Cute Fomalism, the essay

I was very pleased to see the ideas coalesce into a new idea. It gave me allot to think about .

it's 8.45 am + ive just read it - fascinating, i like how M's pulled it all together into focus, like one of them kaleidoscope things you look thru and twist.

"In a land with only one political party, only one hair colour, and pretty much only one racial group [his emphasis], communal respect and social harmony are easily achieved."

Isn't this a bit Enoch Powell "rivers of blood"?

I was a bit thrown by the thing about class distinctions, myself. Some more explanation for all us gaijin would be nice.

Well, I haven't read it yet, and hey, *Momus* lives there, not me. And I think he's a smart and a funny guy. But isn't this the country where politicians are regularly assassinated by sword-thrust, where factories have a dummy of the boss kept in a special room for you to bat with a baseball bat when you hate him, and where suicide and public drunkenness statistics dwarf those of most European countries?

Years ago I knew a young Japanese girl who'd moved to the UK to be able to see all the African music that was hot here then. She had a gaijin boyfriend, and they were getting married, so her parents came over. They had a few days to kill, so they went sight-seeing. Including visiting the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The day of the Poll Tax Riots. Well, as ma and pa hunkered behind the pillars and smoke boms flew and crowd surged this way and that, gaijin bf tried to apologise: "We like it," said ma and pa. "It reminds us of the 60s, and the riots where we first met and fell in love."

That anti-airport protest, the one where the protestors all wore scarfs and hardhats, lasted for YEARS.

Great movie, also (funny, sad): never properly released here, Harada Masato’s Bounce-ko Girls (1997), about schoolgirls working as prostitutes to keep themselves in Nokia and make-up and designer clothes. The heroine leaves, for America.

But isn't this the country where politicians are regularly assassinated by sword-thrust, where factories have a dummy of the boss kept in a special room for you to bat with a baseball bat when you hate him, and where suicide and public drunkenness statistics dwarf those of most European countries?

But Mark, all of those are *good* things, aren't they? Except maybe the suicide rate.

I'm going to Japan / I hope I can quickly learn the language, yeah.

Don't bother. Even though you speak it fluently, after half an hour chatting with them in THEIR OWN language, they say they are tired of talking English. heh? Yeah.

Japanese is easy to pronounce but a bitch to learn. MOstly becasue of the social mores that filter into the language. So many rules, rules, rules. Its all about social context.

One Political Party? Not quite. Not to mention which, the major power play that was just pulled off in that party is as wild a political ride as Germany had through some of the 20s. Momus is living in Disney's Japanland. Also, how prostitution can transform into something "all in good fun". (oh, and mark -- that sounds just like "2 or 3 things I know about her" -- any chance that it was influenced by the french new wave?)

prostitution = "all in good fun" — who said that? Nick only quoted my first para. The movie is funny, but also quite bleak. It's very sane about perversity, and about these kids pragmatically exploiting exactly the thing about themselves which they're — on the other side of their heads — disgustedly protesting: their sub-adult cuteness.

Influence: I wasn't reminded stylistically, particularly, but I haven't seen 2or3 for years. Now that you mention it, it *is* pretty Godard-ish in topic, but Godard-ism seen backwards thru time, kinda, from a "post-ideological" now to a 60s moment when Things Might Have Been Different. The sex-club owner who wants to either recruit or discourage the girls, for their own safety, is a former student radical: his bar is draped with red flags, and he ends up at one point drunk and dancing with the ring-leader Bounce-KO gal — who isn't the heroine — singing old Communist songs.

But it's a lot less cake-and-eat than JLG is, sex-kitten-wise: and it's great on female teen bonding and squabbling. And Sassy-era schoolgirl feminism — which Godard is a bit shaky on, no?

I need to see Les Chinoises. I've never seen Les Chinoises.

.also he forgets the Ainu, who went thru something similar to the First Nation genocide here in North America .

