class finally had enough income for discretionary spending on culture. As Japan entered the 1980s, most everyone in the country was consuming products related to music, fashion, and manga to an active degree — especially normal middle-class teenagers with “standard” Japanese tastes and conventional life paths.

Cultural producers and advertisers needed to target social segments with the largest possible size and the highest amount of discretionary income. At first this meant Tokyo’s upper and upper middle-class, and for obvious reasons, these groups had pioneered consumer culture in the immediate post-war. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, the affluent still had disproportionate buying power, so the first fully consumer magazines for young people like JJ and Popeye built those lifestyle expectations into their message. Middle middle class consumers likely read those magazines at first as aspirational, but theygrew rich enough in the bubble era to become the most dominant and lucrative segment of the market. As a result, manufacturers went for both the giant middle class mass, and the resulting mainstream culture ended up reflecting the values — or what were perceived to be the values — of standard middle-class consumers.

The market responds to the tastes of those actively buying goods, so consumer culture can feel akin to a political election. Consumers “vote” for their favorite products/creation through the act of purchase. Producers in turn continue the creation of popular items, stop making unpopular ones, and make new products based on the templates of previous hits. Unpopular manufacturers and producers disappear or adapt to winning formulas.

Thus at the height of the cultural market in Japan, normal, middle-class consumers had the most “voting power.” Whatever they liked, the market took most seriously. In the peak of the publishing industry in 1996, for example, issues of a mainstream “good girl” fashion magazine like non•no sold nearly a million copies — vastly more than any niche title like Popteen. Big apparel companies then made brands that fit within the non•no style. At the same time, styles and items with mass consumption like those seen in non•no or JJ enjoyed social legitimacy. In other words, whatever everyone was buying was the “right” thing to buy. Hence non•no had greater influence over the social norms of fashion than smaller titles thanks to huge sales and an industry structure built around it. This principle carried across most major cultural fields: mainstream consumers outnumbered niche consumers, and the markets overwhelmingly created products for mainstream tastes.

The rise and fall of “counter-consumers”

While mainstream culture mostly spoke to mass consumers, the 1990s saw disproportionate dominance on Japanese culture from a group of sophisticated, educated Tokyo-based consumers, who are best described as “counter-consumers.”

Japan had a strong political and artistic counter-culture in the 1960s, but as it shed its political aspects after 1972, this “underground” community gradually shifted their attention on creating physical goods sold to small niche audiences built upon tastes in opposition to the mainstream. For example, Kawakubo Rei aimed to push fashion into avant-garde directions through her line Comme des Garçons, which before its Paris debut had only a fractional audience in Japan. The members of this millieu then mostly participated and supported their community through the act of consumption — rather than politics or true Bohemian drop out culture. They were “counter-consumerists” — demonstrating personal allegiance to a deep niche through buying goods counter to mass culture.

They had likely expected their world to stay small, but as Japanese economy started its exceptional rise in the 1980s, the number of media and shopping buildings increased, and the well-informed types who curated content for these institutions moved to introduce more and more leading-edge culture to their increasingly sophisticated consumers. The PARCO Theatre in Shibuya, for example, opened with a performance from avant-garde dramatist Terayama Shuji. The end result was a twenty year “culture bubble” where Japan’s college and art-school students made up a powerful consumer bloc, supporting cutting-edge creators within Japan and buying products from all over the world with similar values. In this era, art magazines like Studio Voice sold over 100,000 copies, and unreadable post-modern works like Asada Akira’s Structure and Power became best-sellers.

This small group of Tokyo elite continued to stake out a huge claim on Japanese culture in the mid-1990s through magazines like Olive and relax. The street fashion style Ura-Harajuku — led by Fujiwara Hiroshi, who had started out in the underground London Nite scene — became the most popular look for men around 1997, and like Shibuya-kei musical artists like Pizzicato Five and Cornelius had certified chart hits. Members of this taste culture saw their values reflected in Tsutsumi Seiji’s Saison Group retail chains Parco, Muji, Wave, and Loft. Furthermore the small counter-consumerist minority ended up working themselves in the increasingly lucrative cultural industries, thus propagating this set of tastes and values to a new generation.

At the turn of the century, however, the counter-consumerist wave started crashing. As fewer and fewer middle-class consumers bought goods, they stopped experimenting on “weirder” products. Cultural producers could thus no longer justify making goods that worked as branding projects but had no financial return. Furthermore the new millennial youth generation could not understand the values of either the superficial Bubble kids or the cultural elite obsessed with Western art, music, and fashion. Magazines like Studio Voice and relax folded, while famed Shibuya record stores Maximum Joy and Zest closed their doors. Even HMV — the birthplace of Shibuya-kei as a mass-market genre — disappeared and was replaced with a Forever 21. Avant-garde brands returned to having tiny audiences. Comme des Garçons started up myriad new low-priced, logo-based lines that would appeal to younger and less daring customers.

The culture bubble had popped, and counter-consumerists went back underground.

Marginal subcultures on the fringes

From the 1960s to the end of the 1990s, the upper-middle class and middle-class controlled Japanese pop culture, yet there had always been a few important marginal youth consumer groups outside of the Japanese mainstream. The most solid subcultural voting blocs since the late 1970s have been the otaku — anti-social “nerds” interested in science fiction, comic books, video games, and sexualized little girls (lolicon) — and the yankii — “delinquent” non-urban working class youth with low levels of education and a blue-collar destiny. (The gyaru subculture — originally upper middle-class — should now be seen as the female manifestation of yankii values.)

