Gaijin Myths About Japan: The Salaryman

No one type in Japan earns as much discombobulated Gaijin ire as the Salaryman (sarariman). Salarymen are frequently referred to as uncreative, mindless, drones, grunts, alcoholic, misogynist and all that is wrong with Japan. Perhaps there is some measure of truth to these observations. But before we go there, let us shine a light on social-cultural context of the gaijin casting such aspersion in an attempt to understand the behind-the-scenes "how" and "why".

First though, let me be clear about my terminology. I use gaijin as a mildly offensive insult. As you likely know, gaijin is an abbreviation of gaikokujin, "foreigner". Most urban Japanese understand that the contracted version is somewhat abrasive but still use it. In every day conversation, the word is not quite a "nigger", "gringo" or "beaner" but nor is it completely inoffensive. In the right/wrong hands, however, it does become a derogatory term.

My usage is somewhat more specific. In my context, gaijin refers to a stereotypical, willfully ignorant, Anglo-colonial steeped in internet lore on Japan, lacking Japanese language skills, Japanese peers, friends or community and who feels a strong sense of "us versus them". The gaijin is a type of cultural chauvanist, primarily though not exclusively in his early to mid twenties, s/he is always right, Japan is always wrong, his/her country is the epitome of democracy, human rights and social justice and Japan is a racist hotbed of extremism, thought control and repression.

Sigh. This would not be so depressing if it were not so common.

So gaijin hate salarymen. But why? To me, the salaryman represents everything that the gaijin cannot and will not ever be. As an outsider, suddenly injected into Japanese society the gaijin lacks the educational and social context that his same age peers share. Certainly that is a disadvantage but it is not unique. While the sane viewpoint might be for one to work hard at integrating into the community, establishing friendships and other meaningful relationships, the gaijin scorns these connections as merely obligatory, lacking the organic roots of his/her own experience of community building... 

Which took place in another country and to which s/he is no longer a part...

Irony much?

But for what other reasons does the gaijin hate those besuited office workers? The gaijin, frequently resentful as a result of ongoing culture shock, a lack of language and social skills and limited employment prospects finds him/herself positioned in a field with little prestige or vertical movement. This is not inherently negative, everyone has to earn a living and not everyone is ambitious. Some people just want to pay the rent, have enough food and have something to do everyday. But for the gaijin the salaryman's world is so foreign, governed by obscure sempai/kouhai (senior/junior) rules, mandatory parties, inefficiency, subservience and... sometimes... good pay and twice yearly bonuses. Politics of envy, perhaps?

Next comes the gaijin assertion that salarymen are uniform drones, they all dress the same, have the same haircut and abide by corporate dress policies. There are two problems with this: first, have you ever seen how gaijin dress?

Yeah, that's right, fish out of water, often over-sized, no-currency foreign brand names two years, too late. Have you seen the shoulder pads, mis-matched shirts and ties... have you seen the "hilarious" gag ties, tank tops in late Autumn and sunglasses on subways? I have. And so have the salarymen. Be careful to notice that the object of laughter may well be capable of subjecthood, in spite of being Japanese...

The second problem is that gaijin aside from lack of linguistic proficiency also tend to be context blind. A black suited salaryman is a black suited salaryman, right? Look again. Did you notice the angle of the cuts, the fabric type, thickness, durability? Did you have a close look at the stitching on the shirt, the weave, the pattern? Did you notice that all check is not created equal. Can you distinguish between this and last year's check? See overstated the entry level brand name watch on that guy? New to money. See the well made, understated, subtle elegance of the smart phone cover that guy is using? He has been at this a while. 

But the gaijin sees none of this. Even within salarymen there is more diversity than the black suit. Many smaller companies or specific branches of larger companies encourage more creative dress styles as they try to create an image of desirability a means of attracting new recruits. Gaijin frequently do not know how to intperpret such data and assume such salarymen are freaks, hosts or something else other than what they are.

Foreigners in Japan don't have to be gaijin. The first step to giving up gaijin sensibility starts with questioning not only stereotypes but the propensity toward adopting them as valid knowledges. Stay tuned, more on the way.

