The multi-tasking tribe
Aug. 23rd, 2005 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusMy first Wired column is online. It's a piece called "Reading Green Tea Leaves in Tokyo" and it's about how capitalism shows different faces in different places, how some of its localized versions are less toxic than others, less injurious to human health and human intelligence, and whether these differences are down to consumers or producers.
Scanning the Wired site, I found a really nice article entitled How mobile phones conquered Japan. It's a review of a new English-language book called Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. The article made me realise how scarred my brain has become by reading (and refuting) the daily doses of crusading cynicism going on over at Neomarxisme. I now half expect every book about Japan to be an exposé of conspiracies, yakuza control, or gripes about a system that's headed for oblivion. So it's tremendously refreshing to read the conclusion of the Wired piece: "By understanding how a once-alien technology became such a natural extension of everyday life in Japan, we may yet understand what is in store for the rest of the world."
Xeni Jardin, who wrote the piece, comes to this delightfully Japanophilic conclusion (its optimism matches my own basic feeling about Japan) not after turgid, cynical analyses of the business structure or marketing history of the keitai, but with a look at Japan's history, and specifically at cultural precedents like "the legend of Sontoku (Kinjiro) Ninomiya, a Johnny Appleseed-like national folk hero often represented in statues outside bookstores and schools... most often remembered reading as he walks, burdened with bundles of firewood gathered in daily chores. The book points to this multitasker ancestor as a precursor of contemporary nagara ("while-doing-something-else") mobility, a concept now embodied in students who wander from home to class and back again, eternally gazing into a palm full of e-mails."
This sense that Japan's technological modernity (and even avant gardism) might be rooted not in incomplete emulations of the West but in something very ancient, folksy and specifically Japanese is exactly what I feel about the country; that it's a place where, as I put it in my Superlegitimacy essay, trains may look like Western trains, but are actually "a set of Japanese etiquettes and assumptions travelling through space".
I asked Hisae about this idea of the "multi-tasking tribe", the Nagara-zoku, and she came up immediately with an even older, more folksy ancestor: Prince Shotoku Taishi, a medieval multi-tasker so intelligent that he could listen to what ten people were saying, all speaking at once. He's the man in the statue to the left, and he would have loved the keitai.
It might seem odd to hold the view that Japanese phenomena are so rooted in local Japanese traditions, and yet applicable (by "Japanization") to the rest of the world, but I don't think it's a contradiction. When I think of the really successful Japanese products—Pokemon, or the films of Miyazaki, for instance—they're successful because they're full of a very specific Japaneseness. Their universality is rooted in their particularism, and their global reach comes from their local resonance.
It's odd that Marxy and I have such different views of Japan—mine culturalist, aestheticist, utopian-evangelical, his structuralist, business-oriented and pessimistic—and odder still to read, in a recent Marxy interview, that my early essays about Japan (he cites Shibuya-kei is Dead) were a big influence on the young Marxy: "He was the only one I could find who really understood what was going on there."
But it wouldn't be the first time theologians (because that's what we are, Japan theologians) have diverged. I was watching a documentary last night called "God's Rottweiler", a biography of Pope Benedict. Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Kung were both modernisers in the 1960s, responsible for bringing the Catholic church into the 20th century (Vatican 2 saw the end of Latin mass, for instance). But they soon diverged, Ratzinger deciding that liberalization was making the church lose its identity, and Kung heading leftwards into Marxist-influenced Liberation Theology. (There's a nice joke about Ratzinger and Kung at the Pearly gates here.) So which of us is Ratzinger and which of us is Kung? I leave that up to you to decide.
Scanning the Wired site, I found a really nice article entitled How mobile phones conquered Japan. It's a review of a new English-language book called Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. The article made me realise how scarred my brain has become by reading (and refuting) the daily doses of crusading cynicism going on over at Neomarxisme. I now half expect every book about Japan to be an exposé of conspiracies, yakuza control, or gripes about a system that's headed for oblivion. So it's tremendously refreshing to read the conclusion of the Wired piece: "By understanding how a once-alien technology became such a natural extension of everyday life in Japan, we may yet understand what is in store for the rest of the world."
