Dean Durkin
12.17.21
Media Capitalism in 1980's Japan
Popular stereotype in large part defined the 1980s as an era of mass commercial consumption which brought about the erasure of individual identity through cross-cultural product assimilation. American and European corporations achieved high popularity in Japan through notable brand titles like McDonalds and Louis Vuitton, while Japanese products exported into the United States were widely known for their technological innovations like the Nintendo console, the Sony Walkman, and Yamaha synthesizers. Popularity is an identifiable language within Yasuo Tanaka’s Somehow, Crystal that allows a common identity to be found within the ‘simplistic’ life of Yuri. By listing the right pages of the book with footnotes that provide context to brand names, products, areas, and sayings, Tanaka captures both vulgarity and beauty of the popular culture boom within 1980s Japan. Yuri is crafted as a consumer of products through explicitly detailed footnotes giving her a sense of hyper-awareness towards her surroundings. However, her free-thinking remains unconfined towards any traditional familial, camaraderie, or ideological product. Tanaka insinuates the language of consumerism as having corrupted speech and affected the perception of the masses in a black and white manner. As Yuri is unable to express herself to her friends, her thoughts become the purest form of an expressionless manner of passively living which translates as a form of resisting the effects of media capitalism. She shifts her attachment to objects to match her life of “somehow moods”(30), reflecting both a consumption yet an autonomy from any singular product. Yuri becomes a living breathing dialect of the Japanese youth’s interaction and response to media capitalism in 1980s Japan. Her sensibility to music contrasts with her personal relationships, forming Yuri into both an autonomous player and a consumer.
Yuri’s quite excellent taste in music is solely confined across a wide range of purely American genres. She makes the case to articulate every piece of music that is playing through detailing the artists origin, unique relation to its genre, and its composition within the cultural sphere. Yuri’s relationship to sound functions as a sort of subconscious displaying of her internal state concerning her personal relationships with those close to her. This creates a dialect between the individual and the masses as identifying the state of Japanese consumer culture in the 1980s. Yuri’s day begins when she wakes up to interact with the Japanese commercial radio. She turns on the FEN station immediately upon waking up and interacts with a series of songs that articulate her inner moods and reflect her emotional patterns. The station is “strangely playing”(1) Willie Nelson’s “Moonlight in Vermont”, featuring an easing guitar tune aside a soft voice describing the winsome landscapes of Vermont. Its lyrics read “People who meet in this romantic setting are so hypnotized by…” going on to describe a scenery of summer breezes, telegraph cables, and meadow larks. Yuri’s connotation of its ‘strange’ playing could be a reference towards a dream, the fact that she lives in Tokyo, and a number of open interpretations. When Stephen Bishop’s “On and On” turns on with lyrics fetishizing Jamaican women while ‘putting on Sinatra to cry,’ it throws Yuri off “in the morning.”(1) She aspires for the contemporary “shake it, shake it for me baby” Kenny Loggins, whose heavy tempo pop is far more exciting for the morning. When Paul Davis’s “I Go Crazy” comes on, Yuri lights a cigarette and interprets the lyrics as her own. Yuri express her own sentiments through manipulating the lyrics of this song about losing oneself in another lovers eyes, turning “I go crazy” (0:55) into “I go melancholy, I go gloomy.”(2) Yuri’s moods are obviously not in line with those of the radio since she constantly reinterprets its displaying of sounds to match her own reality. As her reflective state partially stems from her solitude, her desire for the radio to meet her mood translates as reciprocative for a commercial Japanese station failing to satisfying her taste levels to American music.
The absence of any Japanese music could be interpreted as an American dominance, but Michael K. Bourdaghs chapter on New Music and the Negation of the Negation in his book Sayonara Amerika provides context on the state of Japanese music throughout the 1970s. His chapter focuses on Happy End, a music group who gained notoriety for influencing original Japanese rock towards new heights. Their integration with American compositional styles placed them between “two competing narratives” being either the triumph of “globalizing American culture” while “a traditional and local resistance to American culture.”(176) Similarly to the effect of Somehow Crystal, Happy End’s music ultimately resisted either narrative through performing original rock music that wasn’t imitating Western styles. The band recorded lyrics expressing “urban angst and alienation” rather than the “conventional love songs” which created a “parodic rejection of mass culture” as a mode for “self understanding”(171). While Somehow, Crystal contains romantic expressions its implications aren’t translated through the underlying theme of pop romance, but through a more isolating feeling. Yuri’s interaction with Masataka in the lovers hotel functions more so as a reflection upon bodily release than an intellectual connection or implied romance. Masataka dismisses notions of pride within their generation while implying they aren’t necessarily depressed, disillusioned nor philosophical, but just ‘are’. The “crystal” becomes relates in its transparency and imperfection whose beauty shifts between light or dark spaces. Provided her preferable taste towards objects with “the better mood,”(40) Yuri persistently floats between shifting states of being. Happy End’s main lyricist Takashi Matsumoto articulated that his generation was “stuck between a ‘pseudo-West’ and a ‘sham Japan’” environment through which “neither the West nor Japan could provide a stable sense of identity.” This places an emphasis on public perception being confined towards two sides such as Yuri’s moods, and the awareness of media capitalism.
The musical conditions Happy End precariously navigated its sound through holds a greater truth towards the contextual narrative that Somehow, Crystal frames in its heavy incorporation of productized cultural sphere. What could easily be interpreted as a meaningless listing of facts pertaining towards the character’s life turns into matters concerning capitalist assimilation of cultural products that are not ‘of Japan’. Yuri points out her friend Nao as being unable to be “raised Japanese because this Japan couldn’t handle her ‘Japanese’ in the first place” even though she is Japanese.(48) Foreign influences from rock music to branding enforces a “strange Western complex all around us.”(52) Yuri points out that its not only her generation specifically that “can’t resist brands,” but Japan as a whole. (54) Through sealing the generational obsession of brands as being un-targeted towards solely a youthful consumption, Tanaka fights the implications of separated capitalist classes as being a whole. This remark becomes one of the only patterns of identifying any ‘Japaneseness’ as a collective culture.
