Jansen on the Taisho period: "The years between the wars exhibited a remarkable pluralism in politics and thought. The rapid course of industrialization spurred by the Russo-Japanese War and climaxing during the years of World War I, brought to focus changes initiated by the Meiji reforms. Those changes had as their goal the creation of a Japan able to hold its own with the Great Powers and a Japan dominant in Northeast Asia. The forces they unleashed, however, brought dislocation in every part of Japanese society. Women began to tire of the 'good wife, wise mother' role to which they had been assigned. A labor movement began to challenge the undisputed dominance of the Industrial Club, and a tenant movement gave evidence of dislocations in village life. The diffusion of education brought with it ready access to outside thought, and modern transportation brought premodern Japan to the new industrial centers and cities. Urbanization brought with it a new mass culture. Japan had become a land of far greater social variety than before. It was more open to the world than it had been. The products and tensions of the modern world had rendered it more internationalist and cosmopolitan. But because more and more of Western literature and thought was available in translation, and Japan's academic and cultural institutions had developed their own structure and mechanisms, Japan's intellectuals were in some ways more parochial than their Meiji predecessors, who had had to meet the West on its own terms and not in Japanese translation."

Jansen on the Taisho era: "Within Japan the political consensus of the Meiji period, long moderated by the founding fathers of the modern state, was also giving way. The Meiji state structure had divided responsibility by reserving it--ostensibly to the emperor--to separate institutions charged with responsibility for military, diplomatic, and political affairs. The original genro had been able to coordinate the institutions this created; their collegial tactics made it work, but their successors had not been bonded by youthful struggle in the same way."

Jansen's description of the Taisho period reminds me of the Boom Awakening. There was a cultural chasm, and Taisho occurred just after industrialization while the Boom Awakening was on the industrial age/information age cusp. But the Japanese students described in Jansen's book reminded me not of Samurai-they reminded me of hippies! Environmentalism appeared during Taisho and was big during the Boom Awakening. Also, the two periods were similar in another way. Awakenings were described by S&H as frustrating big secular projects. But there is an exception. During the Taisho period, as described by Jansen, the new department stores were popular; during the Boom Awakening these stores were the "anchors" for the big shopping centers that arose in the suburbs (see The Malling of America).

I'm trying to learn more about Japanese generations. Does anybody know any good books are articles to look at?

What do you think of this article?

"Japan's Future Growth Threatened" by Audrey McAvoy, Associated Pres

Already mired in its worst economic slump in decades, Japan may well see its growth decline even further as its citizens age and its population shrinks, the government said in an annual economic assessment released Friday . . . "Japan is experiencing aging unprecedented in history," said Jun Saito, the director of economic policy and analysis at the Cabinet Office, which authored the report . . .

The report said the average Japanese woman now faces incentives not to have children: She loses 85 million yen ($772,000) over her lifetime if she quits her job to give birth -- even if she returns to work afterward. The current statistics are ominous. Japan's birthrate . . . dropped to 1.32 in 2002, the lowest on record, and after peaking in 2005, the population is on track to shrink by nearly a fifth by 2050 . . . [T]hose now in their 20s through 40s will pay more into the [pension] system than they will receive due to the large numbers of elderly the country will support in coming years. This is causing more young people to opt out of paying into the system, creating an additional burden on government coffers.

http://www.newsday.com/business/nati...ness-headlines

Originally Posted by callmeindy

I'm trying to learn more about Japanese generations. Does anybody know any good books are articles to look at?

I suspect those are still to be written. The best I could find using a google search is a book reviewed here: http://www.art-photo-web.com/Japanes...824823168.html

In the meantime, the active poster on this site who seems to have the best handle on Japanese generations is Tristan Jones. Send him a PM.

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THURSDAY December 18, 2003
Homeless considered trash in Japan



By Norimitsu Onishi
The New York Times

KAWASAKI, Japan -- The memory of how three youths pounced on him one night with sticks and fists twisted Masahiko Sugai's face with pain. The homeless people living with him here, clustered under a bridge linking this city with Tokyo, avoided the topic.

But the bruises around his eyes, visible for days after the beating, testified to a new crime: attacks by young men and boys on middle-aged men who have become homeless after losing their jobs and who, in the cold logic of Japan's post-bubble-economy years, are useless.

"We're most afraid of boys," Sugai, 51, said one afternoon in early September as cars and trucks rumbled overhead on the Rokugo Bridge. "They're the most dangerous."

A month later, in an unrelated case, 10 boys were arrested here for randomly assaulting three sleeping homeless men. The boys kicked the men, hit one on the head with a bicycle pump, and toppled a bicycle on another, stomping on it.

The boys -- the youngest was 10, the oldest 16 -- told the police that they were "killing time," "getting rid of stress" and "disposing of society's trash." They came from normal homes.

"They didn't stand out at all," said Kengo Honda, 54, deputy chief at the police station that investigated the case.

Honda spoke of the "shameful tendency in Japan to target the weak."

"Considered trash": The police do not keep track of such crimes, and most victims, like Sugai, do not report them. But Mitsuyuki Maniwa, a professor specializing in juvenile crime at Otani University in Kyoto, said such attacks had increased in the past five years and had become more violent.

"Those who have no role in society are now considered trash, just like stray cats or dogs to be disposed of," said Maniwa, who said that in the past these crimes were typically committed by troubled youths against vagrants.

More than 1,000 homeless people are believed to be living here in Kawasaki, an industrial city that has fallen on hard times. Many live in cardboard boxes near the main train station.

In Fujimi Park, they have erected scores of semipermanent wooden shacks, neatly spaced, with locks and, sometimes, ornamented windows and doors. Some have transformed tiny patches of land into gardens. Many keep dogs and have bicycles.

Away from the city center, past a red-light street where foreign Asian women sit behind Amsterdam-style glass windows, about 300 homeless people live near the Tama River, dividing this city from Tokyo. Some have pitched tents on the bank. Still others have found their way under the bridge.

"This is the Japan where people who want to work can't find work," Isamu Ishikawa said.

Hard to find work: Ishikawa, 51, and Sugai, the man who was assaulted, have shared a corner under the bridge with several cats, a dog and a rabbit over the past three months. A young couple (Makoto Watanabe, 33, who said he became homeless after his parents fled in the middle of the night, and Maki Ito, 28, who loved him against her parents' wishes and so followed him here under the bridge) pitched a tent. Tadashi Sakuma, a 62-year-old grandfather, homeless for several years, had built two shacks nearby but came here for the company.

In the afternoons, after they have spent the morning picking up aluminum cans or collecting lunches from the city, they relax over shochu, a cheap Japanese alcohol.

Ishikawa had worked for five years in a Japanese restaurant, starting as a dishwasher and rising to sashimi chef. He had gone to college on a baseball scholarship, but a shoulder injury forced him to drop out. He had married and had two children, and had worked at companies, but a problem nagged him.

"I messed up because of this," he said, tapping a glass of shochu before him.

In recent years, he gravitated to the Sanya district of Tokyo, where he worked as a day laborer and first met Sugai. "But in Japan it's hard to find any work if you are over 50," he said.

He had left his family and moved into a place where he had gone three years without paying his landlord.

Feeling guilty, Ishikawa fled one night in June, taking only his bicycle. He rode five hours to Kawasaki, his hometown, where he went to see his wife and children, but did not tell them he had become homeless.

"My wife even gave me the key to the house and told me to come whenever I wanted to," he said. "But I can't go . . . I don't have a face to show."

Under the bridge, Ishikawa found comfort in his friendship with Sugai.

"Sugai told me, 'Here, when you want to cry, cry.' When I was with my family, I had to be strong. I never hit anyone. But I would yell at my wife. I was hard on her, but I loved her. That's why she handed me the key. But after I came here, I felt free. So that day I leaned against the wall of the bridge and held my futon, and cried and cried."

It was dusk already, and the traffic out of Tokyo over the bridge was getting heavier. Sugai, who had been asleep inside his tent, crawled out, his hair wildly uncombed.

"Why is everyone up so early this morning?" he said.

Weeks passed. Sugai found a gray mutt, but fell into a funk when he had to return it. He and Ishikawa decided to stop drinking. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was re-elected.

One recent morning, Sugai and Ishikawa returned from selling $16.53 worth of aluminum cans at the scrap yard. A news junkie who follows world events on the radio, Sugai goes to the public library these days to read books on Japan's feudal Edo era.

"I think things were easier back then," Sugai said. "During the bubble economy, the Japanese suddenly became rich and went crazy. It changed the Japanese."

Is Tokyo today's equilalent of Swinging London during the 60s?

This is originally from Foreign Policy Magazine. I first read about it in Newtype USA, the premiere magazine for anime and manga fans. Standard disclaimers apply.

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~ikalma...apfpmcgray.htm

Japan?s Gross National Cool


Japan is reinventing superpower?again. Instead of collapsing beneath its widely reported political and economic misfortunes, Japan?s global cultural influence has quietly grown. From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one. But can Japan build on its mastery of medium to project an equally powerful national message?

By Douglas McGray


On Sunday mornings, teenagers crowd the sidewalks of Tokyo?s Shibuya district until they spill over the curbs and into the streets. They start at Hachiko Square, under a video monitor that takes up the entire face of a glass and steel high-rise, and spread out, 30 or 40 wide in the crosswalks. They mill around displays stacked with new sneakers?Nike and New Balance from the United States, Puma and Adidas from Europe via New York. They gather in a small music store that specializes in the American vinyl records played in Tokyo?s popular soul bars?Grandmaster Flash, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament. They spend 370 yen (roughly $3) at Starbucks for a tall iced latte, which tastes just as it does in Washington, D.C., and is just as overpriced. Like any global metropolis, Tokyo serves up a substantial dose of American culture, particularly to its youth. Sometimes, like Starbucks or Nikes, it is authentic. Sometimes, like a ?Harbard University? sweatshirt or a potato salad pizza, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. Less important than authentic American origin is the whiff of American cool.


A few blocks from the Starbucks in Hachiko Square you will find Mandarake, a shop that sells used manga and anime (Japanese comic books and animation, respectively). There is no storefront full of dog-eared comics in plastic sleeves, just a maw of an entrance carved cavelike out of fake rock and flight after flight of stairs down to the basement-level shop. There, comic books and videotapes are stacked to the ceiling, alongside the toys and collectibles they inspired. The real esoterica are under glass, rare Godzilla and Ultraman action figures selling for hundreds of dollars each.


With a network of shops across Japan and a listing on the Nikkei Stock Index, Mandarake Incorporated is positioning for global expansion. New stores opened in Los Angeles in 1999 and in Bologna in 2001. Japan accounts for the bulk of Mandarake?s revenue, said company president Masuzo Furukawa, ?but in, say, about five to 10 years, it should be the other way around. The foreign market should be much bigger.?


Already, ?there isn?t much of a time lag between what sells well in Japan and what sells in the United States,? Furukawa said, comparing business in Tokyo and Los Angeles. The buxom, gun-toting pixies, cute monsters, and transforming robots that fill Mandarake in Shibuya show up in MTV graphics, street fashions, bars and dance clubs, and even museums. Last year, the Getty Center in Los Angeles debuted a blockbuster show on Japan?s ?Super Flat? movement?young Japanese art inspired by the two-dimensional look of commercial cartoons.


Sometimes, like an Issey Miyake gown, the Japan that travels is authentic. Sometimes, like cream cheese?and?salmon sushi, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. What matters is the whiff of Japanese cool.



THE POK?MON HEGEMON

Critics often reduce the globalization of culture to either the McDonald?s phenomenon or the ?world music? phenomenon. For the McDonald?s camp, globalization is the process of large American multinationals overwhelming foreign markets and getting local consumers addicted to special sauce. In this case, culture flows from American power, and American supply creates demand. For the world music camp, globalization means that fresh, marginal culture reaches consumers in the United States through increased contact with the rest of the world. Here, too, culture flows from American power, with demand from rich Americans expanding distribution for Latin pop or Irish folk songs.


But Japanese culture has transcended U.S. demand or approval. Director and actor Takeshi Kitano, arguably the Japanese film industry?s most noteworthy recent export, was first embraced in Europe, then in the United States. At this year?s Berlin Film Festival, Hayao Miyazaki?s Spirited Away became the first animation feature ever to win a top festival prize. A major publishing show in Frankfurt, for the first time, opened an exhibition of Japanese manga. Namie Amuro, reigning ?J-Pop? (Japan-Pop) music diva of the 1990s, built a huge fan base in Asia without ever going on tour in the United States. Millions of teenagers in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Bangkok covet the latest fashions from Tokyo, most of which never make it to New York. Japanese lifestyle magazines, some of the most lavishly produced in the world, are smuggled by illegal distributors across Asia as soon as they are on newsstands in Tokyo, though none has launched an American edition.


At the same time, Japan has made deep inroads into American culture, usually written off by the rest of the world as aggravatingly insular. Bestselling Sony Playstation and Nintendo home video games draw heavily on Japanese anime and manga for inspiration. So have recent Hollywood films, such as The Matrix, and television series, including director James Cameron?s Dark Angel. ?Tokyo is the real international capital of fashion,? the style editor of the New York Times proposed this spring, spurning Paris, New York, and Milan as pretenders. Japanese anime-style cartoons currently fill the majority of time slots in the after-school and Saturday morning schedules on U.S. cable television. The cartoon and video game franchise Pok?mon?broadcast in 65 countries and translated into more than 30 languages?even made the cover of Time magazine.


In the 1980s, Japan pioneered a new kind of superpower. Tokyo had no army to speak of, no puppet regimes to prop up, and no proxy wars to mind. Just an economy. What made Japan a superpower, more than just a wealthy country, was the way its great firms staked claim to a collective intellectual high ground that left competitors, even in the United States, scrambling to reverse-engineer Japanese successes. Seeking guidance on everything from ?quality circles? to ?just-in-time? inventory management, U.S. corporate executives bought stacks of books on Japanese management techniques. The key to Japan?s economic ascendance was not ideology, at least not by Cold War standards; but it was a method, it drove the most dynamic economy of the era, and it was indisputably Japanese.

Fast forward to 2001. High incomes, long life expectancy, and many more of the statistics that mean anything in terms of quality of life still tilt in Japan?s favor. But the national swagger is gone, a casualty of a decade-long recession. Gross domestic product is down; the yen is down; the Nikkei Stock Index hit a 17-year low; and full employment, practically a natural right in Japan, has been replaced by near-record rates of unemployment. Tokyo has tried to keep the International Monetary Fund from investigating its banking system, which is suspected to be in even worse shape than the finance ministry has admitted. A recent downgrade from Moody?s Investors Service rates Japan only slightly more creditworthy than Botswana. The country limps its way into G-8 meetings and remains locked out of the U.N. Security Council.


Yet Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan?s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower.


Its cultural sway is not quite like that of American culture abroad, which, even in its basest forms, tends to reflect certain common values?at the very least, American-style capitalism and individualism. Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan can seem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect the contradictory values of a nation in flux, a superficiality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BT to equate contemporary Japanese culture with ?Super Flat? art, ?devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.? ?We don?t have any religion,? painter Takashi Murakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically. ?We just need the big power of entertainment.?


But gradually, over the course of an otherwise dismal decade, Japan has been perfecting the art of transmitting certain kinds of mass culture?a technique that has contributed mightily to U.S. hegemony around the world. If Japan sorts out its economic mess and military angst, and if younger Japanese become secure in asserting their own values and traditions, Tokyo can regain the role it briefly assumed at the turn of the 19th century, when it simultaneously sought to engage the West and to become a military and cultural power on its own terms.


JAPAN?S POSTMODERN POP

I spent three months last year traveling around Japan, interviewing artists, directors, scientists, designers, and culture mavens. Many of them seemed surprised at the idea of Japanese cultural might abroad. They tended to think very little about foreign audiences. What they talked about instead was foreign inspiration. At times, it seems almost a strange point of pride, a kind of one-downsmanship, to argue just how little Japan there is in modern Japan. Ironically, that may be a key to the spread of Japanese cool.

?I can?t always distinguish elements of traditional Japanese culture from Japanese culture invented for tourists,? confessed Toshiya Ueno, a sociology professor at Chubu University and, in his spare time, a techno deejay with gigs in Tokyo and Amsterdam.


