Truly terrible. These kinds of mass killings always seem to happen in obscure villages and towns, nowhere close to home, but this guy brought the horror right into the heart of Tokyo.
The Akihabara angle is hard to ignore, and certainly, this could easily commence the Second Coming of Otaku Moral Panic. They already found some anime-style drawings from the suspect — something extremely ubiquitous among almost everyone in Japan — but the images will point the blame squarely at “pop culture.” (Will his middle-school tennis club picture lead to a crackdown on clay courts nationwide?) That being said, I don’t think this guy chose Akihabara just because it’s a “popular area,” as if Shinjuku or Ikebukuro would have sufficed. There will be some kind of link.
Patrick Macias sees the killings as the massified otaku culture’s own Manson Moment. The recent Akihabara-worship was good for the economy, the media, and global affairs, but this dregs up all the suppressed fears about the dark otaku heart, justified or not. The Hokoten will close down in order to restore safety. The girl flashing panties was a help to the police on establishing the threat to the public, but this tragedy gives them surplus mandate.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Machimura Nobutaka’s statement. Yomiuri assigns to Machimura this English money quote: “The government will strive to work out comprehensive measures [for the Ainu] with the understanding that the Ainu are indigenous people.”
You can read the full text of the “Resolution Seeking to Recognize the Ainu People as an Indigenous People” (アイヌ民族を先住民族とすることを求める決議) here. Meat:
(Rough summary: The government shall recognize the Ainu as an indigenous people as defined by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — indigenous to the northern part of the Japanese archipelago and environs, Hokkaido in particular, with a unique language and distinctive religious/cultural practices. Having adopted the UN Declaration, the government shall furthermore seek advice from knowledgeable parties at a high level and develop its existing Ainu-related policies into a concrete, comprehensive strategy for abiding by the declarations provisions.)
Director of the Hokkaidō Utari Kyōkai (”Hokkaido Ainu Association”) Katō Tadashi interviewed on the subject (again, pardon the quick-and-dirty translation):
There are 46 articles in the UN Declaration. What will the Utari Kyōkai seek going forward?
The resolution proposes that the government “seek advice from knowledgeable parties at a high level” (高いレベルで有識者の意見を聞きながら), and in accordance with this we’d like the government to spend a year or so discussing the issue from historical, legal, and other perspectives. At that point, we would like them to sort out what can be done immediately, in the medium term, and in the long term, and proceed based on that.
It is said that the reason the government hasn’t recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people is because they are afraid of demands like “Give us our land back” or “Guarantee us seats in the Diet.”
The Utari Kyōkai has never said “Give us our land back.” When the Law for the Promotion of Ainu Culture (アイヌ文化振興法) was promulgated [in 1997], the policy details were finalized in accordance with the existing domestic situation. We want [everyone involved] to think long-term, not short-term (目先のことを望むのではなく、長いスパンを考えて対応したい).
Yeah, it’s a purely symbolic gesture at this point, and yeah, it may be partly driven by the idea that the Ainu could be used as ammunition in Japan’s ongoing feud with Russia over parts north. But a positive symbolic gesture is better than nothing … right? It’s also got to beat the Japanese government’s previous position, which was that the Ainu were indigenous, and a people, but not necessarily an indigenous people.
Many Japanese bloggers are calling J-rapper Zeebra a modern day hero for uploading a YouTube “diss” to cable music network MTV Japan. Japanese hip hop has finally become political! F**k the industry and shi*! For example…
You talk to the fucking sponsors,
All the bull shit rap you wanna push
Zeebra’s beef is very simple: he was invited to the MTV Video Music Awards Japan, and if you get invited, you are guaranteed to win. Yes, the #1 criteria for winning a MTV Video Music Award is being the one act in the category to actually show up.
But he forgot about a more important criteria: having a video that MTV produced and received money to make. In this case, it’s Rip Slyme’s ode to the Sony VAIO “ING.” (Read my original one act play about the video here.) MTV brought Rip Slyme and Sony together on this marvelous work, so it was only right for the independent music channel and cultural arbiter to award itself for such achievement in the field of commercial enterprise hip hop.
