Roland Kelts's Blog, page 39

On the "Summer of Kawaii" 2014, for The Japan Times

Forget Cool Japan — cute is this summer’s hot global export
BY ROLAND KELTS


Summer is high season for fans of Japanese pop culture. School’s out, weather’s amenable and festivals, conventions and expos shift into top gear in Japan and across the globe.

Many in the pop-culture business are branding summer 2014 “the summer of kawaii” (Japanese uber-cute), and it’s not hard to see why. To inaugurate the season, Japan’s digital diva and holographic pop star Hatsune Miku, cute as her turquoise pigtails, hit the road in late May as the opening act for the first leg of megastar Lady Gaga’s North American tour. Miku’s makers plan to reprise her supporting role when Gaga tours Japan in August. This echoes animated band Gorillaz’s collaboration with Madonna at the 2006 Grammies — beautiful illustrations and flesh-and-blood pop icons share the stage. Expect more.
If you happen to find wolves cute, animalistic Japanese rock band Man With A Mission kicks off a 16-date North American tour on June 18 that will take it from New York to Canada and California, with new EP “When My Devil Rises” hitting iTunes a few days ago. The wolf-headed band blends the melodic funk of Red Hot Chili Peppers with the guitar crunch of Foo Fighters and Japanese mod rockers The Blue Hearts, singing several songs exclusively in English. When I asked bilingual guitarist and songwriter Jean-Ken Johnny after a Tokyo show last month whether the wolf masks ever get hot, he answered: “These aren’t masks. We were born this way.”


As Man With A Mission crisscrosses the North American continent, the world’s biggest celebrations of Japanese pop culture will take place — and Japan’s French fan base still rules the overseas market. Japan Expo 2014 runs July 2-6 in Paris. It routinely attracts audience numbers in six figures, making Japanese producers and artists keen to attend. The French arguably began appreciating the modern pop culture of Japan before anyone else in the West, and among the anticipated highlights at this year’s Expo is the return of singing group Berryz Kobo, who rank among the top of today’s kawaii idols.

But U.S. fandom is catching up. The same weekend will see Anime Expo, North America’s largest Japanese pop-culture convention, hold its 2014 show in Los Angeles. This year, four kawaii-driven Japanese fashion designers — including Swankiss and Kokokim, appearing overseas for the first time — will present their latest collections straight from the streets of Harajuku and Shibuya. (I will be there too, as keynote speaker for a sideline event called Project Anime, a venture that seeks to bring together international convention organizers with Japanese producers and artists.)


A hop and skip up the West Coast in San Francisco is the J-Pop Summit Festival, an annual event hosted by the Japantown Merchants Association and Japanese entertainment complex New People, the epicenter of Japanese pop culture in the Bay Area. This year’s summit takes place in Japantown and Union Square on July 19-20, and the focus will be squarely on kawaii cool. Tokyo Girls’ Style and Daichi are among the star performers, and there will be a special appearance by artist Kei, illustrator of Hatsune Miku.

“The phenomenon of kawaii culture has reached global proportions," says Seiji Horibuchi, director of the J-Pop Summit. "It has become the perfect vehicle to present all of the diverse trends that are being created in Japan across a multitude of genres and mediums.”


Over at Hyper Japan in London, July 25-27, organizers are devoting an entire area of Earls Court to Hyper Kawaii!! — a full-on showcase for Japanese street fashion featuring a stage for live performances, models and, of course, prodigious shopping. The event is a tie-up with Harajuku Kawaii!!, a touring showcase run by Japan’s AsobiSystem, the company behind kawaii cultural icon and performer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Harajuku Kawaii!! will also be at J-Pop Summit Festival.

Closer to home, Nagoya’s annual costume showcase of global kawaii culture, the World Cosplay Summit, runs July 26-Aug. 3. Since its inception in 2003, the festival, with its related competitions, performances and displays, has grown to include cosplay teams and participants from over 20 countries worldwide.

The most hotly anticipated anime release this summer is a watershed title in kawaii culture: the reboot of “Sailor Moon,” called “Sailor Moon Crystal.” Starting July 5, the magical schoolgirls who launched a gazillion anime fans (girls and boys) via television broadcasts in the 1990s — and inspired nearly as many cosplayers to don Japanese schoolgirl miniskirts, prudence be damned — will be streamed on Japan’s video-sharing site, Niconico, subtitled in 10 languages, a testament to anime’s global reach. Viz Media is the series’ North American licensee, and it will also be streamed on Crunchyroll and Hulu.

Like it or not, this summer is all about kawaii. And when Comiket, the world’s largest twice-yearly event focused on fan-made anime and manga, opens in Odaiba, Tokyo, on Aug. 15, expect half a million or more to be on hand, many dressed as cute as they can.

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.