?During the First World War, in Japan, already there was a strong argument about overcoming modernity,? Ueno said, sitting in his cluttered university office behind two turntables and a mixing board. ?Already, postmodern eclecticism was surfacing.? In other words, Japan was postmodern before postmodernism was trendy, fusing elements of other national cultures into one almost-coherent whole. It makes sense: Japan?s history is filled with examples of foreign inspiration and cultural fusion, from its kanji character system to its ramen noodles.


Consider the case of a new band, Lipless X Sister, and a new dance, the Pada Pada. Like most Japanese pop music acts, Lipless X Sister is a concept group, dreamed up by record producers and marketing executives and then assembled through auditions. In this case, the concept was 18- to 22-year-old girls with 2-year-old children. A producer explained the band?s name to local press: ?You can like them. But they?re mothers, so you can?t kiss them.?


Their debut performance took place in March 2001 on a makeshift stage outside 109, a tall shiny department store in Shibuya that, for a few million of Japan?s teenage girls, is the most stylish, most important, and most exciting place in the world. The girls in the band, like every girl in every magazine that season, had light cedar tresses, denim skirts, and tight tops with vintage sports lettering (no doubt all of it was for sale inside). They wheeled their kids out in strollers, all in a line. Then they started to sing. ?Pada Pada mama, Pada Pada mama.?


A new dance then sweeping through Tokyo?s clubs, the Pada Pada is ?uniquely Japanese,? said Katsuo Shimizu, a culture columnist at the daily Asahi Shimbun, touting it as the first popular dance step to originate in Japan. In fact, the Pada Pada looks like nothing if not the Macarena. The dance didn?t seem uniquely Japanese. It didn?t seem at all Japanese. But then, what should one expect, geishas grooving on a Shinto arch?


The Pada Pada doesn?t require a great cultural leap for foreigners. The band has an English name, not that it makes much sense to a native speaker, but English words travel well. If the Pada Pada spreads across Asia, however, it will be on the strength of Japanese pop songs, Japanese music videos starring Japanese girls with light cedar hair, and Japanese cool. Maybe there is not much traditionally Japanese about any of it. But if that is a requirement for national branding, American pop culture is hardly more respectful of traditional Americana?unless you count when Madonna wears a cowboy hat.


MEET HELLO KITTY, DAVOS CAT


Japan?s most visible pop icon, Sanrio?s cartoon cat Hello Kitty, takes the national ambiguity of the Pada Pada further. Kitty is not actually supposed to be Japanese. In fact, Kitty?s last name, announced for the first time in spring 2001 in Sanrio?s official fan magazine, is White.


Kitty White? Kitty is a WASP!


Hello Kitty drives an empire worth almost $1 billion in global sales per year. ?From Target to McDonald?s, she went big time,? wrote Asian-American pop culture magazine Giant Robot, proclaiming her the best ?Corporate Whore? of 2001. Sanrio licenses so many products with Hello Kitty?s likeness that a company spokesman could not confirm the current count. Put it between 12,000, the estimate he gave, and 15,000, a number that is widely reported. You can buy individually wrapped Hello Kitty prunes. You can buy a toaster that burns Hello Kitty?s face into a piece of bread. You can buy a Hello Kitty vibrator. ?We don?t have such strict regulations,? the spokesman said. ?Hard alcohol, maybe that would not be appropriate.?


Hello Kitty?s longtime designer, Yuko Yamaguchi, met me in a small Sanrio conference room, dressed in dark jeans and a baggy shirt. A cell phone and a dozen Hello Kitty dangles hung from a chain around her neck. So which is Kitty, foreign or Japanese? ?When Kitty-chan was born, in those days it was very rare for Japanese people to go abroad,? she said. ?So people yearned for products with English associations. There was an idea that if Kitty-chan spoke English, she would be very fashionable.?


Today, teenagers and 20-somethings in the United States and elsewhere buy Hello Kitty purses and cell phone cases as icons of Tokyo pop chic. In the 1980s, however, Sanrio?s American-based marketing team had to customize Hello Kitty for American audiences, which they considered a tough sell. Often, that meant designing two Kitties, one for Japanese and one for Americans. ?Purple and pink were very strong,? Yamaguchi said, recalling Sanrio?s American market research. ?Blue, yellow, and red were believed to be taboo.?


?There were also motifs that were taboo in the United States. There was a snail, one of Kitty-chan?s friends. When there is a rainstorm, Kitty-chan has an umbrella and a flower, and beside Kitty-chan is a snail. In the United States, that was not accepted, and there was a request to eliminate the snail,? she said. ?Differences in color were easy, but I had difficulty accommodating all the little requests?there were so many.?


?Now, there is no difference in design. Now, we have the same Kitty-chan in both markets,? she said. They have to. Sanrio?s head of marketing for Asia, Shunji Onishi, described the company?s disastrous attempt in the 1990s to customize Hello Kitty for Taiwan and Hong Kong, two of Sanrio?s strongest markets. They put Kitty in local clothes and surroundings, and the products sat on the shelves. ?They know Kitty is from Japan. That?s why they like it,? he said. ?Especially the younger generation.? Even if she is actually English? ?Kitty has a sort of independent existence,? Yamaguchi answered, hedging on nationality a bit. ?I let her transcend the borders of London.? A regular Davos cat.


WHY 600 LB. WRESTLERS DON?T TRAVEL

Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketing boomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony, and Nintendo manage effortlessly. And it is part of the genius behind Japanese cultural strength in a global era that has many countries nervous about cultural erosion.

Imagine for a moment if modern Japan were more like France, less culturally plastic and more anxious that globalization might erode its unique national character. Its cultural reach might look something like that of Japanese sumo?popular at home but stubbornly closed to foreign influence, and as a result, largely invisible outside Japan.

Tokyo?s official sumo museum, maintained by the Japanese Sumo Association, ought to be one of the city?s big foreign tourist attractions; instead, it is a dreary, one-room obscurity. The sumo association sells no official merchandise, at home or abroad. Occasionally, the association will hold an exhibition match outside Japan but only when a foreign city campaigns for a visit, and then never more than once or twice in a year. It is a marked contrast to the U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA), for instance, which in recent years has aggressively promoted its sport around the world and hinted that it might place a new team in Mexico City, or even a whole division of teams in Europe.

It is no wonder why the NBA?and the U.S. football and baseball leagues?takes a global approach. Foreign fans mean extra licensing and broadcasting revenue. And if a foreign star emerges, you have the possibility for another Ichiro. The day Japanese baseball star Ichiro Suzuki left Japan to bat leadoff for the Seattle Mariners, Japanese sports shops were already filled with official Mariners jerseys and baseball caps in anticipation. During the season, Japanese television covered every Mariners game live, despite a 12-hour time difference.

By that logic, the fact that 25 percent of the wrestlers in sumo?s top two divisions are foreign-born should be great for the sport?it raises the level of competition and offers up hometown heroes to potentially lucrative foreign broadcasting markets. But instead, it is a source of great anxiety. Sumo is a rare thing, a part of Japan?s commercial pop culture that looks much as it did hundreds of years ago.

Sumo is seldom broadcast outside Japan, but Hawaiian television carries all the tournaments. So a tall, skinny kid named Chad Rowan grew up watching Konishiki (whose given name is Salevaa Atisanoe), a fellow American from Hawaii who left the United States to become sumo?s first 600-pound wrestler. He also knew Takamiyama, another Hawaiian, the Jackie Robinson of foreign sumo wrestlers, who endured hate mail and death threats as he rose though the sumo ranks in the 1960s. Rowan never considered wrestling, himself. But he knew it was a big deal when Takamiyama, now a powerful coach, offered Rowan a chance to go to Japan with him and train. Rowan took the name Akebono and became the first foreigner the sumo association would declare a Yokuzuna, a grand champion.

When I arrived at Azumazeki Heya, the training club on the eastern edge of Tokyo where Akebono now coaches alongside his former mentor, a dozen wrestlers were waiting for their turns in the ring. Even so, you could not miss Akebono, not at 6 feet 8 inches and 512 pounds. ?Osu osu osu!!? he yelled, crossing his arms and resting them on the bulge of his stomach. ?Push push push!!? A larger wrestler leaned stiff-legged on a smaller one, and the smaller one pushed him from one side of the dirt ring to the other, and back, and again, and back. Sisyphus with a fleshy boulder. The smaller man gasped and collapsed to the dirt, his sweat turning it to reddish mud. ?What?s wrong with your legs?? Akebono taunted in Japanese, grinning. ?You can go for 30 minutes, can?t you? It?s only five or six minutes and you look exhausted!? Akebono speaks only Japanese at the heya, even with Azumazeki (the name Takamiyama took when he retired from competition, instead of his given name, Jesse Kuhaulua).

Wrestlers live at their heya, train at their heya, and eat at their heya. For a foreigner like Akebono, the instant immersion is twofold: immersion in sumo and immersion in Japan. Not everyone would face that kind of cultural rebirth for a chance at success in the most foreign of sports, and that is part of the point. ?It?s not easy, man. It?s not easy,? said Azumazeki, in a Louis Armstrong rasp that has made his voice one of the most recognizable in Japan. Although he also discovered Konishiki abroad, he does the vast majority of his recruiting in Japan. ?Back in Hawaii, my relatives and friends introduce us to kids,? he said. ?I don?t encourage them. I prepare them for the hardship.? He explained that he is looking for more than just athleticism and a frame six meals a day can bulk up. ?We try to find someone who would get along with Japan, who wants to be a Japanese kind of person.?

Heya masters like Azumazeki, like coaches in any sport, are under pressure to produce bigger and stronger athletes. At the same time, there is a strong stigma against traveling the world in search of foreign giants. If all else fails, the sumo association will enforce a seldom-mentioned quota of 40 foreign wrestlers in sumo at one time?or about 15 percent of the total. But all else has yet to fail.


YOUTH WITH A YEN FOR TECHNOLOGY

A cultural superpower needs a healthy economic base but not necessarily a healthy economy. Perversely, recession may have boosted Japan?s national cool, discrediting Japan?s rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosened the grip a big-business career track had over so much of Japan?s workforce, who now face fewer social stigmas for experimenting with art, music, or any number of similar, risky endeavors. ?There?s a new creativeness here because there?s less money,? said Tokyo-based architect Mark Dytham, a London transplant. ?Good art is appearing, young strong art. Young fashion is appearing.? Graphic designer Michael Frank, who shares a flourishing downtown studio with Dytham, agreed: ?A lot of interesting smaller magazines appeared in the last four or five years. A lot of small little businesses, people running their own shops, people running their own music labels, people running their own clubs. Bigger companies are starting to pick up on those little things and support them.?

Meanwhile, a constellation of factors distinct from the economy and its woes has kept yen flowing to the pop industries and other cultural media that Japan projects around the world so effectively: demographics that favor youth and their whims, a reliable demand for luxury goods, and a reputation for cutting-edge technology.

A generation of declining birthrates has filled Tokyo with one-child families. In scarcity, there is power. Not political power, not yet anyway, but consumer power, lots of it. ?[Children] sense that they are rare,? said Mariko Kuno Fujiwara, of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, a sociological think tank attached to one of Japan?s major advertising agencies. And so they tend to be spoiled. Fujiwara recalled one newspaper headline??Our Children Kings??with a laugh. Tokyo?s youth spend an average of $150 a month on cell phone bills alone. They propel a dizzying turnover in street fashion. They drive the second largest music industry in the world, by far the largest in Asia and one that is second only to that of the United States. At an HMV music store in Ginza one afternoon, I counted more than 100 people in line, and not one of them looked to be over 30. Japanese firms have strong financial incentives to hew to the demands of a generation with high disposable income, regardless of economic ups and downs.

Luxury goods have also fared well in Japan?s slack economy. Japanese consumers haven?t stopped buying high-end products, as a number of sociologists I spoke with stressed. They simply save up longer for them. So even as the economy languishes, rush hour in Tokyo is like a luxury car show. Louis Vuitton, which opened its Tokyo boutique in the midst of the current recession and marked up prices 50 percent over Paris shops, makes more money in Japan than anywhere else in the world. Sony electronics are also frequently more expensive in Japan than abroad, one Sony industrial designer explained, because Japanese consumers strongly prefer lighter materials and sleeker designs, even if they cost more. A sliver of a minidisc player in pumpkin orange and lime green, a narrow cell phone with a big color screen for Web browsing, a tiny MP3 personal stereo that clips directly in your ear?these are goods that inspire technolust in the levelest of heads, Japanese or foreign.


ALL MEDIUM, NO MESSAGE?

Last summer, the prestigious New York art gallery P.S.1 announced an exhibition called Buzz Club. ?Animation, cell phone art, fashion, sculpture, anime, films, elaborate graphics, popular action figurines and models, electronic music, and sound and light installations,? the gallery promised, billing it as ?the largest exhibition of Japanese pop culture creators ever assembled outside of Japan.? Exhibitors included Groovisions, a design group most famous for dreaming up a nationally ambiguous cartoon girl named Chappie, and an electronic music and design collective called Delaware. Global Japan had achieved the New York scene?s seal of approval.

There is much more to Japan than the national cool of Buzz Club. Most foreigners will never penetrate the barriers of language and culture well enough to see Japan as the average Japanese sees it. But that is part of Japan?s secret to thriving amidst globalization. There exists a Japan for Japanese and a Japan for the rest of the world. Often, in the case of youth fads, for instance, there is a good deal of overlap. Sometimes, in the case of sumo or the layout of a typical suburban house or the variety shows that proliferate across Japanese television networks, there is none.

More than 60 years ago, in a classic study called Mirror, Sword, and Jewel, a German economist at Tokyo Imperial University named Kurt Singer discussed the contrast between the ?plasticity? and ?endurance? of Japanese culture, the ability to absorb and adapt foreign influences while still retaining an intact cultural core. Yet for Singer writing in the 1930s, the question was ?why this gifted and active nation has produced so little that has been found acceptable by other countries in an age open to all foreign influences.?

Today, Japan has outgrown that question, thanks largely to the qualities of Japanese culture that Singer himself identified. In fact, in cultural terms at least, Japan has become one of a handful of perfect globalization nations (along with the United States). It has succeeded not only in balancing a flexible, absorptive, crowd-pleasing, shared culture with a more private, domestic one but also in taking advantage of that balance to build an increasingly powerful global commercial force. In other words, Japan?s growing cultural presence has created a mighty engine of national cool.

It is impossible to measure national cool. National cool is a kind of ?soft power??a term Harvard dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. coined more than a decade ago to explain the nontraditional ways a country can influence another country?s wants, or its public?s values. And soft power doesn?t quantify neatly. How much of modern American hegemony is due to the ideological high ground of its democracy, for instance, how much to its big corporate franchises, to Hollywood, to rock music and blue jeans, or to its ability to fascinate as well as intimidate? National cool is an idea, a reminder that commercial trends and products, and a country?s knack for spawning them, can serve political and economic ends. As Nye argued in this magazine more than a decade ago, ?There is an element of triviality and fad in popular behavior, but it is also true that a country that stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its messages across and to affect the preferences of others.?

However, while Japan sits on that formidable reserve of soft power, it has few means to tap it. National cool ought to help Japan infuse its universities, research labs, companies, and arts with foreign talent. But in a vast public opinion study conducted throughout Asia in the late 1990s, respondents who admired Japanese culture and Japanese consumer products thought little of the idea of studying or working in Japan, even less of moving there for good. And as open as Japanese culture is to foreign influences, there is neither political nor public support in Japan for immigration, or for immigrants.

When Nye first wrote about soft power, he rightly believed that Japan?s insularity kept it from taking advantage of its formidable economic soft power. Today, a decade of globalization has made Japan somewhat less inward looking, but a decade of recession and political turmoil has made many Japanese seem less secure in some of their fundamental values, undermining traditional ideas in everything from business culture to family life. Those values may rebound with the economy, or they may transform into something new?a national uncertainty infused with even more anxiety by the demographic changes that will accompany the graying of Japan?s population.

Japan?s history of remarkable revivals suggests that the outcome of that transformation is more likely to be rebirth than ruin. Standing astride channels of communication, Japan already possesses a vast reserve of potential soft power. And with the cultural reach of a superpower already in place, it?s hard to imagine that Japan will be content to remain so much medium and so little message.


Douglas McGray is a contributing writer of FOREIGN POLICY magazine. He spent the spring of 2001 in Japan as a media fellow of the Japan Society.

Is Tokyo today's equilalent of Swinging London during the 60s?

This is originally from Foreign Policy Magazine. I first read about it in Newtype USA, the premiere magazine for anime and manga fans. Standard disclaimers apply.

