Cosplay Pere UBU and Japanese Auto production

Cosplay --  Pere UBU and Japanese Auto production

(or, Sixteen going on Sixty)

            -Note Bene - I don't want to mislead you the following has very little to do with Japanese auto production other then that the teamwork production style has been used successfully by Sony  in JPOP and particularly with Ayumi Hamasaki - and a few other tangential comments, such as the Japanese feel more comfortable exporting technology then services and this may negatively impact overall business impact.

             The article is a part of a continuing series of attempts to break Americans away from the naive assumption that everybody loves them and more so that everybody wants Americans to take over their businesses.

                      It being a lovely spring day it seems a good idea to break away from the usual intellectual stuff ‘round here and and talk about a fashion style. Being as I’m a guy and I don’t “dress up” this will be a limited discussion of necessity. 

  

                Jimi Hendrix used to say the reason why he became a musician was so he could dress the way he wanted without being labeled a “fag.” Then again, Jimi said a lot of stuff. 

                   The operant word here today is Kawaii, a Japanese word for which there is no direct translation. As a lifelong musician, if you say the word Kawaii to me I’m going to think of the synthesizer company from the seventies and eighties. They may still be around. They were like the second level of quality and cost behind the first rank, larger Japanese Synth Companies which were Yamaha and Roland. These companies are definitely still around and their keyboards are used in most major rock concerts.

           Actually I still have a Kawaii XD-5 drum machine, which was a poor man’s 808 and into which I hand programmed from scratch (sine waves) in order to get the Harry Partch Scales and other musical oddities– It took a long time but I was very proud of it.

Obviously any talk by me about Kawaii ( Pronounced like Hawaii) is going to include a lot of music talk to preface it. First off, I like J-Pop , but it’s a different idiom from American music. We like to say Brit music stems from the music hall and American music stems from the barn. All indigenous music has the influence of the court and the vulgate but J-pop is more towards the court. I like to say that the Japanese make pop songs the way they make cars – they are team operations of very precise working together. It is very dramatic as well.

             Briefly when Disco collapsed into synth pop in the 80’s it went all over the word and spawned techno, rave, house, and all the other dance genres. ( As an aside, in regards our usual themes here, the major cities of the world have more in common with each other then with the smaller cities of the individual nations – this is because of the rise of a global upper class as the human race bifurcates and heads down the path to new, separate species.)

                              For me, in the beginning was the KLF. Drummond and McCaulty were a Scottish duo ( The Kings of the Low Frequency – The Keltic Liberation Front – The justified Agents of Mu Mu) who had a coupla hits, especially “Last Train to TranceCentral”, “3AM Eternal” and “justified and Ancient” – that really rocked. Then they for intents and purposes, retired and began new careers as conceptual artists. This was like, 1990.

                          Then in the early 90’s in the first example of classic Jpop the Sony company, put together the group Zone. I have little info about them – but – for instance when that chick alledgedly wrote the tune “Complicated” as a teen ager I did not buy it. Eighteen year old girls do not write those type songs. I get the impression that “Secret Base” the first big Zone tune, was written as well by a professional.

                            Zone may have been like the monkees but it was all there – the performance, the song, the production. The girls may have not been rocket scientists but they had a quality that really helps in terms of Kawaii.

                             At it’s worst Kawaii can be like the playboy bunny syndrome. As a musician one gets to see rich people and how chicks suck up to them and it can be a drag when the girl behaves as if she’s fourteen years old – especially if the girl is closer to forty then fourteen. Kawaii or “cute” mean effervescent, playful, happy, but it also can mean manipulative.

                     Don’t forget the line between the playboy bunny and the prostitute is not very wide, but as well there is a strong theatrical tradition, both European and Asian that is as work. Let me review the music quickly and we’ll get back to that.

                          First off one wants to mention Otsuka Ai, who is a singer that varies her repertoire from up tempo dance “feel good” numbers to confessional self expression songs and also includes love ballads. It is the love ballads that may be difficult to take in that they usually involve misty images of he BF at the moment, kittens, old gentle people with smiles of wisdom and mohair sweaters.

                          There’s a group called AAA, or triple A that does up tempo stuff well. A few jpop band seem to have extra singers and dancers – sort of like boy bands- but they don’t overdo the gratuitous harmonies and the dance routinues, rather then being co-ordinated schuck and jives tend to be acrobatic.

                         The giant of the genre since 2000 is Ayu Hamasaki. At first you think shes the Madonna of Japan and she can do that – and she does very successful and elaborate live shows in the Madonna mold. She also tends to do the evening gown ballad trip a little more then kids go for. As a songwriter I’d suggest that in some ways ballad writing is so formulaic that a lot of stuff that should not be performed winds up on stage.

                   We joke that it gives the singer a chance to rest before the next up tempo number. Ballad writing is not dead but there’s gotta be something musical goin on or it’s just a space filler.

