Sun, Jun 11, 2006 page18

• Pink Godzillas, postfeminist cyborgs and the rent-a-family market

  Takayuki Tatsumi, Japan's leading cultural critic, puts his country's popular culture under the microscope, and finds that the tables have turned for the West

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in 1945, not to mention the fire-bombing of other Japanese cities and their civilian inhabitants during the previous 18 months, you'd have thought that what any starving Japanese left alive would have wanted to do most would be tear any Americans they could find limb from limb and eat them. A famous essay published in 1946, Daraku-ron (An Invitation to Total Depravity) by Ango Sakaguchi, opened the door to such manifestations of cultural extremism. Who could have foretold, however, that what the culture turned to instead was a cult of eating, not the hated enemy, but metal?

  An early expression of the phenomenon was Sakyo Komatsu's 1964 novel Nippon Apache-Zoku in which the entire nation is dominated by metallivarous and metallicized freaks, with the non-metal-eaters reduced to the status of a refugee minority. The origin of the concept, according to one of Japan's leading cultural critics in this endlessly refreshing new book, was the habit of margin-alized Koreans and others of stealing metal from the ruins of Japan's biggest arms factory outside post-war Tokyo, and ferrying it along the river at night in anticipation of large profits. The government, which needed the metal for (paradoxically) Korean War projects in the early 1950s, turned a blind eye to the operations. The practitioners coined the term "eating metal" to describe their activity, and from this a whole fictional culture was spawned, still alive at the end of the last century in cyberpunk Japan.

  But what the media called these nocturnal desperadoes was "Apaches." This, writes Takayuki Tatsumi ("Japan's hippest literary critic," also an occasional jazz fusion pianist), was because the term had, in the wake of John Ford movies such as Fort Apache (1948), become current in the US for outlaws who defied the central government. But why should the Japanese have taken on an American term? Because of the phenomenon of "creative masochism," says Tatsumi. When you lose a war, you don't continue to resist the conqueror. You grovel at his feet, adopt his culture, and depict yourself in your films and manga comic books as eating scrap-iron.

  

  FULL METAL APACHE By Takayuki Tatsumi 235 pages Duke

  The reason behind the apparent unrelatedness of many of the art-works studied here is that the book brings together several previously-published academic articles in which Tatsumi surveyed different aspects of post-war Japan and its ever-inventive popular culture. Metallic men are only a part of it, though the chapter dealing with them provides the book with its title.

  Also featured, however, are pink samurai and punk cats in space, as formulated respectively in Nicholas Bornoff's study of love, marriage and sex in 1991 Japan and the dystopian post-anime feature Tamala 2010 from t.o.L (`tree of Life') in 2002. Then there's metafiction, and the Japanese neo-dada art form "Thomasson," named after a US baseball player signed by the Yomiuri Giants in 1982 before it was discovered "he could not hit the ball." Not much metal-eating here, but great fun for all that.

  There's much else, including consideration of Bartok's 1919 ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, relevant because the avant-garde Japanese playwright Shuji Tera-yama based a hyperkitsch musical on it in 1977, with the mandarin as a cyborg, a 1995 article by a Greek-American post-feminist writer going under the name of Eurudice entitled Why Clinton's Foreign Policy Shows He Is Good in Bed, and Alan Brown's partially gay 1996 novel, set in Japan, Audrey Hepburn's Neck.

  Numerous literary forbears, mostly American, feature too, all predictable -- Edgar Allan Poe, William Burroughs, Thomas

  Pynchon, and so on. J.G. Ballard's there, of course, plus Richard Calder -- author of Dead Girls (1991), Dead Boys (1994) and Dead Things (1996). An extensive 1998 e-mail interview with Calder is printed as an appendix. For many years he lived, almost unbelievably, in the tiny Thai town, on the border with Laos, of Nongkhai.

  Also making an appearance are Ridley Scott's 1982 cult movie Blade Runner, William Gibson and his award-winning cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), and the real-life Japanese rent-a-family industry, providing substitute relatives for social occasions that might prove embarrassing without them.

  The implicit theme of this almost-brilliant book is that whereas cultural influences from 1945 to 1995 were of the West on the East, today the direction has reversed. There were antecedents, of course, so that someone like Bruce Springsteen can be referred to, in the book's foreword by Larry McCaffery, as a "closet Japanoid." Standard figures in the history of Western interest in Japan inevi-tably show up, from Lafcadio Hearn to John Luther Long, author of the original Madame Butterfly story in 1898.

  There was a time when Edward Said's exposition of the evils of almost any interest in the Orient had everyone quaking guiltily in their boots. But we're all post-orientalists nowadays. This book is not original cultural dissection of the kind that came from the pens of Leslie Fiedler or Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, Camille Paglia in the 1990s, or Peter Conrad (at his best) today. There's plenty of surface glitter, and a large number of topics are covered, but interpretation is sometimes cursory. These topics are not that new, moreover, though they may feel rejuvenatingly modish and up-to-date to the staider academic.

  But as an overview this book makes absorbing reading, and is for much of the time obsessively fascinating. Critical theory's jargon is thankfully absent, and the book can be recommended to all except those seeking the very strongest stimulants in the way of cross-cultural intellectual analysis. The innermost organs of pink Godzillas and postfeminist cyborgs may remain, in the last analysis, unprobed. But even so, Full Metal Apache is a rich and nourishing soup with almost everything in there, nuts and bolts included. There's almost no one whose cultural diet can't in some way be broadened, you can't help thinking.
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