I know my involvement with Neojaponisme seems random at best. but just stick with me here. I recently left the ML hive to go out an interview the musician Morgan Geist. He has nothing to do with Japan, nor does this interview. I just happened to be a fan, and this might be my first piece of actual journalism. The article was lovingly edited by Nik Mercer of Anthem Magazine, as the actual interview spanned over hours. Morgan Geist has some interesting things to say and is worth the read if you like electronic music, or just reading about being an active musician, producer, label manager, and more.
I recently saw the Mythbusters episode that debunks this clip. They didn’t have the balls (or screen time or interest) to say it, but the lesson was: Japanese TV is yet again faking another reality segment. No wonder Japanese TV stations so aggressively take down YouTube clips or otherwise the rest of the world would be constantly submitting this nonsense to scientific testing. Pretty soon Adam and Jamie are going to be using ballistic gel to determine Kimutaku’s actual height.
Wouldn’t it be great if Japanese TV had a version of Mythbusters that just busted Japanese variety show segments? You could call it 『怪しい電通』.
Do Japanese TV shows ever have to come out and say, oh, by the way, the guy was on a rope? If Japanese TV was a presidential candidate, it’d be McCain. Always assuring to have a reality-show entertainment complex so happy to embody caveat emptor.
Lest you think that mainstream Japanese men have ceased to lust after underage females in bikinis, note this Zakzak cover girl (link most likely NSFW) and tagline, “She may be a high school student, but she’s an adult E-cup!” I guess the abstracted breast size overrides the pesky age issue. Buy the DVD and support the 17 year-old model’s parents’ dream of one day owning a yacht!
I can’t tell you the stress it puts on me every second Tuesday having my recycling silently judged by local volunteers at the recycling drop-off point. One time I even got into a Kafkaesque argument over whether aluminium cans should be pre-crushed or not. If that woman had had the authority to call the cops on me for showing up with a bag full of uncrushed cans, she would have done it in a second.
My first line of skateboards designed for Lesque, Tokyo’s hottest young skate company, is back from the plant. They may be available at your local skateshop if the Lesque boys don’t sell out on tour. Their “Couch Surfing” tour is pretty much the highlight of skate demos and culture in Japan this summer. If you have even the most remote interest in skating, go check them out. Seriously.
Lesque is an interesting company in that they have eschewed the traditional Japanese business model of sucking up to a distributor for manufacturing/funding, choosing to handle management and manufacturing themselves in a similar style to D.I.Y. outfits like Dischord Records.
Recently, one of their two pros, Shinichi Ito, got fed up with the minimal support offered by his supplementary sponsors and told them to take a hike. The result was this video. He is currently on the lookout for new sponsors (though Elwood already snatched him for clothing).
I’ll be briefly introducing the team before their presentation at the next PechaKucha Night at SuperDeluxe on September 24.
The Meeting Modernity series of found photographs is the focus of Néojaponisme’s first traveling exhibition. Recently unearthed outside of the city of Sano in Tochigi-ken, this series of pictures documents Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taishō Periods. The series is comprised of portrait photography in particular.
The exhibition debuts next month at Young Art, a gallery in Los Angeles’ Highland Park.
MEETING MODERNITY
September 13- October 4 2008
Opening Reception:
Saturday, September 13, 2008 7-10pm
Do you guys like the 21st century? Music delivered through the air instead of on compact media!
Are you upset about the iTunes store’s low price of $.99 (or 150 yen) for a song? Do you want to pay much, much more? Maybe even 4x as much??
Then I recommend au’s LISMO service, currently charging ¥420 to download a single song. Maybe the Japanese just value pop music way more than philistine Americans. I mean, Americans also give “critical reviews” to album releases! How rude to the record companies!
God bless Road to the Deep East. J-Pop has ceased to be something that you can actually listen to, so I am happy to have someone fill me in on the major issues. My only fear is that this blog is not actually a Japanese guy, but some incredibly-accurate J-pop fan from Sausalito of Scots-Irish descent, who created it as a brain-warping meta hoax: gaijin imitating Japanese person imitating gaijin.
Anyway, this latest post on Road to the Deep East seems to bolster my theory that artists who sell well during times of market growth become more “legitimate” than artists who sell well during times of market decline. (And I mean long-term growth/decline, not just short spikes.) To wit, bands that made it big in the mid-late 1990s — like L’arc en Ciel and Porno Graffiti — will have much longer careers than bands that had hits in 2003 — like Orange Range or 175R. Arashi are of the now, but everyone else on the survey ranking pretty much says: this whole J-pop thing is a 1990s revival pageant. Unless you can release some foreigner doing intentionally non-innovative covers/copies of Japanese musical conventions, don’t even bother launching new artists.
An alternative theory would be that your average teenage Joji does not care about J-Pop at all, so bands with intense followings like L’arc or Arashi register as “mass pluralities.” That doesn’t explain Aiko though — queen of bland.
Also, note the idea that Oricon’s numbers must automatically be suspected, and then the double punch of calling fabricated research “Mainichi WaiWai style.”
Professor and writer Uchida Tatsuru has an essay up on how the 1968 Zenkyoto (“The All-Campus Joint Struggle”) student movement changed Japan, with a good comparison of the 1960 Ampo protests and the 1970 Ampo protests. He sees the early ’60s student leftists as anti-American nationalists and late ’60s student leftists as apolitical, non-socialists with a soldier mentality.