Gaijin Myths About Japan: An Introduction

A long time ago, scholars and students in “the West” studied East Asia and the Orient. Large quantities of important knowledge were produced by dedicated researchers well before the existence of the internet. The greatest blow to this body of knowledge - ironic since it was steeped in liberal tradition - was its democratization. This occurred in two steps.

First, rising levels of wealth in the west resulted in greater numbers of people began to travel, for pleasure, for new experiences, for commerce and further research. Newly made travelers began to write new narratives freed from the constraints of academia and more in tune with the self discovery spirit of the age. Autobiographical accounts trickled into mainstream media and began to shape the West’s image of “the East” with a speed and reach far exceeding that of traditional academe.

Next came two phases of what we call the internet. The first phase - still relatively obscure, its content limited to those with the money, infrastructure and skills to produce and publish content – developed into a fusion of scholarly knowledge and autobiography as an increasing volume of information became available. These early internet pioneers had a profound impact on the not only the quality of real and useful information but also in developing pseudo-legitimate mythologies.

Without peers, without a community to immediately be challenged by and answer to, such early virtual locales were invested with a weight of authenticity at times somewhat disproportionate to their veracity.

This phase (the Geocities Daze) gave way a common experience of the internet built on social networking technologies and eventually liberated from the desktop by smartphones. This new phase distributed information at a rate and breadth completely outstripping its now rather archaic ancestor. In the first phase, the creation of knowledges, however (im)perfect required a significant investment of time. So too did their acquisition and utilization. However, in the second phase (the Smartphone Daze) as a result of converging technologies (improved search engines, twitter, facebook, aggregate readers etc) new information can be widely disseminated in moments.

Given the capacity for instant feedback/critique it is possible to assume that quality of information may be guaranteed through crowd control. Not unlike Wikipedia. However, as is repeatedly seen, in multiple locations on a daily basis, the sheer volume and variety of information, coupled with an increased tendency toward laziness has resulted in a form of critical blindness. In other words, because of information overload, because of homogenized social communities built on superficial connections, confirmation bias is an all too common feature of contemporary public knowledge production processes.

So what does this have to do with Asia? And what does it have to do with Japan?

I recently read an article in the trash known as Japan Today. A news re-publisher with an extremely toxic and immature comment feature. The article in question can be found here: JT Trash About Teaching English.

A location in which commentators with little to no local language ability or formal/trained educational education experience reheated dated arguments about why “they can’t learn English”.

So why do I care?

I have been living in Japan for over ten years. I have said, read, heard and seen the same trash stereotypes over and over. And the thing is, with so many foreigners orking and living in Japan, you might think that these out of date, at times verging on unbelievable knowledges would have been thoroughly disproved. But as I wrote above, confirmation bias, lack of depth and failure to engage with local communities has seen not only the continuation of these knowledges but their amplification through contemporary internet technologies.

This little feature series is an attempt to address some of them from a long term resident’s perspective. Brace yourself because it is not going to be nice, feelings might be hurt and fantasies popped. Part One: The Salaryman coming soon.

The! Projuis-arrrghz!

Dunn gaht sumfin stuck in mah craw.

One day the metal internet woke up and discovered production. The next day it learned about mastering. Someone used the word "dynamics" and with an unnaturally intimate connection with wikipedia the modern armchair producer was born.

Make no mistake, I am appreciative of the technological leaps that occur year on year, the kind that make the prohibitvely expensive studio tools of yesterday, today's plugins and freeware. Cockos' Reaper DAW changed my life in all the right ways.

However, just as these innovations brought me joy, so too did they turn somewhat annoying audio-nerds into opinion belching internet annoyances. Their knowledge is kind of like a fart in an elevator or a sexist remark by a "friend" in the wrong/worst possible context - inappropriate and unwanted.

That is correct, dear reader - they hear a hard mastered album and scream "brick walled". They run it through their favourite audio editor to proove for once and for all that they are objectively right! They proclaim judgements of value, complain loudly and say how it should (have) been...

Yet languish at home without a single audio production credit to their names...

All the while listening to low-bitrate streams through cheap/laptop/smartphone speakers... somebody better be collecting my sighs because they could be making a lot of money.

Metallic Grostequerie: Sequel Interstitial (Between-quel?)

This article has been on the backburner for a while. It had several drafts and has been abandoned as many times. But thanks again to Metalsucks it is back. Well, a version of it anyway. Please note that I am referring to a news article that came out on June 25, 2013.
 
