The Other Side of the Closet (PART 1)

I recently rediscovered this old short story I wrote a couple of years ago and since it seems unlikely that anyone is ever going to publish it and since I so rarely update this blog, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, knocked up a few illustrations and decided to dump it on here. There will be three parts in total and I'll post each of the next two episodes up when I have time to draw some suitable pictures to accompany them. Anyway, here's the first bit.

The Other Side of the Closet

Ian Martin

"They must be crazy!" Keiichi cried, grinning, as we stepped out of the stairwell into the bright, clear spring sunshine.

I nodded solemnly and tried to stop myself from smiling.

"He talked so long I thought he was never going to stop, eh Shunsuke!"

Keiichi looked as if he was about to start dancing as he launched into an imitation of the old man's voice.

"...really the best value. Remember the location, right by the bus stop and only five minutes from Yotsuya Station..."

Keiichi had always been good at imitations and he had the estate agent's voice down perfectly; the slow, precise enunciation of each word that made him sound like an NHK Radio education broadcast, and the slightly weary hint of desperation that was all the estate agent's own.

"...all the space you could need. Two bedrooms, large dining room and kitchen combo, lots of closet space, even a spare one in the kitchen..."

The old man had seemed very proud of the extra closet and had spent a good while longer than necessary talking us through all the uses we could put it to.

In fact, the whole meeting had been quite frustrating. We'd sat there for more than an hour, nodding solemnly and politely, trying not to laugh, trying not to cry out, trying not to scream with delight.

"Sixty thousand yen! They're out of their minds!"

We high-fived, Keiichi climbed a lamp post to celebrate, and I grabbed and kissed a passing businessman, then waved goodbye to him as he shook me off and hurried onwards.

The apartment was indeed in a beautiful location, on the corner of two tree-lined roads. It was on the second floor with the kitchen window overlooking the street. We'd looked around twice: once to see if we liked it and then a second time so that Keiichi's girlfriend, Aya, could give it her seal of approval. Even she, with her notoriously exacting taste, had only noted two problems.

Firstly, she was not impressed by the old man who seemed to constantly sit in the window of the first floor apartment with the radio tuned to J-Wave. Apparently he had given her a strange look as she was inspecting the building's structure and she thought he might be a pervert. Secondly, the building had been painted bright yellow.

Fortunately, neither of these problems had been enough for her to veto the apartment and within three days of signing the contract, Keiichi and I had moved in.

The two of us had been friends since high school and we'd somehow entered university together as well: him studying sociology and me doing art and design. I always teased him, saying that he'd followed me, but thinking back it was just as likely to have been the other way round. The truth of it was that we often just ended up making the same decisions, and that was probably why we were friends.

After we graduated, however, things began to change almost immediately. A couple of weeks after moving into the new apartment Keiichi started his new job at an advertising company, working late into the night and leaving me alone in the apartment for most of the day. I settled into a habit of sleeping into the afternoon and working on my occasional illustration jobs at night. I was the first to admit that it wasn't the best way to make a living, but it brought in enough money to live, especially with the rent being so cheap.

At the end of the month I got some money from a women's magazine that I'd done some sketches for and decided to celebrate. When there was still no sign of Keiichi by 10:00 p.m., I pulled on my jacket and headed out alone.

Shibuya is the worst place in Tokyo, from the suffocating crush of people as you exit the station to the smell of the sewers that rises up from beneath the pavement. I navigated my way through the crowds, past 109, up the hill and then through a network of seedy streets that led to the club I was heading for.

The lower floor was thick with people shuffling about, dancing self-consciously. No one was talking because the music was too loud, so I moved on to the upstairs bar. I talked to a few girls, casually mentioning that I worked for fashion magazines – a half-truth, admittedly, but not an outright lie – and eventually got talking to a cute girl with dyed brown hair and big eyes. Her name was Yuko or Yuka, or something like that.

She was working in a boutique and had done some modelling, she said, which I took with a pinch of salt. We liked a lot of the same music and movies though, and after we'd both drunk enough to let our inhibitions drop, we took a taxi together back to my place.

