2013: A New Hope / W. David MARX
This website shall reward no high fives to Prime Minister Abe Shinzō (especially after his Yasukuni visit), but we will admit that the Abe Regime Redux successfully implanted a hypnotic suggestion, both in Japan and overseas, that the Japanese economy may be heading towards its long-awaited recovery. Looky, looky — the Nikkei cracked 16,000! Of course the skepticism index grows in parallel. Normal Japanese people suspect that the Abenomics momentum will not deliver higher wages, and herein lies a threat of serious sugar crash. At no time was the air more pessimistic about the future than in the mid-2000s when people heard constantly in the media about a “growing economy” and yet saw no changes in their bank accounts.

Putting aside Abenomics, however, there were some exciting hints that Japanese society is under transformation. Between Fukushima and the abominable new secrecy law, there is real potential for a semblance of political debate returning to popular culture — even if the mainstream media refuses to be the host. The rise in smartphones and web literacy means that the Japanese Internet may soon become a true reflection of the national experience rather than an exclusive meeting ground of anonymous, angry, right wing-sympathetic idol-lovers. And Puzzle & Dragons and Line are not just hit apps: the companies behind them are answering Japan’s long call for more entrepreneurs.

Times remain perilous, but fortunately, with less faith in the establishment, the Japanese people are striking out to save themselves.

Economics and Politics / Noah SMITH
Abe has been riding the wave of popularity from Kuroda Haruhiko’s program of monetary easing, but the success of that policy is mainly just a rebound from the deflationary hole which Japan dug itself into after the 2008 crisis. To boost growth in the longer term, Abe is going to need to tackle the thorny issue of structural reform, which he is unlikely to do, given the havoc it will wreak on the Japanese social contract.

Meanwhile the Japanese opposition is splintering once again. This is only natural; the LDP has a nationalist ideological core that keeps it glued together, while Japan’s liberals have no such central idea or group around which to coalesce — especially after a defeat. As long as liberalism has no central organizing principle in Japan, the LDP or something like it will continue to reign with only short interruptions.

The Secrecy Law is a clear product of this new political order. The fragmentation of the Japanese opposition, combined with the brief spurt of economic optimism created by monetary policy, made this terrible law possible. Given the inertia of Japan’s politics, it is doubtful that this loss of freedom can be undone without major political upheaval. The only silver lining will be if the law galvanizes a grassroots liberal movement in Japan.

Kanji of the Year / Matt TREYVAUD
The 2013 Kanji of the Year was 輪, “ring,” as in Olympics (五輪), because of course. Of course. Some voters were all, oh, you see, the much-discussed TPP promises to turn the Pacific rim into a big ring of trade and blah blah blah — come on, man. Even 五, which just means “five” and is the other half of the Japanese translation of “Olympic Games,” made it to 14th place, ahead of 税, “tax”. See you in 2020, 五!

A Shift in the Great Shift / W. David MARX
The central idea of my long 2011 essay “The Great Shift in Japanese Pop Culture” was that otaku and gyaru subcultures’ current dominance was not a cyclical trend but instead the result of structural changes in society. To wit, lower levels of youth culture consumption forced the industry to cater almost exclusively to highly-dedicated subcultural groups and ignore mainstream or sophisticated tastes.

The events of 2013 completely challenged this thesis. At some point in the last few years, the gyaru look essentially disappeared. The front of Shibuya 109 is full of women who look almost… normal. Meanwhile the once influential gyaru-o newsletter men’s egg closed up shop. Working class kids from the countryside who wore outrageous things in the past have significantly mellowed. Meanwhile the shrinking of the total youth market means that the fashion industry needs to further collapse subcultural barriers to make one big “youth culture” with very few hard edges. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is working hard to be both Harajuku and Shibuya — although it’s unclear whether these neighborhoods will continue to signify a clear difference in fashion.

At the same time, mainstream consumers are growing tired of otaku antics, fueled in part by normal people’s looming takeover of the Japanese Internet. From here on, culture will be born on the open web and thus recenter around something other than 2ch. In this scenario, otaku will keeping demanding infantile cartoon females to soothe their psychological pain but the rest of society will no longer have to watch.

Peak AKB48 / Ian MARTIN
For years now, idol music has made a mockery of the Oricon singles charts, but 2013 was a new low, with AKB48 and their sister clones accounting for half of the top 30 singles of the year and boy bands from Johnny Kitagawa’s thousand-year reich accounting for most of the rest (Exile, Southern All Stars, and Linked Horizon were the only intruders in this idol love-in).

An AKB48 single will sell ten times an Oricon number one from other weeks, somewhat from the Dentsu-machine’s cross-marketing media saturation. The primary driver, however, remains encouraging consumption patterns among fans that have nothing to do with music and everything to do with the dutiful purchase of silicon discs as if they are character goods. The AKB48 cult has essentially gamified the groups, allowing fans to “play” through their consumption levels.

This system, however, encourages fans to see idols as their personal property, which naturally leads to terrifying penance rituals like Minegishi Minami’s concentration camp cosplay head-shaving. These rituals help keep fans engaged, but the Minegishi incident — along with Shukan Shunbun catching top AKB48 manager Kubota Yasushi having a sleepover with member Kasai Tomomi and then manager Togasaki Tomonobu merrily deploying “prostitution” as his alibi for being seen taking young girls to a love hotel — provided the weary public with some very concrete examples of AKB48’s once abstract ickiness.

The objective evidence suggests that AKB48 jumped the shark this year. Google Trends shows a very clear decline for AKB48 searches, and with the top members from the group’s glory days going solo, 2014 could be the year that consumers finally force the media-industrial complex to move on to something else. The question is, what in the world will replace them?

Japanese Indie Music / Ian MARTIN
The idols and best-of albums on the yearly charts suggest that the mainstream music market is stuck in an ‘80s-’90s fug of golden era nostalgia, but the indie scene also harked back to the old days in its own way. My Bloody Valentine’s long-awaited follow-up to Loveless gave the Japanese shoegaze scene a shot in the arm, with the lineups of the Yellow Loveless tribute album and the Japan Shoegaze Festival revealing a level of diversity (although not always of quality) that is less the scene that celebrates itself and more the scene that celebrates absolutely bloody everything.