These marginal groups are true minorities when compared to the mainstream market, but their size is not what makes them marginal. The use of “marginal” here measures the distance from the subcultural consumer segment to both middle-class social norms as well as from the tastemakers, gatekeepers, and workers within the large companies that produce pop culture. The counter-consumers, for example, were never large in number, but they had their hands on the reigns of the culture industry. Otaku may likely work at independent game publishers who make erotic titles, and ex-yankii run yankii magazines, but Japan’s largest and most hallowed culture companies such as Magazine House, Nintendo, Sony, and Uniqlo mostly hire graduates from Waseda, Keio, and other top universities. Otaku and yankii had strong outcast communities, but they essentially had to live on the fringes of pop culture. Yankii and otaku spent their formative years as true social outcasts — blamed as juvenile delinquents and sociopaths.

In times of a substantial and profitable mainstream consumer market, large companies were justified in ignoring the yankii and otaku segments as potential customers. Moreover the culture industry had a great risk in indulging too conspicuously in these subcultures, lest they offend their core of middle-class consumers. Fashion magazine non•no could not have shown a yankii or ganguro girl as a style icon — the editors’ curated style is not just different from the yankii style but fully premised on being a style that is not yankii. Accordingly the major consumer magazine publishers — Magazine House, Takarajima, Shueisha, and Kodansha — never made titles directly appealing to yankii youth. This was left to smaller fringe publishers like Kasakura and Million. Large advertisers — magazines’ true consumers — also demanded that media material be in “good taste” for the very same reasons. They wanted to connect with aspirational upper middle-class culture rather than despised outcast culture.

So until very recently, Japan’s culture industry — dominated by educated upper-middle class counter-consumers — worked hard to appeal to Japan’s large middle class. Tokyo’s powerful consumer base and Tokyo as industry center of cultural production made the wider culture gravitate towards the specific tastes of Tokyo upper middle-class youth. This, however, has drastically changed in the last decade with the fall of middle class consumerism. Next time we will look how the otaku and yankii have taken over the vacuum left by the middle-classes as they exit markets.

Last time we looked at the decline in Japanese wages, increased demand for inferior goods, and decreased demand for luxury brands. This time we look at the effects of lower incomes on markets for explicitly cultural goods.

Part Two: The Implosion of Cultural Markets

Within Japan almost every single market for cultural goods has seen prolonged decreases in sales since the late 1990s or has headed into troubled waters.

• Music: The music market exploded in the 1990s thanks to karaoke, mini-CDs, TV tie-ups, and female-oriented J-Pop but that growth has been completely wiped out and now sales returning to late 1980s levels, even with increased digital downloads.
• Publishing: Revenues in the book and publishing industry decline yearly, and the manga and anime industries are in crisis. Manga magazine sales are collapsing, and even relatively stable single-title comic collections have started to drop. Consumer magazines are going under faster than new titles can be created; just in recent years, we’ve said goodbye to Esquire, Pinky, Studio Voice, and PS. Discount chain Book Off is increasingly unable to sell its cheap used books, CDs, and games. And of course, the Internet has also ravaged porn magazine sales, which kept many publishers in Japan able to support its other non-porn magazines.
• TV: TV viewership is down — with the main broadcast channels routinely getting less than 10% shares weekday prime time — despite no serious competition from cable or satellite TV. 13.5% of young men say they watch no TV. TV sales were down 73% in October 2011, and 75% of 3D TV owners were “disatified” with the technology.
• Clothing: Clothing sales have declined 30% since their peak in 1991, with the men’s suit market essentially halving in size since 1997. Sales are also shifting away from premium goods and onto fast fashion and low priced brands like Forever 21, Uniqlo, and Shimamura. Meanwhile “select shops” — once the main site of sales for small boutique import brands — have shifted their inventory to their own cheaper Chinese-made lines.
• Gaming: Games sales did very well over the last decade, but the once-dominant Japanese game industry has been faltering on the global stage, and even stalwart Nintendo — who hugely expanded the audience for gaming through the Wii and DS — is beginning to see major declines. Sony now makes most of its income from its insurance business rather than its consumer electronics or gaming. Meanwhile working class hobby pachinko is also bleeding money.
• Cars: Although automobiles are not strictly cultural goods, there has been a great decline in Japanese auto sales and part of that stems from young consumers no longer buying cars as part of a “driving” hobby.

One exception is films: 2010 was a banner year for motion pictures at ¥220 billion in ticket sales. The film market, however, is increasingly aggregating around mega-hits rather than supporting a wide diversity of titles. Some key art-house theaters, like Ebisu Garden Cinema, closed after 17 years.

Why the decline?

There are a variety of factors to blame for the declines in these markets. As suggested in Part One, lower salaries have decreased consumers’ discretionary income with which they buy cultural goods. Young workers in particular are having trouble finding work, and when they do, have very low salaries and no clear track for salary increases. Uncertainty about future earnings also means a higher saving rate, which further decreases discretionary spending in the present. Among the marketing community, Japanese millennials are known as the “generation who doesn’t consume.”

Demographics have also played a big part in hurting the cultural industries: An anemic birthrate has evaporated the youth consumer base. In 1964 — at the height of the “baby boom” — 18.6% of the top population was between 15 and 23 (18.03 million). During the Bubble Era, the Dankai Jr. generation made up a relatively high 14.1% of the population (17.47 million). Although statistics are not immediately available for the last nine years, we can assume that the number of youth is already lower than the meager 11.1% of 2000 (14.13 million) — which was already the lowest recorded since 1920. (Statistics from here.) This means that 3-4 million consumers have disappeared from the zone that in the past has been responsible for most cultural expenditure. Smart companies are thus shifting their product lines to appeal to the larger demographic swaths of older, richer consumers.

Moreover young people are increasingly entertaining themselves with free to low-priced content on mobile phones and the web, and to a certain extent (although less than the West), much material is available online in pirated form. Spending has also shifted towards paying off phone bills rather than being spent on CDs and clothing directly like in the past. Phone companies are capturing much more of consumers’ money and then distributing it to content providers themselves.