Xeni Jardin, who wrote the piece, comes to this delightfully Japanophilic conclusion (its optimism matches my own basic feeling about Japan) not after turgid, cynical analyses of the business structure or marketing history of the keitai, but with a look at Japan's history, and specifically at cultural precedents like "the legend of Sontoku (Kinjiro) Ninomiya, a Johnny Appleseed-like national folk hero often represented in statues outside bookstores and schools... most often remembered reading as he walks, burdened with bundles of firewood gathered in daily chores. The book points to this multitasker ancestor as a precursor of contemporary nagara ("while-doing-something-else") mobility, a concept now embodied in students who wander from home to class and back again, eternally gazing into a palm full of e-mails."This sense that Japan's technological modernity (and even avant gardism) might be rooted not in incomplete emulations of the West but in something very ancient, folksy and specifically Japanese is exactly what I feel about the country; that it's a place where, as I put it in my Superlegitimacy essay, trains may look like Western trains, but are actually "a set of Japanese etiquettes and assumptions travelling through space".I asked Hisae about this idea of the "multi-tasking tribe", the Nagara-zoku, and she came up immediately with an even older, more folksy ancestor: Prince Shotoku Taishi, a medieval multi-tasker so intelligent that he could listen to what ten people were saying, all speaking at once. He's the man in the statue to the left, and he would have loved the keitai.It might seem odd to hold the view that Japanese phenomena are so rooted in local Japanese traditions, and yet applicable (by "Japanization") to the rest of the world, but I don't think it's a contradiction. When I think of the really successful Japanese products—Pokemon, or the films of Miyazaki, for instance—they're successful because they're full of a very specific Japaneseness. Their universality is rooted in their particularism, and their global reach comes from their local resonance.
It's odd that Marxy and I have such different views of Japan—mine culturalist, aestheticist, utopian-evangelical, his structuralist, business-oriented and pessimistic—and odder still to read, in a recent Marxy interview, that my early essays about Japan (he cites Shibuya-kei is Dead) were a big influence on the young Marxy: "He was the only one I could find who really understood what was going on there."
But it wouldn't be the first time theologians (because that's what we are, Japan theologians) have diverged. I was watching a documentary last night called "God's Rottweiler", a biography of Pope Benedict. Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Kung were both modernisers in the 1960s, responsible for bringing the Catholic church into the 20th century (Vatican 2 saw the end of Latin mass, for instance). But they soon diverged, Ratzinger deciding that liberalization was making the church lose its identity, and Kung heading leftwards into Marxist-influenced Liberation Theology. (There's a nice joke about Ratzinger and Kung at the Pearly gates here.) So which of us is Ratzinger and which of us is Kung? I leave that up to you to decide.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 09:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 09:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 09:52 am (UTC)::off to read the review::
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 09:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 09:55 am (UTC)If you're looking for someone to blame for attitudes like these, blame Denis Donoghue, whose 1982 Reith lectures The Arts Without Mystery (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith/reith_history.shtml) were a big influence on me. (Hint: he was attacking the Coles Notes concept that you can de-mystify the arts and that the arts without mystery would be in any way desireable.) Wish the Beeb would hurry up and get those lectures online so I can see whether I still agree with all Donoghue's ideas.
great image
Date: 2005-08-23 09:59 am (UTC)Re: great image
Date: 2005-08-23 10:20 am (UTC)"the Momus" of the 00s? Thanks goodness NOT!
Date: 2005-08-23 10:21 am (UTC)I don't think I'm "the Momus" of the 00s when it comes to Japan, because he always has been "selling Japan" to a certain extent. I think he got people (including me to some extent) excited about what was going on there in the late 90s. I am not really selling Japan as much as selling the idea of "understanding Japan." And like with anything, the more you understand it, the less you idealize/worship it.
I also feel the responsibility to correct a lot of the common misconceptions about Japanese pop culture that abound in the Western media. They are slow to the story, and what’s nice about blogs and the Internet, is that we can provide real-time coverage.
I get such a reputation for being a grump or jaded or "disillusioned" or "a bitchy Westerner" when it comes to Japan, but if you want to start being disillusioned about Japan, the only thing you have to do is pull back the curtain and look at the way the cultural industries work here.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 10:26 am (UTC)Re: "the Momus" of the 00s? Thanks goodness NOT!
Date: 2005-08-23 10:30 am (UTC)Marxy
Re: "the Momus" of the 00s? Thanks goodness NOT!
Date: 2005-08-23 10:33 am (UTC)The veil of Gaia (http://www.theoi.com/Protogenos/Gaia.html), if you know your mythology, turns out to be made of forests, and Gaia herself is "a buxom, matronly woman, shown half risen from the earth, unable to completely separate herself from her element". In other words, you can't tear away the veil without tearing away the substance too.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 10:34 am (UTC)thanks!
Date: 2005-08-23 10:51 am (UTC)Re: "the Momus" of the 00s? Thanks goodness NOT!
Date: 2005-08-23 10:53 am (UTC)best,
r.
