Still City Glossary by Edwin Gardner

1 STILL CITY GLOSSARY Tokyo Still City New Horizons and Still Cities The Search for a Future Beyond Growth Recently, the world witnessed two major events. (1) Since 2008—for the first time in history—more than half of the world’s population lives in towns or cities. A condition that is altogether new, and fully transformative for social, political, and physical conditions. City life becomes the essential human experience. (2) In October 2011 the seventh billion person was born. Both these developments pose challenges to our natural environment, and to the way we organize extraction, production, distribution and consumption of materials and products. How do we provide for the needs of concentrated populations of millions? Currently we have cultivated 43 percent of the earth’s ice-free landmass. Considering the total of our cities, towns, agricultural grounds and extraction sites. If the world’s population grows from seven billion to nine billion by 2045, we’ll probably use more than half of the earth’s icefree landmass by 2025, which will disrupt even more the Earth’s ecosystems. These concerns are not new. In 1972 the Club of Rome's report ‘The Limits to Growth’ concluded that somewhere in the 21st century the carrying capacity of earth would be reached—our resources would become depleted and Earth’s ecosystems would collapse. The conclusions of this report were based on a cybernetic computer model that showed how developments in demographics interacted with other areas of development, like food production, industrial output, pollution and resource depletion. So far, most of the world’s macro developments match the Club of Rome’s model. Adding to these challenges is a growing awareness that automation is increasingly capable of making human labor more generic and even obsolete—testing one of the central tenets of capitalism: Work Hard, Consume Harder. We need new horizons.

The Still City Glossary This publication is a glossary about stillness, and the notion ‘stillness’ denotes for us an emergent paradigm, a world and society beyond the paradigm of growth.

We are living in an increasingly urban world, in which growth is the central tenet. Growth, in all its cultural translations and incarnations, has been the cornerstone of modernity. Most of our parables stress the virtues of personal growth, economic growth, demographic growth and technological innovation. Forms of growth that are considered deeply intertwined, simultaneous, and interchangeable. But what happens when growth is no longer feasible, or when it becomes undesirable? What happens to a city when growth based on ‘Bigger, Better and More of it’, becomes unsustainable? What happens when a city stops growing but doesn’t shrink either? What kind of values and narratives will emerge when the notions of economic growth and personal growth disconnect? How will people relate to labor, love, family, individuality, community, history and the future? Is there such a thing as a mature city? The Still City Glossary is a first gathering of concepts, stories, thoughts, anecdotes, histories and images in which we sketch the outlines of the territory we are investigating. We are seeking to articulate what a post-growth urban society could be. A Still City as we call it.

and practices—can be a seen as strengthening an inclusive and sustainable society that is not based on growth? And how do these trends interact when extrapolated to a society where these trends would constitute dominant cultural rationales? How could a Still City function? How could the evaluation of these trends shift perspectives today, in the way we make policy, commerce, science and culture? Considering these questions we were inspired by the World3 cybernetic model and its results on which the “Limits to Growth” report of the Club of Rome was largely based. Where the Club of Rome sought to warn the world of the dangers of short-term thinking, Still City Project seeks to project a sustainable and inclusive society, based on already existing but emerging values, narratives and practices. And, we decided that our first case study should be Tokyo. Japan’s economy has been experiencing zero-growth for the last two decades, it has a rapidly aging and shrinking population, and even the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo is now experiencing a slow-down and even shrinkage in its periphery. To us Tokyo seemed like a good place to start search for hints of what a Still City might be like.

The Still City Project

How to use the Glossary

The Still City Glossary is a prelude to the Still City Project—a long term project that kicks off with the Still City Tokyo Workshop (29 October– 8 November, Shibaura House, Tokyo). The Still City Project was formulated after contemplating two interlinked contemporary concerns or understandings: Economic growth based on population growth, mass consumption and technological innovation appears to be less and less sustainable. Technological innovation has the potential to replace human labor or to make human labor more generic. Both these understandings make an economic system based on efficiency, cost reduction and mass consumption not viable on the long term. Obviously these concerns or understandings have to do with the totality of our cultural narratives, values and practices, so when addressing them we wanted to approach it as holistically as possible, while still having our feet on the ground and work with intelligence that is local, tangible, and rooted in the everyday. As workable points of departure we formulated the following questions: Which contemporary trends—values, narratives

The Glossary is structured as a series of alphabetized encyclopedia entries, which can be navigated by the hyperlinks that connect all entries. Each underlined word the title of a lemma in the Glossary. We encourage you to follow the links, break out of the narrative, and start where you see fit rather than going from A to Z through the Glossary. Unlike an encyclopedia our entries are subjective, seeking to provoke and not insisting on a neutral position. Entries vary from definitions to extended quotations to full articles. Sources can be found at the end and are denoted by codes throughout. Monnik

2 2-D Memories

Happy, Happiness Hamawaki Hamawaki Dairy HOLISM, HOLISTIC, HOLISTICAL Home, Homes Homo Faber Homo Ludens

Pan Narrans Population Problem(s ) Progress

Abundance Animal Laborans Anthropocene Anthropocentrism Artificial Artisan (s ) Artist (s ), Artistic Aum b Babel Bandaged Houses Beerkens, Anneke c Career CAZALIS, CARLOS Club of Rome Craft-Based Economy Craft (s ), Craftsman, Craftsmen, Craftsmanship Creative (s ), Creatively, Creativity Creative Destruction Culture (s ), Cultural, Cultured

Human, Humanity, Humankind J JOY, BILL K Kaczinski, Ted Kami Konbini Kong, Thomas l Labor Leisure Luddite (s ) Looser, Thomas

r Real Religion (s ) Remunerated Life Replicator(s ) Resource (s ) Robot (s ) Rots, Aike s Shinto sources Spirit (s ) Steady-State Steady State Economy Still Space (s ) Sun t

Technology Throughput Time (s ), Timeless m Tokyo Tokyo Space-Time d Machine (s ) Totoro Paradigm, The Malthus, Thomas Robert Truth Daly, Herman Mature, Maturity Memory Markers Density u Model (s ), Modelling Disaster(s ) I Disaster(s ) II Monnik Uneconomic Growth Monozukuri Universe e Morlocks Museums of Small Catas- w Ecosystem(s ) trophes, Education Whitelaw, Gavin End, Ends, Ending, Ended, n Work(s ), Working, Endless Worker(s ) Everyday Nature Worall, Julian Neo-Luddite, Neo-Ludf dism y New, Newer, Newely Future No Message Youth g

Godik, Maren Grey Goo Ground(s ), Grounded Growth

Onigiri

A frog in a well does not know the great sea

2-D MEMORIES down except for a lone archway that marks the entry to the old building. In its place stand a big, anonymous public housing estate and a new community center that house an upgraded version of the past. The outlines of the old walls and pools of the onsen are crudely delineated with mass produced tiles. Personal and collective memories are reduced and flattened into abstract, two-dimensional visual images for the future generation. (See Hamawaki Dairy). Kong

images, formula’s, codes and other abstractions, never by people who are in the business of making physical products. Would their vision of the future be just as compelling to them if these assemblers could also create outstanding works of philosophy, literature and science? It’s hard to spot a craftsman on Star Trek. The ships seem populated by brainy types who feed their designs into their replicators and holodecks. It seems that the future doesn’t need everyone, only people of a certain kind of intelligence and with a certain kind of skill set. In many ways this future is al-

ABUNDANCE

ready here. Sixty percent of the persons

↓ An old onsen in Hamawaki is torn

In most positive futurisms our lives are in the Dutch educational system are made easier by robots, nanotechnology engaged on the VMBO level, the lowest level. These people are engaged on and genetic engineering. In his book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, written in 1987 and updated in 2007, Eric Drexler describes how manipulation of matter at the atomic level could create an utopian future of abundance, where everything could be made cheaply by using nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. A subsequent book, Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution, which Drexler co-wrote, imagines molecular level ‘assemblers’. These ‘assemblers’ would be able to manufacture any product at a cost no greater than that of cheap plastics today. Visions of cheap abundance are always imagined by people who are in the business of creating knowledge, narratives,

a level that has the lowest social status, and they know it. They know the future doesn’t need them. They are trained for the most generic and uninspiring jobs. No kid dreams of becoming nighttime cleaner of office buildings. Today most production is outsourced to cheap labor. Tomorrow machines will be cheaper then the cheapest labor. Monnik

ANIMAL LABORANS Labor is that activity that corresponds to the biological processes and necessities of human existence, the practices that are necessary for the maintenance of life itself. Labor is distinguished by its never-ending character; it creates nothing of permanence, its efforts are quickly consumed, and must therefore be per-

petually renewed so as to sustain life. In this aspect of its existence humanity is closest to the animals and so, in a significant sense, the least human (“What men [sic] share with all other forms of animal life was not considered to be human”). Indeed, Arendt refers to humanity in this mode as animal laborans. Because the activity of labor is commanded by necessity, the human being as laborer is the equivalent of the slave; labor is characterized by unfreedom. Arendt argues that it is precisely the recognition of labor as contrary to freedom, and thus to what is distinctively human, which underlay the institution of slavery amongst the ancient Greeks; it was the attempt to exclude labor from the conditions of human life. In view of this characterization of labor, it is unsurprising that Arendt is highly critical of Marx’s elevation of animal laborans to a position of primacy in his vision of the highest ends of human existence. Drawing on the Aristotelian distinction of the oikos (the private realm of the household) from the polis (the public realm of the political community), Arendt argues that matters of labor, economy and the like properly belong to the former, not the latter. The emergence of necessary labor , the private concerns of the oikos, into the public sphere (what Arendt calls “the rise of the social”) has for her the effect of destroying the properly political by subordinating the public realm of human freedom to the concerns of mere animal necessity. The prioritization of the economic which has attended the rise of capitalism has for Arendt all but eclipsed the possibilities of meaningful political agency and the pursuit of higher ends which should be the proper concern of public life. IEP2012

ANTHROPOCENE The Anthropocene is an informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. The term was coined recently by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer, but has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth’s atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological era. To date, the term has not been adopted as part of the official nomenclature of the geologists. Monnik

after the rain, earth hardens

ANTHROPOCENTRISM

the valet, engine running—or, if you were wealthy enough, you could leave usMan at the apex of evolution. Lithograph ing one of the three heliports. by Ernst Haeckel from Anthropogenie Parque Cidade Jardim is a safe and conoder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen trolled environment where your feet never have to hit the pavement again (much less (1874). the soil beneath all the tar, concrete and steel that covers todays urban cityscape). Cazalis

ARTISAN(S ) — see Craftsmanship ARTIST(S ), ARTISTIC

— The Origins of the Artistic Self

ARTIFICIAL → Live, Work and Play—three words

central to the advertising campaign that promoted Parque Cidade Jardim, a set of nine luxury, guarded skyscrapers that featured condominiums, offices, top segment shopping malls, lush green areas, refreshing spas, and much more. It was being built whilst I lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2009. The building site was overlooking the pungent, sewage filled Tiete River—the most polluted in the country. The concept behind the development was that you would never have to leave Parque Cidade Jardim, if you so pleased. From your apartment in the residential tower you could go to your office in one of the corporate towers by simply crossing the green mezzanine plaza, and in the meantime your family, including the pets, could take the elevator straight into the shopping mall, where they could get a meal in one of 23 different restaurants, see a dozen or more films, choose a workout in one of many gyms, or opt for a variety of grooming experiences, including one for the pets. If you do had to leave the premises, your automobile would be waiting for you at

Japanese creative labor has long been exclusively associated with craftsmanship. From the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), with its rigid class division, craftsmen or artisans were socially placed above merchants and below farmers. As a consequence of Japan’s industrialization during the Meiji period (1868–1912), artisan labor became partly substituted by machinery and many craftsmen didn’t have any choice other than to start working in factories, becoming part of lower class society. During the postwar period, craftsmanship was considered of lower prestige than “proper company employment,” but due to Japan’s nationalistic agenda, craftsmen gained respect in society: artisans (shokunin) became “bearers of a unique Japanese ‘tradition’” (Kondo 1990: 234–235). Part of reason why Japanese craftsmen gained respect was related to a certain “character” they represented, which was considered culturally meaningful to postwar Japanese selfhood. In the process of creating things, craftsmen showed self-surrender (tariki) and proved an ability to endure hardship under difficult economic and social conditions. Artisans took pride in their resilience and considered their work as pathway to maturity and symbolic selfrealization. “[a] mature artisan is a man who, in crafting fine objects, crafts a finer self” (Kondo 1990: 241). The creation of things, whether for utilitarian or aesthetic purposes, was not associated with the existence of individual talent of the maker. Craftsmen were anonymous artistic producers and the basic idea of craftsmanship was that “beauty could exist without heroes” (Moeran 1997: 26). By the end of the 19th century, a Japanese art world started to rise, deeply influenced by Western orientalist appreciations of Japan. Ernest Fenellosa, an American art historian teaching at the

University of Tokyo, was key figure in the institutionalization of the Japanese art world and established Japan’s first art school in Tokyo. A distinction between fine art (bijutsu) and craft (kōgei) started to emerge and with the institutionalization of the art world, artists could no longer retain to be anonymous producers of beauty (Moeran 1997: 13). The institutional implementation of the Western art world in Japan raises questions about the particular Western sociohistorical development of the “artistic self.” Was it possible to just “copy” the Western art world and as a consequence create a “Western artistic self” in Japan? During the European Renaissance, the distinction between craftsmen and artists already existed. Craftsmen were workers with excellent technical skills, proficient in minutely imitating their masters. They collectively produced utilitarian products in workshops. Artists, on the contrary, were seen as gifted individuals with extraordinary inborn qualities. These “superhumans” created nonutilitarian masterpieces for religious clients or nobility. During the Enlightenment the power of the nobility and church decreased and artists celebrated greater autonomy and freedom—with at the same time a greater risk of insecurity. They started to position themselves as opposed to the petite bourgeoisie both in thought and behavior. The “lofty” artist’s only aspiration was aesthetic self-expression. The image of the disdainful artist was born, a vagabond voluntarily living a penniless life at the outskirts of society (Sennett 2008, Wittkower & Wittkower 1963). Both images of the Western artist, namely the artist as genius and the artist as vagabond, are related to a specific Western historical context and one would expect it to be impossible to implement these particular images of “the creative self” in Japan. Beerkens/AB1

AUM → Aum are fictitious creatures from the

Studio Ghibli film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, 1984), a post-apocalyptic science fiction

dystopia. In this film, the Aum are large isopod-shaped insect-like creatures, which are of crucial importance for preserving the fragile ecosystem as they are agents of purification. Their name is probably derived from the mystical Sanskrit syllable aum, which is often recited during Hindu

and Buddhist ritual practices. There is a striking similarity between the names of the insect, and the religious organisation that was responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway attacks, Aum Shinrikyō. As Inaga argues, its leader, Asahara Shōkō, was ‘a fervent reader’ of the comic books, who ‘seems to have willingly assumed (…) the role of the Aum insect and the purifying forest in this disgracefully polluted world’ (1999:120). Apparently, Asahara considered the violence committed by his followers an act of purification necessary for the establishment of a new world order. Rots/AR1

After victory, tighten your helmet strap

big similarity, small difference

BABEL

ence Research of the University of Amsterdam. Her current project is called: Fashionable Futures: Japanese Youths’ Hopes in Precarious Times. She is currently doing fieldwork in Tokyo at Bunka Gakuen Fashion University.

