Pop Culture

(Big Danger in Little Osaka #21, 2009)

Coming to Japan is like stepping into a parallel pop-cultural universe, where suddenly quasi-ironic urban slang and an extensive library of Pulp Fiction quotes no longer hold any cultural capital. Unfamiliar celebrities adorn billboards, trendy stores blare the hottest tracks you’ve never heard, and schoolchildren wear bags emblazoned with strange new anime characters. If you do see a familiar Western face, they will be advertising a product you’ve never heard of: Cameron Diaz sells Softbank phones, Tommy Lee Jones is the spokesman for Boss coffee and Beyonce sells Crystal Geyser bottled water (“this is my water”) in a commercial that she would never dream of releasing in the United States.

The fashion in Japan, or at least in Osaka, is completely different and much more extreme, with styles including faux-Victorian gothic, old-school fifties’ rocker, and what can only be described as ‘the 80s in space’. Big hair is still in, and guys can look as androgynous as they please without getting beaten up. Fashion is taken very seriously: you always see girls re-applying their makeup on the train and guys readjusting their hair-dos in public bathrooms. While Japanese people are generally on the smaller side, there are still some pretty strange ideas about weight. I saw a magazine advertisement for a weight-loss programme: girls were going from “wow, that’s quite skinny” to “Jesus, she needs medical attention.” One girl had dropped from 51 to 38 kilograms. I have also been told that it is also considered attractive to have a ‘small face.’ Whatever that means, it’s something that apparently most Westerners don’t have, as many of my friends have been told “wow, you have a big face!” by their students.

Japan has the second largest music industry in the world, and it is largely self-contained since no other countries speak the Japanese language. You can find Japanese recordings in almost any genre (including a surprisingly extensive range of noise music, or ‘Japanoise’), leading to the feeling to that you are looking in on an alternate version of the history of popular music. The two big genres are, of course, J-pop and J-rock, which are inescapable. Somehow, the boy band has not yet died in Japan, and they still provide bland, nasty music and hunky guys for schoolgirls to swoon over; as one of my students told me, when writing about her favourite act, “EXILE is studmuffin group”. The hottest J-rock act right now is possibly the creepily-named ‘Mr. Children’, though I prefer J-rock mainstays ‘Bump of Chicken’ myself.

Japanese television is where the pop-culture of Japan all fuses together in one big sticky mess. One of the most popular formats is the variety show, where an ever-changing line-up of flavour-of-the-day models, actors and pop idols (collectively known as tarento, or ‘talent’) gather together to take part in bizarre games and ritual humiliation in front of a studio audience. Turn on the TV any given time and at least one channel will be showing this hugely entertaining format. Of course, the best parts of Japanese TV are the ad breaks: apparently Japanese commercials are limited to fifteen seconds each, so each one is an audiovisual assault of fast movement, celebrity endorsements and one-second jingles. Unlike back home, I often channel surf so that I watch nothing but ads, in the hope that I will see that one with the talking kangaroo, or that one where steam shoots out of Tommy Lee Jones’ ears.