A brief introduction to Japanese websites

Recently, I was asked to provide an overview of Japanese media, with a focus on Japanese websites. I thought that I would share the information here as well for those who might be curious.

Obviously the major barrier to exploring the various Japanese websites and publications is that it is all in Japanese and is rarely in English. Plus, as anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the Japanese market will notice, the Japanese market is quite homogeneous and very specific. Thus, domestic companies dominate, and established names abroad oftentimes get no recognition.

One good example is that big PR/marketing agencies like Ogilvy and Saatchi & Saatchi have low market share. The market itself is dominated by the big Japanese firms like Dentsu and Hakuhodo. In fact, in many cases, foreign agencies would team up with domestic agencies (same with accounting firms like Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, or Chuo Aoyama PwC).

Social Networking Sites are big in Japan too, but Facebook is not at all popular, the main users being Japanese who have foreign experience or foreign friends. As far as I know, Myspace, Last.fm, and the like are also not popular at all. The most popular SNS is called Mixi. It is pretty much like Facebook but with less features. Most people do not register with their real names nor use their faces as profile pictures. Nevertheless, the website saw an explosive increase in popularity around 2006. The groups/communities inside are quite specialised, and it is quite easy to market to a target audience.

Blogs. Google's Blogger is not as predominant, with many people going along with domestic ones like Livedoor or Goo Blog. Also the aforementioned Mixi has a "journal" function, which many people use as a blog.

Online shopping: There are of course internationally recognised companies like Amazon, but there are powerful domestic players too, Rakuten being one of them. The developed delivery network and services (e.g., "cool shipping" services enable cakes or anything that requires refrigerating to be shipped at a specified hour) allow for smaller, independent merchants to sell a wide variety of items. A great site that many refer to when they are comparing prices and user reviews is Kakaku.com. The site not only covers products, but also courses, insurance programmes, financial products etc. Japanese people tend to do a lot of research before buying a product, and the knowledge of shop assistants is also superior to any country I've been in. Kakaku.com oftentimes even provide even more indepth information.

Print Magazines are still a very influential source of information (My impression is that a lot of people still do not use internet from a computer compared to the US or the UK, and would use their advanced 3G phones- in fact I would say that the Japanese cell phones are the most advanced in the world, and Nokia, Blackberry, let alone the iPhone, can hardly gain market share. Here is an example of phones). Japanese magazines tend to be a lot more consumer oriented, with the aim of giving very practical advice on everything. For example, the Japanese versions of international magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar exist; yet they are usually more for people who want to be "sophisticated" and "artsy", more so than in the US or Europe. Popular magazines like Non-no, Oggi, More, etc would have specials like "choose the ultimate cardigan" which would have pages and pages of cardigans from premium brands like Dior to cheap brands like Uniqlo, sorted not only by price, but also style, TPO, etc. Also, there are a lot more fashion magazines for men like Men's Non-no, Smart, Fineboys, etc. In London, you can usually read these if you are to go to Japanese hairdressers and Japanese used bookshops. It is essential that you understand how practical information is conveyed, so do take a look if you have the chance. As for an equivalent of Time-Out, it is called Tokyo Walker (or other derivatives depending on the region). There are even ones that put more focus on restaurants such as Tokyo Calendar.

For English press in Japan, there are not that many. The English edition of the top daily Asahi shimbun, the Japan Times and the Mainichi Daily News are recognised newspapers. There are magazines like Hiragana Times, and websites like seekjapan.jp. The website offers insights gained by foreigners living in Japan.

I will elaborate on each area in the future if there are any requests.

Men's fashion and the Men's suit.

Recently, David Kinsey of My Fellow Acrobat wrote a blog entry about a TV commercial by Oliver Peoples' glasses. The advertisement features Zooey Deschanel (who, together with M. Ward, released a wonderful recording last year with '60s Burt Bacharach style tunes) and Matt Costa, each sporting a range of Oliver Peoples' glasses, in a late 50s/early 60s setting.

David comments that the men's line of glasses "seem to be coming out from another time zone than Zooey's." Now is it that, beyond men's sunglasses, men's fashion in general is 'anachronistic' and not as 'inspired' as women's?

My take on it, is that men's fashion has always been a lot more formalized and not as flexible compared to women's. Now, I am not talking about the grand age of men's fashion back in the 16-17th centuries, long before the dandy Beau Brumell, who is said to have introduced the now oh-so-standard men's suit with the shirt and tie combo. Somehow, men's fashion, at least when it comes to formal clothes, has become unchangeable, with strict rules to follow. Just a glance at any contemporary award ceremony will show that men are stuck into wearing a tuxedo that allows very little variance in both form and color, whereas women can play around with the silhouette, color, type of fabric, and even add a wider range of accessories. Men lost even more space to manoeuver when hats became more of an option than an obligation for a decent gentleman (and no, it isn't JFK's Inaugural address that killed the hat industry!).

Because of its inflexibility and rigidness, my impression is that the abandonment of the suit style as casual wear was quite dramatic for men's fashion. Already in the 50s, Marlon Brando and James Dean made jeans, t-shirt and leather jacket from a working class to fashionable items of clothing. Although we can still see middle class men largely preferring suits at that time (as seen in low-budget French Nouvelle Vague films from the mid-50s to the early 60s), I would guess that the Swinging London scene of the mid-60s (see for example, the menswear shop "I was Lord Kitchner's Valet") and the hippie movement of the late 60s detached, compartmentalized and froze men's formal fashion. In other words, while allowing for more pluralism in informal styles, the suit 'costume' (as the French still call it), remained detached and became relatively resistant to change (well, the changing width and length of this and that I consider to be minor).