“Having conceived Babel, yet unable to build it themselves, they had thousands to build it for them. But those who toiled knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned. And the minds that planned the Tower of Babel cared nothing for the CAREER workers who built it. The hymns of praise Japan and The Neoliberal Turn of the few became the curses of the many. Between the mind that plans and the Since the post-World War II reconstruchands that build there must be a Media- tion, Japan’s capitalist model has been tor, and this must be the heart.” different from the American laissez-faire (Maria, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, system based on a discourse of self-reliance and self-responsibility, as well as 1928) from the European welfare-type based on economic and social state intervention. The Japanese state emphasized its “unique moral grid” encompassing the idea that taking care of the less fortunate was a family’s—and to a lesser extent community’s—duty. The moral framework of mutual care and loyalty was secured by governmental interference in the way corporate Japan, “Japan Inc.,” was structured. A relatively high percentage of Japan’s male workforce held lifetime employment, which assured seniority-based wage increases and decent pensions. Family wages made an important contribution to the gendered geography of both the company and the house, the latter being the “satellite sphere” of the Japanese company. Japan’s path into stable lifetime employment was not just open to skilled and well-educated people, but also to high school graduates in blue-collar jobs. Wages between blue- and white-collar workers in large companies differed BANDAGED HOUSES minimally. Regardless of someone’s level of education, entrance into a large ↑ Scattered throughout the Hamawaki Japanese firm meant a stable uni-linear district are traditional houses bandaged work trajectory. The “white-collarization with blue, brown or grey corrugated met- of Japanese blue-collar workers” (Koike al panels. These cheap, generic panels 1988: 266) stood at the base of Japan’s perhide the scars of decay caused by weath- sistent ideology of classlessness or midering and the demolition of the once dle-classness, covering existing social closely knitted community of houses, re- differences under a blanket of equality. vealing only a rare window or two for the With Japan’s decreasing economic vital act of breathing. The slow erasure growth since the 1970s, the burst of the of houses has decimated the network of financial bubble in the 1990s, and the narrow streets and small open spaces, ongoing economic crisis, the corporate leaving the surviving buildings standing ideal began to deteriorate. Employment alone, sometimes surrounded by a sea stability—particularly among lowof empty parking lots. (See Hamawaki skilled workers—decreased and wages Dairy) Kong in part-time and temporary jobs weren’t sufficient to support whole families. The BEERKENS, ANNEKE Japanese government, however, maintained its reserved attitude towards a Anneke Beerkens is a PhD candidate at state-organized welfare system and The Amsterdam Institute for Social Sci- from the 2001 Koizumi administration

6 onwards, Japan has openly taken “necessary” neoliberal reforms in order to adjust to the demands of global competition. As a consequence, the economic and social gap between white- and bluecollar workers has widened. The transformations in Japan’s corporate structure have particularly affected Japanese youth. Recruitment of new young workers has decreased since many elder employees are still protected by the benefits of a lifelong contract. Young people now have to make do. These changes are not just a matter of economics: they have prevented most young people—even those with impressive qualifications— from reproducing the sociality, the sense of self, and the sense of belonging that guided their parents through life. Economic insecurity has aggravated ongoing patterns of delayed marriage, divorce, and low demographic reproduction. The establishment constantly blames its youth for being incapable of reproducing “Japan Inc.” and never attaining social adulthood. Once the focus of hopes for the future, Japanese youth are now viewed as Japan’s “new face of poverty” . In sharp contrast to the rest of the economy, Japan’s popular culture industry is booming. The local and global popularity of “J-cool,” in the form of computer games, manga, anime, toys, and fashion, generates much needed economic capital. As is the case of other postindustrial societies, young Japanese people aim for a job in one of the creative industries. For them, this may be as insecure a path as arubaito, but one that gives meaning, self-esteem, and identity: a path that makes one a social being again—in their own eyes at least. So far, the Japanese turn to neoliberalism and the way it affects Japanese youth sounds like a familiar narrative. In Japan as elsewhere, neoliberalism is a voracious global specter that invades society and favors the dominant classes, aggravating the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots.” Analyzing neoliberalism as “status quo,” as an agent that “does things to people” is a pitfall that holds the danger of creating a Foucauldian discourse that feeds belief in the “magic” and uni-linearity of neoliberalism outside of academia. Neoliberalism, therefore, should be analyzed as an incomplete and always changing cultural specific process, as “action grounded in specific practices and locales that can be thickly described” (Ho 2005: 68). A closer look at the way in which Japan’s

7 postwar educational system has been structured to socialize “working selves” will help to understand the particularities of Japan’s turn to neoliberalism and the way in which it affects the Japanese society and particularly its youth. Beerkens

CAZALIS, CARLOS Carlos Cazalis is a documentary photographer. Since 2005 Cazalis has been working on the Urban Meta project, a long term documentary project looking into eight of the most populated cities in the world. Through this project he investigates the dilemma’s of sustainability that these overpopulated area’s present, and secondly how the human psyche deals with a completely artificial manmade environment severed from nature.

CLUB OF ROME The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. Founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy, the CoR describes itself as “a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity.” It consists of current and former Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe. It raised considerable public attention in 1972 with its report The Limits to Growth. The club states that its mission is “to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public.” Monnik

CRAFT-BASED ECONOMY In an article in the New York Times, Adam Davidson synthesizes a number of recent events into a larger phenomenon that he calls a “craft-based economy.” He points to Sam Adams beer, Starbucks, Apple, and the various products offered on Etsy as facets of what is apparently called “happiness economics”, which argues that “once people reach some level of comfort, they are willing—even eager—to trade in potential earnings at a lucrative but uninspiring job for less (but comfortable) pay at more satisfying work.” Another dimension of this view is that other individuals within this

Cover the ears and steal the bell

economy, and presumably enough of the middle class to matter, are willing to be price insensitive on certain consumables. JL2012

CRAFT(S ), CRAFTSMAN, CRAFTSMEN, CRAFTSMANSHIP “Craftsmanship” may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society—but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stand in the way of the craftsman’s discipline and commitment: schools may fail to provide the tools to do good work, and workplaces may not truly value the aspirations for quality. And though craftsmanschip can reward an individual with a sense of pride in work, this reward is not simple. The craftsman often faces conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to do something well for its own sake can be imparied by competitive pressure, by frustration, or by obsession.” RS2008

CREATIVE(S), CREATIVELY, CREATIVITY — Creative Labor and Its Discontents

Particularly because work today is such a powerful determinant of identity, young people in post-industrial societies pursue employment that feeds global youthcentered consumption. The expanding creative industries dedicated to the development of symbolic products in entertainment, visual and performing arts, advertising, design, and fashion are the ideal contexts to do so. The decision of young people to work in the creative industries as artists, designers, or cultural technicians matches the post-industrial shift towards service and knowledge economies in which creative jobs form a large part of the workforce. Intelligence, knowledge, and creativity rather than physical input are highly valued tools in a person’s “post-Fordist skill set”. In the creative industries, life and work are coterminous. Flexible work times, mobile workplaces, wearing casual

clothing during meetings; work becomes a marker of one’s identity as well as a means for lifestyle. The rewarding and satisfying feeling of creating something that is a unique extension or reflection of your self attracts many to creative work. However, choosing a creative path does not mean that young people are “taking the easy road.” An identity that is based on a notion as slippery as talent, makes creative subjects very vulnerable on a personal level: “inadequate personal performance hurts in a different way than inequalities of inherited social position or the externals of wealth: it is about you. Agency is all to the good, but actively pursuing good work and finding you can’t do it corrodes one’s sense of self” (Sennett 2008: 97; emphasis added). Despite the “coolness” and veneer of freedom, creatives are full of insecurity and experience large amounts of stress because of the constant need to improve their skills. The vulnerable position of creative subjects manifests itself on a material level as well. The charm of self-realization and self-expression as experienced in good times can easily turn into financial insecurity and hardship when the economy experiences a downturn. However, hardship and poverty have become embedded in the cool image of many creative workers. Young creatives turn the limitations of precarity to advantage: work insecurity becomes freedom, overwork is experienced as self-actualization, and labor-intensive work for low pay in dodgy locations becomes evidence of passion. This “attitude twist” makes creatives “exemplary entrepreneurs” and ideal neoliberal subjects in the eyes of the neoliberal state. Inspired by Negri (1989) and others, theorists have called creative workers “the new precariat”—a portmanteau term constructed from “precarity” and “proletariat” that conveys both exploitation and political potential. Beerkens

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION At its most basic, “creative destruction” (German: schöpferische Zerstörung) describes the way in which capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction of some prior economic order, and this is largely the sense implied by the German Marxist sociologist Werner Sombart who has been credited with the first use of these terms in his work Krieg und Kapitalismus (“War and Capitalism”, 1913). In the earlier work of Marx, however, the idea of creative destruction

Don’t let your daughter-in-law eat your autumn eggplants

or annihilation (German: Vernichtung) the informants told the author: implies not only that capitalism destroys “Every time I walk passed my favorite and reconfigures previous economic or- places (in the online game World of Warders, but also that it must ceaselessly de- craft) I take a short break because this value existing wealth (whether through (virtual) place is so beautiful—it is difwar, dereliction, or regular and periodic ficult to explain but this place touches me economic crises) in order to clear the profoundly and at the same time is still so ground for the creation of new wealth. simple.” And: “Standing on the hills and seeing the sun set Monnik

CULTURE(S ), CULTURAL, CULTURED Culture/Technology

A recent report, drafted in commission for the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure, the primary strategic advisory board for the Dutch government and the Dutch parliament in the fields of the physical environment and infrastructure, stated that the need among young people to experience nature is ebbing away and hence the future legitimation for Dutch environmental policies, since the experience—consumption—of nature is the main argument behind investments in the natural environment. The rapport was based on an anthropological survey into the everyday experience and perception of nature amongst young people. The survey went beyond the ‘responsible’ and ‘expected‘ answers and tried to access their real feelings. The report, titled ‘Hoezo Natuur’ (Why Nature) and written by Stichting Waarde, concluded that most reflections on the future of our natural environment do not take into account our fundamental belief in progress. According to the author this was unwise. Many people equal progress to increasing independence of natural limitations and threats—thanks to technological innovation we life longer, healthier and more comfortable lives. The report found that most young people, who grew up in a man-made and even augmented environment, associated nature with parks and lawns. Asked about climate change most young people expressed that they didn’t really care about the decline of biodiversity. They felt that the moment climate change became a real threat we would find a way to deal with it. The report found a lot of confidence in the technical fix. Not surprisingly, since they grew up in a world where internet and mobile phone are a given, most food is bio-engineered and everyday reality is augmented. Their sense of what is natural and what is artificial is fading. It’s increasingly difficult for them to make the distinction. One of

on Booty Bay (a place in the online game World of Warcraft) is just priceless.” Monnik

DALY, HERMAN

Herman Edward Daly (born 1938) is an American ecological economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park in the United States. He was Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, where he helped to develop policy guidelines related to sustainable development. He is closely associated with theories of a Steady state economy. He was Man of the Year 2008 by Adbusters magazine. He is widely credited with having originated the idea of uneconomic growth, though some credit this to Marilyn Waring who developed it more completely in her study of the UN System of National Accounts. Monnik

DENSITY “The second special feature of Edo was that it was a society with an extremely high population density, which resulted in the cultivation of subtle sensitivities. The average family home in Edo had a frontage of only two ken (about 3.6

meters), and the average family had six members. Under those circumstances, it was impossible for married couple to have a private bedroom. Without going nearly as far back as the Edo period, I remember that in my own childhood my parents slept in the same room with one child, and my grandparents slept in an adjoining room, with the other children. This was the norm in Japan previously. In Tokyo today, there are some two hundred fifty people per hectare, which represents a high population density. But there were six hundred eighty-eight people per hectare in Edo. Tokyo may be densely populated, but it cannot compare with old Edo. With a city this crowded, one loud voice can irk scores of people. In Japanese there are the phrases, “The eyes are as eloquent as the lips” and “probing another’s stomach.” This communication of the eyes and the stomach—which is the Chinese and Japanese metaphorical equivalent of the heart or breast in the West—was a product of Edo’s high population density. In such a densely populated society, the slightest change in feeling or expression, gesture or attitude, can exert a great effect on interpersonal relationships. A subtle and refined sensitivity is fostered. It was this sensitivity that produced the subtle psychological dramas of the plays of the Kabuki theater known as sewamono, or domestic dramas. The heightened sensitivity to materials that characterizes sukiya-style architecture can also be traced back to these roots. From another perspective, feudal society with its rigid class distinctions, densely populated cities, and tight web of human relationships, did not permit the individual to expand his frame of reference and open his world out to broader horizons. Those conditions encouraged instead an intense turning in, concentration on and refinement of the internal world, which found expression in the human emotions of love, have, duty, and feeling; in an extreme sensitivity to the changes of the four seasons; and a love of plants and animals.” KK1994

DISASTER(S ) I “There is with Shinto no sense of punishment, no philosophical problem of suffering. Palmer* pointed out that this is a very different understanding of human significance than that which prevails in the West. In Shinto, we are here by the grace of the gods, but we are not their

Due to the presence of fools wise people stand out

main concern—we are not the centre of the story. We are not why the gods exist, we are not why creation exists, and we are not why these events exist. These natural disasters occur because this is just how nature is.” *: Martin Palmer, director of Alliance for Religions and Conservation) AJI2011

DISASTER(s ) II

The output of the standard scenario from the World3 computer model used as the basis for the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) report, predicting a depletion of resources and consequently a planetary ‘collapse’ between 2000 and 2100. Up until now reality is roughly following the predictions of the World3 model. Monnik

ECOSYSTEM(S ) “(…) the brief and rather peculiar history of the rise of the idea of the “self-organising network”. Of course some of the ideas come out of anarchist thought. But the idea is also deeply rooted in a strange fantasy vision of nature that emerged in the 1920s and 30s as the British Empire began to decline. It was a vision of nature and— ultimately—the whole world as a giant system that could stabilise itself. And it rose up to grip the imagination of those in power—and is still central in our culture. But we have long forgotten where it came from. To discover this you have to go back to a ferocious battle between two driven men in the 1920s. One was a botanist and Fabian socialist called Arthur Tansley. The other was one of the most powerful and ruthless rulers of the British Empire, Field Marshal Jan Smuts. It all started with a dream. One night Tansley had an unsettling nightmare that involved him shooting his wife. So he did

the natural thing and started reading the works of Sigmund Freud, and even went to be analysed by Freud himself. Then Tansley came up with an extraordinary theory. He took Freud’s idea that the human brain is like an electrical machine— a network around which energy flowed— and argued that the same thing was true in nature. That underneath the bewildering complexity of the natural world were

interconnected systems around which energy also flowed. He coined a name for them. He called them ecosystems. But Tansley went further. He said that the world was composed at every level of systems, and what’s more, all these systems had a natural desire to stabilise themselves. He grandly called it “the great universal law of equilibrium”. Everything, he wrote, from the human mind to nature to even human societies—all are tending towards a natural state of equilibrium. Tansley admitted he had no real evidence for this. And what he was really doing was taking an engineering concept of systems and networks and projecting it on to the natural world, turning nature into a machine. But the idea, and the term “ecosystem”, stuck. But then Field Marshal Smuts came up with an even grander idea of nature. And Tansley hated it. Field Marshal Smuts was one of the most powerful men in the British empire. He ruled South Africa for the British empire and he exercised power ruthlessly. When the Hottentots refused to pay their dog licences Smuts sent in planes to bomb them. As a result the black people hated him. But Smuts also saw himself as a philosopher—and he had a habit of walking up to the tops of mountains, taking off all his clothes, and dreaming up new theories about how nature and the world worked. This culminated in 1926 when Smuts cre-

ated his own philosophy. He called it Holism. It said that the world was composed of lots of “wholes”—the small wholes all evolving and fitting together into larger wholes until they all came together into one big whole—a giant natural system that would find its own stability if all the wholes were in the right places. Einstein liked the theory, and it became one of the big ideas that lots of right-thinking intellectuals wrote about in the 1930s. Even the King became fascinated by it. But Tansley attacked. He publicly accused Smuts of what he called “the abuse of vegetational concepts”—which at the time was considered very rude. He said that Smuts had created a mystical philosophy of nature and its self-organisation in order to oppress black people. Or what Tansley maliciously called the “less exalted wholes”. And Tansley wasn’t alone. Others, including HG Wells, pointed out that really what Smuts was doing was using a scientific theory about order in nature to justify a particular order in society—in this case the British empire. Because it was clear that the global self-regulating system that Smuts described looked exactly like the empire. And at the same time Smuts made a notorious speech saying that blacks should be segregated from whites in South Africa. The implication was clear: that blacks should stay in their natural “whole” and not disturb the system. It clearly prefigured the arguments for apartheid. And this was the central problem with the concept of the self-regulating system, one that was going to haunt it throughout the 20th century. It can be easily manipulated by those in power to enforce their view of the world, and then be used to justify holding that power stable. (…) a new generation of ecologists began to question the very basis of Arthur Tansley’s idea of the self-regulating ecosystem. Out of this came a bloody battle within the science of ecology, with the new generation showing powerfully that wherever they looked in nature they found not stability, but constant, dynamic change; that Tansley’s idea of a underlying pattern of stability in nature was really a fantasy, not a scientific truth. But in an age that was increasingly disillusioned with politics, the ghosts not just of Tansley but also of Smuts now began to re-emerge in epic form. In the late 70s an idea rose up that we—and everything else on the planet—are connected together in complex webs and networks.

