Broad generalizations about Japan 1

Yesterday I went shopping with Courtney to an outlet mall in an area called Tarumi. The outlet mall is strange because it actually looks like a mall. Japanese shopping districts are usually set up along roadsides, leading to long shopping areas that often stretch for a few districts.

So there I was, being dragged from store to store, when I noticed something about Japanese…society? Culture? I’m not sure what to call it, but I noticed that Japan’s modus operandi with respect to other cultures is to assimilate that culture and then, for wont of a better and less offensive word, pussify it. They take other people’s ideas and make them safer, more mainstream and less extreme. Here are some examples:

1. Japanese curry is not nearly as spicy as Indian curry. They have spicy options, but they’re not often used.
2. The vast majority of clothing stores are samey and generic. Beyond that, however, foreign brands have been brought to Japan and completely diluted. Browsing though the stores at the outlet mall, I came across many well-known sports or ‘culture’ brands, such as Asics, Nike, Adidas, and Billabong. Problem is, their window display is the limit of their sports goods for sale. In the Adidas store, there were different sections for different types of shoes. I saw basketball, tennis, ‘lifestyle’, ‘original’ (whatever that is), and all-purpose. There was not a tennis racket to be found, nor a ball of any kind. The billabong store featured no surfboards, boogie-boards or any other kind of ocean-related equipment that was not clothing, despite being only a few minutes from Kobe’s two beaches (which are protected from those terribly dangerous waves by cement buffers). Timberland and various other ‘outdoor’ stores stocked nothing but clothes clothes clothes. What about brand image? Even the models look like random homeless people that they took off the street and shaved. (By the way, I know Asics is a Japanese brand, but I believe that in America, they actually try to come off as knowing something about sports.)
3. This is much the same point but it requires its own number. I went into the Underarmor store, a brand made famous by its association with elite sportsmen and big muscles. I’m not sure about foreign countries, but in Japan they have a children’s line that makes me want to puke.
4. I weight train at the YMCA, and their adverts feature skinny-ass bulimia victims with 10lb weights in their hands looking completely Zen as they do a one-arm concentration curl off their knee. And that’s the men. Women don’t tend to pick up weights. I’ve seen another huge poster for a gym in the city with a woman actually holding a barbell over her shoulders as if she is about to squat with it. It loses something in that the weight plates are blue (or pink, I can’t remember which), she’s staring at the camera with this ‘can someone take this thing off me now?’ look on her face, and the barbell is loaded with maybe 40lbs/18kg. They’ve taken…the ENTIRE POINT out of weight training.
5. Everything here is sickeningly cute. I can handle that. I even go along with it to a certain extent. I have no problem with the giant soft-toy tofu block with a happy face on it that more or less lives on our bed, but when they take something that is meant to be serious or scary and cuteify it, I get  annoyed. LEGO is a major perpetrator. I’ve seen a LEGO Agent Smith from the Matrix as well as a LEGO murderer-guy from the Saw series of movies. Those things are supposed to be scary serious. I can’t tell if it’s a cultural thing or if Japanese companies simply make a toy out of everything and see what sells, but either way it sucks.              
6. Japanese music, even ‘rock’ music, generally involves a collection of painfully young, painfully energetic teeny-boppers prancing around on the stage pretending to play guitars with no cords attached to them. In female pop stars, attractiveness far outweighs talent, and when their tiny star quickly burns out, those idols often turn to soft porn and bikini picture books for a living because they have no skills and no niche market that actually gives a damn about them (besides sweaty old men who want to lick their knees and then give them a hydrochloric acid bath).
7. All the men look like women and all the women look like cruel parodies of women. The men wear heels, have huge pouffy hair, are as thin as sticks and spend most of their hard earned man-whore money on giant belt buckles. The women wear 6-inch heels, have HUGE pouffy hair, starve themselves into near-transparency and spend most of their hard earned woman-whore money on makeup and giant sunglasses. I get the feeling that these attractive young butterflies want to spend all that time looking pretty for each other, but in fact they mostly do it for the older generation of Japan, who have the money and are willing to pay in money or Louis Vutton (sp?) handbags to have hosts and hostesses fawn over them and ignore the wedding rings on their fingers.

 

8. It’s been a long winter an I’m obviously a very bitter person.

9. There is no number 9.

10. Coffee here is WEAK. Hot chocolate here is THIN.

As a disclaimer, let me say that I know for a fact there are strong counter-culture movements in Japan. There is a thriving heavy-metal industry, countless niches clothes stores selling what amounts to bondage gear that you can wear in public. There’s a lot of underground stuff that I’m sure is very extreme, but for the most part, Japan conforms to the safe middle ground. In a recent poll of my 2nd year students, a vast majority said that they would rather lead a stable life than an adventurous life, and many of them stated the need to be safe. I’m all for safety as well, but not to the point that life becomes completely boring.

Rant over. The end.