Shisouchizubeta vol.3:English Abstracts and Translations

Japan 2.0

English Translations and Abstracts Edited by Hiroki Azuma Shisouchizu Beta vol. 3 genron

Shisouchizu Beta vol. 3: Japan 2.0 Edited by Hiroki Azuma Issued by Hiroki Azuma Published by Genron Co., Ltd. Il Mondo Bldg. 2F, 1-16-6 Nishigotanda Shinagawa, Tokyo 141-0031, Japan Cover image: Picture of Mitsumata, Edo by Utagawa Kuniyoshi From the Hagi Uragami Museum collection With the collaboration of the Kawasaki Isago no Sato Museum Translations supervised by Naoki Matsuyama Design by Takayuki Ichinose, Yutaro Kawashima Printed in Japan by Chuo Seihan Printing Co., Ltd. and Onoue print, Inc. First published on 8 July 2012 Š2012 Genron Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved isbn 978-4-9905243-5-7 c0010 global.genron.co.jp

Japan 2.0 English Translations and Abstracts Edited by Hiroki Azuma Shisouchizu Beta vol. 3 genron

Japan 2.0 is a proposal, an invitation to envision a new image for Japan. Although the diversity of viewpoints is the book’s essential quality, there is an undercurrent that runs through it that becomes most clearly manifest in the new constitution presented in its pages. The new constitution envisages a country where people and culture flow in and out, while the sedimented memories of this archipelago are inevitably passed on. In other words, a country that attempts to open up to the outside and to simultaneously retain an internal continuity.

This twofold aspiration requires the inclusion of the following pages of English translations. On one hand, the translations improve the flow: they increase accessibility by opening these texts to people who do not speak the Japanese language (just like the other articles from past Shisouchizu Beta issues made available for free on our English website global.genron.co.jp). On the other, by increasing the visibility of the texts in other contexts, they raise the probability of the Japanese language and culture to inform or inspire others and hence to endure.

Japan is said to be shrinking. It is a country where deep-seated issues have been forcibly lifted to the surface by the disaster, generating a climate of widespread resignation. It is in such a climate that the contributors speak of a new image for Japan and that is why their words are never sterile: they are fertile with a sense of alarm about the future of this country. The fact that many of them speak of the importance of translation and cast their gaze beyond the seas is another indication of the necessity of these translations.

Included here are full translations of five articles and dialogues, as well as abstracts for the remaining contents in the Japanese pages.

The potential value of these translations lies in their ability to prompt new conversations beyond existing boundaries, connecting the seemingly unconnected. We look forward to hearing from you.

N.M.

Contents Translations opening note e7 art project e16 speech e44 interview e56 dialogue e79

A New Nation, A New Constellation Hiroki Azuma

Akihabara 3000—Saipan

Maiko Fukushima, Chiyomaru Shikura, Hiroki Azuma

The Artist’s Mission and Determination—Doha Takashi Murakami

A Land Where All Things Germinate—Kyoto Takeshi Umehara

Journalism and the Future—Beijing Michael Anti, Daisuke Tsuda, Hiroki Azuma

Abstracts short story e100

proposal e101

It’s Not as if Everything Should Be Taken Politically Genichiro Takahashi Constitution 2.0 Genron Constitution Committee (Masanori Kusunoki, Ryosuke Nishida, Masayoshi Sakai, Hideaki Shirata, Hiroki Azuma)

proposal e102

Plan 2.0 for Remodeling the Japanese Archipelago Ryuji Fujimura

proposal e103

Literature 2.0 and the Future of Our Written Language Makoto Ichikawa

dialogue e104

The “Bad Place” After 3.11 —Tokyo Yohei Kurose, Noi Sawaragi, Hiroki Azuma

article e105

I Won’t Let You Say That You Don’t Love Gyaru-o—“Cool Japanology” and the Strong Definition of Perversion Masaya Chiba

article e106

The Chance of Winning Lies West of India—Updating Foreign Diplomacy 0.8 to 2.0 Shamil Kosuke Tsuneoka

article e107

The Disempowered Japanese Provinces—Is Consumer Society an Enemy of Democracy?

Ryosuke Nishida

article e108

The Two Faces of Manga Go Ito

article e109

National Quiz 2.0 Noriyasu Tokuhisa

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Contributors

Japanese pages: pp. 042–053

opening note

A New Nation, A New Constellation Hiroki Azuma Translated by Naoki Matsuyama

I bring to you the Japan 2.0 issue.

During the past year many have articulated their thoughts about whether 3.11 will cause Japan to change, or whether the earthquake and the nuclear accident were epochal events or not. Some public intellectuals have complacently claimed that the disaster was not significant enough to change everyday life, or even that it should not change.

However, I feel that concerning the question of whether or not Japan has changed, the conclusive answer already exists. Japanese society has, without a doubt, changed since 2011. This opening note is being written in the month after all nuclear power plants in Japan stopped operating when the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido was taken offline for a periodic inspection. There must have been no one who, before the disaster, predicted that no nuclear power plants would be producing energy in the early summer of 2012 in Japan.1 At the very least, energy policy has changed. Energy is the basis of the economy, and the economy is the basis of society.

It is apparently the first time in forty-two years that no nuclear power plants are operating in Japan, something that last occurred in 1970. 1970 is the year in which Expo ’70 was held in Osaka, Yukio Mishima died, and pedestrian malls were introduced—many sociologists regard this year as the greatest milestone in postwar Japan.

It was the year in which the “season of politics” ended, giving way to a paradise of consumption. Today, we live in a period in which the rules established during that year are beginning to crumble. Japan has changed. Regardless of whether or not people desired the change.

This book takes as its point of departure this recognition of the current situation. Has Japan changed? Should it change? This book e7

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believes that we are no longer in a stage where those questions are pertinent. Japan was forcibly changed by the violence of the disaster.

What we need now are words that, accepting this as a premise, act as a lighthouse which, though perhaps unable to provide the answer to the question of where Japan should be headed, may at least hazily light the way forward.

What should Japan be like? If we think about it, we have been dismissing this simple question from our minds for a very long time.

We have put off confronting reality, looking scornfully at the political stagnation and sinking into the slumber of consumption, knowing full well that it is nothing but a slumber.

When I think about that period, I always think of a scene in the science fiction anime Megazone 23, released in 1985.2 This work, which still maintains a cult following, introduces a convoluted setting wherein the 1980s landscape of Tokyo in which people live is actually a world fabricated in a spaceship in the future, within a virtual reality generated by a computer. The story proceeds with the protagonist becoming aware of this truth and trying to escape the fabricated world, but what leaves a strong impression is the following conversation: At one point, the protagonist asks the computer, which is in the shape of a woman, why the virtual reality is modeled on Tokyo in the 1980s, a distant past. With an expression of mixed sadness and pity, she answers, “It was because that period in time was the most peaceful for humanity.” This brief conversation is laden with several layers of sarcasm and perversion. The reality of the 1980s is not real; it is merely a dream plastered with lies. But at the same time, it is the happiest dream, and hence cannot be easily ended. This paradox portrayed by the animators in 1985 accurately captures the essence of the mentality of many Japanese people from 1970 to 1995, or even up to 2011. For a long time, we have been taught that the avoidance of confronting the question of who we are (as well as the question of nuclear power plants, the question of Okinawa, the question of generational disparities) was a necessary condition for attaining happiness and maturity, or even “justice.”

Those conditions are beginning to break down. We can no longer be indolent intellectuals or hypocritical upholders of postwar democracy.

Be that as it may, this journal is neither one of the established “gene8

A New Nation, A New Constellation

eral-interest” magazines (rondanshi) nor a business magazine. Specialists and journalists should be the ones entrusted with the tasks of proposing concrete policies and analyzing social problems in detail: forcing this journal into these roles will probably not yield any productive results. Instead, what this journal pursues in its projects, selection of contributors, and the conceptual vision unique to it, is a more vague and “literary” new self-image of Japan, that would inevitably form the basis of any policies or analyses.

A new image of Japan. Such an expression may attract angry complaints from no small number of readers. “What’s this abstract nonsense? What’s needed now are concrete programs for reforms. There’s no time for the word games of intellectuals,” they may say. In fact, the moralizing notion that academics should keep quiet in order to make room for people with practical skills to speak up has recently become stronger.

However, this journal believes that precisely because Japan has reached a severe crisis and is in need of concrete reforms, overhauling the basis of abstract principles is of fundamental importance.

No matter how good a policy may be, it will always be implemented by human beings. Regardless of the extent to which social systems or economic situations change, reality would only creak under the strain if the heart did not change too. We need a new heart to build a new nation. If that sounds too rightist, nationalistic, or derived from a textbook of ethics, we could use the expression “mindset (maindosetto),” as used by economists or business scholars in Japan. A new society requires a new mindset. The title of this issue, Japan 2.0, points to such a new mindset.

Looking back on history and going back a further hundred years from 1970, Japan in the early Meiji period was faced with similar issues. Still in his thirties, Yukichi Fukuzawa wrote the following in 1873:3 “In private life [people are] wise; in office, stupid. If dispersed, there is light; when gathered together, darkness . . . having been oppressed by this spirit, the people have not been able to exercise their natural abilities to the full. Since the Meiji Restoration, the government has been trying to promote scholarship, law, and commerce, but without much result, for the same reason . . . Japanese civilization will advance only after we sweep away the old spirit that permeates the minds of the people. But it can be swept away by neither governe9

Hiroki Azuma

ment decree nor private admonition. Some persons must take the initiative in doing things in order to show the people where their aims should lie.” The Restoration, according to him, must start at the level of individuals, and in order for this to happen, there would be a need for a new scholarship and education to raise awareness.

In the same text, Fukuzawa states that “it is generally correct to say that in Japan there is only a government, and as yet no people.”

He was well aware of the fact that, at the time, Japan needed not just a new system, but also a new mindset, in other words a new attitude and image for the “people.” It may be difficult to put the Meiji Restoration and the disaster side by side, but I believe that the issues faced

by Japan today are identical to those of Fukuzawa’s era: to present a new mindset to the people who are intelligent if “dispersed” so that they may continue to be so when gathered. This is a pertinent issue in today’s Japan, where failures continue to accumulate as American-style ideals are propounded in response to the question of how to use the creativity that is scattered all over Twitter or Nico Nico Douga to benefit society.

This is why, following Fukuzawa’s teachings, this book attempts to present a new spirit or mindset as emerging in a manner that differs from a simple policy recommendation, locating itself somewhere between academia and practice, or between the management of a nation and edification.

Who are we? Who should we become? As the entire world becomes one, and the network is on the verge of engulfing the entire planet, what meaning is there in living in an island nation in the Far East?

That is the principal subject of this book.

From the constitution to a cosplay photographic shoot, from a slapstick short story to a new plan for remodeling the archipelago, from an article on foreign policy to a theoretical analysis of gyaru-o, from an interview with a philosopher in Kyoto to a dialogue with a journalist in Beijing, the texts and images included in this book cover a broad array of fields and viewpoints.

The reason for this is simple. The principal aim of this book is to think about the future of Japan, particularly the future image of Japan.

Hence, its conception would not be complete by concentrating solely on heavy and serious topics (preferred by oyaji), leaving aside a consideration of a future that is pop, frivolous, and childish (that of onnae10

A New Nation, A New Constellation

kodomo, so to say).4 This is the premise of this journal. Beside a heartwrenching and vehement argument about resuming operations of nuclear power plants flows a series of troll tweets on the subject of a late-night anime. That kind of Twitter timeline is the reality in Japan, and we need to start from that chasm in order to draw a valid vision for the future. This book is composed with such an awareness, but the diversity may bewilder a no small number of readers.

However, a careful read reveals the existence of many “threads of associations” which may not weave together a single grand narrative, but which, rather, gently and mutually connect the seemingly incoherent projects and articles.

For example, Takashi Murakami’s speech in Doha not only resonates with Takeshi Umehara’s philosophy through the subject of the 500 Arhats (Umehara has written a book on Arhats); it is also deeply connected with the articles by Masaya Chiba and Go Ito through the critical eye toward Cool Japan, and also to the article by Shamil Kosuke Tsuneoka through the recognition of the diplomatic importance of the Middle Eastern countries. The attention to pop culture in the articles by Chiba and Ito link with the opening art project, but the decision to shoot the photographs in Saipan, where an illusory future of Akihabara was envisioned, allows us to associate it not only with a possible expansion of the Axis headed southward drawn by Ryuji Fujimura in his plan to remodel the Japanese archipelago, but also, on the other hand, to Ryosuke Nishida’s article, through the subject of the exhaustion of regional economies (Saipan’s economy is heavily dependent on Japanese tourists, and it is burdened with problems that echo those of Okinawa and Fukushima).5 Furthermore, the draft for the new constitution, to which Nishida also contributed and which forms the central pillar of the book, takes as its theme the balancing of the two contradictory issues of the inescapable shouldering of the memories of this country and the need to open up toward the world, which is exactly what Murakami has been practicing in the global art market.

In this way, it is possible to draw a diagram—a constellation as it were—comprised of a thread that goes from Murakami to Saipan through Chiba and Ito, and from Saipan to Fujimura as well as to Murakami through the constitution. There is not only one constellation. Other diverse relationships are being extended within the book.

Who is the girl who appears in Genichiro Takahashi’s short story? e11

Hiroki Azuma

And why is Maiko Fukushima’s chest embroidered with the letters “Fukushima”? It is, however, senseless to provide the answers to all of the hidden allusions, and it is also quite possible that readers may find ones that the editorial team is unaware of.

I hope readers will seek out countless constellations. The sum of such constellations is the shape of Japan envisioned by this book.

Nevertheless, the reason this journal takes such a circuitous editorial policy begs an explanation. Why, if the subject is the future of Japan, does the book not present a simple answer? There is a rather complicated situation behind this.

What should Japan be like? I, that is, Hiroki Azuma, the editor-inchief of this journal, have my own answer to this question. I would be able to neither select the contributors nor plan its projects if this were not the case. My answer, for example, could be summed up with the words “making Japan as a ‘flow’ and Japan as a ‘stock’ compatible,” which I stated in the introduction to the project to create a new constitution.

On the other hand, however, this is a journal, and I am no more than the coordinator of the whole (the Japanese word for magazine, zasshi, includes the character zatsu, which means miscellaneous assortment). There is nothing that is more boring to read than a journal that is tinged solely with the philosophy of the editor-in-chief. And if we think about it, the question “what should Japan be like?” should not be brushed away with a single hasty answer. That is why, in editing this book, I was confronted with the paradoxical situation of wanting to offer a clear answer while also, at the same time, knowing that I should not do that.

This contradictory situation is the reason I introduced earlier the analogy of a “constellation.” And as I did so, the name of Walter Benjamin floated into my mind. Benjamin once wrote that ideas are like constellations with objects and phenomena as stars.6 That is why this book answers the question of what Japan should be like by aligning “stars.” It does not present an easily understandable manifesto that presents the new Japan. What it does present, instead, is a list of stars that, out of all the countless stars that will form the group of constellations that constitute Japan 2.0 in the near future, are beginning to emit (to my eyes) a particularly bright light at the present stage. e12

A New Nation, A New Constellation

Now, in 2012, a new constellation is beginning to rise. Japan 2.0 is beginning to emerge. Most of the stars, however, are still hidden under the horizon, and we cannot know in what form it will finally emerge. Being a constellation, it may appear differently to everyone.

That is the kind of thinking that informs the editing of this book. I would therefore like to entrust the reader with the choice of what kind of lines to draw between the stars aligned by this book, and what kind of ideals to visualize when doing so.

The disaster broke us apart. This was the title of the opening note in the previous issue. In response to this, this issue has been edited with the intention of discerning, if not a way to unite us as one, at least a gentle connection, some kind of pattern among ourselves who have become fragmented, in other words, a constellation. We need a new constellation.

A few final words.

The opening section of this book includes, in addition to a photographic project with Chiyomaru Shikura and Maiko Fukushima and a short story by Genichiro Takahashi, a speech that Takashi Murakami gave in Doha, Qatar in February 2012. As has been widely reported, Murakami held a major retrospective in the ALRIWAQ Exhibition Hall in Doha from February to late June. What grabbed the most attention was the new work The 500 Arhats, whose entire surface, measuring three meters by one hundred meters, overflows with a prayer for lost souls.

Many readers will already know about this exhibition, so I will not provide a description. The same goes for The 500 Arhats. I cannot forget the moving and thrilling sensation, the cold shiver that was sent from the top of my head to my heel down through my spine, as I witnessed the painting in the hall on an early afternoon on February 7, as people frantically prepared for the opening on the next day. In the field of contemporary art, I am nothing but an amateur onlooker.

How difficult the production, how miraculous its presentation, how its subject is a response to the disaster, and how the techniques are a culmination of the artist’s activities—let us leave those questions to specialists.

The reason I bring up Murakami’s name to conclude the opening note despite of this, is because I wanted to set down the following on e13

Hiroki Azuma

paper.

As he mentions himself, Murakami has produced this work as a response to the Great East Japan Earthquake, or rather, out of a sense of duty of the artist to those who live in this period of fierce disasters.

And what a gigantic response it is. A painting measuring three meters in height and one hundred meters in length. Its enormity corresponds to the enormity of the disaster. The size was not coincidental: it must have been necessary in order to respond to the impact of the disaster.

Because of that, its conception is not something that can easily be realized. Producing a painting of one hundred meters in Japan, and sending it to the Middle East by dividing it into one hundred panels.

This operation alone, from the packaging to lawyers and the countless staff, requires a fund of tens of millions of yen. Regardless of the intensity of Murakami’s imagination and sensibilities, this masterpiece would never have materialized were it not for the fact that Murakami already had an organization and funds of a certain scale when the crisis happened. That is to say, having established Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. in 2001 and having taken the step toward the realm of group work and marketing, Murakami was the only one in the Japanese art world who quietly and without even being aware of it had prepared for this crisis in 2011. Kaikai Kiki’s activities have attracted both praise and censure. However, without Kaikai Kiki, Murakami would not have been able to respond to this crisis in any way as an artist. Aside from the level of perfection of the work itself, I was shaken most of all by his progress as an artist, or rather, as a human being.

There are many ways to confront reality. No one would have shown any understanding if someone had stated before the disaster that Murakami’s activities in the 2000s were a preparation for a new crisis. But this was the reality.

This is why I would like to deliver this more than 600-pages long conceptual book into your hands in the hope that the vision of this book, which seeks out a new image for Japan, along with this small publishing company called Genron Co., Ltd., which was established to publish this journal Shisouchizu beta, will appear to have been a preparation for some kind of crisis when looking back from the future in a decade or two.

The word “concept” has the etymological connotation of “pregnancy.” My hope is that the concept of this book is pregnant with the e14

A New Nation, A New Constellation

bud of the regeneration of Japan.

Welcome to the world of Japan 2.0.

6 June 2012 Gotanda, Tokyo

1. On June 16, after this article was written, the government announced its decision to resume operations of the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors of the Oi Nuclear Power Plant.

The state where no nuclear power plants are operating is therefore planned to end as of July. The reactivation is, however, subject to a strong opposition, and public opinion continues to be divided at the time that this article is submitted to print.

2. I refer to this work in my Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). It was originally published as Doubutsuka suru posutomodan (Tokyo: Kodansha Gendai Shinsho, 2001).

3. An Encouragement of Learning, Section 4, trans. David A. Dilworth and Umeyo Hirano (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1969). Originally published in 1872 as Gakumon no susume.

4. [Translator’s note: As it is clear from the fact that the author wrote onna-kodomo in katakana, this reference to middle-aged men (oyaji) and women/children (onnakodomo), should be understood not as an acceptance but rather as a criticism of the premise that the “serious” pertains to men while the “frivolous” pertains to women, which continues to exist in a country where politics and culture are predominantly understood through a patriarchal filter.]

5. Refer to the third installment of “The Theme-Parking Globe” (Teema paaku-ka suru chikyuu) in Genron etc. vol. 3 (Tokyo: Genron, 2012), the members’ magazine published by Genron.

6. “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. This means, in the first place, that they are neither their concepts nor their laws. They do not contribute to the knowledge of phenomena, and in no way can the latter be criteria with which to judge the existence of ideas... Ideas are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements’ being seen as points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time redeemed; so that those elements which it is the function of the concept to elicit from phenomena are most clearly evident at the extremes.” From The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Brooklyn: Verso, 1998), 34–5.

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Japanese pages: pp. 006–019

opening art project

Akihabara 3000: Hyperreal—Saipan Maiko Fukushima, Chiyomaru Shikura, Hiroki Azuma

by Kenshu Shintsubo, Kazuki Umezawa Translated by Naoki Matsuyama

In an “Akihabara” that slightly deviates from our own reality, there was a girl who, all alone and unnoticed by others, fought day and night to protect justice and moe.

Her name was Mofuku-chan, and she was a freshman at Shohei High School in Chiyoda Ward. Mofuku-chan could see the aura emanated by moe goods. To her eyes, CDs, DVDs, figures, and body pillows shined brightly. The aura seemed to represent the influence that the original works of those goods had within the world. The goods of those works that sold well by winning the hearts of viewers emanated an ethereal and alluring blue light. Due to this ability, Mofukuchan had become something of a miko (shrine maiden) for the otaku.

One day, she discovered another property of the aura. It happened when she wandered into a dimly lit second-hand DVD store located in a back street of Akihabara. There she saw that a few DVDs of some old, minor anime shined with a brightness she had never seen before. The light they emanated was different from the aura she was used to seeing: it was burning red. The aura did not just represent the number of sales. It represented how deeply a particular work had been loved in the form of a change in color. Learning this, Mofukuchan became engulfed in the harsh endeavor to save moe.

The big corporations that make use of the blue aura. The cult-like otaku who worship the red aura. Mofuku-chan did not yet know that awaiting her was a spectacle through space and time, a world 1000 years in the future, and a climactic battle to save Akihabara . . .

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Akihabara 3000

A magical girl. A Spacetime observer. An archaeologist. The stage is a tropical beach. Anime and video game-related goods are stranded on the beach like debris. The magical girl knows nothing. The Spacetime observer knows everything. The archaeologist is trying to save the world.

Mofuku-chan fights with a mysterious organization that tries to destroy Akihabara by abusing the power of the aura. She fights with the organization, converting the power of aura into divine power, but one day, she is defeated by the enemy. The moment she thinks the end is near, she is sucked into a spacetime distortion that takes her to a world 1000 years in the future.

1000 years later, Akihabara has turned tropical. Mofuku-chan finds that her body has somehow turned into that of a magical girl. A man who calls himself Chiyomaru approaches Mofuku-chan, and she guards herself with a magical weapon. Humanity is on the verge of extinction in the world of 3000, and Mofuku-chan is the only one who can save the world, Chiyomaru tells her. e17

Maiko Fukushima, Chiyomaru Shikura, Hiroki Azuma

The Spacetime Observer, AZM, watches over them. AZM is a form of artificial intelligence that spews out fragments of information. AZM explains the cause humanity’s degeneration. Chiyomaru lets Mofuku-chan know that he has finally succeeded in summoning her to his world after long years of research.

Mofuku-chan begins to relax her vigilance. The debris of otaku goods begins to recover its vitality due to the power of Mofuku-chan’s aura.

You can see the red aura, Chiyomaru says, that is our hope, the world wouldn’t have perished if “good moe” hadn’t been forgotten. But can moe save the world? asks Mofuku-chan, and Chiyomaru gives her a complex look.

Guided by Chiyomaru, Mofuku-chan walks inland. There, she finds a decaying tank. AZM provides information to Mofuku-chan, who asks if there had been a war. What is moe? Moe is love for the ghost. Whose ghost? As Mofuku-chan is overpowered by the torrent of words, Chiyomaru opens an ancient text.

