One of the benefits of being a continuously broke writer is that I can watch banks collapsing around me without feeling the impact too much–at least not yet. Unlike others in New York City, I don’t have a massive portfolio to mourn, and I’m pretty good at doing my own cooking and enjoying small ethnic eateries and not lamenting my inability to eat at Raoul’s every week. It also, unfortunately, means that I don’t necessarily understand what is going on around me as I feel I should.

I do know enough to know that Japan experienced a banking collapse a decade ago, which prompts my 20-something Japanese friends to recall the “bubble” and how it dashed their dreams of partaking in massive Japanese wealth. So I wonder; is there something to learn from Japan’s own bank woes and its bailout?

One article I’ve read seems to think so. Examining the Swedish banking collapse and the Japanese banking collapse, the author draws the following conclusions.

RESOLUTION: The Japanese government recouped a sizable amount of its bailout funds by reselling collateral, most often land, and other assets. The abysmal times in Japan during the 1990s are now known as the “lost decade.” Even though the economy is better now, the Japan’s stock market still hasn’t returned to its peak before the bubble burst. And Japan still has about $9 billion worth of property held as collateral that needs to be sold.

LESSON FOR U.S.: Japan waited too long before resorting to a bailout using taxpayers’ money to write off the mountain of bad loans on banks’ balance sheets, experts say.

The Swedish government, claims the article, intervened quickly and as a result, the banking system recovered more quickly.

Regardless, I’m assuming (ahem, Mr. Pink, ahem) that we will begin to see a number of Japan-related articles in which the dangers of too much debt are examined and rexamined. Are any lessons applicable? Will anyone be smart enough to heed the lessons? I’m hoping the varied and intelligent readers of Japundit will weigh in with opinions.

On the bright side, massive economic downturns often go hand in hand with great creative output, so I’m hoping that artists will at least be inspired by this mess!

An imprint of DC comics intended to function as an American alternative to manga, has folded shop. On the surface, Minx seemed like a good idea; why not translate the manga medium for a more America audience, using cultural references that don’t necessarily leave parents scratching their heads? Japundits could have told publishers years ago that manga has a growing audience. To hear one of editor Shirley Bond tell it:

“I started to wonder what was going to happen in a few years when those readers would want something new,” she said at the MINX launch in February, 2007. “So I pitched this line as an alternative to manga, but also as an alternative to traditional fiction, because I thought that it was really about time that teenage readers had their own imprint and that they could experience a brand new visual reading experience.”

But it didn’t work.

One British reporter wonders why and has this to say:

just as British kids of my generation grew up watching so much Saved By the Bell and Sweet Valley High that we talk about “jocks” and “proms” even though these barely exist within our direct experience, tomorrow’s Americans will be looking around for the otaku and bishonen that are supposed to populate every school. It’s nice to see cultural colonialism happening in reverse, and of course teenagers love to plunge into an esoteric world that makes no sense to their parents, but at the same time it does seem a bit ridiculous that an American 16-year-old can’t pick up a comic that more closely reflects her own life.

At Japundit, we’ve observed for a while that popular culture isn’t necessarily flowing in the one, hegemonic direction that apologists always fear. But it does occur to me that part of the appeal of manga may be its very “foreign-ness” and its imaginative use of setting and character and design, and the narrative risks that writers in Japan take naturally. For audiences around the globe, this kind of story-telling is thrilling. Do

I’m curious to hear from the experts–this means you–on what it is about Japanese manga that is so compulsive for you and if you think its success could ever be duplicated in the west.

My apologies for the low level of posting here for the past couple of days. I have been hit by a lot of work, and I have something that required preparation to attend to tomorrow.

We also are getting ready for some major changes to the site, which will be announcing soon.

One interesting concept I learned about soon after coming to Japan was jiko shokai, which just means “self introduction” but which seems to have a special cultural significance here.

In almost any situation where people will be interacting, be it a classroom, a part-time job or the local PTA board, a new member will always stand and make a formal self introduction, telling the others their name (including how to write it in kanji), where they’re from, what their hobbies are, and so on.

Giving this information to the other members of the group allows everyone to categorize the newcomer properly, and afterwards the others will do their own jiko shokai in turn.

These self introductions are also heavily used in ESL teaching, too, since formal self introductions are seen as the “most basic” form of human communication in Japan. Back when I was an ESL teacher, I taught children a lot, and I made sure to spend a lot of time teaching self-introductions, since I knew that the parents of my students expected that their kids have this ability before anything else and would complain if their kids couldn’t recite basic information about themselves to others.

