Congratulations on your WIRED column. To commemorate, here is a Momus magazine cover:

Wah! That photo must have been taken at my ICA performance in 2003! I'm wearing my friend Suzy's jacket! I wish she'd let me keep it, it's very "Emo-Commie"!

I really like the idea that the Japanese culture has a tradition of 'doing something else at the same time' -- enshrined in folklore to boot. Think I might adopt one of those ancestors as an elective affinity figure...

::off to read the review::

By the way, on the Ratzinger-Kung question, I think I'm Ratzinger. Because I tend to want things to keep strong identities, hold onto their otherness. In fact, I'd go further than Ratzinger and put the mass back into Latin if I were pope. I mean, what's the point of promoting the illusion that we can understand something as irrational and opaque as the mass? Better to preserve its otherly charisma, and work on people with the "charm of otherness". But, lest that sound incredibly reactionary, I'd say the same about Kung. He should become a Marxist pur et dur rather than try to make some impossible, silly pact between Marxism and Catholicism, diluting them both and falling between stools in the process.

If you're looking for someone to blame for attitudes like these, blame Denis Donoghue, whose 1982 Reith lectures The Arts Without Mystery were a big influence on me. (Hint: he was attacking the Coles Notes concept that you can de-mystify the arts and that the arts without mystery would be in any way desireable.) Wish the Beeb would hurry up and get those lectures online so I can see whether I still agree with all Donoghue's ideas.

Though don't incomprehensible, unquestionable rituals such as religious observances in languages not understood by the public (be they the Latin Mass, memorisation of the Koran in Arabic or what have you) lead to a culture of unquestioning blind faith, rigid hierarchy and submission to authority, which can be exploited by those well situated to push their own agendas?

Well maybe now you are the voice of the Westerner in Japan. What Momus was to you in the 90s may be who you are to curious people in the 00s. Especially since the distribution of Japanese popular culture has saturated the masses.

I don't think I'm "the Momus" of the 00s when it comes to Japan, because he always has been "selling Japan" to a certain extent. I think he got people (including me to some extent) excited about what was going on there in the late 90s. I am not really selling Japan as much as selling the idea of "understanding Japan." And like with anything, the more you understand it, the less you idealize/worship it.

I also feel the responsibility to correct a lot of the common misconceptions about Japanese pop culture that abound in the Western media. They are slow to the story, and what’s nice about blogs and the Internet, is that we can provide real-time coverage.

I get such a reputation for being a grump or jaded or "disillusioned" or "a bitchy Westerner" when it comes to Japan, but if you want to start being disillusioned about Japan, the only thing you have to do is pull back the curtain and look at the way the cultural industries work here.

If you're going to make fun of my interview text, you should blockquote it or something. Or compare it to lyrics by the Grass Roots etc.

Marxy

Interesting that Ratzinger wants to preserve an identity that was already adrift, and Kung's Marxism is actually closer to folksy Jesus. Some issues (abortion, contraception) are sacrosanct when it comes to change (despite the fact that the bible hardly mentions them), while issues that both the old and new testament are very clear on (over 50 direct and 20 indirect indications that the lending and borrowing of money for profit is wrong) find themselves dismissed through 'having to live in the real world'. I don't suspect either Ratzinger or Kung would take a crusade against banking (the larger church commissioners being some of the world's biggest investors), but that the modernising/preserving filter is a personal and human set of prejudices and has little Christian content is always worth stating.

I guess that's why the joke about Christ being chased out of heaven by Ratzinger saying "I was wrong!" is funny.

I haven't fully read the book mentioned above, so I don't want to criticize it. But I think everyone should be suspicious about finding essentialist Japanese characteristics, dating from time eternal, that somehow facilitate today's keitai culture. The reason that specific generation was/is called the "nagara-zoku" was precisely because they weren't supposed to be so "unfocused" - according to the "typical" rules of Japanese behavior. If that had been a traditional Japanese trait, why would you give it a new name all of a sudden? I think nagara-type behavior actual spans across all cultures and is mainly driven by adapting our behavior to technological innovation.

You can always go back in history and find precursors to some modern event, but you can find an equal number of counterexamples, and it is almost always impossible to prove a those cultural properties' clean descent from the past.

A better avenue to think about keitai is the fact that government over-regulation essentially squashed all computer-based Internet usage until broadband. In the 70s, Japan was supposedly ahead of the US in terms of digitizing contents and making electronic data networks, but the ridiculous restrictions on owning second phone lines and prohibitively high phone rates made cell phones a much easier place for Internet-esque culture to arise.