Indiepop of a definitively ‘80s variety was all over the place as well, with groups like Wallflower, Homecomings, Elen Never Sleeps, The Moments, Ykiki Beat, Boyish, and Hearsays putting out new releases, many of whom on Fukuoka label Dead Funny Records. While the shoegaze scene tends to use the past as a springboard towards creating something of their own, indiepop is increasingly unaware of the genre’s ’80s roots and draws more from contemporary overseas acts like Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Veronica Falls, and French Films.

Other music that impressed in 2013 included Buddy Girl and Mechanic’s excellent self-titled debut as well as a magnificent new album by Melt Banana. And notably, there was a new Capsule album Caps Lock that represents some of the most interesting and promising work Nakata Yasutaka has done in years — and a welcome relief from the frequently overbearing nature of his output over the past few years.

RIP Tsutsumi Seiji (1927-2013) / W. David MARX
Why do retailers in such a fundamentally conservative culture like Japan frequently champion the world’s most creative, innovative, and iconoclastic artists? Tsutsumi Seiji, who passed away late this year, embodied the answer to this question. Tsutsumi did not just play a key role in the expansion of Japanese consumer society, but made sure that it developed in interesting directions.

As an inheritance consolation prize from his father, Tsutsumi took control of the family’s second-rate department store Seibu. Importing French designers and holding grand art exhibits, Tsutsumi turned Seibu into a cultural powerhouse and then spun its financial success into the broader Saison retailing group — namely, fashion building Parco, DIY-shop Loft, import record store Wave, avant-garde fashion boutique Seed, and the back-to-basics Mujirushi Ryohin (MUJI). Tsutsumi was an enlightened despot among capitalists; a theoretical thinker and respected poet/writer, he once explained to shareholders his business strategy “as a Baudrillardean exercise in embrace of simulacra and parody.” He made Saison a patron for the world’s great talent: The PARCO theater, for example, opened with a performance from avant-garde dramatist Terayama Shūji.

Tsutsumi personally set the highest levels of taste for Japan’s fast-moving, sophisticated consumer society. Sadly, the Japanese economy over the last decade has not been able to sustain the advances Tsutsumi made, as stores and brands head towards lowest common denominators to sustain sales. The lingering brilliance in retailing, however, can be directly traced back to Tsutsumi.

(To learn more about Tsutsumi, read either Architects of Affluence or the more gossip-y The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan’s Richest Family.)

RIP Yamazaki Masayuki (1945-2013) / W. David MARX
In the early 1970s, Harajuku was a quiet neighborhood like any other residential area of Tokyo, with a small creative class clustered around a café called Leon. In 1972, bar owner and Elvis aficionado Yamazaki Masayuki of famed grimy Shinjuku bar Kaijin 20 Mensō opened a new watering hole called King Kong down the street from Leon. Its success led to more bars, and in 1975, Yamazaki opened a new shop off Meiji-doori called Cream Soda to sell vintage 1950s clothing he picked up in London. The store struck gold, sparking not just a boom for retro Greaser fashion in the American Graffiti mold but also launched the distinctly Japanese business of scooping up second-hand American garments and selling them at huge markups back in Tokyo. Yamazaki made millions from selling American delinquent style to teens, culminating in the multi-level Pink Dragon store on Cat Street that still stands today. The rockabilly boom faded in the mid-1980s, but as Yamazaki’s great legacy, Harajuku still stands today as Tokyo’s center of youth culture.

RIP Hayashida Teruyoshi (1930-2013) / W. David MARX
The 1965 photo book Take Ivy clearly demonstrates the degree to which Japan has acted as the unofficial archivist of Western popular culture. Americans in the 1960s never thought to photograph, document, and annotate the campus styles of university students any more than they thought to produce books about other everyday things such as traffic lights, Howard Johnsons, or silverware. As part of a team from clothing brand VAN Jacket and magazine Men’s Club, photographer Hayashida Teruyoshi visited six Ivy League campuses in May 1965, and his images became the Take Ivy book. Between web scans and a U.S. reprint in 2010, his snaps from the voyage have been traded around the American cognoscenti as the definitive guide to classic American style. Hayashida was only vaguely aware of his recent fame overseas, but after his death, he should forever represent the beginning of Japan’s importance in reverently chronicling global culture.

RIP men’s egg (1999-2013) / Patrick MACIAS
men’s egg magazine (never capitalized) fought the good fight for bad taste, beginning in 1999 and finishing on a very sad day in November 2013. The gas, it seemed, had finally gone out of a screaming, howling fourteen-year streak that straddled the pre-millennial generation of dark-tanned sidewalk surfer dudes to the post-apocalyptic gutter playboys of the Center Guy tribe.

A magazine designed as spin-off from egg magazine proper — designed for girls and still in print, it should now be noted — men’s egg was rude, funny, and possessed of a clinical myopia that assumed that the Shibuya ward was the only place in the world that really existed and actually mattered. Ostensibly a fashion and lifestyle periodical, the pages were thick with fear of the opposite sex, and plenty of anxiety about sex itself. With that came the constant reassurance that the worst obstacles could always be overcome with the right pickup lines and the correct consumer choices (depending on who the advertisers were that month).

The exact cause of men’s egg death is unknown, but the usual suspects — low circulation, the decline of the print magazine, and a sluggish specialized men’s fashion market — probably didn’t help. Maybe it was time for everyone associated with the scene to just grow up and graduate already (Hot gossip: I know of one guy who spent 2013 experiencing partial hair loss over the stress associated with modeling for men’s egg, running his own brand, working as a host, and who knows what else).

When I got the news that the magazine was going away, two quotes from two friends came immediately to mind. They may seem really simple, or even unrelated, but that’s the way real hard truth sometimes shows up at the end of the year. “Work aimed at young people in Japan is quite difficult,” says one. “I feel sorry for today’s kids. They don’t have money to spend on stupid clothes anymore,” says another. But as long as there is a Tokyo and a Shibuya with trash-strewn streets acting as incubators of sorts, I’d like to think that there will always be eggs.

The Year in Murakami Haruki / Daniel MORALES
2013 was the year that Murakami Haruki became a super-duper star equally in all parts of the world. Not only was his April novel Colorless Tazaki Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage Japan’s best-selling book, even the publication of a single short story in Japanese drew the attention of the international press.

“Drive My Car: Men Without Women,” published in the December Bungei Shunju, concerns a stage actor Kafuku who has to hire a driver after a DUI. The driver turns out to a be a younger woman named Watari Misaki in whom he feels comfortable confiding his solitary life as a widower. Between this and the English translation of the very strange “Samsa in Love,” published in The New Yorker in October, Murakami has had a strong year, returning to his roots and focusing less on writing long, “comprehensive” novels.

