Basking shark

[imomus]

Yesterday I compared the "sharky" iconography of UK style magazine Dazed and Confused with some very different imagery in Japanese fashion magazine Fudge. Cultural comparison can never be an exact science, but Hisae and I discussed whether I could have picked a more appropriate Japanese magazine, and decided that Relax might be the closest parallel, in terms of topics covered and the type of person buying it. So today I thought I'd do a survey of what's been happening in Relax in 2005. I'm using summaries and scans from the website of The Glade, from whom you can order Relax and other Japanese magazines worldwide (at €17, though, copies of Relax aren't cheap).

March 2005

Glade blurb: "Slow Games & Smart Toys" is the subtitle of this current issue of Relax. What to expect: a truly massive feature on all sorts of toys - board games, as well as computer games. You'll get to see early sketches of the Mario Bros., there are robots, and all other sorts of playful things.

Features
- News Building: Ewok 5MH in Tokyo, Message vs. Lodown, Number (N)ine, Head Porter Plus
- Puma: Mongolian Shoe BBQ
- Art + Design: Vision Quest



May 2005

Glade blurb: Relax 99 is the thickest issue to date. With over 220 pages you will not get a magazine but a small book... about dancing. Don't think 'boring old people dancing' now. It's Relax - keep that in mind!

Shall We Dance takes us around the globe showing us all different facets of dancing. There is a huge feature on Buenos Aires, Tokyo and New York City.

Features
- Front Yard #3 with illustrations by A. Miwako
- Paris à la Mode fashion report
- fashion shoots include pieces by: Lee, Nike, Visvim
- extra: Relax Dance Journal (Tokyo & Overseas)



June 2005

Glade blurb: Yes, Relax is back and they surprise us with better feature stories in every new issue. Issue #100 is a Tokyo special - "> visit Tokyo > accept Tokyo" is the subtitle. Accept Tokyo? Why wouldn't one accept this city...

#100 comes with a complete catalogue of Nike's Brasil '05 collection, with sticker sheet.

Features
- illustratins by Kan Hiroshi
- Tokyo: Raf Simons, J.T. LeRoy, Simon Taylor, Kim Jones, Clements Ribeiro, Zingaro
- New Tokyo Souvenir
- Tokyo - "Convenient Guesthouse" report
- Tokyo Night Journal (meeting with night butterflies)

Hisae actually bought the Relax Tokyo special the other day at ProQM, our local Relax stockist here in Berlin, and I'd just comment that the issue is interesting because it's really about Tokyo as seen through the eyes of foreigners. Many of the articles feature gaijin Tokyoites, usually foreign males (Brazilian, American, British) photographed lying on narrow futons in cramped Tokyo apartments with their Japanese girlfriends.

Conclusion: if this really is the closest Japan has to a Dazed and Confused, I have to say that personally I find the topics and imagery in Relax (which recently changed editors, but hasn't significantly changed its topics, themes, tone or concerns) even less "sharky" than the examples I chose yesterday from Fudge.

Of course, the closest Japanese magazine to Dazed and Confused is... Dazed and Confused Japan. I can't say much about that because I've never bought it. It does seem to be one of the more successful "localisations" of a Western magazine to Japan—i-D, for instance, closed its Japanese edition after a mere five issues—and differs quite significantly from the London edition. Those differences would be very interesting to look at in more depth. Oddly enough, Dazed and Confused Japan looks to me a lot closer in imagery to a Japanese fashion magazine like Composite than its English sister. Its big theme seems to be "creator's style" and groups rather than "self-assertion" and individuals. Notice the very harmonious-looking collective portrait on the cover of the current edition!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Relax may be the closest, seeing that it is not a catalog consumer guide, but a general lifstyle magazine. But I get the sense that Relax readers are younger than Dazed readers, and its subject matter comes from out of the relatively "soft" Shibuya-kei and Ura-Harajuku scenes. Whereas Dazed is all about the fashionable sharky subcultures based around London and NYC.

Relax usually also sells its main stories to companies, which is generally going to soften the tone a bit, no? I don't think OP ended up liking that cocaine ad Vice did for them back in '02. When the point is to titilate readers, things descend into a spiral of debauchery. When the point is to give companies ad space masking as editorial, thing stay much calmer.

Marxy

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it's interesting that you collapse a sensibility difference into a systematic one (or, to put it another way, a cultural difference into an economic one). I don't disagree—culture cannot remain distinctive without distinctive economic structures—but I'd be interested to hear whether you think there is any basic cultural difference being expressed in the "soft" imagery of Japanese magazines, in terms of the way nature is represented, women are represented, groups are represented, children are represented, and so on.