So imagine if you are Zeebra and you show up thinking, “Hey, I showed up. I can’t lose” and then losing to a commercial for a computer. You’d be pissed enough to air your grievances in rhyme.
Joel Martinsen’s “Willow fluff and trashy romance novels” is a great read on the topic of Zhang Ziping, an early 20th-C. Chinese novelist who borrowed freely from Japanese sources. (Anyone know what “归儿日” might be?)
I had never seen any polls backing up the thesis outlined in the article title, but the larger youth culture definitely pointed signs towards a general acceptance of hosts and hostessing. I mean, the hottest subcultural styles in recent years have been O-nii-kei for boys and Koakuma Gyaru for girls — admittedly “yankee” delinquent fashion looks, but both based on idolizing people in the mizu shoubai nightlife. Now thanks to marketer-extraordinaire Miura Atsushi, we see that about a quarter to a third of young women are pretty comfortable with “lighting pathetic smelly old misogynist patriarchs’ cigarettes” as a career aspiration.
You don’t have to be a moral crusader to be upset about this development. Wanting to become a hostess either requires an incredible lack of imagination or just chronic disillusion at work opportunities for women. Being a hostess is not a “long-term career,” but when your options as a woman are being a “secretary” or a “serious employee who has to drop out of the management track once pregnant,” hostessing looks like an equally winning destination. And when you work as an “office lady,” you have to flatter the exact same suits every day for much less money than a hostess. You can at least change out your assigned salarymen every 30 minutes as a hostess.
The main problem with the ensuing Sankei Shimbun moral outrage, however, is that this is clearly a product of social stratification. Dead is the idea that anybody can work hard enough to become a successful white collar employee. If you have no college degree and live in some godforsaken Iwate Prefecture village, what other options do you have upon arriving in Tokyo, with no money and no social capital, than to become a hostess. Imagine more and more people every year falling out of the middle class, and now hostessing makes more and more sense as an occupation.
By some estimates, 30% of professional models moonlight as cabaret hostesses.
This is only half the story. The real scoop here is that professional modeling agencies own and operate hostess clubs at which they employ their less popular models. Yes, if you want to be a model in Japan, your agency will basically half-pimp you out to Roppongi and Ginza to serve on entertainment executives while you are “in training.” If one of the corporate media bosses likes you, he will go to your agency head and say, “Hey, I like that girl Miho,” and they’ll say, “Which one is Miho? Oh you mean Kaho. Same bitch, thousand names, right? Ha ha. Okay, maybe we can let her be a model now instead of treating her like an indentured semi-sexual servant.” And the media guy will say, “Let us treat her like an indentured semi-sexual servant.” Then they’ll both laugh and money will change hands. Seriously, can you think of a better fly trap for hostesses than opening a “model agency”?
Screed aside, I blame the male customers for all this. There are a million hostessing jobs because there are ten million guys who are so inept with talking to normal women that they happily pay ¥6000 for an hour of “banter” and Suntory Old on the rocks. Prostitution is a universal; “kyabakura” is an aggregate of guys who need a pep talk and to learn to think about their own wives as human beings.
No surprise that Japanese companies are some of the world’s most active YouTube clip executioners. I am sure they are only taking video off YouTube so that they can go and monetize their own archives themselves… Who am I kidding? There won’t be a move towards making past material available to viewers until Japanese TV stations are no longer run by 200 year-old zombies afraid of electricity who spend half their day filing receipts for hostess clubs.
I am exaggerating though. They aren’t actual zombies.
hpgrp gallery New York presents “Sticky, Messy, and Sweet”
May 23rd, 2008 – June 21st, 2008
It seems these days that Japanese art is hot or new or one of the next great things. Murakami’s enormous retrospective exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum is an obvious milestone but the range of group shows and smaller exhibitions in galleries through out the city in the past year or two featuring art by Japanese artists have grown exponentially. Curator and Little Cakes gallerist Hanna Fushihara Aron presents her perspective on an under recognized faction of Japanese artists.