Amazon Bestsellers / Matt TREYVAUD
Fully half of Amazon’s top 10 bestselling books this year were by either Hyakuta Naoki or Ikeito Jun. In fact, apart from Murakami Haruki (in at #2 for Colorless Tazaki Tsukuru etc.), they are the only two authors of fiction in the entire top twenty. We also got two Kankore books, some game guides, and various books promising improved communication: better handwriting, better speaking, better interactions with your doctor. Oddly, the best-selling book in the “foreign books” (洋書) category is… the Rider-Waite tarot deck?

Anime Movies / Matthew PENNEY
2013 saw the release of two Ghibli films — Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) and Kaguya Hime no Monogatari (The Tale of Princess Kaguya) — perhaps the final feature-length movies in the respective careers of anime titans Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao. Both films have moments of brilliance, but both also have problems that hold them back from the top tier of the Ghibli canon. In Kaze, Miyazaki may have been true to his vision of Zero fighter designer Horikoshi’s struggles, but the love story felt forced and makes female lead Nahoko into a sort of prop in the engineer’s tale. Miyazaki is renowned for sketching young heroines full of vitality and potential but has never shown how one gets from that state to actual adulthood. Nahoko in particular lacks agency and ends up as simple fodder for the tragic climax. Takahata’s Kaguya carries on his experimentation with animation technique, but at well over two hours it loses some of the concise archetypal force of the folktales on which it is based.

While Kaze and Kaguya may be strong films by great directors, it is Shinkai Makoto’s Koto no Ha no Niwa (Garden of Words) that may stand as the most confident anime film of 2013. Koto is a short film at 46 minutes and does not move much beyond the themes and experiments with style and tone of Shinkai’s earlier films like Byosoku Go Senchimetoru (Five Centimeters Per Second), but it is a fine return to form after the visually brilliant but narratively cluttered attempt to do a Miyazaki-style adventure film in Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo (Children Who Chase Lost Voices).

Anime TV / Matthew PENNEY
2013 is the best year for anime TV of the last five thanks to excellent examples of many anime genres. Action series Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) has established a strong presence in Japanese popular culture despite (because of?) an absence of the saccharine and sexploitative elements that keep most recent anime in the otaku ghetto. The reworking of zombie / monster, 99% dystopia vs. 1% utopia, and high-flying hero tropes in Shingeki show that in a crowded international action-thriller market, Japanese manga and anime can still show us something fresh. For “slice of life” Uchoten Kazoku (The Eccentric Family) stands out for the warmth of its storytelling and its incredibly detailed depiction of Kyoto — perhaps the best representation of a real environment in anime history. The robot anime Suisei no Gargantia (Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet) echoes past greats like Mirai Shonen Konan (Future Boy Conan) and Gunbuster but also appears as a breath of fresh air in a genre that still creaks under the weight of the legacy of introspective and not infrequently grim Evangelion. At 13 episodes, it is perfectly paced and effectively weds elements of space opera, futurist thinking about artificial intelligence, and the classic anime eco-fable. The comedy series Watashi ga Motenai no ha do Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui (No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!) is another standout. The hilarious exterior provided by voice actress Kitta Izumi’s brilliant performance is frequently peeled back to reveal a poignant look at adolescent fear of others and the self-defeating fantasies which are a dark side of otaku experience.

My pick for the best anime TV series of 2013 is drama Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil). An experiment in rotoscoping by Nagahama Hiroshi, known for his work on Mushishi which stands as one of the great achievements of small screen anime. Aku no Hana improves on the manga with its constricting, decayed representation of a small Japanese town, enhanced sense of realism, and fantastic score. Finally, the deliberately stupidly insane Kill la Kill defies genre pigeonholing (and good taste) but is relentlessly entertaining and yet another memorable series from what was an excellent year in TV anime.

Attack on Titan / Matt TREYVAUD
After four years building steam, Isayama Hajime’s Attack on Titan made the leap from manga to anime this year, immediately becoming a worldwide hit and spawning endless arguments about whether the protagonist’s surname is spelled “Jaeger” or “Yeagar” (not to mention baffled posts on Chiebukuro asking whether “Attack on Titan” is really an appropriate translation of 進撃の巨人). Titan‘s refreshingly non-sexist attitude drew particular praise, and its mysterious setting has inspired endless allegorical interpretations: The titans are China! No, the walled, doomed city is Japan! Me, I prefer to see the titans of the early chapters as stand-ins for colonialism, War of the Worlds style.

Typography on the Web / Ian LYNAM
In June, telecommunications giant SoftBank announced the purchase of Fukuoka-based FontWorks, one of Japan’s leading type foundries. The acquisition neatly mirrored events in American telecommunications over the past few years, notably Adobe’s buy up of the Typekit webfont service in 2011. Softbank and FontWorks were strategic business partners since 2011, having worked together to develop FontPlus, SoftBank’s proprietary webfont service. (The official explanation in the merger document is that “SBT believes that we are able to establish system which enables us to utilize mutual corporate resources rapidly and effectively, and it will make further progress on our service deployment combining ‘creativity’ including the Web-font service and ‘technology.'”) The acquisition reifies Softbank’s aggressive interest in web technologies and an expansion from mere mobile communications to more developed aspects of mobile computing. The ¥1,760 million purchase belies SoftBank’s outlook for the future of web-based typography in Japan.

Kiss me Kappa / Matt ALT
After the short-lived fad for pouty, come-hither “duck mouth” expressions peaked in 2010, domestic and foreign media scrambled to identify other facial trends without much success (an even shorter-lived fad for “sparrow face,” notwithstanding.) We finally have a new contender: “kappa mouth,” which takes its name from the flatulent, frog-skinned, bird-beaked yokai with a penchant for sticking slimy fingers into swimmers’ colons. It involves rolling in the lips and pushing down to create a shallow V. Pundits are suspiciously silent as to whether the naming refers to the yokai’s beak, or rather the expression one assumes after having a slimy finger stuck into their backside.

The Year Nothing Happened / W. David MARX
We should all feel blessed that Japan did not see any further tragic natural disasters this year, but at the same time, the widely-desired, post-earthquake national resurgence was not exactly forthcoming. If the last decade saw an explosion of recessionary culture in Japan, 2012 suggested that even this recessionary culture could be on the wane, leaving us a true social vacuum. To have culture, people have to participate in society; to have political change, people have to vote and organize; to have global economic success, companies must make products that the world wants.

