I am not sure I understand what is going on in this article.

1. Japan has been too influenced by American culture, but also hasn’t been influenced enough.

Murakami Ryu complains about Japan taking up too much American-style materialism, but then complains that Japan only took up American culture in a superficial way. But wouldn’t it be way worse had Japan adopted American style values in a deep and thorough way? Hasn’t Japanese culture been “saved” by only appropriating American culture as surface?

2. The entire idea of Japanese social dependence comes from the defeat of WWII and not over a millennium of Confucian-derived values.

“A Japan shaped by its reliance upon big brother/big daddy America would naturally perfect this form of expression.”

Murakami Takashi — if I was new to this, I would think that everyone in Japan is named “Murakami,” by the way — is obsessed with framing every possible Japanese cultural tendency through the lens of WWII. Sure, the war was an epoch-changing affair and the scars are deep, but I don’t think America suddenly invented the idea of dependence and hierarchical relations and hoisted them on Japan. Murakami seems to complain about all these hierarchical structures — in an incredibly Oedipal American way — and then blames them on America. And then he also goes around saying that Japan is “superflat” — no hierarchies at all.

Then Murakami Ryu says, “The paradigm of Japanese society has changed since the era of rapid economic growth, but our society still provides the same kind of education and corporations are still managed by rules based on norms rooted in the paradigms of that time.”

This is a great summary of Japan’s political issues, but the cause has way more to do with Japanese internal political inertia and social organization than any sort of complex with America.

3. Japan is powerless to do anything about this American influence.

“There are 45,000 American troops here, and American fast food is everywhere. What could we do to stop it?”

For the time being, let’s ignore the fact that there is Japanese fast food everywhere and that there are probably as many Doutors as Starbucks.

I absolutely believe that the United States has had a distorting influence upon the Japanese political process. The CIA secretly funded the LDP until, at least, the late 1980s and put right-wing thugs on their payroll to crush Leftist dissent.

That being said, individual Japanese citizens do have a choice of whether to eat McDonalds or Yoshinoya. All that “fast food” is there because it sells really well. McDonalds Japan just posted record revenues.

In the same way, the Japanese people could have voted for a political party that promised an independent foreign policy from American needs, but the LDP has been given the reigns to the country for almost the entirety of the post-war period. There are everyday lifestyle choices that would help mitigate the American influence, but most people are choosing the status quo. No one seems to be interested in asking why there is such a high demand for American culture and products in Japan.

“And the BBC reported in May that Japan’s Communist Party had swelled to more than 400,000 members, with 1,000 newbies signing on every month.”

So, good, the Japanese, through support of the JCP, are making a political movement against Japan’s participation in the American capitalistic sphere and the nuclear treaty. But if membership is increasing, why did the JCP lose ground in the last Tokyo election? And why do people think they will lose further ground in this month’s big national election?

4. Everyone loves American culture, but there is something shameful about liking American culture.

“Oe admitted that books like Huckleberry Finn and volumes by Walt Whitman first inspired him to embark on his career as a writer. He reportedly bowed his head in apology immediately after making this confession.”

I think the context of that anecdote was that Oe has always been aligned with the Japanese left, but as an American Left-style humanist liberal democrat, he had to feign a certain amount of shame in front of the dominant USSR and China-oriented Socialists. I don’t think that liking Huckleberry Finn is particularly shame-worthy in more mainstream circles. Murakami Haruki wears his American influences on his sleeve, and he’s a hugely-selling author.

5. American culture has lost influence in Japan.

“Younger Japanese are setting the trends that young Americans and other Westerners now follow”

This needs to be highly qualified. Mixi was a Friendster rip-off, and American web culture — other than 4-chan perhaps — has taken very little influence from Japanese web culture. There are probably things that prove the “Japan got to postmodernity before the US,” but net culture does not work as an example.

But I agree with the bigger point: young Japanese have generally lost interest in the U.S. This is totally true — especially in the fashion world. Japanese youth know so little about the rest of the world that there is no way they could harbor an inferiority complex.