There is also a (somewhat dubious) linguistic explanation that teachers have never wanted computers in the classroom, because computers do not encourage Japanese students to learn how to write kanji by hand. But whatever the case, there has never been a strong computer culture in Japan and all the functions that sold the Internet to consumers in the West ended up selling keitai to Japanese consumers. Phones are also cheaper to buy than computers, which was crucial for getting kids involved.

odder still to read, in a recent Marxy interview, that my early essays about Japan (he cites Shibuya-kei is Dead) were a big influence on the young Marx

I used to feel almost the same way about Japan as you did. But then I discovered that I have some serious ethical qualms with many of the driving forces behind Japanese pop culture. I *wish* you were right about things, but I would just have to ignore a lot of things I've learned.

Marxy

Interesting point about computers, and, from my own observation at least, it seems to be true. My brother runs a software company, and when he visited me in Japan he spent some time investigating the kinds of software they were generally using. He said the software was about fifteen years behind the West.

I do love Wired, and that was an excellent article. Ecclectic.

(I can't separate JKGalbraith from the Cheaper By the Dozen books, even though they're not quite the same -- Gilbreth/Galbraith.)

This post reminds me for some reason of the work of Kishi Keisuke

hey, didn't momus just change the title of that WIRED article right under our noses?

You know the "WiRED" sensibility that made magenta text on acid green paper seem like a good idea in 1997? After the dot-com crash, that sensibility had to go underground, but still operates in the form of making stupid editorial decisions under the noses of their guest writers.

Who the fuck is "Hans Kung"?

Cheers,
Diacritics Matter.

Reading while walking isn't a very smart thing to do though. It's begging for injuries, especially of the feet, elbows, or head.

Exactly. What's so hilariously wrong-headed about this whole analysis is that many people in Japan have a hard enough time walking down the street without hitting things, even when they aren't nuzzling into their cell phones.

This may be the most quaintly strange and fascinating CO post ever, starting as it does with with Wired and ending up at late 20th century Catholic theology, via Marxy and Shotoku Taishi.

Certainly not run-of-the-mill.

I'm thinking Marxy is going to be annoyed by this article in Wired too. It says that Asian people see differently from Western people—looking at context more, emphasizing harmony—and that the differences are cultural. "The way that we see and explore the world literally depends on where we come from". No big surprises there, but it does rather undermine the project of people from one culture telling people from another how they should run things.

I also think, in the light of this new research, we should ban "Ebony and Ivory" from ever being played again, with its now-false line about "we all know that people are the same
wherever you go".

Is there any chance you could put a search feature on your LJ info page? All LJ journals come equipped with one (the magnifying glass icon), but it's pretty limp, and doesn't really find everything. I put a freefind one on mine, but there are plenty of others out there. It'll probably take an hour for it to index.

It's terribly easy to search Click Opera. Just use Google, and put

imomus + search term

(without the plus sign).

"In Japan, even the Coca-Cola corporation was selling bottles and cans of green tea alongside Coke and Fanta. Pure, super-healthy green tea, without additives, without sugar. It seemed like an object lesson in the nature of capitalism -- capitalism didn't have to be inherently toxic. It didn't have to put too much sugar or salt in stuff, or sell you drinks that made you fat."

DAMN IT MOMUS! This has nothing to do with "Capitalism"

Capitalism is a mode of production in which the output of the productive cycle is owned by the providers of Capital, i.e. the Tools and Machines that the Workers use, and/or the money/credit to buy such machines. That is why it is called _Capital_ism.

IT IS NOT A SYNOMYM FOR ANY BUSINESS UNDERTAKING.

_BUSINESS_ is not by nature a bad thing, as you say, but _Capitalism_ *IS* always and everywhere a bad thing, not because it sells sugary drinks, but because it exploits the worker and consentrates wealth in the hands of nonproductive Capital owners.

It is very frustrating that so many creative, intellegent writers such as yourself conflate "Capitalism" with business, this is exactly the framing the right wing propogates, as if allowing a wealthy elite of property owners to appropriate the product of workers is somehow a prerequisite to vending beverages. PLEASE STOP IT.

Ok, sorry, rant over.

By the way, thanks for Eye Patch. It was great, my eye is better now and I would love to return it with my gratitude.

If you are in the neighbourhood, every tuesday (including tonight) is my Stammtisch. 20:30 or so at Cafe Buchhandlung, 32 Tucholskystr. Berlin-Mitte. Please drop by if you like, the DJ, Emma, is generaly quite good. I will be happy to buy you a drink or two ;)

In anycase, some other time if you can't make it.

Cheers,
Dmytri.

Hi Dmytri, I'm in Scotland right now so can't make your Stammtisch. Glad the eye is better.

Your point about capitalism is well taken, although I think the distinction between capitalism and business is a bit too neat. Have there been any instances of capitalism existing without business? Can they really be disentangled?

Churches always rely on subterfuge and scare tactics - it is the only way that they would exist at all. Momus proposes to make these absurd institutions more pleasing for the rest of us by maintaining/accentuating their otherness.