None of this happened, however, and in its place, we got nothing new. Instead of a more terrible AKB48-like thing, we got just slightly less AKB48. Instead of extreme political change, the disheartened electorate voted for a return to LDP rule.

A decade ago there was something slightly interesting in the long decline: How would a truly advanced country handle poor economic prospects, fatal demographics, and dwindling global relevance? But now in 2012 we’re too familiar with the very process of decline. We all know that 2013 will just see a little more slouching in the same direction — more nothing. And while the stakes are getting higher and higher for this great nation to turn things around, the stakes for any individual action, field, or event could not feel any lower.

Nothing really happened in 2012, but for your reading pleasure, here are a few things that transpired this year.

Tokyo Skytree / Matt ALT
Even if you don’t appreciate the architecture (or the neato circular pulsing at night), any fan of Japanese entertainment has to pay the Tokyo Skytree a certain grudging respect, if for no other reason than that it serves up its lifeblood — a stable high-definition television signal. But there are two big strikes against the Skytree. In a city filled with perfectly free observation decks (like those of the the iconic Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building), it’s hard to imagine forking out ¥2,000 a head for an elevator ride. But more importantly, every Tokyoite knows in their heart of hearts that the Skytree isn’t really part of the skyline until it gets smashed to pieces in a giant monster movie.

The Election / Adam RICHARDS
Through some weird twist of fate, Abe Shinzo and his long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party regained control of Japan’s messy political system, giving Abe of all people a second stint as prime minister. For three years, the rival Democratic party attempted to forge a new direction for the country but were mired in disagreements on which direction to take, a series of petty scandals, mismanagement following the March 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster, and a mixed bag of policy decisions. The most lasting of these unpopular policies was to pass a consumption tax hike together with the LDP, in a deal that also kickstarted talks to fundamentally revise Japan’s social safety net protections.

So when Prime Mnister Noda called a snap election as part of said deal, a disappointed electorate returned the LDP to power in resounding fashion. The returning Abe administration has taken on a decidedly bolder policy agenda than when he first came around in 2006, when he tried unsuccessfully to maintain the positive momentum of the Koizumi years. Now his first priority is ending deflation, seemingly at all costs, enlisting former PM Taro Aso as finance minister to keep the bureaucrats from meddling. Once that’s out of the way, he wants to revise the constitution; not to change the pacifist Article 9, at least at first, but to lower the threshold for triggering a referendum for proposed revisions from a 2/3 Diet vote to a simple majority. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Abe will manage to stay in office long enough to do any of this.

Nuclear Protests in Japan / W. David MARX
In 2012, there were many protests against nuclear power in Japan. The DPJ government did nothing concrete in response to these protests, and then the most pro-nuclear political party — the LDP — won back power.

Ishihara Shintaro Trolls the Planet / Connor SHEPHERD
If you think Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintarō’s most entertaining days are behind him, last summer he raised the bar for global-scale trolling with his offer to buy the Senkaku Islands from the Japanese private citizen who owned them. There is ostensibly no practical reason why Tokyo would want or need some unpopulated islands hundreds of miles away from the city, so when Ishihara raised ¥1 billion from some friends to purchase them, we can assume that he did so for no reason other than to anger the Chinese, who want the islands for their awesome hypothetical oil and gas. And it worked — the Chinese got angry! And by essentially forcing the Japanese central government to buy them before he could, he single-handedly caused a significant international incident. Seriously, this guy is a pro.

Operation “Sue-my-datchi” / Matt ALT
2011’s disaster relief “Operation Tomodachi” marked a rare high point in the often strained relationship between Japan and the US military. Late this year, however, eight crewmen from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan announced a lawsuit against TEPCO for exposure to radiation, demanding $40 million in compensation and punitive damages. Let’s get this straight: A group of men serving aboard a floating arsenal packing not one but two nuclear reactors and ostensibly engaged in rescue operations, are suing the very country they were trying to assist in the midst of a disaster. One might hope they’d donate any winnings to those who actually lost families and homes, but given the chutzpah needed to even raise a suit like this, it’s probably too much to wish for.

Grandma Went to Jail / Nick DONEGAN
While much is made of Japan’s graying population and the perceptions of filial respect shown by its youth, 2012 saw the elderly turn towards a new activity: crime. With a strangely “understanding” white paper from the Ministry of Justice, and the number of rather gruesome incidents starring the gentile grand-figure, 2012 was a banner year for showcasing granny’s true skills with a knife. With the overall crime rate on the decline — by the National Police Agency’s estimation, at 5.8% per year — and the world economy on the possible brink of recovery, perhaps we will look back on 2012 as “just a phase” in the high-stakes, rebellious, and attention-seeking world of the Japanese pensioner.

Macabre Murder Factory Flies Under the Radar / Adam RICHARDS
Over a period of decades, one woman orchestrated a criminal operation specializing in the systematic kidnapping, torture, defrauding, imprisonment, and murder of perhaps dozens in Hyogo Prefecture’s Amagasaki. Before her arrest this year, Sumida Miyoko would hire thugs to storm the house of an intended target family, subdue them, and proceed to keep them in captivity as she gradually emptied their bank accounts and took ownership of their property. To aid her reign of terror, she would force children to beat their parents while other family members watched. She maintained an apartment full of human doghouses, some of which were on the balcony to keep people for bad behavior during the winter. At least one died from injuries sustained there, while other victims were found in states of extreme starvation, many beaten severely and one with scars making her all but unrecognizable. One daughter of a victim family caught Stockholm Syndrome, became a key accomplice, married Sumida’s son, and had a child.

The grisly details do not stop there, but after reading about this story I had to wonder why on earth isn’t this the Crime of the Century? Perhaps because it highlights so many of the embarrassing systemic problems of Japanese society — police inertia (police refused to intervene on behalf of multiple victims), a lack of neighborly concern, the shocking ease of defrauding Japan’s various bureaucratic systems, etc. Sumida recently killed herself in prison, deftly avoiding justice in a final bit of police bungling that sends a fitting message for those of us living here: When the rules aren’t well enforced, as is so often the case in Japan, it’s the bullies and monsters that will have the upper hand.