Isn’t the Internet making up for all of this cultural decline?

Of course, most countries have also seen an implosion of “analog” content in the face of a digitizing world, and Japan is no exception to this trend. Despite high Internet penetration, however, web culture has yet to establish itself as a legitimate pillar of content in Japan. Most offline cultural producers, like newspapers and weekly magazines, do not put a significant amount of material online. There are no start-up sites with the influence of Boing Boing, or the political importance of Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, and the Drudge Report. There have been few D.I.Y. bloggers who rival offline cultural influencers; no 14 year-old bloggers invited to haute couture fashion shows in the vein of Tavi Gevinson. In fact, the Internet in Japan still retains a “techy” or “nerd” image, and an impenetrable otaku site like 2ch is still the central heart of Internet meme creation.

Magazines in Japan usually directed consumers towards the “proper” goods to buy and how to use them, and there have been almost no websites — at least for traditional mainstream genres like fashion — that have taken over this role from print. Magazines get the latest information and bestow a legitimacy upon their advice. An anonymous kid with a blog just doesn’t have the same effect over the market.

There have been cultural and structural barriers towards moving offline content online and creating new web content businesses (see “The Fear… of the Internet”), and the overall result is that the Internet in Japan is not picking up the slack of the traditional culture markets as they shrink. Most importantly web use in Japan is relatively passive and anonymous, and this only further questions the culture created upon it.

This means that cultural institutions still have to look at analog markets — like the number of CDs or magazines sold — as a way to gauge success and popularity. Our best understanding of a “hit song” in Japan remains a “number one” on the Oricon charts. A “hit” TV show pulls numbers that were once understood to be a “failure.”

The total effect is that as Japan’s economy declines, Japanese popular culture is not just dropping in terms of sales but also in terms of total participation as well as “visible” participation. Consumers were once engaged with pop culture most actively through the act of consumption — buying a CD, book, or video game — but not only have they ceased buying goods, they are increasingly not even participating passively when media is virtually free, like in the case of TV. And they are not building significant new cultural spaces online with the same power, influence, and legitimacy as their precedents. There are almost no barriers to creating and distributing content, and yet the amount of legitimate content with engaged consumers is decreasing.

The U.S., in particular, has seen an explosion of content from cable TV proliferation and new Internet businesses in the last decade, which has made everyone assume the universality of the Long Tail theory. Japan shows the opposite: a decrease in the amount of culture in the market, as well as the number of participants in pop culture. There may not be any parallel to this phenomenon in any other major country.

Next time we look at how the market once made its products for the middle-classes and leading-edge consumers and why it’s no longer profitable to do so.

In five parts, how marginal subcultures took over a Japanese pop culture with no central core nor leading-edge.

Whether or not the country truly suffered something as dire as “lost decades” for the last twenty years, Japan has certainly seen a dramatic change in its social fabric since the bursting of the bubble economy in the early 1990s. Japanese incomes have plummeted since their peak in 1997. Meanwhile companies are shifting more and more job openings to “non-regular” and temporary positions, meaning fewer young workers can even get their foot in the door to future middle-class earnings. Few are confident about their future economic security.

Back when the Japanese economy was strong in the 1980s and even the mid-1990s, Japan arguably had the world’s most vibrant consumer culture. Now in the face of unemployment uncertainty and declining wages, consumers are cutting back, and in response, the marketplace has rapidly shifted from premium goods and services to supplying cheaper substitutes.

So what has this meant for Japanese pop culture? Consumer spending on culture has declined almost parallel to wage decreases, and most markets — music, publishing, fashion — started to slowly implode even before the Internet decelerated demand for analog goods.

The shrinking of cultural markets does not just mean less culture in Japan, however. The hollowing out process has had a distorting effect on the content of the actual culture being produced and distributed. As regular consumers exit the market and leading-edge consumers are forced back underground, “marginal segments” with highly concentrated buying power — particularly, the otaku, yankii, and gyaru — have taken a leadership position in setting tastes and trends. Over the course of this five-part series, we explain this process and also demonstrate the degree to which Japanese pop culture now caters to specific niche audiences rather than reflecting a “mainstream” set of values. Japan may have become the world’s first consumer market without a mass core — and this has significant implications for the future of its cultural exports.

• Part One: Incomes and Consumer Expenditures in Decline
• Part Two: The Implosion of Cultural Markets
• Part Three: Mainstream Consumers vs. Marginal Subcultures
• Part Four: The Rise of Marginal Subcultures
• Part Five: The Difficulty of Exporting Marginal Subcultures

Part One: Incomes and Consumer Expenditures in Decline

Lower incomes, lower allowances

Average Japanese incomes have taken a huge hit over the last 13 years. This chart shows the degree to which salaried employees’ incomes dropped since their peak in 1997. The most significant declines came after 2008’s so-called “Lehman shock,” and even with the slight uptick in 2010 and expected for 2011, wages are still not back to 2008 levels. As Shukan Bunshun calculated, the end result is a loss of ¥220 trillion in lost or declining salaries in the last 12 years (Japan Times). Not all Japanese employees are salaried, of course, but these measures best demonstrate the state of Japan’s middle and upper-middle classes.

Meanwhile the size of the middle class is likely shrinking due to a shift of corporate positions from “regular workers” to “non-regular workers.” Non-regular workers are not guaranteed steady income increases, and therefore, often make 40% of a regular worker salary doing essentially the same job. In 1990, the share of non-regular workers was 20%; in 2007, it was 34% (ref). This has especially affected younger Japanese moving into the workforce for the first time.

Furthermore things have been difficult in the last decade for lower and working class families in Japan, especially the elderly. The number of families receiving government welfare benefits has skyrocketed in the last decade, returning to levels last seen in the early 1960s, before Japan’s “economic miracle.”