International media capitalism in Japan alone is not put to blame on either the younger or older generations, but the commercial masses losing its identity as a whole. There are two Japanese products introduced in the West that can prove this claim that tightened the bounds between the commercial artist and the individual. The first was a product that initiated a closer proximity between commercial music and the individual: the Sony Walkman. The second product initiated the consumption of commercial music to pertain to the collective group: the karaoke machine. In The Walkman effect Shuhei Hosokawa traces the public reaction and interaction with the apparition of this portable, and private music player into the public sphere. The walkman penetrated through the boundaries between musician and audiences by giving listeners the ability to play music within the spaces of their personal lives without disturbing the public soundscape. While the radio station publicized sounds through channeling specified ‘moods’ through loudspeakers, the walkman enabled itself as free from any commercial space by transforming “spatial signification into something else” than either “euphoric or dysphoric”(178) sensations. Happy and sad songs become re-contextualized through more a personal and contemplative manners. While the public stereo influenced the surrounding space with a collective soundtrack, the walkman effectively contextualized the individual as distinctively separate from public spaces. This mechanical function effectively separated the listener from their surrounding reality to be publicly perceived as “listening to something,” but whose gazer knew not what “he is listening to.”(177) Walkman floaters in public spaces neither “refuse communication nor are isolated from reality,” but continue “enunciating the existence of their secret” in this “simple way.”(177) Yuri’s interaction with the public sphere works like the walkman effect. Her degrees of awareness in connecting with the physical world are formed through her personal opinion of products, exactly like the degrees of a readers’ knowledge of the footnotes. This places an emphasis on the individual as not being apart of the masses, but containing an individuality from others.
While Yuri’s taste is not limited between choosing outward and inwardly oriented products, her experiences and relationship to them reflect the interaction to the karaoke performance. Christine Yano’s The floating world of Karaoke in Japan confronts the effect of the karaoke performance within collective groups, and how each individual’s participation with media capitalism contributes towards making karaoke ‘work right’. While the walkman’s interaction is limited to the individuals experience of putting on headphones, the pleasure of karaoke is contributed by its participants knowledge of the commercial material and their performance in response to the music. Acting as a form of escape from the mundane life, the individuals “performance/ participation constitutes a state of ambiguity when he/she exists apart from everyday statuses and identities” ending when the applause dies down and the individual “re-enters the social structure.”(1) Whenever Yuri provides her personal comments within the footnotes a touch of human reaction towards a product is placed such like in karaoke. Its continuing process of “separation-liminality-reincorporation” is relayed from the observation and performance of the individual, which transforms the performance of karaoke into a group collaboration.(2) The karaoke performance demands one to know the “context well,”(12) for the collective group to reach a pleasurable experience. Performances are generally rated based on voice inflection and the ability to ‘keep up’ with the lyrics. Awareness of the commercial material strengthens ones performance to initiate new takes on tracks, or sing it flawlessly. However like the walkman, an unfamiliar reaction to a song can perpetuate mixed reactions. A performer instinctually giving a spectacular performance can positively add to the weight of the moment, while a terrible performance could be either the fault of a terrible imitation, or the song itself ‘sucks’. It is through the natural human reaction that the karaoke performance escapes the boundaries of commercial listening and forms the individual as both apart and evermore separate from commercial music.
The Walkman and karaoke machine reflect both the commercial intake of both the collective masses and the individual’s relationship towards media capitalism. While both products can be seen as an escape from the mundane, their power is held within their ability to transform surrounding environments towards heightening the individual experience and participation within the public sphere. The perpetual dialect of the walkman reflects the ambiguous forms through which Yuri communicates her proper internal emotional feelings, while on the other hand the karaoke performance connotes Yuri’s sensations towards both popular music and her family. Like karaoke, Yuri’s reaction to pop culture forms from reactionary states the interdependent on her ‘moods’.
The Diorissimo footnote reads Yuri’s nature with media capitalism: “Diorissimo: Diorissimo with its floral mix of lily and jasmine, is supposed to be fitting for the unsullied missus or the pure young lady.” (137) As Yuri wipes the perspiration off of her forehead through which she can smell the "Diorissimo perfume I had put on back in the clubhouse mixed with my sweat.”(136) The emphasis on supposed becomes a measure for Yuri to break the traditional intent of this product, and include her ‘version’ of it. Somehow, Crystal breaks the narrative of a commercially driven youth by applauding the minimal attention span of the youth’s ability to pertain to no singular product.
If the perception is held that media capitalism erased individual identity, then its implied contradictory statement means that individual identity is born from media capitalism. In synthesis format this means that individual identity is habitually born and broken in the consuming of trends of products through a constant phase of a shifting attention: ‘somehow moods’. Yuri’s realist narrative shapes a personal reconsidering upon the mundane aspects that drive her society. While Japanese culture was capitalistically driven towards a commercialized media civilization within the populace, its traditional structures never disappeared. The books inclusiveness of street names, buildings, and temples alongside brand names, and expressions, combine all of these things as a whole. Thus the distinction between old and new is erased. Tanaka points to the Japanese mode of thought on media capitalism as posing a danger towards the perception of the youth, whom live the same with the special exception of knowing what’s currently hot. Similarly to Yellow Magic Orchestra’s remixing of video games sounds that were “transforming youth culture,”(188) Somehow, Crystal emerges as a reactionary novel of the cultural impact of ‘new Japan’s’ effect on youth culture.