Japanese Electronic Maker Doom / Nick DONEGAN and Adam RICHARDS
2012 was one of the most disastrous years for the bloated electronics industry since its inception. Sharp, Panasonic, and Sony started the year off with bad news but thoughtful hopes — selling off factories to Chinese investors, realigning product foci, and even looking to create new product lines! — but ended up reporting losses totaling to ¥1.23 trillion ($15.3 billion). The massive investments failed to pay off, and now Sharp, the most cash strapped of the once-mighty giant manufacturers, looks increasingly likely to end up mostly a parts supplier for Apple. With Sharp supplying iPhone and iPad panels, Sony making the camera sensors, and a small army of smaller manufacturers making many other components, the Japanese electronics industry as a whole seems fated to lack compelling products of its own, forcing it to occupy the less glamorous and less profitable role as the world’s ultra high-tech parts maker.

Japan Keeps Buying US/UK Tech, Nobody Cares / Connor SHEPHERD
Here’s something you might not know: Over the past two years, companies from Japan have been buying all kinds of high-tech companies in the United States and Britain. At the tail end of 2010, social-games giant DeNA bought the American mobile game shop ngmoco for a WTF-level $400 million, and that kicked off a crazy chain of Japanese companies gobbling up US and UK assets (look how many companies mentioned in this article are high-tech), ending with Softbank buying Sprint and HR/classified ad giant Recruit snapping up jobs-listing startup Indeed.com for you-know-what’s-cool-a-billion-dollars (allegedly, not much about this deal is transparent). Despite all this, no part of these deals made any headway towards complicating the general narrative of Japan’s decline.

The Rise of Smartphones / Adam RICHARDS
2012 was undisputedly the year of the smartphone. I bought an iPhone in late 2011, and it has made me curious about what devices my fellow Tokyo commuters are using. Over the past 12 months there has been a remarkable shift. Initially there were maybe one or two smartphone users vs. traditional feature phones in Tokyo, and now the ratio is reversed. I almost feel pity for people who have not opted for a smartphone at this point. By 2013 a clear majority will have them, giving them access to the “real” Internet (and not bastardized versions for feature phones), often for the first time.

Internet Rage Flourishes / Adam RICHARDS
For years now, the mainstream media’s response to — and hence the elite’s general impression of — the Internet was to see it as a threat, prompting all manner of scare stories even as the general population found its own uses for it. And politicians made sure to have a presence there but seldom would turn to it for either policy advice or a source of popular support. In 2012, however, Internet rage became much more visible in public discourse. Earlier this year a scandal erupted on the Internet when it was found that a popular comedian’s mother was fraudulently receiving welfare benefits. Not surprisingly, the right wing Internet communities (by far the most visible on the Japanese web) railed against what they saw as an unworthy program that gives cash to the undeserving. What was surprising, however, was that the political class — both then ruling party DPJ and opposition LDP — reacted to the scandal with measures aimed at responding to their concerns. One might be tempted to praise politicians for joining the modern age as it were, but net right wingers are mostly out of step with the general public (not to mention good policy). The question now is whether new PM Abe will be as eager to please what he sees as a core constituency.

Video Games / Matt ALT
2012 marked Microsoft’s decision to abandon the Tokyo Game Show. Many pundits spun the move as yet another symptom of the Japanese game industry’s decline. Others spun it as yet another example of Japanese gamers’ traditional disdain for the fetishistic first-person violence of American shooting games. But the real story was about the rise of mobile gaming aggregators like Gree and DeNA, whose floor displays dominated those of traditional Japanese console game developers in terms of both size and bombast. Their apps are wildly popular in Japan, but can they crack the foreign marketplace?

Japanese Game Developers / Jean SNOW
The world gaming community has not been kind to Japanese game developers in recent years. In response, a majority of the games being produced in Japan overly cater to the home audience, leaving the rest of the world looking to the West for their gaming entertainment. Not a good thing for the Japanese gaming industry, considering the impact gaming has in today’s culture (see iOS gaming and blockbuster launches of the latest iteration in the Call of Duty series) and especially sad considering that many a longtime gamer was raised on Japanese-produced titles and consoles. But as 2012 comes to a close, there are some signs — like RPG king Square Enix aggressively releasing titles on iOS and Android — that all may not be lost.

The Pop Music Charts in 2012 / Ian MARTIN
At the end of every year, chart organisation Oricon publishes its rankings of the best-selling music of the year, and for the past few years the singles charts have been congealing like a scab around mass idol collective AKB48. This year they and their sister groups accounted for twelve of the top twenty, with the other eight positions taken by boy bands from the stable of the more established evil organisation in pop Johnny & Associates. Meanwhile the album charts were dominated by “best of” repackagings of older artists like Matsutoya Yumi, Yamashita Tatsuro, Exile, and Mr. Children, who held both of the top two positions with their “Micro” and “Macro” compilations. K-Pop was largely absent from the rankings, although KARA and Girls’ Generation continue to be reasonably strong sellers. With singles largely existing as a means for fans to display their love for idols, albums seemingly an exercise in nostalgia for a gradually ageing fanbase, and either the industry or the market turning away from overseas influences, the future looks pretty dismal for the Japanese pop mainstream.

Shugo Tokumaru — In Focus? / W. David MARX
The sweeping and majestic guitar strums of 2010’s Port Entropy took Japanese genius songwriter-producer Shugo Tokumaru from international Pitchfork darling to the heights of indie fame in his home country, complete with his songs plastered under TV CMs for blue-chippers Sony and JAL. With his new In Focus? Tokumaru could have easily gone full-out, feel-good J-Pop, but instead took a step back to his daring, experimental roots — resulting in what is easily the year’s best Japanese record. His eclectic instrumentation may have been further neutralized into a mellow mix, but peppy, peppy songs like “Katachi” and “Down Down” took Tokumaru to new places with fully danceable rhythms and tight pop structure. The whole thing is held together with the glue of cartoonish micro set pieces, weird time signatures, inventive vocal melodies, sped-up munchkin background vocals, and 1960s vocal jazz references. Really, what other miracles could we possibly want from this musical Messiah?

