Roland Kelts's Blog, page 33

Meet me in Madison, 4/30

With Satoshi Kitamura, Aoko Matsuda, Motoyuki Shibata, Adam L. Kern and Glynne Walley. Hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

On the road again: Chicago appearance, 4/28

With Satoshi Kitamura, Aoko Matsuda, Motoyuki Shibata, Susan Harris and Michael Bourdaghs. Hosted by the University of Chicago. Specs here.

We Love Japan, for The Happy Reader

My short subjective and selective history of the West's infatuation with "Japan." For Penguin UK's The Happy Reader .

Taking pictures of taking pictures

"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one."
Don DeLillo, White Noise.

On AnimeJapan 2015 & Comiket's "Otaku Summit," for The Japan Times

AnimeJapan 2015 sees the big picture


by Roland Kelts

For most in Japan, April marks the start of the new working year. But for the anime and manga biz, it all begins in March.

Last weekend, the second annual AnimeJapan trade fair overtook Tokyo Big Sight, with more than 120,000 total attendees (a spike of 10,000 over last year’s tally), 2,500 of whom were business representatives from Japan and overseas. This weekend, March 28 and 29, will see the first-ever “Otaku Summit,” a special edition of the biannual Comics Market (Comiket), featuring manga-fan artists from 18 countries and held at Chiba’s Makuhari Messe.

AnimeJapan is the union of two events, the former Tokyo Anime Festival (TAF) and The Anime Contents Expo (ACE), whose initial split was caused by a rift over ex-Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara’s controversial censorship drive in 2010. The first TAF I attended in 2005 targeted industry insiders — domestic studios, networks and media. But AnimeJapan has evolved into a hybrid that is part overseas-style fan convention, part trade fair, and far more globally conscious.

“Yes, we are really trying to transform AnimeJapan into the world’s best anime event,” says general producer Yuji Hirooka of Bandai Visual. “We are actively inviting more foreign visitors. We are also trying to make it more enjoyable for different kinds of visitors, like fans, businesspeople and even families. We want to meet their different needs.”

[photo Rob Pereyda]At AnimeJapan, three stages hosted a steady series of performances and presentations throughout the two days of public access, and a separate area was allotted to family activities like games and sing-alongs. Amateur cosplayers, once banned, roamed the floors.

“It was much more fan-friendly than I expected,” says Bamboo Dong, managing editor of Anime News Network, an online English-language information portal. Dong, based in Los Angeles, was attending her first AnimeJapan.

“I was surprised to see as many cosplayers as I did, both Japanese and foreign, milling around the booths. I expected most of them to stay in the photography areas. (And there was) a big emphasis on the actual production of anime, a lot of reverence for creators, which is a level of celebrity I don’t really see at the comic shows here (in the U.S.).”

Last year, several complaints about the lack of business opportunities led to the reinstatement of the business-only day prior to public access. Tokyo-based Rob Pereyda, founder and chairman of production company, Henshin, LLC, thinks that this year’s event produced measurable results.

“There was more overall polish in the execution specifically aimed at ‘going global,’ ” he says. “(The changes this year) clearly translated to more business being done at the show. Atmospherically, there was a flavor of ‘taking action’ in the air, through alliances, mergers, acquisitions — and expanding partnerships.”

[Rob Pereyda]
Japan’s 40 year-old Comiket, held every winter and summer, is the largest of its kind in the world, drawing over half a million manga-fan artists and their readers to Tokyo Big Sight. But it remains largely insular. This weekend’s Comiket Special, the sixth installment of a smaller, more experimental event staged in the spring, with its focus on hosting an international Otaku Summit, is a first.

The idea of reaching out to overseas manga otaku (fanboys and fangirls) was hatched by the fledgling International Otaku Expo Association (IOEA), whose director, Kazutaka Sato, and coordinator, Dan Kanemitsu, have been working for three years to turn concept into reality.

Kazutaka was on vacation in Paris with his wife in 2010 and happened upon France’s Japan Expo, the largest overseas showcase of Japanese pop culture. He tells me he was shocked to see the Metro teeming with foreign cosplayers. “Even at the Champs Elysees,” he says. “They were everywhere.”

The four members of the IOEA have made over a dozen trips to overseas otaku events in the past two years to reach out to non-Japanese participants. The association, Kanemitsu stresses, will only come into being once this weekend’s event is underway.

“It doesn’t really exist until (the summit) happens,” he says.