(http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/ainu.html)

Also, now I come to think of it, the Bounce-Ko Gal gameplan involves getting the money but not giving up the sex: it's kind of a Prank Prostitution. They always scarper at the key moment, and they can't be touched because they're under age. Except it's all starting to go pear-shaped, and one or more of them is going to get trapped, or hurt, very soon.

Is formalism relative to it's environment? ie influenced at all? It must IMO. The essay basically says no. But it seems that because Japan is such a formalist society and the artist is making the sampler their form of musical choice, it is "pure " formalism. Myself if formalizing on a sole instrument, because I am an American, there is no way I could be a true formalist. I suppose if I ate only McDonalds shopped Walmart, bought hello kitty everything and made up some ridiculous routines to follow when any of these forms occur, then yes, I could be considered a "pure" formalist.

Nick wrote: "In a land with only one political party, only one hair colour, and pretty much only one racial group [his emphasis], communal respect and social harmony are easily achieved." Isn't this a bit Enoch Powell "rivers of blood"?

I don't think I can be accused of semi-fascist political rhetoric here. The implication in my statement is that communal respect and social harmony are no great achievement in a society where everyone is genetically so similar, and a single party has been in power since the war. No great achievement, perhaps, but a very important part of the distinct atmosphere in Japan, just as their absence (what I call 'anomie' in the essay) is an important part of the atmosphere in countries like the US and the UK, both recently witness to major social unrest in the form of running battles between the police and racial minorities.

No responsible social observer of Japan should ignore the possibility that the absence of racial pluralism here has positive as well as negative cultural consequences, no matter how convinced a pluralist he may be himself. And I don't think we can wade into another culture with some sort of Marshall Plan saying, 'Hell, we have the social mix right in the West, let's give it to them now'. That, rather than my ponderings, would be the Disney approach.

Mark -- I attributed the "all in good fun" thing to a sentiment of Momus, actually, in a sort of parodied way. His essay, when it touched on sex, had that vibe, like sexual relations were qualitatively better in Japan. My imperession is that the family structure is actually that much more deep-set.

Momus -- you again forget the Koreans. Which is not hard, given how hard Japan tries to. But still, it reminds me of a tour-guide I had in Turkey who, when asked about the Kurdish, replied "oh, we're taking care of that problem".

Also, how does Japanoise fit into formalism? I mean, it might be argued that this is the formalism of noise, except figures like Haino would absolutely disagree.

I do think, however, that the very monolithic aura of Japanese culture is worthy of investigation. Just that it shouldn't be taken as good coin.

How good sex is qualitatively in any given country is pretty subjective. My ten yen's worth is that I enjoy sex a lot more in Japan.

And I repeat, Japan is racially monolithic. I don't believe Ainu and Koreans can add up to even 2% of the population, though I'd have to check.

Anomie in the west is not the result of ethnic pluralism per se, but of our failure to deal with it. It's down to the simple fact of people of different races living side by side in our cities, but the fact that they can't -- for the time being, anyway -- seem to do so without robbing, dissing and beating up on each other.

Japan hasn't reached ethnic pluralism yet. Let's hope that when and if they do, they handle it better than we have (cf. Cincinnati and Oldham).

Sorry, that should read: 'It's not down to the simple fact of people of different races living side by side in our cities...'

I was speaking of a different essay the one about fom, fathers of music, sorry I started a misleading thread.

Its true that the races do not mix happily in America. Its really sad and stupid. But I have noticed , at least in Boston, that whites and asians often mix ok, but asians don't mix well with black and hispanics, who in turn dont mix well with whites. Its depressing to think years of supposed affirmative action and desegregation seems to have only changed the media, not the reality. Perhaps blacks and whites in America have such cultural differences they just don't even want to mingle, they don't even know HOW. Bu tobviously allot of it also has to do with not wanting to TRY. But I do feel that the more blacks in America start to create an increasingly esoteric black subculture the less whites and blacks will be able to understand each other. But I wouldn't want blacks to "act white" either. I hate the idea of race and I think all blacks and whites should intermarry to make everyone black aand white.