Inside I saw Keiichi's shoes and coat on the floor. No matter how serious he became about his job, he was still messy at home. The two of us tiptoed across the kitchen, the girl giggling at the sound of fitful snoring coming from behind Keiichi's door, and entered my room. I slid the door shut and she let me kiss her, which is when we heard the sound from the kitchen.

The harsh cymbal-crash of a saucepan hitting the kitchen floor jolted us from our kiss. At first I thought a local cat might have got into the apartment, but the sound was quickly followed by a human-sounding gasp of annoyance. Next came further sounds of kitchenware being rearranged.

The girl looked at me, her already wide eyes growing to the size of saucers.

"Your roommate?" she whispered.

Keiichi had been sound asleep when we had come back to the apartment, but the sound of his snoring had stopped now. I was slowly edging towards the door of my room when a sharp buzzing sound came from behind me. I swung round to see my mobile phone scampering around over the tatami floor and quickly snatched it up. It was a message from Keiichi:

-Is that you in the kitchen?

I texted him back that it wasn't and asked if it could be Aya. He didn't reply for a while. Meanwhile the girl was tugging at my arm.

"What's that smell?"

She was right. It smelled like frying vegetables. I edged closer to the door again. I could see a crack of light around the doorframe and decided to try edging it open slightly. Just then my phone went again.

-It's not Aya. Shall we both go out there at once?

I agreed.

I took a couple of deep breaths, got my phone ready and called Keiichi's number. It rang once, then twice; my heart was beating faster. The third ring was the signal and we both threw open the doors to our rooms.

In the kitchen stood a girl in her late teens or early twenties, wearing an old-fashioned looking kimono. Behind her were two gently simmering pots and a frying pan full of vegetables. She spun round in surprise. She stared at Keiichi, then me, then back to Keiichi, then back to me. She dropped the spatula and spoon that she was holding and ran through the door of the kitchen closet.

"Did you see that?" Keiichi sounded shocked, "You saw that too, right?"

I had seen it too. She had run through the door to the closet.

The girl I'd brought home with me had also clearly seen it because she was pulling on her jacket and edging fearfully towards the front door.

"Hey, where are you going?" I called after her, struggling to remember her name, "Just hold on a minute Yuka!"

She finished pulling on her boots, threw me a glance over her shoulder, said, "My name's Yuki," and left.

"So what do we do now?"

I opened the closet and looked around inside. It was empty apart from a bag of rice, a dustpan and brush, and some bottles of household cleaner. Keiichi didn't reply for a while.

"We both saw it. It was a ghost, right? There's no doubt about it, Keiichi: that was a ghost."

I turned back round. Keiichi was sitting at the kitchen table with the frying pan in front of him, deep in thought, eating the fried vegetables.

"Is it safe to eat that? You know, ghost food?"

He nodded, "These are the peppers and aubergine I bought the other day."

I sat down opposite him.

"Seriously though, what do we do now? How do we get rid of it?"

"These are good. You should try some, come on."

"I don't want to try some," I shouted, "I want that ghost gone and Yuka or Yuki or Yuko or whoever she is back in my be..."

I cut myself short as I heard the front door open again. I thought for one horrible moment that Yuki had come back and heard me, but it was worse. It was Aya.

"I get a text in the middle of the night asking me if I'm in your kitchen," she announced wearily, "I rush over here in a panic half expecting to find your dead bodies hanging out of the windows, and what crisis do I find? A ghost has scared off three of Shunsuke's girlfriends. Life is just a never-ending circus attraction with you guys, isn't it? Oh, and Keiichi, be a darling and go pay the taxi driver please."

Keiichi shuffled back into his room to fish out his wallet before heading outside. Aya sat down at the kitchen table, crossed her legs, folded her arms and glared at me in silence. I knew she was quietly blaming me for whatever had happened. In Aya’s world any time something happened to Keiichi, it was always my fault somewhere along the line. When we were students if he missed a class because of a hangover, it was because I was leading him astray. If he was having money problems, it was my fault for setting a bad example. Aya was an intelligent, organized woman with a sharp tongue, and it was hard work being disliked by her. I rode out her silence as best I could until Keiichi returned.