The biannual Comiket events organize their fan artists into “circles” that sometimes consist of a single artist, a team of artists, or artists and their friends and family members at a table bearing their work. In 1975, the first Comiket drew 32 people. Now, its scale is massive: 3,700 volunteer staffers look after 36,000 artist circles and more than 500,000 attendees.

Comiket
By contrast, this weekend’s Comiket special will host roughly 6,000 circles, anticipating an attendance of 50,000.

“We’re a marketplace first and foremost,” says Kanemitsu. “But the smaller scale (of Otaku Summit) allows us to try different things, like special concerts, seminars, interactive features, presentations by and for foreign participants. We cherish diversity.”

“Diverse” is not a word often associated with Japan, and certainly not with the manga and anime industries. In 2015, it remains nearly impossible for non-Japanese artists to work for Japan’s manga publishers or anime studios, and equally difficult for those parochial and cash-strapped businesses to hire them. But these two events show that “taking action” is in the air, however idealistic they may be.

Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.” He is a visiting scholar at Keio University in Tokyo.

Turning Japanese, for The Long + Short

Turning Japanese
Coping with stasis: how the supposed 'sick man of Asia' might be a model for us all



By Roland Kelts

I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure creaky, and basic services like ground transportation chaotic and unreliable.

I steel myself before landing, my mind tallying variables and unknowns: will my luggage land with me and emerge on the dingy carousel? Will the taxi service I booked online arrive on time, at the right terminal, or at all? Will traffic be an impediment to my destination?

And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of Los Angeles highway off-ramps from LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit.

Landing in Tokyo, though, is a breeze. All the travelators and escalators glide silently; the wall-mounted clocks, digital and analogue, tell the right time. When I reach the baggage carousel, my suitcase is already circling. Trains and buses depart punctually. I don’t have to pre-book because they’re scheduled merely minutes apart. I don’t have to think of anything beyond a book, the last one I was reading upon touchdown, fishing out my passport at immigration, and what I might order for dinner that evening once I reach my apartment. Everything seems to be taken care of, and nothing is broken.
As I ease into town, usually via the limousine bus service, the sidewalks outside are teeming with well-dressed urbanites heading home from work or out to restaurants, everyone in motion with purpose and meaning.

But that’s not what the papers say. Japan has seen over two decades of a stagnant-to-recessionary economy since its 1989-90 juggernaut bubble burst. It has become the world’s economic whipping boy, described repeatedly as ‘the sick man of Asia’, incapable of revival, doddering off into the sunset.

Reports of Japan’s societal stagnation are no prettier. Stories about the country’s ageing population and plummeting birth rate abound – with the latter hitting a record low last year amid dire predictions of a disappearing Japan. At current rates, demographers estimate that the overall population will drop 30 million by 2050.


Sekkusu shinai shōkōgun

Celibacy syndrome: Japanese women and men are tagged as ‘sexless’ with a distinct lack of interest in sexual relations.

Japan’s 2014 fertility rate is low – 1.4 births per woman – but David Pilling, former Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, notes that South Korea’s is lower; and that those of other developed countries, from Taiwan and Singapore to Germany and Italy, are similarly low.

“Much of the world is going Japan’s way,” says Pilling. “If Japan is doomed, so are many others.”

However, Pilling adds, the alternative isn’t necessarily better. “Can we really only conceive of a successful economy as one where the population increases year after year? By this measure Pakistan and many African countries should be screaming success stories. They’re not.”

Japanese men and women, meanwhile, are tagged as ‘sexless’, caught up in a celibacy syndrome (sekkusu shinai shōkōgun) that has both the married and the single declaring their lack of interest in sexual relations.

Japan’s young shut-ins (hikikomori) are socially withdrawn digital hermits, self-confined to their bedrooms, video games and online chats. The so-called herbivore/grass-feeding men (soushoku danshi) avoid competition in any arena, romantic or professional. Their female counterparts greet them with a shrug, collect their paycheques and dine out with their girlfriends.

Intuitively, this entropic, shrinking, even disappearing Japan shouldn’t look and feel as good as it does. To visitors, expats and residents alike, Japan is still one of the richest, most civilised and convenient countries in the world. There should be potholes in its streets and pickpockets in its alleys. Shops, restaurants, bars and factories should be darkened and idle. Its trains should be late, the passengers poorly dressed and busking for change.