Even monkeys fall from trees

Out of it came epic visions of connectivity such as the Gaia theory and utopian ideas about the world wide web. And human beings believed that their duty was not to try to control the system, but to help it maintain its natural self-organising balance.” AC2011

EDUCATION

Japan’s Educational System and the Turn to Neoliberalism The postwar Japanese idea(l) of egalitarianism is reflected in Japan’s educational system, and has turned Japan into a “J-mode educational credential society” (gakureki-shakai). Central to this educational system are the standardized entrance examinations that grant admission to secondary education (high school), and potentially tertiary schooling (college or university). Preparation for the exams consist of cramming large amounts of “intrinsically irrelevant knowledge” (Kariya 2010: 95) and the fundamental idea behind it is that every Japanese citizen could—with the right attitude towards studying and enduring hardship—get a secure middle class future. Commitment and sacrifice, rather than “ascribed intelligence,” are considered the main criteria to distinguish between winners and losers—leaving aside that memorizing large amounts of knowledge is a cognitive ability that is not equally distributed either. Children who can’t endure the “examination hell” often feel deep personal failure for not having the right “character,” a painful consequence with sometimes severe outcomes. The credential school system has been intertwined with Japan’s corporate system in a way best understood as “school guarantees employer, and employer educates employee.” Schools usually maintain a network in the corporate world, and firms often only recruit at certain schools with whom they collaborate closely. Large Japanese companies traditionally educate fresh graduates—white-collar or blue-collar—into proper employees, loyal to the company for the rest of their lives. Ideal graduates, therefore, are “tabula rasa” when they enter their jobs and thus receptive to becoming transformed and socialized into ideal workers—a socializing process that transcends work-related education and deeply invades private lives and leisure time (Allison 1994, Borovoy 2010 a&b, Brinton 2010a, Cave 2004).

In recent decades, the educational system has encountered problems related to the changes in Japan’s occupational structure. The shift from lifetime employment into temporary contracts has made firms less eager to invest in in-house training, which has laid bare the fragile base of Japanese graduate’s general knowledge. In addition, the Japanese knowledgebased service economy has required a different “skill set” in which problem solving, taking initiative, and collaborating have become important tools. School curricula have proven to fall short of teaching the knowledge and skills needed in the new reality and, since the 1980s, several parties have raised their voices for educational reforms. The government’s Council of Education Reform attempted to introduce a shift from cramming and disciplining to more creative and independent learning practices: class pedagogy needed to change in order to develop student’s self-learning competencies. Creativity (sōzōsei) and individuality (kosei) spread around as pedagogical keywords and a subject called “life studies” was added to the school curriculum as to develop “skills and concepts that foster children’s intellectual growth by calling upon their own experiences, thereby motivating them to find and develop their own interests” (Kariya 2010: 96). The transition from J-mode credential society towards a so-called “life-long learning society” (shōgai gakush ū shakai), in which people would develop more individualized knowledge during the whole course of their lives, sounded promising. However, the actual implementation of the reforms has proven to be problematic. Teachers have lacked the ability to become “supporters and stimulators” of the individual’s learning process and have tended to continue their teachercentered pedagogy in which every class is minutely prepared and planned. In addition, the implementation of learnercentered teaching styles and less strict curricula does not correspond to the fact that entrance exams are still the main indicators of quality for both students and teachers (Kariya 2010: 96-101). The fostering of different kinds of human capital through educational reform has proven to be more problematic than expected. Nevertheless, the job market has continued to demand flexible individual agents with potentially transferable skills. A corporate and public narrative of cultivating individual potential (jitsuryoku),

interests, and even passion has arisen. Since schools often lack the proper tools to meet society’s demands, young people feel the pressure to accumulate skills and develop specific knowledge themselves. Being or becoming an interesting and qualified potential employee has become one’s own responsibility. A recent popular phenomenon that even private universities have embraced is called “double-schooling” (daburu suk ūru) in which private institutions offer several extra-curricular courses for students. Students—at least those with sufficient financial means and a certain level of insight in recent societal changes—can “collect” licenses and certificates so as to strategically position themselves in the job market. The particularities of Japan’s educational system illustrate that Japan faces very specific problems with the turn to neoliberalism, problems that force us to be aware of the uniqueness of “Japan’s neoliberal face” rather than approaching neoliberalism as the “abstract inhuman specter” with absolute agency. From the perspective of Japanese educational institutions as well as young Japanese subjects, the socialization of the new generation into proper “neoliberal subjects” has proven to be problematic. “Japan’s capitalism has come less at the cost of inequality or dependency than at the cost of individual choice, freedom, and opportunity, gender equality, and meritocracy” (Borovoy 2010a: 74). The now emerging discourse of “ability-ism,” as Borovoy calls it, doesn’t match the reality of the Japanese context: Japanese youth still seems deeply influenced by the allencompassing postwar “cultural grid.” Beerkens

END, ENDS, ENDING, ENDED, ENDLESS ↗ First time I visited Tokyo I was struck

by panic. This endless city with its never ending tubes and railways, its innumerable elevated highways, and its—at least to my eyes—lack of historical references gave me the impression that I somehow landed in a world without spatial or temporal fixed points of reference and that there was no way out. To calm myself down I persuaded my colleagues to find the edge of town with me. We took the Chuo line to Takao station, an hour by train from Nakano. When we got out we walked for twenty minutes in the direction of what we hoped was the edge of

Feed a dog for three days and it is gratefull for three years.

town. When we found the fence, on the foot of a hill, all my fears left me. On the other side of the fence was the forest. When climbed over the fence we found a stairway in the forest that led to a shrine. An image of Tokyo as an enormous pile of tidal debris washed up against the mountains has been with me since. Monnik

EVERYDAY “In recent years, one genre that has emerged is known as nichijo-kei anime (“everyday life cartoons”). The genre has gained popularity, and it often portrays the peaceful lives of groups of young women without placing much importance on an overall narrative. Nevertheless, the focus on simple pleasures, sorrow or other sentiments in life, and other everyday incidents makes these stories seem more real and easy for almost anyone to empathize with. It is this familiarity that viewers seem to enjoy.” WJ2012

FUTURE “For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring

that the Future is over. I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was over, and just as silly. But really I think they’re talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of temporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture. The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely more stuff, Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.(...) This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capitalF Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.” WG2012

godik, maren Maren Godzik is a senior research fellow at the Deutsches Institute fur Japanstudien since November 2006. Maren studied Japanese Studies, Sociology and Oriental Art History at the University of Bonn and at Kumamoto University. After a research stay at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music she earned her Dr. phil. from the University of Bonn in 2005. Maren has been working on the changes of elderly housing in the time of the ageing of the Japanese society. She is especially interested in alternative (communal) forms of housing and living. Her book, ‘Avantgarde Männersache? Künstlerinnen im Japan der 50er und 60er Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts.’ was published in 2006.

GREY GOO Grey goo (alternatively spelled gray goo) is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control selfreplicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves, a scenario known as ecophagy

Feed a cat for three years and it forgets after three days.

(“eating the environment”).

Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines. The term grey goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation, stating that “We cannot afford certain types of accidents.” In 2004 he stated “I wish I had never used the term ‘grey goo’.” Monnik

GROUND(S ), GROUNDED ↓ Gazi Nafis Ahmed is a friend and a fellow photographer. Many years ago, he and his family lived in a house on a plot of land with a garden and many trees, in what is now a very busy part of Dhaka. Knowing I was working on the city and its fast growing pace, he invited me to have a look from his high-rise apartment. Standing there, overlooking the city, Nafis shared his family experience about living in this overcrowded and noise filled city. He told me how his grandfather had built the three storey house they lived in 1948. It was his father however, who thinking of the benefits and of the

future of the family, ironically decided to demolish in 1995 the very house they lived in. When I asked why, Nafis responded, “to build the very building you are in right now.” By forsaking the house, the garden, and the very soil on which his grandchildren used to play, his father consolidated the family’s fortune. We visited the roof—the swarm of rickshaw drivers below truly reminded me of marching ants. The view was impressive, not only because there were hundreds of other smaller high rises, but because we could see several tiny bits of green on other rooftops, small gardens in the sky. After all, Bangladesh was a country of farmers and some 300,000 plus were migrating to the city every year. I tried to imagine what it was like to abandon an earthly family home for a high rise dream worth a million. When we were ready to leave the rooftop, one of Nafis’ tenants, a child, came up to peddle his bicycle around in circles. It was something he obviously couldn’t do on the streets below. There was simply no space left to circle around in. Any available space had been overcome by the needs of habitat with the lure of profit from high-rises, to house the on going influx of people, and by the maddening

traffic this ever growing city produced. Cazalis

GROWTH Since the mid-20th century the global economy has grown more than 5 times. If it continues to grow at the same rate, it will be 80 times as big in 2100 than it was in 1950. This extraordinary expansion of economic activity has no historical precedent. A world in which an estimated 9 billion people all achieve the level of affluence expected in today’s developed countries needs an global economy 15 times the size of today’s global economy by 2050. Growth is the fundamental assumption on which all policy decisions inside financial institutions, manufacturing companies, governmental bodies and consumer households are based on. Expected economic growth or shrinkage drives investment, production and consumption. A non-growing economy is an anathema to an economist. That is because prosperity is measured in economic terms and continued economic growth as the means to deliver it. This formula is cashed out as an increase in the gross domestic product (GDP). The GDP is a measure of economic activity in a region. The

Half an hour in a spring evening is worth a thousand gold pieces

assumption is that when the GDP grows prosperity grows, although it is widely recognized that most of the newly obtained wealth is not distributed equally among the population. Monnik

HAPPY, HAPPINESS Gross National Happiness

The term “gross national happiness” was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s fourth Dragon King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who opened Bhutan to the age of modernization soon after the demise of his father, Jigme Dorji Wangchuk. He used this phrase to signal his com mitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan’s unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. At first offered as a casual, offhand remark, the concept was taken seriously, as the Centre for Bhutan Studies, under the leadership of Karma Ura, developed a sophisticated survey instrument to measure the population’s general level of well-being. Two Canadians, Michael and Martha Pennock played a major role in developing the Bhutanese survey, which took a six to seven hour interview to complete. They developed a shorter international version of the survey which has been used in their home region of Victoria BC as well as in Brazil. The Pennocks also collaborated with Ura in the production of a policy lens which is used by the Bhutanese GNH Commission for anticipating the impact of policy initiatives upon the levels of GNH in Bhutan. Monnik

HAMAWAKI

HAMAWAKI DAIRY Over 2 winters and summers from 2009 to 2010, I traveled to the Hamawaki district of Beppu, Japan as an organizer and team member of the Crisis Design Network and a Motorola Foundation

supported community project. With limited knowledge of the city and language, Hamawaki was like a puzzle with fragments of an urban reality that I have to decipher. The occasional encounter with aspects of life new and unexpected became a source of fascination and curiosity. Walking through an old, fairly empty shopping arcade with music still playing from the overhead speakers, the city felt dream-like; a sense of tranquility and uneasy stillness that was at once comforting and eerie, as if a quiet crisis was lingering and slowly brewing. (See Bandaged Houses, Memory markers, Museums of small catastrophes, 2-D Memories, No message). Kong

HOLISM, HOLISTIC, HOLISTICAL

↓ Manifesto for Holistic Complexity (2010) by Susanna Hetrich.

Home, Homes While today by far most of the people living in the Tokyo metropolitan area have grown up in the same area— e.g. 80% of those aged 25 to 34, the older generation is much more divers concerning their origin. Only 60% of those aged 65 and more were born in the Tokyo area (IPSS 2006). After World War II and especially during the rapid economic growth during the 1950s and 60s huge numbers of young people came to Tokyo for education and work due to industrialisation and urbanisation. At its peak at the beginning of the sixties up to 380,000 people per year migrated to Tokyo and the three surrounding

Heart rather than appearance

prefectures, raising the population of this area from about 13 million (which was 15.5% of Japan’s population) in 1950 to 24 million in 1970 (23.0%). Since then the growth has slowed down. In 2010 the population was 35 million (27.6%) (Census 1950, 1970, 2010).1 In addition to the reconstruction of war damage this caused an enormous demand of housing which had to be provided in an extremely short time. Standardized mass housing became the new homes of people living in Tokyo, first in the form of four- and five-storey apartment housing, then, with growing wealth, as detached homes more and more remote from and connected by train lines to Tokyo’s centres. Tokyo obviously changed completely during these years, with only a few quarters maintaining the pre-economic style. While the process of change of the city is visible in the existing houses or their documentation, it is not so obvious, how Tokyo’s residents adjusted to their changing surroundings. E.g. how are older Tokyoites childhood experiences of home connected to their present views of home? Whether they had been living in Tokyo or the countryside, they often had experienced what can be called socially “permeable houses”: In addition to family members, which were, due to a larger number of siblings or co-residing grandparents, more numerous than today, neighbours and other people, it seems, were frequent guests in people’s homes: Farmers were each others harvest helpers and received meals in the houses during the days of work, the family business was often conducted at home making employees to quasi-household members and customers to visitors of the home. Not every house had a bath and not every family possessed a radio. These facilities where, therefore, shared with neighbours. Children used houses of their neighbours as pathways or shortcuts to back allies, older people enjoyed a cup of tea together. In contrast, after having moved to Tokyo or other urban centres as adults, nuclear families became the ideal, which was also promoted by the housing policy and which is visible in floor plans. Homes tended to be rather “secluded” socially and in terms of architecture. Non-family members were seldom seen in homes. Privacy became a major aspect of living. For those having migrated from the countryside to Tokyo, their old-style parent’s house received a status of nostalgia that even was passed

on to the next generations, who in many HUMAN, HUMANITY cases experienced these homes not more HUMANKIND —see Homo Ludens, than two times a year during their visits Homo Faber, Animal Laborans, Pan Narof their grandparent’s house in summer rans, Antrhopocene and Anthropocenfor Obon (festival of returning ancestral trism. spirits) and for New Year (Japanese cinema, television dramas, manga and JOY, BILL literature is full of this topic).

Floor plan of a childhood house drawn by In 2000 Joy gained notoriety with the a women born in 1927 in Saga Prefecture. publication of his article in Wired MagaReviving memories about childhood homes is “more than a nostalgic remembrance”, it is “the beginning of a trip into the future”. New forms of housing based on a community approach may be a reaction to contemporary economic and demographic change as well as a result of memories of childhood homes. Godzik/MG1

HOMO FABER Homo faber (Latin for “Man the Creator” in reference to homo sapiens meaning “wise man”) is a philosophical concept articulated by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler that refers to humans as controlling the environment through tools. Henri Bergson also referred to the concept in The Creative Evolution (1907), defining intelligence, in its original sense, as the “faculty to create artificial objects, in particular tools to make tools, and to indefinitely variate its makings.” Monnik

HOMO LUDENS Homo Ludens or “Man the Player” (alternatively, “Playing Man”) is a book written in 1938 by Dutch historian, cultural theorist and professor Johan Huizinga. It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Huizinga uses the term “Play Theory” within the book to define the conceptual space in which play occurs. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture. Monnik

zine, “Why the future doesn’t need us”, in which he declared, in what some have described as a “neo-Luddite” position, that he was convinced that growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology would bring risks to humanity. He argued that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future. He advocates a position of relinquishment of GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) technologies, rather than going into an arms race between negative uses of the technology and defense against those negative uses (good nano-machines patrolling and defending against Grey Goo “bad” nanomachines). A bar-room discussion of these technologies with inventor and technologicalsingularity thinker Ray Kurzweil started to set Joy’s thinking along this path. He states in his essay that during the conversation, he became surprised that other serious scientists were considering such possibilities likely, and even more astounded at what he felt was a lack of considerations of the contingencies. After bringing the subject up with a few more acquaintances, he states that he was further alarmed by what he felt was the fact that although many people considered these futures possible or probable, that very few of them shared as serious a concern for the dangers as he seemed to. This concern led to his in-depth examination of the issue and the positions of others in the scientific community on it, and eventually, to his current activities regarding it. Monnik

Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass

KACZINSKI, TED

Theodore John “Ted” Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), also known as the “Unabomber”, is an American murderer, mathematician, social critic, anarchist, and Neo-Luddite. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski engaged in a nationwide bombing campaign against modern technology, planting or mailing numerous home-made bombs, killing three people and injuring 23 others. In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He decided to start a bombing campaign after watching the wilderness around his home being destroyed by development, according to Kaczynski. From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised “to desist from terrorism” if the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the “Unabomber Manifesto”), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization. Monnik

KAMI Kami may, at its root, simply mean “spirit”, or an aspect of spirituality. It is written with the kanji, Sino-Japanese reading shin or jin; in Chinese, the character is used to refer to various nature spirits of traditional Chinese religion, but not to the Taoist deities or the Supreme Being. An apparently cognate form, perhaps a loanword, occurs in the Ainu language as kamuy and refers to an animistic concept very similar to Japanese kami. Following the discovery of the Jōdai Tokushu

