[silk] Modern boys and mobile girls

[Udhay Shankar N <udhay@xxxxxxxxx>]

<x-flowed>http://www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,466391,00.html

For sci-fi author William Gibson, Japan has been a lifelong inspiration. 
Here, the writer who coined the phrase 'cyberspace', explains why no other 
country comes closer to the future... or makes better toothpaste
		
Sunday    April     1, 2001
The Observer
		
'Why Japan?' I've been asked for the past 20 years or so. Meaning: why has 
Japan been the setting for so much of my fiction? When I started writing 
about Japan,   I'd answer by suggesting that Japan was about to become a 
very central, very important place in terms of the global economy. And it 
did. (Or rather, it already had, but most people hadn't noticed yet.) A 
little later, asked the same question, I'd say that it was Japan's turn to 
be the centre of the world, the place to which all roads lead; Japan was 
where the money was and the deal was done. Today, with the glory years of 
the bubble long gone, I'm still asked the same question, in exactly the 
same quizzical tone: 'Why Japan?'

Because Japan is the global imagination's default setting for the future.

The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down 
the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort 
of fiction I write behoves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, 
as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, 
you pay attention to the Japanese. They've been doing it for more than a 
century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if 
only in terms of what we used to call 'future shock' (but which is now 
simply the one constant in all our lives).

Consider the Mobile Girl, that ubiquitous feature of contemporary Tokyo 
street life: a schoolgirl busily, constantly messaging on her mobile phone 
(which she never uses for voice communication if she can avoid it). The 
Mobile Girl can convert pad strokes to kanji faster than should be humanly 
possible, and rates her standing in her cellular community according to the 
amount of numbers in her phone's memory. What is it that the Mobile Girls 
are so busily conveying to one another? Probably not much at all: the 
equivalent of a schoolgirl's note, passed behind the teacher's back. 
Content is not the issue here, but rather   the speed, the weird 
unconscious surety, with which the schoolgirls of Tokyo took up a secondary 
feature (text messaging) of a new version of the cellular telephone, and 
generated, almost overnight, a micro-culture.

A little over 100 years ago, the equivalent personal, portable 
techno-marvel in Tokyo would have been a mechanical watch. The printmakers 
of the Meiji period made a very large watch the satiric symbol of the 
Westernised dandy, and for the Japanese, clock-time was an entirely new 
continuum, a new reality.

The techno-cultural suppleness that gives us Mobile Girls today, is the 
result of a traumatic and ongoing temporal dislocation that began when the 
Japanese, emerging in the 1860s from a very long period of deep cultural 
isolation, sent a posse of bright young noblemen off to England. These 
young men returned bearing word of an alien technological culture they must 
have found as marvellous, as disconcerting, as we might find the products 
of reverse-engineered Roswell space junk. These Modern Boys, as the 
techno-cult they spawned came popularly to be known,   somehow induced the 
nation of Japan to swallow whole the entirety of the Industrial Revolution. 
The resulting spasms were violent, painful, and probably inconceivably 
disorienting. The Japanese bought the entire train-set: clock-time, steam 
railroads, electric telegraphy, Western medical advances. Set it all up and 
yanked the lever to full on. Went mad. Hallucinated. Babbled wildly. Ran in 
circles. Were destroyed. Were reborn.

Were reborn, in fact, as the first industrialised nation in Asia. Which got 
them, not too many decades later, into empire-building expansionist mode, 
which eventually got them two of their larger cities vaporised, blown away 
by an enemy wielding a technology that might as well have come from a 
distant galaxy.

And then that enemy, their conquerors, the Americans, turned up in person, 
smilingly intent on an astonishingly ambitious programme of cultural 
re-engineering. The Americans, bent on restructuring the national psyche 
from the roots up, inadvertently plunged the Japanese several clicks 
further along the time line. And then left, their grand project hanging 
fire, and went off to fight Communism instead.

The result of this stupendous triple-whammy (catastrophic 
industrialisation, the war, the American occupation) is the Japan that 
delights, disturbs and fascinates us today: a mirror world, an alien planet 
we can actually do business with, a future.

