From My Email: Pop Culture, and a Discovery about AKB 48 (What Else?)

A couple of people and I got to talking about W. David Marx and Cool Japan, which got me to thinking about Japanese pop culture. The following is the relevant part of an email, uncensored, with one word corrected, one punctuation mark removed, font changed, and, oh yes, a hyperlink added. Otherwise, RAW. I think that I’ve picked up on something that no one, anywhere, has noticed.

Also, I’m seriously thinking about posting something mean-spirited about Ronald Dore. What do you think?

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The best way to kill off One Piece (which I never liked BTW) would be to have the MEXT political team do a public announcement endorsing it. (On the other hand, PM Noda is a dead ringer for Komawari-kun, if they ever get around to doing a live-action version...)

Speaking of popular culture, look at the following list of AKB 48 members who have finished in the top 10 in voting, with their top finishes.

O Ohshima Yuko 大島優子 1
O Maeda Atsuko 前田敦子 1
O Shinoda Mariko 篠田麻里子 3
O Itano Tomomi 板野友美 4
C Watanabe Mayu 渡辺麻夕 4
C Takahashi Minami 高橋みなみ 5
C Kojima Haruna 小嶋陽菜 6
C Satoh Amina 佐藤亜美菜 8
VO Miyazawa Sae 宮澤佐江 9
O Kasai Tomomi 河西智美 10

"O" as in old-fashioned, "C" as in contemporary, "VO" as in...very old. Old-fashioned means that they would have been the kind of names that were predominant as I was growing up. Let me also note that "Tomomi" is gender-free (岩倉具視, haha）, although most three-syllable "-mi" names are more likely to be conferred on females. Contemporary means the kind of names that girls in their teens and twenties typically have. Very old means Meiji-, Taisho-old. As further proof of how name preferences have changed, there is only one other "-ko" in the whole bunch. (To be fair, her top finish so far has been 38. Next AKB member to bare all?) In fact, beyond these nine most popular members, contemporary names predominate the list. Is this all just coincidence? I think not.

Finally, as an example of: Japan Cool (not Cool Japan) influence .

Personally, I miss the old version . I must be growing old.

Have a nice weekend.

Sunday Funnies: I Am Not a Feminist , But…

Anecdotes and selective data to reinforce the prevailing conventional wisdom…it’s what I’ve always railed against when I see it in the mass media. Here’s Kate Harding writing in a similar vein in Salon, on an AP report that claims to have identified “a disturbing trend: Women in the U.S. are drinking more, and drunken-driving arrests among women are rising rapidly while falling among men.” The second part cannot be denied; the first part is… I’d say the jury is out—which is actually Harding’s point.

Which somehow brings me to this NYT report on the new, hybrid jury-judge panel system that has been brought in for criminal trials here. I have a problem with this:

”…opinion polls have shown the Japanese public to be highly skeptical of the jury system, primarily because of deep cultural aversions, including a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with colleagues and to question authority.”

Now I know the first part is true, and I’m ready to go along to some extent with the thrust of the assertions in the second part. But are the two, in fact, linked? It sounds vaguely plausible. But do the opinion polls show the linkage? I’d like to see how they do that, because I don’t see a line of questions that tease it out.

Going back to feminism, the same friend who sent me the last article also has been passing around another NYT report, this one about the growing social acceptability of “lavishing adoring (albeit nonsexual) attention on men for a hefty fee” as an occupation for young women. The report goes on to claim:

“[W]ith that line of work, called hostessing, among the most lucrative jobs available to women and with the country neck-deep in a recession, hostess positions are increasingly coveted, and hostesses themselves are gaining respectability and even acclaim. Japan’s worst recession since World War II is changing mores.

Members of the middle-class resorting to the overt use of their sexuality to earn a living in these hard times is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, as this Salon report shows, nor is it absolutely gender-specific, as least in the world of TV dramas. But are the increased “respectability” and “acclaim” linked to the current recession? They appears to have far more to do with the more gradual, more enduring emergence of everyman—and woman—as a media force. Some of this new breed of celebrities—such as the tetujinchefs—have seen their fame last much longer than their allotment of 15 minutes. From this perspective, Eri Momoka, the “single mother who became a hostess and worked her way out of penury to start a TV career and her own line of clothing and accessories” is merely the water trade’s variation of the dokusha models, the amateurs who have taken over some of the traditional trendsetting role of entertainers and professional supermodels.

And speaking of the water trade, the report does not explore the world of the celebrity hostess’s cultural ancestors, the geisha, and even the high-class prostitute oiran, European courtesans, and the Classic Greek hetaeras, professionals whose cultural, social and even political influence has been obscured by the multiple filters of Victorian and contemporary sensibilities. Then there are the economics. Do the $100,000 hostesses receive healthcare benefits? Not likely. Pension plans? And who pays for their clothes? Like the geisha, these things add up. And like the professional athlete or the futures trader, old hostesses tend to fade away. Which is where the sugar daddy—again as in the case of the geisha—comes in.

Not that NYT is obliged to explore these avenues. But the stories are there for those who are willing to make the effort. For those who aren’t, there’s always the Case of the Earwax-Cleaning Murder to turn to.

Why Norimitsu Onishi’s Report Japan’s Outcasts Still Wait for Acceptance Is Wrong, and Why It Matters: Coda without a Finale

I’d had the final part in the can days even before I’d written the previous installment, but had decided that I’d put up maybe a couple of more before I went there. Unfortunately, real life intervened and, somewhere along the way, I seem to have lost the appetite to continue. Perhaps the exchange of comments at a number of points along the way drew out so much out of me on the subject that there no longer was any there there… which, come to think about it, is not a bad thing at all. So let me thank the people who took the trouble to comment for giving me a good intellectual workout.

However, having I’ve looked again at the final piece, I see that it’s not well written and certainly needs more work. Who knows, one of these days, I might edit it and put it up. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to email it to anyone who wants to see it—I actually sent it to Roy Berman because, if I remember correctly, I thought that he deserved an explanation of why I was doing this after I read his take on the affair and I wasn’t ready to put it out there just yet. You know where to find me; my email address is: okumurajun@gmail.com (also accessible from my profile). In any case, I think that the justifications for my attack—what else was it?—were more appropriately expressed in a paragraph from one of my counter-comments here. I’ll repeat it below for your convenience.

