TOKYO By now, the images associated with Japan s global pop juggernaut are new to no one. Pokemon, launched in 1996, is a multibillion dollar multimedia empire, extending into 68 countries worldwide. Its bright yellow, perky-tailed mascot soars above 5th Avenue in the annual Macy s Thanksgiving Day parade, right next to an old pup named Snoopy.
Fashion-fanatic Harajuku girls are now called the Harajuku Girls, a Japanese dance troupe touring the world and gyrating in sold-out stadiums alongside a blonde singer named Gwen Stefani. Hello Kitty manufacturer Sanrio s overseas outlets frequently outperform their domestic counterparts, and anime- and manga-devoted clubs and conventions have sprouted and bloomed in foreign soils like Takashi Murakami s psychedelic smiley-faced flowers. Much of the imagery is redolent of kawaii, either emitting a whiff of the uber-cuteness now considered an essence of Japanese popular culture, or, as in the case of Murakami and other contemporary artists, playfully subverting it.
There is also a giddy smorgasbord of styles and designs, mixing high and low and East and West with seemingly endless imaginative abandon and, of course, plenty of hyperkinetic action: spiky-haired guys and gals a la Naruto and Dragon Ball and a heap of video game consoles leaping across screens and bursting through comic book panels. The combined effect of this assault on the global consciousness is a vision of a contemporary Japan exploding with energy, inventiveness, color and light, qualities we generally ascribe to youthfulness: actually being young, or perpetually feeling that way. Many foreigners see in today s Japan the face of the future.
But inside the country, specters of darker hues shadow the horizon: an aging population and a declining or stagnant birthrate; an expanding class of young, part-time workers (freeters) with checkered resumes and scant skills; and so-called NEETs ( Not in Employment, Education or Training ), with their CVs and skill sets suspended in mid-youth. Stories of pathological young shut-ins ( hikikomori ), who withdraw into their bedrooms and virtual worlds to avoid the real one, and internet suicide pacts, through which young loners meet one another online in order to kill themselves in the brick-and-mortar world, have begun haunting headlines at home and abroad. There doesn t seem to be much optimism, says Motoyuki Shibata, a translator, author and University of Tokyo professor.
Shibata s current classes are made up of what he calls the first generation in modern Japan to grow up without the sense that things would get better. We re the risk-averse generation, a 20-year-old female student at the University of Tokyo explained to me. We grew up too comfortable to take risks.
While conducting research for my book Japanamerica, I found that the social ills afflicting Japan s younger generations and the pessimism they betray began to form a narrative nexus, tying an increasingly anemic youth culture to the anxieties felt by many in the anime, manga, toy, game and other pop cultural industries. It s not hard to find pessimism about the young pessimists. Michael Arias, the Japan-based American director of the recent anime feature Tekkonkinkreet, illustrates his concern by reciting the names of several professional anime artists and directors in their 40s and older: his industry and craft may be finding audiences abroad just as they are dying in Japan.
Making Tekkonkinkreet, I was fortunate to enough to work with some of the best talents in the field here in Japan, he says. And I heard over and over from the veterans on my staff how depleted the ranks have become in the last ten years or so. What to make of the apparent disparity between the image of a vibrant cool Japan and a domestic youth culture that is shrinking in size, hope and ambition?
Conference to focus on pop culture This disparity is one of several issues that prompted a trio of professors to organize Youth and Imaginative Labor: East Asia and Beyond, a conference hosted and sponsored by the Japan campus of Temple University and the Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies. Academic gatherings devoted to popular culture tend to provoke bursts of satire or eye-rolling (see Don DeLillo s White Noise for a bit of both), but the organizers of this one have gone a step beyond campus walls inviting the very youth who are their subjects to participate, perform and play. It s going to be a combination of the theoretical stuff and the cool stuff, says professor Anne Allison, chair of the department of anthropology at Duke University and a visiting professor at Sophia University.
Allison is the author, most recently, of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, a strikingly lucid, thorough and nuanced exploration of popular Japanese cultural exports amid the conditions of global capitalism. It s very unusual for an academic conference. Usually you just have professors and some students in the audience.
We have Japanese students and some coming from Hong Kong, mainland China and South Korea. We hope they re plugged into these questions differently than we are. A lot of them are thinking about them in the trenches.
Among those working the front lines are young Chinese and Koreans studying the fan-artist ( dojinshi ) phenomenon in their respective countries and whose pop cultural outputs threaten to eclipse Japan s in the coming years. Numerous cultural producers in Japan, from toy, anime, manga and video game companies to fashion designers and others, are now outsourcing their manual labor to their Asian neighbors. Tezuka Productions, the studio left behind by the deceased father of the form, Osamu Tezuka, proudly promotes its expanding Beijing facility on its own website, even as its executives bemoan the dwindling talent and opportunities for younger Japanese at home.