Lower incomes mean less discretionary spending. Japanese wives traditionally control the family budget, and in these tenuous times, they are giving less to their husbands as “allowances.” A survey recently found that these allowances are at their lowest point in three decades — ¥76,000 in 1989, now at ¥36,500. Accordingly, men are going out after work less and spending less when they go out. We could assume that parents and grandparents are subsequently giving less to their children in allowances and gift money, although the data suggests that these allowances have not fallen particularly hard. This may be balanced out by the fact that grandparents and parents are able to concentrate smaller payments on fewer children in light of steeply declining birthrate.

Lower expenditures and more inferior goods

With lower incomes and low confidence about future earnings, Japanese consumers have been demanding less expensive products. Many enterprising companies such as clothing brand Uniqlo, beef bowl purveyor Sukiya, and fast food chain McDonalds have reorganized their businesses to provide consumers with the cheapest possible goods. These companies have either taken dominant positions in the market — Uniqlo’s so-called hitorigachi “winner takes all” — or seen record profits like McDonalds.

The proliferation of discount retail and restaurants does not necessarily mean that Japanese people are living worse lives. Deflation has finally brought once sky-high Japanese prices for everyday items in line with Europe and the United States. For example, Uniqlo — which is “extremely cheap” in the eyes of most Japanese — sells relatively high-quality garments at the price American customers expect to pay at a mid-range brand like The Gap. In many ways, deflation has empowered Japanese consumers to get more for their dwindling yen.

What is troubling, however, is the market’s move towards meeting consumer demand with inferior goods. Inferior goods, economically-speaking, are goods that see demand increase as incomes fall. In these instances, consumers choose poor-quality, substitutes for a preferred item. Instead of buying a normal good like fresh deli ham, consumers go for a cheaper, less satisfying product like Potted Meat Food Product. If given limitless choice, the consumer would obviously choose the normal good over the inferior one.

In the case of Japan over the last decade, we have seen a significant rise in popularity of inferior goods and a decrease in demand for premium goods. Japan’s most notable inferior good of the moment is “third-category beer” — a beer-like beverage with nearly zero malt content that sells for slightly less than real beer. Japanese consumers facing no economic constraint would choose Japan’s most iconic (and not particularly expensive) mass market beers such as Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Ichiban Shibori over third-category beer. So what does it say about the consumer market when Japan will soon have a majority “fake beer” market for malt-flavored beverages? Even with falling demand for beer-like drinks, third category beer is seeing growth. This is a sign that the consumer living standard considered normal just a decade ago has fallen dramatically into a new “basket of goods” that would once have be seen as only appropriate for the relatively destitute.

This income-driven demand for cheaper goods is thus changing how companies prioritize production and marketing. Suntory — with a product line that ranges from cheap hooch Tory’s to global award-winning Yamazaki single-malts — has ceased to promote its mid-range whiskeys such as Suntory Old and focuses its mass media campaigns almost exclusively on the cheapest products that can be mixed in low-price highballs. Until recently, Tory’s was a post-war relic that had generally disappeared as the country grew rich, but now Suntory buys extensive train advertisements for this whiskey, which costs only ¥1080 for a 700ml bottle. The company has also invested heavily into entire TV campaigns around the slightly higher-grade but still cheap Suntory Kakubin with stars Koyuki and Kanno Miho.

On the other end of the spectrum, luxury sales in Japan have essentially collapsed. Middle-class Japanese shoppers — buying in Japan and abroad — once made up the single largest global market for European luxury goods. Now China is set to overtake Japan in terms of luxury demand. Although the market for import apparel and accessories peaked in the mid-1990s and department stores — one of the main sites for luxury consumption — have suffered a structural and steady decline since that time as well, the top global brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Prada managed to achieve strong prolonged growth within a nominally shrinking market.

Since 2008, however, most of the luxury brands have seen serious drops in sales. And even with luxury’s bounce-back around the rest of the world, Japan experienced a continued decline in sales until a slight uptick very recently. Louis Vuitton and Gucci bags were once the mainstream standard for middle-class (and even lower middle-class) women, but judging from the streets of Tokyo, young women now prefer furoku canvas bags that come for free inside of a magazine. There have been signs of slight luxury business recovery in recent months, but this can mostly be explained as Japan’s upper class going out to shop again and Chinese consumers visiting Tokyo. Luxury goods will likely never again be a part of the middle-class “standard.”

Japan, of course, was always an exception here: Young clerical workers with low incomes generally do not put themselves in debt to buy handbags intended for the very rich. Still, this is another example of how Japanese consumers have completely changed their lifestyle expectations regarding consumption over the last decade. In the next part of the series, we will see how lower incomes and reduced expenditures have directly impacted markets for cultural goods.

Next time: How markets for cultural goods have imploded in the last decade.

In 1973 famed writer and novelist Paul Theroux made an ambitious jaunt across Europe and Asia almost exclusively by train. His account was published in 1975 as The Great Railway Bazaar — now one of the great classics of the travel writing genre.

With trains as the central theme, Theroux could not resist paying Japan and its shinkansen a visit, so he ends up using the island nation as his furthest point East before heading back to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Express. Coming from a stint in the deep jungles of war-stricken Vietnam, Theroux flies to Japan in late 1973 to ostensibly give a few lectures on English literature. These engagements at universities in Hokkaido and the Kansai region are just excuses, however, for him to take the bullet trains up and down Japan.

While Theroux boasts no expertise on Asia or Japan in particular, what is fascinating about his account is the degree to which he is already able to summon the most classic stereotypes of post-war Japan by the early Seventies.

First and foremost, everything is incredibly expensive — even to this American living in the U.K. Theroux writes, “It is with a kind of perverse pride that the Japanese point out how expensive their country has become.” Clothes “cost the earth,” and he hears rumors of a $40 cup of coffee. Yet he quickly realizes something that is still true today, that Tokyo can be cheap if you stay in inns rather than hotels, eat ramen and other Japanese dishes, and take commuter trains instead of taxis.

