Idol Chatter: The Evolution of J-Pop

Posted on February 26, 2011 by philipbrasor

The following article originally appeared in the April-June 1997 issue of Japan Quarterly, a now defunct English-language publication put out by the Asahi Shimbun. For a continuation of the story, there is an article I wrote for The Japan Times in Dec. 2009 about the development of J-pop in the 00s.

Takuro

Takuro

Last fall, Fuji TV premiered a half-hour series called Love Love Aishiteru. Co-hosted by the teenage singing/comedy duo Kinki Kids and veteran singer-songwriter Yoshida Takuro, Love Love is what is known in Japan as a “variety show,” meaning that it is essentially a talk show centered around a theme, a gimmick, a strong personality, or any combination of the three. The theme of Love Love is music, since Yoshida is considered one of the main forces behind Japan’s early 1970s folk music boom, but most of the half-hour consists of light conversation between that week’s guest and Kinki Kids, who, owing to their sharp sense of humor and huge popularity among adolescent girls, provide the show with its strong personalities. Yoshida, for the most part, sits uncomfortably to the side during these chats. The show’s gimmick is its band, which includes several of Japan’s most respected musicians and singers. Yoshida and Kinki Kids sing on the show, but the guest always sings a song, too.

One night, the guest was Osaka comedian Akashiya Sanma, who is more than twice as old as either of the Kinki Kids and about a decade younger than Yoshida. At one point in the conversation Akashiya tried to explain the importance of Yoshida’s music to his generation. “Takuro was like a god,” he said, “like…” He paused , trying to come up with an analogy that these youngsters would understand. Domoto Koichi, the funnier of the two Kids, finished the sentence for him: “Like Johnny?” The studio audience exploded with laughter. Everyone knew that he was referring to Johnny Kitagawa, the president of Johnny’s Jimusho, one of Japan’s most powerful talent agencies. The audience’s reaction was understandable, since Johnny Kitagawa is Kinki Kids’ boss and, considering Kitagawa’s reputation as a dictatorial impresario, certainly something of a god to them. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Feb. 20, 2011

Posted on February 20, 2011 by philipbrasor

High-quality stuff from Beisist Shonai

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about rice and Japan’s consideration of participating in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would remove the import tariffs that protect Japanese farmers, in particular rice farmers. I plan to post a related article at Yen for Living tomorrow about how the TPP would affect the price of rice at the consumer level. I had planned to include that information in the Media Mix column, but it would have distracted from the main point, which is that the image of rice farmers is slightly distorted by media that are in favor of TPP but think that farmers can handle it if they’re smart and resourceful. I don’t think there’s any doubt that resourcefulness is a good thing, but since the vast majority of rice farmers are part-timers, most will be unable to compete on any level once the floodgates are open. The question, then, is whether or not the Japanese public is willing to let them fail, and maybe in the end the question is little more than a rhetorical one. There are too many factors, historical and otherwise, that point to an eventual liberalization of the market for rice and other agricultural products. If Japanese rice farmers are doomed, it seems to be an economic inevitability, not a political one. Rice farmers insist that the Japanese public can pay more for their rice and should, which is true but beside the point. The government desperately needs to increase consumer spending and one small but not insignificant means of doing that would be to reduce the average household expenditure on Japan’s staple food. The Yen for Living article will describe exactly how much more money could be in circulation if people paid less for rice, about ¥1.54 trillion.

In the same vein, a corollary issue I didn’t address in the column is what the TPP might affect other than agriculture. The financial writer Gucci goes on to say in his Aera article that Japan’s annual domestic agricultural production is ¥10 trillion. Though the loss of that production will have an effect, it won’t be nearly as momentous as the liberalization of financial markets. Japan’s private savings amounts to a staggering ¥1,400 trillion, 90 percent of which is socked away in financial institutions that use it to buy government bonds, thus keeping Japan solvent. If even 1 percent of that whole amount was snatched up by foreign financial entities promising better returns (not difficult in a country where the interest rate for ordinary bank deposits is 0.02 percent) that’s ¥14 trillion yen out of domestic circulation, which is a lot more than the loss from agricultural imports.