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~ikalma...apfpmcgray.htm

Japan?s Gross National Cool


Japan is reinventing superpower?again. Instead of collapsing beneath its widely reported political and economic misfortunes, Japan?s global cultural influence has quietly grown. From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one. But can Japan build on its mastery of medium to project an equally powerful national message?

By Douglas McGray


On Sunday mornings, teenagers crowd the sidewalks of Tokyo?s Shibuya district until they spill over the curbs and into the streets. They start at Hachiko Square, under a video monitor that takes up the entire face of a glass and steel high-rise, and spread out, 30 or 40 wide in the crosswalks. They mill around displays stacked with new sneakers?Nike and New Balance from the United States, Puma and Adidas from Europe via New York. They gather in a small music store that specializes in the American vinyl records played in Tokyo?s popular soul bars?Grandmaster Flash, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament. They spend 370 yen (roughly $3) at Starbucks for a tall iced latte, which tastes just as it does in Washington, D.C., and is just as overpriced. Like any global metropolis, Tokyo serves up a substantial dose of American culture, particularly to its youth. Sometimes, like Starbucks or Nikes, it is authentic. Sometimes, like a ?Harbard University? sweatshirt or a potato salad pizza, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. Less important than authentic American origin is the whiff of American cool.


A few blocks from the Starbucks in Hachiko Square you will find Mandarake, a shop that sells used manga and anime (Japanese comic books and animation, respectively). There is no storefront full of dog-eared comics in plastic sleeves, just a maw of an entrance carved cavelike out of fake rock and flight after flight of stairs down to the basement-level shop. There, comic books and videotapes are stacked to the ceiling, alongside the toys and collectibles they inspired. The real esoterica are under glass, rare Godzilla and Ultraman action figures selling for hundreds of dollars each.


With a network of shops across Japan and a listing on the Nikkei Stock Index, Mandarake Incorporated is positioning for global expansion. New stores opened in Los Angeles in 1999 and in Bologna in 2001. Japan accounts for the bulk of Mandarake?s revenue, said company president Masuzo Furukawa, ?but in, say, about five to 10 years, it should be the other way around. The foreign market should be much bigger.?


Already, ?there isn?t much of a time lag between what sells well in Japan and what sells in the United States,? Furukawa said, comparing business in Tokyo and Los Angeles. The buxom, gun-toting pixies, cute monsters, and transforming robots that fill Mandarake in Shibuya show up in MTV graphics, street fashions, bars and dance clubs, and even museums. Last year, the Getty Center in Los Angeles debuted a blockbuster show on Japan?s ?Super Flat? movement?young Japanese art inspired by the two-dimensional look of commercial cartoons.


Sometimes, like an Issey Miyake gown, the Japan that travels is authentic. Sometimes, like cream cheese?and?salmon sushi, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. What matters is the whiff of Japanese cool.



THE POK?MON HEGEMON

Critics often reduce the globalization of culture to either the McDonald?s phenomenon or the ?world music? phenomenon. For the McDonald?s camp, globalization is the process of large American multinationals overwhelming foreign markets and getting local consumers addicted to special sauce. In this case, culture flows from American power, and American supply creates demand. For the world music camp, globalization means that fresh, marginal culture reaches consumers in the United States through increased contact with the rest of the world. Here, too, culture flows from American power, with demand from rich Americans expanding distribution for Latin pop or Irish folk songs.


But Japanese culture has transcended U.S. demand or approval. Director and actor Takeshi Kitano, arguably the Japanese film industry?s most noteworthy recent export, was first embraced in Europe, then in the United States. At this year?s Berlin Film Festival, Hayao Miyazaki?s Spirited Away became the first animation feature ever to win a top festival prize. A major publishing show in Frankfurt, for the first time, opened an exhibition of Japanese manga. Namie Amuro, reigning ?J-Pop? (Japan-Pop) music diva of the 1990s, built a huge fan base in Asia without ever going on tour in the United States. Millions of teenagers in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Bangkok covet the latest fashions from Tokyo, most of which never make it to New York. Japanese lifestyle magazines, some of the most lavishly produced in the world, are smuggled by illegal distributors across Asia as soon as they are on newsstands in Tokyo, though none has launched an American edition.


At the same time, Japan has made deep inroads into American culture, usually written off by the rest of the world as aggravatingly insular. Bestselling Sony Playstation and Nintendo home video games draw heavily on Japanese anime and manga for inspiration. So have recent Hollywood films, such as The Matrix, and television series, including director James Cameron?s Dark Angel. ?Tokyo is the real international capital of fashion,? the style editor of the New York Times proposed this spring, spurning Paris, New York, and Milan as pretenders. Japanese anime-style cartoons currently fill the majority of time slots in the after-school and Saturday morning schedules on U.S. cable television. The cartoon and video game franchise Pok?mon?broadcast in 65 countries and translated into more than 30 languages?even made the cover of Time magazine.


In the 1980s, Japan pioneered a new kind of superpower. Tokyo had no army to speak of, no puppet regimes to prop up, and no proxy wars to mind. Just an economy. What made Japan a superpower, more than just a wealthy country, was the way its great firms staked claim to a collective intellectual high ground that left competitors, even in the United States, scrambling to reverse-engineer Japanese successes. Seeking guidance on everything from ?quality circles? to ?just-in-time? inventory management, U.S. corporate executives bought stacks of books on Japanese management techniques. The key to Japan?s economic ascendance was not ideology, at least not by Cold War standards; but it was a method, it drove the most dynamic economy of the era, and it was indisputably Japanese.

Fast forward to 2001. High incomes, long life expectancy, and many more of the statistics that mean anything in terms of quality of life still tilt in Japan?s favor. But the national swagger is gone, a casualty of a decade-long recession. Gross domestic product is down; the yen is down; the Nikkei Stock Index hit a 17-year low; and full employment, practically a natural right in Japan, has been replaced by near-record rates of unemployment. Tokyo has tried to keep the International Monetary Fund from investigating its banking system, which is suspected to be in even worse shape than the finance ministry has admitted. A recent downgrade from Moody?s Investors Service rates Japan only slightly more creditworthy than Botswana. The country limps its way into G-8 meetings and remains locked out of the U.N. Security Council.


Yet Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan?s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower.


Its cultural sway is not quite like that of American culture abroad, which, even in its basest forms, tends to reflect certain common values?at the very least, American-style capitalism and individualism. Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan can seem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect the contradictory values of a nation in flux, a superficiality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BT to equate contemporary Japanese culture with ?Super Flat? art, ?devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.? ?We don?t have any religion,? painter Takashi Murakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically. ?We just need the big power of entertainment.?


But gradually, over the course of an otherwise dismal decade, Japan has been perfecting the art of transmitting certain kinds of mass culture?a technique that has contributed mightily to U.S. hegemony around the world. If Japan sorts out its economic mess and military angst, and if younger Japanese become secure in asserting their own values and traditions, Tokyo can regain the role it briefly assumed at the turn of the 19th century, when it simultaneously sought to engage the West and to become a military and cultural power on its own terms.


JAPAN?S POSTMODERN POP

I spent three months last year traveling around Japan, interviewing artists, directors, scientists, designers, and culture mavens. Many of them seemed surprised at the idea of Japanese cultural might abroad. They tended to think very little about foreign audiences. What they talked about instead was foreign inspiration. At times, it seems almost a strange point of pride, a kind of one-downsmanship, to argue just how little Japan there is in modern Japan. Ironically, that may be a key to the spread of Japanese cool.

?I can?t always distinguish elements of traditional Japanese culture from Japanese culture invented for tourists,? confessed Toshiya Ueno, a sociology professor at Chubu University and, in his spare time, a techno deejay with gigs in Tokyo and Amsterdam.


?During the First World War, in Japan, already there was a strong argument about overcoming modernity,? Ueno said, sitting in his cluttered university office behind two turntables and a mixing board. ?Already, postmodern eclecticism was surfacing.? In other words, Japan was postmodern before postmodernism was trendy, fusing elements of other national cultures into one almost-coherent whole. It makes sense: Japan?s history is filled with examples of foreign inspiration and cultural fusion, from its kanji character system to its ramen noodles.


Consider the case of a new band, Lipless X Sister, and a new dance, the Pada Pada. Like most Japanese pop music acts, Lipless X Sister is a concept group, dreamed up by record producers and marketing executives and then assembled through auditions. In this case, the concept was 18- to 22-year-old girls with 2-year-old children. A producer explained the band?s name to local press: ?You can like them. But they?re mothers, so you can?t kiss them.?


Their debut performance took place in March 2001 on a makeshift stage outside 109, a tall shiny department store in Shibuya that, for a few million of Japan?s teenage girls, is the most stylish, most important, and most exciting place in the world. The girls in the band, like every girl in every magazine that season, had light cedar tresses, denim skirts, and tight tops with vintage sports lettering (no doubt all of it was for sale inside). They wheeled their kids out in strollers, all in a line. Then they started to sing. ?Pada Pada mama, Pada Pada mama.?


A new dance then sweeping through Tokyo?s clubs, the Pada Pada is ?uniquely Japanese,? said Katsuo Shimizu, a culture columnist at the daily Asahi Shimbun, touting it as the first popular dance step to originate in Japan. In fact, the Pada Pada looks like nothing if not the Macarena. The dance didn?t seem uniquely Japanese. It didn?t seem at all Japanese. But then, what should one expect, geishas grooving on a Shinto arch?


The Pada Pada doesn?t require a great cultural leap for foreigners. The band has an English name, not that it makes much sense to a native speaker, but English words travel well. If the Pada Pada spreads across Asia, however, it will be on the strength of Japanese pop songs, Japanese music videos starring Japanese girls with light cedar hair, and Japanese cool. Maybe there is not much traditionally Japanese about any of it. But if that is a requirement for national branding, American pop culture is hardly more respectful of traditional Americana?unless you count when Madonna wears a cowboy hat.


MEET HELLO KITTY, DAVOS CAT


Japan?s most visible pop icon, Sanrio?s cartoon cat Hello Kitty, takes the national ambiguity of the Pada Pada further. Kitty is not actually supposed to be Japanese. In fact, Kitty?s last name, announced for the first time in spring 2001 in Sanrio?s official fan magazine, is White.


Kitty White? Kitty is a WASP!


Hello Kitty drives an empire worth almost $1 billion in global sales per year. ?From Target to McDonald?s, she went big time,? wrote Asian-American pop culture magazine Giant Robot, proclaiming her the best ?Corporate Whore? of 2001. Sanrio licenses so many products with Hello Kitty?s likeness that a company spokesman could not confirm the current count. Put it between 12,000, the estimate he gave, and 15,000, a number that is widely reported. You can buy individually wrapped Hello Kitty prunes. You can buy a toaster that burns Hello Kitty?s face into a piece of bread. You can buy a Hello Kitty vibrator. ?We don?t have such strict regulations,? the spokesman said. ?Hard alcohol, maybe that would not be appropriate.?


Hello Kitty?s longtime designer, Yuko Yamaguchi, met me in a small Sanrio conference room, dressed in dark jeans and a baggy shirt. A cell phone and a dozen Hello Kitty dangles hung from a chain around her neck. So which is Kitty, foreign or Japanese? ?When Kitty-chan was born, in those days it was very rare for Japanese people to go abroad,? she said. ?So people yearned for products with English associations. There was an idea that if Kitty-chan spoke English, she would be very fashionable.?


Today, teenagers and 20-somethings in the United States and elsewhere buy Hello Kitty purses and cell phone cases as icons of Tokyo pop chic. In the 1980s, however, Sanrio?s American-based marketing team had to customize Hello Kitty for American audiences, which they considered a tough sell. Often, that meant designing two Kitties, one for Japanese and one for Americans. ?Purple and pink were very strong,? Yamaguchi said, recalling Sanrio?s American market research. ?Blue, yellow, and red were believed to be taboo.?


?There were also motifs that were taboo in the United States. There was a snail, one of Kitty-chan?s friends. When there is a rainstorm, Kitty-chan has an umbrella and a flower, and beside Kitty-chan is a snail. In the United States, that was not accepted, and there was a request to eliminate the snail,? she said. ?Differences in color were easy, but I had difficulty accommodating all the little requests?there were so many.?


?Now, there is no difference in design. Now, we have the same Kitty-chan in both markets,? she said. They have to. Sanrio?s head of marketing for Asia, Shunji Onishi, described the company?s disastrous attempt in the 1990s to customize Hello Kitty for Taiwan and Hong Kong, two of Sanrio?s strongest markets. They put Kitty in local clothes and surroundings, and the products sat on the shelves. ?They know Kitty is from Japan. That?s why they like it,? he said. ?Especially the younger generation.? Even if she is actually English? ?Kitty has a sort of independent existence,? Yamaguchi answered, hedging on nationality a bit. ?I let her transcend the borders of London.? A regular Davos cat.


WHY 600 LB. WRESTLERS DON?T TRAVEL

Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketing boomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony, and Nintendo manage effortlessly. And it is part of the genius behind Japanese cultural strength in a global era that has many countries nervous about cultural erosion.

Imagine for a moment if modern Japan were more like France, less culturally plastic and more anxious that globalization might erode its unique national character. Its cultural reach might look something like that of Japanese sumo?popular at home but stubbornly closed to foreign influence, and as a result, largely invisible outside Japan.

Tokyo?s official sumo museum, maintained by the Japanese Sumo Association, ought to be one of the city?s big foreign tourist attractions; instead, it is a dreary, one-room obscurity. The sumo association sells no official merchandise, at home or abroad. Occasionally, the association will hold an exhibition match outside Japan but only when a foreign city campaigns for a visit, and then never more than once or twice in a year. It is a marked contrast to the U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA), for instance, which in recent years has aggressively promoted its sport around the world and hinted that it might place a new team in Mexico City, or even a whole division of teams in Europe.

It is no wonder why the NBA?and the U.S. football and baseball leagues?takes a global approach. Foreign fans mean extra licensing and broadcasting revenue. And if a foreign star emerges, you have the possibility for another Ichiro. The day Japanese baseball star Ichiro Suzuki left Japan to bat leadoff for the Seattle Mariners, Japanese sports shops were already filled with official Mariners jerseys and baseball caps in anticipation. During the season, Japanese television covered every Mariners game live, despite a 12-hour time difference.

By that logic, the fact that 25 percent of the wrestlers in sumo?s top two divisions are foreign-born should be great for the sport?it raises the level of competition and offers up hometown heroes to potentially lucrative foreign broadcasting markets. But instead, it is a source of great anxiety. Sumo is a rare thing, a part of Japan?s commercial pop culture that looks much as it did hundreds of years ago.

Sumo is seldom broadcast outside Japan, but Hawaiian television carries all the tournaments. So a tall, skinny kid named Chad Rowan grew up watching Konishiki (whose given name is Salevaa Atisanoe), a fellow American from Hawaii who left the United States to become sumo?s first 600-pound wrestler. He also knew Takamiyama, another Hawaiian, the Jackie Robinson of foreign sumo wrestlers, who endured hate mail and death threats as he rose though the sumo ranks in the 1960s. Rowan never considered wrestling, himself. But he knew it was a big deal when Takamiyama, now a powerful coach, offered Rowan a chance to go to Japan with him and train. Rowan took the name Akebono and became the first foreigner the sumo association would declare a Yokuzuna, a grand champion.

When I arrived at Azumazeki Heya, the training club on the eastern edge of Tokyo where Akebono now coaches alongside his former mentor, a dozen wrestlers were waiting for their turns in the ring. Even so, you could not miss Akebono, not at 6 feet 8 inches and 512 pounds. ?Osu osu osu!!? he yelled, crossing his arms and resting them on the bulge of his stomach. ?Push push push!!? A larger wrestler leaned stiff-legged on a smaller one, and the smaller one pushed him from one side of the dirt ring to the other, and back, and again, and back. Sisyphus with a fleshy boulder. The smaller man gasped and collapsed to the dirt, his sweat turning it to reddish mud. ?What?s wrong with your legs?? Akebono taunted in Japanese, grinning. ?You can go for 30 minutes, can?t you? It?s only five or six minutes and you look exhausted!? Akebono speaks only Japanese at the heya, even with Azumazeki (the name Takamiyama took when he retired from competition, instead of his given name, Jesse Kuhaulua).

