J-Pop Culture Update: Moe Madness!

Here's the anime du jour at the Constructivist household. It's called Kimi Ni Todoke and the Full Metal Archivist calls it "the Bible of moe." What's moe? Mao Asada would like to know. (Hint: Mao Asada is moe and so is her reaction to the question posed to her at the end of the video.) For more details, check out the hottest new anime in Japan and around the world at AnimeKuro. What's striking about "Reaching You" is how a subculture into fetishing the purity and innocence of young girls has gone mainstream via the manga and anime. And what's striking about the Discovery Channel International Made in J-Pop Culture documentary is the subtitles posted on it in Japanese on youtube:



Japanese pop culture is fascinated by how American (and other) pop culture is fascinated with Japanese pop culture. Check out the channel of the samuraitoshi3 to see what I mean.

Me, I'll go back to Karen Tei Yamashita's Circle K Diaries (2001).... Somehow I find the Discovery Channel's borrowing tropes from its nature documentaries less interesting than early Yamashita writing about the permutations and mutations of Brazilian, Japanese, and American identities.

Happy Birthday, FMA!

Some birthday wishes for the Full Metal Archivist....

May an international flight be in your future:



May J-pop always be on youtube for you:



May Daisuke Takahashi come back from his knee injury better than ever:



May you always have someone to take care of the alarm clock for you:

Jero Watch: For the Full Metal Archivist

Here's a Jero duet for your travels in Kyoto with onechan's and imoto's baba. Enjoy!

With Itsuki Hiroshi:



For those who need the Jero primer, check this quickie out from Reuters:



And here's a longer one from NHK, this part focusing on his background:



It continues, now with the early stages in his enka career and his thoughts on enka, the blues, and Japanese culture:



He reveals a crush here:



Here's the conclusion, focusing on the two months he's been touring in Japan this year, arcing back to his origins, interluding with an English test, and concluding with a look ahead:

Make It Dragon Ash in 2008

Amazing discovery today about the Full Metal Archivist's musical tastes. I came home very late from picking up the girls--for which I have to thank Ari, bw, Vance Maverick, and Harriet Beecher Stowe--only to discover that she's into j-punk! Specifically, a group that goes by the name of Dragon Ash. You know what's coming next, right?



Yup, that's her favorite song. Too close to Sugar Ray for me, but it's a start.

Here's why this is so exciting. If you check my profile, you'll see I'm into music in a big way, but most of it the Full Metal Archivist is not so into. So if I start her on The Offspring, move into Green Day, then back to some of the classic punk albums, I might just be able to get to to hear the connection between them and, say, Primus, Mos Def, and, if I need to fall back on them, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Next step: Tool sounds a lot better to her. Happiness reigns in the Constructivist household and onechan and imoto are brought up right, musically speaking, of course.

Heh, I can't wait till I can say, "I love it when an 'imposing my musical canons on those I love' plan comes together!" Or, if it fails, "Would you believe...?"

Make It Jero for 2008

The Full Metal Archivist is becoming quite the trendspotter these days. Meet Jero from Pittsburgh, enka singer extraordinaire:



His grandma's Japanese, as he reveals on this show:



[Update 2/25/08: Damn, Japan Probe beat me to Jero--twice! I'll fix the above links when I have time, but for now head over there for ones that actually work!]

Time to Unleash the Awesome Power of Mottainai

Girls still not better. Must up ante. They're big fans of Mottainai Obaasan, this grandmother in a children's book who goes around telling the kids not to waste anything. Turns out there's an NGO called Mottainai, whose official theme song didn't pass the musume test. But here are two videos on the same theme that did, the first a little bit country and the second a little bit hip hop.





Maybe together they can lend extra power to the girls' immune systems!

Saturday Morning Hot Style

This One's for the WAAGNFNP and Planet Grenada

Consider this a sequel to my Nagasaki and global capitalism posts at WAAGNFNP, as well as a response to this post from Planet Grenada.

Here's a hip-hop showdown between King Giddra ("9-11")--



--and Mos Def/Immortal Technique ("Tell the Truth")--



--I vote for KG. What's your call?

Bonus question: Immortal Technique on a different 9/11 ("The Poverty of Philosophy")--



--or Mos Def on a different disaster ("Katrina Klap")--



? Well, it's Mos Def, of course, b/c of the Emperor Cheney/Darth Bush image midway through.