The 2015 Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual ranking of the safest major cities in the world put Tokyo on top, with Japan’s second city, Osaka, at number three. While smaller and mid-sized Japanese cities betray some of the conventional signs of economic hardship (boarded-up storefronts and sparsely populated shopping malls ), in a world beset by rising fanatical violence and rancorous racism and inequality, safety is nothing to sneeze at.

In his 2014 book, Bending Adversity, Pilling grapples with the cognitive dissonance at the heart of 21st-century Japan: is it a harbinger of global stagnation? Or is it a model of global sustainability? In the book's most-quoted passage, a British MP, upon arriving in Tokyo in the early 2000s and surveying its lively environs, is reported to have said: "If this is a recession, I want one."

I caught up with Pilling, now based in Hong Kong but a frequent Tokyo returnee, to ask if he'd had a change of heart about the resilient, sustainable Japan he outlines in his book. He remains deeply sceptical of the knee-jerk pejoratives associated with stagnancy.

"Do rich societies really need to get richer and richer indefinitely?" he asks. "A lot of improvements in standard of living come not through what we normally consider as growth, but through technological improvements."

In fact, Pilling sees Japan's globally stagnant years as a time of dramatic domestic growth, if not the kind associated with standard economic measurements like GDP. "Many would agree that the standard of living, particularly in big cities like Tokyo, has improved significantly in the so-called lost decades. The city's skyline has been transformed, the quality of restaurants and services improved greatly. Despite the real stresses and strains and some genuine hardship, society has held together reasonably well. If this is what stagnation looks like, humanity could do a lot worse."

What makes one society hold together 'reasonably well', while others fail? You only have to look to the language for insight. Common words like ganbaru (to slog on tenaciously through tough times), gaman (endure with patience, dignity and respect), and jishuku (restrain yourself according to others' practices and needs) convey a culture rooted in pragmatism and perseverance.

After the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in northern Japan, the international media was awash with stories about the dignity and superhuman patience of survivors, many of whom peacefully waited hours in single-file lines for relief supplies, only to be turned away in the frigid weather, asked to try again the next day. No one rushed to the front; no one rioted. In shelters, meagre foodstuffs like rice balls were split in half or in quarters to make sure everyone had something to eat.


Soushoku danshi

The grass-feeding or herbivore men: Japanese men who avoid all competition in any arena.

Nearly everyone was on the same proverbial page: Japan's population is 98.5 per cent Japanese, as defined by citizenry. While ethnic diversity has its strengths (and some academics point out that, when you analyse the population's regional roots, Japan is quite diverse), a set of common cultural values, instilled from birth, may strengthen resilience in the face of crisis and adversity.

Journalist Kaori Shoji tells me that having few resources and learning to make the most of them is essential to the Japanese character. "The Japanese temperament is suited to dealing with poverty, scarcity and extremely limited resources. If [American Commodore Matthew Perry's] black ships didn't show up [to open Japan to Western trade] in the 19th century, we'd still be scratching our heads over the workings of the washing machine or the dynamics of a cheeseburger. On the other hand, with four centuries of frugality behind us, we have learned to be creative. Frugality doesn't have to mean drab stoicism and surviving on fish heads.”

Japan's stagnancy, pilloried by economists and analysts in the west, may turn out to be the catalyst for its greatest strengths: resiliency, reinvention and quiet endurance.

Until a couple of years ago, I lectured Japan's best and brightest at the University of Tokyo. My Japanese students were polite to a fault. They handed their essays to me and my teaching assistant with two hands affixed to the paper, like sacred artefacts. They nodded affirmatively when I asked if they understood what I'd said, even when they didn't . They were never late to class, and they never left early.

But when I pressed them on their future plans, they expressed a kind of blissful ambivalence. "I'd like to help improve Japan's legal system," Kazuki, a smart and trilingual student from Kyushu told me. "But if that doesn't work out, I just want to be a good father."

Sayaka, a literature major from Hokkaido, asked me if I understood her generation's dilemma. "We grew up very comfortable," she said. "We learned not to take risks."

No risk-taking – anathema to today’s 'fail-fast', Silicon Valley culture – would seem to indicate stagnation writ large. But what if it's a more futuristic model for all of us, even superior to Japan's sleek, sci-fi bubble-era iconography: all hi-tech and flashy yen, but no soul?

Waseda University professor Norihiro Kato, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, sees a radical example in Japanese culture that he describes as a model of 'de-growth', of returning to other measures of growth that transcend stagnancy, focused instead on quality of life.