                       Incidentally other then “konnitchiwa” and “hai”, I don’t know a lot of Japanese but different languages lend themselves to different melodies. When Elizabeth Browning wrote “Sonnets from the Portuguese” she was referring to the fact that it is a very mellifluous language. Listen to Brazilians like Djavan or even Jobim and is obvious.

Japanese doesn’t have a lot of long, syllabic exercises but it’s is filled with many one sound words, which means it can make rap that moves very fast.

              I can’t rap to save mey life because I’m trapped within all these multisyllabic academic words. And, for instance groups like the Orbital and FSOL could never seem to fuse their beats with any kind of organized lyric content. Ibiza Chill out does a slightly better job, as does Italian house music with it’s endless repeated choruses.

Japanese music doesn’t have that problem . In a nutshell their songs often have begininnings middles and endings which is to say they have what we call poetic form, if not architecture. And groups like Zone can be easily compared with the Go-Gos musically.

                        As I indicated Ayumi Hamasaki is the major Jpop artist. She records like most of the major artists on Sony and so she has people write the music and a more or less constant studio band, including a very good lead gtr player.

                             ````

                          Basically one of the keys to successful post disco dance music is modulation. Triple A does it and other groups as well and this helps the tune avoid the repetitiveness that led to it being so hated, at aleast in the states. Hamasaki does that effortlessly and on a tune like Flying high she shifts tempo, key, and meter at the same time, dropping into a rap thing. It’s very effective.

                                The two masterpieces are “Evolution” and “Surreal”. I can’t claim full knowledge of her oeuvre as of yet however. There are tunes that continue the advances made in those two songs,and as well, as in the case of virtually every major artist, she has spawned imitators. Her background seems quite ordinary and she has worked her way up the ladder over the years. She’s not really Kawaii and in fact, from what I can gather, she’s considered something of a trend setter herself.

It’s funny and it seems contradictory that in American Country Western music we’d ordinarily think of female singers as subservient to their men but there’s also a tradition of women being pressured into be the servants of men and not liking it. So Ayumi seems to have that sense of what we sometimes joke as “the ever present tortured artist effect.” In other words she simply will never be totally happy.

In this instance then one can’t imagine Ayumi Hamasaki being content to be classified as part of any trend other then her own. As I indicated there are permutations of Kawaii that extend beyond the brainless bimbo stereotypes of love bunnies and prostitutes.

One is it is a very brightly colored and attractive fashion statement – much akin to Carnaby Street in the UK in the sixties. To increase the allure a little more a genre called “Cosplay” or costume playing involves young women dressing up as their favorite anime characters or in the style of same.

                   Recall if you will the Japanese have for a long time had a very sophisticated religious sense. They, for the most part have no messianic religions ( although that may weaken their ability to withstand the seductions of messianic leaders) and - not to put too fine a point on things, spent centuries slaughtering each other in the Shogunate wars. Therefore the normal adoption of God poses, through masks, as in Noh drama, is not as all inclusive as it would be in more primitive societies. People understand that magic only goes so far.

I use religious analogy that’s what I’m comfortable with- but theatrical comparisons are, if anthing, more direct. Alfred Jarry’s “UBU Roi”, Hugo Balls “DADA”, the Kapek Brothers “Rossums Universal Robots” all carry the same philosophical baggage.

If you prefer a wider context, the works of Cocteau, the so called “New Vaudevillians and even Pee Wee Hermans plays offer the same absurdist underpinnings .(For those unfamiliar with American theatre Herman (Paul Reubens) based his “Pee Wee” character on the 20’s comic Eddie Cantor.

                 To bring this back to more familiar territory recall what I once labeled the Mickey Mouse line. Two armies face off on a battle field. One is dressed like Mickey Mouse. They advance on each other an one side is decimated because they could not fire on an enemy that looked like Mickey Mouse

             To elaborate further. I was talking to a bus driver the other day. He’s of average intelligence and no bad habits. Someone has indoctrinated him with the line that President Obama allegedly hates the military. (Actually what is happening there is we are witnessing the setting up of the post warfare military. On all levels re-enlistments are jockeying to get the sweet spots like Germany, South Korea, or even the Pacific and nobody wants anything to do with the middle east.)

              We are not concerned with that question here – what is important is how the message is transferred and if the message  transfer takes hold, can it be changed in light of the facts, or is it beyond such alteration?   That American military policy has since the second world war been based on subjective beliefs is a given - but it can no longer be afforded.

                 Realistically we must assume our typical bus drivers mind  is made up forever. This doesn’t mean that counterprogramming can’t be employed but lets not count on it. The selfish gene doesn’t care about truth and you have not begun to understand real horror until you look into people’s souls.