6-year-old drummer & hip-hop international

Here's a Japanese jazz trio, playing on the street, with a 6-year-old drummer trading fours:



And here's a blog entry on international hip hop.

This One's for Ian Condry, Halifu Osumare, Suzuko Morikawa, Oliver Wang, Deborah Whaley, Gary Okihiro, Nikhil Pal Singh....

The plot thickens. The mystery deepens. A new category--Japanese hip hop--comes to Mostly Harmless.

Ian Condry's new book Hip Hop Japan (2006) and web site Japanese Hip Hop, along with Halifu Osumare's "Beat Streets in the Global Hood" (2001), get pride of place in this post.

But it turns out many people are working on the globalization of hip hop culture, including the contributors to Global Noise, Fanning the Flames, Black Cultural Traffic, The Afro-Asian Century (positions: east asia cultures critique 11.1 [Spring 2003]), and AfroAsian Encounters.

While you're waiting for the books to arrive, you can also check out Caleb Kinney's "hip hop influences Japanese culture" and Hip Hop Japan.

Enjoy!

This One's for Mark Anthony Neal and Marc Gallichio

If you're not reading NewBlackMan, I don't know where to start about how wrong that is. But I just remembered that Mark Anthony Neal, who runs the blog, would be a great person to ask about Japanese engagements with hip hop culture. Here's one recent post on an African-American engagement with Japanese art. (For more on the artist he features, see her interview in Callaloo 29.3 [Summer 2006].)

Marc Gallichio is a foreign policy expert and East Asia specialist who became interested in Afro-Asian connections, which resulted in The African American Encounter with Japan and China. He doesn't blog yet, but don't hold it against him.

This One's for Patrick Macias and Matt Alt

We're getting closer to some answers to my questions from last post. Here are some clues, courtesy of An Eternal Thought in the Mind of Godzilla and AltJapan.

Macias has a new book out--check out his post announcing its first full-length review (in Japanese). While you're at it, the following exclusive podcast of Kokusin Tensai is relevant here in a way I will neither describe nor explain (just click).

Meanwhile, Matt wants to introduce us to JOE:



Pleased to meetcha!

So where are these clues leading us?

This One's for Vijay Prashad and Bill Mullen

Vijay Prashad is the author of, among many other books, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (on Afro-Asian connections and the myth of cultural purity). Bill Mullen is the author of, among several other books, Afro-Orientalism (on African-American intellectuals' and activists' constructions of Asia). I can't think of two better people to interpret this photo--



--which raises the question for me, "what's the converse of Afro-Orientalism?"

I'm fairly familiar with the territory Prashad and Mullen map. I gave a conference paper in 1999 in which I linked Silko's Almanac of the Dead to currents in African American literature and Black Studies:

From Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men to Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, from Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo to Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters to Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, African-American (in the continental rather than national sense of the latter term) novelists have told stories about spirits of resistance. They have inspired projects like Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island and Barbara Browning’s Infectious Rhythm, so it should be no surprise that these and other novelists have also inspired Almanac of the Dead. But despite the thematic and other similarities among these works, I would place Silko’s novel in most direct relation to three novels in particular--W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco--for each of these novels attempts to trace connections between the earliest encounters among Africans, Europeans, and Americans in the New World and present-day political and economic structures and movements, and each represents a different moment in internationalist Black Studies--Du Bois’s pan-Africanism and Marshall’s third worldism are well worth comparing to Silko’s indigenist narrative. In short, by analyzing how Silko’s Almanac of the Dead takes part in the Black Studies project, we can come up with ideas about how to continue its development, reach new audiences, and rethink its curricular and institutional practices and priorities.

Later it struck me that Gibson's Sprawl series also belongs in this pantheon, so to speak, and still later I finally got around to reading Reed's Japanese by Spring, which is by turns brilliant and infuriating.

Still, it strikes me that thinking about what to make of Japanese appropriations of black cultures and politics is a fairly new endeavor. The only example that comes to mind offhand is Sushi K, the parodic character from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I attended a talk in Hawaii this January in which a Japanese pop culture scholar shared his research on actual as opposed to invented Japanese hip hop--what I took from it is that the music got better as the politics got more nationalistic, and both were in response to criticism from the mainstream hip hop press. It turns out he teaches in Fukuoka and we've hung out at the conference and here. Here's hoping he agrees to write for Mostly Harmless soon!