On UNIQLO for M magazine and Women's Wear Daily

I usually dread shopping for clothes. The volume of options amid mazes of racks induces nausea. But here, the tightly folded and labeled stacks convey the comfort and clarity of minimalism—even though there’s tons of stuff. “We excel in plenitude,” a staff member tells me.
Uniqlo itself is piled high with contradictions: a very Japanese clothing retailer and corporate culture that is determined to be, and go, global, with American-style transparency and entrepreneurship tethered to Japanese-style customer service in its hybrid heart; an arbiter of basicwear that flirts with both high and fast fashion; and a promotional machine that is teeming with brand strategies even as its logo appears nowhere on its product lines. “We have a lot of paradoxes,” says Mark Johnson, the company’s executive director of global visual merchandising.

On the day I visit the Tokyo flagship for a guided tour, the entrance is dominated by a display for SPRZ NY, an abbreviation of “Surprise New York.” This is the slogan for the chain’s latest campaign, a partnership with the Museum of Modern Art (Uniqlo sponsors MoMA’s free Friday nights) that involves a seasonal line of T-shirts and assorted casualwear called the UT Collection, featuring graphics from the works of Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Keith Haring, and other pop artists selected by MoMA. The collection also includes vintage pop imagery from brands, such as Disney and MTV, chosen by its creative director, Japanese hip-hop streetwear designer Nigo, of A Bathing Ape (BAPE) and Billionaire Boys Club (BBC). Nigo brought on board his buddy and BBC collaborator Pharrell Williams for a collection of Uniqlo T-shirts and caps called I Am Other.

Meanwhile, Uniqlo has embarked on a brick-and-mortar global rampage. Just as “SPRZ NY” was kicking off in Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue flagship—together with the opening of Uniqlo’s first-ever in-store Starbucks—the company launched its first German store, in Berlin, and debuted in Australia less than a week later. Uniqlo plans to open two hundred new stores by the end of 2014, in Boston, New York, Paris, Shanghai, and Sydney, with a long-term plan to launch twenty per year in the U.S. alone. Its target is $50 billion in sales by 2020, which would allow it to overtake Zara, H&M, and the Gap as the world’s largest clothing retailer.

Back in Ginza, samples of the MoMA T-shirt line are encased in glass, in the center of the store. The
display heightens the sense of occasion without being ostentatious. I am reminded of conveyor-belt kaiten sushi restaurants, a low-cost mainstay in Japanese cities, where one of the world’s most expensive cuisines can often be had for about a dollar or two per plate, gliding past your eyes on colored, price-coded platters that bear slabs of fish atop pods of rice. The sushi isn’t the best or the worst, and it’s not pretending to be anything but itself. It looks good, it’s edible, and it’s affordable.

Uniqlo’s principal tagline is “Made for All,” and its models resemble decent-looking college friends. The company’s utopian universalism extends to its global product line. With few exceptions, and the simplest
adjustments to size charts (a medium in Japan is a small in the U.S.), Uniqlo sells the same things everywhere.

Like other Japanese companies after World War Two, including Toyota and Sony, Uniqlo seeks to be a safe, low-stress option in a world gone chaotic. There is nothing intimidating or discriminatory about its pitch. It’s like an airport lounge: Everyone is in transit, just passing through, so let’s take care of basic needs, with splashes of color to revive the spirit.

Uniqlo is the growth leader for Fast Retailing Ltd., which includes Comptoir des Cotonniers, GU, Helmut Lang, J Brand, Princesse Tam Tam, and Theory. The name is the result of a misspelling—its original brand, the Unique Clothing Warehouse, should technically have been abbreviated as Uniclo, but a Japanese employee got the second consonant wrong.

Its founder, 65-year-old Tadashi Yanai, is Japan’s second-richest man, worth an estimated $17.8 billion (as reported by Forbes), but he grew up very poor, in a rural village in a devastated and humiliated postwar Japan.

Yanai is the same age as one of his favorite novelists, Haruki Murakami. Like Murakami, he grew up steeped in American culture—seen from afar, a world of plenitude and logic, color and light. He once described the smell of chocolate and coffee as “aspirational.” His Tokyo office is lined with Time magazine covers from the fifties and sixties, and his heroes range from Bob Fisher, founder of the Gap, to Steve Jobs. Yet he retains a singular pride in Japanese etiquette and that most elusive of retail experiences, quality customer service.

At a press conference in Yokohama this spring, Yanai announced a strategic shift in Uniqlo’s focus. Going forward, he said, the company’s most critical asset is its “people.” Sixteen thousand of Uniqlo’s thirty thousand part-time employees in Japan would be offered full-time status, he announced, including health insurance and the chance to work their way up to becoming store managers. Yanai offered the assembled employees and media a bit of philosophical advice: “I would like you to spend most of your time as store managers listening to what your staff has to say. Hear ten times more than what you say.”