Well, okay, that was a little misleading. But I couldn’t resist after JP’s last post.

It does seem, however, that Japan’s newly minted minister for tourism and transort, Nariaki Nakayama, had to resign after claiming that:

that Japanese people were “ethnically homogenous” and “definitely … do not like or desire foreigners”.

I was curious to read also that members of the Ainu were particularly disgruntled by this comment. According to reports, Nakayama also refused to retract his statement, claiming he’d rather resign–which he did.

Most Western nations are facing the problem of aging populations, but Japan is really leading the pack, with its combination of a very low birth rate, healthier diet and a good medical system.

Japanese older people are just like elderly from any other part of the world, sometimes friendly and interesting to talk to, and other times unwilling to take crap from anyone as they dive for the last pair of shoes at a department store bargain sale. As an American living in Japan, it’s can be interesting to strike up conversations with older Japanese, who will often talk about what the war years were like for them, or the time they saw General MacArthur, and there’s an unspoken acknowledgment of all that’s changed in the past 60 years.

Since it’s generally expected that the oldest son or daughter will take over the family house and care for the parents in their silver years, elderly folks generally have the benefit of lots of family around them, at least in the semi-rural prefecture where I live. Partially because of this system, and also (I’ve been told) because Japanese rarely leave the area where their family grave is located, you don’t see people migrating to a different part of the country when they retire as is the case with Florida.

The main social activity of Japanese retired people seems to be going to the doctor’s office every day to sit and chat with friends while they wait to be seen by the doctor for some (usually imagined) pain, and if you ever get sick in Japan you’d better have a strategy for getting to the doctor’s office early.

While most of the older people living in my neighborhood are very genki (healthy, full of energy), there’s one poor woman whose back is stuck at a 90 degree angle, making her unable to stand up at all. I’d always assumed this problem came a lifetime of planting rice by hand, but supposedly it’s caused by a chronic vitamin B1 deficiency that was a problem in the first few decades of the 20th century.

Some exciting news for people who are fond of thinking in terms of hair thickness and ear wax texture.

The Japanese can be genetically classified into two categories–people native to the Ryukyu Islands in Okinawa Prefecture and people native to other parts of Japan–researchers from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Science (Riken), who analyzed the genes and genetic structure of about 7,000 people, have discovered.

Riken’s findings, which were meant to shed more light on the origins of Japanese, were published in the online edition of a U.S. science magazine on Friday.

The biggest genetic difference in these two groups were found to be hair thickness and ear wax texture. People who originated from areas outside of the Ryukyu Islands tend to have much harder hair and drier ear wax and were discovered to be genetically closer to Chinese people.

What does this do to the “homogeneous Japanese race” theory?!?

Cyndi Lauper is in Japan right now doing a series of concerts. I saw her on the TV the other day as she did Time After Time, much like the following performance she did on TV in 2005.

Caught this commercial for the Intel Centrino 2 on TV last night.

Here is the open thread for the weekend.

Normal commenting rules do not apply, so have fun.

Taste and freshness, sure, but I’m not sure how confident I want my sandwich to be. It may convince me not to eat it.

Autumn is upon us, and in Japan that means one thing: School Sports Festival, a special event held at all elementary schools where kids run relays, do tug-of war, have egg toss competitions, perform dances that they’ve been practicing for months, and so on.

Known as undo-kai in Japanese, the Japanese tradition of a special day when kids can show off their athletic abilities to their parents began in 1874 when an English teacher named Frederick William Strange organized the first “outdoor games” as a way for Japanese to learn about Western sports.

Today, Sports Festivals are held across Japan, which turns out to be quite profitable for companies like Panasonic and Sony, who are all too happy to sell this year’s hot new video cameras to all the oya-baka (”parent-fool”), the word for parents who go ga-ga filming their own kids.

The other day my daughter’s elementary school had her last Sports Festival, and we dutifully gathered to cheer her on during the various events she was in.

It’s an annual tradition at the school that the sixth graders treat everyone to a brass band performance of the theme to Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers, and everyone did a great job.

27-year-old Japanese ex-porn (AV) actress Nao Oikawa (she retired from boinking in front of cameras in 2004) seems to have completed the move from blue movies to mainstream pop idol via a girl group named G3 Princess, which also includes Yumi Sugimoto and Rina Aizawa. Ms. Oikawa is the one on the right in the following video.