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Keepin’ on: No Age in the age of anything

Posted on February 18, 2011 by philipbrasor

Randall & Spunt

The heady rush that punk delivers is indistinguishable from its hard-fast-short credo, and what emo has drained from the punk experience isn’t so much its native cynicism but rather its performance rigor. Years ago punk cured me of my consumerist preferences in live music: I often judged a band in terms of cost-effectiveness. How long did they play? I then saw Elvis Costello during the Armed Forces tour play a blistering 30-minute set in Berekeley. The college crowd was pissed, demanding an encore that never came and believing they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth. I was floored. It was the most intense concert experience I’d had up to that point. EC and the Attractions came out and played fifteen songs without pause and got off. Though Costello was not, strictly speaking, a punk act, he was exploiting the punk performance style to make a point. Of course, this style was developed in clubs where an evening’s entertainment consisted of half a dozen acts, so one could perhaps sympathize with the Berkeley crowd for feeling they hadn’t heard enough for what they’d paid, but I couldn’t say I wasn’t satisfied.

No Age, the punk duo from Los Angeles, played at Quattro on Feb. 16 in front of a good-sized crowd that was appreciative and at time stoked but never quite dropped over the edge into total punk ecstasy. Drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall have a slightly artier take on hard-fast-short. The frantic tempos, bullet-proof melodies, and pocket-sized compositions are all there, but augmented by interludes of guitar squall and loops/effects that were recreated on stage by a serious-looking friend in a tie and windbreaker. Randall played the same hollow-bodied guitar through the entire 75-minute set, and the pair only paused between songs maybe twice. The show had momentum but lacked the kind of sharp definition, both aurally and visually, that usually makes live punk so bracing. My companion mentioned that just when a song started to hit its stride, it tended to end. He liked the fact that they were expanding punk’s parameters but thought they didn’t go far enough: It’s possible to take hard-fast-short too seriously. Call me old-fashioned, but that wouldn’t be punk; which, of course, is hardly a flexible position to take in an indie rock world where anything is acceptable and rules mean nothing. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Feb. 13, 2011

Posted on February 13, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about K-pop, specifically the TV Tokyo drama series Urakara starring the Korean girl band Kara. Though I don’t discuss the quality of the show in any detail, readers should be warned that it’s pretty awful; which, of course, is neither here nor there. The need to get Kara intense exposure on Japanese television was the obvious motivation for the program, even if that doesn’t necessarily justify its lack of coherence and crappy production values. Against all available evidence, I had actually hoped it might offer mindless silliness along the line of The Monkees; and when I first heard of the show I mistook it for a reality series, which might have been truly transgressive: Kara members seducing Japanese guys and then breaking their hearts. But no. In fact, it doesn’t even have the girls performing their music, at least not yet, so I’m not entirely sure what it’s supposed to be promoting except, maybe, Kara as possible fodder for TV talent. That, I would say, is a stretch. Even BoA, who is totally fluent in Japanese, has had limited success as a talent along the lines of Yoon Son-ha, the only South Korean who gets regular work on Japanese variety shows.

Also, I seem to be getting a lot of flack in the comments section from JYJ fans regarding my reference to the trio as “traitors.” I apologize for the term, which was meant ironically, so I probably should have placed it in quotes. My point was that bolting from one’s talent agency, whether in Japan or Korea, is considered a serious breach of show biz protocol regardless of the reasons, and as far as I know the group still hasn’t been forgiven by the industry in South Korea. The fans, of course, are quite a different matter. Their album is selling very, very well.

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Media Mix, Feb. 6, 2011

Posted on February 6, 2011 by philipbrasor

Dr. Makoto Kondo's "Your Cancer Just Seems Like Cancer"

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is basically about skyrocketing medical costs and the probable failure of Japan’s national heath insurance program to keep up. However, the heart of the matter is the priorities attached to medical care, and I admit that the examples I’ve offered create a slippery slope. Medicine’s purpose is to prolong life and to make it more comfortable, which could be taken as two distinct purposes. The conventional wisdom of the medical community says that the first purpose has a priority over the second; after all, without life there’s nothing. Consequently, any means of prolonging existence, even at the expense of the patient’s quality of life, is acceptable. Dr. Makoto Kondo’s assertion that there is no evidence that radical surgery and chemotherapy prolong life “meaningfully” for most tumor-based cancer patients is thus treated in the medical world as a form of sedition or heresy, depending on which metaphor you attach to that world. I am not a medical expert, and, were I to be diagnosed with cancer and told that my only chance of survival is surgery and/or chemotherapy, I would likely accept that line of treatment because we all want to live.