                      For intents and purposes the goal of those who would enslave you is simple – “How can we make our candidate more Kawaii?” How can we convince the voter that despite every appearance of being a heartless psychotic our boy loves his mother, children and small dogs.

                       Now I must begin by apologizing if I offend the sensibilities of readers. I don’t mean to do so, but on the other hand to refrain from addressing certain issues would be a disservice to the reader, and what is more a disservice to the work at hand.

                       One feels like Winston Churchill in being compelled to remind the reader that if some tells you they don’t like you, you must take them at their words and not think that one can simple overcome prejudice with kindness. Over coming obstacles with a sense of humor and will power is something that belongs in Hollywood and on television, but it doesn’t happen that often in real life.

                          What we may suggest exists is a duality of attitude discernable in cultures that ,mirrors that which we see in individuals. The monads create the totality. More advanced societies like more advanced people learn to mask this duality. As we say the key to success is hypocrisy, meaning the ability to force others to live under constraints that we ourselves can disregard. In classic terms rulers make decisions that mean life and death for followers whilst never risking that themselves.

                        Again we traditionally force the dispossessed agree to terms we ourselves would never consider. For instance the notion often promulgated that if two sides side down and talk eventually they will get to know ech other and like each other. They may get to know each other and they may even, as adversaries develop a sort of admiration for each other – but that doesn’t change the essentials.

                              Strindberg might suggest that in cases where one side is disadvantaged, it can be forced to capitulate and in do so retroactively change it’s viewpoints but when cultures or persons of sufficient back ground interact this is not the case. Isreal and Palestine have been talking for over a lifetime and there’s no suggestion they trust each other anymore then originally. This is an interesting case because both cultures are verbally dexterous, and because the ground is not fungible. Like a virgin it either belongs to one side or another.

                        Accuse me of prejudice if you will but for years I lived in NYC and nearby and went through many attacks of chemicals, bombs, hand guns, etc and the other side was nearly always Islamic – So what is one supposed to think? I hear apologists say that 9/11 could not have been predicted and find what our leaders try to make us think is laughable. That said, on a personal level most Muslims are able to control their disgust for westerners – especially when it comes to sex.

                          In Oxford UK I lived for five years in the same house as Muslims. I had the upper flat – they had the lower. We had zero interaction until they started stealing my mail from the mailbox and they got the bank card which they used to empty out my UK bank account.

                           Another little story. I would buy the newspaper and small goods from the local store and put the change into a container for Islamic charities. Behind the counter was a little old lady and you know, it’s sort of an unwritten rule to always be polite to little old ladies because it’s they wh secretly run the world.

                           And so she said to me one time, “You know that money goes to Islamic Charities,” with the implication that I was a fool since the actual collection was for the Jihad. The point to be made is that the dual association between the west and Crusaders is inevitable and unavoidable and after all - it did happen.

                  The joke in Europe is Muslims move west but Christians rarely move into Muslim countries because who the hell wants to live like that?

                           The irony, realistically is that it quite possible that the western refusal to disassociate itself from the Feudal Islamic states brought about a large part of the anger between the two areas. I’ve never been east of Istanbul but I have been to former third world colonies and one of the ongoing resentments about the colonial periods is that the European colonists refused to educate or in anyway improve the lives of their subjects.

The parallels between the Islamic world and the Japanese culture are not difficult to find – especially when we consider that women are more segregated from the rest of society then in the west. In actually though the degree to which women are hidden away in Japan is much less then in Islam.

                   To repeat though what you have is people who are polite to you , up to a point, but in actual truths, among themselves regard you as undesirables. These are both societies that were closed to the rest of the world until the nineteenth century whereupon they were open up via gunboat diplomacy.

                            There is no American equivalent for the Japanese world Gaijin, or foreigner and it is the embarrassed Japanese parent that must silence their child who cries out “Gaijin!” upon seeing in particular a westerner, on the street. Again the joke is, if you see a white person on the street in Japan they are either a tourist or an English teacher. There are very few other reasons for white people to be there.

                               As an aside this seems to contradict the notion of open markets – but there are plenty of American Businesses there, only run and owned by Japanese. Suffice to say neoliberal economic policies as promoted by both parties in the US are only of interest to American Corporations when there are substantial profits to be made – if that’s not the case, no one cares.

                                     And being realistic again we must not forget that these are the people we dropped the bomb on. A little reticence is not to be unexpected. A friend of mine mentioned that she grew up in Osaka, and the first thing I recalled is that Osaka was on the short list for the next few atom bombs to be dropped.

                                 As the Buddha would say, “We are dealing with conditioning” It’s an interesting an unsolvable question as to what is the difference between conditioning and knowledge. They are almost like viewing the same event from different angles.

But even were the bomb not in existence the issue as to who was destined to control the sea lanes of the Pacific would still apply.