This looks pretty anomic to me. Go Shibuya school girls, go!

offshoot to Mike's point, abt self-consciously hermetic subcultures: one of the tired old charges against global commodified pop culture blah blah was always the idea that things would become Bland and Standardised. Er, totally not true, hullo... GCPC has in fact *intensified* the Babelisation: sped up the process whereby "English = Universal Language" diverged into maybe dozens of mutually uncomprehending, well, dialects is just too weak a word. These Englishes share a written form , but they're actually not the same language any more.

Since I am profoundly unqualified to speak on this topic I feel obligated to post something. I got my friend Mike to read this thing - he lives in Tokyo - and here's his take.

I would have to agree with the basic thrust of what he is up to, and although most of his ideas aren't new he organizes them well. As far as his discussion about ostranenie-onanie, it is worth noting that the freer, lighter attitudes towards sex here have an important counterweight in the stifling formality of general daily office life and human interaction. While not anti-sexual per se, the "straightjacket society" represses human intimacy and informality in many contexts, including the sexual. Thus, it is not that "Japan is open about sex and the west is repressed;" rather, the oscillation between the polarities of openness/sexuality find different manifestations. In the West there is more chance in daily life to act sexual but less tolerance for extreme forms of sexuality; in Japan, there are times when no leeway is given for spontaneity in human interaction (including but by no means limited to sexuality), and conversely, times when anything goes.

On a different note, the most interesting aspect of Japan these days for me is something little remarked upon in the west- to wit, the runaway madness of the construction industry here. It is a form of "capitalist socialism" to keep employment high that is poisoning the countryside which was once legendary for its beauty. Government grants fund massive public works projects that nobody uses. The countryside is littered with museums with no art, state-of-the-art monorails that carry no passengers, highways leading up into the mountains and stopping suddenly that nobody ever dives on. Did you there is 30 times as much concrete per square foot in Japan as in America?

One thing I thought the essay brushed over a bit was the ban on showing genitals in porn. This just jarred with the idea of Japan being "OK about sex". To say that masking the pubic areas allows form (in the shape of uninhibited, playful sex) to run free might fit into the argument, but I'm still left wondering what it is in Japanese morality that feeds the (to us) odd double standard in which pubes are banned but cum shots are allowed.

I couldn't imagine Japanese lying around saying 'society feels unreal to me, nothing matters'. (They're probably saying that a lot in Russia these days.) If the Japanese are sometimes depressed and suicidal, it's because this society is all too real, too right in their eyes, with values so clear-cut that to flout them means excommunication and hemlock.

I recently read Murakami's 'A Wild Sheep Chase' and just like in 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' (which everyone should read), there seems to be an awful lot of listless, disenfranchised characters who don't seem at all committed to their career or conventional values. And no one seems to get at them for it, either. Obviously, this is a work of fiction - I'd be interested to know how close to the real Japan Murakami's world is generally considered to be (excluding all the supernatural bits, obviously)

I was under the impression that the noted editing in porn re: full genitals was some strange hangover from the American-imposed constitutional reform following WWII. In otherwards, when you go see _Pearl Harbor_ and pray for Ben Affleck's death, remember: he's fighting for the right to be censorious.

Fom what I've heard not all their porn has pixelated privates, you can get normal porn if you know where to look in the smut shops. Probably just another one of Japan's myriad formalities. Just like even though you can hear conversations through the rice paper wall, you are supposed to not listen.

Ned, who in their right mind is going to go see "Pearl Hrabor"? We've already seen the money bomb-dropping shot in the trailers. There's no other reason to go.

I think I'm (gasp!) agreeing with you there, Mark.

Certainly I think, say, Charles Moore and Tim Westwood (the same age! the same background!) have been speaking in completely different languages, utterly incomprehensible to each other (even though they may use a few of the same words) for at least the last four years. The only reason I've never said so before is that it might have been seen as endorsement for the myth that Rural And Urban Britain Are At War.

