The Image Factory

The Image Factory: Fads & Fashions in Japan (2003), by Donald Richie, takes a penetrating and frequently humorous look at Japan’s styles and crazes, from Tamagotchi digital pets, cosplay, manga, yamanba (mountain hag) girls, and cell phones, to pachinko, fake foreigners, the kawaii mindset, and the sex trade.

Writing about fashion, as Richie points out in the book, is to write about the past. Particularly in Japan, where styles are rapidly adopted and dropped. As such, parts of The Image Factory are naturally outdated. Richie was aware this would be the case, and so in writing the book he chose to shine light especially on how Japanese culture, its rules, and its history engender such uniquely Japanese trends and modes of expression, many of them extreme in comparison to their counterparts overseas. So we get a shrewd and witty exploration of a people and the stimuli that activate its constant creation of images to reflect its ever-changing identity, with plenty of examples of fads and fashions from the years and decades before.

Cosplay

Rockabilly

Geisha

Yamanba (Mountain Hag) Girls

Ganguro Girl

A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture

A Japanese Mirror, published in 1984, is Ian Buruma's dissection of the myths that imbue the darker segments of Japan's culture. He doesn't hold back; his cuts are sharp and deep. The "mirror" here can represent a number of things: a reflection of the nation's history on its present, its heroes and villains on society, or art on life and vice versa, and the way society wants to see itself and also, conversely, how it doesn't want to see itself (the wandering hero, for example—like Tora-san, charming and beloved by audiences as an anachronism incompatible with modern-day Japan and its norms, and rejecting inclusion in this society anyway).

On the mirror concept, Buruma writes:

The morbid and sometimes grotesque taste that runs through Japanese culture—and has done for centuries—is a direct result of being made to conform to such a strict and limiting code of normality. The theatrical imagination, the world of the bizarre is a parallel, or rather the flip-side of reality, as fleeting and intangible as a reflection in the mirror.

Buruma covers so much in the book in terms of films, literature, historical figures, actors, archetypes, social roles and so forth, that it's as illuminating a read as it is useful as a reference. It left plenty of impressions on me and influenced how I view aspects of the culture. And these impressions were not all positive. Buruma has such a masterful way with words, and so broad an understanding of Japan, it's often hard not to agree with him.

Although the book came out in the early 1980s, a lot of it still feels relevant to Japan today, though I'd argue that many of the more extreme cultural elements that Buruma brings to the fore have been whittled down over the past decades since the freewheeling days of the economic boom and also due to Japan being further pried out of its isolation by globalization. All in all, an excellent book that's rich with ideas and acute observation.

A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories

A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories (2005) is a collection of twenty-seven stories by Donald Richie. Richie was an authority on Japanese film and culture and well known for his travel book, The Inland Sea (1971). He passed away just a few years ago on February 19, 2013 at the age of 88 in Tokyo.

These stories, some of which are no longer than a couple pages, are centered around moments of realization or little leaps of understanding. They are about everyday Japanese people. A few reflect aspects of Japanese culture that Richie must've been intrigued by, while others look at clashes of culture, mostly through the prejudices of middle-aged Japanese women. Differences in regard to areas of Tokyo is a lesser theme in the collection; in one story a foreign woman who's just moved to Yanaka may have been inadvertently spied upon, or intentionally so, through an open window. Her neighbor sees this foreign women with her Japanese boyfriend, and—although nothing like the neighbor's reaction would happen in Harajuku, we're told—the neighbor brazenly suggests to the foreign woman that she either leave the boy or leave Yanaka.

A few of the stories or parts of them are interesting, but I got the feeling that Richie put nowhere near as much work into them as he did with his other publications. The edition I picked up, from a shop in Asakusa selling used books (600 yen, near-new condition, and autographed by Richie), has dozens of typos, including missing words and egregious punctuation errors, which interfered with how I processed the writing and envisioned what was described. Apart from that, the stories are all right, especially for anyone interested in Japan and Donald Richie.