Kanazukai it is now known that the medieval word kami (上) meaning “above” is a false cognate with the modern kami (神), and the etymology of “heavenly beings”is therefore incorrect. Shinto kami are located within the world and not above it. In fact, traditionally human beings like the Emperor could be kami.No need was felt to locate them beyond this world. In his Kojiki-den, Motoori Norinaga gave a definition of kami: “[A kami is] any thing or phenomenon that produces the emotions of fear and awe, with no distinction between good and evil.” Because Japanese does not normally distinguish singular and plural in nouns, it is sometimes unclear whether kami refers to a single or multiple entities. When a singular concept is needed, “-kami” or “-kamisama” is used as a suffix. It is often said that there are ya-oyorozu no kami (八百万の神?, countless kami) in Japan. (“ya-o-yorozu literally means eight million, but idiomatically it expresses “uncountably many” and “all around”—like many East Asian cultures, the Japanese often use the number 8, representing the cardinal and ordinal directions, to symbolize ubiquity.) Monnik

grew from 53 to 71 percent between 1983 and 2003. This development combined with the size of an urban apartment. 42% of the units in Tokyo the rental market (45% of the housing market) consists of less than 29m2. “Thanks to conbini, oneroom mansion dwellers have no need to cook a meal or launder their underwear. They are sophisticated consumers who do not require a living room, dining table or kitchen. The infrastructure dispenses with the necessity for family or local community” — A. Suzuki (Do Android

Crows Fly over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo? The Interactive Urban Landscape of Japan, 2001) or as Gavin Whitelaw

writes: “ It is not uncommon to hear local residents living by themselves refer to konbini as “replacement refrigerators” (reizoko nokawari).” In contrast to contemporary sustainability discourse about ‘off-the-grid’ systems the konbini model suggests a radically different model. By metaphor it could be considered a smart-grid, it takes advantage of economies of scale of a highly networked on-demand logistics system while being very locally imbedded in the fabric of the city and urban communities. It makes it possible for urban dwellers to KONBINI ‘outsource’ elements of their house, like waste management, refrigeration, washKonbini (the Japanese contraction of ing and even a toilet. Monnik&RR2011 convenience store), known as konbini is omnipresent in Japan’s urban land- KONG, THOMAS scape (There are 43.000 konbini’s in Japan, that’s roughly 1 konbini per 3000 Thomas Kong is the Principal of Studio people). Open 24 hours a day, and with Chronotope and a licensed architect in a wide range products and services and Singapore. He is currently an Associate always in close proximity, they have be- Professor and teaches in the architecture come an indispensable infrastructure to and interior architecture programs at the urban life. Besides things you might find School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in a supermarket the konbini provides is Visiting Associate Professor (2012/13) customers with a swath of services: one at the Department of Architecture, Nacan withdraw cash from its ATM, pay tional University of Singapore. utility bills, make photocopies, print documents and photo’s, purchase tick- LABOR — see Work ets, order flowers, send mail, discard recyclables, use the restroom, get direc- LEISURE tions, book holidays, order home-deliv- The Age of Leisure ered meals and even recharge your cell phones. “Thus for the first time since his creThe proliferation of the konbini goes ation man will be faced with his real, hand-in-hand with the developments in his permanent problem—how to use his Japanese households and the housing freedom from pressing economic cares, market responds to this. With a notable how to occupy the leisure, which science decline in marriage and family forma- and compound interest will have won tion, and a rise in single-only and couple- for him, to live wisely and agreeably and only households or staying with your well. parents parents as a ‘parasite-single’. The strenuous purposeful money-makers The number of independent households may carry all of us along with them into aged 25-29 in the private rental sector the lap of economic abundance. But it

Luck exists in the leftovers

will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard—those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties—to solve the problem which has been set them.” JMK1930

into the imaginary General Ludd or King of Dead Man, a film by Jim Jarmusch Ludd, a figure who, like Robin Hood, (1995), that is situated somewhere on the was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest. Northern Frontier, in the late nineteenth Monnik century. The dialogue is between William Blake LOOSER, THOMAS and a nameless railroad technician. William Blake, the man with the letter, is Thomas Looser is Associate Professor traveling by train from Cleveland to the in the Department of East Asian Studies town of Machine, where a job is waiting at New York University. He is the author for him, or so he thinks. As his journey of many articles on Japan’s cultural and progresses, and the train moves west, historical anthropology, cinema and new the composition of his fellow travelers media, and globalization, his latest book changes. At first William fits in, peois entitled Visioning Eternity: Aesthet- ple have an urban feel and are smartly ics, Politics, and History in the Early dressed, but as the train moves west, Modern Noh Theater (2008). Works in their place is taken by poor frontier famiprogress include a co-authored book on lies and at the end stages of the journey anime and new media in Japan and a vol- he is surrounded by smelly bearded gun bearing men dressed in leather and fur. ume on Superflat art and 1990s Japan. As the movie continues it becomes clear that the town of Machine represents MACHINE(S )

LUDDITE(S )

The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who violently protested against the machinery introduced during the Industrial Revolution that made it possible to replace them with lessskilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking “collective bargaining by riot”, which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration, as the scattering of manufactories throughout the country made large-scale strikes impractical. The movement was named after Ned Ludd, a youth who had allegedly smashed two stocking frames 30 years earlier, and whose name had become emblematic of machine destroyers. The name evolved

—“Well, that doesn’t explain… why you’ve come all the way out here, all the way out here to hell.” WB: “l, uh, have a job out in the town of Machine.” —“Machine? That’s the end of the line.” WB:“Is it?” —“Yes.” WB:“Well, I... received a letter… from the people at Dickinson’s Metal Works…” —“Oh.” WB:“… assuring me of a job there.” —“Is that so?” WB:“Yes. I’m an accountant.” —“ I wouldn’t know, because, uh, I don’t read, but, uh, I’ll tell you one thing for sure: I wouldn’t trust no words written down on no piece of paper, especially from no “Dickinson” out in the town of Machine. You’re just as likely to find your own grave.” The conversation is a fictional one; it’s an excerpt from the opening sequence

the outermost outpost of civilization, it’s hardly a foothold. The men William Blake encounters are without exception depraved degenerates—treacherous fanatics, dumb killers, cruel rapists, twisted cross dressers and murderous cannibals. It becomes obvious that the ‘White Man’ needs civilization to keep him from falling into barbarism, but not only after it hollowed him out in the fist place. Civilization—e.g. industrialization, or modernization—as depicted by Jarmusch, creates it’s own indispensability. Monnik

MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (13 or 14 February 1766–23 or 29 December 1834) was an English scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularized the economic theory of rent. Malthus has become widely known for

17 his theories about population and its increase or decrease in response to various factors. The six editions of his An Essay on the Principle of Population, published from 1798 to 1826, observed that sooner or later population gets checked by famine and disease. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible. William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, for example, believed in the possibility of almost limitless improvement of society. In a more complex way, so did Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notions centered on the goodness of man and the liberty of citizens bound only by the social contract— a form of popular sovereignty.

Malthus thought that the dangers of population growth would preclude endless progress towards a utopian society: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man”. As an Anglican clergyman, Malthus saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behaviour. Believing that one could not change human nature, Malthus wrote: “Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind, that in every age and in every State in which man has existed, or does now exist / That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, / That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and, / That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.” Monnik

Melon field, under a plum tree

MATURE, MATURITY

MODEL(S), MODELLING

“Young people have grown less inter- From Doomsday Device to Scenario ested in studying foreign languages,” he Machine How to Approach the End of writes. “They seem not to feel the urge to Growth Beyond Cautionary Tales grow outward. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘Japan is The first historical moment when hua small country. And we’re OK with manity was confronted with the shortsmall. It is, perhaps, a sort of maturity.” comings of the growth paradigm, was RK2010 with the 1972 Club of Rome Report ‘Limits to Growth’. As many critics of the MEMORY MARKERS “Limits to Growth” have pointed out, the report as well as the model can only tell ↓ A memory marker bares testament to us so much about the future. the former presence of a building. Sev- The conclusions of the report were largeeral of these markers are found in Ham- ly based on a cybernetic computer model awaki, where prominent buildings used that showed how developments in demoto stand. Not unlike a tombstone for a de- graphics interacted with other areas of ceased person, the markers are the physi- development. The main areas of interest cal acts of remembrance for a community were: the food system ( dealing with agthat has lost its beloved buildings. (See riculture and food production), the inHamawaki Dairy). Kong dustrial system, the population system,

My skirt with tears is always wet

the non-renewable resources system and the pollution system. How the interactions between these systems developed was plotted out over a specific time period (from 1900 to 2100) and produced various scenarios for the world depending on certain chosen departure values. The model predicted that at a certain point the carrying capacity of earth would be reached. In other words, resources would become depleted and ecosystems would collapse. So far most of the world’s macro developments match the Club of Rome’s model. Besides that, the model showed that the growth paradigm has its limits. It also showed for the first time that we need to look at the whole world as an assemblage of interconnected forces that all effect each other. Action can’t be taken effectively in isolation, the world needs to be managed as a globally interconnected system. While showing that everything is related to everything, it also implicitly made the argument that sustainability and taking care of the environment is fundamentally a management problem. While we do think that the world is a deeply complicated and interconnected place, we also think making a sustainable world is not simply a problem of management, of efficiency, and of numbers. The development of the world, of societies and cities, depends on much more than deterministically linked quantifiable parameters. Bringing about qualitative changes in ideology, psychology, culture and politics is at the very least as important as trying to change the numbers. Motives are the source of action, and it is a mistake to reduce humans to purely rational beings; a mistake often made in economics. Still City deals with the cultural parameters of a sustainable society, and does not seek to address it merely as a problem of technology, innovation or management. We accomplish this with what we call a “soft model”.

Hard model vs. Soft model

Against the hard ‘mechanistic’ model of the Club of Rome we want to pose a soft ‘cultural’ model. A model of interacting cultural entities and notions, that have agency, and that influence each other. The world is not merely populated by mindless big forces, it is also populated by things and ideas that also have some sort of agency. Our conception of a soft model is as a memetic, or material-semiotic model, that seeks to identify the interaction between memes (a “unit of

culture” such as an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.). This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). This doesn’t mean quantitative developments are excluded from the model, they just become one of the interacting entities, but in more than just a mechanical way. For example, the percentages of growth and decline also act psychologically, not merely mathematically.

Limits of Growth vs. Still City

Where the ‘Limits to Growth’ model made clear that we had to do something, the ‘Still City’ model investigates how we can do these things. The ‘Limits to Growth’ report’s departure points were familiar macro-trends, while we are trying to discover new emerging trends that are still small, but could have broad socio-cultural impact. What both models have in common, is that they both seek to extrapolate. Where the Club of Rome seeked to warn the world of the dangers of short-term thinking, the Still City seeks to go beyond the cautionary tale and project concrete ways of how to get to a sustainable and inclusive society based on already existing but emerging values. Monnik

MONNIK Monnik is an interdisciplinary laboratory for research and education working at the interface of culture, technology and consciousness. Monnik was founded in 2012 by Christiaan Fruneaux, Edwin Gardner and Vincent Schipper. The work of Monnik concentrates on how persons and society need to reconfigure or reassess their relationship with their self-constructed modern (urban) world. The methodology of Monnik consists of academic, artistic and speculative research and translating their investigations into lectures, publications, workshops and curricula.

MONOZUKURI The word monozukuri can be compared to the English word craftsmanship. However, in craftsmanship, the emphasis is on the man and his skills. Monozukuri emphasizes “mono,” the thing that is made, and “zukuri,” the act of making. The person doing the making is de-emphasized, and skills are only implied. I think this reflects Japanese sense of responsibility for making things, as in material sub-

stantive things. Japanese Shinto religion celebrates an appreciation and reverence for things animate and inanimate. Japanese businesses show this appreciation as well. For example, Japanese multinational pharmaceutical companies perform ceremonies every year to thank their experimental animals for sacrificing their lives to make medicines safe for humans. Japanese electronics companies have annual ceremonies thanking prototyping materials for their service in the development of products. Recognition of prototyping materials’ sacrifice is particularly interesting because they never got to fulfill their destiny of being made into products sold on the market and enjoyed by customers. Taking care of things and making efforts not to be wasteful is very much part of traditional Japanese craftsmanship. We should all thank our experimental animals, prototypes and broken tools. JIC2010

MORLOCKS Morlocks are a fictional species created by H. G. Wells for his 1895 novel, The Time Machine. They dwell underground in the English countryside of 802,701 AD in a troglodyte civilisation, maintaining ancient machines that they may or may not remember how to build. Their only access to the surface world is through a series of well structures that dot the countryside of future England. Humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are the child-like, frail group, living a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth, while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing and infrastructure for the Eloi. Each class evolved and degenerated from humans. While one initially has the impression that the Eloi people live a life of play and toil-less abundance, it is revealed that the Morlocks are attending to the Eloi’s needs for the same reason a farmer tends cattle; the Morlocks use the Eloi for food. This is why there are no old people, and why the Eloi seem to fear the dark. Monnik

MUSEUMS OF SMALL CATASTROPHES → Everyday household objects lay scattered in vacant rooms and reveal traces of past lives that occupied the rooms. Their

Never rely on the glory of the morning or the smiles of your mother-in-law

dispositions disclose what happened before the occupants had to leave, whether by choice or circumstance. Were they playing with the Nintendo game console while having dinner at the same time? Why did they have to leave so suddenly? Was she drinking a cup of green tea when the illness struck? The vacant interiors are like small museums of frozen moments in the everyday lives of the residents. They expose and display personal catastrophes that may have taken place in the rooms. (See Hamawaki Dairy). Kong

NATURE Although it is often perceived as a universal given, ‘nature’ is a historically constructed entity, that is conceptualised differently in different cultures. In Japan, the concept ‘nature’ (shizen) has played a central part in modern ideology. In the early twentieth century, the notion that there is a unique Japanese way of relating to nature became a cornerstone of the nation building project, as exemplified by the following statement by art historian Anesaki Masaharu: ‘In many countries nature is thought of as necessarily wild and bold, in contrast to human refinement. According to that conception, life consists in the combat against nature, or in the conquest of it. But the Japanese lives too close to nature for him to antagonize her, the benignant mother of mankind. (…) He loves to observe the changing face of Mother Nature, and wishes to enjoy it within doors and through the medium of art as well as in the field or garden. Life varies accord-

ing to the varying seasons, and the Japanese derives the artistic enjoyment which he finds an essential part of life from his ability to respond to nature’s suggestions and inspirations’

(Anesaki Masaharu; 1973 [1932]: 6–7)

Notions about the supposedly unique Japanese artistic appreciation of nature were elaborated upon and legitimised ‘scientifically’ by scholars such as Watsuji Tetsurō. He developed a ‘spatial philosophy’ in which he distinguished a number of different climates and natural environments, arguing that ‘the Japanese’ were uniquely collectivistic, harmonyoriented and sensitive as a result of their moderate climate and corresponding wet rice cultivation. In the postwar period, authors such as Watsuji and Anesaki were criticised by some for their nationalist essentialism and environmental determinism; nevertheless, their ideas were highly influential in the development of a popular, pseudo-scientific discourse on the uniqueness of the Japanese nation (nihonjinron), which gained widespread popularity in the 1970s and 80s. It comes as no surprise, then, that the topic of ‘the Japanese perception of nature’ has captured the imagination of scholars outside Japan as well, as illustrated by the fact that a great number of books and articles have been written about the topic. Some of these reproduce popular essentialist notions, while others critically point out that this so-called ‘love of nature’ has not prevented environmental degradation in modern Japan; or, more importantly, that the ‘nature’ that is appreciated in tradi-

tional Japanese aesthetics is not ‘wild’ nature ‘out there’, but rather, a tamed, cultivated, idealised version of nature. In any case, the topic continues to fascinate and be discussed by people inside as well as outside Japan, and the recent interest for Shinto as an ancient Japanese tradition of nature worship may be considered an expression of this same fascination. But there is more at stake. In many countries and situations, expressions of environmental advocacy are explicitly political. Discussions about climate change, landscape preservation and pollution are directly related to economic interests, and have become highly politicised, to the point that scientific evidence regarding human influences on climate change has come to be discredited and dismissed as ‘merely’ a political opinion. However, the opposite may also be the case: practices related to nature and the environment may be strategies for becoming socially engaged without becoming explicitly political. In her book Friction, anthropologist Anna Tsing gives a perfect example of this: she describes how Indonesian students in the 1960s and 70s joined ‘nature lovers’ clubs as a strategy to be socially active, yet in a ‘decidedly non-political’ way. As the late Sukarno and subsequent Suharto regimes were repressive and paranoid with regard to potentially subversive activities, students in the 1970s and 80s engaged in deliberately ‘apolitical’ activities such as hiking and mountaineering. Paradoxically, however, as Tsing rightly points out, their organisations were rooted in youth nationalist movements, and their focus on ‘natural harmony’ was ‘shaped by the heritage of “politics” even as they chose to avoid it’ (2005: 129). Moreover, their ‘ways of talking about and being in nature’ were influenced by nationalist notions of ‘Indonesian’ natural space as much as they were influenced by supposedly ‘international’ notions of environmental protection and romantic appreciation of ‘wilderness’. As such, they were undeniably political, albeit not in an explicit way. Through their practices, these urban, middle- or upper-class Javanese students asserted their otherness vis-à-vis the ‘local’, rural communities they encountered, while symbolically claiming the places they travelled to as part of ‘their’ national nature. In an artificial state composed of a great variety of ethnic groups, where the lands of ‘peripheral’ communities are controlled and exploited by powerful Javanese elites,