He explained what had happened with the ghost and Aya patiently took in everything he said. He demonstrated the empty closet and proffered the fried vegetables as evidence. Finally he sat himself down again with a shrug and a nervous grin. “So I guess we know why the place was so cheap now. Crazy night, huh?”

“Yes,” I butted in, “but how are we going to get rid of it?”

Keiichi shifted uncomfortably, “Well, let’s think about this. I mean, so far all she’s done is cook...”

“So what? It’s a ghost!” There was something frustrating about Keiichi’s laid-back attitude, and I could feel myself raising my voice. “Surely it must have some other place to go. What about all the other dead people? Why can’t it hang out with them instead of hassling us in the middle of the night?”

A look of annoyance flashed across Keiichi’s face.

“Just because she scared off that precious little girl whose name you can’t even remember, I don’t see why I should...”

I was ready to come back at him when Aya cleared her throat and we both stopped. She reached into her bag for a cigarette and lit it up, looking from one of us to the other. We both looked back at her, our judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one, and waited for the verdict.

She took out her cigarette, wearily blew smoke, and said four words that I never thought I’d hear from her lips.

“I agree with Shunsuke.”

To be continued...

Fukushima vs. the Romance of the Telescope

Last summer I was taking a train across Europe with my wife. It was a minor dream of mine that I’d found myself suddenly able to realise: To take a trans-Europe express whilst listening to the album Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk. It was a silly dream, and taking a thirteen-hour train ride from Berlin to Paris, followed by several more hours on trains before we arrived in Bath, instead of just flying made it an extraordinarily inefficient use of time, but what use are dreams, even dumb ones, if you don’t seize the chance to make them real?

As we moved out of the Berlin suburbs into the countryside, one of the most striking things was the way the farmland was spotted with wind turbines. Wherever you looked, you saw these vast, white electricity-generating windmills scattered across the fields, in between the occasional cluster of old farm buildings and cottages.

Now I know there are lots of issues about wind power – the unpredictability of generating capacity from day to day, the hidden carbon cost of building them and then the gas power required to back them up during periods with low wind, the supposed noise pollution problems, the visual impact on the environment, and the cost in government subsidies that presumably explains why German farmers were so eager to have them on their land in the first place. Nevertheless, there was something powerful about the image that I couldn’t put into words. Something I don’t feel when seeing electricity pylons, something to do with the clean, smooth simplicity of the design, standing proudly artificial in nature’s midst (we’re pretending that farmland counts as natural here, and I hope you’ll forgive me) while at the same time working together with nature’s most elementary forces to create energy. The economics and hidden problems aside, the image itself just felt right. I turned to my wife, motioned to her to look, and she said in two words what I had been unable to say:

“ちょうサイバー” (“Very cyber!”)

Which brings me onto what I really wanted to talk about here, which is the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the anti-nuclear protest movement.

One of the problems I’ve had in processing the impact of Fukushima and the subsequent protest movement, I’ve come to realise, is that it cuts through two powerful prejudices that I have. These are things I strongly believe and can back up with cold, hard reasoning, but I call them prejudices nonetheless because they are principles that I feel emotionally, in my gut before I even think about bringing reason to the table. The first is my instinctive support for any protest movement that goes up against a conservative establishment. I’m a lefty and I feel an instinctive sense of solidarity with any left-wing or left-aligned political or social movements. When I see policemen in Shinjuku battering protestors, or yakuza-backed fascist groups staging counter-demonstrations designed to intimidate and warn off ordinary people from joining in, I get a deep red mist. When I learn about politicians, media and big business collaborating behind the scenes, cutting corners on safety, collaborating to conceal information and spread lies, when I see the establishment’s ranks closing to protect its own interests at the expense of ordinary people, and when I see public figures who try to do something about it demonised and driven from their positions, I feel automatic support for whoever it is that could get such contemptible people so scared and angry.

