Shibuya-kei is b-b-back?

[imomus]

I don't know if I've caught some kind of cold -- which would be odd, since I haven't had one for years -- or if all this sento bathing has made me feverish, but I spent my last day in Tokyo walking round in some kind of weird dream state. My throat and nasal membranes were lightly inflamed, a heady musk of mutton fat rose in my throat, and I felt the pleasantly hallucinatory sense of nostalgic unreality that often precedes a cold. In this kind of state I often get flashbacks to scenes from years ago. I'll see a recurring image of the East End of Princes Street, Edinburgh, for instance (upstairs from what's now Burger King, but used to be... the dingy cafe of Patrick Thomson's department store, didn't it?), and then, the next moment, a room in Finland.

The really odd thing about today, though, was that the city of Tokyo seemed to be conspiring with my fever. The whole place transformed itself into one gigantic psychedelic flashback. Suddenly the excitement of the 90s was back. Was it because I've been in Osaka so long, and saw Tokyo -- its zippy consumer spectacle, its stylish supercool youth -- afresh? Was it just sento fever? Or was something afoot, something fresh stirring in the autumnal air?



Taking my cue from Jean Snow's blog I went to Shibuya to see the Braniff International exhibition up on the seventh floor of the Parco Museum. Now, my ties with Parco run deep. It was at Parco's chain of Quattro Clubs that I played the gigs that first brought me to Japan, in 1992 and 1993. Later, I released albums on the Parco Quattro label. My first address in Tokyo was the Tobu Hotel, just a few steps away from the Parco department store. Shibuya-kei, the movement organised around 'jet set' lounge culture, 60s optimism, cosmopolitanism, and so on, was also, for me, organised around Parco department stores. And so it shouldn't have been so surprising that the Parco Braniff show turned out to be recycling exactly this sort of 60s- and-70s-in-the-90s imagery: Alexander Calder-designed jets, Pucci-styled stewardesses in space helmets. To evoke this imagery at its peak in the prime of the Shibuya-kei period I just have to recall Yoshinori Sunahara's 'Sounds of the 70s' album, the Bungalow label, and a Pizzicato 5 show I saw in London in about 1997 (it was, to sum everything up, a Wallpaper magazine party) in which Maki Nomiya was dressed in a dainty sci-fi air stewardess' uniform all in white.

Now, my first reference to Shibuya-kei on my website came in September 1998, when I declared Shibuya-kei dead. Well, I may have been a bit premature. I come today to tell you that Shibuya-kei is no longer dead. Perhaps it never was, or perhaps it's walking undead. It's back, like a Pucci Lolita, like a snapshot in a cherished copy of FRUiTS magazine. For five years the spirit of Gap and Uniqlo has banished all but beige, grey, cream, black and white from Japanese streets. But pinks, yellows, oranges and reds are back, synthetic fabrics are back, a bold sort of sensuality is evident again. Not only in this Braniff exhibition, but in the second show I saw today, an impressive display, designed by Groovisions, of Guy Peellaert's Pravda action girl comics (last seen in a book published by Shoichi Kajino, my A&R man at Nippon Columbia at the height of Shibuya-kei and now designer of fashion magazine Ryuko Tsushin -- a true dandy of vintage Shibuya-kei).



Down in the basement bookshop of Parco -- recently revamped in orange -- Kahimi Karie is once again on magazine covers (sporting with Swedish children in travel magazine Lingkaran), 'frenchy pops' records are displayed prominently in the record store alongside the obligatory bossa nova, and the new film at Cinema Rise (with its classic post-modern 80s dome, a trompe l'oeil rumpled and flipped toga in concrete) is 'Doorway To Love', a comedy about cool otakus by Matsuo Suzuki with the most cluttered, pinkest poster you ever saw.

Playing old Kahimi numbers at my Tokyo concert recently I joked 'this is retro-Shibuya-kei... welcome to the Shibuya-kei Museum!' What I didn't find out until later (when I listened to the clutch of CD-Rs people thrust into my hands after the show) was that half the audience were in neo-Shibuya bands like McDonald Duck Eclair, Dahlia and Migu (who sound exactly like prime-period Buffalo Daughter and comprise ex-members of the Cornelius touring band). The trend is confirmed by the success of new bands like Plus Tech Squeeze Box, whose flirty, squirty J-pop parody records recall classic Escalator / Trattoria groups like Yukari Fresh and Citrus.



It all strikes me as very odd that this stuff should be back so soon. Then again, I did once say that Shibuya was the place where all trends would one day be invented and revived simultaneously (mathematicians have calculated that that day will arrive in 2013). And perhaps I shouldn't declare things dead quite so early. Often, they're only sleeping. Something that summed up as many key Japanese concerns as Shibuya-kei did -- cuteness, positivity, the image of a non-toxic and ludic consumerism, sex appeal, futurism, the exotic appeal of Brazil and France, sex, sensuality and generosity -- doesn't simply disappear. It goes underground, lets people wear denim and black and Gap for a while, then pops up suddenly like a pink and white Takashi Murakami mushroom.

In my tiny way I helped create this particular fever. I understand and appreciate its values. Nostalgia for its optimism makes perfect sense to me. If something from the 90s has to come back, I'd rather see this stuff popping back through the damp topsoil than Madchester, Britpop or Grunge. So welcome back, Shibuya-kei! We missed you.

Comments

Re: Japan's economic recovery reflected in its fatuous pop music?

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, this is an interesting point. The Chinese economic boom has helped Japan bounce out of recession, but consumer spending is still down and there is certainly not the feel of prosperity on the streets.

Japan's 1955-system is falling apart, so this 21st century growth is not structurally-sound; China's need for materials and services is just giving Japan an influx of cash. Like if someone kept handing an incompetent businessman money and we all said, "Hey, he's doing well for himself!"

The reason for Japan's vibrant pop culture in the past was that fathers worked in stable jobs with steady income, and kids spent this money for them. When these kids got out of tertiary education, they too took jobs and replicated the system. This whole structure did a fantastic job of generating wealth and distributing very evenly throughout society.

However much the economy is rebounding (which to be honest, cannot even be contemplated until they deal with the demographic disaster about to befall them), the freeter can find jobs but they can't find careers. No one wants to join a big white-collar company and be a part of a very arcane set of culture, and when they eschew this path, they are hurting their chances at an upper middle-class income level. While there is still an idea of a "middle-class" consumer lifestyle, fewer and fewer people can actually live up to it, and sarakin (loan-sharking) and debt are on the rise. You can't buy a Benz while working at the cake store.

The 90s relaxation of part-time work restrictions helped kids earn money outside of their struggling parents and kept the consumer markets afloat without their parents' excess cash. However, when they were shopping, they weren't studying, and the very strict hiearchy of the education system means they can't get top-level jobs (which they probably don't want anyway.) The important distinction to make is that freeters have jobs, but not careers. And their kids will not grow up in the same prosperity in which they did.

So, yes. Japan's economy is not in recession, but no one is excited over the strictly technical definition of growth when all the structural factors are still pointing towards a weaker economy in the near future. And even if the economy was raging, there would be a lag before consumer confidence and pocket money increased. And the whole point is that Shibuya-kei is neither big in Japan nor did it ever go away. So trying to connection one piece of economic data with Momus's observations made in isolation is not going to get us anywhere.

Marxy
neomarxisme.com