Not seeing is a flower

this can hardly be called ‘apolitical’. Thus, in some situations, nature-related practices and ‘environmentalist’ narratives can serve as strategies for concealing the political; that is, for depoliticisation. Likewise, discourse on ‘nature’ may be employed to conceal political agendas and assumptions, by naturalising (i.e., reifying) what are in fact historical constructions. In this context, it may be useful to bring to mind Ronald Barthes’ classic discussion of the myths of contemporary popular culture (sports, cars, haute cuisine, tourism and so on), and his rich theoretical essay, ‘Le mythe, aujourd’hui’ (‘Myth today’). In this essay, he suggested that ‘nature’ is in fact a highly political concept, powerful because it is not recognised as such by the majority of people. He defined ‘myth’ as a form of depoliticised speech (‘une parole dépolitisée’); that is, a rhetorical device to hide the fact that concepts and notions are historical and political constructs, by presenting them as ‘natural’ (and, hence, uncreated and permanent). Accordingly, representations of nature might be considered types of myth in the Barthesian sense of the word. In contrast to culture, then, nature is seen as something which transcends historical particularity, and therefore relativity; and, as Julia Thomas aptly remarks, ‘it is precisely the belief in the permanency and unchangeability of an idea, particularly a relatively unmarked, unexamined idea like nature, that gives such a concept its ideological potency’ (2001: 8). In other words: the stories we tell about nature often convey ideological messages, but most of the time they are not recognised as such— which is exactly the reason they can be so effective and powerful. Rots/AR2

NEO-LUDDITE, NEO-LUDDISM

The New Luddite Challenge

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is

impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatis-

fied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.” Written by Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (1995) TK1995

NEW, NEWER, NEWELY The growth economy is based on the production and consumption of novelty. Novelty is both reinforced and reinforces the social logic of consumerism. Status is given on the ability to produce, recognize or obtain novel products—may they be physical or metaphysical. As an individual is very difficult to obtain and maintain a sense of self-worth without being regarded well by others. This social dynamic has been deliberately reinforced by government, because of its role as a driver of growth.The drive for novelty has brought us many good things. On the whole most of us live longer and healthier lives because of constant innovation spurred on by the lust for investigation and discovery. Rejecting our obsession with novelty carries the risk of demonizing it. Monnik

NO MESSAGE → An advertising sign at a building site

stripped bare and lay silently amidst the overgrown site. The austere emptiness, punctured by the neatly lined rusting screws that bind the white surface to the frame replaces the past optimism and ambition for the project. In time, the whiteness will disappear too, overtaken by the invading verdure. (Also see Hamawaki Dairy). Kong

ONIGIRI → The onigiri is as much about form as

content. Its size and shape are literally determined by the hands of the creator. Some scientists have gone so far as to study how naturally occurring salts and oils from the woman’s palms subtly alter the taste of rice, thus giving the homemade onigiri a distinct flavor that is traceable the mother who created it. The

21 onigiri’s ability to connect the child to the home caregiver has been reinforced, and some might argue exploited, by the state educational system. A majority of Japanese nursery schools and kindergartens do offer lunch programs, thus making parents, usually mothers, responsible for creating a lunch box (obento) filled with tasty, easy-to-consume foods like onigiri. Anthropologist Anne Allison argues that such a lunch box policy serves the dual purpose of reinforcing a gendered state ideology while opening the household to a subtle yet effective form of surveillance. Through the daily production and consumption of lunch boxes, both mother and the child are observed, judged, and disciplined by school officials and, by extension, the national

Not-speaking is the flower

education system. Teachers and school officials critique the mothers’ obentomaking skills from nutritional and aesthetic standpoints. A half-eaten onigiri will accompany the child back to the home and kitchen along with a note from the teacher on how to improve tomorrow’s meal. The critical role of homemade lunch box design in a child’s (and family’s) early educational evaluation has spawned a minor media industry focusing on obento menu ideas. As a popular component of the obento repertoire, the onigiri is reinvented monthly in magazines and TV cooking programs. The homey rice ball becomes a canvas on which a mother may exercise her expertise and creativity. The strategic placement of strips of

seaweed and circles of processed cheese on a ball of rice by loving hands transform an onigiri into the face of a cat or a panda. In recent years, the attention given to obento has generated problems of its own. Lunch box creativity wars among overly zealous mothers led some kindergartens to instruct parents to pack only onigiri in hopes of toning down the competitive drive toward more elaborate boxed meals. The onigiri’s power as a cultural symbol continues to be reinforced in folktales and films where rice ball production and consumption embody care, loyalty, and magic. In popular children’s stories, like Sarukani Gassen (“Showdown between the Monkey and the Crab”) and Omusubi Kororin (“The Tumbling Rice Ball”), the gift of a rice ball, even when by accident, ultimately leads to reciprocity, prosperity, and deeper interpersonal ties. Even contemporary storytelling makes use of the onigiri’s magical dimensions. A pivotal moment in the Academy Awardwinning animated film Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (“Spirited Away”) occurs when the young heroine, Chihiro, accepts a rice ball from her dragon-prince friend Haku. The strength Chihiro gains from her meal enables her to undo an evil spell that turned her parents into swine and Haku into a fantastical beast. When asked why so many Japanese viewers cry as Chihiro eats her onigiri, film director Miyazaki Hayao explains that the scene is a powerful reminder of commensality and human interdependence. “As a child or a parent, you understand that the onigiri is a food sculpted by the hands of someone you know and whose tireless efforts give you life.” For Miyazaki, the rice ball is infused with a kind of emotional magic powerful enough to humanize, or rehumanize, his story’s animated characters. Stories about the onigiri’s power are not limited, however, to folktales and popular films. As a commercially mass-produced packaged food, the onigiri is one of the bestselling items in Japanese convenience stores. Beyond its material importance, the life of the onigiri as a processed industrial food is so closely tied to the growth of Japan’s konbini industry that the development of some chains parallels advances in rice ball production and marketing. Japan’s two largest convenience store chains, 7-Eleven Japan, the originator of the packaged onigri, and its rival Lawson, are illustrative examples. Whitelaw

Poke a bush, a snake comes out

PAN NARRANS

REAL

“The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan Narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.” TP2002

POPULATION “For

many countries net immigration has become a larger source of population growth than natural increase. Immigration may temporarily ease the age structure problem, but the steady-state population requires that births plus in-migrants equal deaths plus out-migrants. It is hard to say which is more politically incorrect, birth limits or immigration limits? Many prefer denial of arithmetic to facing either one.” NH2008

PROBLEM(S) The economic problem, sometimes called the basic, central or fundamental economic problem, is one of the fundamental economic theories in the operation of any economy. It asserts that there is scarcity, or that the finite resources available are insufficient to satisfy all human wants and needs. The problem then becomes how to determine what is to be produced and how the factors of production (such as capital and labor) are to be allocated. Economics revolves around methods and possibilities of solving the economic problem. In short, the economic problem is the choice one must make, arising out of limited means and unlimited wants. The economic problem is most simply explained by the question “how do we satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources?” The premise of the economic problem model is that wants are constant and infinite due to constantly changing demands (often closely related to changing demographics of the population). However, resources in the world to satisfy human wants are always limited to the amount of natural or human resources available. The economic problem, and methods to curb it, revolve around the idea of choice in prioritizing which wants can be fulfilled.. and how do we know what to produce for the economy. Monnik

PROGRESS → See p.23

↑ In Google Trends the term real econo-

my is virtually absent before 2007, and spikes into global consciousness late 2008 with the Global Financial Meltdown. The dream ended, and we asked: “but ... what is real then? What is a real economy, real work, real value?” Monnik

RELIGION(S ) “The neoclassical (economical ed.)view is that man, the creator, will surpass all limits and remake Creation to suit his subjective individualistic preferences, which are considered the root of all value. In the end economics is religion.” NH2008

REMUNERATED LIFE “The transition away from physical labor also involves an expansion of productivity beyond the rationalized confines of the workplace. Virno argues that while production was once exclusively the domain of labor (as Marx described), the mere fact of our existence now involves participation in the social mechanisms of productions. That is to say, with our every actions, we now are constantly creating value for capitalist enterprises (even if we are completely unaware of it). Virno concludes (p. 103) that it no longer even makes sense to talk about labor time and non-labor time: The old distinction between “labor” and “non-labor” ends up in the distinction between remunerated life and non-remunerated life.” PJR2012

REPLICATOR(S ) → From the comic book story Storm: The Von Neumann Machine. Pandarve (a conscious planet) is threatened by a huge

rapidly approaching anomaly. Storm and his comrades are commanded by Pandarve to save her and to divert or destroy the anomaly. They travel towards the ap-

proaching object and find out that it’s a Von Neumann Machine. In theory, a self-replicating spacecraft (also known as Von Neumann machines or probes) could be sent to a neighbouring star-system, where it would seek out raw materials (extracted from asteroids, moons, gas giants, etc.) to create replicas of itself. These replicas would then be sent out to other star systems. The original “parent” probe could then pursue its primary purpose within the star system. This mission varies widely depending on the variant of self-replicating starship proposed. Given this pattern, and its similarity to the reproduction patterns of bacteria, it has been pointed out that von Neumann machines might be considered a form of life. In his short story, “Lungfish”, David Brin touches on this idea, pointing out that self-replicating machines launched by different species might actually compete with one another (in a Darwinistic fashion) for raw material, or even have conflicting missions. Given enough variety of “species” they might even form a type of ecology, or—should they also have a form of artificial intelligence—a society. They may even mutate with untold thousands of “generations”. The first quantitative engineering analysis of such a spacecraft was published in 1980 by Robert Freitas, in which the nonreplicating Project Daedalus design was modified to include all subsystems nec-

Rained on ground hardens

Repentance never comes first

essary for self-replication. The design’s strategy was to use the probe to deliver a “seed” factory with a mass of about 443 tons to a distant site, have the seed factory replicate many copies of itself there to increase its total manufacturing capacity, over a 500 year period, and then use the resulting automated industrial complex to construct more probes with a single seed factory on board each. It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion such as “warp drive”, and speeds limited to an “average cruising speed” of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years. Monnik

RESOURCE(S)

ed in less that four decades. Some rare metals will be exhausted in a decade even at current global consumption rates. Resource scarcity is, however, only part of the concern. Current debate is driven more strongly by the problem of sinks— the capacity of the planet to assimilate the environmental impact of economic activity. Before we run out of resources we run out of planet. Monnik

ROBOT(S ) ↓ Non-functional robot. A futuristic object made from Polystyrene. Its smooth and gleaming surface conjures up imagery of rocks from outer space. In opposition to the general expectation, this robot lacks any functionality. Its sole intention is to serve as projection area for its respective user. By Susanna Hetrich

Sinks and sources / If the whole world ROTS, AIKE

consumed resources at only half the rate the US does, for example copper, tin, Aike Rots is currently working on his silver, chromium, zinc and a number of PhD candidate at the Department of Culother strategic minerals would be deplet- ture Studies and Oriental Languages, of

the University of Oslo in which he discusses recent ideological and institutional developments in Shinto, and critically examine related notions of ‘nature’, ‘animism’

SHINTO What is Shinto? In popular introductions, it is usually described as Japan’s ‘indigenous’ religious tradition, practised alongside Buddhism since ancient times. It is said to be concerned with the worship of kami (deities) residing in natural elements such as mountains and rivers, as well as kami associated with the rice harvest and the imperial family. As it supposedly has ‘no founder, no sacred scripture, and no doctrine’, it is often considered to be unique—despite the fact that, arguably, the same applies to many worship traditions worldwide. These popular definitions of Shinto are somewhat problematic. Throughout history, there has been a great diversity of traditions of kami worship, but these were disparate, subject to change, and

25 intertwined with Buddhist and Taoist practices and beliefs. As such, they differ considerably from the modern independent tradition ‘Shinto’, which was not established until the second half of the nineteenth century. As Mark Teeuwen has argued, Shinto ‘is not something that has “existed” in Japanese society in some concrete and definable form during different historical periods; rather, it appears as a conceptualization, an abstraction that has had to be produced actively every time it has been used’ (2002: 233). Consequently, it is practically impossible to give a neutral, empirically adequate definition of Shinto, as the very term is a normative abstraction, and ideologically charged. Thus, different definitions and conceptualisations of Shinto coexist, and correspond to different political positions. Some people argue that its essence lies in the intimate relationship between the emperor, his divine ancestors, and the Japanese nation. Others say that Shinto is first and foremost a local tradition of agricultural festivals and nature worship. Some want to transform Shinto into a universal salvation religion. Some even see it as a fascist ideology, considering its historical association with Japanese imperialism. In recent decades, the idea has emerged that Shinto is essentially an ancient tradition of nature worship, a type of ‘primordial animism’. This interpretation has gained considerable popularity, both inside and outside Japan. Several scholars have written about this supposed animism, tracing it back to the Jōmon period (approximately 14,000–300 BCE), and arguing that this supposedly traditional Shinto attitude has largely disappeared as a result of modernisation and ‘westernisation’. Some even claim that Shinto may serve as a model for a new global environmental ethics, that will save humankind from environmental destruction. Unfortunately, however, they do not usually explain how exactly Shinto can prevent climate change, environmental pollution and mass extinction of species, other than in very abstract terms. As the association of Shinto with the natural environment has been popularised by the well-known film director Miyazaki Hayao, I call this development ‘the Totoro Paradigm’—named after one of his most famous characters. In the following essay, I will elaborate on this topic, showing how Miyazaki’s films illustrate contemporary concerns in Japanese religion, politics and culture. Rots

Silent worms dig holes in the walls

SOURCES

society to 'Learning Capitalist' Society. In: Social Class in Contemporary AB Allison, Anne. 1994. Nightwork: Japan: Structures, Sorting and StrateSexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate gies. David Slater and Hiroshi Ishida, Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Eds. Allison,Anne 2009. The Cool Brand and Kawamura,Yuniya 2006. Japanese Teens Affective Activism of Japanese Youth. as Producers of Street Fashion. CurTheory, Culture & Society 26: 89–111. rent Sociology 54: 784–801. Beck,Ulrich 2000. The Brave New World Koike,K 1988. Understanding Industrial of Work. Relations in Modern Japan. Borovoy,Amy 2010a. Japan as Mirror: Kondo,Dorinne K 1990. Crafting Selves: Neoliberalism's Promise and Costs. Power, Gender, and Discourses of In: Ethnographies of Neoliberalism. Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Carol J. Greenhouse, Ed. McRobbie,Angela 1998. British Fashion Borovoy,Amy 2010b. What Color is your Design: Rag trade or Image Industry? Parachute? The Post-degree Society. Moeran,Brian 1997. Folk Art Potters of In: Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Beyond and Anthropology of Japan: Structures, Sorting and StrateAesthetics. gies. David Slater and Hiroshi Ishida, Negri,Antonio 1989. The Politics of Eds. Subversion: A Manifesto for the 21st Brinton,Mary C 2010a. Lost in TransiCentury. tion: Youth, Work, and Instability in Ortner,Sherry B. 1998. Generation X: Postindustrial Japan. Anthropology in a Media-Saturated Brinton,Mary C 2010b. Social Class and World. Cultural Anthropology 13(3): Economic Life Chances in Post-indus414–440. Ortner,Sherry B. 2005. Subjectivity and trial Japan: The Lost Generation. In: Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Cultural Critique. Anthropological Structures, Sorting and Strategies. Theory 5:1. David Slater and Hiroshi Ishida, Eds. Sennett,Richard 1998. The Corrosion of New York: Routledge. Character: The Personal Consequences Cole,Jennifer,and Deborah Durham eds. of Work in the New Capitalism. 2008. Figuring the Future: GlobaliSennett,Richard 2008. The Craftsman. zation and the Temporalities of Chil- Slater,David and Hiroshi Ishida 2010. dren and Youth. Santa Fe Social Class in Japan. In: Social Class Comaroff,Jean and John L.Comaroff. in Contemporary Japan: Structures, 2000. Millennial Capitalism: First Sorting and Strategies. David Slater Thoughts on a Second Coming. Puband Hiroshi Ishida, Eds. lic Culture 12: 291–343. Wittkower,Rudolf and Margot Wittkower Ehrenreich,Barbara 1989. Fear of Fall1963. Born Under Saturn. The Charing: The Inner Life of the Middle acter and Conduct of Artists: A Docuclass. mented History from Antiquity to the Florida,Richard 2002. The Rise of the French Revolution. Creative Class: And How it’s TransYoshimoto,Mitsuhiro 2003. The Status forming Work, Leisure, Community of Creative Industries in Japan and and Everyday Life. Policy Recommendations for Their Genda,Yuji 2005. A Nagging Sense of Promotion. Job Insecurity: The New Reality FacYusuf,Shahid and Kaoru Nabeshima 2005. ing Japanese Youth. Creative Industries in East Asia. CitGill,Rosalind, and Andy Pratt 2008. In ies 22(2): 109–122. the Social Factory? Immaterial Labor, AC2011 Curtis, Adam. 2011 How the 'ecoPrecariousness and Cultural Work. system' myth has been used for sinister Theory, Culture & Society 25: 1–30. means http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Ho,Karen 2005. Situating Global Capienvironment/2011/may/29/adam-curtalisms: A View from Wall Street tis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts (last Investment Banks. Cultural Anthrovisited: October 27, 2012) pology 20(1): 68–96. AJI2011 Ivakhiv, Adrian J. 2011 Religion Honda,Y 2004. The Formation and & the Japanese tragedy. Immanence. Transformation of the Japanese http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2011/03 System of Transition from School to /16/religion-the-japanese-tragedy/ Work. Social Science Japan Journal (last visited October 27, 2012) 7(1): 103–15. AR1 Inaga Shigemi. 1999.‘Miyazaki Kariya,Takehiko 2010. From CredentialHayao’s Epic Comic Series: Nausicaä

