- Apparently low/middle class consumers in Japan would put themselves into debt to buy luxury brands like Gucci. I'm not sure if this is meant general debt like we see in the US with credit cards, or if it mean specific financing for those items. (I met a guy in Central America that was making payments on a jean jacket.)
- If I read correctly, the lower income pressure is making things that are marginally cheaper, like fake beer, actually take off. I would assume this is because of the generally high cost of products in Japan? Whereas in other countries, even with lower income, you don't resort to fake beer... maybe I misunderstood though.
- As of the article's time, the Internet doesn't have any really influential outlets in Japan, and print media dominates for legitimacy and doesn't put much content online. I know myself and other folks that don't read any print media, so it seems odd that the Internet didn't penetrate quickly in Japan.
- The squeeze on the markets means fringe groups now "dominate". That is, "normal" folks cut back on their consumption, but fringe groups are defined by such consumption. So the normal purchasing is gone, leaving just the fringe, leading to groups like AKB48 being #1, when in reality they have niche appeal.
It closes pointing out that this fringe popularity taking over means Japan's cultural exports are growing weaker, and like technology, might be disrupted by Korea. Since the article was written, I think SNSD has grown in popularity, and Gangnam Style certainly brought K-pop into the highlight.
It'll be interesting to see if Korea can successfully export other cultural stuff that Japan has done well with, like video games and anime. (From my brief and irrelevant exposure, it seems Korea is very insular and does not do well exporting culture, although the kpop thing might be changing that. For example, all Korean sites seem to require you to login with your Korean national ID.)
To illustrate, Blu-Ray discs of anime sell at incredible prices in Japan, e.g. $88/disc or $600/boxset of 6 discs[1], and the same goes for merchandise like figurines. (Compare that to the $60 price of US season boxsets.) The reason is simple: for studios to make sufficient profit, they must rely on a small but core consumer cluster - otaku - to pay extreme prices, because mainstream consumption has imploded. (See [2] for a detailed revenue estimation.) The otaku in turn "maniacally" consume whatever anime they like, making studios increasingly have to turn toward otakus' tastes rather than mainstream or international preferences. Otakus become anime's primary consumer group, and then many anime watchers outside of Japan feel alienated by the decreasing amounts of the sort of genres that first drew them to the medium. I think this partially accounts for the fall in anime's international popularity over the last several years.
[1] http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=115312
[2] http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2012-03-07
It's really quite scary how high youth unemployment can doom a generation's economic prospects. There are "over 2,500,000 freeters and between 650,000 and 850,000 NEETs living in Japan between the ages of 19 and 35",[2][3] which is a fair number although probably not terribly different from other advanced economies. (Freeters are permatemps, i.e. those without permanent employment who work low-paying temp jobs in-between periods of joblessness; NEETs are recluses.) However, the benefits and mobility gap between the traditionally employed and the freeters/NEETs is large enough that I think they'll be cemented as an underclass at the rate things are going. Once they're off the traditional career ladder, they can't get back on it, and they're stuck living with their parents and sometimes withdrawing from social RL and becoming otaku on discussion BBSs.
One possible route out for Japan is exporting to foreign markets, but the market-cultural distance between Japan and other nations has widened since large Japanese corporations started disengaging from their foreign ventures. The whole Galapagos effect means that Japanese entrepreneurs have to base themselves in other countries if they want to have a shot at creating a product that sells outside Japan. It's a pity because I think they can make some rather unique, interesting products - they just don't have a way to get noticed outside of Japan. Korea took a much better route in focusing on exporting both electronics and media to the world, and they're doing very well as a result. Japanese media used to be significant here in Singapore in the '90s, but its popularity waned as the K-wave surged, and now K-dramas dominate the airwaves, I suspect crowding out even English-language shows.
I last visited Japan in 2008, and saw a good number of cut-price discount stores there, but overall prices weren't truly cheap. I wonder how different things are nowadays after these further years of lean.
[2] http://www.japanfocus.org/-Kosugi-Reiko/2022
[3] http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=907
(This 3rd link is very worth reading for details on the unemployment situation and lost generation in Japan)
> Apparently low/middle class consumers in Japan would put themselves into debt to buy luxury brands like Gucci
It might be different for people with really low income, but in general that's credit card payment in 3 or 4 chunks. And for people really into brands, there is a decent resale value when a bag or other good is taken proper care.
> fake beer It actually doesn't taste bad. Not as good as premium beer, but not so different from other run of the mill beer. 'fake' would be too pejorative I think.
> print media
It might be just me, but print media hasn't the same status n Japan as in other countries. The "it's printed so it must be true" way of thinking felt less entranched, and printed content was also lighter in tone and credibility. The nikkei shinbun would be the exception perhaps, other venues are seen as heavily biased and you'll find more truth on the internet anonymous boards (2chan) than on tv or newspapers.
About the cultural exports, I think the problem is less about fringe stuffs than About missing the boat on the dominant digital platforms (mainly iTunes and iOS). The same thing is about to appen on ebooks, where the whole industry is aving a hard time doing the transition.
- I'm not sure if I'm thinking of the right 'fake beer', but marketing of food products in Japan has lately been heavily skewed toward 0 calorie food and drinks. I'm not sure this is entirely fueled by reduced purchasing power.
- The internet in Japan is still very much limited by the fact that it's still primarily browsed via low resolution cell phones. It's getting better, but a fair amount of sites were written for C-HTML/i-mode-HTML, and laptop browsing experience suffered as a result.