I think that the data, facts and opinions that I cite regarding the buraku issue are at least as good as the facts and opinions that Onishi raises in his article. I also think that my version of Nonaka’s political circumstances when he gave up running for LDP President is superior to Onishi’s. I leave it up to you the readers of this blog to decide who has a better case. However, that’s not the real issue at stake here. What I find disturbing is the fact that one of the few reports on Japan in the “newspaper of record” that appears to probe beneath the surface of events turns out to be a collage of anecdotes and opinions that ignores the substantial amount of material that do not support a personal take on Japan that appears to drive the reporter’s work. I have some guesses as to where that personal take—more temperament than ideology—comes from, and I’ve gained a little sympathy for Onishi as I progressed because of this. But that does not provide an excuse; this is a news report, not a short story that we are talking about.

And that is as good a place as any to end this coda without a finale. Thanks for coming, you all.

Why Norimitsu Onishi’s Report Japan’s Outcasts Still Wait for Acceptance Is Wrong, and Why It Matters: Interlude

Martin J. Frid pointed me to the Wikipedia entry on Norimitsu Onishi which in turn led me to one of Onishi’s articles entitled “Japan and China: National Character Writ Large”. As you may be able to guess from the title, the article displays his usual aversion to his idea of Japan (I can live with that) and disregard (ignorance?) for facts in preparing his brief (I can’t live with that). However, the piece, written in his second year as Tokyo bureau chief, diminished my anger towards and increased my empathy for the man. But first, a summary of the article, in his own words:

Of all languages in the world, Japanese is the only one that has an entirely different set of written characters to express foreign words and names. Just seeing these characters automatically tells the Japanese that they are dealing with something or someone non-Japanese. What's more, the names of foreign citizens of Japanese ancestry are also written in this set of characters, indicating that while they may have Japanese names, they are not, well, really Japanese.

By contrast, in Chinese, no such distinction is made. There, non-Chinese names are depicted, sometimes with great difficulty, entirely in Chinese characters. Foreigners are, in effect, made Chinese.

At bottom, the differences reflect each country's diverging worldview. In Japan, the rigid division between the inside and outside in the language underscores this country's enduring ambivalence toward the non-Japanese. While today's Japanese travel overseas with an ease and confidence that would have been unimaginable only two generations ago, they remain uneasy about foreign things and people coming here. Safer to label them clearly as foreign.

In the United States, parents' freedom to name their children may be absolute. Here the government and the media set the boundaries of names and the way they are written, thereby also setting the boundaries of Japanese identity.

In the media, the names of George Bush and Saddam Hussein are written in the characters reserved for foreign names. But so are the names of people of Japanese ancestry, like Alberto Fujimori, Peru's deposed president, or Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of ''Remains of the Day,'' who left Japan at the age of 5 and is a British citizen. Their names could be written in kanji, but are instead written in katakana, in an established custom indicating that they are not truly Japanese.

The distinctions are sometimes difficult to draw, as they touch upon the difficult question of who is Japanese, or, rather, when does someone stop being Japanese. The media have no set criteria. Are the criteria citizenship, blood, mastery of the Japanese language or customs? Or, in this island nation where leaving Japan has always meant leaving the village, does one start becoming non-Japanese the minute one steps off Japanese soil? There is a strong argument to be made for that. Children of Japanese business families stationed overseas for a few years invariably encounter problems returning here. Schoolmates often pick on them and call them gaijin, meaning foreigner or outsider.

When Japanese first began writing down their own language, they used Chinese characters whose pronunciation most resembled those of the Japanese words. (Actually, it was somewhat more complicated than that, but let’s leave it at that for the moment.) The characters used to depict the Japanese words in the Manyo era would lose many strokes and flourishes until they evolved into two sets of alphabets: the katakana and the hirakana. The stiff, unbending, “masculine” katakana was the alphabet of official record and academia—almost always as a complement to the vastly more exalted Chinese characters—while the “feminine” hirakana was the preferred means of expression for the womenfolk, the vernacular, and indigenous literature. Thus it must have been that noble names would be registered in official records in Chinese characters only, while those of the common folk would tend to be registered by a mixture of Chinese characters and katakana (but not, if it could be helped, hirakana). Vestiges of this tradition lived on in pre-WW II legislation and regulations that survived defeat and US occupation as a mixture of Chinese characters and katakana. By contrast, Meiji era authors aspiring to high literature (which came to be known as jun-bungaku or “pure literature” as opposed to taishu-bungaku, or “popular literature”, all of which in a turn of events that even I have to admit has a distinctly Japanese flavor spawned the category chukan-bungaku, or “intermediate literature”) used the effeminate hirakana even as they increasingly began to write in a new, evolving vernacular. Throughout all this, Chinese characters continued—continues—in use if nothing else as a visual aid to enable groups of letters to stand out and distinguish themselves as individual words.

It is within this context that foreign words and names were incorporated into Japanese writing. Rendering them in Chinese characters was out of the question, since even Onishi admits that this is done in Chinese “sometimes with great difficulty.” So the choice of katana within the context of a hirakana-based text was all but inevitable. This had nothing to do with any kind of Japanese ethos that Onishi intimates; it was the logical outcome of the ancient legacy where Japan was using three sets of letters when the Black Ships arrived. The katakana served as a surrogate for kanji, nothing more.

Be that as it may, this raises the Onishi question: How should the names of foreigners with Japanese-origin names—not necessarily ethnic Japanese—be written in Japanese? Using the original Chinese characters is not as easy you would imagine; even the most commonly used surname can have several different renderings in Chinese characters and it is not a given that every individual will know which one applies in his case. As for the given name, a second-generation Japanese-foreigner may not have a Japanese rendering of it at all. The simplest, uniform rule then is to treat them as any other foreigner, that is, render them in katakana. And that is what the media and official sources, in principle, have done. This arrangement that has everything to do with the peculiarity of having two alphabets in addition to the Chinese characters (in contrast to Koreans, who have only one alphabet) and little to do with Onishi’s insinuations.

What remains is a small number of borderline cases, i.e. what to do with naturalized Japanese citizens, individuals who have given up Japanese citizenship, and the rare individual who are revealed to have retained Japanese citizenship after becoming a public figure in Japan. The first case is the easiest: upon naturalization, the new Japanese citizen needs to assume a name that can be rendered in one or more of the three character sets. And this is the one moment in a Japanese citizen’s life that he can adopt the name of one’s desires, be it a close approximation of one’s original name, or something altogether different with few legal restrictions. (I don’t see any legal barriers to a newly Japanese male renaming himself Tsuchiya Anna, for instance. Or Hoshino　Aki. And did I tell you about the time that I ran into a very pregnant Jun Okumura?) With the second and third cases, my sense is that the media tends to use whatever script that was being used when that person first became a public figure. Thus, the name of a star figure skater who subsequently gives up Japanese citizenship will continue to be rendered in the characters that comprised that person’s original Japanese name (unless that person has adopted a different name), while someone like Alberto Fujimori, whose Japanese citizenship became known only after he sought asylum, will continue to have his name rendered in katakana. By the same token, “Norimitsu Onishi” woujld be rendered in the katakana alphabet. All this has nothing to do with Onishi’s personal angst.