In the twenty-first century, the Japanese-ness of Uniqlo is embedded as a key part of its appeal. When the first New York store opened in Soho, in 2006, I was startled by its signage: The English alphabet hung next to its katakana equivalent (Japanese syllabary for non-Chinese or non-Japanese words). Dangling above lower Broadway, with its raffish admixture of high-end design shops and low-budget retailers, the Japanese script looked appealingly out of place. Now it just looks cool. Little wonder that Uniqlo’s current slogan is  quizzically Zen: “Global is local; Local is global.”

For Uniqlo employees, the two key Japanese cultural concepts are kaizen (constant improvement) and monozukuri (making physical things well). Uniqlo staff members are happy to drive these points home, citing the innovative product lines called Heattech, a synthetic long-underwear fabric that keeps you warm without bogging you down, and Airism, another fabric that keeps you cool while absorbing your sweat. There is also a line of thin, lightweight down jackets called Ultralight Down.

Although Uniqlo is routinely lumped into the fast-fashion camp with outlets such as Zara and Forever 21, it really isn’t that. The quality of a pair of socks, for example, or a down vest, means more to its customers than the lineup for summer 2014. Its “Made for All” slogan is not all puff. You are meant to enhance Uniqlo, not the other way around.

Oliver Ormrod, a bilingual Canadian from Uniqlo’s public-relations department, says he sees this as a distinctly Japanese trait, born out of the nation’s frictions with its neighbors, its natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, and volcanic eruptions), and its war-inflicted damage. “In Japan,” he says, “there’s a long history of people adapting to the environment, as opposed to the environment adapting to them. We created Heattech (lightweight long underwear) with this in mind. There’s very little central heating in Japan. You need to find ways to keep yourself warm.”

Uniqlo’s emphasis on customer service can be difficult for its employees. Each morning, they arrive hours before opening, to recite key phrases meant to instill best practices and loyalty:

Hello, my name is _____. How are you today?Did you find everything you were looking for?Let me know if you need anything. My name is _____.Thank you for waiting.Did you find everything you were looking for?Good-bye. We hope to see you again soon.
When I learn this, I can’t help but think back to the eighties, when I was a kid in Boston, watching stomach-churning videos of Japanese autoworkers singing company songs and performing jumping jacks to prove their obedience to the brand.

But Uniqlo is not some Japan Inc. robot, its employees say. Most Japanese companies hire Japanese expats to run their overseas businesses, says Uniqlo U.S. CEO Larry Meyer. Not Uniqlo. In France, the French rule the stores. In China, the Chinese. And so on. “I’ve worked with a lot of companies,” Meyer says. “And this is truly the most transparent, sharing store sales on a daily basis. I think most of our customers know we’re a Japanese company at heart, and that’s good. We are of and from Japan. And I’m proud of that.”

Yanai is a Japanese CEO of a certain generation, and it’s impossible to ignore his country’s roots in Uniqlo’s character. I am told time and again that he is very hands-on, visiting stores un-announced in Japan and overseas to peruse the shelves, offering tips and comments in a soft-spoken voice, interspersing jokes with the advice. In Japan, he is something of a celebrity, but he rarely appears on television or gives interviews. In the U.S., he appears regularly at his New York stores, but he is unrecognized, and his American staff members tell me they can e-mail him at any time, and he replies personally.

Still, his global vision is not without pitfalls. In early April, Uniqlo’s stock nosedived, and the entire Nikkei stock-market index tanked with it. The reason? Faltering sales in Japan and doubts about the brisk pace of Uniqlo’s global expansion.

This was likely a mere speed bump for Yanai and others of his generation—Japanese who saw their country crushed by war, then arose from the ashes to create an economic and cultural juggernaut that remains unprecedented historically. Uniqlo, a clothing chain that embodies so much of what we love about Japan—excellent service, innovation, and smart styles—is transforming the fashion landscape, even as it remains a blank slate of identity.

In its native land, the brand’s brandlessness has been key to its appeal, particularly for younger Japanese, many of whom bristle at the designer-label fetish of their nouveau-riche elders. (Although sustaining the youth market anywhere is tricky. A few years ago, the epithet “unibare!”—a kind of “gotcha wearing Uniqlo duds!”—was hurled at the unsuspecting, prompting Yanai to cultivate higher-end real estate and designer partnerships.)

The postmodernism of Japan has always been ascribed to its ability to produce canvases that
accommodate our desires and longings.

Hello Kitty wouldn’t be Kitty if she had a mouth.

Karaoke is nothing if you don’t invest yourself in the singing. A tea ceremony is a drag if you don’t whisk the matcha, and there is no ikebana if you don’t arrange the flower stems.