In my morning RSS feed reader scan (RIP google reader) I came across this week's NSFW version of Sh*t that comes out today (their asterisk, not mine). The NSFW portion of the posting was a single album artwork used just below the heading, Documentaries of Dementia by Necrotic Disgorgement. The album artwork features three naked, white zombie women in various states of mutilation. What makes this cover somewhat different to similar works is that it is photographic. Death metal art is frequently hand painted or more often than not these days digitally created. The controversy surrounding this image arises not from the article itself but from the comments that follow it, in particular an argument in the comments around the implied meanings of tortrure and gender relations.

The thread started by Igottawocket proclaimed:

Can metal, like, collectively agree to cool it with the album covers depicting tortured, naked women? Not really sure if it was ever "cool," but it most certainly isn't now. It kind of begs a lot of questions about what's going on in the heads of the band members, and, frankly, is kind of just fucked all around.

This is a sentiment to which I am mostly in agreement. The key word here is "mostly". As I have previously discussed grotesquerie in metal has a long tradition and is a complex discourse of aesthetics, shock tactics, subversiveness and misogyny. As a result it is difficult for me to condemn this particular (or most other similar) artwork out of hand. After all there are a range of contextual issues that the viewer may not be aware of that influence how the art is to be read. Did the women give consent to be protrayed in this way? Were they paid? Is there an attempt at subversiveness here? Is it an attempt to engage with the horror porn genre?

However, what we can say is that the artwork is clearly part of a broader metal aesthetic tradition in which violence is foregrounded and women are marginalised.

The thread continues with Hair Metal Police, Meh and Snobber McSnob providing fairly typical oppositional, adversarial replies:

So, according to your logic, anybody who directs a splatter film is a psychopath.
I personally don't see a difference between this and the flat-out misogyny of the lyrical content of bands that use picture of dogs eating kibble on their covers. In most cases it's VERY heavy satire.

There is a level of defensiveness in metal which is on one hand admirable, since it shows that metal heads have a passion for defending the genre but on the other hand it is somewhat worrying. When blanket statements incorporating socially accepted memes such including "freedom of expression" and "democracy", I start to worry. What these once subversive discourses do in the present is confine debate to the placard level:

"Naked, beaten women on record covers is bad!"

"Yeah well, opposing freedom of expression creates battered women".

Rinse and repeat all over the internet.

Interestingly, I would contrarily agree with Hair Metal Police's sarcasm in that I believe people who are enjoy creating violent artwork are psychopathic. However, where out opinions diverge is at the point where moral value is automatically accorded to the concept of psychopath. A psychopath need not be evil, nor is s/he required to actually enact/execute her psychopathic tendencies. Indeed as most people with some sort of secret desire, fetish or fantasy are aware, the consummation of the desire frequently results in its deflation, disappointment or even complete dissipation. It is the erotica in the mind, the exploration of taboo without risk to either one self or another party (consenting or in a worst case scenario, non-consenting).

Creating grotesque art can function in the same way especially with the consent of involved agents. It becomes a way for those with “psychopathic” non-vanilla, non-normal and potentially harmful tendencies to achieve a degree of satisfaction or consummation through the physical execution of their unique, personal eccentric world view without inflicting unnecessary, unjust, unethical and unwarranted harm on other, actual human beings.

The user known as Meh claims that it is very heavy satire. While I see a potential for satire even as a lifelong metal head I see very few identifiable clues as to the satirical function of this and many similar artwork in contemporary death metal. I would ask Meh; what exactly is the satire critiquing? 

Similarly there are a number of writers who express opinions along the line of: "Well it's all just make believe, it's not serious". Like this entry by Sion Wyn Jones:

It's just an album cover. It's ingrained in the Death Metal or BDM culture. It's the norm, to depict something horrible and disgusting. Especially if that's what the lyrics are based on as well. And for the artist, their just artist. There's nothing wrong with them, their not actually promoting killing Women or any other person. It's just fiction, something that fits the music style. Dammit OP, don't take this stuff so seriously.