And Momus's comments on multi-culturalism: Britain, for all its faults, is one of the most integrated societies in the west; the notorious-with-the-right Runnymede Trust report also said this country has the best race relations in western Europe. The Oldham riots have a lot to do with, it seems, the inward- and backward- looking nature of that town itself, and its official refusal to take part in the anti-racism campaigns in much of the rest of Britain in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It's hard to imagine such things happening anywhere in London these days.

Nick: I don't want to say anything about it for fear of getting it wrong, but I think if you read some interviews with Murakami questions like that are discussed. Undergroud in particular may be of interest, but I'm reading it right now and haven't gotten to the part where he writes yet (the rest is interviews with gas-attack-related people).

*Somebody's* seeing the damn thing, apparently. I'm as distressed as you.

Mike wrote:

"Its true that the races do not mix happily in America. Its really sad and stupid. But I have noticed , at least in Boston, that whites and asians often mix ok, but asians don't mix well with black and hispanics, who in turn dont mix well with whites. Its depressing to think years of supposed affirmative action and desegregation seems to have only changed the media, not the reality. Perhaps blacks and whites in America have such cultural differences they just don't even want to mingle, they don't even know HOW. Bu tobviously allot of it also has to do with not wanting to TRY. But I do feel that the more blacks in America start to create an increasingly esoteric black subculture the less whites and blacks will be able to understand each other. But I wouldn't want blacks to "act white" either. I hate the idea of race and I think all blacks and whites should intermarry to make everyone black aand white."

Mike, I live in Chicago, about 35-40% black and a white minority city, and I don't have that impression at all. I left for five years, and when I came back I noticed a very clear improvement in the race relations climate. Separation and mistrust between races comes out of political and economic insecurity: things were much more tense when I was in college in the eighties. Now, I'm friends with people who are culturally very black-oriented, but that doesn't create any distance with me, a white person. I don't find black cultures increasingly esoteric, either. I find them increasingly mainstream.

I'd write more, but I have an engagement. Maybe tomorrow.

BUckminister Fuller's Car wrote " Mike, I live in Chicago, about 35- 40% black and a white minority city, and I don't have that impression at all. I left for five years, and when I came back I noticed a very clear improvement in the race relations climate. Separation and mistrust between races comes out of political and economic insecurity: things were much more tense when I was in college in the eighties. Now, I'm friends with people who are culturally very black- oriented, but that doesn't create any distance with me, a white person. I don't find black cultures increasingly esoteric, either. I find them increasingly mainstream.

I'd write more, but I have an engagement. Maybe tomorrow. "

Hey, congradulations on getting engaged but since when does that mean you have to make breif posts?

Anyways, maybe race relations are good in Chicago, or your neihgboorhood there, but you need only look as far as Cincinnati and LA to see that all is not hunky dory everywhere. Also I do think African american culture is increasingly exclusive. I am not saying this is bad or anything, btu I do think it causes more "anomie" among mixed race societies. Sure, white people love to listen to Puff Daddy, but that doesnt mean they want to go and hang out with black people. Rather, they liek to exploit black culture for their own personal identity purposes in rebellion against the old order. Boston is pretty segregated along white and black lines. I knew a black person who was encouraged last year, to not live in white Brookline becase she was black, by the realtor! One of my best freinds is black and he always refuses to go to white South BOston. Years of political action have not changed black and white desires to have their own seperate cultural identity.

Shout to John Davey, if you're still around. I'm gonna do "how records changed call and response" on THIS thread, cuz we're not sposed to newly thread up at the weekend, which I've just noticed it is. But not now, as (a) it's the middle of the night and (b) it's the repeat of Buffy now.

maybe in the multi-cultural society there are numerous pockets of formalism, each racial group and within said group demographic divisions, but as I alluded to earlier the one shared formalist experience we can have together is consumerism. cuteness well, we have a cute group here in the US the skater guys and girls, they have their own logo orientations, their own indie labels, bands, all highly skate-centric, maybe this is our pocket of cute formalism?