So why has Onishi produced this crapulous piece of not-even-pop linguistics that cops the fig leaf of journalism? The answer appears to lie in the following personal confession hiding behind a set of questions. For it must be his deep sense of alienation as the oddest of gaijin; an individual who looks like a native, talks like a native—I understand that he speaks excellent Japanese—yet finds that the similarities only serve to accentuate the distance between the North American essence that permeates every fiber of his being. One feels that it would have been much easier on his psyche if he had been White. No, Onishi is not a fuckwad, or even a wuckfad. He is in his own way sincere and true to his essence. He is the one who left the village. This does not excuse his journalistic transgressions, in the same way that the character flaws of Nixon’s (or Carter’s for that matter), but it does help in understanding him and humanizing his errors—much in the same way that I hope mine will be understood, if not forgiven, by those who know me well.

There are many other notable errors in Onishi’s report, but there’s only so much pro bono work I can do.

Finally, it is useful to confuse you further by taking note of the fact that the pronunciation of Chinese names are given in hirakana, while those of Korean names are given in katakana.

Why Norimitsu Onishi’s Report Japan’s Outcasts Still Wait for Acceptance Is Wrong, and Why It Matters: Fourth Installment

Before we proceed to the conclusion of this series, Let’s take a look at what Norimitsu Onishi the journalist may consider to be the most important point:

It is now time to take up head on the central issues, or at least the justification, for Norimitsu Onishi’s report:

a) Is it easier for a burakumin to be a Japanese Prime Minister than a black man to be the President of the United States?; and
b) Will Japan have a burakumin Prime Minister in the foreseeable future?

My answers are: a) yes; and b) no.

With regard to the first question, note that it is inherently easier to overcome social prejudice in a parliamentary system than a presidential one. In the former, the primary source of approval that you need to reach the top is the jury of your peers, the parliamentarians that you get to know and interact on a daily, you-and-I, often intimate basis. Look at the Prime Ministers who to the layman’s eyes looked then and look now appear to be mediocrities at best. But a presidential aspirant must gain the approval of a much larger, far more diffuse constituency with whom he/she has at best an impersonal, sporadic, relationship generated and sustained by a faithless media. As such, it is essentially a beauty contest, an area—particularly where electoral campaigns are concerned—where the most superficial distinctions such as pedigree, color of skin, and place of birth can hold inordinate sway, where the only thing the electorate “gets” may be what they see, no more, no less.

It is instructive to note that an increasingly large number of African-Americans are being appointed to key administration posts that require Senate confirmation—in sharp contrast to their conspicuous absence in the Senate itself. (There are comparatively more African-American Representatives—a tribute to the powerful effect of gerrymandering.) Collateral proof lies in Hiromu Nonaka’s rise to a insider position of power in the LDP despite the lack of policy-making accomplishments. Where people can be seen as individuals in their own right, they can bridge the gap between “the other” and “us”. There is some truth behind the old joke, “some of my best friends are Jews”.

Let’s now take up the second question, i.e. the Prime Ministerial prospects of the burakumin. I have already shown how the core prejudices against these people have taken a steady drop-off over the years. Why then, am I so pessimistic about a burakumin becoming Prime Minister any time soon? The same reason that it is unlikely that the United States will see a Polish-American President—demographics.

I have not been unable to find the last national survey in 1993, but it is extensively cited in this 1998 report from the head of the pro-Communist (and generally considered the most stand-up) activist group Zenkairen that states that the dowa-related population had dwindled to less than 900,000, or about 0.7% of the total Japanese population at the time of the survey. True, much of this attrition was the result of people moving out of the dowa areas (though it is only fair to note that not all the people in the areas were/are burakumin). So let’s make a very generous assumption (or a cruel one, depending on your point of view) that twice that number of people, or somewhat less than one out of every 60 Japanese, are self-identified as being of burakumin origin. To counterbalance that assumption, let’s give into our hopes and assume that future Japanese Prime Ministers will last an average of three years, or the equivalent of one LDP Presidency term. If you can accept all that, then there is less than a fifty-fifty chance of a burakumin becoming a Prime Minister in this century by reason of pure demographics. That is about as good a chance of a Polish-American, taking 3% of the U.S. population, becoming U.S. President, assuming an average tenure of 6 1/2 years, or one and a half terms per President.

All this conjecture begs an inconvenient question: How many of these “burakumin” will consider themselves/be considered as such, as they intermarry and move in and (mostly (out) of the dowa areas? And will we even know, even if we have such a one? Could the burakumin be morphing from an imagined community to an imaginary one as it loses cultural and geographical roots?

Why Norimitsu Onishi’s Report Japan’s Outcasts Still Wait for Acceptance Is Wrong, and Why It Matters: Second Installment

Norimitsu Onishi claims that “[t]he topic of the buraku remains Japan’s biggest taboo, rarely entering private conversations and virtually ignored by the media.” Really?

True, it’s been almost thirty years since I talked to anyone about the dowa mondai at any length, and that was in the course of my work in the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency days. Also true that media outlets rarely take up the matter these days. Most recently, subsidies to dowa areas did come up during Osaka Governor Hashimoto’s negotiation with the prefectural assembly, where he told the assemblymen that he knew the issue well since he’d grown up there. The rambunctious Governor’s casual coming-out passed without further notice, so you could arguably claim this as an example where the topic was “virtually ignored by the media”. But is the reason for all this, as Onishi appears to intimate, “Japan’s obsession with its past and its inability to overcome it”? Or could there be other, more significant factors at work?

But first, let’s look a brief look at the past.

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Question its motives if you will, but it was actually the Meiji government that set the ball rolling, as it went up against longstanding custom and tried to enforce the legal and social emancipation of the burakumin against entrenched, sometimes fierce, resistance. One of the pre-WW II heroes in Japanese history books is the Suiheisha, or the Leveling Society, which fought for burakumin> rights. At least one pre-war novel, Hakai (The Broken Commandment), became a bestseller (and twice made into film after WW II, but that’s another story). I do not know how the post-Meiji Restoration, pre-WW II Japanese media dealt with all this, but I do know that they were a lively bunch, so much so that their reporting looks splendiferously tabloidy to our contemporary eyes. Add the Imperial Household’s sympathies for the burakumin and other disadvantaged groups to the mix, and it is hard to believe that the media at the time would have ignored the issue altogether.