Try to stray from these limits of the suit, and a photo taken wearing the particular suit would be a source of amazement and embarrassment a few years later.

I might be stretching it a bit, but I think that this rigidity is what results in men paying much more than women on suits. Since men cannot digress too much from the norm, the only way in which they can distinguish themselves is by the quality of the fabric, the mastery of tailormanship and the informed selection of how to combine double/single breast, types of lapel, pockets, sleeves, vents, etc. Just like the scene in American Psycho, where the characters compare the subtle variations of the different shades of white, the font, and how watermarks are used, men who aspire to be "fashionable" become trained very quickly to read the subtle language of the suit...

Japan and its invisible homeless

On 22 February, the NGOs Έλληνες Ενεργοί Πολίτες (Greek Active Citizens) and Homeless Support organized an event in Athens to collect sleeping bags and sleeping mats for the homeless. Their initiative drew a considerable amount of media attention to the increasing number of homeless people in the Greek capital.

One of Homeless Support's organizers, Vassiliki Tzanakou, told the national daily Kathimerini that the recent economic downtown has created a new wave of people who have become homeless due to financial difficulties. Although the aggregate number of the homeless in the past two years have increased to a point where the homeless are more and more visible on the streets, the current crisis has created a new army of 'invisible' homeless, 'who have not quite hit the rock bottom but do not have far to go'.

This reminded me of the situation of the homeless people in Japan.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 95% of the homeless in Japan are men with an average age of 57.5. Unlike women and children, they fail to be covered by the social welfare system (due most likely to the general belief that men have no problems finding stable jobs). The number of homeless had increased dramatically when the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, but was on a graudal decline until the on-going financial crisis.

Due to the cultural stigma attached to homelessness, the homeless in Japan are extremely ashamed of being so, and it is rare to see anyone asking for money in the streets like in Europe and the US (there are more buddhist monks who do so, following the practice also seen in Thailand). In Tokyo, the homeless usually live collectively in larger parks and river banks, skillfully making ad-hoc homes with cardboard and blue nylon sheets. Those who spend the night inside the train stations or the underground pathways are promptly told by police to leave in the early morning. On the one hand, the blue nylon sheets have become part of the cityscape. On the other, these 'homes' create a sort of segregation, where one rarely has any contact with the homeless, which consequently allows people to pretend as if the problem does not exist.

Many of the ad-hoc 'homes' can be quite elaborate [source]

This is not to say that people are oblivious of their existence. There have been numerous incidents, especially from the late 90s onwards, where the homeless have been a target of bullying, torching, and fatal assaults by teenagers. The media would always treat such events sensationally, but rarely would go one step further and criticize the social welfare system that has failed to keep up with the job market that is marked by increasing job precariousness.

The current financial crisis was a strong slap in the face for the Japanese government. With blue-chip companies such as Sony and Canon announcing large-scale job cuts, there is a growing demand that the social welfare system be updated. Along with the so-called 'Net café refugees', the Japanese government needs to urgently come up with countermeasures that will enable these people to rejoin the workforce.

Of course, one can argue that there are people who would take advantage of the welfare system. This is true for any type of social welfare that attempts to protect a large number of people. Still, the current standards fail to capture those who are in actual need. Extending support to encompass temporary workers, and instructing corporations to gear their benefits to those who will not spend their entire life at the company would immediately improve the conditions of many Japanese.

Teaching history, the Japanese way

A typical scene from a Japanese middle school [source]

I hated history class at my Japanese high school. History was about preparing for university entrance exams, which did not test analytical power, but the pure strength of memorization. Hence, history tests were all about filling in the blanks and no more. One thing that demonstrates the ridiculousness of this was that I had to remember a name of a tax from the Heian period (794-1192CE) that was applied to a specific type of farmland used for specific crops (along with the other four or so).

How lame.

The emphasis on memorization does have its benefits, at least in the early stages of education. Thanks to all of the hours spent trying to remember everything by heart, I still can recite all of the dates of big events in Japanese history. However, all of this is not adequate when an increasing number of Japanese are going abroad, becoming representatives of their own country whether they like it or not.

Of course, when one is abroad, the common topics from history are: Colonization leading to WWII (with all the atrocities committed); Westernization (starting from 1868); post-war recovery in relation to the US; whaling; etc. All of these are topics requiring a knowledge of modern Japanese history, yet it is the part that is neglected at schools. Too much time is spent on the 'good ol' times' when Japan was fairly isolated and had a 'flourishing' Japanese culture.

This needs to change. Already, Japanese have a disadvantage when it comes to their below average English skills. How are they to expect a correct representation of their history abroad when they don't even know the issues surrounding key events in Japanese history?

A lot of times, Japan justifiably gets bad press for their textbooks that skim over sensitive issues like the Nanjing massacre and the treatment of 'colonial subjects', 'hostages' and 'detainees'.

To be sure, these things are important, but the fundamental shortcoming of teaching history in Japan is that it does not foster critical thought, inquisitiveness, or analytical skills. Disputes surrounding the above issues will remain for the time being, whether we like it or not. So the key is to know all of the debates surrounding these issues and be able to give your own opinion on them.

There are plenty of books in Japanese by leading scholars that address historically contentious issues. Still, lacking inquisitiveness, students will only think of memorizing what will be in the entrance exam and go no further. Hopefully an increasing number of younger high school teachers with international experience will start changing things, little by little.