Chiyomaru invites Mofuku-chan to touch the tank. The memories of the fallen enter into Mofuku-chan’s body, causing a violent biological reaction resonating with the aura of moe. Mofuku-chan, the magical girl, turns into a magical holy mother. Her new aura is of a luminous gold, and brims with a benevolence that connects moe to the life of a new generation. The spacetime gate opens, and Chiyomaru watches the scene with a smile on his face. To go back to her own time with her new aura to save Akihabara and wipe out the future in which Chiyomaru lives: that is Mofuku-chan’s destiny. Mofuku-chan’s true struggle begins here. e18

Akihabara 3000

Models: Maiko Fukushima, Chiyomaru Shikura, Hiroki Azuma Planning: Hiroki Azuma Photography: Kenshu Shintsubo Art Direction: Kazuki Umezawa Text: Kazuki Umezawa, Hiroki Azuma Costume: chloma (Junya Suzuki, Reiko Sakuma) Digital Post-production: Takako Sano (Trigon Graphics Service) Make-up and Styling: Noriyoshi Yamada (e.a.t‌) Shooting Location: Akihabara, Saipan With the collaboration of MAGES. Inc. and Moe Japan Co., Ltd.

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Japanese pages: pp. 020–041

opening art project

Akihabara 3000: Real—Saipan Maiko Fukushima, Chiyomaru Shikura, Hiroki Azuma Translated by Ko Ransom

aki habara in 2012 Azuma

The title of this magazine is Japan 2.0. In spite of this, it opens with a cosplay photo shoot conducted in Saipan. I’m sure many readers are surprised at this apparent nonsense. Firstly, I’d like to thank Chiyomaru Shikura, as well as Maiko Fukushima, also known as Mofukuchan, for agreeing to participate in such a bizarre project. This roundtable talk is a supplement to our photo shoot—or rather, it is this discussion that the shoot is intended to accompany.

To introduce them once again, Shikura-san is the president of MAGES. and has been involved in the production of many of their games, including Steins;Gate, one of their best-known works. He is a man of many talents, simultaneously managing the themed cafe The Afilia Magic Senior High School while also having composed and written the lyrics to many hit songs.1 I have personally had the opportunity to view his work in the past, and had always wanted to work together with him some day. We are also joined by Mofukuchan, a vital part of any discussion on modern day Akihabara (Akiba) culture. As president of Moe Japan she created the Mogra and Dear Stage clubs, and in recent years she began producing the idol group Denpagumi.inc.2 She is also frequently presented in the media as an example of a young female business owner, and many of you may be familiar with her from that context.

These two have taken time out of their busy schedules to come with me all the way to Saipan, and we have just wrapped up a two-day cosplay photo shoot. Now, I’d like to move straight into our discussion.

You may have noticed, but this cosplay project is intended as an allegory for the positions that both of you occupy in current-day Ake20

Akihabara 3000

iba. 3000 years in the future, otaku have perished, and Akihabara is in ruins. There, a mad scientist, played by Chiyomaru-san, has excavated the remains of the once-prosperous Akiba and is trying to gain some sort of power through them. On the other hand, a magical girl, played by Mofuku-chan, fights every day with her magic in order to protect Akiba’s old traditions. The two somehow transcend spacetime and meet, summoning a new hope. That’s the backstory to this photo shoot, but also, by turning you into these characters, it’s a metaphor for your own positions: Chiyomaru-san is trying to connect and expand into new contexts by using methods learned from Akiba, as seen, for example, in AKIHABARA BACKSTAGE Pass3 that he operates, while Mofuku-chan’s attachment to Akihabara as a place is absolute.

Shikura

What? Really?

Azuma

Yes! [Laughter] And this discussion is meant to act as a B-side, or a kind of “audio commentary” to the photo shoot. It’s a little complicated, but...

In any case, to repeat myself, I’d like to talk today about the future course of “Cool Japan,” as well as the direction of Japan as a whole.

Japan has spent the sixty years since the end of World War II creating a unique culture that some now refer to as “Galapagosized.”4 Though one of the most noticed, representative parts of this culture is Akiba culture, it has begun to decline—or at the very least, it is clearly not on the upward path of growth that it once was on. What should Japan, or in today’s case, Akiba, its symbol, set as its goals in this situation? What do we do to ensure that Akihabara, and thus Japan at large, remains a holy land for young people and a gathering place for individuals around the world thirty or fifty years from now? In today’s discussion, I’d like to ask you two about long-term strategies for accomplishing this.

My preface has grown a bit long, but I’d like to start the discussion by asking Mofuku-chan to talk about how she views the current state of Akihabara culture.

Fukushima

Okay, but my brain is having trouble changing gears since I was in a school swimsuit until just a few moments ago... [Laughter] To begin with how I see things, while “Cool Japan” is a big topic of discussion right now, I think that most of what’s being talked about e21

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is decidedly old. It’s been about ten years since Akiba first became big and exciting enough to be discussed as a “holy ground,” and that boom peaked around 2005. When the AOKI menswear store opened on Chuo-dori, the largest and most recognized “main street” of Akihabara, it symbolized a major shift, and right now, Akihabara is rapidly losing its identity. When people in my line of work talk these days, you often hear them say that Akiba has turned into a regular town.

In my personal experience, the loss of the pedestrian mall that occurred with the Akihabara massacre5 was a major change. Until then, Akihabara was a place where you could, for example, go to the pedestrian mall and see groups of people dancing the dance from Haruhi Suzumiya that was popular on Nico Nico Douga. The dance became popular through “I tried dancing” (odottemita) videos6 on the service, and the groups attracted big audiences despite many of their members being bad at dancing. There was no distinction between the performers and the audience, with everyone gathering steam together as one. When I saw that, I felt like Akihabara may have been the only place in the world where something like that was happening. Now, though, there isn’t that group feeling anymore.

I think the reason that happened was because the people who gathered in Akihabara at the time felt alienated from regular society, so they viewed Akihabara as a place where they could belong.

Once they were in Akihabara they were freed of any restraints, which gave birth to a kind of power. But among young people now, being an otaku doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re alienated, and it’s not something to be ashamed about, either. If you’re an AKB48 fan, then, well, we’re in an age where even Tsunehiro Uno7 can declare on Twitter that he’s a fan of the group. There aren’t any restraints anymore.

Other than that, I guess there’s also the appearance of pinchike.8 I think they symbolize the current generational shift in Akiba. I believe that there was an age of the 2.5-dimensional, something between two-dimensional and three-dimensional. That was the age when maid cafes were popular, but now a new generation of otaku who are all about 3D is flowing into the city. They’re totally different from the otaku of old. They’re not interested in 2D, just 3D. The kinds of customers we have at Dear Stage are beginning to change, too.

Azuma

How about you, Chiyomaru-san? Do you feel any changes? e22

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Shikura

Hmm, that’s a good question.

There are a few things I have noticed, but I think the biggest change is that otaku, who until now only consumed content, have started to create and present content themselves. I think that accounts for this “3D-ification of Akiba.” Not only do you have the “I tried dancing...” (odottemita) category that Mofuku-chan was talking about, but there are also a lot of other “I tried...” (~shite mita) categories on Nico Nico Douga, like “I tried singing...” (utattemita), so now a huge number of people are showing off their own performances.

The wotagei culture9 at live concerts is the same thing. A lot of times the people in the crowd are creating something more passionate and exciting than the people on stage. If you include Twitter and Mixi in this, compared with only a few years ago there has been a huge increase in the channels that people can use to create and transmit their own content and performances, broadly speaking. It used to be that the media held superiority in the distribution of content, but that superiority is being shaken in a big way.

Azuma

That kind of situation could be seen as unfavorable by producers such as yourself and Mofuku-chan. If we live in a world where anyone can distribute content, in what direction will otaku culture move from here on out?

Shikura

To begin with, the creation of content is definitely going to become format-centric. For example, the “big three” content franchises10 composed of Hatsune Miku, The Idolm@ster, and Touhou Project have become hits in and around Nico Nico Douga, and the main reason behind this is that they allow users to express themselves in some way by using their characters. To put it another way, characters are now just formats.

I don’t make a distinction between 2D and 3D when I say this. The same applies to AKB48: while each individual idol may have her own charm, what stands out most is the fact that the group’s “handshake event”11 and “general election”12 systems are closely tied to their success. Now, the focus of competition in that field of business is about first presenting a new format, then seeing if you can cause people to become excited about that format and build it up. The reason I started AKIHABARA BACKSTAGE Pass was also because of my interest in these kinds of “formats.” e23

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Fukushima

You’re exactly right. I think that currently the creation of systems to sell idols is the most authentic kind of business venture of all. It’s astonishing how many varied ideas are being created.

Shikura

Like turning handshake events into high-five events because shaking hands takes too long. [Laughter]

Azuma

Of course!

Fukushima

There are a lot of interesting ideas there. For example, I won’t say their name, but I have one idol group in mind. Their business model is quite different from groups you would normally consider idol groups because they started a fan-oriented business as idols before ever making a CD or performing a live concert. The group’s members were openly recruited from the public, and if fans pay enough money they can even go on dates with them. They still insist that they’re idols, though, because they have certain targets based on the money they get from going on dates. For example, if they save up two million yen, they’ll release their debut CD, or if they amass thirty million yen, they’ll do a concert in Budokan. They say their final goal is to appear in Kohaku Uta Gassen.13 There’s another group called SUPER GiRLS14 that allows fans to vote through a cell phone app to participate in everything from deciding on the group’s members to choosing their costumes and CD covers. The service they’re offering is a lot like The Idolm@ster, wherein users feel like they’re playing a game while they produce a real idol group. I think you can find the real cutting edge of Akiba in that field.

Azuma

So the most exciting thing in Akihabara right now isn’t the content, but competing business models. That definitely symbolizes a transformation in otaku. Akiba culture used to place utmost importance on content and was supported by the kinds of people who couldn’t make friends in school, or people who these days would be said to have “communication disorders.”15 Essentially, the scene described in Kaichiro Morikawa’s 2003 Learning from Akihabara: The birth of a personapolis.16 Things have completely changed since then, and otaku have become significantly more sociable, creating a need for platforms that allow them to connect.

However, to play my role as moderator by asking a pessimistic e24

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question, isn’t there something we lose with that change? I feel the charm of old Akiba culture wasn’t in social business, but rather in strong content, particularly anime.

Fukushima

I think it’s an entirely generational problem. The people from generations younger than mine simply can’t become interested in content in which they can’t involve themselves.

Shikura

Mofuku-chan and I have differing thoughts on this point, because I think that content is still of utmost importance. As a whole, the scale of the content industry in Japan is still about equal in scale to Japan’s steel industry in terms of total volume, including both domestic and international sales.17 We can’t just toss that aside. That’s why Akihabara’s longstanding position as a place for the dissemination of content can’t be allowed to wane. While the format business might be popular right now, if the content inside of those formats isn’t strong, they ultimately won’t succeed. We were just talking about going from 2D to 3D, but Akihabara will run out of steam if it keeps going down the same path of only 3D. It’s the same with all of the competing idol sales formats: they need to be paired with content, or else they won’t be able to last.

Fukushima

Oh, but I agree with you. I think that things will be different five years from now.

Azuma

Wait, but I thought you said that the younger generation was only interested in participatory content. Even so, you still think that the “format business” will begin to stall?

Fukushima

I don’t know about stall, but trends will change. Akihabara is a town that changes very quickly.

will the “format business” work worldwide?

Fukushima

Also, it isn’t that I think that content isn’t important. I only think I have a different image of “content” than the two of you. I think that from here on out, we should look at examples like Hatsune Miku, where “creators” are people who can act as producers capturing the flow of things amidst the countless works created using a specific e25

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format. I believe that the work of those kinds of people will begin to be regarded as content.

Azuma

That’s similar to Toshinao Sasaki’s idea of “curation journalism.”18 For example, in the world of journalism, take the reporting of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Some people are arguing that detailed information coming through Twitter from people on the scene was better at capturing the situation than the large-scale reporting of the mass media. Mofuku-chan is predicting that something similar will happen in the world of content: the ability to capture and consolidate the countless amount of “small content” created by a countless number of users will become increasingly important.

I agree, but only partially. It’s true that things will move increasingly in that direction. However, I’m skeptical of the notion that everything will end up that way. In other words, no matter how much Twitter journalism spreads, there will still, in the end, be information that only professionals can find. Similarly, isn’t there content that can only be created via concentrated efforts by professionals because of the time and resource investments required?

Participatory content also has the problem of being highly dependent on context. For example, Touhou Project may be one of the hottest content properties among young people right now, but it is incredibly difficult to introduce it as content overseas. Never mind international audiences—it’s even difficult to explain to anyone in Japan who isn’t an otaku. The reason for this is that there are too many things that one must already know in order to understand what is interesting about Touhou Project. Looking at things in terms of spreading the Japanese content industry abroad, autonomous works by major, outstanding creators such as Hayao Miyazaki are more competitive than participatory content.

Fukushima

But that’s exactly what Yasushi Akimoto, the producer of AKB48, is doing right now. He’s creating a sister group to AKB48 in Jakarta.19 And what about Hatsune Miku? Miku is appreciated overseas, too.

Shikura

It’s difficult for me to reply to that because my company has been involved with the staging of many Miku concerts, but... [Laughter] There’s a big difference between the manners in which Hatsune Miku has been received in Japan and abroad. The many Miku users e26

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in Japan share a sense of identity and creativity, which then gives birth to various songs, and so the culture behind her has grown in large part thanks to a kind of collective intelligence. In other words, while it may seem natural, part of the attraction to Hatsune Miku is a “historical” attraction: the community has fostered her. When she appears on a stage, the fans think the Miku they have created is standing on that stage. On the other hand, her popularity abroad is a simple one based around her as a singing character, or as a symbol. In other words, like Azuma-san said, it’s not as if the Hatsune Miku community, or the format itself, is being exported overseas. Of course, it’s definitely cool, thrilling, and boastworthy that a collective intelligence created by Japanese otaku has become popular throughout the world. Miku has far more songs than any other artist in the world, and she’s a large-scale digital artist with supporters and creators. The strength of that alone is large. In any case, I wanted to make it clear that the Hatsune Miku that has become popular in Japan and the Hatsune Miku seen by people outside of Japan are two different things.

Azuma

I think that Hatsune Miku symbolizes how content in Japan has been engulfed by communication. However, overseas she is consumed as simple content.

Shikura

That’s right. And that also becomes an advantage, conversely. While her charm as a character determines whether or not she’ll be accepted overseas, the only community that can give birth to that character remains in Japan.

This is why I think that Japan shouldn’t change any of its strategies when trying to appeal to an overseas audience. Instead of embarking on some sort of marketing strategy that targets an international audience just because something will be sold overseas, first you need to create something that will become popular in Japan.

I don’t think I need to point out that this is incredibly important for Akiba 2.0. For example, you’ll often see in video game proposals where, for example, 150,000 sales are needed to break even, and because that number is difficult to reach in Japan alone, the game will also be made with North America in mind. Most of the titles created on this basis end up failing.

Akihabara is a strong town. The entire place is like a web portal e27

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for otaku. It’s incredibly flat, and full of rows of rectangular buildings that are very conscious about wall advertisements. So, as long as you have strong content, you can repaint the scenery of the town overnight. If we can build the city to the point at which content that can succeed in Akihabara will also be able to succeed overseas, then creators may start aiming for an “Akihabara debut” as they do with “Hollywood debuts” now. If that happens, then of course the town would gain more attention, even from people overseas. In any case, Akihabara is the most sensitive town in the world in terms of how it reacts to content.

the change in consu m e rs Azuma

Fukushima Shikura

Thinking of Akihabara itself as a web portal! That’s a very good way to put it, but to once again make an objection as this discussion’s moderator, your scheme in which things that become popular in Akihabara could eventually spread throughout the world assumes that the consumers in Akihabara have a good eye for content. Do you think that this situation will continue, though?

The competitiveness of Akiba culture is dependent not only on the accumulation of its creators’ technical skills, but also largely on the high literacy level of the otaku who consume content there. However, as you just mentioned, many otaku who seek social bonds over strong content have started to appear in the past few years. For example, even anime is being treated as nothing more than a topic for conversation, with more and more people consuming anime by watching the first episode, then giving up if the series doesn’t become widely talked about. Then, because creators understand that this is happening, they start to change their titles so that they’ll become discussed on 2channel.20 Can we really just say that creating something good will be rewarded by the market within such an environment?

That’s what I’m the most worried about right now, too.

Otaku are still very discerning. Right now, forty or fifty anime series are being created every season, but only two or three of them succeed in a business sense. While this could be seen as the “decline of anime,” the same thing is happening in America, too. There is of course the case of Hollywood films, but even looking elsewhere to the world e28

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of American-made TV dramas, shows will be cancelled without a second thought if their ratings are too low. Even among the ones that make it, only a tiny group, comprised of shows with the highest ratings, is exported around the globe. It’s a tough world.

Azuma-san was just talking about otakus’ literacy dropping, but you could also say that their literacy levels are healthier than ever. The monopoly held by terrestrial television stations is starting to crumble. For example, if you compare the cost to run a program on Fuji TV with that of Tokyo MX,21 you’re talking about a factor of ten. Additionally, you now have various mediums, including Nico Nico Douga. A fairly unrestricted kind of competition is starting to take place in this messy world of video media that’s still being rebuilt. Looking toward the future, there will probably be some sort of new format born from this chaos, which will in turn create strong content. As long as there’s competition, strong content will always be created, and fans will always select it.

Only, I’m personally fixated on the creation of content inside this kind of environment, and the reason that I’m experimenting with new formats is because what I really want to do is create new content.

This is somewhat unrelated, but many things that come out of communities are ultimately owned by those communities rather than by any set, single owner. In some ways this situation prevents these formats from developing as industries. I sometimes see users with negative stances toward things being created with business in mind from the start, but really, commercial content can have soul, a message, and beauty just like anything else.

Fukushima

But even at my age, I don’t find works that are popular online interesting at all. Those things change with generations, and generations will only continue to shift. Even if a video on Nico Nico Douga has a lot of comments on it, if a lot of those comments are by elementary and middle school children, choosing videos based on the number of comments will only result in simple ones rising to the top. I have a feeling that Shikura-san is talking with otaku in their thirties and older in mind. Young people today really are ignorant.

Shikura

Really? I think that far from being ignorant, they’re a generation that has grown up always having had the internet, which means that they’ve naturally gained a high level of visual literacy. It’s so easy to e29

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see so many different things online.

Azuma

It has been revealed in a recent analysis of Nico Nico Douga that elementary and middle school students post a massive number of thoughtless comments on the service.22 To begin with, people in their twenties, who comprise the generation that is most vocal online, don’t actually have that much money, and their opinions end up not being the same as the opinions of people who actually buy things.

While the trajectory of something good becoming talked about to then lead to purchases would be ideal, buzz and sales aren’t that connected anymore.

Also, people are starting to pay too much attention to online media, which sometimes creates certain biases in titles. For example, it has become popular recently to give light novels absurdly long and strange names, and I think that this trend is a result of the effect of websites that summarize 2channel threads.23 You get drawn in by the title and end up clicking on the article. You know what I’m talking about. To put it another way, the light novel is no longer rivaled by anime, but rather by summary sites.

Shikura

I don’t see that as a negative. A long time ago, when you paid to advertise something, you would see a roughly proportional increase in sales. Many people even used the line of thought that spending (X) amount of money on advertising would result in (Y) number of sales.

But now, because of the influence of the internet, that’s not the case anymore. While you can’t always trust online fame and reputation, it’s still better than an age in which simply spending money on advertising results in sales.

Also, to begin with, only a small number of creators can ever make a living at any given time. In the past, it cost a ton of money to acquire video or sound editing tools. Because the cost of entry was so high, the competition was much more relaxed. But now that people can get their hands on those kinds of tools for cheap, anyone can try to chase his or her dreams of becoming a creator. That’s why the competition looks so fierce now. In reality, it’s always been true that only a handful of creators who are truly original and can create works that people will pay for will survive.

Azuma

Of course I agree that true creators are only rarely born, but isn’t there e30

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a set number of consumers required in order for creators to make it in the world? For example, people are saying that manga isn’t selling anymore because of the spread of cell phones. This is an incredibly dire situation; whether or not manga is or isn’t interesting anymore, this illustrates that consumers simply don’t want to read manga in the first place. What many consumers wanted was just a tool to kill time with, and it ultimately didn’t matter if that tool was manga or a cell phone.

You can generalize by saying that the number of core users who truly love some sort of content, whether it be anime or games, may be even smaller than the number that some generations think. The majority was only consuming manga or anime in order to communicate. And so, when a new communication tool appeared, they all flocked to it. That’s the kind of change we’re seeing right now, and when this happens the entire market that works to select new creators begins to shrink and taper off.

Shikura

Even if otakus’ time is being stolen away by communication, the core subject of that communication is still content. I think the key to bringing content and community together is the creation of commercial titles that may only take two hours to watch or play but can be talked about for thirty or forty hours.

the future of games Fukushima

Then what about mobile games? Creators spent decades creating the environment upon which those services rely to succeed, but then along came mobile games, which spread everywhere thanks to the strength of free downloads and suddenly stole away all the consumers.

Shikura

Oh, that’s a good topic! [Laughter] Yeah, that’s definitely happened. Until a recent point in time, competition in game development was fought over specs. But then, things advanced to the point that we hit limits. For example, even if frame rates increased, the human eye wouldn’t be able to notice, or if sound quality increased, users’ senses wouldn’t be able to recognize the fact. That’s when the Wii appeared, which was then followed by the PlayStation Move and the Kinect, shifting the core of competition e31

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to the development of software that supported motion controllers that required players to use their entire bodies. Right as that happened, smartphone games that could be controlled with one finger, and even feature phone games that were played with just one thumb, started to appear in contrast with the consumer game industry. The full body versus a single finger—it seems a bit ironic. The mobile gaming commercials that said “games are free” were striking, too.

I think that right around the time that the age of motion controllers comes to an end, people will come to once again recognize the D-pad as key to the strength of the consumer game industry. In other words, we’ll return to our roots. On the opposite side, smartphone games will become increasingly rich, approaching the quality of consumer games. So then, what they’ll start requiring in the near future is their own D-pad. That’s how the two nearby but rarely intersecting industries will once again become one, which will ultimately mean that the entire gaming industry will have expanded... Or at least, it would be nice if that happened. If regular smartphones start featuring D-pads, then we could turn the tables: “Cell phones didn’t steal away video game players! In fact, phones have just turned into game systems!” [Laughter] If we look at it that way, the appearance of cell phone games could connect to Akihabara’s prosperity as a whole, and could be a chance more than anything.

Of course, the new business model for games is paying money for downloads or data itself, so the income from that never actually reaches Akihabara as a place. That’s the real problem. That’s why we need something like a game where you can collect data like you would Bikkuriman stickers,24 but which prompts you to physically go to Akihabara to get a specific item in real life. You can do things like that to widen the front gates to the town and bring lots of different people into Akihabara.

Azuma Shikura

I see.

Also, we’ve been talking about generational shifts, but I’ve always thought that the three amusement cultures that people don’t grow out of are otaku, fishing, and golf. [Laughter] The oldest generation of otaku, who are in their fifties now, are still reliably spending money on otaku things. If you consider the long term, this could be the greatest strength of the otaku industry, as well as Akihabara. e32

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Azuma

In that case, money might flow to longstanding makers without reaching new creators. You see a lot of remakes of famous titles recently, so this is playing out in reality, too.

Fukushima

Hmm... I know that we’re primarily talking about 2D today, but I think that the Akiba that 3D otaku see is different from all of that.

For example, even when we talk about generational shifts, anime and idols are completely different. The “content” in the idol industry is guaranteed to change over time. Idol otaku consume new things one after the next, regardless of what generation they’re a part of.

Azuma Fukushima

Because the content ages.

Right. Also, if I can talk about my personal experience of how Akiba is changing specifically focused around 3D otaku, I think that communication between customers and employees is very important in creating the situation that Chiyomaru-san was describing.