WW II brought an end to this era as everything was subsumed into the war effort. But efforts resumed at the prefectural after the war and as things began to settle down. In 1961, the national government got into the act again, as it set up an advisory council to the Prime Minister to look at the issue and suggest ways to improve the lot of the buraku people. Legislation came much later, in 1969, but three national antidiscrimination organizations—one pro-Communist, one pro-Socialist and one conservative—kept vigilance, resorting often to civil disobedience that could edge over into eventually-ritualized violence. Then and later, the reporting may have been flawed (I hope to speak to this point later), but it was there. It stretches our credulity to insinuate a longstanding social taboo and media silence.

But why the current lack of attention? I’ll come to that later. And on that note, I am going to call it a day.

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In passing, I note that the post-war years saw yet another buraku cultural phenomenon, Hashi no Nai Kawa (River without a Bridge), a seven-volume series of novels that has sold to date a total of 8 million copies—there are seven volumes—and made into film twice. Do we have a culture of remakes? Seriously…

Why Norimitsu Onishi’s Report Japan’s Outcasts Still Wait for Acceptance Is Wrong, and Why It Matters: First Installment

People who know me know that I rarely swear except in jest. And extreme anger. （And just because it’s fun.） Moreover, I carefully weigh and measure everything that I write and take personal responsibility for each and every word. Having said all that, I have a confession to make: I had been a little tipsy so early in the evening when I posed the question: On the Occasion of Barack Obama’s Inauguration, Should I Be Calling Norimitsu Onishi a Fuckwad? Now that I’ve had a chance to sober up, I’d like to apologize for my foulmouthed ways, follow Jon Stewart’s example, and change it as follows: On the Occasion of Barack Obama’s Inauguration, Should I Be Calling Norimitsu Onishi a Wuckfad?

Now that I have got that confession out of the way, I’d like to explain what’s so wrong about Onishi’s report Japan’s Outcasts Still Wait for Acceptance. However, this will be a sizeable task, so I’ve decided to do it in multiple posts. I will hopefully be able to tie them all together in a concluding—conclusive—post. Here, my friends, enemies, and neutral parties, is the first installment.

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In 2001, Hiromu Nonaka, possibly the top powerbroker in the Hashimoto faction, the largest such group in the LDP at the time, sought to enter the race for the LDP Presidency. Every LDP President but one (Yohei Kono) has served as Prime Minister. Thus, a Nonaka victory would have been a landmark event for Japan; for Nonaka was a self-declared member of the buraku people, descendants of the social outcast classes whose discrimination went back more than a thousand years. Nonaka would have been the first known member of the long-suffering underclass to become Prime　Minister of Japan. But it was not to be, for Nonaka gave up his quest almost before it began. Onishi in his article uses quotes from Taro Aso, his former colleague and now DPJ Diet member Yasuoki Kamei and Nonaka himself to suggest that it was the opposition from his colleagues to his outcast status and his fear of the negative fallout on his family that forced him to give up his quest. As usual, he never comes out and says it outright, although the caption to the accompanying photos “Mr. Nonaka rose to chief cabinet secretary, but as a descendant of a class of outcasts further advancement was blocked” is far less coy. But the implication is clear. An artful piece of work, again, as usual. But in the telling, he left out some crucial facts, basic assumptions about Japanese politics, that cast doubt on his understanding of or intentions regarding the reason for Nonaka’s withdrawal.

Nonaka had received three Cabinet postings p-rior to his failed quest: Chief Cabinet Secretary, Minister of Internal Affairs, and the Chairman of the National Public Safety Commission. This track record is crucial to understanding what must have been Nonaka’s standing in the LDP and his image in the public eye. Now Onishi sees great significance in his assignment as the Chief Cabinet Secretary, which he claims to be “the government’s No. 2 official”. But few things can be further from the truth. That’s like putting Rahm Emanuel ahead of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Tim Geithner in the pecking order. Moreover, Onishi fails to mention Nonaka’s earlier Cabinet assignments. The latter is also at best a grievous omission.

Let’s take the Chief Cabinet Secretary assignment first. LDP Prime Ministers typically will have served in one of two (or three) high-profile Cabinet positions before he is deemed fit to serve as Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance or Minister of Foreign Affairs. (In a pinch, the Ministry formerly known as MITI would have served in the days before the luster of Japan’s post-WW II resurgence wore off.) The Chief Cabinet Secretary has often been a plum assignment, but a junior one nonetheless, an opportunity for the appointee to display and hone his skills as a political operative and collect political chits before—this is important—progressing to more senior Cabinet and party posts. True, in more recent years, the LDP has put forth a couple of Prime Ministers whose administrative experience consisted mostly of Cabinet Secretary assignments— but we know how those Abe and Fukuda experiments turned out.

Nonaka’s other, earlier, Cabinet postings also tell a story. It is notable, if not out of the ordinary at all, that he fulfilled them simultaneously. In fact, it had been customary for a single Cabinet Minister to serve in both capacities, that is, right up until the final months of the ill-fated Mori administration—which Nonaka sought to replace in 2001. For the typical Home Ministry appointee was a long-serving, inoffensive, party hack or the nominee of a junior coalition partner. As for the National Public Safety Commission, it is still hard today to say what it really does—more so for non-Japanese speakers, since uniquely among Japanese bureaucracies headed by Cabinet Ministers, it has no English-language web pages—beyond that fact that it is nominally in charge of the police force. The Japanese police force uncomfortably saddles the local and national bureaucratic divide—a legacy of the occupation years—which fact no doubt figured in the double assignment for so many years.

In any case, all this did not add up to an auspicious beginning for someone with aspirations for the highest reaches of constitutional powers. In fact, it was a career path that was more conducive to following the footsteps of the top inside political operators—at best the likes of Masaharu Gotoda, at worst Shin Kanemaru. And that was the public perception, to the extent that there was one, of Hiromu Nonaka, more a kingmaker than a king. It may have been Nonaka’s added misfortune that the embattled incumbent Mori had also been regarded as an over-promoted ward-heeler with little taste or aptitude for real statecraft. In any case, Nonaka had not followed the typical career path for a future Prime Minister, and he was not yet head of his own faction when such things had still mattered, had not been anointed as Hashimoto’s successor, and still had rivals within his own faction, let alone the other factions and the local party rank-and-file. Simply put, there is a highly plausible explanation of Nonaka’s failure independent of his burakumin background.