Wrestlers live at their heya, train at their heya, and eat at their heya. For a foreigner like Akebono, the instant immersion is twofold: immersion in sumo and immersion in Japan. Not everyone would face that kind of cultural rebirth for a chance at success in the most foreign of sports, and that is part of the point. ?It?s not easy, man. It?s not easy,? said Azumazeki, in a Louis Armstrong rasp that has made his voice one of the most recognizable in Japan. Although he also discovered Konishiki abroad, he does the vast majority of his recruiting in Japan. ?Back in Hawaii, my relatives and friends introduce us to kids,? he said. ?I don?t encourage them. I prepare them for the hardship.? He explained that he is looking for more than just athleticism and a frame six meals a day can bulk up. ?We try to find someone who would get along with Japan, who wants to be a Japanese kind of person.?

Heya masters like Azumazeki, like coaches in any sport, are under pressure to produce bigger and stronger athletes. At the same time, there is a strong stigma against traveling the world in search of foreign giants. If all else fails, the sumo association will enforce a seldom-mentioned quota of 40 foreign wrestlers in sumo at one time?or about 15 percent of the total. But all else has yet to fail.


YOUTH WITH A YEN FOR TECHNOLOGY

A cultural superpower needs a healthy economic base but not necessarily a healthy economy. Perversely, recession may have boosted Japan?s national cool, discrediting Japan?s rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosened the grip a big-business career track had over so much of Japan?s workforce, who now face fewer social stigmas for experimenting with art, music, or any number of similar, risky endeavors. ?There?s a new creativeness here because there?s less money,? said Tokyo-based architect Mark Dytham, a London transplant. ?Good art is appearing, young strong art. Young fashion is appearing.? Graphic designer Michael Frank, who shares a flourishing downtown studio with Dytham, agreed: ?A lot of interesting smaller magazines appeared in the last four or five years. A lot of small little businesses, people running their own shops, people running their own music labels, people running their own clubs. Bigger companies are starting to pick up on those little things and support them.?

Meanwhile, a constellation of factors distinct from the economy and its woes has kept yen flowing to the pop industries and other cultural media that Japan projects around the world so effectively: demographics that favor youth and their whims, a reliable demand for luxury goods, and a reputation for cutting-edge technology.

A generation of declining birthrates has filled Tokyo with one-child families. In scarcity, there is power. Not political power, not yet anyway, but consumer power, lots of it. ?[Children] sense that they are rare,? said Mariko Kuno Fujiwara, of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, a sociological think tank attached to one of Japan?s major advertising agencies. And so they tend to be spoiled. Fujiwara recalled one newspaper headline??Our Children Kings??with a laugh. Tokyo?s youth spend an average of $150 a month on cell phone bills alone. They propel a dizzying turnover in street fashion. They drive the second largest music industry in the world, by far the largest in Asia and one that is second only to that of the United States. At an HMV music store in Ginza one afternoon, I counted more than 100 people in line, and not one of them looked to be over 30. Japanese firms have strong financial incentives to hew to the demands of a generation with high disposable income, regardless of economic ups and downs.

Luxury goods have also fared well in Japan?s slack economy. Japanese consumers haven?t stopped buying high-end products, as a number of sociologists I spoke with stressed. They simply save up longer for them. So even as the economy languishes, rush hour in Tokyo is like a luxury car show. Louis Vuitton, which opened its Tokyo boutique in the midst of the current recession and marked up prices 50 percent over Paris shops, makes more money in Japan than anywhere else in the world. Sony electronics are also frequently more expensive in Japan than abroad, one Sony industrial designer explained, because Japanese consumers strongly prefer lighter materials and sleeker designs, even if they cost more. A sliver of a minidisc player in pumpkin orange and lime green, a narrow cell phone with a big color screen for Web browsing, a tiny MP3 personal stereo that clips directly in your ear?these are goods that inspire technolust in the levelest of heads, Japanese or foreign.


ALL MEDIUM, NO MESSAGE?

Last summer, the prestigious New York art gallery P.S.1 announced an exhibition called Buzz Club. ?Animation, cell phone art, fashion, sculpture, anime, films, elaborate graphics, popular action figurines and models, electronic music, and sound and light installations,? the gallery promised, billing it as ?the largest exhibition of Japanese pop culture creators ever assembled outside of Japan.? Exhibitors included Groovisions, a design group most famous for dreaming up a nationally ambiguous cartoon girl named Chappie, and an electronic music and design collective called Delaware. Global Japan had achieved the New York scene?s seal of approval.

There is much more to Japan than the national cool of Buzz Club. Most foreigners will never penetrate the barriers of language and culture well enough to see Japan as the average Japanese sees it. But that is part of Japan?s secret to thriving amidst globalization. There exists a Japan for Japanese and a Japan for the rest of the world. Often, in the case of youth fads, for instance, there is a good deal of overlap. Sometimes, in the case of sumo or the layout of a typical suburban house or the variety shows that proliferate across Japanese television networks, there is none.

More than 60 years ago, in a classic study called Mirror, Sword, and Jewel, a German economist at Tokyo Imperial University named Kurt Singer discussed the contrast between the ?plasticity? and ?endurance? of Japanese culture, the ability to absorb and adapt foreign influences while still retaining an intact cultural core. Yet for Singer writing in the 1930s, the question was ?why this gifted and active nation has produced so little that has been found acceptable by other countries in an age open to all foreign influences.?

Today, Japan has outgrown that question, thanks largely to the qualities of Japanese culture that Singer himself identified. In fact, in cultural terms at least, Japan has become one of a handful of perfect globalization nations (along with the United States). It has succeeded not only in balancing a flexible, absorptive, crowd-pleasing, shared culture with a more private, domestic one but also in taking advantage of that balance to build an increasingly powerful global commercial force. In other words, Japan?s growing cultural presence has created a mighty engine of national cool.

It is impossible to measure national cool. National cool is a kind of ?soft power??a term Harvard dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. coined more than a decade ago to explain the nontraditional ways a country can influence another country?s wants, or its public?s values. And soft power doesn?t quantify neatly. How much of modern American hegemony is due to the ideological high ground of its democracy, for instance, how much to its big corporate franchises, to Hollywood, to rock music and blue jeans, or to its ability to fascinate as well as intimidate? National cool is an idea, a reminder that commercial trends and products, and a country?s knack for spawning them, can serve political and economic ends. As Nye argued in this magazine more than a decade ago, ?There is an element of triviality and fad in popular behavior, but it is also true that a country that stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its messages across and to affect the preferences of others.?

However, while Japan sits on that formidable reserve of soft power, it has few means to tap it. National cool ought to help Japan infuse its universities, research labs, companies, and arts with foreign talent. But in a vast public opinion study conducted throughout Asia in the late 1990s, respondents who admired Japanese culture and Japanese consumer products thought little of the idea of studying or working in Japan, even less of moving there for good. And as open as Japanese culture is to foreign influences, there is neither political nor public support in Japan for immigration, or for immigrants.

When Nye first wrote about soft power, he rightly believed that Japan?s insularity kept it from taking advantage of its formidable economic soft power. Today, a decade of globalization has made Japan somewhat less inward looking, but a decade of recession and political turmoil has made many Japanese seem less secure in some of their fundamental values, undermining traditional ideas in everything from business culture to family life. Those values may rebound with the economy, or they may transform into something new?a national uncertainty infused with even more anxiety by the demographic changes that will accompany the graying of Japan?s population.

Japan?s history of remarkable revivals suggests that the outcome of that transformation is more likely to be rebirth than ruin. Standing astride channels of communication, Japan already possesses a vast reserve of potential soft power. And with the cultural reach of a superpower already in place, it?s hard to imagine that Japan will be content to remain so much medium and so little message.


Douglas McGray is a contributing writer of FOREIGN POLICY magazine. He spent the spring of 2001 in Japan as a media fellow of the Japan Society.

Originally Posted by Vince Lamb '59

Is Tokyo today's equilalent of Swinging London during the 60s?

This is originally from Foreign Policy Magazine. I first read about it in Newtype USA, the premiere magazine for anime and manga fans. Standard disclaimers apply.

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~ikalma...apfpmcgray.htm

Japan?s Gross National Cool


Japan is reinventing superpower?again. Instead of collapsing beneath its widely reported political and economic misfortunes, Japan?s global cultural influence has quietly grown. From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one. But can Japan build on its mastery of medium to project an equally powerful national message?

By Douglas McGray


On Sunday mornings, teenagers crowd the sidewalks of Tokyo?s Shibuya district until they spill over the curbs and into the streets. They start at Hachiko Square, under a video monitor that takes up the entire face of a glass and steel high-rise, and spread out, 30 or 40 wide in the crosswalks. They mill around displays stacked with new sneakers?Nike and New Balance from the United States, Puma and Adidas from Europe via New York. They gather in a small music store that specializes in the American vinyl records played in Tokyo?s popular soul bars?Grandmaster Flash, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament. They spend 370 yen (roughly $3) at Starbucks for a tall iced latte, which tastes just as it does in Washington, D.C., and is just as overpriced. Like any global metropolis, Tokyo serves up a substantial dose of American culture, particularly to its youth. Sometimes, like Starbucks or Nikes, it is authentic. Sometimes, like a ?Harbard University? sweatshirt or a potato salad pizza, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. Less important than authentic American origin is the whiff of American cool.


A few blocks from the Starbucks in Hachiko Square you will find Mandarake, a shop that sells used manga and anime (Japanese comic books and animation, respectively). There is no storefront full of dog-eared comics in plastic sleeves, just a maw of an entrance carved cavelike out of fake rock and flight after flight of stairs down to the basement-level shop. There, comic books and videotapes are stacked to the ceiling, alongside the toys and collectibles they inspired. The real esoterica are under glass, rare Godzilla and Ultraman action figures selling for hundreds of dollars each.


With a network of shops across Japan and a listing on the Nikkei Stock Index, Mandarake Incorporated is positioning for global expansion. New stores opened in Los Angeles in 1999 and in Bologna in 2001. Japan accounts for the bulk of Mandarake?s revenue, said company president Masuzo Furukawa, ?but in, say, about five to 10 years, it should be the other way around. The foreign market should be much bigger.?


Already, ?there isn?t much of a time lag between what sells well in Japan and what sells in the United States,? Furukawa said, comparing business in Tokyo and Los Angeles. The buxom, gun-toting pixies, cute monsters, and transforming robots that fill Mandarake in Shibuya show up in MTV graphics, street fashions, bars and dance clubs, and even museums. Last year, the Getty Center in Los Angeles debuted a blockbuster show on Japan?s ?Super Flat? movement?young Japanese art inspired by the two-dimensional look of commercial cartoons.


Sometimes, like an Issey Miyake gown, the Japan that travels is authentic. Sometimes, like cream cheese?and?salmon sushi, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. What matters is the whiff of Japanese cool.



THE POK?MON HEGEMON

Critics often reduce the globalization of culture to either the McDonald?s phenomenon or the ?world music? phenomenon. For the McDonald?s camp, globalization is the process of large American multinationals overwhelming foreign markets and getting local consumers addicted to special sauce. In this case, culture flows from American power, and American supply creates demand. For the world music camp, globalization means that fresh, marginal culture reaches consumers in the United States through increased contact with the rest of the world. Here, too, culture flows from American power, with demand from rich Americans expanding distribution for Latin pop or Irish folk songs.


But Japanese culture has transcended U.S. demand or approval. Director and actor Takeshi Kitano, arguably the Japanese film industry?s most noteworthy recent export, was first embraced in Europe, then in the United States. At this year?s Berlin Film Festival, Hayao Miyazaki?s Spirited Away became the first animation feature ever to win a top festival prize. A major publishing show in Frankfurt, for the first time, opened an exhibition of Japanese manga. Namie Amuro, reigning ?J-Pop? (Japan-Pop) music diva of the 1990s, built a huge fan base in Asia without ever going on tour in the United States. Millions of teenagers in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Bangkok covet the latest fashions from Tokyo, most of which never make it to New York. Japanese lifestyle magazines, some of the most lavishly produced in the world, are smuggled by illegal distributors across Asia as soon as they are on newsstands in Tokyo, though none has launched an American edition.


At the same time, Japan has made deep inroads into American culture, usually written off by the rest of the world as aggravatingly insular. Bestselling Sony Playstation and Nintendo home video games draw heavily on Japanese anime and manga for inspiration. So have recent Hollywood films, such as The Matrix, and television series, including director James Cameron?s Dark Angel. ?Tokyo is the real international capital of fashion,? the style editor of the New York Times proposed this spring, spurning Paris, New York, and Milan as pretenders. Japanese anime-style cartoons currently fill the majority of time slots in the after-school and Saturday morning schedules on U.S. cable television. The cartoon and video game franchise Pok?mon?broadcast in 65 countries and translated into more than 30 languages?even made the cover of Time magazine.


In the 1980s, Japan pioneered a new kind of superpower. Tokyo had no army to speak of, no puppet regimes to prop up, and no proxy wars to mind. Just an economy. What made Japan a superpower, more than just a wealthy country, was the way its great firms staked claim to a collective intellectual high ground that left competitors, even in the United States, scrambling to reverse-engineer Japanese successes. Seeking guidance on everything from ?quality circles? to ?just-in-time? inventory management, U.S. corporate executives bought stacks of books on Japanese management techniques. The key to Japan?s economic ascendance was not ideology, at least not by Cold War standards; but it was a method, it drove the most dynamic economy of the era, and it was indisputably Japanese.

Fast forward to 2001. High incomes, long life expectancy, and many more of the statistics that mean anything in terms of quality of life still tilt in Japan?s favor. But the national swagger is gone, a casualty of a decade-long recession. Gross domestic product is down; the yen is down; the Nikkei Stock Index hit a 17-year low; and full employment, practically a natural right in Japan, has been replaced by near-record rates of unemployment. Tokyo has tried to keep the International Monetary Fund from investigating its banking system, which is suspected to be in even worse shape than the finance ministry has admitted. A recent downgrade from Moody?s Investors Service rates Japan only slightly more creditworthy than Botswana. The country limps its way into G-8 meetings and remains locked out of the U.N. Security Council.


Yet Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan?s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower.


Its cultural sway is not quite like that of American culture abroad, which, even in its basest forms, tends to reflect certain common values?at the very least, American-style capitalism and individualism. Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan can seem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect the contradictory values of a nation in flux, a superficiality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BT to equate contemporary Japanese culture with ?Super Flat? art, ?devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.? ?We don?t have any religion,? painter Takashi Murakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically. ?We just need the big power of entertainment.?


But gradually, over the course of an otherwise dismal decade, Japan has been perfecting the art of transmitting certain kinds of mass culture?a technique that has contributed mightily to U.S. hegemony around the world. If Japan sorts out its economic mess and military angst, and if younger Japanese become secure in asserting their own values and traditions, Tokyo can regain the role it briefly assumed at the turn of the 19th century, when it simultaneously sought to engage the West and to become a military and cultural power on its own terms.


JAPAN?S POSTMODERN POP

I spent three months last year traveling around Japan, interviewing artists, directors, scientists, designers, and culture mavens. Many of them seemed surprised at the idea of Japanese cultural might abroad. They tended to think very little about foreign audiences. What they talked about instead was foreign inspiration. At times, it seems almost a strange point of pride, a kind of one-downsmanship, to argue just how little Japan there is in modern Japan. Ironically, that may be a key to the spread of Japanese cool.

?I can?t always distinguish elements of traditional Japanese culture from Japanese culture invented for tourists,? confessed Toshiya Ueno, a sociology professor at Chubu University and, in his spare time, a techno deejay with gigs in Tokyo and Amsterdam.


?During the First World War, in Japan, already there was a strong argument about overcoming modernity,? Ueno said, sitting in his cluttered university office behind two turntables and a mixing board. ?Already, postmodern eclecticism was surfacing.? In other words, Japan was postmodern before postmodernism was trendy, fusing elements of other national cultures into one almost-coherent whole. It makes sense: Japan?s history is filled with examples of foreign inspiration and cultural fusion, from its kanji character system to its ramen noodles.


Consider the case of a new band, Lipless X Sister, and a new dance, the Pada Pada. Like most Japanese pop music acts, Lipless X Sister is a concept group, dreamed up by record producers and marketing executives and then assembled through auditions. In this case, the concept was 18- to 22-year-old girls with 2-year-old children. A producer explained the band?s name to local press: ?You can like them. But they?re mothers, so you can?t kiss them.?


Their debut performance took place in March 2001 on a makeshift stage outside 109, a tall shiny department store in Shibuya that, for a few million of Japan?s teenage girls, is the most stylish, most important, and most exciting place in the world. The girls in the band, like every girl in every magazine that season, had light cedar tresses, denim skirts, and tight tops with vintage sports lettering (no doubt all of it was for sale inside). They wheeled their kids out in strollers, all in a line. Then they started to sing. ?Pada Pada mama, Pada Pada mama.?