“Sticky, Messy, and Sweet” focuses on a particularity found not only in contemporary Japanese art but also in its culture where at first glance things may look candy colored sweet but there are other layers and depths which are opposite to the stereotypically orderly and clean image that outsiders have of Japan. The country being both historically xenophobic and self-conscious has the tendency to hide the unkempt, obsessive, or perverted underbelly. As one example, many have not heard about the growing number of young homeless in Japan. As seen in a recent NHK (Japan’s PBS) documentary, teenage runaways use “Manga Kissa” or “Manga Cafes” as cheap places to sleep overnight. The tiny rooms normally used to surf the net or sit and read comics offer only a lounge chair to sleep sitting upright in. During the day these kids might wear Hello Kitty bottled perfume to hide their unwashed body odor and sport their one and only in style outfit but at night they go back into the world of shadows. Another example can be seen in Mike Mills’ documentary “Does your soul have a cold?” which follows five people living with depression in Japan, a nation where the word for depression has only started to be known widely for less than ten years. Anyone “sick” should not be seen. Anyone with a hint of the sniffles should wear a face mask to protect others from getting sick.
This is not to say that this show is about depressing subject matter. On the contrary, the show is brightly colored and swirls with emotions and spontaneity. The references made were to give an idea of “What is shown widely” and “What is not shown as widely” especially when it comes to what is representative of Japan. “Sticky, Messy, and Sweet” shows other existences and experiences contrary to the slick and commodified or cutesy beyond belief. Although some the participants have graduated from prestigious art schools both in Japan and the United States, the others are more self-taught and could be referred to as being somewhat “Otaku”, fixated on anime or manga or on any other hobby, which in and of itself labels them to be outside the masses.
Some of the artwork in this show physically represents all three adjectives in the title; some a combination of two. Ai Tsuchikawa’s obsessive drawings filled with miniature fishy shmoo characters, rainbow flares and wirls are drawn on taped together pieces of paper, her installations of found objects covered in plastic “slime” epitomizes the idea of “Sticky, Messy, and Sweet”. Yui Kugimiya’s thick and goopy oil paintings cut and sectioned by colorful strands of yarn are gross and cute at the same time. Mumbleboy (pictured above) and Reiko Tada use craft to get sticky and messy. Gunji Yusuke uses scotch tape to put together little plastic bubbles holding drawings as if they were idea bubbles. Chie Fukao uses what is immediately around her like her own bed sheets to make an imaginary rabbit character’s resting area. Akinori Shimodaira uses simple, translucent brush strokes to create his dreamy, blurry, paintings.
With this show, the curator hopes to give a glimpse of another side of the Japanese psyche; one that goes beyond the polite exterior. She hopes to delve deeper and explore the more untamed.
hpgrp gallery New York
32-36 Little West 12th Street, 2nd Floor
(Between 9th Avenue & Washington Street)
New York, NY 10014
212-727-2491
http://www.hpgrpgallery.com
Gallery Hours - Tue-Sat 11am-6pm, Sun 12pm-6pm
MyFonts is now an official distributor of my type foundry, Wordshape’s typefaces. Stroll on by to pick up the now heavily discounted Cooper Black Swash Italic and/or Rubber Vloeren.
Cooper Black Swash Italic is a true digitization of Cooper Black’s swash characters which never made the jump from phototype to digital form. Most designers have settled for using the (IMHO) far inferior Goudy Heavyface swash characters in lieu of the more friendly Cooper O.G. action.
Rubber Vloeren is a digital adaption of Piet Zwart’s lettering for old pre-linoleum rubber flooring advertisements. The same Rubber Vloeren alphabet was used by Zwart on several other occasions. There’s a showing in Dutch Type by Jan Middendorp of the most spectacular version: a gold-on-blue version on ceramic tiles made for the First Church of Christ Scientist in The Hague when working for the architect Berlage.
As some may have noticed, I have an “in” at the American version of The Office, so I tend to think about the show a lot. For the last few years, I would often meditate on why the formula would not work in Japan and came to the conclusion that the premise too strongly attacks the sanctity of corporate life.