[(Anonymous)]

Another point of difference is that these kinds of Western magazines are made by editors generally the same age as the readers, or at least with similar sensibilities. From working at Tokion, I can vouch that everyone tried to pitch content that they themselves would want to read or would impress other fellow members of the community. Maybe Vice or Dazed are more cynical about what they feature, but I get the sense that the editors are constantly trying to impress other editors by finding the "coolest" things instead of just hawking shit to kids.

In Japan, lifestyle magazine editors are mainly hired employees of massive publishing companies who bounce around various magazines during their careers. They are typical much older than the readers, and often, have little direct interest in the content at hand. (I do think, however, that the ex-editor-in-chief at Relax was extremely good at what he did.) Working in publishing in Japan (especially at Kodansha, Shueisha, or Magazine House) is a prestige job. They don't have to suffer the terrible salaries, and so in the end, there are a lot of college educated "good kids" manning the desks.

Your are right that Japanese culture in general is much "softer," and I think it's important to point out that it lacks both violence and debauchery, but also intellectual ideas. Vice in particular has an ideological agenda, but most of these sharky Western magazines are cynical or satirical or otherwise get their power through attacking other institutions. Almost none of the Japanese media ever gets up to anything mildly confrontational. (I think we disagree on why this is.) So when you've checked off "conflict" as a possible source of content, there's not much left besides exploring the softer sides of life.

Marxy

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, shock horror, I think I agree with everything you say there. I'd just qualify this a bit:

I think it's important to point out that it lacks both violence and debauchery, but also intellectual ideas.

I think that depends on how narrowly you define "intellectual ideas". If we include aesthetic ideas, or things like innovation in styles and products, we have to say that Japan is very rich in intellectual ideas. Lots of patents are filed in Japan! What's relatively absent is what I call "talk radio culture" — our post-protestant insistence on putting our opinions in a ring with other people's. And I don't actually think that's the be-all and end-all of human intellect.

[(Anonymous)]

again momus/marxy world where the twain shall never meet and carricatures of both japan and the 'west' are created.

intellectual ideas" basically as many in japan(ese mags) as anywhere (intellectual - not only patronisingly, appologeticaly assigning intellectual values to frilly aesthetics.). the way they're created, processed and put forward may different (to put it simply i'd say they're more layered, filtered, oblique etc in japan)

putting our opinions in a ring with other people's.
there really is plenty of this too soft and hard in every form japanese media so i don't know what the fuss is all about.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

one for the bonfire.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/news/nn11-2004/nn20041109a6.htm

P.I.C.

[(Anonymous)]

Your newish picture is possibly the best ever. Aiha loove it.

Saint Awesome VIBDauphin

[blndsnnts.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how much you rely on photography here and elsewhere as the synthesis of all (?) experience and ideology. If anything, it's a different form of ideology from what is coursing through culture. Perhaps there's some essay on photography you've read that I haven't, but I would say both cultures are both equally dependent on photography and this is not good. Pictures are not profoundly dialogic; photographs can only respond to specific things in other photographs and at an alarmingly minute rate. People have become obsessed with the photography narrative, which is kind of like literary narrative, but of course so much more condensed and with less parallelism, texture, etc. A picture *is not* worth a thousand words.

As my friend said a week ago, photography is a way of making the self the other and vice-versa too, maybe. Sontag said photography is huge in "giving us an immense amount of experience that 'normally' is not our experience. And by making a selection of experience which is very tendentious, ideological. While there appears to be nothing that photography can't devour, whatever can't be photographed becomes less important." I have yet to read her book on the matter. As the Chinese supposedly don't think in photographic terms, perhaps the Japanese and Western think too much in photographic terms.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Interesting, I was watching an interview with photographer David Bailey last night and he said that people place too much trust in photographs because they're mechanical images, and that in fact he thought that asking someone to do a drawing would reveal much more about his personality than asking someone to sit for a photographic portrait.

Actually, one of the things that makes Relax magazine look softer and more "humane" than Dazed is the fact that it opts for drawings over photographs, at least for its covers. This has been a conscious part of the magazine's identity from the start, although since the change of editor last year they've stuck to it less, putting more photos and fewer drawings on the cover, which I think is a shame.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

we love bluecalico, don't we?

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Well, I do.

[(Anonymous)]

Nice to see the Japanese have changed so much in recent years.

Lest we forget, here are some skulls in the making from the Rape of Nanjing, China:

[imomus.livejournal.com]

News of the end of World War II hasn't reached the town of Ross-on-Wye, I see.

[(Anonymous)]

Just two questions, that is all.
Does this guy on top wear costume or he is not?

Does Marxy has a blog other than this one?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

His blog is here (http://pliink.com/mt/marxy/). I think he's in costume on his blog, yes. I certainly hope so.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

they do che guevara door mats (no joke!), where i (unfortunately 1 month to go) still live. most 12 year old skaters here wear strictly AC/DC and not Bow Wow Wow as some style gurus would hope for.