This is actually a fairly common opinion among metal heads. It also happens to be a line of reasoning that is dense with complexity. What I take issue with is "engrained in [...] culture. This is simply conservatism by another name. If the purpose of the cover is to be shocking/provoking/subversive yet is done so in a way consistent with engrained values, how does it actually achieve this purpose? I also wonder about the sentiment relating to the lyrics no "promoting killing women or any other person." The fact is that this is exactly what the lyrics do refer to. Again a key problem as I see it is with the application of default moral positions.

Meanwhile there is Robstermb's reply to Jones:

The largest issue with it, to me, is not that it's sexist or disturbed... but because it's just so done and boring now. It's no longer shocking and it just seems immature and forced now. It's been a long time since Tomb of the Mutilated.

This is consistent with my own thinking. Death metal in particular had a zeitgeist in the post-80s context of thrash and early death metal. There was a legitimate fight against censorship and many groups at the time sought to push the limits of erotic and violent expression. As with most contemporary expressions of a genre it is exceedingly common to see a historical disjunct a kind of hyper aware "today" cannibalising its "yesterday" with barely enough time to consider last week let alone twenty or thirty years ago.

Ultimately my problems with grotesquery and sex in metal can be distilled thus:

1. Shock for its own sake is an extremely limited intellectual framework from which to work these days. As I said in the original article on this topic, true shock/subversiveness should unseat us deeply. It should ask more questions than it answers. It should be unsettling. In the past, grotesquerie in metal achieved this. It rarely does so in the present.

2. Metal offers a space for the exploration of the grotesque, the profane, the ugly and the immoral. However, not all expression within its boundaries is self-reflexive. The failure to connect with the intellectual, ethical and moral frameworks of the past significantly influences the extent to which metal art can be considered legitimately "shocking". Is it just that now we live in an age of perfect, decontextualised appropriation? Personally I believe this to be both true and not. After all, when we underestimate the intelligence of others we underestimate our own. Thoughtful, reflexive people are born out of the strangest events, through effort and sometimes mere coincidence. There is no single, unbroken line that connects present visual aesthetics with the past and furthermore it is the social, cultural perspective of the viewer which plays an important role in determining the context of an artistic work.

3. Metal is still mostly a man's world. The objectification of women within the genre has yet to be fully dealt with. Coupled with the demographic context of metal makers in the west it is highly unlikely that this will change any time soon. However, it is already changing and a number of bands continue to push against, traverse and ignore boundaries. It is interesting to ponder just how acceptable, grotesque or titillating images of men being tortured and raped would be to men, especially given the still prevalent taboo of homosexuality in a lot of metal circles.

Deconstructing Anglo-centric Knowledges of Japan

Currently tossing around the idea of putting together a collection of critical essays which disrupt existing knowledges of Japan available to non-Japanese speakers.

The idea arose from the now defunct Tepido.org website, a location for critical (and not always amicable) engagement with the self-made activist cum academic Arudo Debito (debito.org).

Previous to reading Tepido, I had personally taken on board many of the knowledges available to me through print and the internet about Japan. I uncritically perpetuated stereotypes and bought into the fanfare of one-sided critique of Japanese culture, customs, economics and  politics. However, as I gained Japanese linguistic and literary capability (which I have written about elsewhere on this blog) many of these stereotypes and knowledges revealed themselves to be largely untrue and frequently based on the sole experiences of a jaded minority sharing similar cultural backgrounds.

Linguistic capability enabled me to enter into Japanese society in a way, I believe, unimaginable to many of these original knowledge producers. This leads to the present: a desire to create new knowledge on Japan, in English, to counter the increasingly fixed knowledges that continue to circulate and get reproduced in world media. I am interested in multiple voices even where those voices are critical of my own opinion. The point is to assemble a group of people to speak on Japan in a critical and engaged way and to have their work critiqued by their peers. And then let the reader decide.

Sound academic? Not really, though the tone might be formal, the only academic qualifications required are solid essay writing skills and the ability to properly source where the information is coming from. Also, a bit of a thick skin. First time writers should not be put off by criticism, editorial or theoretical.

Ideally, I'd like to create a hard copy, but online only is no problem and less expensive. Authors' works would remain their own property, however, I would be interested in exclusive hosting of the final product to contributors' own sites/blogs or even a purpose built site. We have to write it first. 

Ideas? Questions? Let me know in the comments and we can get this started.

Stop photocopying me, photocopying me, me: Metal Vocals No Need?