But what of Aso’s statement, “Are we really going to let those people take over the leadership of Japan?” Now before I go on, I want you to note that I am quite willing to accept that he said such a thing, if not exactly in those words as translated into English. Onishi cites a highly credible witness and the thought if not the words are plausible for someone of Aso’s generation and background. (I’ll try to return to this point as part of a later installment.)

Aso reportedly made that statement in a meeting of the Kono mini-faction, which he was still years from inheriting from the eponymous Yohei Kono (who you likely remember as the issuer of the Kono Statement and less likely as the only LDP President to date who has not served as Prime Minister). In the event, Aso did stand for the 2001 LDP Presidential election, where he received a grand total of 31 votes as Junichiro Koizumi surprised everyone by trouncing the heavily favored Hashimoto 298 to 155. But is it not a little too much to conclude that the words of a secondary figure in his own mini-faction influenced decisively the choice of the candidate in what was still the largest faction in the LDP?

I do not claim to have proven that Nonaka’s failure had nothing to with his burakumin background. But I do believe that I have lined up and explained some easily available facts that have been omitted in Onishi’s narrative—facts that would have pushed it to the very edges of falsehood by omission as far as the interpretation of Nonaka’s failure is concerned.

Onishi also fails to give a plausible explanation of Nonaka’s rise within the LDP. But here, I have no good explanation either. I think that this place is as good as any to end my first installment.

Dana Goodyear ♥ Cell-Phone Novels

An acquaintance sent me a link to Dana Goodyear’s December piece on the Japanese profusion of keitai shosetsu, or cell-phone novels. Here’s my riff on it.

In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with nineteen-fifties America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants—the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones. The stories are like folktales, perhaps not literally true but full of telling ethnographic detail.

Dana Goodyear’s I ♥ Novels is par for the course for The New Yorker, which I suppose isn’t bad at all. It’s well researched, and there’s an intimacy to the interviews that goes beyond the merely illustrative. Goodyear doesn’t overanalyze. A few quibbles:

I have problems with her depiction of the milieu of the typical keitai shosetsu as “rural” and “rustic”. In fact, I looked at descriptions of five keitai shosetsus. They all had urban or unidentifiable settings. True, none of them were obviously located in Tokyo, but… Inaka=country may be “provincial”, but not necessarily “rustic”. People forget that even in the most “rustic” prefectures, only a small fraction of the population actually engages in agriculture. Japan is a profoundly urban nation.

Then why the purportedly non-Tokyo setting? (In one of the five that I looked at, the action appears to take place in Osaka and Kishiwada, a satellite community with a population of 200 thousand.) I think that it’s mainly a plot device that forces separation, with the older boyfriend (or brother—incest appears to be a popular subtheme) going off to college or work in the big city. And how often haven’t we heard that? You can see that a lot in American novels and TV dramas too. Another, not necessarily mutually exclusive explanation is the one’s own transition to an unfamiliar, impersonal milieu and the estrangement often triggers the creative instincts. In fact, modern Japanese high literature has been constructed on that fertile mixture of rapture, rejection, disillusionment and longing.

And Yankees? “Lower and lower middle classes”, sure (though you wonder who’s left), but the fashion she depicts (and more importantly the lives of the heroines from what I gather) has a much broader appeal to Japanese youths than what we understand as the Yankeee lifestyle (itself an evolving, sometimes hard-to-define subject).

Goodyear appears to link the profusion of a cell-phone culture to a personal computer deficit. But an online report based on a 2006 World Bank survey of 28 countries (likely OECD members) puts Japan in 12th place, behind the Swiss, Anglos, Teutons, and South Koreans, but ahead of Latin countries including otherwise well-off people such as the French and the Italians, as well as Austria, Belgium and Ireland, three other high-income nations. I suppose this tells us that Catholics, compared to Protestants, have a life. But I digress: my point is that there’s nothing here to suggest that there’s a link between a cell-phone culture and purported computer use. In fact, my guess is that the typically youthful cell-phone addicts are the very kind of people who are inclined to access the Internet on regular PCs. Then why the mass cell-phone addiction? Two words: commuter trains; they’ve been replacing weekly magazines and tabloids and more reputable dailies.

Unrelated to the main theme of the essay, but an important assertion nevertheless:

Mone’s withholding is consistent with the ethos of the Japanese Internet, which is dominated by false names and forged identities.

Perhaps. And I’ve laid out my thoughts before on the corrosive effects of anonymity. But I should note that almost all of the comments on the American political, sports, and other blogs that I’m aware of are also pseudonymous.

Finally, what does the future hold for keitai shosetsu? To repeat a sentence from the initial quote:

In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease.

And “incest” too. Add war, subtract abortion, and you might as well be describing Homer, the Greek and Jacobian tragedies, Shakespeare, Kabuki, the Arabian Nights… Oh yes, and mistaken identities and lookalikes too. And The Tales of Genji was in form and function the soap opera of the day. So don’t write off the keitai shosetsu just yet. High culture is nothing but pop culture that has acquired historical context.

ADD. 15 January: I correct myself in the comments regarding my temporary lapse of judgment on the distinction between anonymity and pseudonyms.

Fast Food Nation Japan and other Michelin Thoughts

Ikuhiro Fukuda, a professor at Waseda University, also had some interesting things to say with regard to Michelin in the Yomiuri a couple of weeks ago. He notes that the Michelin restaurant guides for France also list (relatively) inexpensive unrated restaurants but the Tokyo version is limited to rated restaurants. Further on, he points out that in choosing Japanese restaurants, Michelin has essentially turned a blind eye to decor and service, something unthinkable in France. Specifically, he points out that the three-star sushi place is basically a twelve-seat bar that shares a toilet with the other establishments in the building. More important, in his own words:

This owes its origins to the distinct history that does not see the like in Europe, namely that sushi and other Japanese cuisine featured in Michelin such as soba and eel had their origins in the food stalls of the Edo Era, that is, fast food in contemporary terms. “Fast and tasty”, something that is quite normal for us Japanese, are concepts that hard to reconcile in Europe.

Note that I had merely noticed the fast-food origins of Japanese cuisine, where Fukuda traces them to the Edo Era. More broadly, hasn’t much of Japanese culture has historically been driven by the urban middle class, culinary culture being no exception?