Uniqlo slides nicely into place in Japan’s history of bold modesty. You find the store, slip into its embrace, and silently ascend. Everything is laid out neatly, and everyone is willing to help. After war, poverty, pain, and hardship, a simple, colorful sweater can go a long way.

Back to Iwate for NHK

I attended kindergarten in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, when I lived with my grandparents. I revisited Iwate many times, accompanied by my mother.
Now I am here to host a documentary for NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, on the aftermath of the 2011 quake and tsunami.

Iwate is as beautiful and becalming as I remember it.

On Japan's 'satori sedai,' the enlightened generation, for Adbusters

The Satori Generation
A new breed of young people have outdone the tricksters of advertising.
by Roland Kelts

[photo by Ono Kei]
They don’t want cars or brand name handbags or luxury boots. To many of them, travel beyond the known and local is expensive and potentially dangerous. They work part-time jobs—because that is what they’ve been offered—and live at home long after they graduate. They’re not getting married or having kids. They’re not even sure if they want to be in romantic relationships. Why? Too much hassle. Oh, and too expensive.

In Japan, they’ve come to be known as satori sedai—the “enlightened generation.” In Buddhist terms: free from material desires, focused on self-awareness, finding essential truths. But another translation is grimmer: “generation resignation,” or those without ideals, ambition or hope.

They were born in the late 1980s on up, when their nation’s economic juggernaut, with its promises of lifetime employment and conspicuous celebrations of consumption, was already a spent historical force. They don’t believe the future will get better—so they make do with what they have.  In one respect, they’re arch-realists. And they’re freaking their elders out.
“Don’t you want to get a nice German car one day?”—asked one flustered 50-something guest of his 20-something counterpart on a nationally broadcast talk show.  The show aired on the eve of Coming of Age Day, a national holiday in Japan that celebrates the latest crop of youth turning 20, the threshold of adulthood.  An animated graphic of a smiling man wearing sunglasses driving a blonde around in a convertible flashed across the screen, the man’s scarf fluttering in the wind.  “Don’t you want a pretty young woman to take on a Sunday drive?”

There was some polite giggling from the guests.  After a pause, the younger man said, “I’m really not interested, no.”

Critics of the satori youths level the kinds of intergenerational accusations time-honored worldwide: they’re lazy, lacking in willpower, potency and drive.

Having lectured to a number of them at several universities in Tokyo, I was able to query students directly. “We’re risk-averse,” was the most common response.  We were raised in relative comfort.  We’re just trying to keep it that way.

Is this enlightened, or resigned? Or both?

Novelist Genichiro Takahashi, 63, addressed the matter in an essay 10 years ago.  He called the new wave of youth a “generation of loss,” but he defined them as “the world’s most advanced phenomenon”—in his view, a generation whose only desires are those that are actually achievable.

The satori generation are known for keeping things small, preferring an evening at home with a small gathering of friends, for example, to an upscale restaurant.  They create ensemble outfits from so-called “fast fashion” discount stores like Uniqlo or H&M, instead of purchasing top-shelf at Louis Vuitton or Prada. They don’t even booze.

“They drink much less alcohol than the kids of my generation, for sure,” says social critic and researcher Mariko Fujiwara of Hakuhodo. “And even when they go to places where they are free to drink, drinking too much was never ‘cool’ for them the way it was for us.”

Fujiwara’s research leads her to define a global trend—youth who have the technological tools to avoid being duped by phony needs.  There is a new breed of young people, she says, who have outdone the tricksters of advertising.

“They are prudent and careful about what they buy. They have been informed about the expensive top brands of all sorts of consumer goods but were never so impressed by them like those from the bubble generation. We have identified them as those who are far more levelheaded than the generations preceding them as a result of the new reality they came to face.”

The new reality is affecting a new generation around the world.  Young Americans and Europeans are increasingly living at home, saving money, and living prudently.  Technology, as it did in Japan, abets their shrinking circles.  If you have internet access, you can accomplish a lot in a little room.  And revolution in the 21st century, as most young people know, is not about consumption—it’s about sustainability.

Waseda University professor, Norihiro Kato, points to broader global phenomena that have radically transformed younger generations’ sense of possibility, calling it a shift from “the infinite to the finite.” Kato cites the Chernobyl meltdown and the fall of communism in the late 1980s and early 90s; the September 11 terrorist attacks in the early 2000s; and closer to home, the triple earthquake, tsunami and ongoing nuclear disasters in Japan.

These events reshaped our sense of wisdom and self-worth. The satori generation, he says, marks the emergence of a new “‘qualified power,’ the power to do and the power to undo, and the ability to enjoy doing and not doing equally.  Imagine a robot with the sophistication and strength to clutch an egg without crushing it.  The key concept is outgrowing growth toward degrowth.  That’s the wisdom of this new generation.”