"The shape of wisdom as well as self-worth has drastically changed,” he tells me at his office in Takadanobaba, north west Tokyo. "We can point to periods of change, the late 80s with Chernobyl, or early 90s with the end of the USSR and communism [the end of history, according to Francis Fukuyama], or the early 00s with September 11. And finally the early the early 10s, with March 11 and Fukushima Daiichi."

Kato sees our world as one of fundamental transition, from dreams of the infinite to realities of the finite – a transformation Japan grasps better than most of us. "I consider younger Japanese floating, shifting into a new qualified power, which can do and undo as well: can enjoy doing and not doing equally."

I ask him if Japan's model – stagnancy as strength – can inform the rest of the world, educate us in the possibilities of impoverishment?

"Imagine creating a robot that has the strength and delicacy to handle an egg," he says. “That robot has to have the skills to understand and not destroy that egg. This is the key concept for growing our ideas about growth into our managing of de-growth."

Handling that egg is tricky. A spike in youth volunteerism in Japan post 3/11 suggests that young Japanese, despite the global hand-wringing over their futures, are bypassing the old pathways to corporate success in favour of more humble participation.

In 2005, University of Tokyo graduate Mitsuru Izumo, who had a cosy law firm gig in his lap, left to found a startup: Euglena.jp: a way of feeding the world’s poorest via algae hybrids. A Keio University graduate is now selling stitched bags from Ethiopia. Haruka Mera of startup Ready, For? is thriving on global kickstarter campaigns for Japanese startups.


Ganbaru

To slog on tenaciously through tough times: a term highlighting Japan's sense of pragmatism and perseverance.

Mariko Furukawa, researcher for Japanese giant advertising firm Hakuhodo, reckons the think-small mentality of young Japanese is turning stagnancy into sustainability. She cites the proliferation of agri-related startups – peopled by young Japanese who are leaving the cities for rural environs, despite the low returns, and who don’t seem to care about globalisation.

"These small techs should really add up to something, and we may be able to replace [stagnation] with new innovation, not necessarily new technology," Furakawa says. "I think (the) Japanese ability to innovate in such things is very strong. And so, because these city planners and urban designers are talking about downsizing the cities, wrapping up into smaller furoshikis (Japanese rucksacks), so to speak, the awareness is there, they know what needs to be done. In this sense, we may be at the forefront of developed economies."

Furukawa notes that many European nations facing similar dilemmas don't have the same tools to address them. "Europe has been suffering from low growth. But I don't know if they are that innovative at new ways of living."

Japan's Blade Runner image of yesteryear, a futuristic amalgamation of high-tech efficiency coursing through neon-lit, noirish alleyways in sexy, 24-hour cities, is really a blip in the nation's 4,000-year-old history. Today the country is more about quality of life than quantities of stuff. In its combination of restraint, frugality, and civility, Japan may serve as one of our best societal models of sustenance for the future.

[Calligrapher Keiko Shimoda]

Roland Kelts is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and The Japan Times and the author of the best-selling Japanamerica. He divides his time between New York and Tokyo.

"Cool Japan" analyzed in The Atlantic

Japan's Ministry of Cool
Ahead of hosting the 2020 Summer Olympics, the country is ramping up government-sponsored efforts to promote its culture abroad.
PATRICK ST. MICHEL


Japan wants the world to know just how cool it is. Over the past six months, the country’s government has announced plans to pump millions of dollars into companies eager to expand internationally, such as the online lifestyle retailer Tokyo Otaku Mode and the ramen chain Ippudo. And that’s just the start. There are plans for a Japan-centric TV station and many more projects aimed at promoting the nation’s culture to the rest of the world while generating money and interest in the 2020 Olympic Games, hosted by Tokyo. The effort isn't new: For over a decade, the country has embraced “Cool Japan,” a government-supported movement focused on selling what many have described as its “gross national cool.” This has involved touting cornerstones of pop culture such as cartoons, comics, music, and food overseas, as well as seemingly less hip products such as rugs and salt.