(There are some differences from the present, however. Theroux’s account claims that fruit, mostly imported from South Africa, comes cheap and plentiful. Judging by the insane fruit prices of my local supermarket in 2011, this was either an observational mistake or has completely disappeared over the last few decades.)

Further stereotypical scenes: drunk Japanese salarymen passed out on the streets, women greeters at department stores, a “Japanese taste for gadgetry,” the lack of guilt towards consumerism, men and women in surgical masks, and highly ordered behavior that Theroux calls “a people programmed.”

During his short time in Japan, Theroux ends up doing a lot of things and talking to a lot of people, yet he focuses his write up on what he finds to be the culture’s peculiar forms of sexuality.

Looking for something to do at night, Theroux ends up at a performance called “Red Flowers Fall on Fair Skin” playing at the Nishigeki Music Hall. The newspaper ad — “commemorating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon” — tricks him into believing it is a culturally important show. Hence he acts disappointed to ultimately discover it is, as he puts it, a “tit show.” Resignation turns to abject horror as the stage performance slowly transforms into first, a minstrel show, and then bouts of incredibly violent and sadistic sex. In a segment called “Ten no Amishima,” a man kills a woman right as he orgasms, and in the final piece “Onna Harakiri,” a naked woman slowly commits suicide with a blade, splattering blood everywhere. Theroux is even more weirded out by this “savage eroticism” when the male audience shuffles out in orderly fashion and then they all bow goodnight to colleagues with utmost protocol.

While Theroux’s account reads like a satirical fictionalization of Japanese entertainment, this particular show did actually exist. “Red Flowers Fall on Fair Skin” 『白い肌に赤い花が散った』played at the Nishigeki from November to December 1973, written by playwright and failed LDP candidate Takechi Tetsuji. Theroux does not catch, however, that this kind of performance was far from “mainstream”: Takechi was a highly controversial figure who had been prosecuted routinely for obscenity.

Yet after that show Theroux seems to find sex and violent art everywhere he looks. He tries reading Edogawa Rampo and finds it implausibly perverted. He flips through a young woman’s manga as she’s in the train bathroom and discovers “bloody stories.” He hears an anecdote about a teacher and her students’ mothers all getting together to giggle over a pornographic Buddhist scroll. Even when he meets a Kyoto professor obsessed with Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl, the discussion quickly descends into the Japanese scholar’s specific proclivities for sex shows. (We alsp learn in this discussion that Saul Bellow had a boring time in Japan until they figured out to take him to a strip club.)

Theroux is no prude, but he is never quite able to laugh off the encounters with sex throughout his time in Japan. He had even seen the darker sides of the Asian sex trade throughout his travels in places like India and Bangkok, but he seems traumatized by the sheer banality of “blood-thirsty” sexual voyeurism in Japan.

The Great Railway Bazaar’s brief Japan episodes put forward familiar views of Japanese sexuality that would later become stereotypical. That being said, was the author’s special attention to Japanese sex culture a fair topic for exploration? Or was it intentionally exploitative, meant to shock his English-language readers and draw moral lines of which Theroux was clearly on the right side?

While in Japan, Theroux does not once comment upon Japanese sexual services intended for the individual, nor does he seek them out. No one stops him on the street to offer him girls. Yet his social experiences keep bringing him back to the subject of sexual voyeurism, and you can feel his frustration and slight digust. Compare that to his experiences in the rest of Asia, where he treats prostitution with little shock, and his reportage just ends up layering a creepy veneer on something he finds to be generally inevitable.

Theroux likely had little background to understand the degree of institutionalization of sexual commerce within Japan, especially for a nation that has moved far beyond its pre-war poverty-driven prostitution industry. There is no single “red light district” but a widely distributed network of establishments across the country, employing hundreds of thousands of workers. As scholar Anne Allison and others have shown, Japan’s gigantic “mizu-shobai” industry of sexual services — ranging from paying to drink with women to strip clubs and full-out prostitution — relies quite heavily upon on its integration with the corporate world. Sexual voyeurism and gender hierarchy have not been regrettable acts of desperate men: Top male bosses fraternize and companies “build bonds” through the help of these services. In the 1970s, Thereoux was likely to run into the activity as soon as he entered a male-exclusive world, such as university faculties of Western literature.

And it is this very framework of male fraternization that pushes sex towards being a voyeuristic activity. Heterosexual sex for male bonding must be rebuilt and reconfigured — from its original conception as a private act between individuals — for the purposes of group male entertainment. Hence violence and sadism are likely to become core thematic principles, as alternatives like romance, love, and tenderness directly project man’s private bonds to women — thus creating a conflict with its new context. In other words, “savage eroticism” is likely a functional product of sex’s role in male fraternization rather than merely a cultural quirk.

Interestingly the socialized voyeurism of Japanese sex culture that Theroux encountered has faded in recent years, and his travels mark the final days of an era when the “sex show” had a special place in society. These days sex services are split between the faux relationships of hostess clubs and kyabakura, meant to provide psychological support for men, and the full-out physical gratification of pink salons, delivery health, soaplands, and other fuzoku parlors. While corporate money still keeps the hostess club world afloat, younger men — who are now less likely to be full-time company employees with access to entertainment accounts — have moved away from sex services as social bonding. When they rent naughty DVDs at Tsutaya, they’d rather not run into anyone they know.

Today legal and gray market sexual services still make up a significant portion of the Japanese economy and employ a large number of women. In this sense the book’s observations — while now certainly clichéd — came plausibly from a place without malicious intent. Theroux may have been one of the first Western writers to call disproportionate attention to the socialized aspect of sex in Japan, but he certainly was not exaggerating for effect.