I feel a pretty strong sense of danger when it comes to Akihabara’s future, so I’d like to emphasize this point. There’s a cycle in Akihabara, whereby store employees will have an incredible kind of charm to them, whether because of their knowledge of what they’re selling or something else, causing people to then go to Akihabara because they want to hear them talk. If that cycle can’t be created, Akihabara can’t fight against online sales, because things are just cheaper online. If you want to know why the customers who buy CDs at Chiyomarusan’s AKIHABARA BACKSTAGE Pass or my Dear Stage go all the way there to buy them instead of just going to a CD store, it’s because they want to shake hands with an idol they like, or to be told “thank you” in person. In other words, they’re paying that money in exchange for communication. In my ideal world, the employees in Akihabara’s retail stores would all, from now on, be able to offer charming communication to their customers on the same level as a club host.

If not, then Akihabara will be swallowed up by the internet. We might go on and on about “Akiba culture,” but current-day Akihabara is nothing more than a town for consumption. Content isn’t actually being made in Akihabara. If anywhere, anime is being made in Suginami Ward. We’ll have to compete with Korea and China in the near future, too. You can’t compete based upon how well you can put forward content alone. e33

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Shikura

Being a place for consumption isn’t a bad thing by any means. As you can see from the number of maid cafes in the area, store employees in Akihabara possess a high level of hospitality. What’s even more important than that, though, is their eye for content. A lot of store employees in Akihabara really are otaku, which means that they have information. They’re able to discern what will sell. When you stick advertising banners up on Akihabara’s walls, you of course have your product seen by customers, but more importantly, you should also keep in mind that you need to be seen by the employees working in Akihabara. A title that those employees don’t think well of won’t be sold by them in the first place.

I think that’s the most important thing of all. By piling up small individual efforts like that, you create an environment in Akihabara wherein good things are picked out and sold. By doing this Akihabara’s value rises, and the staff in the stores there become professional connoisseurs, which will eventually give special meaning to an “Akihabara debut” even to creators overseas. Placing advertisements on walls in Akihabara will become very important, which will lead to a concentration of money to further heat up the town.

Fukushima

If you want to talk about something that you can only find in Akihabara, it’s not going to be its strength in creating content. To go back to the very beginning of our discussion, I used to think that the indigenous culture of the “street tribes,” with their unique performances like wotagei, had that kind of creative power. But recently, I’m not so sure. Maybe Chiyomaru-san has a good point there.

brand, holy lands, theme parks Shikura

The theme of this discussion is Japan 2.0, or rather, Akihabara 2.0, right? To jump ahead to my conclusion, what I believe is necessary in order for Akihabara to be reborn as a “2.0” is to turn it into a brand.

While society likes to say that content is “transmitted from Akihabara to the world,” they don’t really understand what’s going on.

Like Mofuku-chan said, Akihabara isn’t actually creating anything, nor is it transmitting anything, either. So, what is actually impressive about Akihabara? When you’re faced with this question, the only answer is Akihabara’s brand: if you can sell in Akihabara, you’ve done something impressive. e34

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Azuma

You’re absolutely right.

Shikura

In order to do that, it might even be ideal if we could change the entire structure of the town. Akihabara’s restrictions and structure are what allow it to still function fairly well as an otaku web portal, but now that otaku culture has become so fragmented, different otaku have their own strong, unique traits. A kind of zoning has naturally occurred in the town, with one area, for example, having many game stores, while others have many anime stores, maid cafes, and so on.

But I think it would be ideal if things could be more organized and efficient. It seems possible that the area from Dear Stage to AKIHABRA BACKSTAGE Pass could one day be a space for 3D idols. I’d be overjoyed if the Governor of Tokyo or the Akihabara Business Association would create something like this, but I’m sure it would be hard to do.

Fukushima

I’m sure it would be. The citizens of Chiyoda Ward, the part of Tokyo that Akihabara is in, hold a lot of power. That’s why it’s difficult to secure a large amount of land, and also why there are so many restrictions on creating new stores. I can’t even talk about them here, but I was almost driven to tears so many times when starting my own businesses because of all of the difficulties and restrictions I ran into!

I really want our readers to understand that.

Shikura

Oh, now I remember! I had considered buying land in Akihabara once. It was never more than a half-formed idea, though. [Laughter]

Azuma

So the only way to revive Akihabara’s brand is to turn to urban planning?

Shikura

You can also think of building Akihabara’s brand as turning Akihabara into a theme park.

Azuma

So store employees and maids would be like cast members at Disneyland. That relates to what you were saying, Mofuku-chan.

Shikura

Only, in order to do that, Akihabara’s market scale, or in other words the total sales in Akiba, have to reach a certain level. If Akihabara itself isn’t a giant market, then there’s no appeal for foreign merchants to enter into it, and foreign creators won’t be interested in making e35

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an “Akihabara debut.” Right now, Akihabara’s market isn’t big enough for that. There’s this misconception about it being “Cool Japan,” but it can’t last for long like this. Intuitively, I’d say that unless Akihabara’s sales are twice the size they are now, the place has no real meaning, can provide no dreams, and has no chance of long-term survival.

Also, when this happens, the word “otaku” will also have to change into something that’s far more broad and inclusive if it wants to survive. In other words, whether they’re idol otaku, game otaku, or anime otaku, they’ll be lumped together as “otaku,” and every kind of otaku will gather in Akihabara. No matter what the genre, if you’re an otaku of something, Akihabara will have stores selling something for you. You’ll be able to shop, eat, and even go to events. Our only option is to foster Akihabara’s transformation into that kind of a theme park-like town.

Ueno’s Bike Town and Ochanomizu’s Instrument Town both started to decline as the booms around their respective merchandises ended. But Akihabara is a place with many different attributes, and as long as new merchandise that caters to those different attributes keeps being created, the town keeps continuing to change, which makes me believe that as long as this keeps up, Akihabara will still be the center of something in ten or twenty years. We need to recognize that if we can hold this fact in mind and keep Akihabara as a town that’s always selling things on the cutting edge, we can create a brand for the town.

If you think about things that way, you also run into a lot of problems. For example, Akihabara is full of goods for sale that are all the exact same format but just have different characters printed on them, like you see on cell phone straps or crane game prizes. I think that in the long term, building a business by doing that will cause customers to lose faith in you.

Fukushima Azuma

I agree. There are a lot of businesses with facile business plans.

I like how this conversation is developing. Personally, I completely agree with you, but allow me to ask a question as the moderator.

While you discuss the need to produce Akihabara as a single brand, in reality there’s nothing that otaku hate more than that kind of thinking. They value systems that have been generated naturally.

For example, take Comic Market.25 Despite growing into an event as e36

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large as it is now, Comic Market is still managed by volunteers, and they haven’t strayed from their position of treating everyone, from staff and exhibitors to customers, as equal “participants.” It’s a very firm ideology, and you can actually explain it historically by looking at the origins of the event.

In the same way, otaku hate it when someone tries to regulate an entire system. On top of that, this community was introduced to the internet in the 1990s, and the attitude only grew stronger. Whether you’re talking about Hatsune Miku or Touhou Project, the natural creation of order out of the accumulation of user-created “small content” is precisely what otaku dream of. When you recognize that otaku have that kind of mentality, it seems as though the idea of producing the entire town of Akihabara would create quite a backlash. What are your thoughts on that?

Shikura

Fukushima Shikura

We might be talking about “producing” Akihabara, but no one person or group could really control the entire town. Stores that are opened in a place where there’s no consumer need for them would get weeded out. Of course, I’m sure it’d be a different story if some all-authoritative person who could create a firm vision of the future and carry the flag for all otaku-kind appeared one day, but realistically, all that can really be done is for each individual store to look at their users and figure out where they want to go.

Would Akiba still be the otakus’ city if that happened?

If we think about things thirty or fifty years from now, it’s pointless to wonder about whether or not Japanese anime or games that are thought of as “otaku-like” media will survive because in that time, media itself will undergo a huge shift. What content will end up looking like will change completely depending on what kind of new media emerges. That’s why there’s no need to be fixated on present-day anime and games when you’re talking about the definition of “otaku.”

You can even distinguish between regular consumption and an otaku mode of consumption of the same title. For example, Dragon Quest sells around the country, and it’s thought of as a game for “regular people,” but people who want character goods of the slime species or of specific characters have to come to Akihabara to find them.

That’s how otaku consume. Otaku, at their cores, are purists: they e37

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consider the original work to be sacred. For example, they’re the kind of people who, when the Steins;Gate anime became popular, wanted to brag that they had already known about it when it was still just a game, showing that they possess more knowledge than the average person about a piece of content. This way of thinking should apply to any kind of content, not only anime or games, and I think that Akihabara just needs to be able to respond to that specific kind of demand.

Azuma

I like that! What’s going to be important from now on isn’t otaku content, but is in fact the otaku way of consuming. You’d want to spread across the world the idea that if someone wants to have an understanding about various content like movies or games that is a little more in-depth than that of the average person, he or she has no choice but to come to Akihabara.

Shikura

That’s right. It doesn’t matter what kind of content it is. If the store with the most complete collection of Star Wars goods in the world were in Akihabara, people from around the world would go there. It would be a global holy land for them. Akihabara should aim to be a theme park where a diverse population of otaku like that will gather.

There are definitely foreigners in Akihabara right now, but you hit a limit when you’re restricted to only people who like Japan. There’s also a need for manufacturers to develop products that will please otaku in various ways. If they get too stuck on one type of otaku, they’ll never be able to move into the future, even if they do keep on creating new content.

Azuma

That would also mean a return to the original meaning of “otaku.”

When you think about it, the current definition of the word, which refers to subculture consumers focused on specific content, in other words a certain group of young people, only emerged in the 1990s.

Before that, there were many different kinds of otaku, like “train otaku” or “astronomy otaku.”

We need to wrap up soon, but let me finish with one last thing.

Just now, Chiyomaru-san was talking about the importance of fostering thirty or forty hours of communication from two hours of content. I think that the otaku style of consumption is precisely that kind of “overconsumption,” but I also think that you can call it narrativizae38

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tion. Consumption of a piece of content or a product doesn’t end with just the work itself, because we create excess narratives surrounding the work as well. This isn’t something that’s only happening in Japan.

For example, you probably know that the prices of European wines are preserved by a vast and excessive amount of information about them. Those kinds of narratives, in other words, accumulations of knowledge, are able to increase a product’s strength five or tenfold.

That’s why from now on there’s a need for Akiba culture to cater to young people, not just offering content to be consumed, but also strategically producing a kind of narrative that underlies that consumption.

Fukushima It feels like we’ve ended up returning to where we started. How do we create platforms for business? You were talking about using narratives to multiply a product’s strength, but that’s precisely what idol production is.

Azuma And so, while this may sound like I’m just forcing the subject to fit into my own interests, I think that the power of words is very important if you want to “narrativize Akihabara.” To put it another way, if you want to make changes in politics or society, a media strategy is part of your plan from the very beginning. It’s the same for determining authority. For example, even if you convinced the residents of Chiyoda Ward to go along with your plans, the end result of those plans would be totally different depending on whether or not you’ve been given a kind of authority. Otaku hate authority, but it’s best strategically to push them away and just make use of it.

That’s why I feel so uneasy about so much of “Cool Japan” or the other words used to talk about Akiba culture. It’s rude to say this, but there are people who say that they’re researching anime or games at a university, but compared to a field like literature studies, which has a long history of accumulated knowledge, what they’re doing is nothing more than an extension of their hobbies. Even prior to that, in newspapers and other places, all you see is numbers being thrown around, like how many people gathered at some shrine because it was in an anime, or how many DVDs sold in North America. They aren’t viewing these things within a cultural context. That means that the narrative surrounding the question of what otaku are, or what the appearance of otaku means to Japan and the world as a whole, is e39

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still just too weak. You can’t hope to create a sustainable brand for Akihabara in this kind of environment, and that’s precisely why, unless something is done, this will all end up being treated like a temporary fad among young people.

Shikura

I see.

Azuma

You see, Chiyomaru-san, that’s why in order to realize your dreams, you need to invest in me...

Shikura

Huh, invest in you? What does that mean? What are you trying to propose? How about we talk in private somewhere else. [Laughter]

Fukushima

Oh no, what’s happening!? You two are trying to come up with some sort of evil plot!

Azuma

All right, then maybe a little later, over dinner...

In any case, today we’ve focused on the problems facing Akihabara, but these are also problems that face Japanese society as a whole. This is because what we call the “otaku lifestyle” is also a symbol of the degree of affluence that Japanese society has managed to achieve in the sixty years since the end of the war. That’s precisely why in this post-3.11 era, wherein people are starting to grumble about the end of the postwar period, as well as the end of otaku, instead of lamenting the end of these things, we have returned to the origins of otaku, proposing that Akihabara itself become a holy land wherein consumers of minor cultures from around the world gather.

I think that it’s a very positive, exciting image of the future. As an editor, I’m incredibly satisfied that we were able to come up with an answer to the question posed at the beginning of this discussion.

I knew that it was worth summoning a magical girl and a mad scientist here! [Laughter] Thank you both so much for all of your time.

27 March 2012 Fiesta Resort & Spa Saipan, Garapan

e40

Akihabara 3000 1. Steins;Gate is an adventure game for the Xbox 360, released in 2009 by 5pb (MAGES.’s predecessor). In addition to being ported to Windows, PSP, and other platforms, it has inspired many other derivative works across various media platforms, including an anime of the same name that was broadcast in 2011. Shikura headed the planning of this project, while also providing the original story and composing the music and lyrics of the opening theme. The Afilia Magic Senior High School is a cafe in Ikebukuro, planned and produced by Shikura, that opened in 2005. It has a “magical school” theme, and is comprehensively produced, from its employees’ cosplay to the store interior. It has expanded in the form of many sister stores within the “Afilia Kingdom.” Some of the many songs whose lyrics or music were composed by Shikura include Nana Mizuki’s “Secret Ambition” (2007) and Yui Sakakibara’s “Soshite boku wa...” (2007). His works have been compiled in the “Game Vocal Best” series, as well as in the “The Works” series.

2. MOGRA is a club that opened in 2009 and centers around anime songs. Dear Stage is a bar that opened in 2008 and which uses the first through third floors of the DEMPA building occupied by Moe Japan. Denpagumi.inc is a female idol group formed in 2008. Their best known songs include “Future Diver” (2011).

3. AKIHABARA BACKSTAGE Pass is a cafe containing a stage that opened in 2011 in Akihabara. It is co-produced by the musical producer Tsunku and Shikura. Customers act as producers belonging to the fictional “Ru Aido Geinousha” talent agency, and are able to participate in popularity contests with the objective of raising the “idol cast,” who perform on the stage, to the level of popular idol.

4. “Galapagosization” is a term primarily used within Japan to refer to domestically focused development of technologies or cultures that ultimately become so far removed from global standards that they are no longer viable in an international setting.

5. An incident that occurred on June 8, 2008, when a then-25-year-old man drove a truck into the pedestrian mall on Akihabara’s Chuo-dori, then began killing and wounding more victims, including police officers, after exiting the car. Seven were killed and ten were injured. As a result of this incident, the pedestrian mall that had been held every Sunday and on holidays was, with one exception, suspended until January 23, 2011.

6. One of many category tags that users on Nico Nico Douga may choose when submitting a video. The tag is attached to videos of people dancing, and said videos frequently portray the submitters themselves.

7. A Japanese critic and editor whose work focuses on contemporary Japanese subculture. His essay “On Suburban Literature: Far Away From Tokyo” was published in the first volume of Shisouchizu beta. In recent years, Uno has become an ardent and vocal supporter of AKB48.

8. The AKB48 theater offers pink tickets at a lowered price to women and men of high school age and younger. Because of this, middle school and high school idol fans are called “pinchike,” a term that also embodies the connotation of having bad manners.

9. “Wotagei” or “otagei” refers to dancing and cheering gestures performed by wota, or idol otaku, involving jumping, arm-waving, and chanting slogans.

10. Hatsune Miku is the second title in the “Vocaloid” series of PC software released

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Maiko Fukushima, Chiyomaru Shikura, Hiroki Azuma

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

in 2007 by Crypton Future Media. The software allows users to make a character sing through voice synthesis technology. It is also the name of the character from that title. Having become a hit, other characters in the Vocaloid series, such as Kagamine Rin and Len, as well as Megurine Luka, were also created. The Idolm@ster is an arcade game that began operation in 2005 and wherein players choose a favorite character and raise that character to popular idol status. Touhou Project is a shooting game series released since 1996 that was created by a doujin circle (amateur/fan group). Over a hundred female characters appear in the series. Because the characters that appear in these titles have been used in many derivative and secondary works, and especially in videos submitted to Nico Nico Douga, the three series have come to be called the “Big Three” on Nico Nico Douga.

The “handshake event” (akushu-kai) is an event in which fans who have purchased a specific item, such as a CD, DVD, or book, can exchange a voucher that is included with the item for the privilege of shaking hands with its creator or star. In the case of AKB48 and its sister groups, fans can exchange one ticket for one handshake with the girl of their choice. These events are a major component of enacting the groups’ concept of “idols you can meet.”

A system popularized by AKB48 in which once a year, fans who purchase a specific single are given the right to cast a vote for their favorite group members. Girls who rank high in these elections are then chosen to perform a CD single. Multiple votes from one individual are allowed, driving some fans to buy many copies of the same single in order to acquire multiple votes.

An annual music show held on New Year’s Eve and produced by Japan’s national public broadcaster, NHK. A female idol group formed in 2010 from members chosen by the “Avex Idol Audition 2010” held in 2009. The audition process was broadcast on television, where the results of a popularity vote held on a mobile site were displayed. After deciding on the group’s members, fans could participate in a number of ways through voting as “support producers” registered on the mobile site, making decisions such as choosing which member would appear on the cover of a magazine, and so on.

“Komyu-sho,” short for “komyunike-shon shougai” (communication disorder).

While the term was originally used to describe someone who cannot communicate well with others due to physical or mental factors, it is used online to mean “someone who is bad at talking with others.”

Kaichiro Morikawa, Learning from Akihabara: The birth of a personapolis (Shuto no Tanjou) (Tokyo: Gentosha, 2003). The title views the urban scenery of Akihabara as an extension of otakus’ private rooms and depicts otaku as, among other things, individuals interested in computers, attractive young women drawn in an anime style, windowless rooms, and having an introverted attitude regarding cultural authority.

According to the Digital Content White Paper 2011 (Dejitaru kontentsu hakusho 2011) (Tokyo: DCAJ, 2011) (Supervised by the METI Commerce and Information Policy Bureau), the scale of the content industry amounted to 12 trillion yen in 2010. According to the 2010 Trade Statistics of Japan Press Release (Boueki toukei houdou happyou heisei 22-nenbun) (Ministry of Finance), the scale of the steel industry amounted to around 18 trillion yen in 2010.

e42

Akihabara 3000 18. A theory posited by Toshinao Sasaki in The Age of Curation (Kyureeshon no jidai) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2011). It states that in our modern, information-saturated environment, the role of “curation,” or classifying and contextualizing primary information, becomes important.

19. Plans for the JKT48 female idol group produced by Yasushi Akimoto were unveiled on 11 September, 2011. After that, twenty-eight members were chosen through auditions, and the group has been appearing on TV, performing concerts, and more in both Indonesia and Japan.

20. Japan’s largest online message board. Anonymous posting on the website is allowed, and in many cases encouraged.

21. Tokyo Metropolitan Television, also known as Tokyo MX, is a commercial television station that exclusively serves the Tokyo area, as opposed to Fuji TV, which is a national network.

22. Looking at independent user surveys such as “On Discovering That Most Comments on Nico Nico Douga Are by Middle School Students After Analyzing Commentors’ Ages” (Niconico Douga no comment no nenrei bunseki shitara chuugakusei ga hotondo datta ken) (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/gen256/20111105/1320503106), “Age Analysis of 300 Million Nico Nico Douga Comments” (Niconico douga 3-oku comment nenrei bunseki) (http://www.niconico-ca.net/pickup3-1.html), and others, one can assume that at least roughly half of the users who comment on Nico Nico Douga are between the ages of ten and nineteen, meaning that the age of commenters is biased toward younger users rather than the overall registered user base.

23. Websites summarizing threads from the 2channel message board, or “matome saito,” have gained wide popularity in recent years, with many readers coming to rely on them as sources of fast-breaking news and general interest stories across a wide variety of topics.

24. The Super Bikkuriman snack sold by Lotte was well known for including a randomly selected sticker inside. These stickers were collected by children across Japan.

25. Comic Market, or Comiket, is a massive event where individuals primarily buy and sell self-published comics, also known as doujinshi. Overall attendance over the three days of recent Comikets has been estimated at over 500,000.

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Japanese pages: pp. 084–099

speech

The Artist’s Mission and Determination —Doha Takashi Murakami Translated by John Person

Murakami – Ego (9 February–24 June, 2012): Murakami’s first exhibit presented since the earthquake. Its content has overpowered visitors. Looming before the entrance is a delicate yet enormous balloon resembling the artist himself. The five thousand square meter exhibition space features works that trace his career thus far. Most overwhelming is the wall painting The 500 Arhats, which spans one hundred meters in length. It is a masterpiece that bursts beyond standards, a work that the reputed perfectionist Murakami presented to the world in a still incomplete form. Our editor-in-chief, who gained an early glimpse of the work in its entirety, tweeted excitedly, describing its degree of perfection by stating that it had achieved “religious transcendence.”

Printed here is the transcript of a Nico Nico Live broadcast issued from the site of the exhibition prior to its opening. Murakami provokes his Japanese viewers from the very beginning. The Japanese must change. Artists must push limits and stir the emotions of the people. Why must this be the case?

Even after scaling the greatest heights as a contemporary artist, Murakami remains angry.

Good evening. I’m Takashi Murakami. We are broadcasting to you live from Doha, Qatar. I believe it’s been about two years since I last appeared on Nico Nico Live. I know it’s been a while, as I’ve been avoiding appearing even on television. I’ve been so focused on this exhibition and the charity auction held last November at Christie’s in New York that I haven’t been able to make any media appearances.1 Today, at the site of the large-scale exhibition I’m holding here in Qatar, I will talk about what I’ve been thinking about as of late.2

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the age o f th e o taku h as e nded Now, to start us off with a provocative statement: I’ve been thinking recently that the age of the otaku has ended. Since the earthquake, it goes without saying that we’ve have had to change the way we think in various ways. To put it simply, we no longer have the time to just slack off. This seems to me to be the most important change.

The people who preach that being an otaku means living within consumer culture, that what makes otaku wonderful is the ability to unearth something pure from the most worldly of sources, are the same ones who criticize me when I do this professionally in the world of art. I’ve always felt that I do not understand why I must be criticized to such an extent.

But lately I’ve become more defiant. Today, I no longer have any customers in Japan. Just now the comment “those rich bastards” scrolled across the Nico Nico Live interface, but have any of you ever sold anything to the rich? You probably have no idea how difficult it is to sell something to the rich—what kind of marketing is involved.

No one, not even ad agencies, knows this kind of stuff.

What do the rich of the world do for a living and what kinds of positions do they occupy? What is their family structure and what kind of life do they live? Isn’t it true that none of you know anything about this? Prior to the earthquake, Japanese people’s lives were fulfilled via convenience stores and infrastructure; they believed that the world was always in harmony, that it proceeded in harmony, with one’s own self at the center. But the moment that this notion was disrupted by the power of nature, various strains and unreasonable things appeared. And everyone started panicking.

But all people do is panic, and there’s no attempt to fight this unreasonableness and to bring one’s world closer to the ideal. People no longer even recognize that it takes toughness to fight such unreasonableness. This is what I have realized, reflecting on this past year.