- The effect of fringe groups on trends plays out differently in different industries. For Anime, shows with more mainstream appeal are actually hard to find now. On the other hand, in Japan, Anime has always been less mainstream than Manga - people who read a series as a comic book often find the TV shows to be watered-down, or don't find the voice acting to their liking. So, it's more just that a medium that's always had fringe appeal is doubling-down on it. That is, it likely would have happened even without reduced mainstream purchasing power - otaku, who actually buy merchandise, are just a more profitable group to market to.
With fashion and music, it's more that the fringe groups have bought the power to influence mainstream habits - plenty of people who aren't otaku but enjoy AKB48 and Perfume. Many shop at d.i.a. but aren't gyaru (at least not to the extreme the author portrays them as) - just trying to be fashionable, particularly in the short period of time between being in school (with black hair, uniform, and no piercings) and working (with black hair, uniform/suit, and no piercings). The increased availability of foreign brands also has an effect - by moving toward more extreme domestic trends, brands can better distinguish themselves from foreign competitors: with the surge in popularity of K-Pop, it doesn't make sense to try to compete with more of the same style of music.
I don't disagree with the general premise of the article, but I think its tone comes off as a little extreme at times - things aren't so bad there that mainstream purchasing has disappeared, it's just shifted toward some very distinctly Japanese trends, which were popularized at least in part due to the disproportionate spending by those groups.
On the surface Japan can seem like it has some things in common (comparable) with the West; however, it's more or less comparing superficial manifestations.
1. Japan while you will see 'international' this and that everywhere and people are taught English from an early age, Japan is very insular (geographically, obviously and mentally) and inward looking (provincial not reflective) and hardly international. People (employees) in the international depts can't expect to rise much within an org. --with few exceptions). All talk and no walk.
2. Japan is very xenophobic (not just a little like Italy might be or France might be about undocumented Roma or Albanians). This could be traced back to how Japan dealt with foreigners (and trade) back in the Edo period as exemplified by Dejima island. Foreigners (dutch) were relegated to an island and had to be back by sundown and could not leave. This attitude has not changed in over a hundred years. 3rd generation Koreans are still considered foreigners (and they must assume a Japanese name, and oddly none the less considered foreign). The foreign population in Japan is actually on the wane for various reasons (economic and also people just get tired of the politics)
3. Japanese industry found their stride in the late 60s; however, few have revisited their assumptions, systems, technologies, methods, etc. For an example, look at their film industry. Almost complete implosion due to stagnation.
4. Conformity. While on the surface these niche 'diverse' groups would seem to indicate break with conformity, it does not. As someone observed, these movements and subcultures are de-coupled from politics, completely.
That's just the beginning. There are many other reasons a 1:1 comparison with the West is not helpful.
There is a kind of parallel withe the US. It's the maturity regression. However, while many in the US recognize and decry the eternal adolescence of American adults (viz toilet humor, frat culture), in Japan it's rather infantilization (viz Hello Kitty, stuffed animals, Pokemon --whose main audience are adults, not children).
Edit: I guess what I mean is that one would extrapolate Japan onto the West at one's own expense (of understanding). In this agree with Japan --they are unique, in this regard.
They don't have to assume a Japanese name. Most do, probably the legal alias they have used all their lives when speaking in Japanese. East Asian countries do not have the same attitudes to names as unique identifiers, invariant across languages as western countries do. The third generation Koreans you refer to are Zainichi Koreans who don't hold Japanese nationality.
However, the Japanese Diet has not yet passed a resolution regarding this matter [Zainich Koreans voting rights in Japanese elections] despite several attempts by a section within Liberal Democratic Party of Japan to do so, and there is considerable public and political opposition against granting voting rights to those who have not yet adopted Japanese nationality. Instead, the requirements for naturalization has been steadily lowered for Zainichi to the point that only criminal records or affiliation to North Korea would be a hindrance for naturalisation.
I'm not saying that Japan isn't very xenophobic but if they want Japanese citizenship most Zainichi Koreans can have it with relatively little difficulty.
You know how we have crunchyroll? That doesn't exist in Japan. Amazon, Netflix; numerous industries just don't exist. The #1 search engine in Japan? Yahoo, although even they can't explain this last bastion. So first of all we got a weird issue of lack of technological disruption in a very wired country.
Secondly, and this is a lot weirder, it all really comes down to lack of being able to fix their own issues. Japan does not sell B2B software at all, and large companies like Sony/Mitsubishi/Fujitsu basically keep programmers fucked by making everything private gardens. Because no one can compete with the internal services, it is a slow death through incestuous defense of certain technology choices with no alternatives.
Everything basically comes down to that oh-so-famous Japanese proverb: "the nail that stands out gets hammered down."
Your other remarks are spot on though.
IE10: http://i.imgur.com/ZBrhDoS.png
Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/ROwDLkb.png
Chrome's text rendering has been pretty broken on Windows since September 2012-ish. There are lots of long bug reports on Chromium's tracker with little effort to fix them. Custom fonts render too thin to the point of discontinuities in the glyphs. The blitting algorithm was messed up so non-black text is often rendered a significantly different color than is specified in the stylesheet. High DPI support is nonexistant (while it was supported for Mac and Linux quickly), so rasterized text is simply scaled up by fractional multipliers, which makes it terribly blurry in both the UI and webpages.
I can only imagine that so many on the Chrome team are running Macs and Ubuntu that they don't see how terrible their software is becoming on Windows in fundamental ways.