In America and Europe, the new generation is teaching us how to live with less—but also how to live with one another. Mainstream media decry the number of young people living at home—a record 26.1 million in the US, according to recent statistics—yet living at home and caring for one’s elders has long been a mainstay of Japanese culture.

In the context of shrinking resources and global crises, satori “enlightenment” might mean what the young everywhere are telling us: shrink your goals to the realistic, help your family and community and resign yourself to peace.

What Takahashi called “the world’s most advanced phenomenon” may well be coming our way from Japan. But this time it’s not automotive or robotic or electronic. It’s human enlightenment.

Roland Kelts is a half-Japanese writer based in Tokyo and New York. He is the author of the bestselling "JAPANAMERICA: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US", and a contributor to enlightened media worldwide.

Toronto Japanamerica report

On manga and the Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2014 for my Japan Times column

Manga becomes a major draw at Toronto Comic Arts Festival
BY ROLAND KELTS


The 11th annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) kicked off May 10. As its title suggests, it’s less a fan-focused pop convention than a platform for comics and graphic novels as art, and for the artists who create them. It has also emerged over the past few years as a great friend to manga.

Toronto is often cited as one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, and one of the safest, with crime rates far lower than in neighboring U.S. metropolises. Half of Toronto’s population were born outside of Canada, a good portion of them in Asia. When I visited the city a few months ago to take part in a week of readings and presentations at the behest of The Japan Foundation, I was surrounded by Asian cuisine and culture on nearly every block. My audiences were large, deeply engaged and multi-ethnic, looking less like a hockey team than a Benetton commercial.

“Toronto has become a great place for fans of Japanese pop culture,” says the festival’s director and co-founder, Christopher Butcher. “We’re fortunate to have a large Japanese population and other ethnic communities here. And even our French community has a great native appreciation of comics culture.”
Butcher and co-founder Peter Birkemore launched TCAF in 2003, modeling it after the veteran biannual comic market and exhibition Stripdagen Haarlem in the Netherlands. Attendance has grown from 600 to an expected 20,000 this year.

The festival’s first Japanese guest was Yoshihiro Tatsumi, author of the manga memoir, “A Drifting Life.” Tatsumi appeared in 2009, the same year “Drifting” was awarded the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in Japan. (The title won two Eisner Awards in the U.S. the following year.) It was only his second venture outside of Japan, and his first time ever in Canada.

Tatsumi’s presence at TCAF was both a surprise for attendees and a big success, according to Butcher. Fans were thrilled to meet an artist from so far away.

“We’d had guests from France and the United Kingdom previously, but five or six years ago, the manga publishing industry in Japan seemed impenetrable,” he says. “We strive to have authors on hand and have their (own) stories be a part of a book’s release. Having an artist come from Japan seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Fortunately for TCAF, it wasn’t. Tatsumi’s positive experience spread via word of mouth through the manga industry in Japan. In 2011, authors Natsume Ono and Furuya Usamuru attended TCAF with representatives from Ohta Publishing Co., one of Japan’s more provocative manga publishers. The next year, Kodansha and Kanata Konami showed up.

And last year, Butcher scored something of a coup: Taiyo Matsumoto, critically acclaimed artist and author of “Tekkon Kinkreet” and “Sunny,” among others, appeared at TCAF alongside his friend, American filmmaker Michael Arias, director of the award-winning anime adaptation of “Tekkon.” Matsumoto even produced an original illustration for the festival’s poster.

Taiyo Matsumoto at TCAF 2013
“TCAF was very warm and intimate, without all the bustle and chaos of the big American conventions,” says Arias, who has lived and worked in Japan for more than 20 years. “(The festival) had such an interesting mix of artists. Some were very edgy. Taiyo was very visibly thrilled at the chance to mix with so many of his contemporaries and see so much of their artwork up close. He’s a serious comic fan, so he ended up going on a very serious shopping spree.”

The festival hosted a screening of Arias’ “Tekkon” and a career retrospective of Matsumoto’s art featuring a few hundred original illustrations. (Matsumoto’s originals have never before — or since — been exhibited.)

This year’s TCAF boasted the festival’s largest manga presence yet, with four artists flying in from Japan: Moyoco Anno, est em (Maki Satoh), and the creator duo, Akira Himekawa (S. Nagano and A. Honda). Among the scheduled events is an interview with Yohei Sadoshima, the charismatic CEO and founder of Japanese literary agency Cork Inc., on the future of manga publishing, and a conversation with Himekawa, the team behind “The Legend of Zelda” and “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.”

Manga artists are notoriously reclusive, and the industry overall is still parochial, focused mainly on the domestic market in Japan. Overseas requests are often denied or ignored. Butcher stresses that the TCAF team makes plans years in advance and works very hard to obtain Japanese guests, and he cites the support of local organizations and the festival’s devotion to art and craft as crucial pillars of its success.