People sometimes ask, “Where is Japan’s ‘Occupy’ movement?” Certainly when people here tried to stage sympathetic protests last summer, they passed largely unattended. However, in many ways Japan’s anti-nuclear movement is already their Occupy Wall Street. Like “Occupy”, it is a protest that cuts to the heart of the incestuous, undemocratic and destructive relationship between business, media and government, and like “Occupy”, it is an outpouring of public anger that could only come from people who have finally felt a real-life, tangible impact on their own lives as a clear result of this dysfunctional collusion within the establishment. With this, I can’t help but feel sympathy. It’s something I believe strongly on an intellectual level, but it is something that first and foremost I feel emotionally. It is a prejudice – a correct one, I believe, but a prejudice nonetheless.

However, on the issue of nuclear power, my left-wing sensibilities come up against another prejudice of mine. I am an unashamed lover of science fiction – no expert, admittedly, but I definitely lean geekwards – and my feelings towards nuclear power itself are emotionally influenced by my sense of wonder at the science itself. It angers me when people on Twitter and other places insist on referring to nuclear energy as “nukes” – a slang term associated primarily with nuclear weapons (like referring to a kitchen knife as a “shiv”, it strikes me as disingenuous – both can cause harm, but only one is designed for the purpose and it seems unfair to conflate them).

On an intellectual level I might ask myself about the wisdom of building nuclear power plants in an area with as much seismic activity as Japan. Nuclear power has with it a lot of the same financial, local and visual impact issues as wind power, coupled with massively more serious pollution, waste disposal, health and safety issues. I’m not going to argue those points. Still though, like wind power, the wonder of it – the romantic image of mankind harnessing the awesome power of the atom – takes my breath away.

Now given the very real suffering of people just a couple of hundred kilometres from where I live in Tokyo and the (I’m going to stick my neck out and guess probably less real, although the government/media/TEPCO axis do little to reassure on that) fears of many in the Tokyo/Yokohama area, such airy, wistful ideas will seem frivolous, facetious, even irresponsible. I accept that my reasons as outlined above are not good ones. As I say, this is a prejudice and my purpose in examining it is to find the emotional source of my instinctive reaction.

But once again, I believe, after thinking and taking into account what I know to be my instinctive biases, that I do still support nuclear power, although whether I support its continued long-term use in earthquake-prone Japan, I am far less sure. The devastation to the Fukushima region is horrifying, but nothing compared to the devastation to the whole world being wrought by our continued reliance on fossil fuels. Many of the problems at the plant and most of the possible dangers to Tokyo seem to come primarily from human failures (and I use this term deliberately – TEPCO etc. should not be allowed to pass off their oversights and systemic corruption as mere “errors”. They, the government and all who colluded with them and continue to do so failed as human beings on this), not failures of the science of nuclear energy itself. At least the fears that sent ultra-wealthy Japanese scampering for Hawaii and Hong Kong, and caused such bitterness and division within Tokyo's foreign community seem not to have been as serious as many worried they were at the time. To hate the corruption but love the science – yes, I am such a naïve romantic.

But whenever I think about nuclear power, or indeed wind, solar, any exciting new technology, I always find it is the sci-fi romanticist in me that leads my thoughts, that chooses their path, with the rational part of my mind following behind saying, “And that could also have useful social implications,” and things like that. When I see protests calling for an end to nuclear energy, I cheer on their attacks on government and industrial corruption, but my stomach knots with fear. What will happen if these protests result in funding cuts for research into fusion power? In my mind I see spaceships with massive fusion reactors bound for Mars and a little bit of me thinks, “This! This is what you’re protesting against, you fools! Can’t you see how beautiful it is?”