Last year, the Japanese government created the Cool Japan Fund, an organization tasked with helping businesses expand overseas, backed by an initial investment of several billion dollars. The country shifted to this approach several years after its “bubble economy” popped in the 1990s, turning to pop-culture exports in place of the industrial ones that helped Japan boom in the 1980s. There is some irony at work here—an eagerness to promote something as trendy usually signals the opposite—but for years the country's efforts have paid off. Now, though, Japan’s drive for coolness faces pressure from its Asian neighbors and growing concerns regarding who exactly Cool Japan is aimed at—the outside world, or the Japanese themselves.
The country's pop-culture creations have captured foreign attention since the end of World War II. Cartoons such as Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and Gigantor played on American television in the 1960s, while singer Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki” sold over 13 million copies worldwide that same decade. The first big boom in Japanese pop culture came in the 80s thanks to the rise of Nintendo, Hello Kitty, and anime—with the latter playing a central role in the following decades as shows such as Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, and Pokemon became staples of thousands of kids' daily routines. Coupled with the Tamagotchi toy, Japanese fashion, and the rise of the famed director Hayao Miyazaki’s animation company Studio Ghibli, Japan became a global powerhouse of kitschy trendiness.

Japan’s cultural ascent was made possible—and necessary—thanks to the economic bubble popping in the early 90s. In the previous decade, the country had arguably "the world's most vibrant consumer culture," writes David Marx at the Japan-focused website Neojaponisme. But as the economy declined, people in Japan started spending less, and companies looked abroad for new markets.

The California Sunday Magazine editor in chief Douglas McGray picked up on this, and in 2002 wrote an article for Foreign Policy focusing on the trend. He compared Japan’s “national cool” to the idea of “soft power,” wherein countries influence others in traditional ways. Consider the United States—American films, music, and TV shows are nearly everywhere globally, and they’ve been spreading an image of “American cool” for decades now. McGray’s piece proved influential, and by 2005 the Japanese government was publicly talking about the concept of “Cool Japan.” The slogan even prompted its own TV program, Cool Japan, aired by national broadcaster NHK and featuring foreign visitors being wowed by all aspects of Japan—from J-pop to candy to construction.

The actual implementation of “Cool Japan” in recent years, however, has been spotty, especially in the Western world. Although peak popularity for anime and manga passed sometime in the middle of the last decade, shows such as Attack On Titan and One Piece have attracted foreign attention, while Japanese video games and film remain influential. Japanese pop culture, however, remains a niche interest, and in many cases not one to brag about (to be called a “Japanophile” or a “weeaboo” is not a term of endearment). There are, of course, exceptions: Gwen Stefani made Harajuku Girls a thing, the experimental musician Grimes is a professed lover of all things Japan-related, and the singer Sky Ferreira's song "Omanko" is about Japanese Jesus and Christmas.

But many explicit efforts to highlight domestic superstars—especially when it comes to Japanese music—have puttered out, while performers such as the pop singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and the metal idol band Babymetal have become YouTube hits without any Cool Japan help. The government department in charge of the project even interviewed the latter trio in order to figure out how they were doing so well without its assistance.

Japan's neighbors to the east are also putting additional pressure on the country. Despite many hailing Japan’s “soft power” at the turn of the century, South Korea has blazed past it, outclassing Japan’s efforts in recent years with its own government-supported cultural promotion, known as Hallyu, or "Korean Wave." Korean films, TV series, and music have made huge inroads globally, while Western performers have been eager to collaborate with K-pop stars. Snoop Dogg teamed up with Psy, while the American electronic music producers Diplo and Skrillex collaborated with the Korean pop stars G-Dragon and CL for the song "Dirty Vibe." Korean pop culture remains a niche interest in much of the Western world: Even though the movement’s crown jewel, Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” was an accidental success following several musical failures, South Korea is still far ahead of Cool Japan, slipups and all. China has also been eyeing soft-power expansion, though beyond its Confucius Institutes (international nonprofit programs meant to spread Chinese culture and language abroad), it still has a way to go.

Japanese pop culture remains a niche interest, and in many cases, not one to brag about.
All three Asian nations’ soft-power pushes have been judged by how successful they’ve been in the West, particularly in the U.S. Even though the allure of “breaking America” certainly helps drive programs like Cool Japan, the real target is developing nations, especially those in Southeast Asia. Many have tagged the region as being on the rise, and as a stronger consumer class emerges, Japan wants to instil a positive image of the country: one that hopefully encourages spending on Japanese cultural goods. In The Japan Times, Roland Kelts writes how Cool Japan is also using Southeast Asia “as a launching stage” for various projects. Again, however, Korea has beaten Japan to the punch, as K-pop and Korean food have become trendy in the region.