“The Japan Foundation has been very supportive of our efforts, as has the French Consulate. They’re just as happy to have a manga author (visit) as they are to have a literary author or a musician. There is a basic level of respect for the work being done there, and Toronto has one of the strongest contingents of comic book stores in maybe all of North America.”

Still, he admits, the North American comics industry is no match for the decades-old world of manga in Japan, which, he says, “may be 100 times bigger. We could devote all of TCAF, the whole show, to Japanese artists. I could choose 100 or more I’d love to have here and still not scratch the surface.”

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. For more information on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, visit www.torontocomics.com.

On Japan's Beethoven for The New Yorker

The Unmasking of “Japan’s Beethoven”  By
Samuragochi, Niigaki announced, was neither deaf nor a composer. Over the past eighteen years, it was he who had composed Samuragochi’s music. Moreover, Samuragochi was not a musician and could not even write musical notation or scores. The Olympic figure skater Daisuke Takahashi was about to perform his short program in Sochi to Samuragochi’s “Sonatina for Violin” in front of a global audience. Niigaki was there before the cameras, he said, because he couldn’t stand to see an accomplished Japanese athlete skating to a fraud.

Throughout the nearly fifty-minute confession, images of Samuragochi flashed on the screen. With his long shiny hair, whiskery jowls, and ever-present sunglasses, he looked like an aging heavy-metal has-been from an episode of VH-1’s “Behind the Music”—past his prime, yes, but still darkly mysterious and maybe brilliant. Some clips showed him walking gingerly with a cane and a slight limp, raising his face to the sun and the wind. In others, he stood with his back to an orchestra, bowing to an applauding audience, tucking his billowy hair behind his ears.

The contrast between the two—Niigaki, the real man behind the music, and Samuragochi, the man who stood in front of it—was comical: Niigaki is slightly wall-eyed, wears librarian-sober black-framed reading glasses, and speaks in slow, dolorous cadences. He’s a dead-ringer for Japan’s enervated middle-aged salaryman plucked straight from an overstuffed subway. Samuragochi, cloaked in black, eyes inscrutable, his left hand bandaged against persistent tendonitis, real or feigned, is another kind of central-casting cliché: the brooding genius driven by passion to make art against the odds.

Samuragochi’s first taste of fame came courtesy of video games: his contributions to the soundtrack of Resident Evil in the late nineties garnered worldwide attention. But in Japan, he became better known for a composition that touches nerves. “Symphony No. 1: ‘Hiroshima’,” released in 2003, was perceived as a memorial and tribute to the suffering victims of the atomic bomb, the hibakusha, including his own parents. Born in Hiroshima, Samuragochi was given a citizen’s award by the city’s mayor, in 2008, for his artistic contribution to its spirit.

Then, in 2011, after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in northern Japan, the same composition was transformed into a kind of theme song of national survival when it was used in a documentary produced by NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster. The film chronicled Samuragochi’s encounters with residents of the most devastated regions as he embraced them and offered hope and strength. Among its many now-surreal passages is one showing its subject writhing on a futon in his home, moaning at spikes of Tinnitus-like pain in his eardrums. (NHK has since pulled the film from its Web site, but there are still clips available on YouTube and the Japanese file-sharing site, niconico.)

Last summer, the Young People’s Chorus of New York City performed a passage from the symphony in Japan and was joined by Samuragochi onstage for a teary-eyed finale. At what would have been the symphony’s American premiere, in New York, in March—an encore performance by the same ensemble with two visiting choirs from Japan—the piece was hastily dropped from the program. Orchestral performances of Samuragochi’s work across Japan were cancelled, including one last month, in Tokyo. Two of my close friends had tickets and were disappointed. “We still have the music, don’t we?” one said. “Who cares who wrote it?”

Many do, apparently. As the scandal continues to unravel, it has produced numerous musings and self-chastisements in Japan and overseas. NHK issued a ten-page explanation of its failure to properly fact-check Samuragochi’s claims before broadcasting its documentary. Classical-music critics have argued that the music itself is subpar, weak imitations of Mahler and Brahms, and shouldn’t have been celebrated in the first place. Scholars have debated the value of authenticity in classical music, citing the numerous instances of ghostwriting in popular music and forgeries in painting. There has been finger-pointing in the Japanese media over who knew and why no one reported what they knew or asked questions. Some blame Samuragochi’s record company, who saw sales of his CDs skyrocket in the week after the scandal broke before withdrawing them from the shelves.