Between infamously long work hours and personal identities grounded in corporate affiliation, Japan has usually been known for its labor rather than its leisure. This may be, however, exactly why the nation’s enduring obsession with golf is so conspicuous. Sure, golf is the most obvious athletic extension of Japan’s social priorities, but in recent days, the sport has an enormous legion of fans that expands far beyond the rigidities of workplace hierarchies. The game has grown and shifted together with society — providing a useful metaphor for understanding both the country’s emergence as an economic power in the 20th century and the downfall of the salaryman-dominated social system in the 21st.

Although now something approaching a cliché, the first images to emerge globally of Japanese golf culture told a slightly depressing story. Back in 1964, an infamous photograph appeared in Life of atomized salarymen at a three-story driving range hitting balls into the void. This etched a nearly permanent narrative for the rest of the world: The busy people of a very crowded Japan were trying to live out the fantasy Western lifestyle at any extreme. Scholar Marilyn Ivy wrote in the essay “Critical Text, Mass Artifacts” that the U.S. media portrayed Japan as “impossible, dehumanized productivity.” And in that framing, those now-iconic industrialized golf ranges surely looked like the key leisure activity of a “dystopic capitalistic” system (Ibid.).

Twenty-five years after that photograph, however, the idyllic towns of Hawaii and California greeted planeload after planeload of “Japan Inc.” businessmen as they headed out to play the areas’ most prestigious greens. The dream had been fulfilled — those practicing in that dystopic driving range were now enjoying the Great Outdoors shoulder to shoulder with the American elite. And when a Japanese businessman purchased the ultra-luxury Pebble Beach Golf Links on the California Coast for $700 million over the market price in 1990, Japanese golf suddenly became another facet of U.S. paranoia towards Eastern economic dominance.

But we all know what happened later: The Japanese economy collapsed in the mid-1990s, and the salaryman class lost its monopoly on social prestige. Golf was a core tradition of corporate warriors, and it therefore also suffered a reputation loss from its over-association with the dominant old-man contingent. The decline of golf, however, is itself history, and in recent years, the sport has been rehabilitated as a sport rather than a day of work outside of the office. And it is now open to almost all — not just old men with expense accounts but also young women on group dates.

Even with these changes to the player base, one thing remains constant: Golf has become as deeply-embedded in Japanese culture as green tea and baseball. There have been thousands of fads and trends involving foreign culture, but golf has weathered a full century of tremendous social change to still reign as a dominant sport. How did this one particular game of hitting a little white ball into a distant hole become so entrenched in the Japanese psyche?

As seen in most importation of Western culture in Japan, golf first entered the country directly through acts of foreign intervention. When Japan re-opened its borders in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the port cities flooded with Western businessmen looking to cash in on a new trade route. Since these men and their families mostly lived in sequestered communities with Western housing, they were also quick to install other institutions, such as churches and cricket clubs, that would replicate their lifestyles from back home. So it was quite inevitable that a foreigner would look out one day on a lush green Japanese valley and claim the land for golf.

In 1901 destiny called for Arthur Hesketh Groom, a Brit in the tea trade who was sick and tired of not having a good golf game in the 33 years he had been in Japan. He took it upon himself to construct a private four-hole course on Mt. Rokko, which two years later, he expanded into nine holes. Thus was born the Kobe Golf Club. In the May 19, 1903 issue of English newspaper Kobe Chronicle, Groom announced a golf tournament on his new course. Unsurprisingly, no Japanese players showed up, and in this nascent year, golf was exclusively a pastime of the expat scene. But by the following year, the now 18-hole Kobe Golf Club had 171 members, seven of whom were Japanese.

Once Groom proved that the sport could work on Japanese soil, golf spread throughout the country — but always at the hands of foreigners. A more winter-friendly course opened in nearby Yokoya in 1904, and two years later, Brits near Yokohama founded a course in Negishi. Native players slowly trickled in to the sport, sometimes as caddies of the Western players, but they were generally slow to become competitive members of this elite world. Japan’s first national golf tournament, which started in 1907, did not even have a Japanese contestant until 1916.

1918, however, was a big shift as Inoue Makoto became the first Japanese player to win his country’s makeshift national tournament. With this victory, golf started to show movements towards greater domestication. Of course the first Japanese involved in the golf scene were the sons of high-society families who had studied or worked in the West. Inoue had been posted at the New York office of his company and spent enough days and nights at New Jersey’s White Beeches Country Club to be crowned club champion for two years straight. Another famed early golfer Akaboshi Rokuro had picked up the sport during his time at Princeton.

These foreign-trained individuals acted as early golfing ambassadors, but soon they were joined by the nation’s less-globetrotting upper class. In 1914, 30 top Japanese businessmen — one of whom later became a cabinet secretary — came together to start their own golf course in Tokyo’s Komazawa area. In just two decades, golf had shifted quite nicely from the foreign elite to the Japanese elite. And this set a pattern common to most trend adoption around the world: The next-highest status group often attempts to imitate the highest-status group’s culture as a way to claim membership to the group above them. This “trickle down” of a burgeoning modern Japanese elite imitating the West was directly responsible for golf’s national expansion.

Right up until the end of World War II, golf increasingly became a well-integrated part of the privileged classes’ lifestyle. By 1940, there were 71 courses across the nation and around 110,000 total players. This was impressive growth from the days of Groom and his private course, but golf had hardly become a mass sport. Compared to other successful foreign imports such as business suiting and baseball, golf had not become anywhere near as common. The limiting factor was mostly financial: Buying golf balls and clubs would have taken up most of an average worker’s yearly salary. We can assume, however, that golf’s small, exclusive player base gave it universally understood associations with wealth and prestige. Golf was clearly the pinnacle leisure activity of Japan’s ruling class. This was true, however, of most modern consumer culture in the pre-war years: Only the urban elite could really participate.