Over at Metalsucks, Vince Neilstein wrote a deliberately provocative piece on the relative irrelevance of the contemporary metal vocalist. His argument is that in general “melodic” vocals are not “metal” enough and that industry standard growls (aka “cookie monster”) are largely interchangeable. 

To a degree, Neilstein has a point and it is one that resonates with one I have been making for a while. In a lot of contemporary/modern metal the melodic vocal blueprint still relies too heavily (for this writer’s taste) on the metalcore thus emo, punk and post-hardcore aesthetics that preceded it. An example of this can be seen on the new Periphery album where Linkin Park-esque approach to clean vocals rips the listener out what should be a tech fest orgy and crams her/him into a Top 40 purgatory of nostalgia. Melodic metal vocals have been done well for a long time from Dio to Devin and Dickinson to Dawnbringer.

Meanwhile, Neilstein is right to point out the obsolescence of the metal growl (though this is a point that has been made for a while) but does in my opinion go too far in dismissing them as an “any teenager with a mic can do them”. Just like melodic vocals, however, the approach to the cookie monster in the room is what determines their value. After all, love him or hate him, ex-Cannibal Corpse main man Chris Barnes had a distinctive and disturbing voice. The same can be said for Obituary’s John Tardy or Morbid Angel’s David Vincent.

Then we arrive at the middle ground, a space between cookie monster and crooner, more of a gruff singing or shouting that may include melodic elements to varying degrees. This is where Phillip Anselmo, Randy Blythe, Dez Fafara, Matt Pike and others weigh in. Here their voices are an obvious extension of personality and experience and are unmistakably those of men (and women) with vision, ideas and passion. These vocalists are the biggest oversight in Neilstein’s piece. The vocalist as a poet. Not hype-man, front-man or band leader, but poet. A person who has a way with words both in writing and in delivery.

In the present age of cut-paste-remix-remake, the endless copying has the effect of preserving certain aspects of contemporary phenomena but also curiously homogenizing them to the standards of the zeitgeist. Where in the past we might simply have unearthed the alternatives somewhere down the temporal track, we now live in an era of endlessly, exponentially bifurcating reproduction. In other words diversity and complexity gets compressed and dismissed into “meh”s and “tl;dr”s. The effect of this on vocals in metal is that of standardization of certain approaches which are reproduced and distributed at incredible speeds.

In other words, what cookie monster-isms and other vocal specificities might have meant in the past is obscured by their universal de-historicised, displaced existence in the present. Moments in time and place are reduced to “that’s just the way it is”. What I believe is that true innovation, originality and passion arises from the relationship between ourselves and our contexts. When we step out of the zeitgeist, when we dare to get meta on our own stylistic, personal and aesthetic meta-narratives we are able to exceed the limits of the known and create something new. In the meantime, though, it is wise for all of us, metal head and other to not become jaded and desensitized to possibility simply because our cognitive processing speed is outpaced by the cloud.

What happened to Metal Hammer?

When it comes to magazines, the British get it right more than most. Whether entertainment, information, tabloid, technology or food, they manage to do something which their Anglosphere peers are rarely able to achieve: a well proportioned balance of content, economic imperative (advertising) and individual editorial/writer personality/flavour. Metal Hammer is a magazine I have read, on and off for about twenty years. Indeed, I even subscribed to the print edition for a few years as well as the ipad digital bookshelf version earlier this year. Until about the time Terry Bezer (aka Beez) left Metal Hammer magazine and podcast in June 2011, both magazine and podcast were exemplary of the British magazine tradition outlined above. Since then the magazine has been “revamped” and reoriented and to some degree rebranded for a somewhat different audience. Let me be clear, as rad a dude as Beez is, as a “mere” contributor, I doubt his leaving was the reason for this change. In fact, the change might have been the reason for his leaving, which was abrupt and completely silent with regards to explanation of any sort. But that is a story for another time.