Sleeping people can’t fall down

NH2008 Hagens, Nate . 2008 Herman in the Valley of the Wind: An Attempt Wright,Lucy 2005. ‘Forest Spirits, Giant at Interpretation.’ In Japan Review Insects and World Trees: The Nature Daly: Towards A Steady-State 11, 113–28. Vision of Hayao Miyazaki.’ In Journal Economy. The Oil Drum. From http:// www.theoildrum.com/node/3941 AR2 Asquith, Pamela J. and Arne Kalland, of Religion and Popular Culture 10. eds. 1997. Japanese Images of Nature: From http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/ (last visited October 27, 2012) PJR2012 Rey, PJ. 2012 Notes on Virno, the art10-miyazaki.html (last visited: Cultural Perspectives. Barthes,Roland 1957. Mythologies. February 2, 2012). Multitude, and the Web. Cyborgology. From http://thesocietypages. Berque,Augustin 1986. Le sauvage et AS2012 10 January, 2012 Shrinking populaorg/cyborgology/2012/07/05/notesl’artifice: Les Japonais devant le tion finally hitting the Tokyo area. on-virno-the-multitude-and-the-web/ The Asahi Shimbum. From http:// nature. (last visited October 27, 2012) ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/ Thomas,Julia Adeney 2001. Reconfigursocial_affairs/AJ201201100035 (last ing Modernity: Concepts of Nature in PKD1978 Dick, Philip K. 1978 How to visited 27 October, 2012) Japanese Political Ideology. Anesaki Masaharu 1973 [1932]. Art, Life, ED1994 Davies, Erik. 1994 Techgnosis Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall GW1 This text is an excerpt from: Rice and Nature in Japan. Apart Two Days Later Watsuji Tetsurō 1967 [1935]. F ūdo: NinBall Rivalries: Japanese Convenience RK2010 Kelts, Ronald. 2010 What’s Wrong with Being No. 2? Adgengakuteki kōsatsu. Stores and the Appetite of Late Capibusters. From /http://www.adbusters. Tsing,Anna 2005. Friction: An Ethnogtalism. Published in: Fast Food/Slow org/magazine/93/whats-wrongFood: The Cultural Economy of the raphy of Global Connection. being-no-2.html (last visited October AR3 Boyd, James W. and Nishimura Global Food System AltaMira Press Tetsuya. 2004. ‘Shinto Perspectives (August 24, 2006) Edited by Richard 27, 2012) RR2011 Ronald, Richard and Alison in Miyazaki’s Anime Film “Spirited Wilk. References for the excerpt are: Alexy. 2011 Homes and Houses, Senses Away”.’ In The Journal of Religion Allison,Anne 1996. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Spaces. Published in Home and and Film, 8 (2). From http://www. Family in Japan; Continuity and unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol8No2/boydand Censorship in Japan. Boulder. Transformation. Edited by Richard Shinto.htm/CREDITS/CREDITS/Note/ Iwamura,Nobuko 2004. Crisis in the Ronald and Alison Alexy. vol8no2.htm (last visited: February Kitchen. JapanEcho 31(2):42–45. 2, 2012). Miyazaki,Hayao 2002. Sen to Chihiro RS2008 Sennett, Richard. 2008 The Cronon,William 1996. ‘The Trouble with no Kamikakushi Onigiri [Spirited Craftsman WG2012 Gibson, William. 2012 From DisWilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Away” Kamikakushi Onigiri]. IEP2012 Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosWrong Nature.’ Environmental Histrust that Particular Flavor. ophy. From http://www.iep.utm.edu/ SSE2012 Sustainable Economics—Votory, 1 (1), 7–28. cabulary & Concept from http://www. Hori Iku 2008. ‘Watashitachi wa shizen arendt/#SSH4ai (last visited October sustainableeconomics.org/Vocabulary. to kyōsei dekiru no ka? “Mononoke 18, 2012) htm#Throughput (last visited October JIC2010 Pringle, Patricia. 2010 Monozuhime” no tetsugakuteki kōsatsu.’ In 27, 2012) Journal of Policy Studies 28, 99–107. kuri—Another Look at a Key JapaTK1995 Kaczynski, Theodore . 1995 InInaga Shigemi 1999. ‘Miyazaki Hayao’s nese Principle. Japan Intercultural Epic Comic Series: Nausicaä in the Consulting. From http://www.japadustrial Society and Its Future. TP2002 Pratchett, Terry. 2002 The Science Valley of the Wind: An Attempt at nintercultural.com/en/news/default. Interpretation.’ In Japan Review 11, aspx?newsid=88 of Discworld II: The Globe. UB2011 Bardi, Ugo. 2011 The Cuckoo that 113–28. JW1 Statistics Division, Bureau of GenMiyawaki Akira 2000. Chinju no mori. eral Affairs, Tokyo Metropolitan won't sing. Sustainability and JapaMotegi Sadasumi 2010. ‘Chinju no mori.’ Government, 2011. Benjamin, Walter. nese culture. Energy Bulletin. From: http://www.energybulletin.net/ Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, AuIn Ōmori Kōji (ed.), Voice style plus: stories/2011-04-06/cuckoo-wontMori no baiburu. Tokyo: Voice, tobiographical Writings. Edited by 103–11. Peter Demetz. Schocken, 1986, 162. sing-sustainability-and-japaneseSkrimshire,Stefan (ed.) 2010. Future JL2012 Laundun, John. 2010 The culture (last visited: October 27, Ethics: Climate Change and Re-Emergence of a Craft-Based 2012). 2012 Depicting Sentiments in Everyday Life Trends in Japan. Apocalyptic Imagination. Economy. From http://johnlaudun. Takeuchi Kazuhiko et al. (eds.) 2003. org/20120224-the-re-emergence-ofFrom http://web-japan.org/trends/11_ Satoyama: The Traditional Rural a-craft-based-economy/ (last visited culture/pop120322.html" http:// October 27, 2012) web-japan.org/trends/11_culture/ Landscape of Japan. Ueda Masaaki 2004b. ‘Chinju no kamiJMK1030 Keynes, John Maynard. 1930 pop120322.html (last visited October 27, 2012) gami: rekishigaku no shiten kara’. In Economic Possibilities for our GrandUeda Masaaki (ed.)., Tanky ū ‘chinju children no mori’: Shasōgaku e no shōtai. KK1994 Kisho Kurokawa. 1994 The Age of SPIRIT(S ) — see Kami Umehara Takeshi 1991. Mori no shisō ga Symbiosis. From: http://www.kisho. co.jp/page.php/292 (last visited Octo- STEADY-STATE jinrui o sukuu: Nij ūisseiki ni okeru ber 27, 2012) Nihon bunmei no yakuwari. Umehara Takeshi 2009. ‘Ancient PostMG1 Josei Kenchiku Gijutsusha no Kai The two centuries and a half of the Edo modernism.’ New Perspectives Quar(2006): Arubamu no ie [Album Period are very interesting in terms of houses]. Sanseidō, p.3. sustainability. It was not just a period of terly 26 (4), 40–54.

27 peace; it was also a period of stable economy and of stable population. Actually, that is not completely true, population increasing during the first part of the Edo period, but when it arrived to about 30 million, it stayed nearly constant for almost two centuries. I don’t know of another society in history that managed such a period of stability. It was an example of what we call today “steady state” economy. The reason why most societies can’t manage to reach a steady state is because it is very easy to overexploit the environment. It is not something that has to do just with fossil fuels. It is typical of agricultural societies, too. Cut too many trees and the fertile soil will be washed away by rain. And then, without fertile soil to cultivate, people starve. The result is collapse—a common feature of most civilizations of the past. Jared Diamond wrote about that in a book of a few years ago; titled, indeed “Collapse”. Now, there is an interesting point that Diamond makes about islands. On islands, he says, people have limited resources— much more limited than on continents— and their options are limited. When you run out of resources, say, of fertile soil, you can’t migrate and you can’t attack your neighbors to get resources from them. So, you can only adapt or die. Diamond cites several cases of small islands in the Pacific Ocean where adaptation was very difficult and the results have been dramatic, such as in the case of Easter Island. In some really small islands, adaptation was so difficult that the human population simply disappeared. Everybody died and that was it. And that brings us to the case of Japan; an island, of course, although a big one. But some of the problems with resources must have been the same as in all islands. Japan doesn’t have much in terms of natural resources. A lot of rain; mostly, but little else and rain can do a lot of damage if forests are not managed well. And, of course, space is limited in Japan and that means that there is a limit to population; at least as long as they have to rely only on local resources. So, I think that at some point in history the Japanese had reached the limit of what they could do with the space they had. Of course, it took time; the cycle was much longer than for a small island such as Easter Island. But it may well be the civil wars were a consequence of the Japanese society having reached a limit. When there is not enough for everyone, people tend to fight

Summer heater winter fan

but that, of course, is not the way to manage scant resources. So, at some point the Japanese had to stop fighting, they had to adapt or die—and they adapted to the resources they had. That was the start of the Edo period. In order to attain steady state, the Japanese had to manage well their resources and avoid wasting them. One thing they did was to get rid of the armies of the warring period. War is just too expensive for a steady state society. Then, they made big effort to maintain and increase their forests. You can read something on this point in Diamond’s book. Coal from Kyushu may have helped a little in saving trees, but coal alone would not have been enough—it was the management of forests that did the trick. Forests were managed to the level of single trees by the government; a remarkable feat. Finally, the Japanese managed to control population. That was possibly the hardest part in an age when there were no contraceptives. From what I read, I understand that the poor had to use mainly infanticide and that must have been very hard for the Japanese, as it would be for us today. But the consequences of letting population grow unchecked would have been terrible; so they had to. We tend to see a steady state economy as something very similar to our society, only a bit quieter. But Edo Japan was very different. Surely it was not paradise on earth. It was a highly regulated and hierarchical society where it would have been hard to find—perhaps even to imagine—such things as “democracy” or “human rights”. Nevertheless, the Edo period was a remarkable achievement; a highly refined and cultured society. A society of craftsmen, poets, artists and philosophers. It created some of the artistic treasures we still admire today; from the katana sword to Basho’s poetry. UB2011

STEADY STATE ECONOMY A failed growth economy and a steady state economy are not the same thing; they are the very different alternatives we face. The Earth as a whole is approximately a steady state. Neither the surface nor the mass of the earth is growing or shrinking; the inflow of radiant energy to the Earth is equal to the outflow; and material imports from space are roughly equal to exports (both negligible). None of this means that the earth is static—a great deal of qualitative change can happen inside a steady state, and certainly

has happened on Earth. The most important change in recent times has been the enormous growth of one subsystem of the Earth, namely the economy, relative to the total system, the ecosphere. This huge shift from an “empty” to a “full” world is truly “something new under the sun” as historian J. R. McNeil calls it in his book of that title. The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth. That behavior mode is a steady state—a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth. Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of better stuff (or at least different stuff ). The remaining natural world no longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy—much less a growing one. Economists have focused too much on the economy’s circulatory system and have neglected to study its digestive tract. Throughput growth means pushing more of the same food through an ever larger digestive tract; development means eating better food and digesting it more thoroughly. Clearly the economy must conform to the rules of a steady state—seek qualitative development, but stop aggregate quantitative growth. GDP increase conflates these two very different things. We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy. That makes it hard to imagine what a steady-state economy (SSE) would be like, even though for most of our history mankind has lived in an economy in which annual growth was negligible. Some think a SSE would mean freezing in the dark under communist tyranny. Some say that huge improvements in technology (energy efficiency, recycling) are so easy that it will make the adjustment both profitable and fun. Regardless of whether it will be hard or easy we have to attempt a SSE because we cannot continue growing, and in fact socalled “economic” growth already has become uneconomic. NH2008

STILL SPACE(S ) ↓ On a utopically located zone of reclaimed land outside of Seoul, Korea’s largest ever development project involved the formation of an entire city. At once a tax-free zone and in many ways a culturefree zone (meant to be English speaking,

and independent of the municipal laws of Seoul), it has involved massive construction of domestic and office space. But these buildings remain largely empty, and 6-lane roads are still deserted. This is part of the stillness of global neoliberal capital, supposedly the new future, that has its parallels within the city of Tokyo. By contrast, within the center of Seoul, a streambed park reclaimed from a high-modernist highway is now supposedly a new kind of city center, a new way of organizing movement and “stitching together” the city, economy, and everyday life in a new local-global set of connections. Yet this has been financed by much of the same interests that have built the empty city-outside-the-city. There is thus a new dynamic of stillness and movement that overlays the old rhythm of everyday life. In between these two formal possibilities (the special economic zone city by itself, vs. the new parkway stitching together an old city in a new way), is a third, interstitial ordering of space and community: the more subcultural world of street art and graffiti: immediately local, and yet caught within its own truly global flows of people and imagery, it transforms the concept of the “street,” and the structure of a self-made contestatory commons. None of these are sufficient examples on their own, for an understanding of how

Spilt water will not return to the tray

“stillness” and movement are playing out. Bringing them together allows some sense of how older and newer organizations of the everyday are being mediated through city form, and how the problems and potentialities for a new sociality are being structured. Stillness plays out with qualities that are sometimes reactionary, and sometimes productively resistant and creative.

in his spare time, in his small Tokyo flat. Why he is building is not clear. Once he’s finished it and has made the Tokyo city authorities aware he has the power to blow up the city. He is asked what he wants, what his demands are. Makato on whim asks for them to arrange that the TV broadcast of baseball game will not be interrupted by commercials, because he happens to be watching a baseball game while he’s asked for his demands. After his first demand is successfully granted, he returns to his flat. In a distracted and bored mood he starts dribbling around the steel ball that is the atomic bomb, wondering what his next demand should be. He loses control of the steel ball, jumps after it and grabs

Looser

SUN In Hasegawa Kazuhiko film The Man Who Stole The Sun (Taiyō o Nusunda Otoko) (1979) high school chemistry teacher Makato builds an atomic bomb