But had this happened to any other Asian country, I doubt the result would 
have been the same. Japanese culture is 'coded', in some wonderfully 
peculiar way that finds its nearest equivalent, I think, in English 
culture. And that is why the Japanese are subject to various kinds of 
Anglophilia, and vice versa. It accounts for the totemic significance, to 
the Japanese, of Burberry plaid, and for the number of Paul Smith outlets 
in Japan, and for much else besides. Both nations display a sort of fractal 
coherence of sign and symbol, all the way down into the   weave of history. 
And Tokyo is very nearly, in its own way, as 'echoic' (to borrow Peter 
Ackroyd's term) a city as London.

I've always felt that London is somehow the best place from which to 
observe Tokyo, perhaps because the British appreciation of things Japanese 
is the most entertaining. There is a certain tradition of 'Orientalia', of 
the faux-Oriental, that has been present here for a long time, and truly, 
there is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be 
captured in the original.

London, being London and whatever else, eminently assured of its ability to 
do whatever it is that London's always done, can reflect Japan, distort it, 
enjoy it, in ways that Vancouver, where I live, never can. In Vancouver, we 
cater blandly to the Japanese, both to the tour-bus people with the 
ever-present cameras and to a delightful but utterly silent class of 
Japanese slackers. These latter seem to jump ship simply to be here, and 
can be seen daily about the city, in ones and twos, much as, I suspect, you 
or I might seem to the residents of Puerto Vallarta. 'There they are again. 
I wonder what they might be thinking?'

But we don't reflect them back. We don't have any equivalent of the robot 
sushi bar in Harvey Nichols, which is as perfectly 'Japanese' a thing as 
I've seen anywhere, and which probably wouldn't look nearly as cool if it 
had been built in Tokyo or Osaka.

We don't have branches of Muji interspersed between our Starbucks (although 
I wish we did, because I'm running out of their excellent toothpaste). Muji 
is the perfect example of the sort of thing I'm thinking of, because it 
calls up a wonderful Japan that   doesn't really exist. A Japan of the 
mind, where even toenail-clippers and plastic coat-hangers possess a Zen 
purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced. I would very much like to 
visit the Japan that Muji evokes. I would vacation there and attain a new 
serenity, smooth and translucent, in perfect counterpoint to natural 
fabrics and unbleached cardboard. My toiletries would pretend to be nothing 
more than what they are, and neither would I. (If Mujiland exists anywhere, 
it's probably not in Japan. If anywhere, it may actually be here, in London.)

Because we don't reflect them back, in Vancouver, they don't market to us 
in the same way they market to you.

The trendy watch chains of London are the only places in the world, aside 
from Japan, where one can purchase the almost-very-latest Japan-only 
product from Casio and Seiko.
Because Japanese manufacturers know that you see them, in London. They know 
that you get it. They know that you are a market.

I like to watch the Japanese in Portobello market. Some are there for the 
crowd, sightseeing, but others are there on specific, narrow-bandwidth, 
obsessional missions, hunting British military watches or Victorian 
corkscrews or Dinky Toys or Bakelite napkin rings. The dealers' eyes still 
brighten at the sight of a tight shoal of Japanese, significantly sans 
cameras, sweeping determinedly in with a translator in tow. A legacy from 
the affluent days of the bubble, perhaps, but still the Japanese are likely 
to buy, should they spot that one particular object of  otaku desire. Not 
an impulse-buy, but the snapping of a trap set long ago, with great 
deliberation.

The  otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of 
the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of 
objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British 
and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and 
in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter 
frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding  otaku -hood, I think, is one 
of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something 
profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, 
in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.

The Japanese are great appreciators of what they call 'secret brands', and 
in this too they share something with the British. There is a similar 
fascination with detail, with cataloguing, with distinguishing one thing 
from another. Both cultures are singularly adroit at re-conceptualising 
foreign product, at absorbing it and making it their own.

Why Japan, then? Because they live in the future, but neither yours nor 
mine, and somehow make it seem either interesting or comical or really 
interestingly dreadful. Because they are capable of naming an après-sport 
drink Your Water. Because they build museum-grade reproductions of the MA-1 
flight jacket that require prospective owners to be on waiting lists for 
several years before one even has a chance of possibly, one day, owning the 
jacket. Because they can say to you, with absolute seriousness, believing 
that it means something, 'I like your lifestyle!'

Because they are Japanese, and you are British, and I am American (or 
possibly Canadian, by this point).

And I like both your lifestyles.

Enjoy one another!

? William Gibson is the author of  All Tomorrow's Parties, and the 
forthcoming Pattern Recognition, both Penguin UK.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
     God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.



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