A new dance then sweeping through Tokyo?s clubs, the Pada Pada is ?uniquely Japanese,? said Katsuo Shimizu, a culture columnist at the daily Asahi Shimbun, touting it as the first popular dance step to originate in Japan. In fact, the Pada Pada looks like nothing if not the Macarena. The dance didn?t seem uniquely Japanese. It didn?t seem at all Japanese. But then, what should one expect, geishas grooving on a Shinto arch?


The Pada Pada doesn?t require a great cultural leap for foreigners. The band has an English name, not that it makes much sense to a native speaker, but English words travel well. If the Pada Pada spreads across Asia, however, it will be on the strength of Japanese pop songs, Japanese music videos starring Japanese girls with light cedar hair, and Japanese cool. Maybe there is not much traditionally Japanese about any of it. But if that is a requirement for national branding, American pop culture is hardly more respectful of traditional Americana?unless you count when Madonna wears a cowboy hat.


MEET HELLO KITTY, DAVOS CAT


Japan?s most visible pop icon, Sanrio?s cartoon cat Hello Kitty, takes the national ambiguity of the Pada Pada further. Kitty is not actually supposed to be Japanese. In fact, Kitty?s last name, announced for the first time in spring 2001 in Sanrio?s official fan magazine, is White.


Kitty White? Kitty is a WASP!


Hello Kitty drives an empire worth almost $1 billion in global sales per year. ?From Target to McDonald?s, she went big time,? wrote Asian-American pop culture magazine Giant Robot, proclaiming her the best ?Corporate Whore? of 2001. Sanrio licenses so many products with Hello Kitty?s likeness that a company spokesman could not confirm the current count. Put it between 12,000, the estimate he gave, and 15,000, a number that is widely reported. You can buy individually wrapped Hello Kitty prunes. You can buy a toaster that burns Hello Kitty?s face into a piece of bread. You can buy a Hello Kitty vibrator. ?We don?t have such strict regulations,? the spokesman said. ?Hard alcohol, maybe that would not be appropriate.?


Hello Kitty?s longtime designer, Yuko Yamaguchi, met me in a small Sanrio conference room, dressed in dark jeans and a baggy shirt. A cell phone and a dozen Hello Kitty dangles hung from a chain around her neck. So which is Kitty, foreign or Japanese? ?When Kitty-chan was born, in those days it was very rare for Japanese people to go abroad,? she said. ?So people yearned for products with English associations. There was an idea that if Kitty-chan spoke English, she would be very fashionable.?


Today, teenagers and 20-somethings in the United States and elsewhere buy Hello Kitty purses and cell phone cases as icons of Tokyo pop chic. In the 1980s, however, Sanrio?s American-based marketing team had to customize Hello Kitty for American audiences, which they considered a tough sell. Often, that meant designing two Kitties, one for Japanese and one for Americans. ?Purple and pink were very strong,? Yamaguchi said, recalling Sanrio?s American market research. ?Blue, yellow, and red were believed to be taboo.?


?There were also motifs that were taboo in the United States. There was a snail, one of Kitty-chan?s friends. When there is a rainstorm, Kitty-chan has an umbrella and a flower, and beside Kitty-chan is a snail. In the United States, that was not accepted, and there was a request to eliminate the snail,? she said. ?Differences in color were easy, but I had difficulty accommodating all the little requests?there were so many.?


?Now, there is no difference in design. Now, we have the same Kitty-chan in both markets,? she said. They have to. Sanrio?s head of marketing for Asia, Shunji Onishi, described the company?s disastrous attempt in the 1990s to customize Hello Kitty for Taiwan and Hong Kong, two of Sanrio?s strongest markets. They put Kitty in local clothes and surroundings, and the products sat on the shelves. ?They know Kitty is from Japan. That?s why they like it,? he said. ?Especially the younger generation.? Even if she is actually English? ?Kitty has a sort of independent existence,? Yamaguchi answered, hedging on nationality a bit. ?I let her transcend the borders of London.? A regular Davos cat.


WHY 600 LB. WRESTLERS DON?T TRAVEL

Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketing boomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony, and Nintendo manage effortlessly. And it is part of the genius behind Japanese cultural strength in a global era that has many countries nervous about cultural erosion.

Imagine for a moment if modern Japan were more like France, less culturally plastic and more anxious that globalization might erode its unique national character. Its cultural reach might look something like that of Japanese sumo?popular at home but stubbornly closed to foreign influence, and as a result, largely invisible outside Japan.

Tokyo?s official sumo museum, maintained by the Japanese Sumo Association, ought to be one of the city?s big foreign tourist attractions; instead, it is a dreary, one-room obscurity. The sumo association sells no official merchandise, at home or abroad. Occasionally, the association will hold an exhibition match outside Japan but only when a foreign city campaigns for a visit, and then never more than once or twice in a year. It is a marked contrast to the U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA), for instance, which in recent years has aggressively promoted its sport around the world and hinted that it might place a new team in Mexico City, or even a whole division of teams in Europe.

It is no wonder why the NBA?and the U.S. football and baseball leagues?takes a global approach. Foreign fans mean extra licensing and broadcasting revenue. And if a foreign star emerges, you have the possibility for another Ichiro. The day Japanese baseball star Ichiro Suzuki left Japan to bat leadoff for the Seattle Mariners, Japanese sports shops were already filled with official Mariners jerseys and baseball caps in anticipation. During the season, Japanese television covered every Mariners game live, despite a 12-hour time difference.

By that logic, the fact that 25 percent of the wrestlers in sumo?s top two divisions are foreign-born should be great for the sport?it raises the level of competition and offers up hometown heroes to potentially lucrative foreign broadcasting markets. But instead, it is a source of great anxiety. Sumo is a rare thing, a part of Japan?s commercial pop culture that looks much as it did hundreds of years ago.

Sumo is seldom broadcast outside Japan, but Hawaiian television carries all the tournaments. So a tall, skinny kid named Chad Rowan grew up watching Konishiki (whose given name is Salevaa Atisanoe), a fellow American from Hawaii who left the United States to become sumo?s first 600-pound wrestler. He also knew Takamiyama, another Hawaiian, the Jackie Robinson of foreign sumo wrestlers, who endured hate mail and death threats as he rose though the sumo ranks in the 1960s. Rowan never considered wrestling, himself. But he knew it was a big deal when Takamiyama, now a powerful coach, offered Rowan a chance to go to Japan with him and train. Rowan took the name Akebono and became the first foreigner the sumo association would declare a Yokuzuna, a grand champion.

When I arrived at Azumazeki Heya, the training club on the eastern edge of Tokyo where Akebono now coaches alongside his former mentor, a dozen wrestlers were waiting for their turns in the ring. Even so, you could not miss Akebono, not at 6 feet 8 inches and 512 pounds. ?Osu osu osu!!? he yelled, crossing his arms and resting them on the bulge of his stomach. ?Push push push!!? A larger wrestler leaned stiff-legged on a smaller one, and the smaller one pushed him from one side of the dirt ring to the other, and back, and again, and back. Sisyphus with a fleshy boulder. The smaller man gasped and collapsed to the dirt, his sweat turning it to reddish mud. ?What?s wrong with your legs?? Akebono taunted in Japanese, grinning. ?You can go for 30 minutes, can?t you? It?s only five or six minutes and you look exhausted!? Akebono speaks only Japanese at the heya, even with Azumazeki (the name Takamiyama took when he retired from competition, instead of his given name, Jesse Kuhaulua).

Wrestlers live at their heya, train at their heya, and eat at their heya. For a foreigner like Akebono, the instant immersion is twofold: immersion in sumo and immersion in Japan. Not everyone would face that kind of cultural rebirth for a chance at success in the most foreign of sports, and that is part of the point. ?It?s not easy, man. It?s not easy,? said Azumazeki, in a Louis Armstrong rasp that has made his voice one of the most recognizable in Japan. Although he also discovered Konishiki abroad, he does the vast majority of his recruiting in Japan. ?Back in Hawaii, my relatives and friends introduce us to kids,? he said. ?I don?t encourage them. I prepare them for the hardship.? He explained that he is looking for more than just athleticism and a frame six meals a day can bulk up. ?We try to find someone who would get along with Japan, who wants to be a Japanese kind of person.?

Heya masters like Azumazeki, like coaches in any sport, are under pressure to produce bigger and stronger athletes. At the same time, there is a strong stigma against traveling the world in search of foreign giants. If all else fails, the sumo association will enforce a seldom-mentioned quota of 40 foreign wrestlers in sumo at one time?or about 15 percent of the total. But all else has yet to fail.


YOUTH WITH A YEN FOR TECHNOLOGY

A cultural superpower needs a healthy economic base but not necessarily a healthy economy. Perversely, recession may have boosted Japan?s national cool, discrediting Japan?s rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosened the grip a big-business career track had over so much of Japan?s workforce, who now face fewer social stigmas for experimenting with art, music, or any number of similar, risky endeavors. ?There?s a new creativeness here because there?s less money,? said Tokyo-based architect Mark Dytham, a London transplant. ?Good art is appearing, young strong art. Young fashion is appearing.? Graphic designer Michael Frank, who shares a flourishing downtown studio with Dytham, agreed: ?A lot of interesting smaller magazines appeared in the last four or five years. A lot of small little businesses, people running their own shops, people running their own music labels, people running their own clubs. Bigger companies are starting to pick up on those little things and support them.?

Meanwhile, a constellation of factors distinct from the economy and its woes has kept yen flowing to the pop industries and other cultural media that Japan projects around the world so effectively: demographics that favor youth and their whims, a reliable demand for luxury goods, and a reputation for cutting-edge technology.

A generation of declining birthrates has filled Tokyo with one-child families. In scarcity, there is power. Not political power, not yet anyway, but consumer power, lots of it. ?[Children] sense that they are rare,? said Mariko Kuno Fujiwara, of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, a sociological think tank attached to one of Japan?s major advertising agencies. And so they tend to be spoiled. Fujiwara recalled one newspaper headline??Our Children Kings??with a laugh. Tokyo?s youth spend an average of $150 a month on cell phone bills alone. They propel a dizzying turnover in street fashion. They drive the second largest music industry in the world, by far the largest in Asia and one that is second only to that of the United States. At an HMV music store in Ginza one afternoon, I counted more than 100 people in line, and not one of them looked to be over 30. Japanese firms have strong financial incentives to hew to the demands of a generation with high disposable income, regardless of economic ups and downs.

Luxury goods have also fared well in Japan?s slack economy. Japanese consumers haven?t stopped buying high-end products, as a number of sociologists I spoke with stressed. They simply save up longer for them. So even as the economy languishes, rush hour in Tokyo is like a luxury car show. Louis Vuitton, which opened its Tokyo boutique in the midst of the current recession and marked up prices 50 percent over Paris shops, makes more money in Japan than anywhere else in the world. Sony electronics are also frequently more expensive in Japan than abroad, one Sony industrial designer explained, because Japanese consumers strongly prefer lighter materials and sleeker designs, even if they cost more. A sliver of a minidisc player in pumpkin orange and lime green, a narrow cell phone with a big color screen for Web browsing, a tiny MP3 personal stereo that clips directly in your ear?these are goods that inspire technolust in the levelest of heads, Japanese or foreign.


ALL MEDIUM, NO MESSAGE?

Last summer, the prestigious New York art gallery P.S.1 announced an exhibition called Buzz Club. ?Animation, cell phone art, fashion, sculpture, anime, films, elaborate graphics, popular action figurines and models, electronic music, and sound and light installations,? the gallery promised, billing it as ?the largest exhibition of Japanese pop culture creators ever assembled outside of Japan.? Exhibitors included Groovisions, a design group most famous for dreaming up a nationally ambiguous cartoon girl named Chappie, and an electronic music and design collective called Delaware. Global Japan had achieved the New York scene?s seal of approval.

There is much more to Japan than the national cool of Buzz Club. Most foreigners will never penetrate the barriers of language and culture well enough to see Japan as the average Japanese sees it. But that is part of Japan?s secret to thriving amidst globalization. There exists a Japan for Japanese and a Japan for the rest of the world. Often, in the case of youth fads, for instance, there is a good deal of overlap. Sometimes, in the case of sumo or the layout of a typical suburban house or the variety shows that proliferate across Japanese television networks, there is none.

More than 60 years ago, in a classic study called Mirror, Sword, and Jewel, a German economist at Tokyo Imperial University named Kurt Singer discussed the contrast between the ?plasticity? and ?endurance? of Japanese culture, the ability to absorb and adapt foreign influences while still retaining an intact cultural core. Yet for Singer writing in the 1930s, the question was ?why this gifted and active nation has produced so little that has been found acceptable by other countries in an age open to all foreign influences.?

Today, Japan has outgrown that question, thanks largely to the qualities of Japanese culture that Singer himself identified. In fact, in cultural terms at least, Japan has become one of a handful of perfect globalization nations (along with the United States). It has succeeded not only in balancing a flexible, absorptive, crowd-pleasing, shared culture with a more private, domestic one but also in taking advantage of that balance to build an increasingly powerful global commercial force. In other words, Japan?s growing cultural presence has created a mighty engine of national cool.

It is impossible to measure national cool. National cool is a kind of ?soft power??a term Harvard dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. coined more than a decade ago to explain the nontraditional ways a country can influence another country?s wants, or its public?s values. And soft power doesn?t quantify neatly. How much of modern American hegemony is due to the ideological high ground of its democracy, for instance, how much to its big corporate franchises, to Hollywood, to rock music and blue jeans, or to its ability to fascinate as well as intimidate? National cool is an idea, a reminder that commercial trends and products, and a country?s knack for spawning them, can serve political and economic ends. As Nye argued in this magazine more than a decade ago, ?There is an element of triviality and fad in popular behavior, but it is also true that a country that stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its messages across and to affect the preferences of others.?

However, while Japan sits on that formidable reserve of soft power, it has few means to tap it. National cool ought to help Japan infuse its universities, research labs, companies, and arts with foreign talent. But in a vast public opinion study conducted throughout Asia in the late 1990s, respondents who admired Japanese culture and Japanese consumer products thought little of the idea of studying or working in Japan, even less of moving there for good. And as open as Japanese culture is to foreign influences, there is neither political nor public support in Japan for immigration, or for immigrants.

When Nye first wrote about soft power, he rightly believed that Japan?s insularity kept it from taking advantage of its formidable economic soft power. Today, a decade of globalization has made Japan somewhat less inward looking, but a decade of recession and political turmoil has made many Japanese seem less secure in some of their fundamental values, undermining traditional ideas in everything from business culture to family life. Those values may rebound with the economy, or they may transform into something new?a national uncertainty infused with even more anxiety by the demographic changes that will accompany the graying of Japan?s population.

Japan?s history of remarkable revivals suggests that the outcome of that transformation is more likely to be rebirth than ruin. Standing astride channels of communication, Japan already possesses a vast reserve of potential soft power. And with the cultural reach of a superpower already in place, it?s hard to imagine that Japan will be content to remain so much medium and so little message.


Douglas McGray is a contributing writer of FOREIGN POLICY magazine. He spent the spring of 2001 in Japan as a media fellow of the Japan Society.

Vince,

Japan seems to be even more deeply embracing linear materialism and (at least relative to it's historic communitarianism) individualism. The former lends itself to saecular intensity and the latter to a specifically 3T ethos.

This article brought to mind Strauss and Howe writing, "An Unraveling is the most eclectic era, with a deliberate mixing and crossing of styles, periods, and genders . . . Unravelings have been eras in which American [and now Japanese?] culture has exercised a profound influence over the rest of the world --- perhaps because this is when it exports the fruits of it's recent Awakening."[The Fourth Turning, p. 115].

And the whole Panda Panda Mama "Children Kings" thing shows a 3T interest in a special new crop of kids with Odyssean potential.

I don't know where Japan currently resides in the saecular cycle. I used to think that they were 5-10 off synch with us when I assumed their last 4T ended with the end of the American occupation during the Korean War. But I've recently read that Japan had a very intense, short baby boom in the late 1940's (much to my disbelief!) which does not seem like late 4T behavior.

Thanks for the article.

Originally Posted by Vince Lamb '59

Is Tokyo today's equilalent of Swinging London during the 60s?