The point is not to deny anyone the full range of treatments possible, which is the usual issue when talking about health insurance, but rather to face up to fact that treatments are made available for a variety of reasons, not all of them having to do with the welfare of specific patients. Kondo has been accused of cynicism because he says the cancer treatment machine is dominated on the one hand by a pharmaceutical industry that has a lot at stake in anticancer drugs and on the other by an academic mindset that does not broach any contrary viewpoint. What’s truly troubling to the medical community about Kondo is that he’s quite dispassionate. He bases his argument on a close reading of clinical literature, which he says shows that while more and more people are being diagnosed at earlier stages for cancer, the absolute number of people dying from cancer has remained the same. His main bugbear is diagnosis, which, in terms of cancer, remains highly problematic. Moreover, he has little faith in the science of pathology as it’s taught and practiced in Japan. Because the purpose of cancer screenings is to find cancer, the likelihood of finding something increases, though Kondo believes in many cases what doctors actually find is a “cancer-like growth” (gan modoki), which will either vanish over time or remain without really doing harm to the host. If the person really does have cancer, the cancer is always present in the body and will either kill the person or not; but in any case, he says, current treatments don’t alter the outcome. Radical surgery and chemotherapy, if they don’t outright kill the patient, definitely lower the quality of that person’s remaining life. Last week, the NHK show “Tameshite Gatten” talked about new advances in early detection that practically claimed no one need ever suffer from bowel cancer ever again. The doctor who had helped develop this new technology was understandably proud. The cognitive dissonance between Kondo’s position and this doctor’s sunny outlook was deafening, except, of course, that it was only in my head. NHK would likely never invite Kondo to any of its programs.

These are difficult ideas to contemplate, but in terms of health insurance they need to be discussed more resolutely, otherwise resources and times and money may simply be propping up a medical model that doesn’t actually improve people’s lives.

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Local Natives are restless: Club Quattro, Jan. 31, 2011

Posted on February 3, 2011 by philipbrasor

Hairy as they wanna be

I often find it difficult to distinguish one post-millennial indie rock band from another, at least in terms of writing about them. In fact, I find it comforting that many are associated with specific geographical regions. It makes it easier to stereotype them, since the melting pot aesthetic (all genres being equal and equally serviceable) and textural prerogatives (lo-fi as a statement of purpose rather than something you have to put up with) have a tendency to obscure the lack of original ideas. I don’t think I’m the first person who believed that Local Natives, who hail from the storied artistic community of Silver Lake in Los Angeles, were from Brooklyn. The band’s peppy, Afro-inflected, intricately arranged rock songs and lack of sartorial exceptionalism lent them the same air of unassuming artistic ambition that characterizes the music scene of New York’s outer boroughs. When I think of L.A. indie, I think punkier (No Age) or glammier.

Local Natives’ debut album, Gorilla Manor, was one of my favorites last year. Though anyone who attempts a cover of a Talking Heads song (“Warning Sign”) from either of their first two albums deserves attention just because of their balls, what LN shares with the Heads is not so much an overachievers’ desire to totally distinguish themselves from their influences–though they do accomplish that–but rather their determination to make music as enjoyable as it is challenging. That sounds like something any band worth its salt would take for granted, but it’s generally the reason why I can’t distinguish one post-millennial indie rock band from another, especially ones from Brooklyn. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Jan. 30, 2011

Posted on January 30, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about that BBC quiz show which offended a lot of Japanese people. I’m hoping that anyone who reads the column will not automatically connect it to the common generalization that all Japanese people like to see themselves as victims, a view that is often advanced when talking about Japanese anger over the atomic bombings, which many in the West (i.e., former Allies) see as being self-righteous. The victim mindset I talk about in the column has more to do with self-restraint, in that the average person, regardless of what he or she thinks, will be solicitous to victims, and by extension their loved onces, simply because of the pain they experienced.