World War II completely disrupted Japan’s old class system, however, and as a new, more egalitarian Japan emerged from the rubble of the Empire, golf had a new chance to penetrate more deeply into Japanese society. For the first few years of the post-war, U.S. soldiers reclaimed most of Japan’s golf courses for military usage, but in doing so, likely gave the sport further legitimacy as the sport of society’s top tier. Things got rolling again for Japanese golfers in the 1950s, as the U.S. returned the courses to private ownership, and the Japanese Golf Association re-opened its doors. In 1957 — the year after the government officially declared the “post-war” to be over — there had been an increase up to 116 courses with 18 million course visits. That same year a Japanese player Nakamura Torakichi won the international tournament Canada Cup (now World Cup) hosted in Japan and sparked what author Tanaka Yoshihisa calls the “First Post-War Golf Boom.” From 1957 to 1961, golf was red hot, as the top executives and managers of Japan’s burgeoning New Middle Class — arguably the new elite in a post-aristocratic Japan — flocked to the greens. With this huge demand to hit the links, an unprecedented number of new courses were constructed. It also helped that companies could claim golf — like boozing with hostesses and lavish dinners — as an entertainment expense. The more golf played, the less tax paid.

Throughout the 1960s, the number of courses continued to grow steadily. But this growth curve got a major kick during the “Second Post-War Golf Boom” of 1971 to 1974. Golf tournaments had begun to appear on TV in the late 1960s, and as a result, a much larger group of middle class workers began to take interest in the sport. This was also a time period when the Dankai Generation — Japan’s Baby Boomers — had entered the work force and began to settle into their careers. Golf’s association with the business elite in the late 1950s had sent the implicit message to younger workers that knowing how to play golf would become a critical requirement for future promotion. This was also the era when Japan’s pop culture really exploded: when consumers could afford to buy LPs, off-the-rack clothes, stereo equipment, and magazines. Japan had emerged from being the world’s manufacturing factory and started to actually spend some of its hard-earned wages on leisure and goods.

Although growth of the golf industry petered off in the early 1980s, the Bubble Economy of 1986 to 1989 spurred the Third Post-War Golf Boom. This era had all the ingredients required to make an elite leisure activity more widespread: speculation-fueled wealth-generation, a currency doubling in value, and a broad culture of conspicuous consumption. The Bubble was the age of excess — the salaryman class living out all the fantasies of the post-war in glorious and excess detail. This meant drinking watered down Johnny Walker Blue Label every night in Ginza hostess clubs in black Armani suits. When it came to golf, companies suddenly had the cash to invest in prestigious country club memberships, corporate trips abroad to Hawaii, and other extravagant ways to tee off. With salarymen being the kings of society and golf being their leisure activity of choice it only made sense that the sport would loom large in the wider culture. Just as the brigades of corporate soldiers hit their paradise years of fancy golfing, this era also saw an influx of female golfers, who made up 20% of all Japanese players by the early 1990s.

Golf’s takeover of Japanese society continued to fit the trickle-down model quite nicely. In all of these golf booms, a roaring economy and greater spread of media brought a huge number of new players into the game. Golf has always been expensive in Japan; this is the country that introduced the idea of “green fees” on top of already-exorbitant sunk costs in country club memberships. And golf always had a strong association with the top echelon of society. So as incomes increased, more people had the disposable income to play golf, and they naturally wanted to play golf as a way to identify as a member of the society’s upper crust. At first this meant internationalized Japanese showing their worldliness by joining up foreign country clubs in their own country. Later this meant the top executives in the New Middle Class imitating the pre-war elite.

By the 1970s and 1980s, golf still had its prestige but lost its exclusivity. Ultra-bright driving ranges across Tokyo would be filled to the brim with white collar workers hitting balls into a net, as practice for the next time their company would pay for them to play 18 holes. And in the Bubble, Japanese became the most famous consumers of golf around the world, snapping up famed courses for unbelievable prices. In Singapore, for example, the Japanese expats joined country clubs at such a rate that the government had to pass a law preventing foreign players from being more than 30% of the total membership (Ben-Ari).

Golf’s growth trajectory in Japan’s miracle post-war should be no surprise, but there is something interesting in how golf managed to stay in the national imagination for so long. There was a time in the 1950s when everyone was obsessed with owning a rice cooker and refrigerator, but of course, these became commonplace in the 1960s and these humble dreams disappeared in their widespread attainment. Tennis boomed around the same time but petered out with the over-proliferation of college tennis clubs in the mid-1980s. Golf had the dual advantage of always being expensive and inaccessible even as incomes rose, as well as being a sport that did not necessitate youthful prowess. The richer and older you were, the more golf you could play. But the increase in players always outpaced the construction of giant courses, and this lack of supply always kept fees at a slightly painful level for the wider population, hence giving corporate entertainment budgets a critical role. Despite Japan’s great wealth, it was nearly impossible to actually play golf in this Bubble era peak. Players would have to reserve golf courses several months in advance as well as pay exorbitant green fees (Ben-Ari). Due to Japan’s tight geographical constrictions, golf became more exclusive the more it became popular. Compare this to the Louis Vuitton handbag, which started in a similar position of being only for the upper classes, and by 2005, was on the arm of every other girl in the subway. Golf’s natural barriers towards mass adoption strengthened its prestige.