This is originally from Foreign Policy Magazine. I first read about it in Newtype USA, the premiere magazine for anime and manga fans. Standard disclaimers apply.

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~ikalma...apfpmcgray.htm

Japan?s Gross National Cool


Japan is reinventing superpower?again. Instead of collapsing beneath its widely reported political and economic misfortunes, Japan?s global cultural influence has quietly grown. From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one. But can Japan build on its mastery of medium to project an equally powerful national message?

By Douglas McGray


On Sunday mornings, teenagers crowd the sidewalks of Tokyo?s Shibuya district until they spill over the curbs and into the streets. They start at Hachiko Square, under a video monitor that takes up the entire face of a glass and steel high-rise, and spread out, 30 or 40 wide in the crosswalks. They mill around displays stacked with new sneakers?Nike and New Balance from the United States, Puma and Adidas from Europe via New York. They gather in a small music store that specializes in the American vinyl records played in Tokyo?s popular soul bars?Grandmaster Flash, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament. They spend 370 yen (roughly $3) at Starbucks for a tall iced latte, which tastes just as it does in Washington, D.C., and is just as overpriced. Like any global metropolis, Tokyo serves up a substantial dose of American culture, particularly to its youth. Sometimes, like Starbucks or Nikes, it is authentic. Sometimes, like a ?Harbard University? sweatshirt or a potato salad pizza, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. Less important than authentic American origin is the whiff of American cool.


A few blocks from the Starbucks in Hachiko Square you will find Mandarake, a shop that sells used manga and anime (Japanese comic books and animation, respectively). There is no storefront full of dog-eared comics in plastic sleeves, just a maw of an entrance carved cavelike out of fake rock and flight after flight of stairs down to the basement-level shop. There, comic books and videotapes are stacked to the ceiling, alongside the toys and collectibles they inspired. The real esoterica are under glass, rare Godzilla and Ultraman action figures selling for hundreds of dollars each.


With a network of shops across Japan and a listing on the Nikkei Stock Index, Mandarake Incorporated is positioning for global expansion. New stores opened in Los Angeles in 1999 and in Bologna in 2001. Japan accounts for the bulk of Mandarake?s revenue, said company president Masuzo Furukawa, ?but in, say, about five to 10 years, it should be the other way around. The foreign market should be much bigger.?


Already, ?there isn?t much of a time lag between what sells well in Japan and what sells in the United States,? Furukawa said, comparing business in Tokyo and Los Angeles. The buxom, gun-toting pixies, cute monsters, and transforming robots that fill Mandarake in Shibuya show up in MTV graphics, street fashions, bars and dance clubs, and even museums. Last year, the Getty Center in Los Angeles debuted a blockbuster show on Japan?s ?Super Flat? movement?young Japanese art inspired by the two-dimensional look of commercial cartoons.


Sometimes, like an Issey Miyake gown, the Japan that travels is authentic. Sometimes, like cream cheese?and?salmon sushi, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. What matters is the whiff of Japanese cool.



THE POK?MON HEGEMON

Critics often reduce the globalization of culture to either the McDonald?s phenomenon or the ?world music? phenomenon. For the McDonald?s camp, globalization is the process of large American multinationals overwhelming foreign markets and getting local consumers addicted to special sauce. In this case, culture flows from American power, and American supply creates demand. For the world music camp, globalization means that fresh, marginal culture reaches consumers in the United States through increased contact with the rest of the world. Here, too, culture flows from American power, with demand from rich Americans expanding distribution for Latin pop or Irish folk songs.


But Japanese culture has transcended U.S. demand or approval. Director and actor Takeshi Kitano, arguably the Japanese film industry?s most noteworthy recent export, was first embraced in Europe, then in the United States. At this year?s Berlin Film Festival, Hayao Miyazaki?s Spirited Away became the first animation feature ever to win a top festival prize. A major publishing show in Frankfurt, for the first time, opened an exhibition of Japanese manga. Namie Amuro, reigning ?J-Pop? (Japan-Pop) music diva of the 1990s, built a huge fan base in Asia without ever going on tour in the United States. Millions of teenagers in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Bangkok covet the latest fashions from Tokyo, most of which never make it to New York. Japanese lifestyle magazines, some of the most lavishly produced in the world, are smuggled by illegal distributors across Asia as soon as they are on newsstands in Tokyo, though none has launched an American edition.


At the same time, Japan has made deep inroads into American culture, usually written off by the rest of the world as aggravatingly insular. Bestselling Sony Playstation and Nintendo home video games draw heavily on Japanese anime and manga for inspiration. So have recent Hollywood films, such as The Matrix, and television series, including director James Cameron?s Dark Angel. ?Tokyo is the real international capital of fashion,? the style editor of the New York Times proposed this spring, spurning Paris, New York, and Milan as pretenders. Japanese anime-style cartoons currently fill the majority of time slots in the after-school and Saturday morning schedules on U.S. cable television. The cartoon and video game franchise Pok?mon?broadcast in 65 countries and translated into more than 30 languages?even made the cover of Time magazine.


In the 1980s, Japan pioneered a new kind of superpower. Tokyo had no army to speak of, no puppet regimes to prop up, and no proxy wars to mind. Just an economy. What made Japan a superpower, more than just a wealthy country, was the way its great firms staked claim to a collective intellectual high ground that left competitors, even in the United States, scrambling to reverse-engineer Japanese successes. Seeking guidance on everything from ?quality circles? to ?just-in-time? inventory management, U.S. corporate executives bought stacks of books on Japanese management techniques. The key to Japan?s economic ascendance was not ideology, at least not by Cold War standards; but it was a method, it drove the most dynamic economy of the era, and it was indisputably Japanese.

Fast forward to 2001. High incomes, long life expectancy, and many more of the statistics that mean anything in terms of quality of life still tilt in Japan?s favor. But the national swagger is gone, a casualty of a decade-long recession. Gross domestic product is down; the yen is down; the Nikkei Stock Index hit a 17-year low; and full employment, practically a natural right in Japan, has been replaced by near-record rates of unemployment. Tokyo has tried to keep the International Monetary Fund from investigating its banking system, which is suspected to be in even worse shape than the finance ministry has admitted. A recent downgrade from Moody?s Investors Service rates Japan only slightly more creditworthy than Botswana. The country limps its way into G-8 meetings and remains locked out of the U.N. Security Council.


Yet Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan?s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower.


Its cultural sway is not quite like that of American culture abroad, which, even in its basest forms, tends to reflect certain common values?at the very least, American-style capitalism and individualism. Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan can seem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect the contradictory values of a nation in flux, a superficiality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BT to equate contemporary Japanese culture with ?Super Flat? art, ?devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.? ?We don?t have any religion,? painter Takashi Murakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically. ?We just need the big power of entertainment.?


But gradually, over the course of an otherwise dismal decade, Japan has been perfecting the art of transmitting certain kinds of mass culture?a technique that has contributed mightily to U.S. hegemony around the world. If Japan sorts out its economic mess and military angst, and if younger Japanese become secure in asserting their own values and traditions, Tokyo can regain the role it briefly assumed at the turn of the 19th century, when it simultaneously sought to engage the West and to become a military and cultural power on its own terms.


JAPAN?S POSTMODERN POP

I spent three months last year traveling around Japan, interviewing artists, directors, scientists, designers, and culture mavens. Many of them seemed surprised at the idea of Japanese cultural might abroad. They tended to think very little about foreign audiences. What they talked about instead was foreign inspiration. At times, it seems almost a strange point of pride, a kind of one-downsmanship, to argue just how little Japan there is in modern Japan. Ironically, that may be a key to the spread of Japanese cool.

?I can?t always distinguish elements of traditional Japanese culture from Japanese culture invented for tourists,? confessed Toshiya Ueno, a sociology professor at Chubu University and, in his spare time, a techno deejay with gigs in Tokyo and Amsterdam.


?During the First World War, in Japan, already there was a strong argument about overcoming modernity,? Ueno said, sitting in his cluttered university office behind two turntables and a mixing board. ?Already, postmodern eclecticism was surfacing.? In other words, Japan was postmodern before postmodernism was trendy, fusing elements of other national cultures into one almost-coherent whole. It makes sense: Japan?s history is filled with examples of foreign inspiration and cultural fusion, from its kanji character system to its ramen noodles.


Consider the case of a new band, Lipless X Sister, and a new dance, the Pada Pada. Like most Japanese pop music acts, Lipless X Sister is a concept group, dreamed up by record producers and marketing executives and then assembled through auditions. In this case, the concept was 18- to 22-year-old girls with 2-year-old children. A producer explained the band?s name to local press: ?You can like them. But they?re mothers, so you can?t kiss them.?


Their debut performance took place in March 2001 on a makeshift stage outside 109, a tall shiny department store in Shibuya that, for a few million of Japan?s teenage girls, is the most stylish, most important, and most exciting place in the world. The girls in the band, like every girl in every magazine that season, had light cedar tresses, denim skirts, and tight tops with vintage sports lettering (no doubt all of it was for sale inside). They wheeled their kids out in strollers, all in a line. Then they started to sing. ?Pada Pada mama, Pada Pada mama.?


A new dance then sweeping through Tokyo?s clubs, the Pada Pada is ?uniquely Japanese,? said Katsuo Shimizu, a culture columnist at the daily Asahi Shimbun, touting it as the first popular dance step to originate in Japan. In fact, the Pada Pada looks like nothing if not the Macarena. The dance didn?t seem uniquely Japanese. It didn?t seem at all Japanese. But then, what should one expect, geishas grooving on a Shinto arch?


The Pada Pada doesn?t require a great cultural leap for foreigners. The band has an English name, not that it makes much sense to a native speaker, but English words travel well. If the Pada Pada spreads across Asia, however, it will be on the strength of Japanese pop songs, Japanese music videos starring Japanese girls with light cedar hair, and Japanese cool. Maybe there is not much traditionally Japanese about any of it. But if that is a requirement for national branding, American pop culture is hardly more respectful of traditional Americana?unless you count when Madonna wears a cowboy hat.


MEET HELLO KITTY, DAVOS CAT


Japan?s most visible pop icon, Sanrio?s cartoon cat Hello Kitty, takes the national ambiguity of the Pada Pada further. Kitty is not actually supposed to be Japanese. In fact, Kitty?s last name, announced for the first time in spring 2001 in Sanrio?s official fan magazine, is White.


Kitty White? Kitty is a WASP!


Hello Kitty drives an empire worth almost $1 billion in global sales per year. ?From Target to McDonald?s, she went big time,? wrote Asian-American pop culture magazine Giant Robot, proclaiming her the best ?Corporate Whore? of 2001. Sanrio licenses so many products with Hello Kitty?s likeness that a company spokesman could not confirm the current count. Put it between 12,000, the estimate he gave, and 15,000, a number that is widely reported. You can buy individually wrapped Hello Kitty prunes. You can buy a toaster that burns Hello Kitty?s face into a piece of bread. You can buy a Hello Kitty vibrator. ?We don?t have such strict regulations,? the spokesman said. ?Hard alcohol, maybe that would not be appropriate.?


Hello Kitty?s longtime designer, Yuko Yamaguchi, met me in a small Sanrio conference room, dressed in dark jeans and a baggy shirt. A cell phone and a dozen Hello Kitty dangles hung from a chain around her neck. So which is Kitty, foreign or Japanese? ?When Kitty-chan was born, in those days it was very rare for Japanese people to go abroad,? she said. ?So people yearned for products with English associations. There was an idea that if Kitty-chan spoke English, she would be very fashionable.?


Today, teenagers and 20-somethings in the United States and elsewhere buy Hello Kitty purses and cell phone cases as icons of Tokyo pop chic. In the 1980s, however, Sanrio?s American-based marketing team had to customize Hello Kitty for American audiences, which they considered a tough sell. Often, that meant designing two Kitties, one for Japanese and one for Americans. ?Purple and pink were very strong,? Yamaguchi said, recalling Sanrio?s American market research. ?Blue, yellow, and red were believed to be taboo.?


?There were also motifs that were taboo in the United States. There was a snail, one of Kitty-chan?s friends. When there is a rainstorm, Kitty-chan has an umbrella and a flower, and beside Kitty-chan is a snail. In the United States, that was not accepted, and there was a request to eliminate the snail,? she said. ?Differences in color were easy, but I had difficulty accommodating all the little requests?there were so many.?


?Now, there is no difference in design. Now, we have the same Kitty-chan in both markets,? she said. They have to. Sanrio?s head of marketing for Asia, Shunji Onishi, described the company?s disastrous attempt in the 1990s to customize Hello Kitty for Taiwan and Hong Kong, two of Sanrio?s strongest markets. They put Kitty in local clothes and surroundings, and the products sat on the shelves. ?They know Kitty is from Japan. That?s why they like it,? he said. ?Especially the younger generation.? Even if she is actually English? ?Kitty has a sort of independent existence,? Yamaguchi answered, hedging on nationality a bit. ?I let her transcend the borders of London.? A regular Davos cat.


WHY 600 LB. WRESTLERS DON?T TRAVEL

Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketing boomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony, and Nintendo manage effortlessly. And it is part of the genius behind Japanese cultural strength in a global era that has many countries nervous about cultural erosion.

Imagine for a moment if modern Japan were more like France, less culturally plastic and more anxious that globalization might erode its unique national character. Its cultural reach might look something like that of Japanese sumo?popular at home but stubbornly closed to foreign influence, and as a result, largely invisible outside Japan.

Tokyo?s official sumo museum, maintained by the Japanese Sumo Association, ought to be one of the city?s big foreign tourist attractions; instead, it is a dreary, one-room obscurity. The sumo association sells no official merchandise, at home or abroad. Occasionally, the association will hold an exhibition match outside Japan but only when a foreign city campaigns for a visit, and then never more than once or twice in a year. It is a marked contrast to the U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA), for instance, which in recent years has aggressively promoted its sport around the world and hinted that it might place a new team in Mexico City, or even a whole division of teams in Europe.

It is no wonder why the NBA?and the U.S. football and baseball leagues?takes a global approach. Foreign fans mean extra licensing and broadcasting revenue. And if a foreign star emerges, you have the possibility for another Ichiro. The day Japanese baseball star Ichiro Suzuki left Japan to bat leadoff for the Seattle Mariners, Japanese sports shops were already filled with official Mariners jerseys and baseball caps in anticipation. During the season, Japanese television covered every Mariners game live, despite a 12-hour time difference.

By that logic, the fact that 25 percent of the wrestlers in sumo?s top two divisions are foreign-born should be great for the sport?it raises the level of competition and offers up hometown heroes to potentially lucrative foreign broadcasting markets. But instead, it is a source of great anxiety. Sumo is a rare thing, a part of Japan?s commercial pop culture that looks much as it did hundreds of years ago.

Sumo is seldom broadcast outside Japan, but Hawaiian television carries all the tournaments. So a tall, skinny kid named Chad Rowan grew up watching Konishiki (whose given name is Salevaa Atisanoe), a fellow American from Hawaii who left the United States to become sumo?s first 600-pound wrestler. He also knew Takamiyama, another Hawaiian, the Jackie Robinson of foreign sumo wrestlers, who endured hate mail and death threats as he rose though the sumo ranks in the 1960s. Rowan never considered wrestling, himself. But he knew it was a big deal when Takamiyama, now a powerful coach, offered Rowan a chance to go to Japan with him and train. Rowan took the name Akebono and became the first foreigner the sumo association would declare a Yokuzuna, a grand champion.

When I arrived at Azumazeki Heya, the training club on the eastern edge of Tokyo where Akebono now coaches alongside his former mentor, a dozen wrestlers were waiting for their turns in the ring. Even so, you could not miss Akebono, not at 6 feet 8 inches and 512 pounds. ?Osu osu osu!!? he yelled, crossing his arms and resting them on the bulge of his stomach. ?Push push push!!? A larger wrestler leaned stiff-legged on a smaller one, and the smaller one pushed him from one side of the dirt ring to the other, and back, and again, and back. Sisyphus with a fleshy boulder. The smaller man gasped and collapsed to the dirt, his sweat turning it to reddish mud. ?What?s wrong with your legs?? Akebono taunted in Japanese, grinning. ?You can go for 30 minutes, can?t you? It?s only five or six minutes and you look exhausted!? Akebono speaks only Japanese at the heya, even with Azumazeki (the name Takamiyama took when he retired from competition, instead of his given name, Jesse Kuhaulua).