Best Indie Albums / Ian MARTIN
Aside from Shugo Tokumaru, the indie and DIY scenes continued to release a wide array of great music under the radar. Fukuoka all-girl indie supergroup Miu Mau released the News EP on CD/R, with a combination of chunky synths, sweet harmonies and spindly, flat, metallic guitars wandering over tunes ranging from the lo-fi Shibuya-kei of “Neon Sign” to the retro-futurist new wave Asiatica of “Mirai no Classic.” Another all-girl three-piece Fancynumnum put out the more densely layered No Now, bringing mantric krautrock beats and textures together with kayōkyoku-like melodies. One of the most extraordinary albums of the year was minimalist psychedelic post-punk band Extruders’ Pray, a live album recorded in a Buddhist temple and released as a CD/R in a brown paper bag, while at another extreme Half Sports showed that 1980s styled guitar pop doesn’t have to be gloomy and affected with the raucous, ramshackle Slice Of Our City providing moment after moment of joyous power pop. Finally, one of the most category-defying and downright odd albums of the year was Kumamoto band Doit Science’s Beefheartian splatterfest Information, with its off-kilter melodies, disorientating collision of rhythms, and wide-eyed diversions into barbershop.

No Dancing / Ian LYNAM
June saw a handful of protests to the recent renewed enforcement of a 1984 addition to the Entertainment Business Control Law that bans dancing in music venues and clubs with less than a 66 square meter floor. Since 2010, Japanese law enforcement agencies have gone out of their way to crack down on dancing in small clubs in Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Osaka. With ten raids in 2010, twenty-one in 2011, and an as-yet undisclosed, yet potentially higher number in 2012, the government is doing its absolute best to uphold an archaic law. The odd thing is that the law was originally instituted in 1948 to crack down on prostitution. As for the reasoning in the contemporary context, the jury is still out.

Jail Time for Downloading / Ian LYNAM
Both houses of the Diet passed a law that added punishments to pre-existing anti-piracy legislation in June of this year, and it came into effect in October. Draconian in nature due to the sprawling range of content and lack of clear definition, this new legal framework, in essence, means watching pirated content or making a backup copy of a DVD can get you up to two years in prison or fines up to ¥2 million. (Don’t worry, Tsutaya fans — ripping CDs is legal.) A key (if untested) loophole that has been discerned thus far is that the viewer must be aware of their pirate action’s illegality. The law requires a rightsholder to identify and report violations themselves, and so far no one has been arrested. All the same, tech-savvy Japan residents would be wise to watch their digital backs.

Sony Music Japan on iTunes / W. David MARX
Sony Music Japan — one of Japan’s biggest music labels — finally put its domestic catalog on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The lesson here is that Japanese companies can’t stop history or progress, but they can delay for a very long time.

Adrian Favell vs. Nara Yoshitomo / W. David MARX
Earlier in 2012, British sociologist Adrian Favell published an academic look at the rise of Japanese contemporary art titled Before and After Superflat. There was little notice in Japan until a translated version of his chapter on Nara Yoshitomo “as a businessman” hit the desk of… Nara Yoshitomo. The aging punk rocking artist took to his Twitter account to vent his spleen (calling Favell lots of not nice things, including “会ったこともない外人”) and denouncing the article as being factually inaccurate. The controversy boiled down to Favell’s challenge of Nara’s image as a “naïve” pure painter; Nara did not like being called “consummate slacker CEO” — at least the “CEO” part. Most interestingly, this controversy created a wave of people in the Japanese art world who rushed to defend Nara against the evils of foreign academic analysis.

Modern Times / Ian LYNAM
It’s been a big year for Tokyo-based Taiwanese-American photographer Patrick Tsai. After an upset at the Canon “New Cosmos of Photography” competition, he went on to have his first monograph Modern Times published by boutique photo publishing house Nakarokusha. A slew of exhibitions in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Nara, and elsewhere followed, as well as being picked by Time Magazine’s for its best photo books of the year. Modern Times is now being displayed in the art/photography sections of every major bookstore in the country at present — a rarity when most foreigners’ work is valued as an import. Tsai has managed to cultivate a body of work that is deemed worthwhile during their his time spent domestically in Japan.

Takamine Tadasu’s Solo Show / Darryl Jingwen WEE
Almost two years after the fact, Takamine Tadasu presented one of the more nuanced responses to the aftermath of 3/11 by casting a penetrating eye on parts of the Japanese psyche that are often neglected, shrugged off, or willfully ignored. Highlights of his show at Art Tower Mito included a room littered with shambolic reams of paper filled with xenophobic, jingoistic hate speech and bulletin board ephemera, and revolving LED signs that churn out the trite hyōgo slogans that festoon every street corner and public transportation facility in the country. The deft spatial composition of this show that straddles theater set and conceptual, text-based art, combined with a finely balanced sense of irony — as well as fortuitous timing hot on the heels of a rather disappointing election — makes this a highlight of the past year in contemporary art.

Goldblatt in Delight Shock about Murakami Loss / Matt TREYVAUD
Not only did Murakami Haruki not win the Nobel Prize this year, actual winner Mo Yan‘s English translator Howard Goldblatt was reportedly “delighted that the other Asian titan, Japanese author Haruki Murakami […] didn’t win.” The sentence ends “… when so many other Asian writers get so little attention in the West,” which, okay, admirable sentiments we can all get behind, but still — ouch, man. Next year’s winner will probably just hire a small child to point at Murakami and laugh. (Goldblatt’s Granta interview is also worth reading.)

The Return of the King / Matt TREYVAUD
Ten years after delivering a Tale of Genji for people who like commas and poetry, Royall Tyler has graced the world with a The Tale of the Heike for people who like line breaks (and homework). Fans of tales about premodern Japanese entities with two-syllable names might also want to check out the translation of the Ise Monogatari Tyler banged out in the interim with Joshua S. Mostow.

New Books about Old Music / Matt TREYVAUD
In the world of comics, Amyū’s Kono oto tomare! 『この音とまれ!』 took on the monumental task of making koto music cool (mainly by putting very little actual koto music in the story).On the other hand, 2012 did also see the republication of jiuta master Tomiyama Seikin I’s 1966 Seikin: jiuta shugyō 『清琴 地うた修行』 (as the meat of Jiuta/sōkyoku no sekai『地歌・箏曲の世界』) and Okamoto Chikugai’s Shakuhachi zuisō shū 『尺八随想集』, so the news was not all bad.

Best Action Manga of 2012 / Matthew PENNEY
Yūyami Tokkotai (Twilight Suicide Squad) by Oshikiri Rensuke is a real seinen original that combines high school club stuff, gags, hand-to-hand combat with a ridiculous sense of impact, and some genuinely creepy J-horror scenes that borrow equally from the 1990s and 2000s hits (Ring, Audition, Ju-on) and classic films based on Edogawa Rampo and Yokomizo Seishi novels. Moving deftly between parody and homage and driving almost immediately into a single-arc story that at ten volumes is already foreshadowing a tight and timely conclusion, Yūyami Tokkotai stands out from the many similar series on the market that are ponderously drawing out their stories past thirty volumes and beyond any artistic credibility.