In truth, since very few of us, including the journalists we rely on to explain these things, really understand enough about nuclear physics, nearly all of our reactions to the Fukushima crisis are driven by such instinctive and emotional factors. The fear of deadly, poisonous radiation that can be neither seen, heard nor smelt is a powerful factor, the distrust of government, media and big business may lead some to feel that the science itself is corrupted by association, or perhaps that humans are too intrinsically corrupt to be trusted with such power. In these emotional responses, we can see folkloric themes play themselves out. The Biblical themes of Original Sin, or the Tower of Babel are powerful stories that evoke our fears of human weakness or hubris, the tales of Prometheus or of Faust can inspire hope or fear in the search for knowledge, fairytales are infested with shadowy evil that slips unseen and unheard through your window at night. Science-fiction embodies all these themes, as well as spinning its own myths about the power of technology to shape the future of mankind. Even when we are presented with the facts, but especially when our knowledge lacks, these age-old and not-so-old themes still carry emotional resonance.

In this way, just as it is irrational to let fear of the unknown or poorly understood dictate our response to Fukushima, so it is also irrational to think that merely by supporting "science" one is being scientific. We pick through the snippets of information in the media, desperately try to recall our school science education, skim Wikipedia articles, and we may think we understand, but unless we are prepared to wade through thousands of pages of data and read dozens of scientific papers, unless we're prepared to deal with the information at our disposal scientifically, all we're really doing is sifting through mountains of stuff that we don't really understand, looking for things that "feel right" (i.e. that confirm our pre-existing, emotionally driven prejudices). Someone like me may well want to argue that by taking the part of science, one is arguing a more positive and utopian ideal, but that is all I am doing.

In a sense, this is simply a long way of saying that it's probably for the best that I'm not the person in charge of determining energy policy for Japan over the next fifty years. On the other hand, I don't think that upon recognising our biases over this issue we should disavow responsibility either. It is such a lovely feeling to be able to say, "If only an expert could handle this stuff, then all these stupid politicians who we elected wouldn't be able to mess things up," but our prejudices often lead us to be selective about which "experts" we choose to believe. I do believe that we don't give enough respect to scientific data, and believe that peer-reviewed science should carry more weight in public life than the populist ranting of news media, the moralistic fantasies of religion or the cynical lies of industry lobbyists. Still, these feelings that I have been characterising as prejudices are also rooted in stories that contain genuine insights into human character and the consequences of human actions. Without being dogmatic about them, they are useful tools in enabling us as people to make judgments about the kind of world we are in and the kind of world we want to make.

The events at Fukushima are a tragedy, and the nuclear industry should clearly be (and I hope it is) asking serious questions of itself rather than simply circling the wagons in anticipation of resuming corrupt business as usual. But my fervent hope is that in its aftermath, we aren't left with a world where we look at technology with only cynicism and fear. For this sci-fi geek at least, technology should be a source of hope for the betterment of mankind, we should be able to separate the corruption of the government-media-industrial triad from the promise offered by science, and I hope we are able to deal with the problems, the risks, and the harsh practicalities of technology without losing sight of the dreams of science, of the romance of the telescope.

Objective music reviews:

For those people on Twitter and in The Japan Times' email inbox who were upset with the mean things I said about Perfume's mediocre new album and concerned about its lack of something called "objectivity", I thought I'd offer up a cut-and-paste objective music review that they can use for all their favourite J-pop albums:

[CD title] is the new album by [J-pop group]. It features the singles [uptempo summer pop tune], [mid-paced autumn track] and [string-laden winter ballad], and fans of these singles are sure to like some of the other songs on the album too. These include [TV drama theme], [TV ad campaign song 1] and [TV ad campaign song 2], which will already be familiar to listeners who watch a lot of television, spend any amount of time in shops that have music piped by USEN, or have walked past a big TV screen outside a station. The vocals are cute and the lyrics deal with the themes of love and friendship. All the songs are between four and five minutes long. Fans of this kind of music will probably like this music.

No need to thank me. You can have this one for free.