So shouldn’t this be a cause for celebration? Isn’t this the end of the psychological crisis? Do any of the artists featured in the piece feel happy about the artistic potential of the latest youth generation? Wasn’t it the complex and dialogue with the West that spurred the creative tension in their work? Would Murakami Takashi give all the money back for his “soul”?

From the desk of The Reporter Generalissimo

To Japan correspondents:

Please go and write an article about Japan’s soushokudanshi: the so-called herbivore men.

Now!

We don’t care that this is an old story in the Japanese media.

Sincerely,
The Reporter Generalissimo

PROGRESS REPORT:
CNN – “Japan’s ‘herbivore men’ — less interested in sex, money” (June 8, 2009)

Independent UK – “Japan’s Generation XX” (June 13, 2009)

Slate – “The Herbivore’s Dilemma” (June 15, 2009)

——–

Marxy sez: I will have some deeper thoughts on this soon…

Be there or… reread Dōjidai game, I guess.

We’ve all suspected at some level that mothers who force their daughters into show business at a young age either have some kind of ethnically-unbound ethically-unbound capitalist lust or are using their children as proxy agents to achieve unfulfilled life dreams. Adachi Yuri, however, may take the cake for stage mom awfulness. Thanks to her nude photo book and now this upcoming porn debut (at age 51!), Adachi Yumi’s career will no doubt be forever buried under the shadow of her mother’s freak show.

More pressingly, I wonder how Adachi’s 16 year-old son feels about this.

The commenters are 2-ch are not so hot on this whole story either: “子供を芸能界に入れる親ってやっぱりどこか外れてるのか”

Nigo steps down as President/Director of A Bathing Ape! I should write more about this, but I am about to step on a plane.

I will be back on the 9th with lots of new content. Sorry for the lack of blogging over the last few months.

Here you have it folks: the best of the Japanese web. Anyone else feel underwhelmed? Seriously, the second best is a site that gives you the most basic common-sense information about pregnancy.

I don’t want to use the word “ugly” for the featured blog formatting, but is there a law or something against breaking preset template in this country?

How many years until there are “professional-grade blogs” with mass readerships that are not horribly-corrupt product-placement schemes, fake celebrity diaries written/vetted by mangers, or re-prints of tech press releases?

Maybe the Japanese are not paranoid of the internet: they are just bored.

Give a round of high-fivers and highly-esoteric “van Doesburg Points” to Team Néojaponisme for getting RMP (“real madd props” [sic]) from the list of lists. Listen to this, lesser peoples of the net:

Néojaponisme (www.neojaponisme.com)
Possibly the hippest cat on the block, this site is run by a group of cooler-than-thou arty types, mainly based in Tokyo. They certainly know their stuff, and hitting the site regularly enough leaves you with the satisfying feeling that you’re kinda hangin’ wid da in-crowd. Don’t get any big ideas, though. You’re still too dassai to approach them in reality.

If you approach us at parties, we will inform you that dasai has one “s” and then go back to being horribly nerdy misanthropes with persecution complexes. Alas, I speak for myself.

No, we kid, we kid. We always appreciate compliments and show our gratitude by being completely uncomfortable on how to react and descending into strange self-parody.

Also, a personal triumph: MEKAS. — Best Poser Site. I think he means “cultural elitist” for “poser” since the best “poser” site would be a site posing to be cultural elitist, right? My idea for Best Poser Site would be a collection of photos capturing all the guys in my high school who ran out to get chain-wallets and Dinosaur Jr. T-shirts in early 1994. A special page would be dedicated to Straight Edge tattoos for guys who stopped being straight edge after about three months.

29 year-old delivery man Ike Takao of Kagawa Prefecture was arrested for sending bomb threats to the video game company Hudson Soft. One threat included “Bring 80 trillion yen in cash to Takamatsu Station! Or else I’ll keep sending bombs to your company until everyone is dead!” After being arrested he said, “I sent them my opinions and hopes for their games, but they didn’t make the games better, so I did it.”

Among his opinions — Momotaro Densetsu: momo not big enough to fit small boy. Bomberman: not enough bombs.