Meanwhile Hunter x Hunter is a series that due to juvenile early arcs and a long hiatus has not built the international fan-base of Shonen Jump brethren Bleach and Naruto. Creator Togashi Yoshihiro, best known for his work on Yu Yu Hakusho, is a experienced creator and in 2011-2012 has successfully introduced a darker tone along with artistic experimentation in the fight scenes — characters take on the form of Buddhist statues and one protagonist’s lines become almost calligraphy-like as he powers up, a far cry from the usual (and increasingly sterile) speed lines and flaming auras.

Best “Artistic” Manga of 2012 / Matthew PENNEY
Maruo Suehiro’s Binzume no Jigoku (Bottled Hell) shows that the ero-guro master continues to grow as an artist. In the title adaptation of Yumeno Kyusaku’s 1928 novella, Maruo brings alive a natural environment that is equally beautiful and terrifying, mirroring perfectly the combination of sexual desire and horror that tears at the protagonists — a shipwrecked adolescent brother and sister. Where Maruo once went for licking eyeballs, he now maintains his transgressive style with symbolism and understatement. Even better, the volume also contains a number of shorts that show he can still summon the old grotesquerie on cue.

Also, Yukimura Makoto’s Vinland Saga is finally beginning to hit the thematic highs of the author’s past hit Planetes. Yukimura uses an old Norse setting to deal with slavery and structures of power and hints that his version of the push to the “new world” is rooted in utopian anarchism.

Fukushima Manga / Matthew PENNEY
There have been over a dozen volume length manga dealing with the March 11, 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi meltdown. The most challenging is Imashiro Takashi’s Genpatsu genma taisen (the title combines “genpatsu” — nuclear power — with the name of the series of novels about a psychic invader from deep space that became the famous/infamous 1983 anime move Harmagedon) which captures the anger felt by many readers while looking critically at the political economy of nuclear power in Japan.

Kobayashi Yoshinori’s (yes, that Kobayashi Yoshinori) Datsu-Genpatsu Ron (On Abandoning Nuclear Power) makes a strong critique of Japan’s nuclear industry from the Right, asking why the public should be asked to pay month after month to electrical monopolies while still picking up the tab to the tune of hundreds of times the company’s stock value if something goes wrong. Kobayashi, of course, believes that while nuclear power is a no-no; nuclear weapons are where Japan should be looking. On the whole, this volume is less deliberately offensive than most of his work and certainly shows a shadow of the mid-1990s Kobayashi who was held to be an adroit progressive before Sensōron (On War) blew everything up.

The most powerful manga on the 3.11 disasters deals with the tsunami rather than the nuclear crisis. The twenty-first volume of Kusaka Riki’s Helpman! (a reference to elder care “helpers”) looks at the quake and inundation of Tōhoku communities from the point of view of the elderly and care workers. Over half of the total dead were 65 or older and hundreds of elderly died in shelters in the days and weeks after the crisis. Helpman! draws attention to this side of the tragedy, which was often homogenized as a “national” or “regional” experience, without losing the sharp affective high points of a mature seinen style. Helpman! is a underrated series that keeps getting better and shows that mainstream manga magazines (in this case, Evening) continue to explore new possibilities for the medium.

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.

Last time we saw that the tastes of upper and middle-class “mainstream” consumers dominated Japanese pop culture from the post-war to the end of the 1990s. This time we will explore the most important cultural change of the last decade: the greater proportional power for marginal subcultures. Mainstream consumers, for the economic and demographic reasons given in Part One and Part Two, have ceased to consume with the same force as before and thus have lost their “voting power” within pop culture.

Part Four: The Rise of Marginal Subcultures

The drop in cultural markets has been almost perfectly pegged to the decline in incomes. Middle class consumers are buying less, and when they buy, now go for cheaper or risk-free products. Within this environment, we could expect marginal subcultures to also have curbed consumption. Yet they did not! And their steady buying into their own cultural niches has made huge changes in the tenor of Japanese pop culture.

Yankii and otaku: Consumption as pathology

The yankii and otaku have never traditionally been blessed with high incomes nor high future earning potential, and in pure homo economicus terms, should be cutting back even more than middle-class consumers. We must understand, however, that for the otaku, yankii, and gyaru, shopping is not merely a form of leisure nor has it even been an attempt to buy into a larger society-wide consumerist message. These groups use consumerism as a therapeutic solution to their psychological and social problems.

The otaku spend their time as avaricious collectors of goods and trading information with other otaku. In shunning away from mainstream standards of sociability, sexuality, and career success, the act of maniacal consumption becomes their raison d’être. They cannot relate with other people if not commenting upon these cultural goods. Culture — most of which must be purchased and enjoyed as object (even when it is just physical media holding content) — is the great satisfier of their deepest desires.

The gyaru, in comparison, put a high premium on social networks and romance. Yet there is a certain pain at the heart of gyaru culture. In his book Keitai Shosetsu-teki (“Cell Phone Novel-esque”), author Hayamizu Kenrou calls the basic aesthetic mode of gyaru literature — cell phone novels, Hamasaki Ayumi lyrics — “trauma-kei” due to its emphasis on overcoming personal tragedy. When I interviewed Nakajo Hisako, the editor-in-chief of Koakuma Ageha, in 2009 I asked, “Why do gyaru spend so much time on their clothing, hair, and makeup?” She answered, “Because we are not cute. If we were cute, we would just wear a white T-shirt. We have to work hard to look good.” There is an obvious logic to this: The gyaru’s transformation into golden curly hair and heavily painted faces is an escape from their normal selves.

Like Nakajo suggests, gyaru culture looks as it does precisely because they are not “blessed” girls (Nakajo’s words). And this means gyaru must spend on clothing, hair treatments, and makeup in order to achieve the desired self-image. Beyond this desire to look like someone else (and basically like everyone else in their peer group), there is also the social demand to show allegiance to a wider gyaru subculture by donning its uniform. To be a gyaru means dressing like a gyaru — no exceptions.

Marginal groups’ up their voting power in the consumer vacuum

The end result is that the otaku and yankii have an almost inelastic demand for their favorite goods. They must consume, no matter the economic or personal financial situation. They may move to cheaper goods, but they will always be buying something. Otherwise they lose their identity. While normal consumers curb consumption in the light of falling wages, the marginal otaku and yankii keep buying. And that means the markets built around these subcultures are relatively stable in size.