And Samuragochi himself cares. Instead of slinking away in ignominy, he held his own two-hour press conference a month after Niigaki’s. His hair cut short, sans sunglasses and cane, he arrived unnoticed by the assembled media until he sat behind the microphone. Clean-shaven and stocky, he now looked more like a former prizefighter than an aging member of Black Sabbath. He began with remorse, apologizing for deceiving the public about the source of his compositions, bowing ritually and closing his eyes. But his mood quickly turned combative. Niigaki, he said, was always asking for more money for his work. (Niigaki claimed that his total earnings over eighteen years amounted to roughly seventy thousand dollars). Niigaki had also told lies about their relationship and the degree of his deafness—which was not total, true, but was more severe than the ghostwriter claimed, and which had only recently receded. While Niigaki claimed that Samuragochi had threatened many times to commit suicide if he went public, Samuragochi said that he had only learned about the former’s discontent very recently. He ended by saying that he had hired a lawyer to sue Niigaki for defamation, though quite how one defames a fraud he left unexplained.


The story is a he-said, he-said. It’s also an archetype: a Cyrano de Bergerac in twenty-first-century Japan, where debates over historical truths and authenticity are points of friction with its rising Asian neighbors. And, in a country that typically tries to look away from dirty laundry, it’s a mesmerizing narrative: deception and twisted histories are suddenly headlines in Japan. The recent destruction of copies of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Tokyo libraries raised concerns about rising nationalist and/or neo-Nazi pods. Accusations of plagiarism in the work of the stem-cell researcher Haruko Obokata have cast suspicions on Japan’s scientific standards. And most Japanese still feel duped by the assurances of the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company over the safety of its nuclear-power grid.

A third person emerged in the tangled Japan Beethoven fraud narrative: Miku Okubo. She is a gifted teen-age violinist with a prosthetic arm. Samuragochi dedicated “Sonatina for Violin” (also composed by Niigaki) to Okubo, and became furious that her family failed to respect his contribution to her career last year when they failed to consult him before one of her televised concerts. Upon first learning of Samuragochi’s lies, the young Okubo wrote back that she was disgusted with him, and with adults in general, none of whom could ever be trusted. She vowed to give up the violin.

But in late March, Niigaki, the real composer behind Samuragochi’s marketed music, performed a duet with Okubo. Still pictures of the two onstage, the real composer and the real teen-age violinist, were shown on a Japanese TV program. Niigaki wears the same dowdy glasses, beneath his receding hair, but his smile is radiant. He looks at least five years younger, and gleeful. It may be a smile of liberation: he has turned from ghost to writer. But it may also be a grin of revenge.

Roland Kelts is the author of “

MONKEY BUSINESS Vol. 4 launches in NYC this weekend

Monkey Business authors are coming to NY! 
To celebrate the the 4th issue launch, the magazine’s contributing authors Toh EnJoe, Hideo Furukawa, Laird Hunt, Matthew Sharpe, founding editors Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, contributing editor, Roland Kelts will be coming to New York and have discussion events in various locations. Please come meet us!

Saturday, May 3, 2pm-
PEN World Voices Festival
Monkey Business — Japan/America: Writer’s Dialogue
Dialogues between Hideo Furukawa and Laird Hunt, and between Toh EnJoe and Matthew Sharpe
at
Asia Society
725 Park Ave. New York, NY 10021
212-288-6400
asiasociety.org
$10 Asia Society & PEN members, $12 Students & Seniors, $15 non-members (Ticket includes a copy of Monkey Business Issue 4.)
Tickets are available at worldvoices.pen.org

Sunday, May 4, 2pm-
Reading at Kinokuniya Bookstore
by EnJoe, Furukawa, Hunt, Roland Kelts, and Sharpe
at
Kinokuniya Bookstore
1073 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10018
212-869-1700
kinokuniya.com/us
Free

Monday, May 5, 12:50pm-
What and How We Are Writing: Two Japanese Authors Talk About Their Work
EnJoe and Furukawa will discuss and read their work with Kelts as a commentator.
Baruch College VC 14-280 14th floor #280
One Bernard Baruch Way (55 Lexington Ave at 24th St) New York, NY 10010
*This is a special class open to the public. Please tell the security at the entrance that you are here for the event.
Free

Monday, May 5, 7pm-
Readings at BookCourt
Readings by EnJoe, Furukawa, Hunt, and Sharpe, moderated by Kelts
BookCourt
163 Court St. Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-875-3677
bookcourt.com
Free
Free

For any inquiries, please email to monkeybiz@apublicspace.org

On Japan's new 'satori' generation for Adbusters magazine

Out now here.

On AnimeJapan 2014 for my Japan Times column

Anime industry reunified at expo, satellite events
BY ROLAND KELTS


AnimeJapan 2014, the rebranded and reunified annual industry trade show, exceeded organizers’ expectations last month, hosting 110,000 producers, publishers, journalists, cosplayers and public visitors. What a relief.