Time flies like an arrow

it. After the first relief, he asks the bomb see nothing less then everlasting life. “What do you want. … Don’t be so mod- The ancient promise from god to man is est. Speak up.” Monnik being reformulated as a promise from us to ourselves. Ever since its murky beginTECHNOLOGY nings, modernity holds the secret promise of boundless freedom, an immortal Instead of transforming the mass into ener- linear life and, even, omnipotence. Since gy, information produces even more mass. the doors of paradise closed on us we’re Instead of informing as it claim, instead on a quest for an endless and boundless of giving form and structure, information utopia. neutralizes even further the “social field ”, Seemingly, the blurring of the physical more and more it creates an inert mass im- with the virtual holds endless promise. permeable to the classical institutions of With the arrival of wi-fi—on our phones, the social, and to the very contents of in- pads and laps, it has become quite ordiformation. — Baudrillard, In the Shadow nary for our body to occupy some random physical space, but for your mind to of the Silent Majority, 1983. reside somewhere else entirely. ConsidTechnological innovation has always ering that it is regarded quite rude to talk been the most powerful engine of social to someone, while looking over his or her change. Technology channels social in- shoulder to see if there is someone more teraction and delivers the instruments compelling to talk to, it is quite another with which we formulate our under- story if you look constantly into your standing of ourselves and of our sur- smartphone. Then you are not only well roundings. Technology is central to our within social norms, you are also a wired belief in progress, a fundamental notion and well-put-together person. in all modern cultures—things can only But there’s a catch. And we don’t mean a get better. But in most cases better also breakdown of etiquette. means man-made, and as technological Since the beginning of telecommunicainnovation and scientific discovery action, time and space seem to have colcumulates, our natural surroundings get lapsed. We talk to people far away from increasingly replaced by, or imbedded in, us. We see them, we hear them, and we the artificial—where everything is pur- have the feeling that we are somehow poseful and carries meaning. close to them. But this experienced proxThe fact that technology is an important imity is not real, or not necessarily so. architect of modern life has not been lost There is still a huge distance between the on history. After the poet William Blake people we see, or communicate with, and witnessed, to his utter dismay, his Lon- us—a distance we instinctively overcome don being transformed into a city of in- by filling in the blanks with our own dustrial mills and urban decay, we have ideas, assumptions and projections. seen the birth of many new ideologies We see people on our TV—people who based solely on the realization that tech- live on different continents, in cultures nological change and material accumu- that are significantly different from ours, lation have become the most important and we think we know what and who we signifiers of who we are and what we do are looking at. We see them and we imas individuals and as a community: Com- mediately project what we would do and munism, Romanticism, Individualism, think in their situation and judge them Capitalism, National Socialism, Fas- accordingly—forgetting that they live cism, Liberalism, and all their various in- in a world that is regulated by different carnations, are all based on the premise rules, beliefs, ideas, expectations and that technology and material accumula- conventions. To a lesser degree, the same tion form the twin axis around which we is true when you are on the phone with shape our behavior, our attitudes, our someone you know. You hear his or her values and our understanding of our- voice, and you image frowning or smilselves, and the world that we inhabit. ing—all according to your expectations. Today we‘re in the midst of yet another As a result, a large part of any mediated technological watershed—a digital revo- conversation takes place in the minds of lution that slowly transforms everything those involved, intricately disconnected. and everyone into one single common The perceived closeness is, thus, not real. denominator—information. And again, It’s an electronically mediated stream of expectations are high. Beyond the hori- communication, supplemented with our zon of our comprehension, singularity own projections about who we are talkprophets, and other utopian seers, fore- ing to, or looking at. Forgetting this—

confusing our projections with a knowledge based on perception—often creates misunderstandings and miscalculations. And with the expansion of the Internet we become increasingly immersed in this fundamentally mediated reality. A reality that is partly a product of our own projections and assumptions, and partly a product of the programmers and designers who wrote it’s code, designed it’s interface, and our interaction. We submerge ourselves more and more in an environment that is a product of our personal and collected imagination. With the incorporation of the physical in the virtual we plunge ourselves into a reality that is entirely cultural—a reality where everything is man-made, or manimagined. Having a totally networked existence is the next step towards our total discarding of the outside. Not only is everything inside, everything will come from within us, or is instantly framed by us. The physical will be tagged, or it will be instantly recognized, framed and layered upon. Nothing will escape interpretation. All will be embedded in a web of meaning and purpose. In the end the idea of the Natural will loose it’s relevance and disappear, decommissioned as redundant. Imagine looking at a building through the camera of your Smartphone. Apps will instantly recognize the building, and will start adding layers that will show you, for instance, it’s inner architecture, or the long gone buildings that occupied that particular space through the ages. It’s true that these apps cannot recognize physical shapes as of yet—they just correlate the position and angle of the camera with a database, but somewhere, somebody is undoubtedly working on it as we speak. And when all is mapped, processed and made sense off, who then still needs the conception of the real thing? A senseless physical world ruled by causality... a world that doesn’t emit ready-made consumable narratives, or convey easy systems of meaning? Consider for instance, seeing a bridge, a manmade structure with a clear purpose; to overcome something, a water or a ravine. Now consider seeing the mountain behind that bridge, just standing there, meaningless. Then consider seeing the same mountain in the framework of a National Park, with tourist surrounding it, rangers guarding it, historical or environmental narratives relating to it, people climbing it and roads descend-

The absent get further off every day

ing from it. The mountain makes much more sense. And finally consider seeing the mountain through a device—lets say an iPhone—that makes the mountain part of something even bigger, perhaps an epic war between good and evil in a popular online video game. We’re constantly searching to make sense of everything. We’re doing a pretty good job. But we’re not there yet—not by far. We’re still prisoners of our hormones and other bodily inconveniences. But, undeniably, we’ve come a long way. And we’re gaining momentum. Hormones are already highly instrumental—think professional cycling, and, to a degree, manageable—think birth control. Strange times are often considered banal by those experiencing them. It seems that the artificial is our destination of choice. It holds the promise the gods denied us. Generated by a deep longing to make sense of our lives, our actions, our surroundings and all things that happen to us we opt for sterilized, hygienic, limitless and most of all purposeful lifestyles. As meaning isn’t easily derived from nature—a world where everything is driven by a seemingly pointless causality—we opt for culture, we opt to cast off the limitations given to us by nature and surround ourselves with our own projections, assumptions and products. Steadily but surely we limit our confrontation with the genuine Otherness. We become rapidly more urbanized; limiting our interaction with Nature, while Nature itself is reduced to National Parks, constraining The Wild to ‘valuable’ but controlled areas, effectively degrading it to the Tamed. And this distancing of ourselves from that-what- originated-outside-of-us continued with the development of telecommunications. Because, as said, communicating via tweet, text message, email, chat, phone, Facebook, etc. is a narrow experience, and the blanks are intuitively filled up with our own projections and assumption. And that’s a real loss, as there’s merit in confronting Otherness, in confronting things that do not project instant meaning, or purpose; beyond instant gratification. Dealing with things that are foreign to us confronts us with limitations. It confronts us with what we can do, and what we cannot do, what we can understand and what we cannot understand. It reminds us of the problematic nature of reality, one that will incessantly question our assumptions of the world and our

place in it. The realization that there are things outside of our control seems obvious, but, strangely enough, it’s not ordinary. Most of our notions are based on the premise that we can do everything we set our minds to. Many of our narratives tell us that nothing is beyond our reach, if only we believe in ourselves—don’t take no for an answer; don’t be taken aback by sudden obstacles; show some perseverance; everything is a challenge. These narratives are made to inspire, and they are being reinforced by our confinement in our own personal and cultural bubbles. In our own little worlds, made-up of narratives that are increasingly self-affirmative, we all become miniature Olympians. But like Olympians—who were a bored and cruel bunch—we are bound to show less and less responsibility towards others. For humans, the vision of a time beyond responsibility, the loss of a social consideration, is of course as old as modernity. To contextualize Keirkegaard’s words, “In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to produce a phantom, ... the Public.” As the establishment of the Public created the foundations for an egalitarian dystopia of blasé, indifference, and “no not me, but him” mentalities, technology expands that public beyond the limits of humankind. The Public Realm will encompass all, assimilating even the Natural into the Cultural. And when there is nothing outside the Public, like the Individual before him, the Public looses its incentive to take responsibility. The individual, confined by own projections, will be redeemed of personal accountability. And so will the Public, because its electronic embrace will encompass everything. There will be no Outside left, no Foreign—the Other will be gone, and responsibility with it. Techonology—the culmination of our efforts to live artificial lifestyles—is a realm where true responsibility is ultimately avoided. There simply will be no human there to take account for anything. But reflecting, our biggest loss is our disregard of the Tragic. In a place where everything conveys meaning and purposefulness, we forget that we’re living in a world where things happen that just don’t make any sense at all. We forget that reality is profoundly complex, emergent and unpredictable. And we forget how to deal with loss, ina-

bility and randomness. Despite our technological and accumulative abilities we still face fundamental limitations. And accepting these limitations, dealing with the limits of our control, will make us not only wiser but also more in par with reality—a reality where our disregard of Nature is bound to backfire. And in the end, when push comes to the shove, there is still no escaping Nature, not yet anyway. And that’s not altogether a bad thing; although Nature is often seen as a deterministic place. Without any obvious purpose, it does offer it’s own fundamental frame of reference. In our quest for immortality we often forget how utterly worthless such a state probably is. And it’s not unlikely that—in our quest for meaning—we discover that when we have done all, and know all, there will be nothing left but everlasting senseless boredom. This is not a plea for embracing, or even worse, glorifying the catastrophic, but life is a deeply uncertain place, and recognizing that fact, and incorporating it in our narratives seems to be a smart and wise thing to do. Honestly, not everything is quantifiable about the self. It will prepare us for choices we have to make regarding sustainability and other limits to our way of life. And it will give us comfort when our personal lives don’t work out as planned—and who’s does? Accepting the tragic nature of life used to be an essential part of growing up. Indulging in our childish demand that we have the right to do everything, go everywhere, be anything and consume everything we want is, well, just childish. Culture is an emergent quality that emerges from all of us, and is therefore outside the control of any of us. It remains to be seen how the recent and future developments will shape our lives, but it’s clear that it will expand the ability of the individual to surround himself with the narratives of his own choosing. And we all know what narratives are more in demand—those who give us that unpleasant feeling that life is a tragic, utterly mysterious place, or those that offer easy interpretations and lull us back into a self-affirmative comfortable doze. Monnik

THROUGHPUT The flow of raw materials and energy from the global ecosystem’s sources of low entropy (mines, wells, fisheries, croplands) through the economy, and back to the global ecosystem’s sinks

The day you decide to do it is your lucky day

for high entropy wastes (atmosphere, malleable, defined by social phenomoceans, dumps). SSE2012 ena, varying with situation and occasion. Monuments no longer stand in some TIME(S), TIMELESS sense against or outside of time, but Time in the City of Temporal Monuments incorporate temporality within themselves. They become more akin to events “The current of the flowing river does not than artefacts. cease, and yet the water is not the same I suggest that in such a city, it is rhythm water as before. The foam that floats on that becomes the crucial element in esstagnant pools, now vanishing, now form- tablishing such “temporal monumentaling, never stays the same for long. So, too, ity”. Instead of spaces that are clearly deit is with the people and dwellings of the fined and understood as “public”, we can world.” Kamo no Chomei. Hôjôki 1212. consider the notion of public rhythms as establishing the basic armature structurThe average age of buildings in Tokyo is ing the urban space-time continuum, the 26 years. The average age of residents of datums by which growth and change are Tokyo is 44 years. Tokyo is a city in which registered, and through which collecthe people are, on average, older than the tivities are gathered and rendered visible. buildings. This insight could be extended to elaboTokyo is often said to be a city without rate the layering of diverse rhythms of monuments—stable, enduring artefacts varying pitch and intensity, describing a that provide a tangible connection to cartography of temporal monuments as earlier times and past generations. But intricate as that of any urban map. what the comparison of the average ages Rhythm is defined by repetition at reguof buildings and people suggests is that lar intervals, and so has an intrinsithe true monuments in Tokyo are its peo- cally cyclical or seasonal character. It ple, particularly its older citizens. Rather emphasises internal metabolic enerthan lining up in front of a crumbling gies over externally directed motion. old stone pile—of which few examples Growth is not expansive, but intenexist anyway, in it makes more sense for sive. This makes it a potentially rich visitors to Tokyo taking holiday snaps for avenue of investigation in considerthe family album to bunch up in toothy ing what a “dynamic stillness” might enthusiasm around the nearest old man entail for a contemporary urbanism. or woman. For it is their eyes that have “Each epoch not only dreams the next, born most durable witness to the dra- but also, in dreaming, strives towards the matic energies that remake the city every moment of waking”, wrote Walter Bencouple of decades, and their skin that has jamin in his Paris, Capital of the Ninetouched the stones and timbers of build- teenth Century. Benjamin conceived of a ings long since gone. temporality in which time is not linear Monuments are to urban space what but is folded upon itself. Time becomes a photographs are to daily life. They pluck matrix in which shiny flecks of times past a moment—ideally one bearing pith and and times future are embedded in the precision—out of the flow of life and inert grey mortar of the present. Under suspend it in motionless counterpoint such temporality, “progress” does not inagainst that ever-moving river. These volve the logical advancement to a hithmoments may be static but they are not erto unexperienced level of existence, passive—they bear upon the flow of life, but involves a cumulative process of endiverting and channeling it, provide counter between these “flecks” in vivid markers and datums for its gauging and flashes of similitude and recognition. measurement. In cities whose monu- What these thoughts are gradually unments are made of durable matter, these veiling is an urban historical imaginaeffects of focus and calibration happen tion that sees a layered, rhythmic urban in the great spaces of public gathering, space-time fired by vivid encounters bethe squares and parks and boulevards tween images and ideas cycled through that shape populations and give them its matrix by the slow churn of the great gears that are the city’s temporal monuvisible representational form. But what happens to this conception ments. Worall/JW1 when the monuments are themselves embedded in the flow of experience, as TOKYO are the living monuments of Tokyo? Here the spaces of the city lose their categori- The shrinking municipalities of greater cal, pre-existing character, and become Tokyo since October 2011. Beside shrink-

age, also the growth-rate of the still growing municipalities has significantly slowed down. AS2012

TOKYO SPACE-TIME Tokyo is a singular capital—a city that intimately and immediately invokes the past, present and the future, at any given location. A city where the reference for tradition and the lust for futuristic novelty is equally dynamic. In Tokyo the average age of a building is 26 years. The city does not have many fixed historical or temporal points of reference. Most buildings come from a builders catalog, making the cityscape highly generic. What looks old is often rebuild. Historical awareness is embedded in craft and ritual. Visitors often experience disorientation by lack of familiar fixed points of reference. Monnik

TOTORO PARADIGM, THE ↓ Miyazaki Hayao (born 1941) is one of

Japan’s most successful contemporary artists. He is the creator of a number of internationally acclaimed animated films, and artistic leader of Studio Ghibli, one of the country’s best-known film studios. The international rights of his films are currently owned by Disney, but his films differ significantly from those produced by his American counterpart, in terms of visual style as well as narrative. Whereas Disney films tend to be based on an ontological distinction between good and evil, the epic confrontation of which is a central motive in the narrative, many of Miyazaki’s characters are morally ambiguous creatures, whose actions are motivated by a variety of concerns that do not fit neatly within a good-bad dichotomy. In several of his films, spirits and deities play a central part, as do notions of (divine) nature, pollution, environmental de-

To fall seven times, to rise eight times

struction and traditional Japanese landscapes. Miyazaki himself has criticised the utopian and nationalist tendencies inherent in some recent interpretations of Japanese animism, in particular the works of Umehara Takeshi; nevertheless, there are some significant, undeniable similarities between his films, and the recent discourse on Shinto, nature and Japanese identity. Not only are his films appropriated by contemporary scholars reemploying mythical notions of ‘the Japanese view of nature’; they also seem to influence understandings of Shinto abroad, as many authors commenting on Miyazaki films uncritically assume that the spirit worlds portrayed in them correspond to Shinto worldviews. For instance, as one of them wrote: ‘Miyazaki is cinematically practicing the ancient form of Shinto, which emphasised an intuitive continuity with the natural world’ (Wright 2005: abstract). Such essentialist, romantic images of a singular, pure, nature-oriented ancient Shinto are surprisingly common, not only in popular but also in academic discourse. Hence, the hypothesis that Miyazaki’s films have significantly influenced popular under-

standings of Shinto, in particular with regard to its supposed relationship with ‘nature’, seems justified. Rather than ‘practicing the ancient form of Shinto’, or simply being influenced by Shinto worldviews, it may be argued that, in fact, the opposite has been the case: by creatively reimagining spirits and deities, as well as ancient landscapes, Miyazaki has actively contributed to the discursive construction of Shinto as an ancient tradition of nature worship. Even though he has not explicitly referred to his own fiction as being representative of ‘Shinto’ as such, his works do convey images and notions that are central to the contemporary discourse on Shinto, nature, and the environment. In this respect, four of Miyazaki’s works are of particular interest, as they represent different motives in contemporary Shinto ideology. I will discuss them in chronological order. The modern classic Nausicaä of the Val-

ley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, 1984) is one of the first films produced

by Studio Ghibli. In subsequent years, its story and characters were developed further in a series of comic books (manga). A science fiction dystopia, Nausicaä com-

32 bines a critique of environmental exploitation with apocalyptic fantasies. It tells the story of a toxic, post-nuclear world, inhabited by small isolated communities of human beings. They coexist with large isopod-like creatures called aum, which are of crucial importance for preserving the fragile ecosystem as they are agents of purification. Nausicaä is a princess and warrior from the Valley of the Wind, a place where people have learned to live in harmony with their natural surroundings. She has to protect the aum, as well as the jungle in which they live, from destruction by battleships from the neighbouring country Tolmekia. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind has strong environmentalist and pacifist subtexts, suggesting that the ruthless exploitation of natural resources leads to the destruction of ecosystems and, ultimately, widespread violence and suffering. Similar apocalyptic motives can be found in environmentalist discourse worldwide, and are central to the narratives of environmental destruction currently employed by several Shinto-related, millenarian new religious movements in Japan, such as Ōmoto-kyō .