Metal Hammer was always unapologetically marketed to a raucous, outsider, youth, hipster, underground crowd. Its demographic was as at least as complex as its subject matter. For many years it was divided into two broad sections, the magazine proper and a supplement at the back entitled Subterranea. Indeed, it was this latter section which yours truly achieved the most satisfaction. The magazine proper deals with relatively “mainstream” hard rock and metal acts with fairly equal coverage of young/new bands, established acts, as well as American, European and UK based scenes (and recently more globally including Central and South America, the Middle East, South East Asia, and South Asia). Advertising is typical of the core demographic – gothic/S&M/“evil”/anti-religious/rebellious influenced fashion as well as appealing to Angloshpere binge drinking culture and more recently musical instruments and related equipment. This is rounded out by album reviews, live reviews, letters and news typical of the music magazine genre. Subterranea also follows this pattern but its focus is more on marginal and so-called underground acts including death metal, black metal, grindcore, doom and other music not normally within the metal canon but nevertheless aesthetically congruent. It frequently contained interviews with well known scene leaders and demonstrated a calibre of knowledge and writing somewhat less trendy and more “in” the scene itself.

Metal Hammer today still mimics this format, yet from the layout to the timbre of the writing, from the advertising to the choice of bands in both sections has resulted in a flattening, or at worst a homogenisation of the previous diversity and complexity. What this results in is a surrendering of the middle ground between accessibility and underground credibility. Hammer once stood as a readable and open minded counter balance to the pop-hype of Kerrang! and the tougher-than-you tr00-kvlt-ism of Terrorizer. Now however it reads like a slightly thicker version of the former on the quality of paper of the latter and with fewer posters than either. I mean, the most recent issue features an interview with Sammy Hagar (yes, as in Van Halen) in Subterranea. Really? No, really? I am happy to vouch for the relevance of Van Halen in hard rock and metal, but in terms of relevance to a black/death/grind/doom underground, Hagar has none. Just why the market needs a re-tooled version of Kerrang! is beyond this writer. It won’t stop me from specyalatin’ though...

With the push to online delivery modes through the Apple Store’s Bookshelf platform it is obvious that as with the rest of the industry, the focus is moving away from actual ink and paper. The internet allows far more satisfaction for the “hardcore” music enthusiast. S/he is able to chase down the most obscure information across a warren of different sites and sample a previously impossible range and density of music. S/he is already online, has RSS feeds set up and regularly receives news about release dates, fan packs, studio reports and new artists. This type of reader no longer needs a physical magazine. Therefore, if a publisher is to maintain a print presence in a shrinking yet still not irrelevant market, it must appeal to the widest demographic possible. All of this is understandable and yet I cannot help but to feel sad. I have lost a long term companion in the re-jigged Hammer. Like a good friend who found god, it still looks the same, talks the same but everything is just somehow “off” and when s/he says what s/he thinks all you can do is remember how things used to be.

Hammer, we ain’t done yet but it won’t be long. Don’t make me say “Twas nice knowin’ ya”. For the rest of you? Stay metal.

Critique – 2 Too old, too outside, too little, too late.

Not so long ago I worked with a chap about the same age as my younger brother. He had a quick, sharp mind and was quite good at programming computers. What he struggled with, however, was the simple act of drawing a straight line. Of course, I do not mean this literally, I mean it in the sense that his solutions to problems were often ineloquent convolutions designed to highlight playfulness and whim of utility. On the surface, there is no real problem with this, I am after all a champion of imagination, deconstruction, absurdity, parody and lateral thought. For me though, as long as simplicity is the underpinning principle then I believe we might call this innovation. His style was not unlike a web browser adorned with numerous plug ins to achieve every possible outcome but requires constant maintenance. His engineering style was akin to a Jack-of-all-trades.

Jaron Lanier’s half-excellent “You Are Not A Gadget” is successful when it critiques such phenomena as group-think/hive mind and the large scale disempowerment through the homogenisation of diversity and flattening of contours through rigid yet ever bifurcation of defining categories in social networking software paradigms. However it is at points such as when discussing musical genre and alternative paradigms/solutions to the devaluing of creative industries that he starts to falter.

When it comes to music, it reads as though Lanier is too old and too outside of the contemporary to sufficiently judge the state of things. He riffs on how jazz is identifiable according to decade and that so is a lot of pop music up until internet saturation. But then, suddenly, according to Lanier a flattening occurs and his peccadillo, indie music, comes to a creative stasis. He claims that even good friends could not tell the difference between groups over the two decades from the nineties until now. However, I would argue that this is because he has placed himself outside of this context and that he is no longer sensitive the subtleties and creative diversity in his chosen genre. To say that the Arctic Monkeys sound Like Primal Scream who sound like Franz Ferdinand who sound like Blur who sound like the Kaiser Chiefs who sound like Bloc Party all within a frozen temporal quagmire speaks more of the author’s personal and cultural context more than it does of a perceived lack of creativity in indie music.