To give one example, despite this bad economy the number of art school applicants is still on the rise. Especially in this economy, the world is trying to wrench money out of the hands of the weak. They produce useless students and train them to think they have achieved something special so as to continue swindling money out of parents. Despite the ever increasing number of schools themselves, the students still can’t apply their educations in society. We are masse45

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producing these youth now and I will continue to complain and say “This is unacceptable.”

b ey ond the bo u ndarie s o f cu lture Even as we broadcast live, there are custodians passing through very close by and it’s quite loud. It’s distracting. But this is what it means to “do what you want in a foreign country.” It’s a different culture. Here in Qatar, they are building everything from scratch on top of this desert. Even where the ordinary task of cleaning is concerned, they start from scratch, bringing people from the Philippines or people from India. With the people of Qatar at its core, everyone here, using broken English, is working to raise this country up as one founded upon culture.

Without communication, you can neither sell anything nor convey value. Without it, nothing is created, no matter how much you raise a ruckus on the internet. I did indeed say two years ago that the MAD videos uploaded onto Nico Nico Douga “can be art.”3 But now they are being mimicked by Hollywood’s Transformers. Is it enough for you that you are being mimicked by the mainstream market in America? Does that warrant saying that “Japan is wonderful” or prove how great you are? Is that all there is to being a real otaku? This is the issue that I have with all of this. If you really believe that all you want to do is provide works of art for free, then you should go on doing that. But I don’t want to. You can’t create anything new that way.

In order to create good work, you need a budget. Even in the case of Japanese films, the budget is an ever-present issue. I talked about this in Bijutsu Techo after I debuted.4 I said, “One reason I make art is that while you can make only a mediocre film with a hundred million yen budget, in Japan if you spend a hundred million yen in producing an artwork, you can really make something explosive.” I can laugh now, but back then I barely had 300 yen in my pocket, much less a hundred million. Even so, at that time I felt that I wanted to run the epitome of a major art production akin to that of Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli, and I expressed that in words. Now I’m turning that into a reality. I’m using hundreds of millions of yen to build an exhibition that will gather art fans from across the world.

How do you build a budget for that? How do you manage it? What do you do about contracts? What kind of people do you need to draw e46

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up a contract? Which lawyers are good, and what type of communication is necessary? Indeed, there are so many elements involved. If you know nothing about these things and still insist on saying that all I do is mimic other people, please be my guest. I’ve always felt that way. But I want to point out, frankly, that the era where you could get away with that attitude is over.

“Are you capable of doing all the above? ” Anytime I ask this question, the answer is always the same: “I have no desire to do any of that.” Well, if that’s the case, don’t complain; you don’t want to do such shitty work anyway, right? That’s what I think. Either way, there are also people who must, and who are meant to, find significance in such work. These are the people who study contemporary art. Is one an artist if he or she receives some of the small amount of money offered by the Japanese government, or a scholarship from a cultural foundation? Not at all. One must conduct a cultural exchange by bringing in one’s own Japanese cultural context, and based upon that, communicating one’s own point of view. For example, how can one communicate to foreigners the sensibility of the Japanese otaku? My works were a result of thinking this through and through and executing it.

what is originality?

Though folks point fingers and call me a copycat without putting much thought into it, what is originality in the first place? For example, where is the originality in the works of Hayao Miyazaki? In fact, we know that the foundation for the characters currently used by Miyazaki was built by animator Yasuji Mori for his Toei Animation film Hakujaden. Whether we’re talking about individual artists or national cultures, nothing is made overnight; when somebody comes up with something new through small, minor changes, that is where originality lies.

It rises, grows, and matures, becoming culture. Why must I be criticized for trying to mature it? From the same plum we can make pickles, garnish, or even juice. We can do what we want using the same material. Using otaku culture, we can produce all sorts of perspectives and induce all sorts of emotions. I’m merely producing one of those expressions. It isn’t exploitation or anything similar.

If someone were to claim to me that “it’s wrong for your art to ree47

Takashi Murakami

semble someone else’s,” I would ask them if they do not think that all of the manga works carried by Shonen Jump look very similar? A foreigner would probably see this and say, “Jump, Magazine, Sunday, and Big Comic Original all look similar—are they not the same?” In such a context how does one communicate the appeal of manga, anime and video games, or the situation post-3.11 Fukushima? This requires a high degree of skill. Bringing Japanese culture to a world unimaginable according to Japanese sensibilities. This isn’t an easy task.

To be clear, it’s not as if I wasn’t popular in Japan from the beginning. When I debuted, I was well received in Japan and was treated as a superstar. In response to this, several art critics said, “Takashi Murakami is a fake who can only make it in Japan; he wouldn’t make it abroad; he is making something utterly unconceptual; he hasn’t studied painting and his sculptures aren’t up to standard. He will disappear soon.” What do these people think now? Now that I’m appreciated by foreigners, they say I’m tricking them. What does this all mean?

Though I approach each project with seriousness and conviction, I came to think that there’s no need for me to address the Japanese if they refuse to take me seriously.

Once most people, not just me, make it abroad, they become subject to half praise and half jealousy. Can’t we just do away with this feeling of jealousy so prevalent among the Japanese? There are no natural resources available to the Japanese. That’s why we’ve been working so hard with just our wits. As in the case of Sony, we’ve made money making all sorts of things and exporting them abroad. Anything that makes it abroad, no matter how much it is mocked, carries universality.

Qatar is a very pro-Japanese country. Yet what are the Japanese government and publishers, who once proclaimed “Cool Japan,” doing now? Are they not conflating Cool Japan with simply bringing AKB48 abroad? Aren’t they simply doing this because it’s easy to host an event through an ad agency? Those in the government are simply trying to take the easy route. That’s why I’m against the Cool Japan policies. AKB48 already makes money, and there’s no need to take it abroad. Aside from them there are so many things, including manga, that could be appreciated abroad depending on the way they are presented. That’s where attention must be given.

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as asian “brothers” This exhibit has its origins in the Qatari government’s sponsorship of my Murakami Versailles exhibition at the Palace of Versailles two years ago.5 It costs a lot of money to hold an exhibition at the Palace of Versailles. As the management of the palace was passed from public to private hands, it was confronted with the necessity of making money.

Since the Palace of Versailles is such an old building, in addition to charging entrance fees the management tried different things, like renting the building out for wedding ceremonies. They need to make enough money to maintain the building. One of the ways they did this was hosting an exhibition. So they attempted to bring in tourists by hosting an exhibition in the cold winter season.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of the idea of the “museum industry.” But museums are industrial, too. Though it isn’t talked about so much in Japan, it costs tens of millions of yen to host an exhibition, no matter how small. Even just bringing the works in requires insurance, production fees, building security, etc.; there are many people involved. For artists like me, it costs several hundred million yen just for that. By having those expenses covered by the Cultural Bureau of Qatar, I was able to hold an exhibition at the Palace of Versailles. And this in turn began with the promise of doing an exhibition in Qatar in exchange for this sponsorship.

The level of the museum industry in Japan is very low. For example, there’s no such thing as an installation director.6 Though I’ve read that the Mito Art Museum has tried to hire an installation director, they mostly rely on outsourcing.

What is common among those involved in museums in Japan is the arrogant attitude that proclaims to the artists that they are the ones that will make them famous and produce their catalogues. But to tell the truth, they don’t have a budget. They don’t even do any research. They don’t have any idea about the global standards of contemporary art. At the very least, the people in Qatar recognize the fact that they don’t know anything. They don’t know, but they want to absorb. By absorbing it, they want it to lead to something in the future.

Museum administration in Japan made the mistake of continuing a system of central control instead of decentralizing or undertaking necessary downsizing. Curators are simply chosen by rotation, e49

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and one could curate a show simply by waiting for his or her name to come around once in three years. Since that means one can only put together an exhibit five or ten times in a lifetime, nobody with any talent comes here. How may curators contribute articles to art journals? Nothing has changed in the past thirty or forty years and we can’t survive on the global scene amidst such a state of affairs.

Qatar is buying art works and building art museums as part of its national policy. You might wonder whether art can in fact be a part of national policy, but Japan, too, did these kinds of things in the past. It was in the late 1970s that the Yamanashi Prefectural Art Museum purchased Millet’s The Gleaners. When modernizing the nation, building art museums is one of the necessary pieces of infrastructure, In the case of Qatar, they have tended toward contemporary art instead of modern art.

Before me there was an individual exhibition by Cai Guo-Qiang,7 who was the visual director of the fireworks performance at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, as well as the gigantic installation, using a huge slab of steel, by Richard Serra.8 Damien Hirst9 is also scheduled to give an exhibition in this same hall. In such an environment, what do I do as a Japanese? This Murakami – Ego is the answer to this question.

The husband of Sheikha Mayassa, Sheik Jassim, called me his “brother” the first time I met him. This “brother” is different from “bro” in the American sense; it means that we are true brothers as Asians. Furthermore, he told me that Qatar spends more money on Japan than on any other country in the world. I found out later that Japanese corporations have built the infrastructure in Qatar, including its liquid natural gas construction projects. He went on to say, “this is why our country really welcomes the emergence of artists like you from within this Asia that we share. We really wanted to bring in artists like you from Asia for our inaugural exhibitions.” This is how we came to plan my exhibition.

the 500 arhats proje ct The 500 Arhats was a very challenging project. I started putting together the source material last June, and that lasted until October. The actual production started in November.

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morning to night. I sent two girls as scouts for Kaikai Kiki to art schools spanning from the Northeast to the Kansai region, in order to conduct orientations for gathering the staff to make The 500 Arhats.

We made it with a staff of about 300 people, working during the winter and summer breaks.

The reason I decided to work on such an absurdly difficult project was because the Japanese were in such a pathetic state after 3.11. But it’s not my job to express regret. I’ve always thought that the artist’s job was to agitate or anger the public, that is to say, to incite emotions that boil up through the artwork.

There was a similar huge catastrophe that enveloped Japanese society in the Heian period, and religion and art blossomed in a frantic explosion during that time. Though people say that religion in Japan lacks originality and is merely an amalgamation of many things, why did so many seemingly superficial religions form in such numbers?

Why is it that people say the zenith of Japanese art was during the Heian period?

The work of artists, whether painting or sculpting, has very little direct effect on things. But in terms of living in a particular time, we have the example of Picasso’s Guernica. Tourists go to see Guernica and learn its history, learn that Picasso opposed the war. In such instances there’s something to be learned from history. Perhaps war is wrong after all. Why did the war have to happen back then? What was Picasso thinking then, and why was it necessary that he make this piece?

Creating the opportunity for people of the future to think about a variety of things like that—this is the work of us artists.

3.11 happened and now Japan is in a huge panic. Just as Goya painted the executions and Picasso painted Guernica, I wanted to depict the chaos of Japan in painting and make it a message for the future. I felt this quite strongly. Perhaps there is no time to sit and look at paintings now that Japan is in the midst of chaos. But I have people abroad look at them in this way. I felt that it was very important to paint these works and exhibit them as an event cultivating goodwill, especially in a country like Qatar that has valued its relationship with Japan and in a short time, donated one hundred million dollars to after the quake.

To tell the truth, I made the new base for “Tongari-Kun” with the exhibit in Qatar in mind. Remembering that I saw LEDs throughout the city when I went to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates a while e51

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back, I decided to add some shiny designs, building it with the newest and largest LEDs in the world.

ar twork o n the brink I often think about what is important in painting. Since the earthquake, I’ve come to think that work must indeed continue to exceed the limits of the person creating it. Going beyond one’s limits, going all the way to the brink of depression or insanity and even then, still bringing yourself into the space of creating the work and approaching it as a group.

Those of you who say “hey Murakami, you don’t make these things on your own,” please consider coming to my studio and trying it out for a bit. Then you will know how hard it is, and why people still follow Murakami. I work the most, and everyone knows this. So they have no choice but to work, too.

There is a scene in Spirited Away wherein the main character announces “I’ll quit this job.” Each staff member says the same thing when he or she is on break. When this project is over, I’ll quit Kaikai Kiki and have my own exhibition or I’ll go abroad.

But the site of an artistic production is a space in which you make them dig in and work, even as they say such things.

Tan Tan Bo Puking – a.k.a Gero Tan, which is placed at the entrance of this exhibit—is the first work in which I attempted this production method. It’s a work from the exhibit that I did at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, France.10 That time, too, I hired seventy people, including volunteers and temp-workers, even though I barely had any money. Since we didn’t finish in Japan, I took around twenty-five of them to Paris, but ninety percent of the staff quit when I was strict with them. On that occasion, I concluded that such a method is unfeasible. But at the same time, I felt like I had left something unfinished.

Even among people in the industry, there are many who say that Tan Tan Bo Puking is my best work. It’s not good if I can’t make the same work again. But this will not allow me to work with contemporary Japanese people. I’ve struggled with this problem.

But perhaps 3.11 served as an occasion, an occasion for me to say what I really think. I thought about this and began making The 500 Arhats. e52

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And so, all sorts of issues come to the fore. I wonder whether its better for a Japanese artist to work at the workshop of a fifty year old Murakami and get yelled at or travel abroad with your dreams and get swindled out of what little money you have. If you feel it’s no big deal getting swindled out of a “measly” 500,000 yen because you could then use that story for your blog, then I actually respect you.

But that’s probably not the case. There are unreasonable things in this world. Fighting this unreasonableness, or training the self to think about how to face this unreasonableness—we must undertake this training.

the artist' s m ission and det ermination There was an artist named Ito Jyakuchu. People used to say that Jyakuchu was an idiot son of a vegetable wholesaler who never married, an otaku who spent all his time drawing. But according to sources discovered recently, Jyakuchu was in fact managing a wholesale vegetable business.11 The sources also revealed that he dealt with each of the unreasonable demands of the Tokugawa Shogunate politically, one-by-one. That was the actual Jyakuchu, who drew precise drawings similar to otaku drawings and who has reemerged as a sensation today.

Among the artists of the Kano School that I admire, there is Kano Sansetsu.12 It seems that he said and did some suspicious things from the perspective of the authorities and in the end he died in prison.

If an artist is to act according to his or her own beliefs, either he or she will be imprisoned like Kano Sansetsu, or like Jyakuchu take on everything, working with the people and the town. I think it is one or the other.

There is a painter that the Japanese love named Van Gogh. He was impoverished and alone—only his brother understood him. He suffered from a mental illness and his works never sold. In Japan, this is taken to be some sort of model case for artists. But it is these types of artists that are in the minority. Ingres and Klimt entered the sphere of politics. Velazquez and Delacroix, too. Real art is not produced without the combination of a political context and an artistic belief—a sense of justice. The tragedy of art education in postwar Japan is that none of this was taught. This isn’t something that I came up with. I recommend Kyoko Nakano’s Scary Pictures series.13 e53

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Indeed, Japan’s anime industry has astounding potential. But these days I hear that there are increasingly more people who think that acquiring skills in school is enough, that there is no need to go through the suffering of learning computer production or toil at the site of an animation production. There were, of course, people like this among those with whom I’ve worked. Anime and games are forms of art, and as such they require a long period of training and talent. In terms of talent, I believe that there’s the kind of talent that shines right away and there is also the kind of talent that lies at the end of acquiring skills through hard work. It’s wishful thinking to simply say, “recognize my talent, but I don’t want to go through the training, I just want to debut now.”

Several years ago in the United States there was an ordeal involving hybrid cars from Toyota.14 Recently there was an article saying that it was all a mistake. They mobilize their entire nation to attack when someone invades their market. The Japanese have not thought about how to engage in such an attack. It’s not enough to simply make things. To repeat, there are things in this world that are unreasonable. Art is not produced without the conviction to fight such unreasonableness.

The true vocation of the artist is to go to the stake for one’s own beliefs. Perhaps I, too, will be arrested and jailed like Kano Sansetsu and Takafumi Horie. But so be it. That is a price I can pay for following the path that I believe in. If you don’t want this to happen, you must move money and everything, just as Jyakuchu did. The Japanese are too soft. As a Japanese, I will endeavor to rid myself of this softness. Thank you very much.

7 February 2012 ALRIWAQ Exhibition Hall, Doha

1. An auction hosted by the major auction house Christie’s on November 9, 2011, with the support of Kaikai Kiki, the company Murakami presides over as president. Artwork was donated by fourteen artists, including Jeff Koons and Yoshitomo Nara, and proceeds of approximately 8.5 million dollars from the sale of twenty-one pieces including those by Murakami, were donated to three organizations involved in disaster recovery support projects.

2. The ALRIWAQ Exhibition Hall located in Doha, the capital of Qatar.

e54

The Artist’s Mission and Determination 3. A medium of art involving moving images assembled from various elements such as videos and music from anime and video games, which are reconstructed into a context completely unique from that of the source material. These have been exchanged between otaku since the 1980s when VCRs became more standard, but have increased in number and experienced a unique course of development since the late 2000s, when video upload sites appeared.

4. In the roundtable discussion “Post-hobby-art-Japan,” with Kodai Nagahara, Takashi Murakami and Kenji Yanobe, published in Bijutsu Techo, March, 1992 (Bijutsu Shuppan-sha).

5. An exhibition of Murakami’s work held between September 14 and December 12, 2010 at the Palace of Versailles in France.

6. A museum managerial position combining responsibility for exhibition quality, budget, and marketing management.

7. Chinese contemporary artist born in 1957. He presented an individual exhibit, Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab, between December 5, 2011 and May 26, 2012 at the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha.

8. American contemporary artist born in 1939. He is known for his gigantic sculptures that incorporate plates of iron and lead. Serra’s piece “7,” approximately twenty-four meters tall, has been on display in the outdoor park of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha since December 15, 2011.

9. British contemporary artist born in 1965 and known for pieces that incorporate or are evocative of animal carcasses. He is scheduled to open an exhibition in autumn of 2013 at ALRIWAQ. 10. The solo exhibit Kawaii Summer Vacation held at the Cartier Foundation between June 27 and October 27, 2002, as well as the group exhibition Coloriage, simultaneously held and curated by Murakami.

11. According to Hideki Usami’s article “Concerning the Official Approval of the Kyoto Nishiki Takakura Vegetable Market” (Kyoto Nishiki Takakura Aomono Ichiba no kounin o megutte) in Market and Auction (Ichi to seri), ed. Nakamura Masaru (Tokyo: Chuo Insatsu Shuppanbu, 1999).

12. Painter born in 1590. His works include The Old Plum (Metropolitan Museum of Art). He died in 1651.

13. A series of books by Kyoko Nakano, beginning with Scary Pictures (Kowai e) (Asahi Shuppan, 2007). The works provide commentary on the allegorical meanings embodied in the classics of Western painting, as well as the contexts of their production.

14. Toyota USA implemented a recall of many of their models, including the hybrid car known as the Prius, between 2009 and 2010. This resulted in widespread criticism of Toyota, but in August of 2011 the United States Department of Transportation released the results of their investigation, announcing that there was “no evidence that a malfunction in electronics” caused the accidents.

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interview

A Land Where All Things Germinate —Kyoto Takeshi Umehara Interviewer: Hiroki Azuma Translated by Chris Lowy

“Civilization is being tried”—this is what Takeshi Umehara said at the Reconstruction Design Council in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake held in April 2011.

According to Umehara, the nuclear accident is a “civilizational disaster” caused by our civilization. We need to go beyond Western civilization that dominates nature, to retrieve a philosophy of the sun.

What kind of “new civilization” do the eyes of the eighty-seven-year-old Umehara see, having shifted from an interest in overcoming Western civilization to research in Buddhism, and again to research in ancient civilizations? What kind of role will the civilization to come play in the history of the world? We visited him in his historical residence in Kyoto to ask about his true intentions.

To the guest of a grandson’s age, Umehara spoke about the thoughts that were handed down to him from his predecessors. Is philosophy possible for the Japanese people? The same question is repeated across generations.

the curse of civilization

Azuma

Thank you very much for accepting our request for an interview today.

Personally, I am a fan of your writings and read them quite voraciously. Up until now it has been difficult to establish a connection between my work and yours, but after the Great East Japan Earthquake of last year you made a comment—the accident at the nuclear power plant was a curse brought on by modern civilization itself— and I’ve been wishing to ask exactly what you meant by it ever since.

Today, I would like to start there, with a discussion surveying anew the complete make-up of the philosophy that you, professor, have e56

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been nurturing for the past ten years. I’m very much looking forward to this discussion.

Thank you for the kind words. As you have stated, the nuclear accident has become a sort of catalyst for me. At the present time, Europe and most other developed nations are creating cultures dependent on some percentage of nuclear energy. As such, it’s as if civilization itself is being called into question by the nuclear accident. Additionally, I was born in Sendai, and my mother’s hometown is a place called Watanoha in Ishinomaki; because these places suffered so much damage at the hands of the earthquake and tsunami, I couldn’t simply write this off as somebody else’s problem. There was also an overlap between the tragic images from the disaster areas and my own experiences during the Second World War. When I was a second-year high school student under the prewar education system, I fell victim to an air raid while doing volunteer labor at a Mitsubishi factory located in the northeastern district of Nagoya. When the bomb hit, I just happened to be skipping work, chatting with a friend. We entered the same bomb shelter. After the bombing was over I headed outside. The bomb shelter I was supposed to have entered had been directly hit, and all inside were dead. To this day, I clearly remember those junior high school students inside the shelter who had become waxy, dead in the manner they had been sitting.

I had grave doubts about that war. I did enlist in the army but was not able to go overseas; I was in Kyushu as part of the national defense force. Of course, there were air raids from the U.S. military. I thought death was in my cards. And yet, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war was over—my life was spared.

There’s a certain feeling of guilt concerning those who suffered at the hands of the atomic bomb, and it remains within me forever.

Even while serving as a special advisor to the Reconstruction Design Council in Response to the Great East Japan Earthquake, I felt a similar emotion toward those who perished in the disaster. This experience prompted me to muster the courage to take this as an opportunity to boldly discuss my own brand of philosophy, on which I have spent years of continuous thinking since after the war. From October to December of 2011, I gave a series of lectures entitled “An Introduction to Anthro-philosophy (jinrui tetsugaku)” at the Tokyo campus of e57

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the Kyoto University of Art and Design.

In an attempt to describe my philosophy, I would like to talk about its development from the post-war period to the present day.

From the start, being drawn to Kitaro Nishida, one of the greatest figures of Japanese philosophy, I decided to enroll in the Department of Philosophy at Kyoto University, a place where the Nishida school of thought remained. Nishida thought in his own terms about the way humans ought to live, producing numerous texts focusing on that philosophy as a single system. Though indeed a fantastic achievement, Nishida often used arcane language to express his thoughts, as witnessed in the phrase, “the self-identity of absolute contradictories.” I wondered if perhaps there was not a simpler way to convey thought.

There were also other scholars from the Kyoto School—disciples of Nishida—such as Iwao Koyama who, agreeing with the Greater East Asia War, proposed theories such as those found in A Philosophy of World History (Sekaishi no tetsugaku).1 It felt as if such thinkers had absolutely no understanding of the real tragedies of war.

Philosophers after the war ceased to think on their own in the way Nishida did; experts on Plato began to conduct research only on Plato. These people can’t be called philosophers—they’re simply researchers in philosophy or historians of philosophy. For me, it was always the scholarship that Nishida produced that was philosophy, and I thought that I, too, would like to someday create philosophy in a similar vein. I think it has at long last taken shape in the past decade or so.

Under the influence of Nietzsche and Berdyaev I wondered, from early on, if Western civilization had not reached a dead end. And thinking that the theory of a new civilization lay hidden within Japanese thought, I studied Japanese ideology.

There’s a book by Daisetsu Suzuki, a very close friend of Nishida, entitled Zen and Japanese Culture.2 This is an internationally recognized classic, and Nishida, responding to this, argued that Western philosophy pertained to the principle of “being,” while Japanese philosophy pertained to the principle of “nothingness.” As for me, however, I felt it unreasonable to describe all of Japanese culture in terms of Zen or “nothingness.” Zen was a single aspect of Kamakura-era Buddhism, and anything pre-Kamakura was thus unexplainable.