As I illustrated in the piece, this solicitude can be exploited by people with agenda and get in the way of things like constructive diplomacy. However, it’s also a factor in judicial procedure, as clearly shown by the decision to allow victims and/or families of victims to question suspects during criminal trials. Though I don’t necessarily think Japanese people exhibit the so-called victim mentality more than people from other countries, this particular sort of integration of “victims’ rights” into the judicial process seems unique, or, at least, specially designed to address emotional needs that courts usually don’t. It’s usually the media who address these needs by giving victims a platform from which to vent their grief and anger, and that’s to be expected. What shouldn’t be expected is that these aired emotions will influence due process. For the longest time it was something of a cliche to say that in Japan you were guilty until proven innocent, but the incorporation of victims’ rights into legal procedure has practically turned the cliche into a policy.

And in terms of the abductee issue, while I think the Japanese media is intimidated by right wing elements to a certain extent, the main reason they don’t express any doubts over the family-dictated narrative is lack of aggression. If someone with any sort of authority came out and expressed the opinion that the abductees were dead, they would report it and then start talking about it. When Toru Hasuike, the brother of Kaoru Hasuike, one of the five abductees who did return to Japan, quit his position as the leader of the abductee families group, it raised suspicions that maybe he knew something about the fate of the remaining abductees that he wasn’t revealing. For sure, Toru, as well as the other returned abductees, has never spoken with total frankness about his life in North Korea, and it has been easy for some to assume that he knows something that would greatly disturb the families of abductees who didn’t return to Japan. In any case, Toru is now said to be persona non grata in the abductee family community. The media is too solicitous of the families’ feelings to find out why, but if Toru came out and actually said something, you can be sure the press would be all over it.

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February 2011 movies

Posted on January 29, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the February 2011 issue of EL Magazine, which came out on Jan. 25. They cover films released in Tokyo between late January and mid-February.

The Dilemma
Vince Vaughn and Kevin James beat the post-boomer guy sensibility to death in this mirthless comedy about conflicting loyalties. When super salesman Ronny (Vaughn) learns firsthand that Geneva (Winona Ryder), the wife of his best friend and business partner, Nick (James), is having an affair, he despairs over whether or not he should tell him, especially after Geneva finds out he knows and threatens to reveal to Nick that she and Ronny were lovers before they met. Vaughn milks the discomfort this situation causes for all its worth as Ronny devises lame excuses for his actions to his would-be fiancee, Beth (Jennifer Connelly), while making foolish attempts to get the goods on Geneva and the bubble-headed boy toy (Channing Tatum) she’s shagging. Director Ron Howard betrays absolutely no interest in Allan Loeb’s incoherent script, allowing gross incongruities in plotting and motivation to stand, and giving neither Vaughn nor James any help with the excruciatingly static humor. Even Queen Latifah, as an automobile executive with a taste for over-literal double entendres, is on her own, and it’s not a pretty sight. (photo: Universal Pictures) Continue reading →