Following this is a brief encounter with hip hop’s post-digital development where he reveals himself to be not only too old and too outside but just plain too American. To ignore the incredible development of hip hop (a) the world over and (b) as an English speaker, the UK in particular is either lazy or ignorant. While it is permissible to say that the splintering and reincorporation of dance genres from jungle to drum and bass to grime, dubstep and so on has seen a certain degree of flattening, the creative forces required for their composition cannot be underestimated. Taking both rhythmic and melodic ideas to completely new extremes, these genres have not only evolved with developments in digital music making but have caused new tools to be required in order to articulate them.

My second critique follows the first. Laniers chosen position as “outside” the complex mainstream of technological development strikes this writer as somewhat naive. The same can be said for his overly optimistic, overly nostalgic appraisal of alternative technological developments suitable for financial compensation of artists. I have found for one reason or another (usually work!) I am forced to sit on and contribute to and at the very least ponder on “leading edge technologies”. The problem with this is that in my gut, I feel as though a prefer a more analog, more real reality to the digital simulacrum that continues to diversify before me. This irreconcilable paradox is actually a blessing. For it reminds me that falling into the binary trap is ever so inelegant and foolish. Either/Or. Click “like”. Just like death metal: old school versus new school? Which do you choose? I do not choose. I can not choose. I will not choose. For to me, what is most enriching and valuable is not pie in the sky suggestions of utopia that lack the cooperation of my peers. What is nourishing for the soul is to keep these so-called binaries, these contradictions, paradoxes under consideration, in dialog, since if while time passes we are actively and reflexively contemplating these square pegs and round holes, it becomes possible to see the infinite complexity surrounding them, the myriad interrelationships and interdependencies.

And it is through this reflection that we are able to, while offline begin to transform what happens online.

Critique – 1 Monotheists, outsiders and proclamations of doom.

Time for a confession. I am a recovering cultural studies junkie. Do not let the lack of capitalisation fool you with regards to my seriousness, there are times when I relapse. An article, an argument, a picture, a person. That is all it takes to send me back into the spiral of contemplating power relations, self-reflexivity (and its absence), creative, pragmatic applications of theory and scholarly excellence. Confession completed before turning toward the issue at stake, some contextualisation is required.

Currently I live in Japan. I have done so for a total of about eight years. I have both weathered and inflicted culture shock. I have reflected on belonging and being foreign. I have learned to send out tender green shoots into the earth, to begin to be of this place. I have turned my expectations inside-out, rejected assumptions both explicit and implicit and to some degree started to “turn Japanese”. Almost the whole of my context is linguistically dominated by Japanese, from the moment I wake up, through to my place of employment, and most importantly the realm of love. That said, I am certainly no “expert” on Japan, I am hardly even an expert on myself (though age has proven to be of some help in that regard).

To be an expert on a place, a people, a complex living context of incredible diversity, seems to me, at this stage in the game at the very least bordering on contemptible arrogance. Sure, I do believe that one can be an expert on existing knowledges, social, economic, religious and so on. Such expertise is valuable, the problem arises when such knowledge is applied unreflexively, thus compounding and enforcing existing hegemonies, conceptual prisons and ignorance. This kind of so-called scholarship persists even to this day, legitimated by countless institutions committed to knowledge production as their reason for existence. This is unfortunate because to me, scholarship should ultimately be about liberation: acquisition of knowledge for understanding and reflection on such knowledge for creativity.

So it is with great interest and curiosity that I engage with scholarship on Japan. I am always looking to increase the depth of my knowledge so that my understanding can become more subtle, refined and respectful of the complexity inherent in culture and society. A recent posting of a scholarly article by scholar on Japan, MG Shetfall on Debito’s civic activist website caught my eye.