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twenty years I have come to regard the notion of soumoku kokudo jikkai joubutsu, or “plants and trees and the house of all sentient beings: all things attain Buddhahood,” as the answer to that question. Plants and trees, as well as the soil (that is, rocks and dirt) all have earthly desires; they are living creatures that have an innate Buddhahood. This worldview places vegetation at its center. This is a concept born from the thought of Tendai Hongaku, a syncretism of the Tendai and Shingon sects of Buddhism that shared the same theoretical assumptions as those of Kamakura New Buddhism, namely the ideas of pure land (joudo), Zen, and the Lotus Sutra (hokke).

The notion that in this world the pleasures of life are located in living things’ killing of one other, perpetuating a cycle of creation and destruction, is something that is also expressed culturally in a variety of ways.

The idea that all living things are at some time capable of attaining Buddhahood is often evident in the Noh theater. The shite, or protagonist, of Nue3 (around 1435) who seems to resemble a nue beast, and the spirit of the cherry blossom and willow that appears in Saigyo’s Cherry Tree,4 are pertinent examples. Or, consider the pine trees planted in the Outer Gardens of the Imperial Palace. Just as the character for “pine” consists of the tree radical and the character for prince, the pine itself is regarded as the Prince of the Trees, symbolizing the emperor. Additionally, I believe, even the idea expressed in the lyrics of the Japanese national anthem Kimigayo that small rocks become big boulders illustrates a mode of thought wherein a rock is considered to be a living, maturing thing.

Going back even further we arrive at magatama, or the commashaped beads of the Jomon Period (approximately 14,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.). Among the magatama, there are those that are made of jade. The faint green color of jade reminds us of young, green buds emerging from snow. There are also some magatama that were made into the shape of animals to be treasured by the owner. In other words, it was those jewels that embodied the spirits of the animals and plants that were most prized. The Jomon Period was populated by a hunter-gatherer culture that, just like those of the Americas and the Aborigines, possessed a very strong spirituality. It is my belief that the first human hunter-gatherer civilization also had a similar acuteness for the spiritual.

However, Western civilization is not like this: it’s anthropocene59

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tric. Even looking as Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” it is the “I” that has become the center of the world. In relation to that “I,” nature is an object that can be understood and dominated through the will of mankind. That culture, that civilization, gave birth to nuclear power.

But that is not acceptable; now, we must once again rethink the philosophy that places at its center vegetation, as well as the co-existence with all living things.

the re tu rning s o u l

There is something else I would like to discuss. Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return posits that a world repeating itself is monotonous and unbearable to the subjective will of men. Nietzsche attempted to affirm this as a call of the will, but I wonder if, rather, eternal return is not something that occurs objectively.

Let me explain. About fifteen years ago I took my grandson to Aichi Prefecture, the place where I grew up. There, I had him catch cicada in the same place I had caught them when I was a child. At the place where I had been catching cicadas, my grandson was catching the tenth or twentieth generation grandchildren of the cicada I myself had caught. This, I believe, is eternal return. In the ideology of Shinran,5 one encounters the notion of nishu ekou, or the two types of merit transferences, wherein the ousou ekou, or “that which leads to the Pure Land through the auspices of Amitabha,” and the gensou ekou, or “that which returns to this world to save humans,” are paired through the auspices of the Amitabha. This is the eternal iterative movement of the soul. There are remains from the Jomon Period, referred to as wood circles, which suggest that ten pillars were arranged in a circle and rebuilt every ten odd years. We can imagine a faith wherein, when a tree grows old, the gods take up residence in a different tree, coming back to life there. I think the Onbashira Festival6 at the Grand Temple of Suwa and the ceremony of transferring deities (Gosengu Festival) at Ise Shrine are also born from this same ideological concept.

This worldview is not limited to the people of Japan. We can see this in the Iomante, or Bear Festival, of the Ainu, and the vast majority of ancient ethnic groups believed in a faith that claimed when a person dies he or she goes somewhere, returning to the pregnant stomach of his or her descendants. From this point forward it is this e60

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understanding of eternal return that will become important.

In other words, our life force has been handed down to us, connected at every pulse to a primitive life, and will continue onward forevermore. It is a deep reverence for the nature that gave us life that must be at the center of civilization. According to Shinran, those who obtain faith are referred to as toushougaku and inherently occupy the same rank as the miroku, or the Buddha of the future. Because miroku saves the people of the future, claiming such equality means, in a sense, that within all toushougaku resides a permanent and unchanging eternal life. This, I believe, is a new faith.

Nietzsche said that a philosopher must remain single, and it is said that Socrates purposefully chose a bad wife to marry; but for me, I think getting married is what ordinary people do.

Thank you.

Your work covers such a wide range of topics. From Western philosophy, research in Buddhism, and studies in the ancient history of Japan to creating your own Noh and Kabuki, your work is truly diverse. Though grasping the entirety of it is difficult, a central point has emerged through this conversation.

For you, Professor Umehara, it is the philosophical task of overcoming Kitaro Nishida that serves as your point of departure.

Indeed it is.

So, initially you were faced with the task of overcoming the philosophy of Nishida, and what you arrived at after undergoing various processes was a philosophy that maintains at its core the coexistence with vegetation and the eternal return of life. This is very interesting.

In opposition to the philosophy of being and existence that spans from Heidegger to Nietzsche—in the language of the Kyoto School, a philosophy of u (being)—stands the philosophy of mu (nothingness), as established by Kitaro Nishida. However, you diverged from this contraposition between “being” and “nothingness,” attempting instead to create your own philosophy.

I, too, had my start in Western philosophy. The philosophy of the West is fundamentally a philosophy of the individual, and I felt the limitations of thinking from the point of the solitude of man. If indeed Kitaro Nishida attempted to overcome such a condition with e61

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Japanese “nothingness,” then what you are trying to do is radically change that schema: it is man that can never become an individual, surrounded by nature and positioned within the continuity of generations. In a manner of speaking we might say that man that can never attain existence. I feel as though I have at long last been able to situate the thinker Takeshi Umehara within the history of philosophy.

e x i ste n c e an d m an kin d

Azuma

Umehara

Azuma

Umehara

Azuma

Since Nishida and Heidegger are similar, it would seem we could also organize your philosophy in terms of its inception as a critique of Heidegger. Though Heidegger’s philosophy is a highly accomplished one, it’s restricted to the realm of men. There is no way out.

Though I have rather deeply studied Heidegger, I never really tried to introduce his theories since I regard philosophy as something we create for ourselves. However, you could say of my philosophy that, in Heideggerian terms, I aim to clarify “Being.”

As you’re well aware, Heidegger in his younger days was concerned with the way men as Dasein became conscious of their existence. He then went through a Kehre (turn) and shifted from a philosophy of existence to a philosophy of being. In other words, his thinking was no longer anthropocentric. According to him, early Greek philosophers spoke of aletheia (unconcealedness), the disclosure that relates to the hidden, until Plato dismissed it. That is Being. Extending all the way to Descartes it had become all the more forgotten: for a long stretch of time, Being had been left behind by a philosophy of reason, only to finally be recovered by Hölderlin.

In the works of Heidegger, Being is treated as a highly abstract concept. This you are attempting to redefine as the will of vegetation.

That is correct. In the words of Heidegger, when walking on a path in the forest, the language of Being can be heard. As such, Being is something close to nature, though not exactly nature itself.

For Heidegger, it was not the forest he regarded as Being, but rather the clearing in the middle of the forest. One of Heidegger’s major collections of writing is entitled Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege, 1950), pree62

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cisely, “a path in the forest.”

Yes. However, in the end Heidegger maintained it was language that revealed Being. This is evident in his assertion that “language is the house of Being.” And, because it is only philosophers and poets who can speak true language, he claims that Being can only be discussed by the philosophers of Greece and Hölderlin. With this I can’t agree.

You’re absolutely correct. Actually, the philosopher I studied, Jacques Derrida, criticizes him on precisely that point.

What does he say?

Derrida is a philosopher who in some ways is very similar to Kitaro Nishida. For example, Nishida has his difficult concept of the “selfidentity of absolute contradictions,” and Derrida engages in a similar discourse. Though in his earlier days Derrida wrote serious philosophical treatises, he gradually began to write in a peculiar literary and poetical style. In fact, I analyzed the cause of this in my doctoral dissertation.7 In that regard, one might say that your attempts, which begin with overcoming Kitaro Nishida’s thought and arrive at diverse forms of expression that include the literary, is in parallel with the work of Derrida.

Incidentally, it is Derrida’s work On Grammatology8 that I hold in the highest esteem. In it he attempts to locate the intrinsic qualities of language not in voice, but rather in écriture, or writing. Hieroglyphic writing, the Maya script, is used as an example of this. In other words, Derrida wonders if the essence of language lies in the notches, in the incisions, in the space of not knowing whether something is a picture or writing.

Beyond this is my own interpretation, but I think Derrida may have attempted to understand Heidegger’s “house of Being” as one such incision. The essence of the character is within that incision, and yet, at the same time, such an engraving can be naturally occurring.

Moreover, those notches that have occurred naturally can at times appear to be written characters. To put it another way, we sometimes accidentally discover a soul within nature. Philosophy will never extend beyond mankind if, like Heidegger, we understand the “house of Being” to be language alone. I think Derrida was a philosopher who e63

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tried to break free from this. Actually, both you and Derrida are of nearly the same generation.

I see. To give an example I’m familiar with, Zeami has a Noh play called Haku Rakuten. Bai Juyi,9 known as Haku Rakuten in Japanese, has come to Hakata wishing to know the state of Japan. Sumiyoshi Myojin, the god of navigation and poetry, boards a small ship and goes to meet Haku Rakuten. When they meet, Haku Rakuten inquires: “In China there is a thing called poetry. What does your country have?” Sumiyoshi then replies, “In my country we have song (uta).

Poems are only made by humans, while songs, just as in the preface to the Kokinwakashu,10 can be the voice of the bush warbler or the croak of a frog.” With this he sends away Haku Rakuten. Even the sound of rain and the sound of wind are perceived as song in Japan. In the Noh theater, the sound of a small hand drum represents the sound of waves. I cannot help but think that to perceive all sounds as music is superior to a poetry that only humans can produce.

Rousseau asserts that music is the origin of language in his Essay On the Origin of Languages (1781). He claims that the original state of language was the act of communicating through song and wails between people separated at great lengths, with language being formed as a degeneration of that practice. Even recently, a theory is being advocated that bird songs are the origin of language. The patterns within the bird songs that emerge through computer analysis suggest that they have the same origin as human language. In reality, the boundary between humans who have language and animals that do not may not be so great.

You’re correct. I think this may be the fundamental difference between Western philosophy and the philosophy of Asia. I thought your discussion of Derrida was very interesting, but the fact that Derrida took up Heidegger in France is extremely important. That is, the fact that Heidegger was linked to the Nazis is still problematized in the present day; while at the University of Freiburg I heard that an event celebrating the one hundredth birthday of Husserl was held, but that the university there would make no public recognition of Heidegger.

What do you think about the relationship between Heidegger and the Nazis? e64

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I believe the relationship between Heidegger and the Nazis is essential to his philosophy; I do not regard it as coincidental. Heidegger was accepted in France belatedly, and perhaps because of that those people referred to as the postmodernists—which I specialized in— were able to separate his writings from his politics. You could say they tried to salvage Heidegger from the Nazis.

On the one hand Heidegger maintains a politically problematic existence, but at the same time he was an exceptional philosopher. I do think it unfortunate that, given the political circumstances in the latter half of the twentieth century, it became difficult to employ that philosophy.

Yes. His own fate and the fate of the nation-state would merge during his early career; the Nazis surfaced insistently. And throughout the war he would study Nietzsche. He gradually grew critical of Nietzsche, which I think overlaps with a criticism of the Nazi party. After that came a Kehre, and he came to regard Nietzsche as the philosopher who discovered a will in the background of the philosophy of reason that ran from Descartes to Hegel. This, for him, was a doomsday philosophy in the Western tradition; it was not a new philosophy of Being. On my part, however, I believe that Heidegger’s philosophy of Being equally fails to escape anthropocentrism. In Derrida, I sensed the seeds of such a philosophy, but is this not the role of a nonWestern civilization like Japan?

Japan was introduced to Western civilization at an extraordinary rate and received much benefit from it, but the nation also experienced an enormous downside. That is, the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the nuclear accident at Fukushima. I think that having experienced both the merits and demerits of Western civilization, Japan has the role in world history of overcoming it.

This is something I spoke about with Toynbee11 during his 1967 visit to Japan. According to him, the reason that the West that lay at the Western edge of the Eurasian continent was able to conquer the world was because it created a civilization of science and technology.

Japan, followed by Turkey, managed to develop as a modern state by adopting it, but the age of borrowing from Western civilization is over. He said that non-Western civilizations like Japan will have to create, and they will create, a new type of civilization in which they e65

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think about science and technology through their own principles.

Responding to this I asked, “By what type of principles can Japan create a new civilization?” He replied, “That’s for the young you to think about!” After a span of forty years I feel I can finally provide an answer to such a question.

The dichotomy whereby humans alone are subjects and nature is an object is what allowed science to emerge in Western civilization.

However, this notion itself isn’t philosophically justifiable. In fact, the scientific knowledge of today refutes this dichotomy at various points. Men are not the only subjects, and they can’t be easily separated from nature. You’re suggesting that in order to philosophically comprehend the most cutting-edge scientific knowledge, one has no choice but to change the starting point of modern science. And, when that occurs, it will be those civilizations from areas outside of Europe that will make a contribution.

That’s correct, and I believe Japan can play an important role. There is a tradition of highly skilled translators and researchers of Western philosophy in Japan. Just as German philosophy got its start by expressing the Latin-based philosophy in German, their own native tongue, it would be desirable in Japan to use translations for debate.

In China, research began with complete Chinese translations of Sanskrit Buddhist texts. Misunderstandings are inevitable, but there were also numerous creative interpretations. I also want similar things to occur in Japan.

Stemming from a certain type of inquisitiveness I studied Buddhism, Shinto, and the philosophy of the Ainu, which I have made use of in my own philosophy. It is this kind of curiosity that I want the youth of the next generation to have.

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Allow me to move on to a separate question. We could say that, from an ethical perspective, you have been lauding a way of life in which one does not cling to one’s own existence. While you, Professor Umehara, have reached such a state of mind, is a similar attainment possible for the youth of today? The reason I ask this is because in spite of everything, I think today’s youth view themselves as individuals, e66

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insisting on their unique existence. Reading your works I could not help but feel that you, too, were like that.

Though I started with the Existentialism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, when leading a real, extremely difficult life I felt it wasn’t possible to continue living while relying upon existence. Thereupon I got married and even started working, and in an attempt to overcome the logic of existence and carry on living I wrote a study entitled “Pathos of Darkness” (Yami no patosu). In it I analyzed the darkness in my own heart.

Additionally, in an attempt to affirm life and move beyond nihilism I began thinking about the philosophy of “laughter.” I started frequenting rakugo comedy performances, researching and writing about the comedy of Tengai Shibuya, Kanbi Fujiyama, and Kon Omura. It was in this way that I was able to overcome existence.

At that time you weren’t thinking about the philosophy that leads to the “attainment of Buddhahood for all things?”

No, I wasn’t thinking about that. That’s a rather recent development, something I have become convinced of through my studies of Noh and Buddhism. Beginning with “Pathos of Darkness” and my research on comedy, after various studies I arrived at the concept of the Doctrine of Original Enlightenment (tendai hongaku ron).

Let me try from a different angle. The reason I asked such a question is because following the earthquake there have been discussions of denuclearization. Today, we see in Japan a swelling of debates stating that these are the final days of nuclear power, which was born of a human desire to control nature, and that from here on out we must live modestly, co-existing with nature.

However, when that happens, what becomes of human desire?

Young people can’t easily discard their desires. While that’s what gives existentialism its reason, I wonder if there’s a way to introduce “people obsessed with their own desires” into a philosophy of co-existence?

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contact with such philosophy is, I believe, a separate matter.

Because it is difficult to give a direct answer, let me tell a separate story. Reading your Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals,12 I wondered if I, too, was not an otaku in my youth. I was a child born out of wedlock, and my mother passed away when I was young. I grew up thinking the relatives who took me in, my aunt and uncle, were my parents. All my relatives knew the truth. Being the only one in the dark, I felt as if for some reason the world looked upon me with coldness. From before entering elementary school I hid away in my own lonely world, staring every day at still pictures of sumo wrestlers someone had bought me, losing myself in daydreams. As something like the predecessor to your “otaku,” I felt that experience and the obsession with my own thoughts were connected somewhere.

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I am honored you read my book. What you have just shared is very interesting.

Otaku is a book that focuses on the culture of Japan’s youth, which overflows with affection towards nonliving things. Characters (kyarakutaa) that do not actually exist are treated with the utmost care, just as if they were living human beings. In this, the concept of “all things attain Buddhahood” continues to live on in an apparently different form. A thriving robotics industry is to be found in Japan, as well. The idea of discovering a soul in things may be thriving even in the contemporary culture of Japan.

Yes. One can see such work in Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka-san was a loyal reader of my books, telling me he would like to make an anime version of a play I wrote called Gilgamesh.13 Unfortunately, Tezuka-san passed away before this could be realized.

“Animation” shares the same etymology with animism, and denotes “the art of instilling life into something.” Tezuka did just that, working to give life to each and every line he drew. There he may have been able to empathize with the philosophy which holds that souls reside in things. This is also related to the issue of why anime is so influential in Japan.

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Well, it seemed Tezuka-san was interested in the story of Gilgamesh.

It’s the story of the various hardships, in the form of divine punishment, faced by Prince Gilgamesh, killer of Humbaba, the god of the forest. Killing the god of the forest indeed signifies the beginning of Western civilization.

Giving another example, Egypt is a nation of agriculture. The Nile River carries fertile soil, and when the sun hits it, wheat sprouts up.

Because of this, Ra, the sun god, is the most highly revered of gods.

The sun god repeats the process of dying and being reborn. Sun cults can likewise be found in similar farming civilizations of the Mayans, and in Japan as well. The central deity in Japan is Amaterasu, and the legend of her hiding behind a heavenly rock cave in fact represents that process of dying and being reborn. At the center of Japanese Buddhism is Dainichi Nyorai, the Buddha of the sun.

And the most important after the sun god is, in Egypt’s case, Isis, and in Japan’s, Kannon Bosatsu: both pertain to water. There were gods of the sun and water in both countries, and I believe we can call them the gods of agriculture.

In Greek and Jewish cultures there exists no concept that equates to the blessings of sun and water. Thales proclaimed, “All things are water”: even if there is water, there is no sun. This is because Greece was a pirate nation that prospered by traversing the sea and dominating colonies. Because of this the gods of Greek mythology reek of blood. Because the Jewish people, too, were a nomadic people, they knew not of farming. Those civilizations that forgot the blessings of the sun and water are connected to modern civilizations.

Please allow me to get this right. What you have stated up until now is that a structured philosophy with men at its center has continued from the time of the Greeks and the Hebrews, and since then there has been a philosophy aiming at the governance of existence and nature which eventually arrived, through technology, at nuclear power.

And for the post-disaster “us,” there is a need to return to a pre-human philosophy.

While I’m following the general outline, I’m a little confused by what you have just said. You spoke of both the sun and the forest as existences representing a pre-human philosophy. But I imagine thinking about the sun is something for an agricultural people, and thinking about the forest is something for a hunter-gatherer people. e69

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What’s the relationship of these two?

This is a very important issue. Though I started out by focusing my thoughts on hunter-gatherer tribes, I began to reevaluate agricultural civilizations after commencing research into the civilization of the Yangtze, finally placing a great deal of importance on farming culture after traveling to Egypt with noted Egyptologist Sakuji Yoshimura in 2008. Though hunter-gatherers and farmers are two different things, I believe there’s a point at which they harmonize with one another.

This is because the forest, too, is nurtured by the sun.

How does this connect to what you said earlier about the will or subjectivity of vegetation? I think we can also say that agricultural civilizations use vegetation as objects, seemingly building their cultures through objectification and domination.

That doesn’t seem to be the case in Japan. According to folklorist Kunio Yanagita, with the coming of spring the gods of the mountains come to the fields and become gods of the rice paddies, once again returning to the mountains when the harvest ends. The gods of the mountains and the gods of the paddies are a single entity. This signifies the fusion of the cultures of the Jomon and Yayoi periods. At a shrine one always finds forestry, and the idea that the gods come down to the rocks and trees within the woods is a vestige of this fusion. I believe this to be the culture of Japan.

Just as I wrote in my 2010 The Buried Dynasty: Solving the Mystery of Ancient Izumo,14 I believe there’s a history of fusion between the Jomon and Yayoi periods. That is, the Izumo Empire, which predates the Yamato Empire and was part of the Yayoi civilization, carried on the hunter-gatherer culture of the Jomon Period. The bell-shaped bronze vessels, bronze daggers, and socketed bronze spearheads unearthed in Izumo all prove this. Painted on the bronze bell-shaped vessels of Izumo are, together with images of people farming, individuals hunting deer and fish. This is proof that there was a civilization that mixed agriculture with farming and hunting. And it was that Izumo Empire that would hand over the country to the Yamato Empire. I can’t help but feel that this history is written into the eighth century collection of Japanese myths, the Kojiki.

In other words, with the gods Izanagi and Izanami being Jomon e70

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and those from Amaterasu onward Yayoi, what’s being depicted in the text is the shift from the Izumo Empire of Susanoo through to Ookuninushi to the Yamato Empire of Ninigi. Though this also means that theory I proposed in The Exile of the Gods I wrote was mistaken, if this new theory is correct then the Yamato Empire clearly left in writing a history that was not favorable to them. This, I think, is fantastic.

In other words, a type of fusion between a hunter-gatherer society and an agricultural society was attained in Japan. Japan is not simply a land of the forest, but rather a land of the forest and sun. These relationships are highly complex when one thinks of, for example, Taro Okamoto’s The Tower of the Sun as being a realization of a Jomon-like symbol.

In what form does the thought of the Jomon remain in the present day?

For example, on the island of Awaji there are places where giant stones in the shape of male penises and female genitalia have been enshrined. That sort of sex-cult constituted the thinking of the Jomon. We can see a conscious push toward birthing and multiplication in the stone tools, in the shape of phalluses and female genitalia, oft-excavated from the ruins of the Jomon. In the Kojiki one also finds the story of Izanagi and Izanami engaging in sexual intercourse.

But at the core of Greek mythology lies a cruel game of killing one another. It was in that context that Aristotle was interested in biological diversity. The zoology of Aristotle is interesting. How do camels have sex? How do insects have sex? He studied sex in this manner.

Later generations completely ignored the intensity with which Aristotle showed an interest towards sex, which I regard as a fairly distorted position.

Plato, on the other hand, had a strong disposition towards monotheism. That would become the foundation of Christianity. By the time we had reached the age of Scholasticism, theology and metaphysics had become most important, contributing monotheism’s momentum. Thus, in an attempt to overcome monotheism, it may be helpful to turn one’s attention to biological diversity in the tradition of Aristotle.

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a time before Socrates to discover the madness of Dionysus in order to overcome Greek philosophy. However, it is the more naturalistlike knowledge of Aristotle that attracts you.

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Incidentally, please allow me to once again discuss desire. I think at the base of all of these—the sun, forest, and wisdom of a naturalistlike polytheism—lays in an affirmation of a world comprised of a life overflowing with desire. This gives shape to all of your philosophical and creative endeavors.

On the other hand, now, if one chooses to coexist with a variety of organisms, I think modern man has no choice but to control his desires. The affirmation and suppression of desire: can I ask you to comment on the relationship between the two?