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Speaking of Michelin, I mentioned the other day that there were no Chinese restaurants in New York Times top ten list of new restaurants in New York. I also noted previously that Michelin Tokyo 2008 had one two-star Chinese restaurant and four one-star Chinese restaurants. Yesterday, NYT profiled the first Chinese restaurant to earn three stars. It’s in the first Michelin Hong Kong edition, launched on 2008 December 2 (my birthday; and for those of you who didn’t know, it’s never too late…).

Travel Tip for Guys Considering Trip to Japan

Fashion guide, from this amateur trendspotter.

It was late afternoon, and a gaggle of teenage girls in their school uniforms, heading home or to other less determinate destinations, had entered the train car when one of them caught my eye. (Presumably, there was a troop of schoolboys as well, but for some reason it escaped my attention.) For an instant, I wondered why, but then I realized: the hem of that one girl’s skirt was longer than those of the others, though it still had a long way to go before it would reach her knees. In fact, all the other girls were wearing their skirts more or less to the same length; that was why the one girl had stood out.

Trend-watchers, the schoolgirl’s skirt has reached the upper limits of decency in the context of stairs and escalators, and there is now no other way to go but down. And go down it will—the hem that is. For if there’s any mortal who pays greater attention to how a schoolgirl looks than a guy, it’s another schoolgirl. And if there’s anything anyone hates more than being “different”, it’s being like everyone else.

So there you have it: short, short schoolgirl uniforms will go the way of the loose socks, the now-mercifully extinct, baggy polar-bear stockings—a reminder to guys trying to make up their minds about a trip to Japan this winter.

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Incidentally, I believe that the miniskirt look for schoolgirl uniforms apparently began with Michiru Yamana, one of the main characters in BØY, a very popular manga that ran in Shonen Jump between 1992-99. I remember reading it and thinking, they can’t get away with that. And in the early 90s, they couldn’t. But in fiction, she could.

History’s Obamas—How about Japan?

In Slate, David Berreby shows that American exceptionalism is not warranted where outsiders assuming power is concerned. He gives Benjamin Disraeli, Napoleon Bonaparte and other well-known examples to prove his point. To explain how this happens in Berreby’s own words:

For one thing, self-made, boundary-crossing leaders generally arise in times of upheaval, when it's clear familiar ways aren't working.

About their atypical and unprivileged status, boundary-breaking leaders have, like Obama, usually been open, not shy—a second trait they often share. They make a loud, clear show of the fact that they aren't hiding or trimming their origins.

When charges of subterfuge fail to stick to a minority candidate, it is often because the target has made them ridiculous by showing a strong, sincere strain of don't-rock-the-boat conservatism.

The lesson to be gleaned, then, from the hardly new success of "outsider'' leaders is that, in troubled times, people want leaderly reassurance. But it's not necessarily ethnic/religious/one-of-us reassurance. Rather, they want something new and brave to address their fears, without effacing what they love most about their country. In other words, they want society to be new and old, changed and restored, familiar and unfamiliar. Anyone can say the right things about those contradictory desires, but it's much more convincing to elect a person who by birth embodies them.

The obvious question for Japan, given its long term structural problems, economic, demographic and otherwise: What are the prospects for a Japanese Obama? What are the chances of an outsider becoming Prime Minister?

Of course if you go far enough back in Japanese history, literally everyone can claim foreign ancestry. In fact, when the current Emperor visited South Korea as Crown Prince, he spoke of his probable Korean origin—an allusion to the Horse Rider Theory, which states that horse-riding nomads from Korea conquered Japan around 300AD and established the unbroken imperial line—which generated much goodwill among Koreans. But that’s probably not what we are looking for here. Let’s narrow the search a little.

Currently, three naturalized Japanese citizens serve in the Diet. They are:

(MURATA) Renho (Taiwanese) http://www.renho.jp/
HAKU Shinkun (South Korean) http://haku-s.media-trust.com/index.html
Marutei TSURUNEN (Finn!) http://homepage2.nifty.com/yugatsuru/index.html

That’s three out of 739 (479 Lower House, 242 Upper House), not a high percentage, an indication less of discrimination than a more general reluctance to accept immigrants. There is no quick and easy way to figure out how many others have non-Japanese parents or grandparents.

Renho is probably the most promising of the three, although I’ve never heard her being talked up as an up-and-coming political leader. It may interest people who are looking for change, any change, though, that They all belong to the DPJ, which, of course, does not have to field so many heirloom candidates. Some years back, ARAI Shokei, a naturalized (North) Korean-Japanese, was a promising, up-and-coming LDP Diet member who had made the jump from the Ministry of Finance to politics, but committed suicide under suspicion of shady financial dealings.

How do other “outsiders” fare in politics? There has been one Ainu Diet member, SUGANO Shigeru, who also belonged to the DPJ for a couple of years before retirement. There have been a number of burakumin Diet members, usually standing from the opposition parties. But NONAKA Hiromu, who has long acknowledged his burakumin origins, was a powerful LDP kingmaker. Osaka's enormously popular (and right-wing) governor Toru Hashimoto has stated that he grew up in the Dowa regions, although he has not explicitly acknowledged burakumin ancestry. The DPJ fielded an openly lesbian candidate, Kanako Otsuji, in the 2007 Upper House election. In balance, the DPJ currently appears to be more progressive than the LDP where non-traditional candidates are concerned,.

More generally, the recent record suggests that we are quite receptive to non-traditional leaders. In soccer, six of the seven (eight if you count repeater Takeshi Okada twice) head coaches of the national team during the J-League era have been foreigners, and six out of eighteen and two out of fifteen in the J-League First and Second Divisions respectively. Gaijins have been making inroads in the more insular professional baseball as well, where four of the twelve managers in 2008 were non-Japanese. (The number dropped to two as two resigned for purely personal reasons.) In the business world, Carlos Ghosn became a national hero when he nursed the near-bankrupt auto manufacturer Nissan back to health.

Come to think of it, we the Japanese people have always been receptive to, even venerating, foreign teachers. That goes back to the beginning of our known history. It appears, though, that we have a harder time accepting outsiders as pure equals. If that is true, then it is food for thought, and I’m sure those culturalists will have a ready explanation. But I’m not a culturalist, so this is as good a place as any to end this post.

ADD (Nov. 21): My heartfelt thanks to James (see comments), who has kindly linked to this Newsweek article. The visit actually never materialized. I’ve managed to totally misremember the whole event, though the point remains the same. It was something I’d believed in so strongly that I hadn’t bothered to fact-check.