One country where Cool Japan appears to be doing well, though, is Japan itself. The newspaper Mainichi Shimbun published an article near the end of February focused on a boom in “Japanese glorification.” The piece argued that, since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the country has embraced more and more media products that trumpet how great Japan is. It's a form of national coping that has only been egged on by the state of affairs in the continent, as Japan's status in the region shrinks compared to China's.

Television shows such as Rediscover Japan and Sugoi Desu Ne! Shisatsudan revolve around foreign visitors being interviewed about how cool Japan is—all dubbed in Japanese. NHK’s jingoistic Cool Japan program—one that isn’t easy to find outside of the country—similarly seems more focused on making even the most innocuous subjects seem like triumphs the Japanese should be proud of. Even travel shows supposedly focused on exploring other countries tend to end up zooming in on how Japan is represented abroad. Universal Studios Japan opened a special “Cool Japan” zone earlier this year, featuring attractions devoted to “four popular brands from Japan that are renowned across the world.” It’s sure to attract attention from Japanese visitors and foreign tourists alike, but in terms of promoting the country overseas, it comes off as a waste.

Japan, for the most part, still holds hefty cultural influence, and continues to hold sway with younger audiences. Big Hero 6, this year’s Academy Award Winner for Best Animated Feature, took place in “San Fransokyo,” a city loaded with Japanese cultural references. If the country wants to spread its soft power further, however—and not waste billions of dollars in the process—the Cool Japan program will have to expand its focus outside of its own shores, and realize consumers won’t automatically snap up whatever it spotlights. Just saying something's cool doesn’t make it so.

Japan's vending paradise, in boingboing

from BoingBoing by Colin Marshall

When he tried to quit smoking, the writer David Sedaris distracted himself from his lingering cravings by changing his surroundings: specifically, he moved to Japan for a few months. Not only did it help him kick the habit, it gave him a great deal of material for his hilarious and observant stories.

In his book When You Are Englufed in Flames, Sedaris tells of his and a French Japanese-language classmate's astonishment at Tokyo's abundance of vending machines:

“Can you believe it?” he asked. “In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.”

“I know it,” I said.

Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was.

“In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him.

The Indonesian raised his eyebrows.

“He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”

The Indonesian student asked why, and we were hard put to explain.

“It’s something to do?” I offered.

“But you can read a newspaper,” the Indonesian said.

“Yes,” I explained, ” but that wouldn’t satisfy your basic need to tear something apart.”
I think about that conversation every time I return from Asia to the States. Loyal Boing Boing readers, of course, know the joys and oddities of Japanese vending machines well from posts on their contents (hot ginger ale, live crab, lobster, bananas, deep-dish pizza, bread-in-a-can, the ubiquitous coffee and cigarettes), their history (and "lives"), and innovations in the field (such as a hand cranks, biometric scanners, and even vending machine-shaped disguises for women).

One time in Japan, I went to the vending-machine rich city of Osaka to interview Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft on my podcast, Notebook on Cities and Culture. Ashcraft is a longtime Osaka resident, and has made himself into something of an expert on Japanese vending machines, writing about their variety, the differences between them and American vending machines, the ones that serve crepes, and the truth about the ones that supposedly sell used schoolgirls' underwear.

More recently, Ashcraft covered the reasons for the popularity of vending machines in Japan, all 5.52 million of them, not just in the major cities but in the suburbs, the countryside — everywhere. He cites, among other factors, the Japanese love of technology, the coexistence of Japan's many major beverage companies and their usefulness as advertisements for those companies, their publicity-stunt potential, and the country's long history of "unmanned seller" stalls (as well as the astonishingly low crime rates that make them viable, though the unthinkable does happen).


We might also consider the Japanese tolerance for what the West would call "overpackaging," as Japan observer Roland Kelts discusses in the clip at the top. I interviewed him as well, and in that conversation the half-Japanese Kelts tells of his own incredulity, when first he worked in Japan, at seeing a group of local adolescents hanging out every night beside a machine selling $10 fifths of whiskey, no ID required — yet never buying any, let alone smashing the thing up.

Maybe they just had a kind of respect for such a hallowed device.

"The few vending machines I come across in New York are just that: vending machines," writes Ashcraft. "That's fine. But in Japan, they're so much more."

For me, they offer a constant reminder that I myself come from a land whose impulsiveness and insecurity turns a pleasure as simple as a can of green tea on a nighttime stroll into an absurd proposition. This is why we can't have nice things, America.

Shimbash! Learn Japanese in 3.5 minutes

On Japan's earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, for NHK TV