Since 2010, the anime industry’s political divisions meant two separate shows: one in Chiba called the Anime Contents Expo (ACE), the other in Odaiba, the original Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF). Dashing between the two had become an annual headache. AnimeJapan brought domestic and overseas players together again under one cavernous roof at Tokyo Big Sight on March 22 and 23.

It wasn’t perfect. “AnimeJapan was a huge success as a B2C (business to consumer) event,” says Yuji Nunokawa, chairman of the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA). “From B2B (business to business) aspects, however, there were some unsatisfactory elements, such as meeting-space shortage and lack of preparation.”

The so-called business days of industry-only meetings that precede the show’s public opening were dropped this year to save money, leaving producers, distributors and journalists to fend for themselves, ducking into small rooms above the show’s main halls or arranging for separate meetings in downtown Tokyo. The official tally of visitors from abroad was 546, a figure Nunokawa calls “an unprecedented success. It is AJA’s hope to promote anime’s presence to the world and make AnimeJapan the world’s best anime event.”


The rift within the industry prompting the creation of two separate shows four years ago was caused by then Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara’s legal interference. His passage of the vaguely worded Bill 156, otherwise known as version 2 of the “nonexistent youth bill,” restricting the sale of particular manga, anime and video games deemed “harmful” to youths and society at large was met by fierce opposition from artists and major producers, publishers and organizations, including the AJA.

At the time, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government administered TAF, and as governor, Ishihara was its official chairman. Several industry players threatened to boycott the fair, and there was concern that Japan would be left with no anime trade show at all. (Then Prime Minister Naoto Kan even weighed in, begging everyone to just get along.) Instead, the offended parties created ACE as an alternative to TAF.

Wisdom and mutual interests prevailed this year. With Ishihara gone, the government handed the show’s administrative reins over to the AJA. Nunokawa met with Koichiro Natsume, president of Aniplex Inc., who oversaw ACE, and the two agreed to reunite the events under a new banner, AnimeJapan. Financial contributions from the industry were critical, says Nunokawa. “Thanks to mutual aid money from each and every company, we were able to keep this event going.”

While there were no business days this year, adjacent events expanded. The 12-year-old Tokyo Anime Award Festival became a global affair, with four days of screenings in Nihonbashi prior to AnimeJapan featuring animation and artists from around the world, and culminating in an elaborate award ceremony at Big Sight. To no one’s surprise, Hayao Miyazaki’s “Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)” took this year’s top prize, and while the director himself was not on hand, his artistic partner at Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata, walked the red carpet with Miyazaki’s potential heir, Mamoru Hosoda. With lifetime achievement awards handed out for “notable contributions” to the industry, the screenings and ceremonies actually sported a bit of glamour — something rarely associated with the anime biz.


And in the two days following AnimeJapan, the second annual Project Anime Tokyo was held in the flashy UDX building in Akihabara. The conference is designed to bring together overseas anime convention organizers with Japanese studios for communication and collaboration. The brainchild of Marc Perez, CEO of the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation, and Nobuyuki Takahashi, president of Studio Hard Deluxe, the first meeting was held by the SPJA in Los Angeles in 2012 at Anime Expo (AX), the largest anime convention in North America.

“One of the things we want to prove to the industry is that we (anime conventions) can promote them with very little investment,” says Perez. The conference is now a twice-yearly event held in LA and Tokyo alongside AX and AnimeJapan. “We also want convention organizers from around the world to share ideas and best practices. One of our goals is to eventually establish a joint charter, rules and regulations about things like bootlegging and piracy and so on.”

According to conference director Marlan Moore of SPJA, this year’s Tokyo conference drew 28 attendees representing 30 global conventions from Mexico, Spain, Russia, Canada and the United Kingdom, among others. Staff from 35 Japanese companies also attended, from the anime, manga, fashion and music industries. The discussion at one meeting touched on the proper way to welcome and manage Japanese guests, especially those who may have never been outside of Japan, let alone visited a fan-driven convention.


The agenda on both days included evening networking mixers and receptions, where language and cultural gaps could be at least partially bridged with the help of nearby cafes and bars. But getting the anime industry out of its inward-looking Galapagos mentality is still an enormous challenge, says Studio Hard Deluxe’s Takahashi.

“Basically, people in the industry don’t really need conventions in Japan,” he tells me. “There are fan clubs, but not cons. And there are so many stores that sell anime and manga products, there’s no need for (cons), so the industry doesn’t think about them, or even understand them.”

But he believes there is hope, born of a demographic necessity: “I personally think that (overseas) anime cons will get 10 times bigger than they are now, while the market in Japan has maxed out and can only shrink. It’s up to us to tell Japanese companies that they really need to cooperate now. That’s our mission.”