With the Bubble’s collapse in the early 1990s, however, the holistic and dominant taste culture of the post-war male elite — whiskey, golf, dark serge wool suits with white shirts and dark ties — became an easy target for ridicule. Tastes had greatly diversified in the 1980s, and a new culture of aesthetic refinement (spurred in great part by the Saison retail empire) rejected the mainstream business-driven cultural world. Japan was no longer monolithic, and as the economy started to teeter and the salaryman became a sad sack in sack suit, golf was suddenly a punchline, more associated with men stained by stale cigarette smoke and coffee-stained teeth than regal men in natty dress breathing in the Great Outdoors. Golf went through some rough years in the national imagination, especially with the collapse of exclusive country clubs and exposure in many cases of funding from organized crime. By the 2000s, however, enough time had passed to give golf a second shot. Thanks to athletes like Tiger Woods, the sport would shed some of its older associations and be reborn as a class-neutral athletic endeavor.

Golf has always had a unique sense of style. With a lack of sustained physical movement inherent in the activity, dress could be relatively fancy compared to other sports. Okay, knee breeches and argyle may have been the height of “sporty” in the past, much like the white flannels of tennis players. Before the modern era, however, there was generally high propriety of dress for all occasions, and this extended to the golf course. Dressing up as “gentlemen” on the green was a natural part of the pastime for early players, and this past has been sewn into the sport’s reputation. Modern players may not take up the exact dress of their ancestors but they surely bask in the sense of decorum established centuries prior.

At the same time, this sense of gentlemanly propriety has made golf a difficult fit within the wider pantheon of sports. Take the case of Japanese Ur shoe-brand Onitsuka Tiger, which framed itself constantly in its early years as the ideal material companion to the Olympic tradition. In the spirit of athletic diversity, Onitsuka Tiger manufactured distinct shoes for every obscure sporting event and physical activity in the modern world from track to boxing to “baton twirling” to rugby to handball. Yet the company’s golf shoes were produced under a separate brand name — GOOD SHOT Golf Shoes. In the 1950s, these had a look that has been mostly forgotten today: clunky black nylon lace-up cleats with patches of white on the toe, something like a boat shoe’s angry uncle. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Onitsuka Tiger went back to the classic saddle shoe design that had become a key look for professional golfers in the 1920s. These stayed in basic whites, browns, and blacks, but later on in the 1970s, expanded into electric reds and yellows.

This kind of business-shoe adapted for the green is a vestigial remnant of golf’s ancestry. These days, global athletic brands have invaded and enforced a strict space-aged techno-savvy — a strong counterbalance to the old aristocratic fun of dressing up. No natural fibers are harmed in the production of modern golf clothes. Sunglasses must look like props from 1980s science fiction films. Even Brooks Brothers — the arbiter of traditional style in the U.S. — likes to encourage younger men to wear anachronistic pieces like rounded club collars to the office while suggesting a relaxed, “less formal” ensemble as the perfect golf wear.

This seems a direct sartorial consequence of golf’s re-imagination as an activity open to all. Democraticization is great for people but terrible for clothing. Formality of dress has always been a quiet tool of class society to clarify status, and it makes sense that dismantling the aristocratic conventions cooked into institutions means doing away with much of the costume. The new American work uniform — an over-sized dress shirt (with undershirt showing through the open collar) and a pair of giant Dockers — could easily be traced directly to belief in meritocratic egalitarianism. Theoretically-speaking, there could be creative fashion in a utopian democratic society, but fashion throughout history — at least what we consider “dressing well” — has almost always been correlated with imitation of the upper classes’ style rules.

Throughout the 20th century, playing golf was a badge of upward mobility — a chance to buy into an exclusive “Gentlemen’s game.” And certainly, dressing up was part of the appeal. The concept of dressing for “time, place, occassion” (TPO) has become a quaint anachronism — except, arguably, in Japan where it still guides most public dress. It makes sense therefore that while golf lost most of its aristocratic or upper class associations in Japan after becoming over-exposed within the salaryman class, the sport was able to make an impressive comeback with Japanese women around 2007 by adding back to the game a sense of TPO-driven dress.

Women’s sudden interest in golf was an unabashed trend conspiracy, mind you, with the golf industry paying out large sums to apparel companies and fashion magazines to directly target young women who had never once considered the idea of putting. They re-framed the game as part of the courtship process with (upwardly mobile) men, and hence, a new opportunity for women to dress up in a completely different set of (adorable) clothing, which they would need to go out and buy. An entire magazine Regina popped up to be the fashion guide for the female golf set.

Yet everyone won. While this has echoes of the industrial complex bending the behavior of citizens, the plot also says a lot about the nature of golf. This would not have been possible with ice hockey nor even basketball — sports that require putting a lot of incredibly specialized people in the same room. And ironically the democratic nature of golf in the 21st century also opened the door. Ladies circuit stars like Miyazato Ai have been an inspiration to Japanese women to get out there and show their athleticism. The dainty clothes were an appeal to some, but the entire female golf movement did encourage many women to take the sport seriously beyond the social dimensions.

Like so many traditions in the 21st century, golf has found a new strength and stability in its ability to signify many things to many audiences. The sport has been freed from its previous monolithic understanding as an exclusive leisure activity for elite men. Golf may no longer work in Japan as a universally understood symbol of economic progress, but the elements of prestige, leisure, and fine dress still resonate with larger audiences than before. Golf can be all things to all people. Businessmen still banter over distribution strategies while rescuing balls from the bunker, and two holes down, a young couple learns to play golf together as an unspoken sign of eventual matrimony. Golf has mutated over the years but these evolutions occur so that it can remain core to the Japanese DNA.

References:

All facts about Japanese golf history, unless otherwise noted, came from:

Tanaka Yoshihisa. Gorufu to Nihonjin. 『ゴルフと日本人』 Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1992.

Other sources:

Allen Guttmann and Lee Thompson. Japanese Sports: A History. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.

Eyal Ben-Ari “Golf, Organization, and ‘Body Projects’: Japanese Business Executives in Singapore.” The Culture of Japan Seen Through Its Leisure. Ed. by Sepp Linhart and Sabine Frühstück. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Marilyn Ivy “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan.” Postmodernism and Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989.