Note: the Emperor’s talk came in 2002. The following year, the South Korean soap opera Winter Sonata became a megahit on Japanese TV and Korean drama and Korean celebrities exploded on the Japanese entertainment scene.

What Part of Enclave Does Onishi Not Understand?

Norimitsu Onishi does a credible of reporting on a public housing estate, a blue collar neighborhood near Toyota City of Toyota fame, whose population is split almost equally between the original Japanese inhabitants on one hand and Japanese-Brazilian workers and their immediately families (not just Japanese-Brazilians, I presume) on the other. By trial and error, many of them seem to have found ways to get along with each other, giving the lie to the conventional wisdom, parroted here by Onishi, that “homogeneous and insular nation,…… Japan is notoriously unwelcoming to immigrants; Koreans who came here during World War II are still treated as second-class citizens.”

Or not. Who knows? But isn’t it the job of the journalist to give some thought to reconciling these two incompatible claims? And what’s this about “Koreans who came here during World War II… still treated as second-class citizens”? Let’s be clear, they are treated as less than “second-class citizens”, but not for the reason that Onishi insinuates. In fact, it’s astonishing that the reason for this escapes him completely, possibly by choice—no big surprise, I assure you.

Now the Japanese media reports from time to time about the troubles that many children of Brazilian and other immigrant laborers encounter in Japan. But Mr. Onishi’s article paints a less alarming (if still troubling) picture on this point. Is this an illusion? Or does the sizeable Brazilian community provide an environment that does a reasonable job of keeping its children out of trouble? I’ve been saying for some time that if you want to bring in Bangladeshi software engineers to Japan, you have to bring in Bangladeshi grocery managers, Bangladeshi barbers, and Bangladshi what-have-yous. You can’t expect them to come here in droves unless you let them have a community. Funny thing is, it wouldn’t be the first time in Japanese history that this happened.

One more thing: When does a housing estate become a Brazilian enclave—the original gated community—when half the population consists of Japanese citizens?

Sorry I’ve been distracted. I’ll let you know when I respond to the comments in my most recent posts.

HAHA He Said Testicles

This raccoon dog is what Blaine Harden is talking about—“supersized testicles” at that. In the New York Times.

I blame it all on Bill Clinton.

Actually, Mr. Harden got the chronology backwards. Godzilla was a post-WW II creation, drawing on Ray Harryhausen and the fears and memories of the nuclear holocaust. If anything, it was Hayao Miyazaki’s work that brought the two Japanese narratives together in the movie theater, most prominently in Princess Mononoke.

I’m back. Will try to post. Later.

Jero the Enka Guy, on CNN

It’s good to see this young man get some recognition over there. After all, he’s one of the few college graduates, much less computer scientists, to make the jump from amateur karaoke to the pros in the enka genre, reminding us of all those music majors and teachers in the United States in the 30s and 40s who brought the blues and folk music into the mainstream.

But speaking of the 40s, “a traditional form of lounge music that flourished in 1940’s Japan”? C’mon, enka produced the first Japanese million-seller single in 1961 and continued to produce big hits and megastars for many more years. It is only in the last couple of decades that the genre has seen a serious decline, but it’s still more popular with the general public than, say, American folk music is in the United States. Or the blues. And “lounge music?” If so, then jazz is “lounge music”, as any self-respecting gaijin should be able to tell you.

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There may be a story here to be told about how outsiders from the “riverbed people” to Korean residents have been integrated into the broader Japanese society through the entertainment industry.

Meanwhile, in Boston in game 5, Matsuzaka is froof that if you’re no good, that’s when it’s really good to be lucky.

TIME Out of Order on Japan’s New Groove

A friend sent me this TIME article. I was seriously tempted to blog it but it is so bad in so many ways that I don’t think that I can critique it to my satisfaction in less than 5,000 words. I’m not going to do that unless I get paid for it.

I’ll give you just one example. Straight off the bat, the report gives a plug for an up-and-coming designer and his ninja-inspired jacket as evidence of a new-found pride for Japanese traditions. Does the correspondent realize that she has just thrown out the half-century history of world-class Japanese fashion designers heavy on Japanese aesthetics and imagery—from Hanae Mori to Issei Miyake to Kansai Yamamoto to… you get the picture—just to highlight someone who is pitching a jacket that channels that American favorite the ninja? If that is unintentional, it only serves to make the story much worse than the infamous wearable vending machine report, best chronicled here*.

Also, “a sleek hooded jacket that zips up to show only the eyes”? Sounds more like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but maybe that’s just me.

Let's just say that the report doesn't exactly go uphill from here either.

* In fact, this article is great material for a full Néojaponisme deconstruction.

ADD: Uh-oh, it's causing brain damage on the Shisaku blog.

TIME Has “Mature” Readership?

It may not be there anymore when you look. Then again, maybe it will. After all, the article has… staying power.

As of July 30, 16:34 Japan Time, the Elder Porn story about a 74-year-old porn actor in Japan placed 8th among the articles most frequently read by TIME.com readers. What’s remarkable about this feat is that the article, posted on June 17, is more than a month old. By contrast, the next oldest article in the TIME Top 10 was posted on July 24, less than a week ago.

ADD July 31: I changed the first link to the article itself. It is down to number 10 as of 12:22PM.

Japan Is No.3 (for U.S. Echo Boomers)

The Harris Interactive released the results of its annual U.S. poll on top vacation destinations. Specifically, it put the following question to 2,454 U.S. adults:

If you could spend a vacation in any country in the world, outside the United States, and you would not have to worry about the cost, what one country would you choose?

Italy tops the list, followed by Australia (after 11 years at the No.1 spot), Great Britain, France, Ireland, Greece, and… Japan. Rounding out the top 1o were Germany, Canada, Spain, New Zealand, Switzerland, Mexico, Bahamas, and Jamaica, in that order.

Japan’s owes its surprising seventh-place finish to Echo Boomers, age 18-31, who ranked Japan No.3., just behind Italy and Great Britain. By contrast, Ireland, which did note even place in the top 15, and overall NO.12 Switzerland finished 4th and 5th respectively among the Matures, or 63 and over generation.

It’s not hard to guess what’s drawing these youngsters to Japan. Hint: It ain’t Tokyo Disneyland, and it ain’t Fujiyama. That it’s an online poll also must have boosted Japan’s numbers.

ADD 24 July: Eschatron bares all, and I give my two bit’s worth on the reasons for Japan’s third-place finish. Like I've said before, the comments are funner than the posts.