Let me answer with a personal story. Though having now considerably weakened, I was no stranger to erotic desire. [Laughter] And that’s not a bad thing. Looking at those for whom erotic desire is exceptionally strong we recall the words bonnou soku bodai, or “the oneness of worldly passions and spiritual enlightenment.” Lust is strong in me but so is the appetite for knowledge and creativity. And yet aspiration for fame or money is fairly weak. While among scholars there are those who chase after fame or money, I’d like them to become people who can allow those desires to be absorbed by a thirst for knowledge and a desire for creativity. That’s the kind of desire that I deem important.

So the type of desire is the issue?

I have nearly no desires attached to my life. This house is not even a house of my own choosing. I can enjoy simple meals and, much like a dress-up doll, wear the clothes my wife dresses me in without a peep.

Though this might be different from normal people, in the stead of these things I have done the work of philosophy in my search for those grand things people do not seek.

In the words of Kukai,15 though the people of the world are satisfied with being slightly covetous, I have an avaricious soul. Avarice (taiyoku) is the spirit of Dainichi Nyorai’s concern for sentient beings. e72

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One can say the world of esoteric Buddhism represented in five magnificent colors is a brilliant affirmation of desires. I expressed this avarice with the line “a heart soaring to the heavens” in the Super Kabuki play Yamato Takeru.16 I again expressed this with the phrase “disease of the romantics” in the second work of Super Kabuki, Oguri (1991). It is the disease of the romantics that causes such a desire to write theater and express that which cannot be expressed in philosophy. Thus, in a broad sense, playwriting is also an element of philosophy.

Ichikawa Ennosuke, who asked me to write Yamato Takeru, believes in the theory that Shakespeare was Francis Bacon. He maintains that because he was a good philosopher he was able to write exemplary theater. It’s tiresome to think that the philosophers in Japan will, if specializing in Kant, dedicate their whole lives to Kant. Philosophers must read widely and think about things in their own terms.

Do you write anything?

I happen to write novels, too.

Try writing a play someday! [Laughter] I think it would be best for the young generation to abandon a slight covetousness and embrace avarice, or the disease of the romantics.

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Allow me just one more question. Today we have been given the privilege of talking in this amazing residence17 of yours here at the foothills of Higashiyama, once home to philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji and host to painter Ryusei Kishida. This is an environment I could not even dream of as someone from the suburbs of Tokyo.

Where do you think the relationship lies between your works, this house you’re living in, and Kyoto, the city in which you reside?

As a high school student under the old system of education I could not decide whether to go to the University of Tokyo or Kyoto University. In the end I chose Kyoto University and have been here ever since. Had I not come here I don’t think my studies of the ancient world would have been possible. The atmosphere at the University of Tokyo forced one to make the choice of either becoming a little elite and taking a job connected to the government, or fighting against e73

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the system. But, because one maintains a certain distance from the government when living in Kyoto, I became intent on pursuing the knowledge of eternal truth.

Mountains surround Kyoto, and wild boars come up to my garden. Even in the Chinese cities of Chang’an and Luoyang the mountains are bare. Though the images of the Buddha that made their way over from China during the Nara period (710 – 794) were of gilt bronze, dry-lacquer, and clay, when statues of the Buddha began to be produced in Japan, those made out of wood became central. There is even an wooden mandala in the Kodo Hall of Toji Temple. This Japanese wood culture is still alive in Kyoto, and I believe it to be connected to my own philosophy.

I also learned a lot from the people of the Kyoto School: Hajime Tanabe, Shuzo Kuki, Teiyu Amano, and, of course, Kitaro Nishida. After the war I was also very friendly with those who gathered at Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in Humanities, namely Takeo Kuwahara, Kinji Imanishi, Shigeki Kaizuka, and Hideki Yukawa. This culture of people from such diverse fields forming a group, or circle, just does not exist in Tokyo.

Why do you think this is possible in Kyoto? Because it is a small city?

Well, because the city is small, drinking spots often overlap. [Laughter] Just as you’d expect, we went to the Gion District. [Laughter] There’s really no connection to sex at these places where one can enjoy fun of the utmost elegance. If you don’t pay a visit at least once every six months you are not recognized as a regular customer. However, by doing that a small community is formed, with establishments sometimes doing things like showing flexibility toward one’s tab. I was really thankful that the people from the Kyoto School became friends of mine.

As Nietzsche said, debating by having truth as a sole friend while confirming one’s own solitude is something that requires courage.

Perhaps in a monotheistic nation God will support you when you become lonely, but for the polytheistic Japanese people it is difficult to “be faithful only to the truth.” With the appearance of friends such as Yukawa-san and (Kojiro) Yoshikawa-san, I received praise from unexpected places. Thanks to this I was able to continue my solitary research. This too, I believe, is because I came to Kyoto. e74

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Additionally, one thing I learned from Nishida-san was that it’s acceptable to search out the principles of a new philosophy among traditional Japanese thought. To that end, one thing that’s great about living in Kyoto is being able to go out and see firsthand actual historic ruins or documents when conducting research on ancient matters.

Whether in The Hidden Cross: A Theory of Horyu-ji18 or Songs From the Water’s Depth: On Kakinomoto no Hitomaro,19 it was only after having doubted commonly accepted theories and continuously thinking about them that inspiration struck. Those ideas may be unacceptable within the context of existing theories, but one can verify them via a thorough survey of available literature. This is not limited to an investigation of documents but includes actually traveling to relevant sites.

I wrote The Hidden Cross after looking at the buildings of Horyu-ji one-by-one. This was an academic investigation with a deep connection to a theory I proposed nearly twenty years ago in Songs From the Water’s Depth. In Songs From the Water’s Depth I argue that it’s not clear whether or not Kamojima—the place where Kakinomoto no Hitomaro was thought to have died and which documents claim was submerged in a tsunami in the year 1024—actually existed or not. Then University of Tokyo professor and planetary physicist Matsui Takanori lead an investigation to look for traces of the island. The results of this investigation would later serve as reference for investigations into the Jogan Earthquake of 869. In other words, the philosophy of verification of written records is also connected in some capacity to my work.

Just as the New Testament claims, “if a grain of wheat does not die” [John 12:24], philosophy depends on whether or not people of later generations cultivate it. That is to say, if Socrates was a grain of wheat, then a youth named Plato—the separation in age is just about that between you and I—cultivated and inherited that wheat. Just when it seemed as if the grain of wheat of Jesus Christ would end with that single grain, Saint Paul nurtured it, creating a grand religion.

Wanting to create something like the Akademia of Plato, I brought into being the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) under the auspices of the exceptional Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Becoming its director, I feel as if one of my dreams—that is, being able to create the third Kyoto School—has e75

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been fulfilled. I want young people like you, Azuma-san, to go on and cultivate the seeds I have planted.

Thank you. I feel as if today I did receive a grain of wheat. I will look after it with the greatest of care.

I think what you just spoke about is deeply connected to the issue of generational linkage you talked about earlier in our discussion.

Philosophy and religion are really just there for us to think about generations and family, and connections to a region. On the one hand modern philosophy overemphasizes the existence of the individual, and on the other, in the Japan of today, the social reality is that people are becoming fragmented very quickly. It was in such times that your ideological developments began with an overcoming of Western philosophy and shifted from the existence of the individual to the connection of life; that in itself brims with a strong message.

Lastly, I would like to ask a question that may sound like a joke: at your age you’re in excellent health! Is there something like a set of rules to keep healthy?

There really aren’t any rules.

Do you watch what you eat or exercise?

No. Since I was young I have eaten what I want, when I want, doing just as I please. My wife says, “it’s been a life full hardships since getting together with this guy.” [Laughter]

That is great! I feel braver through your strong words. I think I will take a hint from that and forget about worrying about my health.

[Laughter]

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The best rule of health is to live just as you want. In my younger days I also drank quite a bit of alcohol. Someday I’ll take you out to Gion Machi!

That would be an honor! If it is you, Professor Umehara, taking me, I will accompany you anywhere.

I really want to thank you for spending so much time with us today. e76

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This interview was carried out as a recording for the NHK ETC program “3.11 go wo ikiru kimitachi he—Azuma Hiroki Umehara Takeshi ni ainiiku” (To Those Living in the Post 3.11: Azuma Hiroki Visits Umehara Takeshi) (Originally broadcast on 26 March 2012).

10 March 2012 The Umehara Residence, Kyoto With the cooperation of NHK Kyoto Broadcasting station

1. Specifically, the Eurocentric theory that the Greater East Asia War (the Pacific War) relativized modernity. This notion was advocated by philosophers and historians of the Kyoto School, including Iwao Koyama, Keiji Nishitani, Masaaki Kosaka, and Shigetaka Suzuki.

2. D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton University Press, 1938). Originally written by Suzuki in English, this text considers the uniqueness of Japanese culture to be centered around the fundamentals of Zen Buddhism.

3. A Noh play by Zeami. Nue is a mythological monster that also appears in The Tale of the Heike. A ghost of a nue, who appears in front of a traveling monk, tells the monk the story of his being killed by Minamoto no Yorimasa so that he may finally disappear into the darkness.

4. Saigyozakura, a Noh play by Zeami. Sleeping in the shade of an old cherry tree, Saigyo is admonished by the tree’s spirit.

5. Shinran (1173–1263). Buddhist monk of the early Kamakura period and founder of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism.

6. A festival held every six years to symbolically renew the temple.

7. Ontological, Postal (Sonzaironteki, yubinteki) (Shinchosha, 1998) 8. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Minuit, 1967) 9. Noted Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty (618–907).

10. Compiled in the early tenth century, the earliest of Japan’s imperial anthologies of poetry.

11. Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). British historian. As exemplified in his A Study of History (1934–1961), Toynbee criticized the notion of the superiority of Western civilization by presenting history as the rise and fall of civilizations rather than that of nation-states.

12. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009). Originally published in Japanese in 2001, it explains the consumption behavior of otaku in terms of “database consumption,” in which non-narrative configurations such as moe elements are consumed.

13. Gilgamesh (Shinchosha, 1988). A play based on the Epic of Gilgamesh and raised alarm about the environmental problems which necessarily accompany civilizations by depicting the destruction of forests caused by civilizations and the aftermath of such destruction.

14. Houmurareta ouchou (Shinchosha, 2010). In his 1970 article “The Exile of the Dei-

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

ties” (Kamigami no ruzan), Umehara advocated the theory that the “land of Izumo” described in early historical texts was a fictional place to where deities were exiled by the Yamato Dynasty. The discovery of a large number of bronze bells at the Kojindani Ruins prompted him to retract this theory in Houmurareta, recognizing that Izumo did in fact exist.

Founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism.

Super Kabuki is a movement in Kabuki theater that combines traditional movement with modern technology. Yamato Takeru was written by Umehara in 1986 and was directed by Ichikawa Ennosuke III. The Umehara household in Sakyo Ward, Kyoto. After being built by a head clerk of a major businessman in the Meiji Period, it was home to Tetsuro Watsuji and Tokotsu Okazaki, disciple of Ryusei Kishida. Under the name of “Mitsugoan,” it is designated as a tangible cultural asset of Japan.

Kakusareta juujika—Horyuji-ron (Shinchosha, 1972). In the text, Umehara proposes the bold theory that Horyu-ji was built to repose the soul of Prince Shotoku, opening up a new perspective on Japanese history in terms of appeasing vengeful spirits (onryo shikan).

Minasoko no uta—Kakinomoto no hitomaro-ron (Shinchosha, 1973). Focusing on the images of “water’s depths” and “death” in the poetry of the Asuka period (592 – 710) poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, the text reinterprets the poet as a personage who was ostracized due to being exiled by Empress Jito as a result of a political struggle.

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dialogue

Journalism and the Future—Beijing Michael Anti, Daisuke Tsuda, Hiroki Azuma Translated by Brendan Deegan

In October 2010, two leading journalists of a new generation had their first encounter. One was the Japanese Daisuke Tsuda, who attracted attention with his On the Twitter Society (Tsuittaa Shakai-ron). The other was the Chinese Michael Anti, who has come under the spotlight with his blog and knowledge of international matters. The two talked passionately about the possibilities of a new journalism opened by Twitter.

Over a year after this initial dialogue, and after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsuda now refers to himself as an activist, and has taken the step toward political participation, going beyond the act of informing. During the same period in China, Sina Weibo attracted more than 300 million users, changing the Chinese internet landscape. Anti was seen fighting in this new context too.

The two met again in February 2012. How have their roles changed in this turbulent world? How will social media change the world and Japan-China relations? Connected across the waters, the two talk about the future to come.

the disaste r and j apane se media Azuma

Today I, along with Daisuke Tsuda and Michael Anti, the blogger representative of a new Chinese civil society, would like to talk about the future of open societies in Japan and China, and the future of journalism in particular.

The idea for this round-table discussion came about when I had the luck of observing the very interesting discussion that took place between Tsuda-san and Anti-san when Anti-san visited Japan in 2010.1 Although at the time Anti-san sketched out a rather bright future, I think there have been a number of changes since then in both China and Japan, including the aftereffects of both the Arab Spring e79

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(the Jasmine Revolution) and the Great East Japan Earthquake. Therefore, in consideration of this new context, I would like to inquire into your thoughts regarding what role social media plays in changing Japan and China and, in particular, the potential in both countries for members of civil society to directly connect with each other without government and mass media mediation.

There is one more thing: Both Tsuda-san and I are setting up new media in Japan and attempting to change society in whatever small way possible. As such, I would also like to hear about trends in the outside world that are difficult to perceive from within Japan. For that reason, today is not just about how the younger generation is changing Japan, or how the younger generation is changing China. Instead, through exchanging our experiences, I hope to develop a broader discussion about the possibility of transformation.

Anti

Thank you. And Tsuda-san, welcome to China.

Tsuda

This is my first time in China, so I am very nervous. [Laughter] Thank you.

Anti

I think you have both already experienced Chinese censorship at the hotel. Using the hotel’s Wi-Fi, you can’t view Twitter or YouTube.

Sometimes there are even problems with Gmail. This is the big problem with China’s internet. If you compare Japan and China, while there is next to no censorship in Japan, the internet and other major media are cut off from each other. In China, the relationship between the two is very close, and it is becoming an extremely large societal resource. But there’s censorship in China. I think these are the advantages and disadvantages in Japan and China.

Anyway, first of all I’d like to ask Tsuda-san: how do you feel about the internet environment in Japan as the post-disaster “hero”?

Tsuda

No, no, you’re mistaken, Anti-san. I’m no “hero.” [Laughter] Quite simply, seen from the viewpoint of information dissemination straight after the disaster, when we speak of what happened at the forefront of social media with the flow of disaster-related information, there is the feeling that 3.11 provided the opportunity for considerably changing the relationship between Japan’s mass media

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and social media. At the root of that is the fact that the mass media completely failed to convey the full extent of the damage in the extremely large area of the Pacific Coast that stretches for more than 1000 kilometres, as well as the different degrees and natures of the damage caused by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident.

Conventional mass media is bound by an established grammar.

With television, for example, there is little alternative but to select and film a location that illustrates how bad the damage from the tsunami is in an easily comprehensible manner. With almost a year having passed since the disaster, information about it has been rapidly declining, with only NHK2 continuing coverage. To start with, due to the fact that there was no system in place to guarantee the supply of gasoline immediately after the disaster, there was very little coverage of areas in the northern parts of the prefecture, while there was coverage of places in the south of Fukushima, such as Iwaki, which are closer to Tokyo. Once the gasoline supply was secured, coverage became centered on the widely damaged areas of Kesennuma and Rikuzentakata, providing “picturesque” images. Affected areas south of Sendai received little coverage. In the damaged areas of Japan, this is referred to as “the problem of the affected area’s north/south divide.”

Even in the places in which footage was taken, the local residents became uncooperative from around the autumn of 2011. There was a widening disillusionment among the people, who felt that even if they spoke to the mass media, their words wouldn’t be included in an article, or that even if they did make it into an article, nothing would change. There was thus an increase in the number of people who would no longer speak to the media. Regardless of how motivated journalists may be, there are limits to the people they can reach and extent to which they can change reality through conventional methods. Concerning the disaster coverage, I think this is now a big problem with Japan’s mass media.

If I talk about social media, on the other hand, based on my own experiences I came to see a new potential. Immediately after the disaster I wanted to go to the affected areas straight away in order to report on the current situation through Twitter. However, it was hard to get gasoline, and I was worried about covering affected areas whose condition I didn’t understand, so I didn’t end up taking the plunge.

When I began to consider what I could do instead, I realized there e81

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was Twitter. At the time there was a lot of confusing information being distributed on the internet, and I thought it would be of use if I could become a hub, disseminating information that was somewhat reliable and information that had been verified. I did this for about a month or so.

But watching television and reading newspapers in Tokyo didn’t allow me to grasp the full picture. I thought I wouldn’t be able to understand things unless I went there, so I ended up traveling around the affected areas by car. When I did, there were so many things there that couldn’t be understood from the television and newspapers. I was shocked. Thus, I reconsidered what I could do and thought that my role was to use the power of social media to convey the smaller fragments of reality, those that slip through the mass media’s coverage in accordance with its grammar. That’s how I began sending out information concerning the affected areas.

What I came to notice during the time I was covering the affected areas was the importance of writing things such as “I am in this area at the moment. Where would it be best to cover?” on Twitter. I would receive replies from locals such as “Report on this place please” and “Please give my situation some coverage.” Listening to what they had to say and then reporting on Twitter, I would then receive additional and supplementary information from locals. Through the constant process of retweeting such information, I became something of a catalyst and was able to create a reciprocal relationship with the actual voices of locals. I felt this was a kind of new type of micro-journalism.

By informing people of the conditions in the affected areas that the mass media wasn’t covering, it made things easier for those engaged in relief efforts. Because individuals are the nucleus of NPO style activities, it was important that the number of people supportive of these activities increased through the use of social media. A new situation then arose: those people who weren’t mobilized by the mass media’s grammar of information worked as volunteers in the affected areas based on information on Twitter and Facebook. This information invited new participants to engage in these activities and created new circuits of information, thus gaining the trust of people in those areas.

Anti-san just said, “Although there is no censorship in Japan, the mass media and social media are cut off.” I think even with the reporting on the nuclear accident we could see the limits of traditional mee82

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dia.

Whether newspapers or television, traditional media only reported information that was 100% confirmed or 100% certain because they toed the line of the government’s announcements. As for the nuclear accident, since we can’t actually see inside, reporting must essentially be based on speculation. Journalists have to keep the information flowing even if it is unverifiable, saying things like “based on the current situation, we can speculate that perhaps….” or “specialists predict this, but this seems only 80% probable.”

However, the traditional media didn’t use this method of reporting. In order to stick to infallibility, in the end they could only continue to repeat the government’s line that “it is safe.” In conferring with the government, the traditional media acted as one with the government. However, a different phenomenon arose within social media. With the presence of specialists from various fields, including those of atomic energy and physics, in social media, information such as “people close to the nuclear plant should evacuate” came to be distributed. In reality, only watching television to understand what was happening in Fukushima was insufficient. Although it was said that “people within the 20km zone should evacuate,” what about those living within the 25km or 30km zones? What should they do?

It was impossible to make a decision with the information on television and in newspapers. So what did those residents do? They used the internet to search for radiation measurements in their area and began evacuating on their own accord. Quite differently from China, up until now in Japan there has been a considerably high level of trust in the government and also the television and newspapers that adhere to it. However, if we speak about the people in Fukushima and its vicinity, the disaster became a turning point, and the situation has clearly changed. I have gone on for a while, but this is the post 3.11 situation of Japan’s mass media and social media, as well as the government and social media.

I would now like to ask you a question. Since our last dialogue, and particularly after 3.11, how does Japan’s media now appear in your eyes?

Anti

It was on Twitter that I found out that the disaster had occurred. The first reports I saw were tweets by Japanese people and Chinese exchange students. Information was distributed on Twitter and Sina e83

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Weibo3 much faster than in the mass media.

I became acquainted with VOA (Voice of America)4 reporter Steve Herman living in Japan through the reporting on 3.11. Using Twitter, he circulated various messages in English regarding the earthquake and the state of the nuclear problem. What I knew about the internal situation in Japan was because of them. In other words, I primarily got information through social media and thus had no idea about what kind of information Japan’s traditional media was circulating.

Japan’s traditional media probably think that they are the “mainstream” of information. When seen from overseas, however, they have a tiny voice because they aren’t prominent on the internet. Thus social media, and in particular the voices of foreign journalists living in Japan who are active on Twitter, have a big influence in the international community. Therefore, like Tsuda-san, I also regard the role of the social media highly in regards to reporting on 3.11.

f rom tw itte r to s in a w e ib o Azuma Anti

How is social media currently being taken up in China?

The biggest event after I returned home from Japan (December 2010) was the Arab Spring. Then in February 2011, under the pretext of the Jasmine Revolution, the Chinese government began the suppression of Twitter users, detaining more than 200 users nationwide. Ai WeiWei was also arrested.5 Starting with journalists and university professors, a large number of intellectuals began moving to Sina Weibo to escape the targeting of Twitter. And Sina Weibo now has 300 million users across the country.

If social movements and change in China arose on Twitter during 2009 and 2010, they arose on Sina Weibo in 2011. However, one important way in which Sina Weibo differs from Twitter is that its servers are located in Beijing, meaning that politically sensitive things will definitely not appear on it.

Furthermore, with Sina Weibo there is no widening of the social network and it doesn’t easily lead to social campaigns. Or rather, it was made so that that couldn’t happen.6 Sina Weibo’s system is an improvement on Twitter and thus, if anything it has now become a “rich” platform that resembles Facebook. As Tsuda-san is aware of, Twitter’s strength is in creating social connections through dispersed e84

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relationships. Sina Weibo doesn’t have that. And then there are the accounts of famous people. The famous people on Sina Weibo are basically also famous in real life. Thus Sina Weibo’s network is nothing more than an elaborate copy of our actual society and has a considerably different character than what is generally referred to as social media. It resembles China’s domestic traditional media instead. Its influence is not based in its character as social media but rather in being nothing more than an elaborate copy of the elite society existing within our actual society.

And as I said before, censorship is at work within it. For example, in order for the central government to drive out Bo Xilai, the Committee Secretary of the Communist Party’s Chongqing branch, it became possible to search the name of Wang Lijun, the vice mayor of Chongqing who sought political refuge at the American consulate, on Sina Weibo (This monitoring is no longer possible).7 This scandal remained a topical issue, as it was possible to find information about Wang Lijun on the internet. In other words, the central government used the media to pressure those with connections to the regional government.

This is not the first time it has happened, either. In July 2011, at the time of the Wenzhou bullet train accident,8 the central government permitted debate about the event on Sina Weibo for a full five days. During that time a total of ten million debates occurred, but from the sixth day they began being censored. The reason for this is that the government used the opportunity to control the Ministry of Railways and purge its corrupt former minister. The Ministry of Railways is said to be its own fiefdom in China, much like Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Company. [Laughter]

There are probably no other examples in the world of “freedom of expression” being used in this way, as a tool to gain control over political opponents. This is very smart censorship.

Tsuda

In that case, as you just said in your analysis, if you search out what information is censored, you can understand the way in which the government wants to control the media. Just as you explicated now.

That’s the peculiar condition of the social media age. When there were only magazines and television, information could be closely monitored before it went into circulation. However, that can’t be e85

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done with social media, whose monitoring may only occur after the fact, thus rendering it observable.

Anti

In China monitoring is the norm so to have no monitoring would be much more “strange.” [Laughter]

the disaste r and pro-japanization Azuma

What was the coverage of 3.11 like in China?

Anti

3.11 had a very great effect on Japan-China relations.

Firstly, China’s traditional media sent a large number of reporters to Japan to cover 3.11. While those reporters were in Japan covering 3.11, their attitudes toward Japan underwent a thorough transformation, the same that I experienced when I was invited to Tokyo as a researcher in 2010. The reporters who set off with a nationalistic attitude in the beginning became thoroughly pro-Japanese upon returning home. But what I want to say here is not that they “became non-nationalistic.” On the contrary, they returned as “pro-Japanese.”