Transactions in Hell also depend upon money

My Neighbor Totoro pacification and protection); if treated these forests have come to represent the (Tonari no Totoro, 1988), which tells a badly, however (for instance, by destroy- very roots of the nation. Accordingly, story of two young girls, who move with ing their dwelling place), they may get scholars such as Umehara Takeshi and

Very different is

their father to an old farm somewhere on the Japanese countryside. They live next to a small Shinto shrine (recognisable from the torii gate and shimenawa rope), surrounded by ancient trees and inhabited by a large teddybear-like deity named Totoro. A benevolent and protective deity, Totoro is responsible for growing trees. In addition, when the youngest girl gets lost and nobody can find her, he rescues her. Loved by children and adults alike, My Neighbor Totoro is probably one of the most popular and well-known media texts in Japan today. In fact, it may be argued that the film has achieved a paradigmatic status, and not only because Totoro itself has become an iconic figure, present in every kindergarten or souvenir shop, that has come to represent innocence, benevolence and social harmony. Reportedly, Japanese landscape planners today use the term ‘Totoro’ to refer to ‘traditional Japanese’ landscapes, in which humans actively interact with and give shape to their natural surroundings through agriculture and other practices. This model is referred to as satoyama (literally: forest-mountain) by today’s ecologists, and constitutes a challenge to traditional conservationist notions of pure nature as ‘wild’ and untouched by humans. My Neighbor Totoro shows an idyllic image of a traditional rural Japan, in which people live in harmony with their human and non-human neighbours, thus corresponding to and revitalising popular notions of uniquely Japanese ways of coexisting with nature—as well as a nostalgic longing for a ‘lost past’. In sum, the film has come to represent a particular view on humannature relationships and authentic Japanese landscapes that has gained great popularity in recent years. In addition, the character of Totoro represents a notion that has taken centre stage in contemporary Shinto discourse: the notion of chinju no mori, or sacred forest. Chinju no mori are generally conceptualised as small forests, with a strong local character; clearly demarcated, yet part of a larger ecosystem. They are the dwelling places of deities, who are strongly connected to (and, for that matter, dependent on) their particular locales. If treated well, these deities are generally benovelent, and protect nearby communities (significantly, the word chinju is made up of characters meaning

angry or upset, and cause trouble. Chinju no mori are generally imagined as old, if not primeval forests, representing a symbolic connection between the present and the ancestral past. In the definition of Motegi Sadasumi, they are

“Forests that have remained from the ancient age of myths until the present time. These are forests where old trees grow in anbundance; where high trees, brushwood and plants growing under the trees are in balance. Many birds, insects and micro-organisms have the space to live here. These are forests with rich ecosystems. Inside, one can find ‘pure gardens’ (kiyorakana niwa), where annual festivals (matsuri) are organised. These are places that remind one of distant, ancient times. This is where the voices of the gods (kamigami) sound in your ears. This is where our ancestors lived, humbly and diligently, in harmony with nature.” — Motegi Sadasumi (2010: 111; translation APR)

Chinju no mori were first associated with conservation practices in the early 1980s; simultaneously, the notion that Shinto might be employed as a resource for environmental ethics developed. In addition, during this time, planting trees became a popular mantra shared by patriotic ecologists. Thus, Miyazaki’s romantic story of a local chinju deity, responsible for growing trees, captured the Zeitgeist beautifully—and, perhaps, gave extra impetus to it. If ecological balance and abundance is one aspect of the chinju no mori trope, so is old age. Shrine forests are often characterised by high, old trees such as Japanese cedars and cypresses, carefully maintained by those shrines that can afford to hire foresters. Paradoxically, as a result, shrine forests generally have little sunlight; consequently, claims such as Motegi’s notwithstanding, their biodiversity tends to be limited. However, as I argued elsewhere, the main function of shrine forests is symbolic rather than ecological; representing a direct connection between present and past, they are a carefully cultivated symbols of the existential relationship between Shinto, the physical land and landscapes that constitute Japan, and the ancient past of the Japanese nation. Conceptualised as the places where society originated (the modern word for society, shakai, can also be read as ‘meeting in the forest/shrine’),

Ueda Masaaki have argued that Japanese culture and society go back to prehistorical forest communities; lamenting the moral degradation and environmental destruction supposedly caused by modernisation and technological ‘progress’, they argue that only a return to ancient values and lifestyles can save humankind from destruction. The ancient forest motive is central to Miyazaki’s masterpiece Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime, 1997). Set in a mythical Japanese past, it tells a story of forest deities and spirits that turn into violent demons as a result of the destruction of their dwelling places; ultimately, the film is about an existential battle between human society, which has embraced modern technology and become alienated from the nature it exploits, and the animal deities who live in and are dependent on the forest for their survival. In other words, it is a critique of the destruction of the balance between human beings and their non-human (animal, divine, environmental) Others, which is the consequence of the modernisation project. Just like Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke is strongly apocalyptic, showing the irreversible process of destruction of sacred nature on which humankind has embarked, and the moral nihilism by which it is accompanied. The film follows the same basic narrative of decline as can be found in the works of contemporary intellectuals such as Umehara and Ueda; moreover, it follows them in their portrayal of forests as places that are divine, inhabited by spirits, life-giving and eventually of crucial importance for the survival of humankind. Incidentally, the forests in Princess Mononoke are modeled after those on the island Yakushima; a Unesco World Heritage site, one of the last remaining areas of real primeval forest in Japan, and often mentioned in contemporary Shinto discourse as archetypal sacred forests. Whereas Nausicaä and Mononoke visualise the problem of environmental destruction explicitly and uncomprisingly, Academy Award winner Spirited Away (Sen to Chichiro no kamikakushi, 2001) addresses the problem in a more implicit and, arguably, sophisticated way. The film tells the story of a ten-year old girl, Chihiro, who gets lost and ends up in a world inhabited by spirits, deities and other non-human creatures. She finds

Unless you enter the tiger’s den you cannot take the cubs

work in a public bath, where the deities come to get clean, and enjoy nice food and entertainment (reflecting several central aspects of Shinto and popular religion in Japan: the importance of ritual and physical cleanliness and purification; food offerings; performances for deities, such as ritual dances; playfulness and joyful celebrations during festivals). In one scene, the bath is visited by a tremendously dirty and smelly creature, believed to be some sort of demon. Chihiro is given the unpleasant job of taking care of this unusual customer. With some luck and a little help from her friends, she succeeds in cleaning him—by pulling a large amount of garbage, rusty bicycle wrecks, old machines and, perhaps, toxic waste out of him. The demon turns out to be an ancient river god, whose river has become polluted and filled with garbage, and who has not been able to find peace until liberated and purified by a helpful child. Thus, Miyazaki creatively reinterprets one of Shinto’s core concerns, pollution and purification, and extends its meaning beyond the realm of the merely ritual, to include the physical pollution of the natural environment. Together, these films represent a number of motives central to contemporary writing on Shinto and the environment: anti-modern and anti-capitalist critiques, apocalyptic expectations, utopian notions of ancient forest societies, a nostalgic interest in traditional rural landscapes, a focus on local forests as symbolic markers of Japanese identity, and a renewed interest in purity and pollution. Hence, any discussion of the discursive construction of Shinto as an ancient tradition of nature worship, and/or utopian theories of ancient forest societies as symbolic resources for the construction of a Japanese collective identity, should take into account Miyazaki’s contributions—if not to academic discourse, at least to public imagination. Rots/AR3

TRUTH “Like letters, Platonic ideas were immobile, isolated, and devoid of warmth and secondary qualities; they seem to transcend the world at hand. As David Abram observes, “The letters, and the written words that they present, are not subject to the flux of growth and decay, to the perturbations and cyclical changes common to other visible things; they seem to hover, as it were, in another, strangely timeless dimension.” Abram also points

out that the Greek alphabet was the first writing machine to capture vowels as well as consonants, thus completing the technological colonization of the spoken world. Abstract form came to rule embodied sense. The oracular animism that once echoed through hieroglyphs died away, and the Greeks began to associate truth with what was eternal, incorporeal, and inscribed”. ED1994

UNECONOMIC GROWTH Uneconomic growth, in human development theory, welfare economics (the economics of social welfare), and some forms of ecological economics, is economic growth that reflects or creates a decline in the quality of life. It is the growth of the macroeconomy that costs us more than it is worth. A situation in which further expansion entails lost ecosystem services that are worth far more than the extra production benefits of the expanded economy. The concept is attributed to the economist Herman Daly, though other theorists can also be credited for the incipient idea. SSE2012/Monnik

UNIVERSE “It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.” PKD1978

WHITELAW, GAVIN Dr. Gavin Hamilton Whitelaw is assistant professorship at International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo. He graduated with a A.M in Regional Studies—East Asia at Harvard University (2001), followed by a M.Phil. in Sociocultural Anthropology (2004), and a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology (2007), both from Yale University. Dr. Whitelaw’s keen interest in konbini has led to a specialization in the topic.

WORk(S), WORKING, WORKER(S) Work and Robots

Avoiding an otherwise lengthly discussion on capitalism, today’s social values are framed by the modern paradigm of ‘more, faster, cheaper’; this underpins our society’s obsession with capital growth. The only way we can experience continued growth is to focus on increasing the rate and decreasing cost of production. Considering that labor constitutes one of production’s main costs, we can only achieve increased capital gains by decreasing labor cost, through increased efficiency, through innovation, mass production and exploitation. So, I guess our future is robots. Robots are now synonymous with productional technology. They are the modern messiah, but also the anti-christ. They represent the savior of the world from the idiocy of humankind’s mistakes, and yet are the prime reason for humankind’s obsolescence. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Rintaro’s remake— based on Osamu Tezuka’s manga—highlight this relation between technology and labor. However, the relation between technology and labor goes deeper, it goes down to the fundamental issue of how it is valued. Lang’s Metropolis uses many motifs, myths and images showing what the revolution in productional technology has made possible. Foremost, it illustrates the potential inherent and the terrifying consequences of the emancipation of the human labor force. Though the story itself is based on a conspiracy to undermine the proletariat revolution, the underlying critique is the mechanization and counter anthropomorphism of the labor force. Though mechanization may be capable of creating a society of homo ludens, the masses are clearly not able to cope with

such a state. The need to mediate the will of the Master of Metropolis and the workers can only be met through the use of robots. The capital/labor conflict is present in the sequence showing the Master of Metropolis in his control and communications center and the workers in the machine room, with the machines being subservient to the master but enslaving the worker.—Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis”. The robot, Maria, is a managerial tool to control the labor force. As the story goes, this control goes amiss, but that is not crucial here, what is crucial is that cyborg Maria begins to represent a shift of the robot as a tool to a robot as a replacement. Her fight against her programming stirs the ludite fear of “when machines take over the world”. Fast forwarding through millions of years, technology has been a tool for increased productivity. It helped us hunt bigger game, work faster, and produce more; at an increasing pace. Technology always helped us, the individual worker. Today, the relation between worker and technology has changed. First it changed from helping the individual worker to be better at its craft to helping the worker produce faster. Slowly the human being merged with the technology, becoming a cog in the machine. However, as we have become one of the interchangeable parts, we are quickly becoming the weakest link. Within the paradigm of growth, we need to continue to produce for cheaper prices. This means more products per second, or even milliseconds. As human produced goods become more expensive there is a clear need to automate. Technology innovates and changes, mankind has not been able to keep up, and as technology and machinery advances beyond the human scope it is no longer a tool, it is a replacement. It no longer increases the productivity of human beings. Rather, in order to allow for increased productivity and thus growth, technology removes the human laborer altogether.

Walls have ears, bottles have mouths

Osamu’s version of Metropolis shows a different angle than Lang’s. In Osamu’s world, the labor force has fully integrated robots—down to the grunt detective force. The humans that live above the slums are free to live a near homo ludite life, while those that live underground are no more than the robots with whom they share their jobs. Putting aside the tension between the human and robot laborers, as this tension is purely based on one group taking away a means of the other to survive, we must pick up on the idea of replacement. In this animated film the robot has replaced the human. The threat that was hinted to by Lang’s Maria has become a reality. A laborer is easiest to replace, and to remove from society. What had been essential elements of a functioning society—such as the baker, the ironsmith, the miller, once considered respectable trades—have been replaced by robot operated shops. These are all robotic work. Yet there is still an issue with labor. Both robots and human laborers are looked down upon, and they themselves feel subservient, and both groups try to fight against it. If robots take over or not, the situation is that labor still has the least social value. This is the story that Osamu’s Maria demonstrates. As any system of values, the value of labor is socially imposed. Values are passed down from parent to child, from teacher to student. It is taught. The mechanics of socially imposed values is a broad topic with limitless consequences, yet our relation to this system is plagued by its matter-of-factness. We do not think immediately that we are choosing a career as a financial advisor because we have been brought up to think that it is the best way forward. We just know that it is the best way forward. Laboring as a part of the mechanical world is especially when the repetitious movements, the routine work is not remunerated with a fat pay cheque. So it is no wonder that vocational school kids don’t feel too great about themselves. The relation of technology and labor, is simply that technology is yet another iteration of outsourcing for more growth. As such, the only thing we need to know is that the growth paradigm—upon which the valuation of labor is based, and which is further propelled by the integration of technology into society—is fundamentally untenable. We don’t have unlimited resources, and we don’t have an unlimited market. At a certain point,

the hockey stick will turn and growth will plateaus… Monnik

WORRALL, JULIAN Dr. Julian Worrall is an Australian architect, scholar, and critic based in Tokyo, where he holds the position of Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University, and runs the research-based practice LLLABO. His work, pursued through a mix of scholarly research, critical writing, and design practice, is broadly concerned with the construction of Japanese modernity, using architecture and urban space as lenses through which to interpret linkages between spatial and socio-cultural phenomena. His first book is 21st Century Tokyo: A Guide to Contemporary Architecture (Kodansha International, 2010); he is currently working on a contemporary history of art and architecture in Japan since 1990.

YOUTH

Labor in the New Millennium The global rise of neoliberalism has engendered deeply rooted feelings of insecurity, confusion, and anxiety. An increased emphasis on self-reliability and self-responsibility creates an environment in which people are more “in charge” of their own decisions, but at the same time feel the pressure of being “charged” by the way their work life evolves: to many, success feels as a mandate and by the same token, no one else but oneself is to be blamed for failure (Beck 2000, Bourdieu 1999, Ortner 1998, Sennett 1998). “No long term” becomes not just a material, but also a social and emotional reality — the base for constant fear of losing grip. As Sennett (1998) argues pessimistically, “fluent” jobs create “fluent” lives and implicitly create “fluent” or “corrosive” characters. And who wants to be accused of having an unstable, fragmentary character, an incomplete subjectivity (Beck 2000, Bourdieu 1999, Comaroff & Comaroff 2000, Ortner 1998, 2005, Wallulis 1997)? Young people in the post-industrial world are the social group most affected by the “corrosive” dynamics that neoliberalism engenders. They are finding themselves in a paradoxical position: on the one hand, they are often the first to be excluded from local labor markets or to have to make do with meaningless and insecure

whEn in roME, do As thE roMAns do

jobs. On the other hand, they are increasingly embedded in a global context predicated on common sentiments, the celebration of consumption, and global forms of self-expression. While the first dynamics result in socio-economic marginality, the second provide a sense of agency at the juncture of the local and the global. This paradoxical situation, however, significantly constrains young people’s ability to reproduce local economic, social, and cultural structures and generates serious tensions with members of older generations, who interpret inability as lack of interest and evidence of the moral decay of the younger generation (Cole & Durham 2008, Comaroff & Comaroff 2000). These intergenerational tensions apply most dramatically to young people with middle class backgrounds. Whereas working class children understand from an early age that certain future paths are beyond their reach and that aspiring to them will alienate them from family and peers, middle class children have been educated with the misleading promise of ongoing upward mobility. The contemporary economic transformations and the overflow of educated young people has made the position of middle class youth more fragile. Those with uppermiddle class backgrounds fear “falling down” due to the expanding and excluding power of the elite class; for lowermiddle class youth, upward mobility seems beyond any possibility (Bourdieu 1999, Bourdieu & Passeron 1977, Ehrenreich 1989, 2002, Newman 1988, Ortner 1998, 2005, Willis 1977). BEErkEns

Colofon still City glossAry is initiAtEd, EditEd And ProduCEd By

monnik tolhuiswEg 2 1031 Cl AMstErdAM info@Monnik.org www.Monnik.org for MorE inforMAtion on thE still City ProJECt: www.stillCity.org Editor-in-ChiEf

Monnik ContriButors

Anneke Beerkens Carlos Cazalis Christiaan Fruneaux (Monnik) Edwin Gardner (Monnik) Maren Godzik Thomas Kong Thomas Looser Aike Rots Vincent Schipper (Monnik) Gavin Whitelaw Julian Worrall grAPhiC dEsign

Annemarie van den Berg Print

Risograph MZ 770 at the Ogikubo Community Center Edition

200 ACknowlEdgEMEnt

A special thanks to Haruka Yokokawa

PuBlishEd By

thE still City ProJECt is suPPortEd By

Japan Foundation Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands, Tokyo