                          Although as an undergrad, and earlier I was an avid reader the study of history is encapsulate history in to a series of axioms. The twentieth century could be synopsized as “Everybody wants to be like Great Britain.” The Germans wanted an overseas empire. The old Empires just wanted to stay in power, and the Japanese wanted their own empire as well. I joke that Roosevelt read the riot act to Churchill, saying in effect, “No look here you’re going to have to let go these colonies, like India, because they give other nations bad ideas.”

                        All this is to say that especially when an entire group of people move into an area they either are assimilated or conquered. American’s , I’ve said before, often consider the politeness of the Asian person as a form of lying. Indeed As Mark Twain said the Arab fathers highest recommendation of his son’s merit was that he lied well. 

            That said the type of lies told by different cultures vary as much as the type of truths. What they do have in common is they're essentially ways of misleading the listener.

In the west the preferred technique for lying is rhetoric, or verbal slight of hand 

             This rely's on logical paradoxes. The Asian method is to make the truth so small as to be obscured by the side revelations.  The Islamic method simply refuses to address the logical flaws at all, preferring as it were to continally change the terms of argument.

 

             As something of a student of languages one must say that the actual language differences between English and Arabic and Asian create further philosophical differences. I’ve mentioned previously the late arrival of Islam is mirrored in it’s legalistic presentation of the laws of the supreme God.

And the Asian mind is different in some ways. Man is more of a part of nature then the ruler of nature. It is however at this point that we must stop and reconsider. Immediate to mind come two deadly fallacies about “the rest of the race” that have to be dealt with.

In some sense they are actually so absurd that one stands a chance of gaining a near universal understanding of the processes they invoke. In other words they are classical propaganda of the variety that insists for instance that members of other races smell different.

                    This ought be straightforwardly understandable, as I said. Much of what we speak of here in these essays is beyond I guess you’d call normal college level perceptions- but remember the smartest people in the best schools are motivate, like myself not so much by the approval of the common herd but by the knowledge that one has expanded the boundaries of human perception.

                  I like to think that my brothers and sisters engaged in the uncreated conscience of generations yet to come have decency and morality at heart but the jury is still out, and As I have tried to indicate the potential for the damage to the future life on earth is frightening. Added to nuclear winter and global warming is now the potential for species bifurcations – where the fortunate will live long and prosper and the less fortunate will descend to a state of subhumanity.

                             That said , when I was a boy it was a given that “Asians do not care for life the way we do.” The assumption was that they did not value their lives and hence were more then willing to die and shed the veils of the phenomenological world. One could point to misunderstood philosophical antecedents, especially the idea of reincarnation and notions of cyclical time but the people who perpetrated this myth had no such complexity in genesis.

                         Their simple message was “It’s okay to kill Asians because Asians don’t mind dying.” As in any form of enforced slavery one must degrade the target to subhuman status before the process of enslavement can contine. Added to that was the idea that there was no Asian single God head in messianic terms and needless to say it was assumed that Asian parents could not possibly love their children. The fact that ancestor worship is far more prevalent in the east then in the west doesn’t seem to have sunk in.

                       If Lenin had his “useful idiots” – those kind hearted souls who without knowing why or how advanced the cause of the revolution we can create another category – convenient fallacies- these are purportedly scientific misconceptions or beliefs that just happen to be of practical advantage to the believer.

                 The next illusion is that we can ascribe the general character from the specific. This makes no sense in any application and again it is created and used for the sole purpose of denying to other people their basic humanity. It is such a large topic one hardly knows where to begin.

Essentially it is the extrapolation, nearly always of some wrong, from one individual to a racial, religious or ethic category. Any such preconceived notion then has the attraction –to some- of removing the responsibility of others to treat the persons in the degraded category decently.

                  I suppose it could be considered something of a bummer that I end this explication of a Japanese fashion trend in this way, but such things have origins. They are in the context of their environment. Many cultures have varying degrees of differentiation between sexes.

                      In Poland for instance the women and men socialize separately but work together in the field. Separate sex socialization, especially out of the home and family tends to lead to problems with Alcoholism. One could make substantial progress in halting death by alcohol in Russia – not by attacking the drinking but by attacking the association it has with manliness for instance.

                   In Japan where long hours in same sex environments are the norm it is almost to be expected that “the ladies” would discover to pass the time to be amused and to impress each other via what the anthropologists would call variations of display.

The whole thing , as I imagine the males would agree, is that it is harmless as long as one doesn’t take it too far.

                    I will conclude with one last observation which is the comparative lack of interest the Japanese show in exporting some of the most attractive elements of their culture including J-pop. Their willingness on the other hand to import cultural artifacts is very impressive – but it is almost as if their export trade, in electronics and automobiles, something for which they have displayed incredible aptitude, is considered “man’s work”, and they prefer to leave the other side of life to the domains of women.

• gs