(12:32pm edit: Additional objective measures of quality suggested by Dan Grunebaum)

AKB48, "Koko ni Ita Koto"

(I reviewed this album ages ago for The Japan Times, but this was a longer, more detailed analysis I did together with a friend and colleague of mine that was originally published in Japanese at Goblin.mu and cross-posted in English from Clear And Refreshing)

With the staggering popularity of AKB48 and their ever-expanding legions of sister groups, there can be no denying that Yasushi Akimoto is in possession of a particular kind of genius. To have taken what at first seems like a niche product, best suited to performing at anime conventions and amusement parks, and made it into the most successful group in the country demands attention. The release of "Koko ni ita Koto" provides as good a platform as any to subject the AKB phenomenon to some measure of analysis, not least to answer the question of whether Akimoto's genius extends beyond the group's marketing and into their music.

THE MARKETING

To achieve the level of commercial success that AKB48 have, they would never have been able to do it without attracting a sizeable female following. Nevertheless, look at the queues outside AKB48's theatre in Akihabara and you see precious few female faces. And while many of their casual casual audience are female, everything the group does is predicated on the assumption of a male audience. In this way, it seems that the group's success is built on an obsessive core of male fans, to whom they faithfully pander, and female fans are simply invited to follow: "This is what kind of female image is considered attractive,” “this is how to be cute,” etc.

AKB48's image treads a thin line in lyrical content, participating in the obvious “moe” sexualisation of childlike imagery but avoiding the kind of direct appeals to lechery that were the stock in trade of 80s predecessors Onyanko Club. Or, indeed, the earlier AKB48 of "Seifuku ga Jama wo Suru"-- in many ways, "Koko ni Ita Koto" shows these earlier works to be naive. The sex is merely a hook to draw audiences towards something longer-lasting: the pursuit of true love, and when we say "true love", what we mean is "the relentless march of consumer capitalism."

The main manifestation of this is in the way that beneath the superficial atmosphere of friendship and mutual support, the members of AKB48 are made to constantly jostle for the affection of fans via the "senbatsu elections" and special edition CDs. Despite the claim that "Dare mo minna Team B oshi desu yo ne?" the song "Team B Oshi" basically amounts to the members of Team B engaging in the equivalent of an intra-team rap battle over who should be the listener's favourite.

There is more to this paradigm of competition than meets the eye. Consider that dozens of girls are singing songs together about the importance and uniqueness of "one true love" to a single imagined male listener. It's reminiscent in some ways of that creepy moment when, listening to a boy band, you realise that there are five guys singing about wanting to get with the same girl -- and yet it's different. With a group like 'N Sync or Blue, the band are the subject and the girl the object: they are seducers and she their quarry. In AKB48's case, the hypothetical man they are singing to is still the subject, with the power to choose from the array of girls before him, while the girls objectify themselves in competing for his attention. This relationship is most obviously apparent on "Ponytail to Shushu", where the girls take on the voice of the male listener and narrate his pursuit of his object of affection from the male perspective. The song also romanticises the obvious point that the man's love can never be physically requited:

Your long hair is bundled in a polkadot scrunchie
I cannot catch that tail of love
If I touch it, this illusion will disappear

In the 2D world that AKB48 and their fans inhabit, "true love" has been systematised like that. The girls make a play for the man's attention in the brief snatches of time the format of the group allows them, through their enactment of the various pre-determined "moe" behavioural elements that act as shorthand for more complex human character traits. At the same time, the man sits in judgement, indicating his affection through voting power that is conferred on him directly in accordance to how much money he spends. It is love as perceived through the mind of a piece of accounting software.

That is not to say that AKB48 fans are stupid. The notion of the single true love that they perpetuate through their lyrics is a lie in which both sides are complicit. The whole time the group and the fans are acting out this curious late-capitalist pastiche of love, what we might call the "Akimoto System" is encouraging the fans to take time to sample the different flavours. "Come to the theatre more than once to see all the girls perform, buy all the different versions of the single, complete the set. You will fall in love with one, but you don't know she's the best until you've shopped around, right?"