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February 2011 albums

Posted on January 25, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here are the albums I wrote about for the Feb. issue of EL Magazine, which comes out today. Though we continue to use the term “CD” in the magazine, I’ve decided to change the related blog post to “album” since several of these came into my possession over my net connection (legally, mind you; I still beg record companies for samples). Obviously, many of them are already “old” if you consider when they were released outside of Japan. I’d prefer to think of them as more seasoned, and my listening habits more leisurely.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
-Kanye West (Def Jam/Universal)
No Mercy
-T.I. (Atlantic/Warner)
Major label hip-hop isn’t dead, but there was little of it released last year that brought me out of myself. The Drake album was underwhelming, the Rick Ross thing generic to a fault; even The Roots’ How I Got Over felt inconsequential compared to much of their previous work. And then Kanye West stepped up with what has been roundly declared the album of the year, and for good reason. West remains one of the few big money rappers who still runs on inspiration, a commodity that has proved to be in ever-decreasing supply as hip-hop became the de facto pop music of the new millennium, and I include Lil Wayne in that equation. West’s prog-rock obsessions are what supposedly made his last album a near dud, but he’s a musician who understands that obsessions, regardless of how thoroughly they can screw up your judgment in the realm of real life, are capable of giving birth to real art, and West is nothing if not a self-conscious artist. Explicit in the title of his new album, his obsessions bear impressive musical and thematic fruit, whether it’s in the brilliantly utilized samples of everything from King Crimson to Mike Oldfield, the laser-like bead he takes on his own disturbing pecadilloes, or the insistence on incorporating guests who will both upstage him (Nicki Minaj, in particular) and provide startling contrast (Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). In the album’s centerpiece, “Runaway,” West toasts the “douchebags, assholes, scumbags and jerkoffs” who are “gifted at finding what [they] don’t like the most.” Tension emerges from the play between this self-doubt and the arrogance implicit in the rapping tone, and which is ratcheted up with music so confident and immediate it can stand up to one of Gil Scott-Heron’s most caustic rants. Moreover, Fantasy is a real album, a collection of songs that complement and build on one another, just like the classic prog rock records that seem to have inspired West in the first place. T.I.’s latest album is more in the conventional hip-hop style, “inspired” by what is unfortunately a cliche hip-hop situation: incarceration. The Georgia rapper had scheduled a different release to celebrate his own after a year inside on a gun conviction, but then he was collared for a parole violation (drugs) and sent back, and No Mercy is what we get instead. Consequently, some people are interpreting its conciliatory tone as a cave-in to popular opprobrium, having obviously expected something tougher. For sure, the self-pity is often risible (“it’s so empty living behind these castle walls”) but introspection doesn’t automatically disqualify a rapper as Kanye proves, and if this very long CD sounds like it was hastily decked out with tracks from the B-files to achieve its more chart-friendly purposes, well, T.I. is a chart-friendly guy, and while the party cuts may indicate to fans that he’s not as remorseful as the other tracks imply, they’re still party cuts. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Jan. 23, 2011

Posted on January 23, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about NHK’s appropriation of commercial TV’s programming strategies. In the print edition of the Japan Times it appears next to Mark Schreiber’s report about the potholes on the road to all-digital television, which starts in July. Mark didn’t mention NHK in his piece, though, as implied in mine, it has a huge stake in the changeover. Yesterday, Asahi Shimbun published a letter from a reader that said pretty much the same thing that I did, though the person took a more critical attitude toward the kind of owarai tarento that dominates television nowadays, saying that they don’t know how to talk and use “bad Japanese.” The impression I got from the remark is that it’s somehow acceptable for such incoherent yokels to appear on commercial TV but NHK has a reputation to uphold. (See example above from the Kansai NHK TV show West Wind) The comment clearly shows what NHK is up against in trying to convey greater relevance to its audience so that viewers won’t feel they are paying for nothing: you’re damned if you do give people supposedly what they want, and you’re damned if you don’t. But, of course, a better old saw would be that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and NHK would probably be more successful in making a case for mandatory subscriptions if it just concentrated on quality programming. What is quality programming? That’s a difficult question to answer, but in any case it sure ain’t Shibuya Deep A.

The letter writer also brought up another point that I didn’t elaborate on in the column. This person seems quite angry with NHK’s concerted effort to promote the digital changeover on the air, especially with relation to the soon-to-be-overhauled BS channels. NHK isn’t just copying commercial TV style, they have in effect become a commercial enterprise, if commercial enterprise describes an endeavor that promotes something for the purpose of getting people to spend money. A good deal of NHK’s “resources,” says the letter writer, are obviously being used to promote itself. (S)he points out that a 60-minute show is now 55 minutes, because 5 minutes of every hour is reserved for “commercials” for NHK digital content, many of which feature celebrities singing the praises of BS channels.

Also, in the column I mentioned that NHK seems to be partnering with some business entities in the production of programs, and focused on a 30-minute “documentary” about the Italian espresso maker Illy. I happened to be in a grocery store this morning and saw a display for green tea from Kakegawa, Shizuoka Prefecture. In big, bold type, the display called attention to the fact that Kakegawa green tea was recently covered “on TV.” Though the display didn’t mention NHK, two weeks ago the science/health quiz show Tameshite Gatten did a whole show on the health benefits of green tea, and mostly covered the production process as it’s carried out in Kakegawa. In fact, the morning of the day that program was aired there was a flyer in the Asahi Shimbun promoting Kakegawa green tea mentioning that its virtues have been confirmed “on TV.” Coincidence? Certainly not. Since NHK wasn’t mentioned in either the display or the flyer the broadcaster obviously can’t be directly linked to them, but the report on Tameshite was nevertheless pretty flattering.

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