San Francisco-based Frederik L Schodt, the author of the forthcoming Astro Boy Essays and a translator and interpreter for Tezuka in the 70s, envisions Japan s continental counterparts as the next frontier. In the United States, the Japanese version of comics and animation is going to be challenged soon by competing products from Korea and China, he says, noting that many importers and publishers are now actively seeking and cultivating artists from both nations. Also, young Americans who are enamored of manga and have been raised on them will eventually start creating their own, as some already are.
The pop appeal might be coded as China or Singapore in the future, agrees Allison. But after that, I don t even think it will be assigned to countries anymore. Pan-Asian pop culture developing Predictions of an increasingly pan-Asian production of pop culture terrifies Japanese in the industry and even government officials, who speak of a crisis of confidence in Japan while their pop icons loom over New York City.
But Temple University Sociology Professor Kyle Cleveland, a conference organizer and the inaugural director of the university s Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies, sees hope in the connection between consumers and so-called prosumers consumers who are capable of producing the products they love. Cleveland is dedicated to building a bridge between both. If youth are ever going to be empowered in Japan, he says, they need to be respected.
A lot of bureaucrats and reporters complain about young Japan being apathetic or lazy, but they re not connecting directly to the kids. To that end, Cleveland is augmenting the conference with a related Pecha Kucha night at art space/club SuperDeluxe. Founded in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (of the Tokyo-based architecture firm KDA), Pecha Kucha, which roughly translates as casual conversation or chit-chat in Japanese, has become a global urban phenomenon, a series of events that offers local artists an opportunity to present their works and ideas directly to an audience of the interested.
In addition to the Pecha Kucha presentations and hip-hop afterparty organized by Zulu Nation Japan, the event will feature a screening of the Japanese/Polish produced anime film Avalon, which will be introduced and discussed by Donald Richie. Pecha Kucha is basically a format, but what s made it work is the network of people it draws in, Cleveland says. The crowd is always as interesting as any presentation.
And SuperDeluxe isa unique space it s Roppongi, but it s not. You have an audience of somewhat Westernized Japanese but you also get Japanified Westerners, and you don t usually see that mix in Roppongi. At the Temple University, Japan Campus conference, Cleveland explains, the academic panels will focus on creative responses by youth to social change and globalization, but it won t just be staid academic presentations, but artists, NPO activists and students who are actively engaged in what they are discussing.
No one is assuming that academic support will enliven Japan s slumbering youth culture. Even the notoriously static Japanese government is trying, somewhat desperately, to awaken its junior ranks with an ambitious Global Youth Exchange, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, taking place in late August. But the Temple conference is an attempt to find out what works and what s wrong in contemporary Japan, and in its sudden appearance on a global stage.
These post-bubble Japanese kids are struggling with the loss of work, a job title, as a guarantee of social identity, says the conference s third organizer, anthropology professor David Slater of Sophia University. A lot of the little hope they have is a sucker punch. They see some possibilities, but not the payoffs.
The risks are too great. When I point out that the professors and their institutions are taking considerable risks themselves with the conference, Cleveland notes that Temple University's Japan campus has long been student-centered, focused on getting kids connected. As an American university in Japan, I think we re a little more flexible in being able to stage these kinds of things.
It remains difficult to imagine Japan s younger generation producing a creative renaissance similar to the one currently being sought by global audiences. Nearly everything from Puffy AmiYumi to Pokemon, from Evangelion to Afro Samurai, let alone fusion sushi and karaoke, has been created by thirty-somethings or their elders. The screening of anime legend Mamoru Oshii s 2001 live action film Avalon is at least partially a case in point: Oshii is 56.
Evangelion auteur Hideaki Anno, now 47, believes that the problem may not lie exclusively with Japan s younger generation. Instead, he says, there is no adulthood for them to grow into. We are a country of children, Anno recently told a reporter from the Atlantic Monthly.
We don t have any adult role models in Japan. The dilemma facing Japan will become commonplace in the coming years how to create a sophisticated adult culture in a capitalist society that has less need or room for one. But Allison is more equivocal about the freeter and hikikomori generations of slackers and shut-ins.
After all, she says, where are all these fresh ideas coming from? They re not coming from kids who are going to college or becoming salarymen. Allison points to the example of Satoshi Tajiri, once an isolated boy taking solace in his addiction to Space Invaders, now best-known for being the original creator of Pokemon and a multibillion-yen empire.
We shouldn t blame the kids, she adds. They re not at fault for neoliberalism or affective culture. They re just in it.
And nobody believes in Japan Inc anymore, because it doesn t exist. Roland Kelts is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.
TOKYO By now, the images associated with Japan s global pop juggernaut are new to no one.
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