In this way, the relationship between AKB48 and their fans is rather like a video game dating simulator played out in real time and on a mass scale. Like with AKB48, "gyaruge" and visual novels operate in a paradoxical world where the player and game enter into a shared fantasy of true love and intertwined destiny, while at the same time, the player is encouraged to replay multiple times to complete the paths of each girl on offer.

"Heavy Rotation" pushes the notion of one true love hard, although it also (probably unintentionally) hints at this "replay factor":

I wonder how many times can people fall in love in the span of a lifetime?
If I could have just one unforgettable love story, I'd be satisfied

The beauty of this system, of course, is that whatever the fan does, whether he completes his collection, or whether he focuses wholeheartedly on the one girl he truly loves, Akimoto is always there to collect the money. The house always wins.

THE MUSIC

Musically, the image of the group as an offshoot of otaku culture is not really accurate. Genuine otaku culture, for all its quirks, is constantly evolving, and most of the fans AKB48 had among hardcore otaku have already left them for the likes of Momoiro Clover or the all-virtual world of vocaloid software. AKB48 have always been a simulation, an otaku-themed Disneyland ride.

In contrast, the music on "Koko ni Ita Koto" remains in a musical furrow that has existed relatively unchanged for years. These are the same watered-down, eurobeat-influenced rhythm and major chord progressions that you hear from pachinko parlours and game centres all over Japan. In each case, the sound is linked not to the specific content of what goes on inside, but to the image of cute, cartoonish, colourful, synthetic good cheer. It’s a world where human interactions and life experiences can be simplified to commodities and financial transactions, a world where the only law is "Follow your dreams," and for convenience's sake, the choice of dreams available to you is laid out on a laminated menu.

While this sound is evocative of the 90s, it's not really retro. To be retro, you must first consciously draw a distinction between the music of today and the period that you want to imitate. In contrast, with a few exceptions, this music simply doesn't recognise the existence of any musical advances made since the mid-to-late 1990s.

It's a shame that it has to be like this, since a group like AKB48, at the very pinnacle of the Japanese pop music scene, are in a position with audiences where they could define a new direction that would influence J-Pop for a generation. But that isn’t what’s happened. Whether through fear of alienating fans, or the need to provide reliable content for the advertisers that bankroll an increasingly significant proportion of the music industry, or through sheer lack of imagination and curiosity, the music relies to an extraordinary degree on a sound that has been in stasis for at least fifteen years.

That's not to say, however, that the album never diverges from this template. If you can get over the karaoke backing track production, the firm beat and more aggressive arrangement of the 2010 single "Beginner" sounds like it might be an attempt at a response to the rising popularity of Korean girl groups like Girls' Generation, although the lyrics disregard these superficial trappings of sexual maturity in favour of a familiar brand of faux-inspirational sentiment:

We should be as brand new as a child...
Let's tear off the chains that controlled us

To be completely fair, both "Kaze no Yukue" and the title track are competent enough ballads. "Ningyo no Vacance" is also notable for actually sounding like it might have been written by a human being, and is perhaps the closest thing on the album to legitimate pop songwriting. None of this is enough to redeem the album, but it bears mention.

THE FINAL WORD

While it seems like the music of AKB48 is a relatively minor aspect of the total media-mix, the problem remains that the popularity of AKB48 and their sister projects as entertainment icons grants an undeserved aura of legitimacy to this regressive, infantile, musically unadventurous approach to pop. Recent Japanese-language singles "Jet Coaster Love" and "Go Go Summer!" saw Korean girl group Kara aping the thin-sounding, cheap production values and lolita-esque demeanour of AKB48 even though their more mature and sexy image had made them stars in their own right. More upsettingly, Japan's most forward-looking pop group Perfume slipped into a worryingly familiar sort of sentimental 90s balladry on their recent B-side "Kasuka na Kaori". It would be a terrible shame if the enormous popularity of AKB48 were to drag an already creatively moribund Japanese pop scene any further into the abyss. Connor Shepherd & Ian Martin 3.August.2011

A Conversation...

ME: Seems like there are different British and American dubs for the English version of Arrietty.

