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 As such, parts of The Image Factory are naturally outdated.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

Tokyo March

Tokyo March (Japanese: 東京行進曲, or Tōkyō kōshinkyoku) is a 1929 silent film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi which was originally screened with live performances by benshi. Dressed in formal black-and-white Western clothing and in bow-ties, the benshi provided the narration, accompanied by musical performances as well.

This melodramatic love story, only 24 minutes long (what remains of it anyway), incorporates some of the themes that Mizoguchi would become well known for through his later films. These include the trials and tribulations of destitute geisha and other women, social inequality in a rapidly modernizing Japan, water as a symbol of both purification and the unyielding passage of time, and relationships between men (usually from the upper crust) and women (common but not unrefined) in the "lower" (but not necessarily uncultivated) pleasure corners, such as Shitamachi in Tokyo and Gion in Kyoto.

In this short story of a film, Michiyo and her friend Sumie live in Tokyo, "the center of sin and corruption" we are told. Michiyo has never known her father, and her mother has recently died. Yen-less she becomes a geisha to make ends meet. A young man (Yoshiki) and his friend (Sakuma) are playing tennis when they see Michiyo walk by. Yoshiki falls in love at first sight, but then Michiyo changes her name to Orie the following day when she becomes a geisha, and Yoshiki "hates" geisha. After a short while, though, the fire in his heart burns away the hate and he resolves to marry her. Meanwhile, his father (we don't know it's his father yet) appears to be falling in love with Orie, too. When he finds out that his son wishes to marry her, he spits at the idea. After all, they belong to a higher social class than mere geisha. The truth, however, is that he is the father of Michiyo/Orie, and now he must tell his son that she is his half-sister. Dun Dun Duuun!!!

Compelling for its black-and-white scenes of a bustling pre-war Tokyo and for its exuberant, melodramatic benshi performance, Tokyo March is a remarkable early work by a man considered to be the most Japanese director of Japanese directors. There's also a happy ending, which surprised me for a Mizoguchi film.

“Tokyo March” (theme song) composed by Shinpei Nakayama, performed by Chiyako Sato

Longing for the past when the streets in Ginza were lined with willow trees A young beauty becomes a nobody with age Dance to the jazz music and down liquor into the night And the rain that is the tears of the dancers will sprinkle at the break of dawn.

Kenji Mizoguchi's Tokyo March

Kenji Mizoguchi's Tokyo March

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.