anomie, certainty we have our dose (although Japan has it’s share of crime, and from what I read quite brutal to their prisoners). but it is economic, there will always be drug dealers, they are part of our great economy (who else could pump so much cash into the tasteless chain- store), but the hardened criminal out to rob for financial gain, once he figures out it’s better on the outside...

ostranenie this is the one where outside of major metropolitan areas in the US (which explains Dymaxion) there is NO acceptance for strangness in a communal way. You can be weird in a small town one on one, but try it at a party when everyone has had a few...

bondage, well I never think anything except, well it livens up a familiar act, and it reminds me of our shared imprints from the land of Pan, you remember, where the fairies get tied up magically by the vines while the Satyrs’ “rollneck” goes up and down.

art stripped of politics, it’s power to transform: this is of interest because Pop wise what would happen to the charts if this were the global standard? I’d say decimation. No love songs, no emo-”i lost my girl” tunes, no Dylan. no pressure really, the instrument becomes the prognicator I suppose, so Phillip Glass and Brian Eno would own the top ten.

how does it feel to be a girl? In Japan? surrounded by the porn industry...

nice to see Nick sorta propping masturbation

the original line drawings remind me of humorous Klee

Mark, I'm still around, but I'm not going to be online much for the next few days so you might want to wait until tomorrow anyway and just post it up as a new thread. Up to you though, I'll be back...

Mark, if you deal with Call & Response in records, Eve's "Cowboy" must be discussed.

I can`t help but find Japanese culture a bit tragic - summed up in cutesy, anime fantasy and pseudo-rebellion it shows all that (at least as a Westerner) seems worst about the country. There`s a fundamental inability to relate to reality, to people and emotions here, which is why so much in Japan is done through the unreal worlds of manga/sex games/plastic art/girls` kawaii roleplay.....it`s safe, because it`s not real, and that`s why it`s popular. Not that unreal is bad - I`m quite happy reading ero-manga and chatting up girls in their mid-20`s pretending their innocent teenage highschoolers, but I think it`s important for a society acknowledge its substance and its problems, as well as its more frivolous aspects. Substance is something that the Japanese just can`t handle.

Conformist rebellion just goes to demonstrate the fundamental conservitism within the Japanese - if you want to rebel, you have to do it in an non-rebellious way or become a social outcast. People who genuinely do stick out are ostracised, generally ending up becoming art students in London or New York just cos they`re desparate for a way out. The pandemic racism of Japan is a good illistration of this - being foreign is a form of rebellion, you`re not one of them so you live your life permanantly on the outside of society. Which is why the Japanese need English conversation lounges and Roppongi - they can dip into this exotic foreign "rebellion" whenever it suits them, acting out their fantasies of internationalism without ever having to make that leap into the unknown, to rebel and "go gaijin"!

And on the same subject, Nick`s point about Japan being a racially homogenous society is pretty much spot on - even among the many Koreans etc living here, most of them (even those born here) are denied Japanese passports so are really only "long-term tourists" - they can`t vote or do other things which "proper" Japanese can. If Japan ever truly internationalises, it`ll be interesting to see how they take this foreign "rebellion"...

Six a.m. A motel somewhere outside of Saginaw, Michigan. Can't sleep so I read essay in half-awake state. Too much for brain to handle now, but seems both interestingly intellectual and intellectually interesting. Truckers want me to get off computer in lobby so they can download porn of Jap girls in synthesis...

As a Black West Indian man who after college moved to Japan for a couple years , I found that experience quite eye opening after 4 years in a Mid Western University. Was I to them the essentialised “black male”, perhaps, but was I not seeking some exotic other myself in the small apartments and perfectly idealized bodies of Japanese women. Nevermind that, I find it retrospectively healthy that there was a narrative between us that went beyond the “you black, me yellow” that characterizes so much of the stateside reace discourse. I discovered at that point what I later heard formally described by Homi Bhaba and others as the liminal negotiation of cultural difference.

It is of course in the unwillingness of much of both white and black America to navigate the interstices that results in what Mike Hanley observes. Black America goes on with its obsession with “keeping it real” while white America continues to keep it really the way things always were.