This article, a meditation on the loss of a Japanese “cosmology” in the post-Meiji, post-Pacific War Japan is rather engaging, the field work with kamikaze survivors, while not explicitly included, deeply informs his analysis. However, there are a number of tired tropes wheeled out throughout the article based on a specific kind of scholarship on Japan, a kind of scholarship that has persisted since the bubble. This includes an over-reliance on English language scholarship and especially North American-centric engagement with Japan. This is to be expected, the author is/was after all an American. We all write where we are from all of the time. From yakuza to pachinko, right-wing black trucks to the apparently problematic entrenched, unreconstructed sexism, and mindless consumerism to emperor worship. It is all present. While this in itself is worthy of rebuff (in addition to his overly positive, incongruous conclusion) there are two other profoundly interrelated issues which trouble this scholarly teetotaller.

The first is the lack of contextual reflexivity. The shattering of cosmology he describes with regard to Japan could easily apply his birthplace. Around the world, we stand witness to the death of the American dream, the wholesale plunge into income discrepancy, increasing poverty and political/religious extremism in the modern United States. Even as things have fallen apart as gods, icons and saints have been shattered at home, Shetfall fails to acknowledge this global phenomenon in his analysis. From China to post-apartheid South Africa to most of Europe, historically important drivers of activity, sources of community and reasons for progress give way to apathy, technological change, redistribution of wealth and the questioning of self and national identities within such a context. Certainly if one is to comment on the phenomenon in Japan that it would do well to acknowledge its broader context. Is this just an unreflexive, self-policing adoption of disciplinary borderlands? Or is it something else, is it yet another “foreigner looking in” fetishisation of a culture that takes place within a longer history of outdated anthropological study?

The second issue for me is one commonly found in the sociology/anthropology literature on Japan from the West: an unquestioned belief in the alliance between monotheism and Freud. Although I do not have the space for a full detailing of my arguments against monotheism I will give a brief overview. The unreconstructed, unreflexive monotheist thinker is limited binary violence. S/he always proceeds from the point of rigid, presumed, enforceable totality. Everything which is good must fit within the framework. Any thought which contradicts of falls outside of the monotheist worldview is relegated as “less than”. However, when applied to cultural contexts with Buddhist histories (note the plurals?) monotheism starts to look not only shaky but somewhat primitive, unrefined and limited. This is not to say that monotheist “believers” are those things, indeed, first and foremost I believe as humans we are capable of extraordinary subtlety and clarity both in spite of and because of our overarching intellectual developmental contexts. People are people. Nevertheless when the monotheist encounters a poly-, a- or non-theist context the exchange always begins with the imposition of authority. Meanwhile, if we take the previously mentioned Buddhism as the starting point we arrive at a brilliant piece of classically Zen paradox. For the Buddhist has no problem with recognising monotheism, as monotheism is simply an expression of human action. It is not and can not be a totality. Even though it has become so. But in the end, it is merely human thought. Buddhism can acknowledge both the sincerity and artifice of monotheism – simultaneously. What might cultural studies, sociology or anthropology informed by Buddhism look like? Perhaps when I experience a full relapse, I will let you know.

Further to this second point is the reliance of Freud. Long time readers (I know you are out there) will know that I have an affinity for Deleuze. To read Deleuze, to dig in deep and to meditate on his thought brings one to an interesting destination. That Freudian thought is unmistakably violence, perhaps second only to Christianity in the mind rapes conducted upon the human species. Freudian desire is trapped within a peculiar Germanic Christian mode of expression which has been legitimated through scholarship for a century. Deleuze is like a little trickster here, he says that while a certain desire, pathos or fetish may exist (although it may not and it may altogether be something else) it is forced into being a specific mode under Freud. For Deleuze, desire is multiple, it arises in response to myriad contexts and it is not necessarily “wrong” or destructive.

In other words, Shetfall’s “letting off steam” metaphor with regard to Japanese development is incredibly limited and demonstrates perhaps more the author’s age, alien-ness in context and disjunct from the complex, optimistic, micro-level inspiration occurring all over Japan than it does any kind of objective reality. Shetfall’s reality, I contend, is confined to a particular set of Anglo-American-Japanese disciplinary coordinates. This is not to say his reflection is wholly incorrect. Indeed although his tropes may be worn, stereotypes often have their origins in some kind of reality, even if removed from and not created by those they are meant to represent. His Japan certainly does exist but it does not necessarily ring true with my experience and therefore likely several... million... others.