Wrestlers live at their heya, train at their heya, and eat at their heya. For a foreigner like Akebono, the instant immersion is twofold: immersion in sumo and immersion in Japan. Not everyone would face that kind of cultural rebirth for a chance at success in the most foreign of sports, and that is part of the point. ?It?s not easy, man. It?s not easy,? said Azumazeki, in a Louis Armstrong rasp that has made his voice one of the most recognizable in Japan. Although he also discovered Konishiki abroad, he does the vast majority of his recruiting in Japan. ?Back in Hawaii, my relatives and friends introduce us to kids,? he said. ?I don?t encourage them. I prepare them for the hardship.? He explained that he is looking for more than just athleticism and a frame six meals a day can bulk up. ?We try to find someone who would get along with Japan, who wants to be a Japanese kind of person.?

Heya masters like Azumazeki, like coaches in any sport, are under pressure to produce bigger and stronger athletes. At the same time, there is a strong stigma against traveling the world in search of foreign giants. If all else fails, the sumo association will enforce a seldom-mentioned quota of 40 foreign wrestlers in sumo at one time?or about 15 percent of the total. But all else has yet to fail.


YOUTH WITH A YEN FOR TECHNOLOGY

A cultural superpower needs a healthy economic base but not necessarily a healthy economy. Perversely, recession may have boosted Japan?s national cool, discrediting Japan?s rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosened the grip a big-business career track had over so much of Japan?s workforce, who now face fewer social stigmas for experimenting with art, music, or any number of similar, risky endeavors. ?There?s a new creativeness here because there?s less money,? said Tokyo-based architect Mark Dytham, a London transplant. ?Good art is appearing, young strong art. Young fashion is appearing.? Graphic designer Michael Frank, who shares a flourishing downtown studio with Dytham, agreed: ?A lot of interesting smaller magazines appeared in the last four or five years. A lot of small little businesses, people running their own shops, people running their own music labels, people running their own clubs. Bigger companies are starting to pick up on those little things and support them.?

Meanwhile, a constellation of factors distinct from the economy and its woes has kept yen flowing to the pop industries and other cultural media that Japan projects around the world so effectively: demographics that favor youth and their whims, a reliable demand for luxury goods, and a reputation for cutting-edge technology.

A generation of declining birthrates has filled Tokyo with one-child families. In scarcity, there is power. Not political power, not yet anyway, but consumer power, lots of it. ?[Children] sense that they are rare,? said Mariko Kuno Fujiwara, of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living, a sociological think tank attached to one of Japan?s major advertising agencies. And so they tend to be spoiled. Fujiwara recalled one newspaper headline??Our Children Kings??with a laugh. Tokyo?s youth spend an average of $150 a month on cell phone bills alone. They propel a dizzying turnover in street fashion. They drive the second largest music industry in the world, by far the largest in Asia and one that is second only to that of the United States. At an HMV music store in Ginza one afternoon, I counted more than 100 people in line, and not one of them looked to be over 30. Japanese firms have strong financial incentives to hew to the demands of a generation with high disposable income, regardless of economic ups and downs.

Luxury goods have also fared well in Japan?s slack economy. Japanese consumers haven?t stopped buying high-end products, as a number of sociologists I spoke with stressed. They simply save up longer for them. So even as the economy languishes, rush hour in Tokyo is like a luxury car show. Louis Vuitton, which opened its Tokyo boutique in the midst of the current recession and marked up prices 50 percent over Paris shops, makes more money in Japan than anywhere else in the world. Sony electronics are also frequently more expensive in Japan than abroad, one Sony industrial designer explained, because Japanese consumers strongly prefer lighter materials and sleeker designs, even if they cost more. A sliver of a minidisc player in pumpkin orange and lime green, a narrow cell phone with a big color screen for Web browsing, a tiny MP3 personal stereo that clips directly in your ear?these are goods that inspire technolust in the levelest of heads, Japanese or foreign.


ALL MEDIUM, NO MESSAGE?

Last summer, the prestigious New York art gallery P.S.1 announced an exhibition called Buzz Club. ?Animation, cell phone art, fashion, sculpture, anime, films, elaborate graphics, popular action figurines and models, electronic music, and sound and light installations,? the gallery promised, billing it as ?the largest exhibition of Japanese pop culture creators ever assembled outside of Japan.? Exhibitors included Groovisions, a design group most famous for dreaming up a nationally ambiguous cartoon girl named Chappie, and an electronic music and design collective called Delaware. Global Japan had achieved the New York scene?s seal of approval.

There is much more to Japan than the national cool of Buzz Club. Most foreigners will never penetrate the barriers of language and culture well enough to see Japan as the average Japanese sees it. But that is part of Japan?s secret to thriving amidst globalization. There exists a Japan for Japanese and a Japan for the rest of the world. Often, in the case of youth fads, for instance, there is a good deal of overlap. Sometimes, in the case of sumo or the layout of a typical suburban house or the variety shows that proliferate across Japanese television networks, there is none.

More than 60 years ago, in a classic study called Mirror, Sword, and Jewel, a German economist at Tokyo Imperial University named Kurt Singer discussed the contrast between the ?plasticity? and ?endurance? of Japanese culture, the ability to absorb and adapt foreign influences while still retaining an intact cultural core. Yet for Singer writing in the 1930s, the question was ?why this gifted and active nation has produced so little that has been found acceptable by other countries in an age open to all foreign influences.?

Today, Japan has outgrown that question, thanks largely to the qualities of Japanese culture that Singer himself identified. In fact, in cultural terms at least, Japan has become one of a handful of perfect globalization nations (along with the United States). It has succeeded not only in balancing a flexible, absorptive, crowd-pleasing, shared culture with a more private, domestic one but also in taking advantage of that balance to build an increasingly powerful global commercial force. In other words, Japan?s growing cultural presence has created a mighty engine of national cool.

It is impossible to measure national cool. National cool is a kind of ?soft power??a term Harvard dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. coined more than a decade ago to explain the nontraditional ways a country can influence another country?s wants, or its public?s values. And soft power doesn?t quantify neatly. How much of modern American hegemony is due to the ideological high ground of its democracy, for instance, how much to its big corporate franchises, to Hollywood, to rock music and blue jeans, or to its ability to fascinate as well as intimidate? National cool is an idea, a reminder that commercial trends and products, and a country?s knack for spawning them, can serve political and economic ends. As Nye argued in this magazine more than a decade ago, ?There is an element of triviality and fad in popular behavior, but it is also true that a country that stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its messages across and to affect the preferences of others.?

However, while Japan sits on that formidable reserve of soft power, it has few means to tap it. National cool ought to help Japan infuse its universities, research labs, companies, and arts with foreign talent. But in a vast public opinion study conducted throughout Asia in the late 1990s, respondents who admired Japanese culture and Japanese consumer products thought little of the idea of studying or working in Japan, even less of moving there for good. And as open as Japanese culture is to foreign influences, there is neither political nor public support in Japan for immigration, or for immigrants.

When Nye first wrote about soft power, he rightly believed that Japan?s insularity kept it from taking advantage of its formidable economic soft power. Today, a decade of globalization has made Japan somewhat less inward looking, but a decade of recession and political turmoil has made many Japanese seem less secure in some of their fundamental values, undermining traditional ideas in everything from business culture to family life. Those values may rebound with the economy, or they may transform into something new?a national uncertainty infused with even more anxiety by the demographic changes that will accompany the graying of Japan?s population.

Japan?s history of remarkable revivals suggests that the outcome of that transformation is more likely to be rebirth than ruin. Standing astride channels of communication, Japan already possesses a vast reserve of potential soft power. And with the cultural reach of a superpower already in place, it?s hard to imagine that Japan will be content to remain so much medium and so little message.


Douglas McGray is a contributing writer of FOREIGN POLICY magazine. He spent the spring of 2001 in Japan as a media fellow of the Japan Society.

Vince,

Japan seems to be even more deeply embracing linear materialism and (at least relative to it's historic communitarianism) individualism. The former lends itself to saecular intensity and the latter to a specifically 3T ethos.

This article brought to mind Strauss and Howe writing, "An Unraveling is the most eclectic era, with a deliberate mixing and crossing of styles, periods, and genders . . . Unravelings have been eras in which American [and now Japanese?] culture has exercised a profound influence over the rest of the world --- perhaps because this is when it exports the fruits of it's recent Awakening."[The Fourth Turning, p. 115].

And the whole Panda Panda Mama "Children Kings" thing shows a 3T interest in a special new crop of kids with Odyssean potential.

I don't know where Japan currently resides in the saecular cycle. I used to think that they were 5-10 off synch with us when I assumed their last 4T ended with the end of the American occupation during the Korean War. But I've recently read that Japan had a very intense, short baby boom in the late 1940's (much to my disbelief!) which does not seem like late 4T behavior.

Thanks for the article.

You're welcome, Sean/WJB. Glad you liked it.

Here's more on how Japan's "gross national cool" is influencing American pop culture:

In the March 19, 2004, issue of Entertainment Weekly, the regular comics column was devoted to manga (Japanese comics), with an explanation of its rising popularity (sales of manga in the US have doubled every year for the past 3 years and now surpass $100,000,000) and reviews of the manga series "Ruroni Kenshin" (also an anime shown on the Cartoon Network), "The Ring" (the inspiration for the horror movie of the same name, itself a remake of the Japanese movie "Ringu"), and "Joan Book 1" (the Japanese are interested in all kinds of things, including Joan of Arc). Considering that manga are now taking up entire walls of bookstores such as Borders, Waldenbooks, and Barnes and Nobles, this should not come as a surprise. The next two items, courtesy of my daughter, who pays as much attention to Japanese pop culture as I do, might.

In the February 2004 issue of Seventeen (I can hardly think of a more mainstream fashion periodical for American tweens and teens than this--can you?), there is a full-page mini-interview and photo collage entitled "girl around the world" and subtitled "eastern standards" that features a 14-year-old from Tokyo. The questions and answers read like the American knew cool when she saw it, but didn't understand why it was cool. Particularly telling were the reactions to a picture of bear on her cell phone (American "There's blood on his mouth. Do you think that's cute?" Japanese girl "It's dark, but it's also very cute--it's a teddy bear. In anime, that gap between gross and cuddly is funny") and to the band that she idolized (Hanamuke, a visual kei band) (American "What guys are your type?" Japanese girl "Like him" points to photo of guitarist. American "He's scary!" --IMHO, he looks like Marilyn Manson-- Japanese girl "No, I think he's cool." While the interviewer from Seventeen obviously didn't get it, my daughter and I did.

Finally, in the July 2004 issue of YM, Linda Fear's editorial "Five things I learned this month" concludes with "5. Want to be a trendsetter? Japan, my friends, is the next big thing." The last editorial page is devoted to "the next big thing, Japan", featuring the latest clothes, accessories, makeup, gizmos, and snacks from Japan. It also featured the latest manga available in the US, using the description "comics by girls, for girls". My daughter and I looked at the manga title and said "they have no idea what they have!" Again, the American fashion people know cool when they see it, even if they don't have a clue what it really means.

Now, some un-Millie-like behavior from Japan's Millennial peers. Standard disclaimers apply.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapc...eut/index.html

Japan stunned by schoolgirl crime


TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- A stunned Japan is searching for answers on Wednesday after an 11-year-old schoolgirl killed a classmate by slashing her throat, the latest in a string of violent crimes committed by children.

Japan, which had long prided itself on being relatively crime-free, has in recent years been confronted by an increasing number of gruesome youth crimes that have prompted it to lower the age of criminal responsibility.

In the latest incident, 12-year-old Satomi Mitarai died of blood loss after she was attacked by a classmate with a knife during the lunch break on Tuesday at their primary school in Sasebo, some 980 kilometers (610 miles) west of Tokyo.

There was no clear motive for the attack, but Japanese media reports said there may have been trouble between the two girls, who were said to be friends, over Internet messages.

The classmate was quoted as telling police she had called Mitarai to a study room where she attacked her. She returned to her classroom with her clothes bloodstained.

"I am sorry. I am sorry," the girl was quoted by the daily Yomiuri Shimbun as telling police in tears during questioning.

Tuesday's killing appeared especially shocking because of the age of the children involved and the fact that both were girls.

"A sixth-grader killing a classmate with a knife. Something like that happening is well beyond imagination," top government spokesman Hiroyuki Hosoda told a news conference on Tuesday.

The Yomiuri reflected the general puzzlement, asking in an editorial, "What sort of connection did these two have? What set it off? Nothing is known."

The victim's widowed father, who lived alone with her and her older brother, said he was in shock.

"That my daughter could no longer be with me is unbelievable. But the unbelievable has happened," Kyoji Mitarai, the local bureau chief of the daily Mainichi Shimbun, told reporters.

"She was like air to me," he added.

Rising crime

In 1997, a 14-year-old schoolboy horrified the nation by murdering two children and leaving the severed head of one of them outside the gates of a school in Kobe, western Japan.

That crime prompted calls for harsher penalties against juveniles, and a law was enacted in 2001 which lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 14 from 16.

Children under 14 cannot be prosecuted, but officials have been reluctant to push the age any lower.

The number of serious crimes by juveniles has continued to rise, however, with the ages of offenders falling.

Last year, a 12-year-old boy in the city of Nagasaki, which is near Sasebo, confessed to abducting and murdering a four-year-old by pushing him off the roof of a parking garage.

According to police figures, the number of minors aged 14 to 19 who committed serious crimes such as murder and robbery rose 11.4 percent to 2,212 in 2003, while the number of offenders under 14 rose 47.2 percent to 212, topping the 200 level for the first time in 16 years.

There have been eight cases where primary school children have committed or attempted murder in the last 15 years.

Police have drawn up new guidelines on fighting juvenile crime, but editorials on Wednesday said more fundamental measures may be needed.

"We must make children understand even more the basic importance of life," the Yomiuri said.

Originally Posted by Webmaster

Posted by: Vince Lamb '59
Date posted: Tue May 29 0:08:04 2001
Subject: Which Turning is Japan in?
Message:
I would expect that Japan would be on the same cycle as the US and be in an Unravelling. However, the one thing that bothers me about Japan being in an Unravelling is that Third Turnings are *usually* times of economic expansion. Japan has been in a long-term recession for more than a decade. Long-term recessions are more the typical of an Awakening.

Pity that, last I talked to him, Mike Alexander hasn't been able to get long-term financial/economic data for Japan. That might settle the matter.

Germany has been in the economic doldrums for an over a decade, however Germany is firmly in a 3T. Economics alone is only going to get so far in analysing where a society is on the saeculum. I would look at politics, popular culture, the media, and social trends to get a clearer picture.

When I last analysed Japanese society back a few years ago, I came to the conclusion that Japan was currently in a 2T. Japan since the 1980?s has become a less conformist, stuffy society, more open and liberated society, akin to what happened to Australia in the 60?s and 70?s.

Japan?s rapidly declining birthrates, cultural experimentation by youth, rise in new spiritual movements, questioning of established values and institutions, sluggish economy with low productivity and collapse of the salaryman corporate ethos as the rising generation of youth abandoned it in favour of tuning out.

An another interesting 2T sign is the total absence of entrepreneurial, free agent spirit in the Japanese economy, is not indicate of a 3T environment, even countries like France and Germany have a little entrepreneurial, free agent ethos in their economy.

I suspect is had not been for Vietnam, most view would have viewed the Boomer generation as very politically apathetic. The current Japanese young adult generation seem to be lot like Boomers were, they have none of the X'er sprit of risk-taking, free agent and entrepreneurialism.

Well that is my thoughts.

Good to see you involved in this discussion, Tristan!

You're right about the relationship between the saeculum and various economic cycles not being fixed throughout history. Since I wrote the passage you quoted (from the old forums more than 3 years ago), I've worked with Mike Alexander and seen many more examples of how the saeculum relates to economic cycles. Mike has also shown me how every turning has been in synch with some economic cycle, especially the stock cycle, the real estate cycle, or the Kondratiev cycle, so I am both more flexible in my choice of economic cycle and less flexible in adhering to economics as an important indicator for saeculum timing. My greater experience is reflected in this post, which I wrote almost a month ago, on The Most Important Thing topic:

This looks very much like a K-peak, fall-to-plateau, plateau, fall-from-plateau, and vortex. While the US stock market doesn't march in step with the K-cycle quite like this (it usually is flat to down approaching a K-peak and then goes up during the fall-to-plateau and plateau), the UK stock market has (Mike's first book shows such a pattern) and the Japanese market may have done exactly the same thing. The anomalous part is that Mike has the K-peak in 1980 (and the traditionalists have it in 1973) and Mike and others consider the K-cycle to be fairly universal. However, this peak makes sense in terms of the hegemony cycle, which is usually in step with the K-cycle, and which showed the end to a Global War phase in 1989-1991.