For a peek at a censored but very not-safe-for-work XXX video that spotlights some of Ms. Oikawa’s more salacious talents, click here.

Japan calls it Takeshima. Wikipedia lists it as the Liancourt Rocks. To the South Koreans, it’s Dokdo. I had never heard of these little boulders sticking out of the Sea of Japan/East Sea until recently, when Japan decided to claim sovereignty over it.

This has the South Koreans pretty pissed. Everywhere I went during my recent trip to South Korea I saw posters about Dokdo (in Korean so I couldn’t read it, but the picture of the “island” was always the same). I even saw a seafood restaurant called Dokdo. OK, so the restaurant predates the recent fracas but that only goes to show how the Koreans feel about the rocks.

I even spotted this shirt:

I probably would have bought it but the store was closed.

People in China and other countries around the world are worried what will become of their own health and the health of their loved ones with revelations of tainted food produced in China hit the news with each passing week.

Meanwhile. . .

While China grapples with its latest tainted food crisis, the political elite are served the choicest, safest delicacies. They get hormone-free beef from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, organic tea from the foothills of Tibet and rice watered by melted mountain snow.

And it’s all supplied by a special government outfit that provides all-organic goods from farms working under the strictest guidelines.

I wonder whether it will be revelations such as these that will lead to revolution in China.

I just got back from two weeks in South Korea (not actually Japan-related, I know, but it’s close). While in Korea I made a number of field recordings with my portable audio recorder. It’s a nice way to remember the trip, an additional sense memory to complement pictures.

I made an “album” of them, and have uploaded it here:

Download korea_in_sound.zip (38.5 MB)

It’s about 30 minutes long. I put it together like a continuous mix, arranged chronologically as I went through the country, but broke up the tracks so you don’t always have to listen to the whole thing.

For those of you interested in such things, I recorded it with an Edirol R-09 recorder at 24 bits. I assembled it in Logic and added just a touch of normalization and EQ, where necessary, and bounced it down to 16 bits. The final editing I did in Peak. I then converted the files to MP3 at 160 kbps for Web distribution. (If you’d like the full, CD-quality tracks, let me know. kemekthedopecomputer[at]hotmail[dot]com)

Enjoy!

The Peanuts, a female pair of Japanese twins (Emi and Yumi Ito), who were a major presence in the Japanese music world back in the ’60s, are planning to release a new album to mark the 50th anniversary of their debut back on 1959.

Here are a few of their better known songs in Japan.

If you are old enough, you might remember them as the duo who sang the original Mothra theme.

They even appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.

There are certain fundamentals that are evident in every culture; among these traditions are art, music, architecture and my favourite – clothing. To me there is nothing more fascinating than sauntering down the Champs-Elyse in Paris scrutinising every detail of the French sense of style, observing luxe hippies hanging out on the central reservation of Las Ramblas in Barcelona, or witnessing the catwalk to work that is New York 7am to 9am.

The natural compulsion to compare and contrast international style loiters in the back of my mind wherever I travel, and never has it been stronger than when I arrived in Osaka several months ago. Seconds after stepping lightheaded and sleepy from a seventeen hour flight I encountered my first peek at Japanese style. The ‘Japanese Only’ queue at immigration was awash with silhouettes and trends as yet unseen in European streets. Even through my sleep-deprived haze I was hooked!

The first thing I noticed was the fabulously draped chunky knitwear in midnight blue, heady aubergines, and earthy browns and greens. This season’s catwalks have cleverly reflected the global consensus of thrift. Being a conscientious consumer has never been so en vogue and the trend’s hasty adoption by the rich (maybe in the reverse process of a trend filtering up from the high street consumer) has shown a shift in global spending habits. Fashion has cleverly pre-empted this stark change in direction from summer’s ethnic florals and prints on miles of soft, luxurious fabrics (not that it’s disappeared completely; Gucci are flying the luxe ethnic flag in their latest collection), and produced garments based on sensible investment and simple silhouettes. Notable for me were Louis Vuitton, Jill Sander, Kenzo (stunning, chunky knitwear swathed haphazardly around models bodies complimented by bare legs and minimum accessories), Stella McCartney and Dolce and Gabbana amongst many others. Though, apparently they are all trailing the chic Japanese women!