[Laughter] This tendency had a strong influence on the reporting of Japan-China relations and led to an improvement in the reporting environment, I think.

Tsuda

That’s very interesting. Was it that the sight of the disaster-struck areas elicited compassion?

Anti

Although the disaster areas brought up memories of the Sichuan earthquake, this is only one of the reasons. The main reason is perhaps that in order to cover the disaster areas the reporters spent a significant period of time in Japan. If Chinese people spend two weeks in Japan and during that time report on normal citizens in an authentic manner, I think they lose their nationalistic prejudices. That is my experience of the time I spent in Tokyo. For most of the reporters, even if they had previously been to Japan, it had been for a short period, and their outlook had been prejudiced by the political nature of the things they were reporting on, such as Yasukuni. It was only here, this time, that a large number of reporters came to Japan for a longer period and without a political purpose.

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Azuma

Was this “change of feeling” that you are talking about something that was manifested in articles or in blog writings, for example? Or was it more like a rumor?

Anti

If you look at the reporting on Japan in China after 3.11, I think you can see that it has become more pro-Japanese than it was previously.

The media that had previously taken what is probably an anti-Japan bias are now taking a completely pro-Japan stance. The deeper understanding of Japanese culture is also reflected in overall changes, from article titles to design features like layout and photos.

Tsuda

Do you have any concrete examples?

Anti

The transformation has been so sweeping that it’s difficult to present one single article that illustrates this.

Before 3.11, Japan was an “evil country” and a “common enemy” in some places, however, Japan is now understood as a “neighbor,” “friend,” and “Asian brethren.” Chinese people generally don’t have favorable feelings toward foreign countries. Yet only Japan has been reported on in the same manner as were the Guangdong and Sichuan earthquakes. Having come into contact with the unique cultures of the affected areas, journalists introduced these cultures in a heartfelt way and depicted them as if they were “their own affected areas."

What we saw after 3.11 were people who were hurt, people who, despite being victims of such hardship, remained strong. We learned a lot from that, and we felt that they were the same as us. In this way, human empathy replaced fear and wariness of Japan, leading people to feel that the Japanese were among their East Asian brethren.

Azuma

Can’t this be seen as the result of the newly gained economic confidence that allows China to feel that Japan is no longer much of a rival?

Anti

No, I think that this transformation is limited to post 3.11. I can give you another example.

While I was living in Japan, I went around praising the fact that Southern People Weekly9 ran an interview with Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara in their October 18, 2010 edition. That was, at the time, the most pro-Japanese viewpoint imaginable, and, of course, a huge risk for the Southern group. However, the coverage after 3.11 has e87

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come to be so far in Japan’s corner that, even if we consider the same Southern group’s media, Ishihara’s interview actually feels “neutral.”

It’s the same with all mainstream media, such as Lifeweek10 and China News Weekly.11 Such a transformation occurred because the agenda is set by journalists. Journalists in China very strongly “lead their readers.” Readers do not lead journalists. Even in the case of reporting on Japan, it is clear that after journalists displayed a transformation, the interests of readers changed as well.

the stru ctu re of ch ina’s jo u rnal ism Tsuda

To touch on the topic of “freedom of expression,” in Japan’s media, even if journalists write articles that include emotional input, they are checked and sometimes rewritten at the desk, or even rejected if they don’t agree with the position of the company. In contrast to this situation, it seems that with China’s media, which functions on the basic premise that speech is regulated by the state, the company’s internal system permits journalists to express their opinions in their articles.

Anti

That’s right. The reason for this is that unlike journalism in the West and Japan, each of which has developed over however many decades, journalism in China burst onto the scene around 2000.

Azuma Anti

Can you explain that?

The modernization or commercialization of China’s media occurred in synch with the diffusion of the internet in China. The internet became available in most of China’s cities in 1998. At the same time, with the progression of the liberalization policies of Jiang Zemin (the general secretary of the Communist Party at the time), a large amount of capital flowed into the media in the latter half of the 1990s, and commercialization progressed. In 1998, Jiang allowed the creation of media groups in each of the major cities. Due to this, companies injected capital and entered into competition to expand around 2000.

Thus, journalism rapidly developed at almost exactly the same time as the diffusion of the internet.

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nalists and had to look among internet users. The best journalists in China now are also the best internet users. By meeting with famous people on a daily basis and building up experiences and achievements, the journalists who were selected in this way gained trust comparatively quickly. On the other hand, editors who have just recently graduated from university and haven’t had the chance to create names for themselves are in a weaker position than journalists, for the most part. In other words, journalists have more power. There is an exceptionally small number of what are called high-ranking editors, but most of them are former journalists.

As I was discussing before, the fact that the way in which Japan was covered underwent drastic change on the basis of the reporters’ experience there was made possible by the fact that reporters who go on overseas assignments are already powerful and their agendas aren’t something that editors can change.

Tsuda

I think these high-ranking editors probably correspond to what in Japan are called desuku. Are such high-ranking editors not able to reject the articles written by journalists?

Anti

No, they can’t. Concerning international news, it is normally the case that domestically based journalists and editors have no say because people based domestically have no understanding of what’s happening in foreign countries.

At any rate, the agenda is decided by the actual reporting journalists. While in the case of domestic news the desuku retains the right of judgment, with international issues the journalists’ power is far stronger. I write a column on overseas affairs, for example, and the editor basically never discusses the theme of it with me and seldom edits my copy.

Azuma

I see. That’s interesting. If viewed from our perspective in Japan, what you just described seems to pertain more to the world of the internet.

In Japan’s traditional media, the editors are extremely powerful.

Anti

The same applies to America. In media that has experienced development over a long period, editors accumulate know-how and build careers. That’s quite natural. However, in our case the media has still only been around for ten years, therefore editors with a good deal of e89

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experience are only just beginning to appear.

Azuma

In that case, it is impossible to even set up an opposition between traditional media and internet media.

Anti

That’s right. Traditional media was cultivated during the internet era from the outset.

Tsuda

That’s a really important point.

To begin with, Japanese people know next to nothing about the transformation in Chinese reporting about Japan after 3.11, which we were discussing before. I think that, in itself, is a symbolic matter in the sense of information’s segmentalization. In Japan’s traditional media there isn’t really any reporting on “how Japan is seen in China.”

After the disaster I saw an article that was empathetic with Japan in a right-of-center Chinese newspaper which somewhat recognized that it appeared as though “the disaster had even changed China.” Almost a year has passed since then, however, and I had no idea about the current transformation. This segmentation is severe.

Azuma

What about the financial aspect of the relationship between traditional and internet media? Which pays better?

Anti

There’s a certain amount of variation, but for the most part there is not a great difference. Of course, it’s a different matter if you’re in a high-ranking position.

Tsuda

That’s a real problem for Azuma-san and myself. [Laughter] Azuma-san, for example, has established a publishing company.

I’m also now creating a media company without a sponsor, and I’d like to employ journalists and editors. However, if you attempt to do that in Japan, there’s too large a gap between remuneration in traditional media and internet media, and you can’t get talented people.

People who work for major newspapers and publishers are already bringing in ten million yen a year in their thirties. I can’t possibly hire them at my company.

Anti

China is quite unique then. The internet companies in China have been supported by American money since the beginning. It enters e90

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through IPO (public stock offerings) or as venture capital investment.

China’s four major portals, Sina, Sohu, NetEase, and QQ,12 are all actually supported by NASDAQ capital. Chinese internet news sites therefore have no shortage of funds and are able to attract high quality editors and journalists with financial sweeteners. I am guessing that it would be difficult to copy this model in Japan.

Azuma

It seems that in Chinese journalism there’s only an opposition between government censorship and media rather than one between old and new media. What is the position of government controlled media, then?

Anti

There are four so-called “government controlled media,” which are People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Guangming, and JFDaily (Jiefang).

However, they’re received as mouthpieces of the government and are read in a different way than are other media.

In China there are now said to be 500 million people who get their news from the internet, and among those are 300 million who use mobile devices to read the news. And in Beijing there aren’t any newsstands that sell People’s Daily. If you wanted to read People’s Daily, the only way would be to get a monthly subscription. Chinese people get it in order to find out what the Zhongnanhai (China’s leaders) want to communicate.

Even amongst the older generations that don’t use the internet, it is not government mouthpiece papers like People’s Daily that they normally read, but rather regional papers that are called “city news,” chief among which are the likes of Southern Weekly.

Azuma

I see. In other words, the opposition between new and old media that is currently occurring in Japan doesn’t exist in China’s journalism.

This is a telling fact, for Japanese commentators have gotten rather used to opposing mass media and internet media.

words as ve h icle for the conveyance of t he t ao Tsuda

In relation to the current discussion, another point that I think differs from Japanese media is the fact that journalists write with a good deal of emotion about what they feel. Aside from a small number of journalists’ columns, such a grammar doesn’t exist in Japanese newse91

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papers. There are rare examples, such as “Minami-Sanriku Diary,” which used to run in the Asahi Shinbun, but even that stopped being published in the nationwide edition.

Anti

I think that’s a problem related to professionalism in Japan’s media.

Since the Han period in China, it has traditionally been said that compositions follow the notion of wen yi zai dao, or in other words, the idea that words should be a vehicle to convey the Tao. This means that “all compositions ought to possess both principles and a perspective.”13 Thus, Chinese people have always been accustomed to compositions embodying a specific perspective.

Still, from 2000 to 2008 American-style professional journalism14 had momentum in China, as well. The event that triggered this was what the journalist Zhang Ping—who now goes by the name Chang Ping—and editor Qian Gang wrote an article, which was published in the Southern Daily Group’s newspaper, Southern Weekly, in 2002, about the Zhang Jun case that occurred in Changde, Hunan.15 His text made his viewpoint very clear, and was consequently considered by the Sichuan provincial government to be a “deliberate attack on the party and government.” Both Qian Gang and Zhang Ping were fired.

This was followed by a contrasting case. In 2003 the same Southern Daily Group’s newspaper, Southern Metropolis Daily, reported on the Sun Zhigang incident. This incident refers to the case of the university graduate, Sun Zhigang, who went out one day without his Guangzhou resident permit and was arrested and died in detention under suspicious circumstances. A journalist called Chen Feng reported on the incident in the style of American journalism, balanced halfway between the bereaved family’s story and the government’s story, and without any emotion or perspective. As a result, although Southern Metropolis Daily was rebuked by the government, Chen Feng achieved personal success. He was selected among the top ten journalists of that year and went on to become the CEO of a large internet company.

Tsuda

That’s an interesting story. What kind of person is Chen Feng, and what kind of company is he the CEO of?

Anti

He’s now is his early forties.

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Azuma Anti

Tsuda Anti

He’s around the same age as us.

He used to be at Ku6,16 which is China’s second or third most accessed video site. At first he was a regular journalist at Southern Metropolis Daily, but after being chosen among the top ten journalists he moved to The Beijing News as a journalist and became head of the news department. After that he was on the news desk at Sohu and then became the general editor of Ku6. From there he changed jobs again and is now the CEO of the company that operates the video site PPTV.com.

This is a telling example. If you employ American-style professional journalism, you can be chosen as one of the best journalists and make a lot of money. In comparison, Qian Gang and Zhang Ping, who stuck with wen yi zai dao, lost their jobs. Looking at these two cases, many people abandoned writing things with perspective at the drop of a hat and adopted an American-style professionalism.

However, this rather short period of American-style professionalism has ended. The reason for this is that micro-blogging sites like Sina Weibo started gaining popularity. It’s hard to continue writing on micro-blogs without putting any feeling into the posts, and readers now expect such posts. Thus, journalists have returned to the tradition of wen yi zai dao.

How do you personally feel about that situation?

There are good points to American professionalism. By first making the facts clear, one provides a basis upon which oppositional factions, such as left-wingers and right-wingers, may enter into dialogue.

There is no classification of journalists according to their political affiliations, as is the case in Taiwan’s media.

Still, that is nowhere near enough. China is an extremely diverse country, and the different interests rarely converge. Thus, even if public consensus is sought, there are too few facts we can speak of.

Conversely, what is necessary for us is more reporting with feeling and perspective. Furthermore, we need to raise up the large number of silent voices. I therefore support reporting with perspective at this point in time, because it can powerfully represent the voiceless multitudes.

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the information environment and democratization Azuma

I think that is very interesting and of relevance when we consider the situation in Japan. What Tsuda-san and I are currently doing is perhaps creating that very journalism which follows wen yi zai dao.

By the way, this will probably sound paradoxical, but listening to what has been said today, it appears that China is, in a certain way, even more “democratized” than Japan. Of course, it is commonsensical to expect a single-party state to not be democratic. In that sense Japan is an entirely democratic country. In actual fact, however, due to the warped structure of the media, information flow is inadequate, and democratic decision-making is not as functional as it may appear to be from the outside. Traditional media employ self-censorship, and there’s a lot of information that isn’t available to normal citizens. 3.11 was a symbolic event in bringing this to light.

For those of us who live in such a country, the future of China’s civil society appears to be rather bright…

Anti

There is a comparatively good symbiosis between internet and traditional media in China, and hence we could say that our environment of information circulation is better than that of Japan. The state of news coverage is also better than in Japan. Still, it is a serious problem that the media can’t debate politics on account of the existence of censorship.

Azuma

What I said was of course on that premise.

Anti

In other words, even if we solve the small problem of the circulation of social issues, there still remains the large problem of the structure of the political system. The greatest obstruction caused by censorship is the severe restriction of people’s movements. In other words, in these circumstances, as knowledge increases all the more, the possibility of taking action to change society becomes slimmer.

Azuma

Nonetheless, because the obstruction is clear, the action that ought to be taken is also clear.

On the other hand, there’s clearly no censorship in Japan. Anything about politics can be debated. However, even though it is debated, politics doesn’t change, and even if you attempt to change socie94

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ety through using Twitter, the enemy you ought to bring down is not clear. This is a difficult problem for us, and in this situation it seems that it is actually easier to arouse action in China.

Anti

Actions can’t be taken. Instead, as people get all the more information, cynicism will erupt in the face of situations in which action cannot occur. They don’t have the courage to take to the streets and start a resistance movement. Or if there is already a resistance movement underway in the streets, they won’t hesitate to jump in and espouse their dissatisfaction alongside it.

The actions of Chinese internet users are actually unstable in this way, and if they did start a revolution in the near future, the decisive cause wouldn’t be internet debate, but instead a severe crisis in China’s economy.

Azuma

That there will be change if economic conditions tighten is also likely the same with Japan.

info rm ation activism and beyond Tsuda

Anti Tsuda Anti

In such uncertain conditions, I believe that Anti-san is attempting to be involved with China’s democratization by observing society at its forefront and by circulating information.

I would like to ask you once more: do you personally want to take the position of a journalist who distributes information objectively, or do you want to be involved as an activist? The reason for this is that I previously identified myself as a journalist, but 3.11 caused me to rethink that stance. Now my interest is in what may be called information activism, which tries to move people emotionally and mobilize them through the subjective selection and circulation of information. That’s why I’m going about trying to create my own media.

While I have started such activities in Japan, I’m interested to know what kind of stance you plan to take from now on.

That’s an incisive question! Well…….

So then….? ……. I’m a fan of Ryoma Sakamoto. e95

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Tsuda

Really? I share the same birthday as him. [Laughter]

Anti

That’s probably why I like you. [Laughter] Ever since I was young, I’ve always wanted to make a great contribution to history just like Ryoma. From 2009 I have been a freelancer, and the reason for this is to determine what is best for me to do. And I’ve arrived at the conclusion that what I ought to do is construct a public diplomacy.

I want to create a network of empathy toward Chinese civil society, as well as personal relationships between China and Japan, Korea, and Western countries. In creating such a network I want to establish a second channel for diplomatic exchange so that the world doesn’t only have to have exchanges with the Chinese government, but can instead have exchanges with Chinese civil society. The reason for this is that I would like to persuade the international society to support China’s democratization, China’s civil society, and the internet.

My current job is primarily conveying China’s current conditions to important organizations such as the American government and media. There are plans in place for me to give a lecture about the internet in China at TED Global17 in Scotland in June of this year. I also helped the Japanese embassy open up an account on Sina Weibo after I returned from Japan. On account of that, one of the officials at the embassy received hundreds of messages on Sina Weibo and was able to learn about the feelings of normal Chinese people. Furthermore, the children’s author Zheng Yuanjie’s visit to Japan one year after the disaster was prompted by my referral of him to the Japanese embassy.

I suppose that I’m perhaps aiming at something more than information activism. There is a gap between information and action, and it’s necessary to fill that. In order for people with information to create useful action, they need funds, firstly, and also political networking. That’s what I’m interested in.

Tsuda

It is for that very reason that I think the example of someone with a journalist’s competency working as the CEO of a large media company is important, as with Chen Feng, who was discussed before.

As we touched on previously, it would be difficult for someone such as Chen Feng to succeed in Japan because he did so with American capital. If you’re able to operate with money that’s collected directly from individuals, then democratized journalism in its true sense e96

Journalism and the Future

will appear. In the past year or two in Japan it has become possible for people who have a certain presence on the internet, like Azumasan and I, to use social media’s power to collect funds and build independent media. By conveying our intention through the media, both Azuma-san and I have collected small amounts of funds from many people. Thus, there are no so-called “constraints.” While of course this is a tougher “thorny path,” the fact that it has become possible is truly an enormous transformation.

Anti

Additionally, translation is of utmost importance when we talk of networking. We don’t know what is happening on your side and you don’t know what is happening with us. The first step is thus the creation of organizations responsible for Chinese-Japanese translations, such as the translation site Dongxi Net.18 It could just be a blog.

Why is it that Sola Aoi19 is popular with Chinese people? First, of course, is that her work doesn’t need to be translated. [Laughter] The next important thing, though, is that she posts in Chinese on Sina Weibo. With that we’re able to know what it is that she’s thinking about each day. In other words, breaking down the language barrier is the first step toward cooperation.

Azuma

It’s just as you say.

Younger Japanese readers are becoming rapidly internalized and have little interest in information from overseas. There are lots of people who can’t read English at all. I hope this discussion will provide an opportunity to change that situation.

Furthermore, it’s important that we go about communicating in our global society as the same Asian people, rather than just between the two countries, China and Japan. My company has created an English website and is actively going about translating essays by young Japanese public intellectuals, including the reportage that Tsuda-san wrote for Shisouchizu Beta vol. 2, and making them publicly available.

We’re also planning to have this discussion translated into English.

I’ve been able to hear a lot about the current state of Chinese civil society and journalism today and think it has provided invaluable clues for considering Japan henceforth. Anti-san, Tsuda-san, and I are all roughly of the same generation. In the future I would like to strengthen our mutual connection and make efforts to create a new knowledge network that is based on individuals. e97

Michael Anti, Daisuke Tsuda, Hiroki Azuma

Thank you to everyone for what has been a long discussion.

16 February 2012 Trends Lounge, Beijing Chinese to Japanese Translation: Yoshiko Furumai

1. “Twitter is changing the future of Japan-China relations” (Twitter ga kaeru nicchu no mirai) http://www.newsweekjapan.jp/stories/world/2010/11/post-1767.php 2. Japan’s national public broadcasting organization.

3. The most widely used micro-blogging service in China. Along with the major portal site Sina (http://www.sina.com/), it is operated by the Sina Corporation. The website’s URL is http://weibo.com/.

4. Voice of America is an international broadcasting station run by the American government. It broadcasts news and a variety of programs across mediums such as radio and the internet.

5. Ai WeiWei is a contemporary Chinese artist born in 1957. He is known for his political activism, including the survey he undertook of the damage from the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008. He was in police custody from April 3 to June 22 of 2011, and was under police investigation after his release.

6. Censorship gives rise to a major risk associated with the public release of personal information. In the article referred to in the above notes, “Twitter is changing the future of Japan-China relations,” Anti states that “there is no way that cloud computing will develop in China’s internet industry. This is because people aren’t able to entrust it with their own personal information”.

7. Bo Xilai’s confidant Wang Lijun visited the American consulate in Chengdu on February 6, 2012 and applied for asylum. The circumstances surrounding this incident were subject to speculation on the internet. After this roundtable took place, Wang Lijun’s name could no longer be searched for on Sina Weibo. On March 15, 2012, Bo was relieved of his duties as the Committee Secretary of the Communist Party’s Chongqing branch.

8. On July 23, 2011, two trains on the Yongtaiwen line in Wenzhou collided on a viaduct, derailing and partially falling from it. Forty people were killed in the accident.

The Ministry of Railways, which controls the line on which the accident occurred, were burying part of the train involved in the accident at the site up until July 27. In response to this came an internet—and particularly Sina Weibo—outpouring of criticism against the Ministry of Railways as well as speculation about the conditions surrounding the accident.

9. Southern People Weekly, published by the major publisher Southern Daily Group, is a weekly magazine dealing primarily in personal criticism. An interview with Ishihara appeared in the special edition titled “The Ishihara you don’t know,” was published on October 18, 2010.

10. Lifeweek is a weekly magazine published by the major publishing company Sanlian. Its content is wide-ranging and covers social, economic and cultural themes,

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Journalism and the Future among others.

11. China News Weekly is a weekly news magazine published by China News Service.

It started publishing a Japanese version, Monthly China News, from August, 2008.

12. For Sina, see note 2 above. Sohu (http://www.sohu.com/), NetEase (http://www.163. com/), and QQ (http://www.qq.com/) are all major web portals.

13. Just as a vehicle can be loaded with luggage, a text ought to preach the “way,” that is, the ethics and morals of Confucianism. This is a teaching that is often explained in relation to Han Yu, the Tang dynasty man of letters, and Zhou Dunyi, the NeoConfucian scholar.

14. This refers to the form of journalism that is supported by professional journalists and editors and exists in contrast to citizen journalism, which places a great deal of importance on information distributed through blogs, social networking services, and video sites.

15. On September 1, 2000, the criminal group led by Zhang Jun attacked an armored cash vehicle in Changde city in Hunan province, killing seven people in the process.

16. http://www.ku6.com/ 17. TED is an American organization that organizes a large-scale annual conference.

The TED conference is held in Long Beach, California and focuses on the themes of technology, entertainment, and design. TED Global is its sister project, whose conferences are held outside of America. It will run from June 25–29 in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2012.

18. http://dongxi.net/ 19. Sola Aoi is a Japanese pornographic actress born in 1983. Her Sina Weibo account, which was created on November 11, 2010, had more than 10 million fans (what corresponds to followers on Twitter) as of April, 2012.

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Japanese pages: pp. 054–083

short story

It’s Not as if Everything Should Be Taken Politically Genichiro Takahashi

Abstracts

Translated by Naoki Matsuyama

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The stage is a country known as “Japan.” A girl who goes by the name of Azumi, an elite hitwoman trained at the prestigious Koga no Sato Murder Academy as well as a virgin, receives an order from the boss in hiding, who is the inheritor of a family emblem depicting a flower and a patriot. The target is an elderly man who, having begun his career as an author, became a politician and, eventually, the president. He is far past his 100th birthday, and Azumi approaches the old man—who, she thinks, has lost his wits—with her guard down, however . . .

Around the same time, a man is driving drunk with his pal toward the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A trip that began for no particular reason is accompanied by the music of a Geiger counter that changes tracks according to radiation levels in the air. Drinking gallons of beer, the two charge ahead toward the central gate of the plant toting a certain “machine.”

Japanese pages: pp. 102–212

p rop os al

Constitution 2.0 Genron Constitution Committee (Masanori Kusunoki, Ryosuke Nishida, Masayoshi Sakai, Hideaki Shirata, Hiroki Azuma)

This section presents the Genron Draft for a New Japanese Constitution. The Genron Constitution Committee was composed of Hiroki Azuma and other members who answered his call for a new constitution, namely Masanori Kusunoki, Ryosuke Nishida, Masayoshi Sakai, and Hideaki Shirata.