Some Thoughts on the WaiWai Incident

RD sent me Japanese set the blogs on 'sleazy Australian' writer, an article by Justin Norrie, a correspondent from The Age. Please read it before you read on; thank you.

Good.

There are a few significant inaccuracies and omissions in Mr. Norrie’s report. Let me explain.

[T]housands of posters have flooded chat sites to decry the "sleazy Australian journalist" who they feel has deliberately besmirched Japan's image around the world.

Is Mr, Norrie sure of his figures? The anger has been directed mainly at the Mainichi newsgroup and the Mainichi Daily News in particular, and much of the anger directed against Ryan Connell does not turn on his actual intent. I do understand the article’s focus on the Australian journalist though; The Age is an Australian newspaper.

The piece, [which cited a Japanese magazine article about a restaurant where patrons allegedly have sex with animals before eating them,] caught the attention of a blogger called "mozu", whose angry post was soon picked up by 2channel, a huge, fractious web forum popular with Japan's hot-headed conservative element..

Actually, the blogger formerly known as Mozu (now going by the name Mozu@ to distinguish him/herself from other Mozus) provided a thoughtful, restrained post on his blog Mozu no Saezuri (Warbling of the Shrike) that questioned the decision by the mainstream Mainichi Daily News English webpage to provide English-language digests of sleazy articles from Japanese tabloids, expressed the fear that the reports would form overseas opinion among readers who might accept them uncritically, and chastised Mainichi for its continued failure to ignorerespond to his/her complaints. As for the story about the bestiality restaurant, it appears in a post on the blog néomarxisme—an excellent Japan-themed blog by produced W. David Marx—which Mozu@ translated and quoted in its entirety. The story was material to Mozu@’s post, but only as part of a testimony that provided added insight into how WaiWai affected perceptions overseas. Finally, Mozu@ is one of the most well-read and intelligent people I’m aware of, online or off-. Anger management would be the last of items to appear on his list of personal needs. Mr. Norrie obviously wrote this on hearsay.

There it triggered an explosion of bile and culminated in a co-ordinated attack on Connell, his family, the Mainichi and its sponsors, some of which have dropped advertising estimated to be worth millions of yen.

Mr. Norrie appears to be referencing a couple of wiki sites here and here when he writes of “a coordinated attack”. But the two wiki sites are actually restrained, informative, and well-designed, and the only personal information there on Ryan Connell pertinent to this story is that he has a Japanese wife. No doubt there must have been many attacks on these people and institutions, many of them ad hominem and some of them threatening physical harm. But to call the entire outcry “a coordinated attack” obliterates the chasm between the worst of the anonymous raving and ranting on the 2 Channel forum (to be fair, the wiki sites encouraged use of 2 Channel as one vehicle for protests*) and the legitimate criticism rained on Mainichi and the deputy editor of its English webpage and virtual WaiWai proprietor Mr. Connell.

Which brings me back to the first point. Read through to the end of Mr. Norrie’s report, and there is nothing to suggest that he is even remotely aware of Mozu@’s original question. Mr. Norrie ignores the constraints imposed by the lack of knowledge about the language and culture of his place of work and does nothing to compensate. As a result, he misrepresents pertinent facts and fails to address the key issue. Overall, he appears to be falling prey to the Myth of the Right-Wing Monolith,

And now, a really small quibble:

There are many WaiWai stories, such as the one about mothers who pleasure their sons to stop them from chasing girls at the expense of school work.

There are many WaiWai stories… that what?

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I happen to think that Mr. Connell is a fine writer. Mr. Connell, as anyone who has seen his WaiWai work knows, has a fluid style and a gift for eye-catching headlines that should be easily transferrable from the rough-and-tumble sleaze and tease of the WaiWai tabloid world to the more stately pages of mainstream media. He is also fluent in Japanese. Come to think of it, perhaps The Age should replace Mr. Norrie with him. Even better, he won’t need an expensive ex-pat compensation package.

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My take on the WaiWSai site is that it was something that Mainichi should never have gotten into. Imagine The New York Times producing a Japanese-language online edition and devoting much of its resources to producing a webpage filled with digests of the sleazier reports from, at best, the New York Post to, at worst, The Weekly World News and everything in between.

Vending Machine Wear Saga Continues

Do you remember when Martin Fackler filed a dead-serious report on vending machine camouflage wear for urban women? Aya Tsukioka, the artist who fooled the New York Times reporter, is at it again. Sankei reports on her latest work, a performance art collaboration with Puma. The act runs through Monday, in the Shibuya neighborhood.

Krispy Kreme Kraze Koming to a Klose

On 15 December 2006, Krispy Kreme, the U.S. doughnut chain, opened its first Japanese store a couple of hundred yards from the south exit of the JR Shinku Station and became an instant smash hit. For over a year, day and night, in every clime and weather, the line of customers would fold back and forth on the storefront patio originally intended for outdoor tables and chairs, then snake halfway or more across a conveniently adjacent land bridge that spans the twenty or so sets of JR railroad tracks. The waiting time at the end of the line would be somewhere between 75 minutes and 115 minutes. The figure would be posted on signboards like a Disneyland ride, one freestanding and another carried by one of a pair of Krispy Kreme ushers, and dutifully updated.

No one waits well over an hour just to grab a doughnut and a cup of joe or to use the bathroom. (Besides, unlike Manhattan, where residents routinely commit to memory the location of every Starbucks and Barnes and Noble, Shinjuku, indeed much of Metropolitan Tokyo, is stocked with publicly accessible toilets, as long as you do not look and smell like a homeless derelict, who have to make do with the less-well-maintained, truly public toilets in the parks.) Instead, they would purchase at least one large box-full, often more, to later share with family and friends.

The wave has crested. In recent weeks, the waiting line has shrunk back to the Krispy Kreme patio, and the signboards are posting 25-, 35-minute waits. The now lone usher no longer needs to carry toteboards. As early as this spring, the waiting time had begun dipping near the one-hour threshold. Still, it’s only recently that the land bridge has reverted completely to the public domain. It was a great run while it lasted. And most customers still carry away large boxes, each containing a dozen or so of the delectable hydrocarbon macro-rings.

I have never seen a food fad of this scale in my lifetime, and I do not expect to see such a one again. The year-long streak of hour-and-a-half waiting lines is a feat never to be repeated, like Ted Williams hitting 400 for the season, or Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points in a game. Thus, it deserves to be recorded, on this, the blog of record.