From Marxy
Date: 2005-08-23 10:53 am (UTC)You can always go back in history and find precursors to some modern event, but you can find an equal number of counterexamples, and it is almost always impossible to prove a those cultural properties' clean descent from the past.
A better avenue to think about keitai is the fact that government over-regulation essentially squashed all computer-based Internet usage until broadband. In the 70s, Japan was supposedly ahead of the US in terms of digitizing contents and making electronic data networks, but the ridiculous restrictions on owning second phone lines and prohibitively high phone rates made cell phones a much easier place for Internet-esque culture to arise.
There is also a (somewhat dubious) linguistic explanation that teachers have never wanted computers in the classroom, because computers do not encourage Japanese students to learn how to write kanji by hand. But whatever the case, there has never been a strong computer culture in Japan and all the functions that sold the Internet to consumers in the West ended up selling keitai to Japanese consumers. Phones are also cheaper to buy than computers, which was crucial for getting kids involved.
odder still to read, in a recent Marxy interview, that my early essays about Japan (he cites Shibuya-kei is Dead) were a big influence on the young Marx
I used to feel almost the same way about Japan as you did. But then I discovered that I have some serious ethical qualms with many of the driving forces behind Japanese pop culture. I *wish* you were right about things, but I would just have to ignore a lot of things I've learned.
Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 11:31 am (UTC)(I can't separate JKGalbraith from the Cheaper By the Dozen books, even though they're not quite the same -- Gilbreth/Galbraith.)
Re: From Marxy
Date: 2005-08-23 11:33 am (UTC)Re: From Marxy
Date: 2005-08-23 11:36 am (UTC)and r. say: he "CAN always"? thanks giving him a little too much credit where none is due. "DOES always" would have been more fitting. if you take a quick overview of recent momusian pennings (i'd say over the last few years), a particular charachterizing factor becomes obvious: almost all of what nick writes about japan akin to some kind of 'japanophilic retcon'...
he excells in taking some cultural nugget that he perceives as 'current' (usually a little dated) or relevant (in this case, the keitai) and then jumping in his google time machine, or on his companion, to find some kind of abraham-like figure to explain everything away in some neat package.
naturally, he gets big points for his overactive imagination, but winds up in the red since more points have to be taken off for the bullshit factor. prince shotoku taishi? right! i'm sure if you translated this entry into japanese and fwd. it to everybody in the R&D department at docomo, they would be like "damn, that momus guy really sussed us out!"
or even if his penchant for postdiction WERE somehow accurate, it still does VERY little to empower the japanese consumer, no? next time i complain about the exorbitant per-PACKET charges by which the monopolistic big two or three keitai companies rake the yen in, i'll be sure to base my objections on the firm ground of good ol prince shotoku taishi! that'll get their attention!
all of the tech. issues and government over-regulation problems you bring up are much more applicable in explaning what has happened, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY (and here is where nick's 'japanophilic retcon' can't help us out) PREDICTING future trends. in other words, he is using the ancient PAST to explain the NEAR-PRESENT (party because it is well-documented in english, non-scientific, and therefore palatable to him in a 'textual' kind of way), and you are (with your master's thesis) trying to explain the NEAR-FUTURE using market-based info from the PRESENT.
of course, the best way for momus to disprove these 'japanophilic retcon' observations would be to write a few PREDICTIVE, 'time capsule' articles on japan and japanese culture. (he has done this at times in the past: remember that nick told us that a ROBOT WORKFORCE will be plugging the gap in blue collar work caused by the japanese population decline...instead of the japanese just porting in a SE asian and brazilian second and third gen. cheap labor force.) i'm sure if the three of us put our heads together, we could come up with a range of topical issues that might be worthy of his predictive pennings. up for that?
heck, if he keeps eating right, i'm sure he'll be with us for at least 20 more years or so, perhaps even more! so NOW is his chance to set himself up to be in a position to say "TOLD YOU SO!" by leaving us some hard, utopian, non-postdictive gems of thought. then, while he is going thru some kind of 'japan and ambulatory cool' phase on his blog in a decade or so, we can swallow our pride and offer to make the green tea for HIM.
kishi keisuke
Date: 2005-08-23 11:40 am (UTC)conspiracy theory and cake
Date: 2005-08-23 11:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 11:48 am (UTC)Cheers,
Diacritics Matter.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 11:50 am (UTC)Re: conspiracy theory and cake
Date: 2005-08-23 02:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 03:10 pm (UTC)Re: conspiracy theory and cake
Date: 2005-08-23 03:34 pm (UTC)