MY WIFE: Why's that?

ME: I don't know. Maybe the UK distributor thought that because it's based on a popular British novel, lots of British people would feel weird hearing these characters speaking with American actors.

WIFE: No, I mean why bother with an American version?

ME: ...

Tohoku, Fukushima, and the social contract

There has been a lot of comment around the world on the Japanese people’s response to the March 11th triple-disaster, mostly positive, with observers from The United States to the traditionally Japanophobic China praising the order and resilience of Japanese people in the face of the almost unimaginable catastrophe that hit large parts of the country.

Trying to unravel what lies behind this orderly response is more problematic. Some web comments in China bemoaned how far their own country was behind their eastern neighbours, making declarations along the lines of “this is what it really means to be a developed country”. Some people in the West shook their heads and muttered, “automatons” or “zombies”. Many people in Japan noted the discrepancy between the way Japanese media downplayed the crisis, relying on government statements and officially established facts, while many parts of the Western media sensationalised the crisis (yes, I’m looking at you, The Sun).

However, I think what it mostly comes down to is the idea of the social contract. Responses to a disaster are calm and orderly when people feel that there is a social contract between them and the establishment that is being respected. In New York after the September 11th terrorist attacks and London after the tube bombings, people mostly responded in a similar way to the way Tokyoites responded to March 11th. These are large, wealthy cities, with strong infrastructure and government institutions that may not always be liked, but which are on the whole trusted to deal with a crisis. In all three of these cases, the people trusted their city as a whole to deal with the problems in a calm, orderly manner, and as a result, they themselves responded in a calm, orderly manner.

Now take New Orleans, a city rife with economic and racial inequality, where right from the moment the crisis started to emerge, the signs were there that the social contract was not being respected. The wealthy, largely white part of town occupied the safest ground, the levees had been neglected, and the evacuation still left many of the poorer residents behind. When the city was flooded, the Bush government initially refused to intervene, politicians squabbled over responsibility, and the news media demonized the starving, neglected evacuees who resorted to looting. Where the establishment doesn’t honour the social contract, the people have no security to cling to.

The people in Tohoku, and Japan generally, still have that sense of a social contract, and despite the much publicised failures of government response after the Kobe quake of 1995 (of which current Prime Minister Naoto Kan was vocally critical), and despite many lingering administrative problems, there is still a sense that society, both at the top and the bottom, is united by shared social bonds.

What is interesting, is the response of people in Japan to the Fukushima situation. Here, it is increasingly becoming clear that the government and TEPCO have consistently lied and concealed information from the people. That the dishonesty and corruption between business and government is deeply rooted and has been to the detriment of the people with whom they had this unwritten contract. When LDP lawmakers can gather to form a nuclear industry lobbying group with the crisis on their doorsteps still ongoing, when figures are starting to emerge on the extent to which former politicians have been gifted lucrative positions in energy firms in return for passing helpful laws, and when the Japanese media refuses to report on the biggest protests of any kind seen in the country since the 1960s, people start to feel that their social contract is not being honoured. Instead of “us” in this situation together, it becomes “us”, the victims, and “them”, the establishment.

If the Japanese government wants to retain the trust of its people, it needs to be very careful how it deals with TEPCO and Fukushima, because something quite fragile is at stake.

2:46 Now on sale -- all proceeds to the Japan Red Cross

Written in two days, edited and put together in one week, and released in just over three weeks, 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake is the result of the #quakebook project, put together via Twitter in the aftermath of the March 11th earthquake in Tohoku.

The book went on sale in ebook form today via Amazon. I wrote the piece Radioactivity, which I also posted on this blog, specifically for 2:46, and it appears there in an edited form. The book also features contributions from Jake Adelstein, William Gibson and Yoko Ono, but the real reasons to buy it are firstly, the way that it pieces together the real-time experiences of ordinary people as they reacted to the quake, and secondly, because Amazon have agreed to donate all the money to the Japan Red Cross.


You can buy 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake from Amazon here.