It had been some time since I’d been to an unfamiliar country and the thrill of seeing new fashion was coursing through my veins by the time I arrived at my hotel (also flowing joyously through my veins was the elixir of life known in Japan as ‘Boss Coffee Rainbow Mountain Blend’). Let’s move away from knitwear now though as it was, at this point in time, still officially summer in Japan and pushing 27° most days. On my first venture out into the Japanese evening I was not greeted with any of the summer’s European fashions (the tea dress, straw trilby or the hideous gym pumps adorning the feet of indie teenagers) but instead was emerged in a world of simplicity and rigid elegance.

I dined alone in a small sushi restaurant on that first night (“Hitori des” being a phrase I learned quickly as a young woman travelling alone) but without my usual armour of a book or magazine. Instead I sat transfixed at my table examining the slew of business people who came and went in their perfectly tailored suits. The men were predictably attired as in any western country. It was the women that held my attention. Never before had I seen so many varieties of the classic white shirt and suit combo. It dawned on me that, in the same way that the Italians do ‘cool’, the British do ‘countryside’ and the Norwegians do ‘cosy’, the Japanese do ‘graceful’ chic. Issay Miyake may be out there on his own in western fashion, a pioneer of the unusual silhouette, but here in Japan you’re treated daily to a visual plethora of style that reveals his roots and inspirations.

Jane Young, a British national who has lived in Osaka for four years informed me that “There is still a culture of expectation in Japan in every facet of life. More so than in any European country the Japanese are expected to conform to certain regularities. This includes their clothes, the general rule of which is ‘conservative’. Even in the heat of summer you’ll see women in sleeveless shift dresses with a long sleeved blouse underneath to hide their arms. Bare legs in the office are also a no-no”.

When asked about the British habit of coming outside at lunchtime for a little sunbathe she replied “They’ll come outside to go to lunch but it wouldn’t be like in Britain where everyone strips off as much of their work clothes as possible! That much skin would be seriously frowned upon”.

What about that parade of fashion that now runs from tweenagers (aged 11-13) right up to late twenties? I don’t have the space to list all of the subcultures I’ve passed through myself or been witness to (living near London will do that to you). But, in my experience, western style goes all the way and behaves as if there will never be another fashion beyond what is ’now’. Simply put – we take ourselves way too seriously! Think of the permanence of tattoos or piercing scars, or the trauma of spending eighteen months growing out your Agyness Deyn crop. The mantra of young Japanese is “try anything once”, whether their fantasy of the day be punk, Goth, Lolita, cowboy (complete with Stetson and confederate belt buckle) or doll. As long as it’s transitory, anything goes!

The Japanese embrace the ephemeral nature of fashion in a way that we find difficult in Europe. “The expectation to conform makes young Japanese fearful of changing their appearance by getting tattoos or piercings that can’t be reversed or will scar.” Says Japanese fashion student Mika Kiminami “They ‘play’ with fashion like no-one else in the world because their time to be creative is limited”. I must agree with her wise words. My observation of young Japanese (the most famous being the fantastical creations tottering sweetly about the crazy circus that is Harajuku in Tokyo) has given me a new respect for them having the mind to think “next weekend I’ll be a punk”.  The skill of boys and girls alike to style themselves in a fresh and individual take on whatever their look of the day is certainly estimable.

The national sense of style in Japan seems to be intrinsically linked with national pride and deep expectation. The sense of countrywide ‘wa’ (harmony) must be protected as far as possible; a concept alien to most Europeans. Never have I visited a country with a more dominant sense of ‘oneness’ than Japan. There is some part of me that loves the organised rebellion of their young people, the way it will conclude when they begin their career and enter the real world. How many times have you heard British ‘kids’ in their late twenties being told to ‘grow up and live in the real world’? Maybe a spoonful of this Japanese medicine would be tough to swallow but ultimately beneficial.

Let it be said though that after spending time in Japan I shall enjoy returning to the convivial and varied world of fashion that Europe offers - much in the way you look forward to the familiarity of your favourite scruffy jumper that you will love and cherish above all other haute couture forever. But Japan I thank you! I thank you for your stiff elegance and ingenious take on being young and creative. I thank you for your individual and indispensable place in the world of fashion, and for being one of the most unambiguous innovators of chic I’ve ever encountered in my wandering quest to view the world’s sense of style one amble at a time.

Just in case you missed it over at Japan News Junkie, you might want to check out Natasha’s Story, which is the saga of a U.S. photographer’s efforts to get young girl of mixed Korean and American blood to American in line with here dead grandmother’s wishes.

Snapped by Mr. Pink recently with his camera phone.