Even if the Japanese have their cycle in tune with the global K-cycle, their economy could respond differently from ours. If their saeculum doesn't, then a good candidate would be either the real estate cycle or the stock cycle, both of which reached a peak ~1990 and then collapsed. That would still argue for a turning change ~1990 and I have my doubts that it was the High that ended then. After all, Japan had student radicals in the late 1960s and 1970s and Japan felt, in retrospect, like a nation in Awakening when I visited it in 1980.

In case you want data from areas other than economics, here are some more links to recent news stories about Japan. Check them all out, but especially the last one. It's showing lots of consumerist and entreprenurial activity among Japanese youth, although in a way that you might not expect. Unfortunately, in a debate over whether Japan is 2T or 3T, it's inconclusive, as unsupervised, mercenary, even meretricious, in the all the meanings of the term, teens would be around during the entire span between the last few years of an Awakening and the last few years of an Unravelling. Since I think Japan's Awakening ended ~1990 with the end of the bubble, Japan may be between 6 and 10 years behind the U.S., so it supports my opinion about where Japan is in their cycle. If you want to include the "customers", who are about 30, among those displaying Nomadic behavior, then my hypothesis is supported even more strongly. Even if you don't, then consider that individualistic behavior is even more rampant during an Unravelling than an Awakening and that high levels of spiritual activity can extend well into an Unravelling, as Mike has demonstrated for the 1920s, Those two patterns of evidence don't help your hypothesis!

Now the links!

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapc...eut/index.html

http://msnbc.com/news/922190.asp?cp1=1

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/EI13Dh01.html

http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/0304/0405soap.html

http://www.lee-chapman.com/tokyo_tim...nd_insolv.html

http://japattack.com/japattack/book/egg.html

http://www.extremis.tv/php/mainframe...71&vHeight=419

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=shukan&id=187

However Japan has remained something of an enigma of me, China?s position in the saeculum has been easier for me to figure out! I have figured out about China, is that China is currently in an Unravelling and what I can attain from its society mood seems to confirm that.

Japan?s society is quite different from most other nations, there seems to be none of the raging culture wars that define politics currently in North America, Europe, India and even China. There is currently very little free-agent, risking taking stuff in the economy by young people, even by European levels. Also Japan hasn?t reached the levels of rampant individualism in its society than even places like Western Europe and even China (accounting for its political system) have reached. Despite its political system China?s saeculum mood is very familiar to someone like me and others. However Japan is a democratic, fairly free nation and it's society is a mostly a mystery to me.

Here is some comments by a former poster on this site on the Japanese saeculum. When I get around researching Japanese history, I figure out If I am going to agree with him or not agree. However given by research back three years back, Old Toby made an convincing case.

From: Old Toby <plainair@mindspring.com>
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if
Subject: Re: WI: Europeans Weren't so Darn Lazy
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 07:30:16 -0400
Organization: The University of Michigan



Mike Ralls wrote:
>
> Daniel P. Duffy wrote:
>
> > Be that as it may, Japan
> > has missed its chance and will never have another.
>
> Don't count Japan out yet. Japan has an amazing ability to change, and
>
> change fast when she puts her mind to it. She hasn't decided yet, but my
>
> guess is that she will in the next 5 - 10 years.

Hmm, for some time, my feeling has been that Japan is currently
about 25 years "behind" the US, and that a lot of stereotypes
about Japan disappear once you consider this fact.

Frex, the conformist, group oriented, sexist Japan demonized
in the 1980s is really the spitting image of America in the
1950s, with the dronelike salaryman having his counterpart
in the American "organization man".

Japan had it's "1964" in 1989, it is now going through an
"Awakening" like America had in the Sixties and Seventies,
albeit a less political one. The old values are under assault
but not gone, and are still entrenched in the upper echelons
of power.

If the 25 year distance still holds, Japan is currently in
it's equivalent of 1977. Remember where the US economy was
in 1977? (OK, I don't, I was only conceived at the end of that
year, but I do know my history, and what history says about
that time is not good)

If the pattern holds, we can expect Japan to start turning
around c. 2007, but won't really get it's groove back until
c. 2020.

Old Toby
Least Known Dog on the Net

To all:

Here is my timeline for Japan since 1853:

Japan's crisis period began in 1853, when American Commodore Perry
came to Japan with four warships and forced Japan to open up its
ports to American and European Commerce. A civil war ensued, leading
in 1868 to overthrow of the 200 year old government and restoration of
the Emperor of Japan. The name given to this revolution is the Meiji
Restoration, where Meiji means "governing clearly."

Japan's defeat by the Americans was a tremendous shock, and led to a
kind of awakening which was quite different from America's antiwar
awakenings. For Japan, the reasoning was, "If England and France and
America can colonize all these countries, why can't we?" So Japan
became Imperial Japan. From 1894-1910, Japan engaged in a series of
wars against China and Russia, resulting in one victory after
another. In the treaties resulting from these wars, Japan was given
Taiwan, Korea, and southern Manchuria, along with other territories.
Japan mostly sat out World War I, but at the Treaty of Versailles
ending that war, Japan was granted additional territorial awards.

Japan's economic situation became a crisis with the 1929 depression,
and was made worse by America's Smoot-Hawley Tariff act (1930) and an
oil embargo (1933), both of which Japan considered to be acts of war
which were part of the motivation to bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941.

In 1945, Japan changed again to be a pacifist nation, and to depend
on America for defense.

This is the arrangement that was challenged in the following
awakening period. The major themes of the Japanese awakenings in the
1960s were antiwar and anti-American.

A good place to start analyzing Japan's post-war awakening is with
the Japan Revolutionary Communist League. This web page gives a
detailed timeline that can be used as a launching point for research
into other aspects of the awakening.

http://www.zenshin.org/english_home/nc_intro.htm

I have no easy way of measuring whether Japan has entered a Fourth
Turning yet, but I assume it has, and one possible trigger would be
North Korea's launching last year of a missile that overflew Japan.
My expectation is the Japan's next war will be with Korea.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Interesting stuff, however I am still not conviced personall, that Japan is currently in a Unravelling. Well my schooling is finished for this semester and I have a couple of weeks off, which I can borrow some books and read up on Japanese history and society. Once I am finished I will give you a wrap of where Japan is on the saeculum.

With other soceities I have been pretty much right where they were on the saeculum. Strauss and Howe even agreed with me about Western Europe and the Middle East's place on the saeculum.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

To all:

Here is my timeline for Japan since 1853:

Japan's crisis period began in 1853, when American Commodore Perry
came to Japan with four warships and forced Japan to open up its
ports to American and European Commerce. A civil war ensued, leading
in 1868 to overthrow of the 200 year old government and restoration of
the Emperor of Japan. The name given to this revolution is the Meiji
Restoration, where Meiji means "governing clearly."

Japan's defeat by the Americans was a tremendous shock, and led to a
kind of awakening which was quite different from America's antiwar
awakenings. For Japan, the reasoning was, "If England and France and
America can colonize all these countries, why can't we?" So Japan
became Imperial Japan. From 1894-1910, Japan engaged in a series of
wars against China and Russia, resulting in one victory after
another. In the treaties resulting from these wars, Japan was given
Taiwan, Korea, and southern Manchuria, along with other territories.
Japan mostly sat out World War I, but at the Treaty of Versailles
ending that war, Japan was granted additional territorial awards.

Japan's economic situation became a crisis with the 1929 depression,
and was made worse by America's Smoot-Hawley Tariff act (1930) and an
oil embargo (1933), both of which Japan considered to be acts of war
which were part of the motivation to bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941.

In 1945, Japan changed again to be a pacifist nation, and to depend
on America for defense.

This is the arrangement that was challenged in the following
awakening period. The major themes of the Japanese awakenings in the
1960s were antiwar and anti-American.

A good place to start analyzing Japan's post-war awakening is with
the Japan Revolutionary Communist League. This web page gives a
detailed timeline that can be used as a launching point for research
into other aspects of the awakening.

http://www.zenshin.org/english_home/nc_intro.htm

I have no easy way of measuring whether Japan has entered a Fourth
Turning yet, but I assume it has, and one possible trigger would be
North Korea's launching last year of a missile that overflew Japan.
My expectation is the Japan's next war will be with Korea.

I have managed the dig up the archives for the Japan thread from the web archive website. If you want to view them I have them on my hard drive.

Originally Posted by Tristan

I have managed the dig up the archives for the Japan thread from the web archive website. If you want to view them I have them on my hard drive.

I'm especially interested in Strauss & Howe's comments from "back in the day".

Originally Posted by William Jennings Bryan

Originally Posted by Tristan

I have managed the dig up the archives for the Japan thread from the web archive website. If you want to view them I have them on my hard drive.

I'm especially interested in Strauss & Howe's comments from "back in the day".

They have not commented much, apart from Bill's comment based on one article that Japan was in an Unravelling.

I have spoken to Neil Howe about Japan's place in the saeculum and he is as confused as me. While he noted that Japan went through the same kind of political protests and student activism that the western nations went through in the late 60's, it was a faint echo of what was happening in the west. Neil went to Japan in 1975 apart from Tokyo he commented that the rest of Japan felt very 'fifties' in it's mood.

By my judgements of Japanese society and it?s generations, I generally study society, culture as well as politics.

I felt Japan in the 1980?s was very much in a High mood, maybe the later part of the decade entering an awakening. However in the 1990?s Japan definitely entered an Awakening mood, the country?s social mood is very different now than it was in the 1980?s. Japanese society and it's institutional culture have been turned upside down in the last couple of decades.

When I was reading an article about the cult that bombed the Tokyo subway, I was reminded how much it's leader an Boomer peer was like Charles Manson and his followers were very much like Charles Manson's followers. They followed a similar sort of doctrine, which preached that the end time was near and they should help it get it along.

Also in the article I was mentioned a lot of young people who had joined the cult talked about the spiritual vacuum of the Bubble years and how they were searching for sense of spirituality. What I have read of this generation, which covers more or less the same years US X?ers do. They have a strong sense of which they are as a general and regard themselves as the New Human beings and have been busy over the last decade basically questioning their parent?s values and beliefs.

They do not seem interested in having a nice quiet life being a salary man or a dutiful housewife like the previous generation. They are more interested in questioning fundamental values of Japanese society and basically tuning out into things like Spiritual Cults. I am not 100% sure if Japan is currently in an awakening, however there are important signs. Australia had little of the riots and terrorism that America had during the last awakening, although there was a fair amount of political activism and a lot of questioning of established values and beliefs. Australia during the last awakening went through the kind of social revolution that Japan is experiencing right now.

I have been reading through translated Japanese media articles and there has been some interest or weird stuff happening in Japan recently.

A lot of the articles about children are quite negative mostly involving some awful crime children have committed. In comparison in Australia there are a lot of news stories which show children and teens in a positive light. I have yet so far to see a news story coming out of Japan that shows a positive portrayal of children.

http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/040...usybodies.html

This article above is about the increasing number of people in the 30?s who have not been married, here is an interesting quote.

"I think mothers are to blame if their daughters in their 30s don't want to get married," marriage counselor Hiromi Ikeuchi tells Josei Jishin. "Women now in their 50s and 60s have continuously whined about how getting married destroyed their lives and how their husbands don't care enough for them. They've encouraged their daughters to be their own people and not depend on men. They didn't teach their girls that getting married equates with happiness. Unmarried women in their 30s have turned out exactly as their mothers had brought them up to be."

There has been quite a bit of articles about the increasing popularity of religious cults in Japan. All of you would have heard about the - Aum Shinrikyo cult which bombed the Tokyo Subway some years back,. However another weird cult has been making headlines they are called the Pana Wave Laboratory, you have to read the article who weird these people are.

http://www.religionnewsblog.com/00003327-.html

http://www.apologeticsindex.org/japan-00.html it has some interesting links on this subject as well

This letter to a Japanese newspaper talks about the underprotection of Kids in Japan today.

Dear Editor,

Where are the parents?

It makes me ill when I see these types of accidents involving children, as the parental supervision in Japan is the main problem and no one seems to acknowledge it!

Just the other day, I watched a child no older than three years old wander into a major road while the mother was typing emails on her mobile phone. Luckily, a bystander ran out into the street to grab the child and prevent her from mowed down. It made me so angry to see this. As I drive to work daily, I see everyday, a very young child standing in the backseat of a car or on the lap of someone in the front passenger seat. Was there not a law passed last year making it mandatory to put children in a child seat? Why do the police not enforce this law? How hard is it for a police officer to simply blow his whistle and knock on a window to inform the passenger to put their child in a baby seat?

A large number of new generation of parents simply to not seem to want to put in the effort to be good responsible parents. Until I was at least 10 years old, I was always made to sit at the table of a restaurant and be quiet and polite - not run around freely looking for something to do.

Should we really be all that surprised that there are so many accidents involving children in Japan? Trying to shift the blame to department stores and other establishments will change nothing. Fix this at the source and make the actions of children the responsibility of the parents, not the store manager who has enough to do - to run a business and not be a babysitter.

Originally Posted by Tristan

I have been reading through translated Japanese media articles and there has been some interest or weird stuff happening in Japan recently.

A lot of the articles about children are quite negative mostly involving some awful crime children have committed. In comparison in Australia there are a lot of news stories which show children and teens in a positive light. I have yet so far to see a news story coming out of Japan that shows a positive portrayal of children.

http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/040...usybodies.html

This article above is about the increasing number of people in the 30?s who have not been married, here is an interesting quote.

"I think mothers are to blame if their daughters in their 30s don't want to get married," marriage counselor Hiromi Ikeuchi tells Josei Jishin. "Women now in their 50s and 60s have continuously whined about how getting married destroyed their lives and how their husbands don't care enough for them. They've encouraged their daughters to be their own people and not depend on men. They didn't teach their girls that getting married equates with happiness. Unmarried women in their 30s have turned out exactly as their mothers had brought them up to be."

There has been quite a bit of articles about the increasing popularity of religious cults in Japan. All of you would have heard about the - Aum Shinrikyo cult which bombed the Tokyo Subway some years back,. However another weird cult has been making headlines they are called the Pana Wave Laboratory, you have to read the article who weird these people are.

http://www.religionnewsblog.com/00003327-.html

http://www.apologeticsindex.org/japan-00.html it has some interesting links on this subject as well

This letter to a Japanese newspaper talks about the underprotection of Kids in Japan today.

Dear Editor,

Where are the parents?

It makes me ill when I see these types of accidents involving children, as the parental supervision in Japan is the main problem and no one seems to acknowledge it!

Just the other day, I watched a child no older than three years old wander into a major road while the mother was typing emails on her mobile phone. Luckily, a bystander ran out into the street to grab the child and prevent her from mowed down. It made me so angry to see this. As I drive to work daily, I see everyday, a very young child standing in the backseat of a car or on the lap of someone in the front passenger seat. Was there not a law passed last year making it mandatory to put children in a child seat? Why do the police not enforce this law? How hard is it for a police officer to simply blow his whistle and knock on a window to inform the passenger to put their child in a baby seat?

A large number of new generation of parents simply to not seem to want to put in the effort to be good responsible parents. Until I was at least 10 years old, I was always made to sit at the table of a restaurant and be quiet and polite - not run around freely looking for something to do.

Should we really be all that surprised that there are so many accidents involving children in Japan? Trying to shift the blame to department stores and other establishments will change nothing. Fix this at the source and make the actions of children the responsibility of the parents, not the store manager who has enough to do - to run a business and not be a babysitter.

I had thought that Japan was well into an Unraveling by now. I'm not so sure after reading your post and it's links.

These few things about which generations the Japanese feel they belong to.

These are the names of current generations which roughly correspond, to the Boomers, Gen X and the Millennials.

Dankai-sedai (Generation of mass. Roughly correspond to Baby-Boomers)

Shin jinrui (New Homo sapience, who spent their late teens and early
twenties during the Bubble economy in late 1980's.)

Uchuu jin (Alien, people in their twenties now. This generation can be
also be called Dankai-nisei (second generation of Dankai)

http://subsite.icu.ac.jp/prc/bird/bi...e/v.41/63.html

The person who wrote the article is a Boomer peer born in the 1950?s.

http://www.cjas.org/~leng/otaku-e.htm