So as the total market shrinks, the marginal groups — in their stability — are no longer minor segments but now form a respectable plurality in the market. In other words, if otaku or yankii all throw their support through a specific cultural item, that item will end up being the most supported within the wider market.

The clearest example of this is AKB48. With the letters AKB in their name, this group of girls was unequivocally marketed towards older males based in the Akihabara otaku culture. Compared to past mass market groups such as Speed, the girls are intentionally chosen and styled to look like elementary schoolgirls and lyrically address older men with direct sexual references. (See the “cat-eared brothel” video for “Heavy Rotation” and the unambiguous “love knows no age” lyrics for “Seifuku ga jama wo suru.”)

The mass idol group regularly has an “election” (sousenkyo) where fans try to vote their favorite girl to Number One. Buying certain AKB48 CD singles gives the fan a vote in the AKB48 election, which thus incentivizes otaku to buy multiple copies of the CD to increase their “political” power. The CD is thus no longer a means of listening to music but a way to influence the future of AKB48. This has created a legion of fans who buy dozens and hundreds of the same AKB48 CD or even 5500 copies. There are now doubts about that story’s authenticity but it basically was an exaggeration of an existing principle. Regardless, the marketing strategy of AKB48 does encourage the purchase of multiple goods, thus amplifying the buying power of nerds beyond their small numbers. This means as a consumer bloc, the AKB48 otaku fans can rival the non-otaku consumer base.

This otaku bloc strength, as well as other niche’s dedicated buying, can be seen through the music charts. In 2010 only three artists made the Oricon best-selling singles market — AKB48 and a Johnny’s Jimusho group Arashi. (At this stage, you can almost argue that music fans of Johnny’s groups are themselves a conspicuous cult rather than a mass market phenomenon.) Only two artists taking the entire singles market is unprecedented in Japanese musical history. In the previous decade, the average number of artists in the top ten was 8.2. The best explanation is that mainstream consumers stopped buying music, even single song downloads, so the favorite acts of marginal subcultures now appear to be the most popular.

Otaku and gyaru: winners by default

This principle demonstrates how AKB48 became an unlikely “mainstream” phenomenon. Despite AKB48 being so clearly marketed towards a niche audience, their success in a declining market has made them perceived to be the most popular in the entire market. Therefore 2010 and 2011 saw AKB48, with backing from advertising monolith Dentsu, doing advertisements for mainstream brands and chains such as 7/11. (Lawson’s has now countered with a nerd-drooling K-On! campaign.) With no major competition from more mainstream-oriented idols and groups, they became the obvious spokespeople and magazine cover girls — thus amplifying their fame more.

In the case of gyaru, there are larger numbers of gyaru than otaku, meaning that the gyaru can just consume their standard number of items and still dominate the market. Before I mentioned that the extremely “normal girl” fashion magazine non•no once sold close to a million copies per issue in 1996 at the peak of the publishing market, which was once far above the 310,000 copies for hardcore yankii/gyaru magazine Popteen at the same time. Around 2009, however, non•no dropped to a mere 180,000 copies a month while Popteen was still hovering around 310,000. Gyaru are still consuming fashion, and therefore need fashion guides to tell them how to do so. “Normal” girls have generally lost interest in clothing and do not need fashion guides as much. So in this collapse of the mass market, a magazine representing a marginal taste has become one of the best-selling.

With the yankii and otaku culture being so proportionally conspicuous in the market and mainstream and avant-garde styles being so minor and invisible, the once marginal looks have a greater legitimacy for less engaged consumers who mostly just desire socially-acceptable styles. As a result, gyaru and yankii fashion have had a strong moment over the last five years, leading to large-scale booms in things once unfathomable such as “hostess fashion.” University students at elite schools like Keio are likely to have hairstyles reminiscent of yankii hosts. Films and books with obvious yankii narratives, such as Rookies and cell phone novel Koizora, became huge national hits in 2009. Gyaru singer Nishino Kana is one of the few well-selling artists on Sony (formerly known for alternative musicians Supercar, Puffy, and Denki Groove). And even former “arty” magazines like CUTiE have moved towards the gyaru style, and the fiercely indie girl mag Zipper put gyaru icon Tsubasa Masuwaka on the cover. There is no popular female style that does not see a little influence from the yankii side of gyaru culture.

Not truly “the most popular”

While otaku and yankii cultures are enjoying a new cultural influence in their deep commitment to consumption, we should not forget that these groups do not make up any kind of actual societal consensus. The masses may be consuming parts of their culture, but these groups are at best pluralities rather than majorities — dominant in the market but nowhere near 50% of tastes.

For example, if you look at the sales numbers for the #1 single of 2010 — “Beginner” by AKB48 at 954,283 copies — this would not have been enough copies to make the top ten from the years 1991 to 2000, when the wider public bought CDs in droves. In 2001, it would have ranked in at #10 — a successful hit for a niche, but not the symbol of J-Pop for the era. The population of Japan in the last ten years has not dropped enough to make this smaller number of sales proportionally relevant — just less people are purchasing music.

AKB48’s narrow popularity becomes very clear when the group appears on television — a medium that continues to have a mass audience (although disproportionally elderly viewers.) Maeda Atsuko had been repeatedly voted the #1 member of AKB48, and yet her recent drama Hanazakari no Kimitachi e (Ikemen Paradise)saw extremely low ratings (episodes around 6%). AKB48 variety show “Naruhodo High School” has drawna dismal 4.5%.

AKB48 have also been extremely popular on YouTube, which skews towards a tech-savvy male audience in Japan. And yet a song like “Heavy Rotation”— at over 50 million views — has nearly one-third “thumbs down” votes. This is an extremely high amount level of dislikes compared to other music videos on the site.

So AKB48 are the most conspicuous music group in Japan at the moment with the highest record sales and highest number of appearances, but they should necessarily be considered a “mass” phenomenon with widespread fans across multiple segments. The group has captured the strongest plurality in the market, and companies have mobilized around them in desperation. If Dentsu could sponsor a different hit idol group with an even broader fan base, they would. But ironically, no one other than AKB48 or Johnny’s Jimusho groups have the sales or market legitimacy to work in the context of mass market advertising. Marginal groups are now feeding and over-influencing the remnants of the mass market just as counter-consumer once did.

Next time, we look at whether marginal subcultures can produce goods that are easily exportable.