Does this Japan consist only of white men and Japanese girls?They're asking it daily, the anons. And the answer is, by and large, yes. Many of the people I'm meeting here do fall into that pattern. But it's a bigger picture than that.
Take yesterday. Risa and Hisae and I rushed to see the free Lullatone show at Tokyo Midtown. Lullatone, a culturally-productive couple of
mukokuseki diasporans, met in Kentucky when Yoshimi was studying there. Shawn wasn't one of those Japan-crazed
anime-and-manga kids. Not at all. But he fell for Yoshimi and came to Japan to be with her -- and, more importantly, to produce some kind of third-culture hybrid, a fusion of American and Japanese culture.
At the show there were other permutations, adding up to the same "third culture".
Mumbleboy was there with his Japanese wife. Kinya Hanada is already something of a cultural hybrid in himself -- born in Japan, but living most of his life in the US (he's about to move to Portland, after staging a one-man show at
hpgrp Gallery in Omotesando -- it opens on June 14th).
After the show half the audience rushed off to Naka-Meguro to see
Sawako in concert. She lives in New York now, but I first met her in Tokyo -- she came to my farewell party in 2002 -- and we both contribute vocals to O.LAMM's "Monolith" album. If you followed the Sawako link you'll see photos of her in Central Park by Hikaru Furuhashi, who I've also
raved about here. The circles are international in scale, but run very tight.
We missed the Sawako show -- as well as a Digiki birthday lunch where we could have met another Third Cultural figure,
Shane Lester of
W+K Tokyo Lab -- but bumped into an interesting couple in Muji, a tall fashion co-ordinator from Leeds, Marc, and his girfriend Natsuyo, a yoga instructor.
Marc, Natsuyo, Hisae and I ganged up and walked halfway across Tokyo, from Roppongi to Aoyama through the cemetery, ending up in Cafe Madu, just off the Aoyama Dori.
Marc and I both modelled ourselves, when we were younger, on David Bowie in
The Man Who Fell To Earth. We both felt like exotic aliens, mating with the planet's residents. And we both sought out Japan as a place where we could wallow in a satisfying kind of alienation, and maintain some kind of extra-terrestrial feeling, some sense of the glam exoticism both of ourselves and of our surroundings. Marc -- who's been here almost twenty years now -- also turned out to know people I knew in both Tokyo and London; Ally the hypnotist, or my 1980s sleeve designer Thomi Wroblewski.
"I prefer the Japanese diaspora to Japan itself," I declared in my
Mukokuseki Diasporans piece about the relaunch of the Japanese edition of Tokion magazine. "The Japanese diaspora is multi-culti, and contains many of the most creative Japanese people as well as those foreigners who love Japan. It contains the best of both worlds, and leaves all that's provincial and stifling in both the West and Japan behind."
"The new Tokion," analyzed misanthropic marketing guru Marxy, "is not so much about this messianistic mission of exporting Japanese cool, but looking at the local culture arising from the contemporary mix between foreigners and Japanese." This was a program I could get behind.
"While I'm very much into exporting Japanese cool, I do think a goodly amount of it is created by the Japanese who've left Japan to study abroad, and who've miscegenated, culturally and biologically, with foreigners, as well as by foreigners who've been drawn to Japan, "Japanizing" themselves in the process. Sure, I love the pure stuff too, but I'm definitely into bastard chic."
Sure enough, when Hisae and I browsed in ABC we found ourselves in a tiny picture in the May Tokion, snapped not in Japan but at a
Yoshitomo Nara opening in Berlin. We also checked out another couple of cultural fusions, the bizarre new marriage cathedral in the middle of Aoyama (which joins the odd Italianate buildings in the Shiosite complex for sheer postmodern perversity)
and the UT store on Meiji Dori, Uniqlo's flagship t-shirt brand, which basically fuses elements from American Apparel, Graniph, Pantone and the LED displays from Cow Books into a t-shirt superstore:
We also saw a bizarre sign, right next to Tadao Ando's architecture studio, announcing "Slob Oxidized Sophistication". I don't know whether it was a bar, a strip joint, or a hot metal shop. But the phrase might just sum up the chemical reaction that fizzes when foreign slobs Japanize.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
imomus's journal