The new constitution is comprised of a Preamble and one hundred articles that are divided into three parts: “Part 1: System of Government,” “Part 2: Rights,” and “Part 3: Auxiliary Provisions.” Moreover, in order to provide readers a better understanding of the purport of the new constitution, the articles have been divided into twelve sections, each presented with added commentary by committee members.

As Azuma mentions in his introduction, the most important idea expressed in the new constitution is that of making Japan as a “flow” and Japan as a “stock” compatible. In order to make this possible, the principle of dualism runs throughout the constitution in the form of such concepts as Emperor and Premier, Nationals and Residents, the state and municipalities, and the House of Nationals and the House of Residents.

For example, “nationals” refers to those who possess Japanese nationality regardless of whether they live in Japan or abroad, while “residents” refer to those who live in Japan regardless of their nationality. Placing these two concepts in parallel reflects the committee’s intention to transform the constitution into one that better accords with the recognition that “in the future, Japanese culture will not solely belong to Japan, and different cultures will in turn flow into Japan.”

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Moreover, the division between Nationals and Residents is also reflected by the two-House system comprised of the House of Nationals and the House of Residents. While the House of Residents comprised of Nationals chosen by Residents mostly assumes the function of the current House of Representatives, the House of Nationals comprised of people around the world chosen by Nationals is expected to function as the “House of good sense” that oversees and guides the House of Residents, as well as the Prime Minister.

A broad array of topics from the current Constitution have been revised, including clearly stating the role of the Self-Defense Forces in disaster relief while inheriting the principle of war renunciation, and explicitly stating the Supreme Court’s right to abstract judicial review of legislation.

The new Constitution was drafted in the period between March and May 2012 in an online collaborative environment enabled by Google Docs. Its content, however, reflects the result of the discussions that took place during five meetings held by the committee members from October of the previous year. A report on the way in which these discussions developed is also included after the commentary.

The last part of this section is devoted to a timeline covering all draft constitutions in Japanese history accompanied by comments.

Japanese pages: pp. 214–251

p r op os al

Plan 2.0 for Remodeling the Japanese Archipelago Ryuji Fujimura

“Plan 2.0 for Remodelling the Japanese Archipelago” proposes the following: First, as a strategy to regenerate Japan domestically by rebuilding public finances and reconstructing a sustainable social infrastructure: 1) To divide political and economic zones according to the introduction of the regional system; 2) To form an economic core in urban centers on the basis of neoliberalism; 3) To reorganize communities in peripheral suburban areas by creating new public spheres.

Secondly, as a global growth strategy: 1) To strengthen the bond with Southeast Asia by exporting urban infrastructure as a package with a particular focus on the railway system in order to construct a Southeast Asian political and economic bloc and compete against China and India; 2) To remodel the territory of Southeast Asian countries in order to promote economic growth; 3) To promote human exchange between Japan and Southeast Asian countries in fields such as medicine, research, tourism, and education.

The key to both is the “JR (Japan Railway) system,” comprised of bullet train technology and station cities. Exporting this system to small-scale emerging countries that are of similar size and in close vicinity to Japan, such as Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, entails the political implication of competing against China and India.

The JR system, which reorganizes economic zones with the combination of a railway system and station cities, will be exported to Southeast Asian countries in order to construct infrastructure and reconfigure industries in the same manner in which Japan enacted the “Plan for

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remodeling the Japanese Archipelago,” pushed forward by former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka.

As a symbol of this, the “Axis of Questions,” which extends from Fukushima to Okinawa, will be stretched out, passing between Taiwan and the Phillipines, between Vietnam and Malaysia, reaching toward Indonesia and Singapore. Focusing on this Axis, the Southeast Asian economic bloc begins to appear as a single whole. The “Axis of Questions” that begins in Fukushima is thus transformed into the “Axis of Hope,” and is redefined as the symbol of the “Plan 2.0 for Remodelling the Japanese Archipelago.”

* This section also includes an archive of past national land plans in Japan.

Japanese pages: pp. 252–299

p rop os al

Literature 2.0 and the Future of Our Written Language Makoto Ichikawa

Late twentieth and early twenty-first century society has been taken by storm by the network and the computer. What is often overlooked is the fact that this entails not only the physical unification of all information transmission and data, but also changes in our perceptions of reality and mental structure that have not happened in several centuries. This change has had a devastating effect on the format of the “book,” which has been regarded as a given for the last 500 years, as well as on our thinking, which has been swayed by this format.

In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson discerns a “homogenous, empty space” within the dates at the top of the newspaper page, and states that this defined the modern state and its citizens. Even prior to that, we used pagination marked at the corner of the book object to symbolize a straight causality. There existed, as it were, time that progressed on a straight line.

The twenty-first century, however, is beginning to separate itself from this “homogenous, empty space.” Within the technology that uniformly connects the far away and the close, time and space are simultaneously lost, with only a “homogeneous, empty something” remaining as residue.

From the point of view of literature, or that of the underlying viewpoint of “regarding the world (perception),” this entails a transition from a metaphorical mode of thinking, wherein things are understood semantically (through a similitude with the object/event in consideration), to a metonymic mode of thinking whereby things are understood in terms of relationships (through a physical adjacency with the

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object/event in consideration). Today’s contents already present this trend.

Despite this, just like our bodies cannot lose sense of time and space even within the “homogeneous, empty something,” our thinking cannot disengage itself from the aspiration towards meaning. As a result, the remnant blankness after meaning falls away in the process of thinking turning metonymic is filled by “meanings” that are easier to understand, by slogans that are more sentimental and primitive. This at times leads to populism and tyranny.

The possibility of this becoming a reality or, contrarily, being avoided, is dependent on a layer of words that is different from “meaning.”

What this refers to is, to borrow Roman Jakobson’s term, the “poetic function of language,” which gives birth to surprise, doubt and beauty.

The twenty-first century is, in that sense, structurally and necessarily an “age of poetry.”

As samples of the above, this article compares the structure of the highly popular contemporary manga One Piece with a series of literary works from Soseki Natsume, a representative figure of Japanese modern literature, to Haruki Murakami. Moreover, this article is constructed using three different layers and separate chapters as an attempt to make the experience of reading the article itself into an experiment of the metonymic (adjacent) connection and injection of meaning.

Japanese pages: pp. 346–374

d ial ogu e

The “Bad Place” After 3.11—Tokyo Yohei Kurose, Noi Sawaragi, Hiroki Azuma

How should art change after the disaster in the “bad place”1 that is Japan? Or rather, is art really necessary for Japan?

This roundtable talk was held in February 2012, immediately after the opening of Takashi Murakami’s retrospective exhibition Murakami Ego, held in Doha, Qatar. With a particular focus on the stunning impact of Murakami’s epic The 500 Arhats presented in this exhibition, the three discussants addressed the role that art should assume following the unprecedented disaster.

Sawaragi points out that in comparison to his past works, Murakami’s The 500 Arhats clearly retreats from a preoccupation with America.

With the post-war framework itself reaching an impasse, it is necessary to reconstruct a larger scheme that moves beyond Japan-U.S. relations.

The 500 Arhats introduces an Oriental motif borrowed from Buddhism and is created not within a Western context, but for an exhibition organized by royalty in the Middle East. This is where the existing scheme is turned over.

Kurose appeals for a revision of otaku culture. The culture of otaku being “weak,” in that it cannot survive without artificial protection, is now faced with the need to make a decision given that the basis of its survival is beginning to crumble due to economic decline and the disaster. At the same time, with viewers no longer responding to the kind of art which asks them to decipher intricate artistic devices, he suggests that art necessitates a system that involves an “animal-like” crowd, applying to this notion the design of commercial spaces such as shopping malls.

As Azuma notes, Japan is a country that has a rare concentration of disasters, and that is what

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prompted the development of art and literature that differed from that of the West. Precisely because Japan is still struggling to recover from a natural disaster that was coupled with the manmade disaster of the nuclear accident, the time has come to reconsider the condition of this country—a bad place—so that we may redraw a new scheme.

1. A concept presented by Sawaragi in his seminal Japan /Contemporary / Art (Nihon / gendai / bijutsu, Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1998). Focusing on art history, Sawaragi describes post-war Japan, wherein any theme is forgotten only to be repeated, as a “bad place.”

Japanese pages: pp. 378–398

art i c l e

I Won’t Let You Say That You Don’t Love Gyaru-o —“Cool Japanology” and the Strong Definition of Perversion Masaya Chiba

Beginning in the late 1990s, a category of young women called gyaru appeared in Shibuya, Tokyo and the surrounding areas. These women are characterized by their black skin, acquired from tanning beds, their long hair bleached to white or gold, and a surfer-like American casual style.

A number of those gyaru achieved—albeit briefly—a minor stance for their exclusive enjoyment with an eerie mask-like contrast between their skin, further darkened with foundation, and brightly colored make-up, separating themselves from the general population. This is the style known as yamanba, named after a mountain witch in Japanese folklore.

On the other hand, gyaru-o are “soft” (nanpa) young men who emulated the style of gyaru so that they could be popular among the gyaru. In the 2000s, this style became pervasive among young men with the magazine men’s egg as its principal media outlet. When considering issues related to gender and sexuality among young contemporary Japanese men, the fact that the gyaru-o style has survived for more than a decade cannot be ignored. Despite this, gyaru-o have almost never been the subject of analysis and discussion. In contrast, the revolutionary character of gyaru as a resistance against conventional images of women has at times been discussed affirmatively. This is partly due to the fact that gyaru-o appear to be taking gyaru back to a phallocentric and heteronormative regime, opposing gyaru attempts at autonomy.

From a foreign perspective, the “Cool Japan” culture of the 2000s is represented by otaku content such as anime and video games. These form one extreme of Japanese popular culture.

There is, however, another extreme. It is the de-

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linquent yankii style, which promiscuously jumbles together the cultures of yakuza and manual laborers, as well as the biker and punk styles.

From the 1980s to today, the two extremes of Japanese pop culture have been the yankii on the one hand, and the otaku on the other. The male and female gyaru styles are forms that developed from the yankii—a “post yankii” style. Furthermore, in the late 2000s, the cultures of gyaru and otaku intersected while retaining their mutual hostility. This intersection is founded in the tendency among Japanese youth to approve of the “fictionalization of the body,” or “becoming like a fictional character.” It is this very tendency that the “frivolousness” (the artificial superficiality) of the gyaru-o vividly presents.

This article focuses on the fact that gyaru-o begin to bear a transgender-like countenance by seeking to turn into an “alter ego” of gyaru (to become/devenir gyaru). The most radical case is the “Center Guy” style, which disappeared immediately after it was established in 2004. By resolutely reducing themselves to mere followers of gyaru, the gyaru-o remain phallocentric and heteronormative, while at the same time potentially and seemingly rendering these norms worthless.

This article analyzes this duality, employing the concept of “disavowl” that is the essence of “perversion” within Lacanian psychoanalysis. And in doing so, Hiroki Azuma’s concept of “animalization,” discussed in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, transmutes to one that can better handle the intersection between otaku and gyaru(-o) in today’s Japan.

Japanese pages: pp. 400–421

a rt i c l e

The Chance of Winning Lies West of India —Updating Foreign Diplomacy 0.8 to 2.0 Shamil Kosuke Tsuneoka

Despite the fact that there is widespread concern that war will break out in Iran, there is no sign that action is being taken in Japan, a country that depends upon the Middle East for its supply of crude oil. To make things worse, a former prime minister has been criticized for attempting to establish a dialogue with Iran.

There is something wrong with Japanese foreign policy today.

On the other hand, the Taliban, which continues in its struggle against the United States, has repeatedly stated that it maintains a favorable attitude toward Japan. Amidst the present situation, in which it would be beneficial for the Taliban and the United States to reach a settlement through peace talks, there exists the need for a mediator. Due to its past relationship with Afghanistan, Japan appears to be seen by the Taliban as befitting of this role.

To date, Japan has carried out peace efforts and support activities for Afghanistan that deserve the Taliban’s recognition. Distancing itself from all forces related to the Afghan conflict and thus retaining its neutrality, Japan, both through official and private avenues, has been proactive in supporting the improvement of the people’s welfare without ever showing hostility towards the Taliban, even when they were in power. That is why Japan has a bigger advantage than any other country in the world in propelling the peace process forward.

Similarly, Japanese people have contributed to peace efforts and fought with civilians in many places around the world, either through the United Nations or via the activities of individuals. Anti-Japanese sentiments exist in neighboring states, but Japan is highly regarded

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in the world west of India.

However, Japan has not been making use of its advantages in recent years. The reason for this lies in the inability of the Japanese people to cast off the logic of the “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks . While in the United States the notion of “anti-terrorist war” has been made redundant by the Democratic administration and the focus has shifted toward the singling out of the locus of responsibility for the outbreak of the war in Iraq, Japan continues to be stranded within a set of old and parochial values.

Japan is now becoming introverted as interest in the world outside of the country diminishes in accordance with the stagnation of the economy. This is the first symptom of a country that is on its way toward losing its status as an advanced nation. The super–strong yen and the deflation of the cost of flight tickets due to the advent of low-cost carriers have created advantageous conditions. We should seize the occasion within the world west of India.

Japanese pages: pp. 422–434

art i c l e

The Disempowered Japanese Provinces —Is Consumer Society an Enemy of Democracy?

Ryosuke Nishida

Japanese provincial communities have entered a phase of major change. This article retraces the background of this change from the points of view of consumption and governance in order to discuss a vision of the future of local self-governing within regional areas in Japan.

A historical premise that forms the starting point for this discussion is the fact that the Constitution of Japan allowed the governance of Japan to be transformed but did not delineate a clear ideal and future vision for local governance. This may not necessarily be the direct cause of the issue in question, but as a result, the concentrated development of cities and industries was positioned as a top priority matter in the process of modernizing Japan. The expansion of regional physical infrastructure, such as traffic and communication networks as well as residential environments, and the development of sectors other than that of industry, have been persistently relegated to the back seat. The “democratization of consumption” finally arrived in regional areas after the 1990s, with the advent of shopping centers and e-commerce, both of which are often criticized for having destroyed the landscapes particular to each region. These changes allowed regional residents to obtain products and content that were until then only available in urban areas.

In the 2010s, locally led reformations of local governance began to be advocated in different regions in Japan. Characteristic of these proposals is that the structuring of regional areas is to be integrated with the reformation of the governing system of Japan as a whole. Existing forms of reformation based on the decentralization of power were insufficient due to the focus

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on finance. The fact that it is impossible to realize the self-governance of groups and residents without obtaining the authority of regional selfgovernance is finally being recognized.

This, however, resulted in bringing to the forefront the question of why one should participate in the operation of a community that is relatively inconvenient in its present state and paying the cost of local self-governance. This is because the choice of moving to a more convenient urban area from a regional community with an advanced “democratization of consumption” is always available.

This article will rethink the future vision and legitimacy of regional areas in Japan, employing viewpoints focused on consumption and governance.

Japanese pages: pp. 436–483

a rt i c l e

The Two Faces of Manga Go Ito

This article attempts a logical study of manga, a form of expression that is often treated as having a privileged connection to Japan.

The Japanese word “manga” embodies “all forms of expression that tell a story using a sequence of panels.” However, in general the word is used to refer only to the manga that developed uniquely in Japan with its domestic market as the background—in other words, only that manga which contains local expressive characteristics peculiar to Japan.

Manga, in this sense, is often treated on the same plane as anime, and is associated with the characteristics of kyara iconography that represent the characters in manga and anime. Symbolic of such iconography are the large, decorative eyes. In turn, these eyes—the anime eyes— are considered to be iconographic of Japan.

The major purpose of this article is to unravel the function those “large decorative eyes” have within the expressive device of manga, as well as to consider how they are related to the development of manga expression in Japan. In this endeavor, the concept of “semi-transparency” provides us with a foothold. This concept was proposed by Hiroki Azuma in response to the fact that the words of modernity, which aimed to depict “nature” directly through symbols, and the words of pre-modernity, wherein symbols themselves were filled with meaning and did not point directly to what lay behind them, were described using the analogies of “transparency” and “opacity,” respectively.

To say that Japanese manga and anime are semi-transparent is to acknowledge the fact that they contain both transparent and opaque elements. The anime eye is symbolic of the opaque.

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When discussed in relation to Japan, manga expression rarely displays the kind of transparency seen in Japanese modern literature, wherein reality is directly depicted. In light of this, this article retraces the history of Japanese manga and the process by which naturalistic realism was introduced to find both the transparent and the opaque in the two levels of the kyara iconography and the panel structure. The semitransparency located at the level of kyara iconography appears as the chimera of a character comprised of a nonfigurative head, epitomized by the anime eye, and a figurative body. The line that connects this chimera to a discussion of panel structure is the gaze of kyara.

The article further posits that the eyes/gaze of kyara is a major element that connects the spaces that are separated by panels over the plane of manga in order to deliver a meaningful narrative. This notion will contribute not only to further research in manga in general, but also to connect manga with other fields of expression, such as painting and film.

Japanese pages: pp. 484–510

art i c l e

National Quiz 2.0 Noriyasu Tokuhisa

A referendum should be held regarding constitutional revisions in order to respond to the post-1990s societal structural change, which is often described as the decline of the “Grand Narrative” (Lyotard). This is the premise of this article.

The reason for this is hidden in the history of quiz. Quiz is a universal format that traverses borders, but the questions themselves vary greatly according to cultural zones. Focusing on this brings to light the condition of contemporary Japan.

Post-war Japanese history, wherein culture was constantly formed by the nation’s relationship with the U.S., casts a clear shadow over the history of quiz. For example, quiz was introduced by the CIE (Civil Information and Educational Section) of the GHQ in an effort to democratize Japanese families. By nature, quiz programs promote communication on an equal footing among those who watch the program. In other words, quiz was utilized to invalidate the patriarchal family of the pre-war.

During the period of rapid economic growth, a program that called for audience participation and awarded to the winner a trip to Hawaii became highly popular. This system whereby the general public competed for a prize accorded with the mentality of the people at the time, and came to form the basic format of quiz programs.

In the 1980s, the legendary program Trans America Ultra Quiz (note that the program was staged in the U.S.) became popular, and with it, the level of participants, as well as the difficulty of the questions, increased dramatically.

However, as society became increasingly postmodernized, the value of cultural sophistication

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declined, contributing to the deterioration of the value of “being able to answer questions.” As a result, widespread audience support was lost, with quiz shows garnering audience participation becoming a thing of the past.

What became popular instead in the 2000s was a program wherein celebrities repeated nonsensical answers to elementary-level questions. Although such a program may seem vulgar, it is in fact supported by an intricate strategy. This is because the more stupid the respondents are, the easier the questions can be. This signifies the return of quiz’s ability to promote communication. Couldn’t this strategy be applied to society? A referendum on constitutional revisions is one way to make this possible.

A referendum is, in a way, a true-or-false quiz. In indirect democracy, people vote for candidates, with the points of dispute being different for each and every voter. With a referendum, however, the point of the question is clear.

Even if people cannot share the answer, at least the question may be shared. Precisely because people shut themselves up within segmented communities, we need to recover the simple “power of questions” that transcends communal bounds. Returning to the origins of post-war Japan, wherein everything from the constitution to subculture was created with material “made in America,” we shall once again make use of the power of quiz.

Contributors

Michael Anti (b. 1975) is a freelance journalist. Among other positions, he has worked as a researcher for the Beijing Bureau of the New York Times and as a columnist for the Southern Metropolitan Daily and Weekly.

He is a former Nieman fellow at Harvard University.

Masaya Chiba (b. 1978) is a researcher and critic. He specializes in philosophy and in the theory of culture and representation and is a part-time lecturer at Keio University and Atomi University.

Ryuji Fujimura (b. 1976) is an architect and lecturer at Toyo University. He established Ryuji Fujimura Architects in 2005 and withdrew from the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Architecture of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2008 after completing course requirements.

Maiko Fukushima (b. 1983) also known as Mofuku-chan, assumed the presidency of Moe Japan Co., Ltd. after graduating from the Faculty of Music of the Tokyo University of the Arts.

Yoshiko Furumai is a freelance writer based in Beijing. After graduating from the department of Chinese at the University of Kitakyushu, she travelled to Hong Kong where she worked as an editor for magazines before turning freelance. She prolifically reports about diverse facets of Chinese society.

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Makoto Ichikawa (b. 1971) is a literary critic and the planner/director of the journal Waseda Bungaku. He teaches at Waseda University.

Go Ito (b. 1967) is a manga critic and associate professor in the Department of Manga at the Tokyo Polytechnic University. He is the author of Tezuka is Dead.

Yohei Kurose (b. 1983) is an artist and art critic. He leads the artist group Chaos*Lounge which he formed with Uso Fujishiro and Kazuki Umezawa. He has contributed articles to Shisouchizu and other publications.

Masanori Kusunoki (b. 1977) is a visiting research fellow at GLOCOM International University of Japan. He specializes in information and communications policy and international standardization activities.

Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) is an artist and the president of Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. His solo exhibition at the Palace of Versailles and retrospective Murakami – Ego have been the subject of major international attention.

Ryosuke Nishida (b. 1983) is associate professor at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences at Ritsumeikan University. He specializes in information society theory and public policy.

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Masayoshi Sakai (b. 1968) joined the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry in 1993. He is the Senior Analyst for Global Strategy (Information Industry) at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (as of June 2012).

Noi Sawaragi (b. 1962) is an art critic and a professor at Tama Art University. He is the author of the seminal Japan-ContemporaryArt among other publications on Japanese art and culture.

Chiyomaru Shikura is a songwriter, composer and music producer. He plans and writes original stories for video games and produces themed cafes. His works include Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes. He is the president of MAGES. Inc. Kenshu Shintsubo (b. 1968) is a photographer. His publications include Rugged TimeScape and \landscape.

Hideaki Shirata (b. 1968) is professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Hosei University specializing in intellectual property law and information law.

Genichiro Takahashi (b. 1951) is an author and a professor at the Meiji Gakuin University. He is the author of numerous works including Sayonara, Gangsters.

Daisuke Tsuda (b. 1973) is a journalist and media activist. He is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Informatics of Kansai University.

Naoki Matsuyama (b. 1982) is a translator of English, Italian and Japanese. He graduated from the University of Cambridge and currently works for Genron Co., Ltd.

Shamil Kosuke Tsuneoka (b. 1969) is a freelance journalist specializing in conflicts and matters related to the Islamic world.

Noriyasu Tokuhisa (b. 1988) joined Genron Co., Ltd. as an editor after graduating from the School of Culture, Media and Society at Waseda University.

Takeshi Umehara (b. 1925) is a philosopher and Honorary Advisor of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken). His countless works that unravel the deep layers of Japanese culture through a comprehensive analysis of literature, history and religion is widely known as “Umehara Japanology.”

Kazuki Umezawa (b. 1985) is an artist. He graduated from the Department of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Musashino Art University. He participated in the Chaos*Lounge 2010 and Hametsu*Lounge exhibitions in 2010 and held the solo exhibition The Ground, Water and Ownerless Property Core in 2012.

Hiroki Azuma (b. 1971) is an author, critic and the president of Genron. He is professor at Waseda University. His publications include Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and General Will 2.0 (to be published in English in spring 2013).

Tetsuro Irie (b. 1988) is a graduate student at the University of Tokyo. He is an editor at Genron Co., Ltd.

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Brendan Deegan (b. 1981) is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University of Tokyo, specializing in Japanese Contemporary Thought and Critical Theory.

Chris Lowy (b. 1986) is a graduate student at the University of Washington. His research includes the contemporary literature and thought of Japan, as well as the Japanese writing system and its role on the literary experience. Researched at Waseda University as a MEXT scholar from 2010–2012.

John Person (b. 1979) is a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations specializing in the modern intellectual history of Japan.

Alex Ko Ransom (b. 1987) is a freelance translator and writer with a focus on Japanese content and subculture.

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