Sure, there are plenty of office comedies in Japan, and many poke fun at ridiculous bureaucratic conventions. But the UK/US Office centers around the following ideas:
1. Work is an ultimately meaningless set of tasks
2. Your immediate boss is an idiot
3. Your corporate overlords are evil
These concepts are very familiar to anyone who has worked at an office in the United States. “Real life” and individual identity are intentionally kept distant from what happens at work. In the show, the secretary Pam secretly wants to be a graphic designer. Dwight likes his job but wears multiple hats in his afterhours as a beet farmer and a volunteer deputy sheriff. Michael seems to be the only one to unequivocally love his job, and he is basically a walking billboard for the human travesty of “Work.” While not “hippie” or Bohemian in appearance, The Office depends upon a post-’60s, anti-The Organization Man outlook on corporate ennui. Jobs are square, bosses are The Man — no matter how hard they try to be “with it.” Without this anti-corporate framework, The Office cannot create humor.
My guess is that these underlying digs at work life are still too pointed for mainstream Japanese TV. (Imagine Sazae-sanincriminating the Japanese government and its corporate allies for presidential assassinations like in The Simpsons.) Just as the SNL parody shows the workers all bowing profusely to the Boss when the Japanese Jim and Dwight argue over the stapler-in-jello, putting the American Office’s attitudes towards working life on Fuji TV or something would force Japanese TV executives to kowtow towards their advertisers. What is good for giant Japanese corporations is still good for Japan. TV stations, ad agencies, third-rate paper companies — these all contribute to the dignity and vitality of the nation. Being a good citizen means being a good worker.
The Office’s horribly-boring, sterile “workplace” set is meant to visually represent the environmental blandness of low-level companies. In Japan, all companies essentially use the exact same desk layout, whether cool TV network or leading ad agency or fashion magazine, and this means an attack on a the physical space of selling paper in Scranton, PA is basically an attack on all Japanese companies.
Yes, the SNL parody is “racist” in the sense that they’d never dare dress up their white cast as The Office (Nairobi edition) and that they simplify Japanese customs to easily recognizable punchlines. But this is the closest we will see the Office in Japan. This country is just not burdened with internal contradictions of corporate life like in the West. Yanks and Brits want to bash their day jobs while still showing up every day or justify their own poor performance by placing “reality” outside of the office walls. The Japanese spend 12 hours a day at work and correctly assess that those tasks and affiliations create their “identity.” Debasing the office is not just heresy, it’s an insult to all those good citizen-workers.
I am amped to announce a number of new eco-friendly paper goods I designed for the Tenth & Grant line of paper goods. A few new greetingcards are out, as well as a Moleskine-esque gridded sketchbook with a pattern inspired by Japanese Modern 50s graphics.
Details on the sketchbook:
A handsome dark green on light green web pattern spans the entire front and back cover of this chipboard notebook. Perfect bound with a handy hinge-score, and 144 interior white pages. 100% recycled paper! Printed with soy inks! Perfect bound with a handy hinge-score, and 144 interior white pages. Forest and Avocado - 5″x6.75″ - gridded interior.
How did they come up with such a catchy and succinct name? They took everyone’s favorite Jesus-friendly aromatic resin frankincense, replaced the “kin” part with “queen,” and then changed the “cense” to “sense” to indicate “having good sense.”
Now, I don’t mean to be sacrilegious or anything, but I don’t think the “kin” in frankincense is supposed to be “king” without the final g. The word is clearly a combination of “Frank” and “incense.” At this rate, the sister brand to Franqueensense is going to be Mxxrrh. Or maybe Fucqueen.
The fine folks at QOOB have commissioned myself and 9 others to create original new short films promoting Alfa Romeo’s new car, the Mi.To. These films are the kickoff to a large film-making contest and a larger ad campaign.
Audio Dregs head honcho and all-time homie numero uno E*Rock kicked down a smoking original track for the video.
, we see that about a quarter to a third of young women are pretty comfortable with “lighting pathetic smelly old misogynist patriarchs’ cigarettes” as a career aspiration.
outlook on corporate ennui. Jobs are square, bosses are The Man — no matter how hard they try to be “with it.” Without this anti-corporate framework, The Office cannot create humor.
