Project Introduction

In a bald-faced imitation of David Plotz’ “blogging the Bible,” which culminated in the tome Good Book, I am going to “blog” every chapter of The Analects of Confucius.

Now, The Analects share very little with the Bible and the other holy texts. They are not a series of tales, myths, extensive parables, or allegories (nor is Confucianism a “religion” per se), and this would seem to make “blogging” the texts a relatively dry exercise. The chapters are mostly just pithy sayings attributed to Confucius or his moral heroes — sometimes wise, sometimes cryptic, and almost always self-righteous. There is only the narrowest space for traditional “literary criticism” and few recurring characters — like “God” in the Bible — to analyze.

And yet, I have decided to blog my re-reading of The Analects for a few reasons. First, Confucian ethics are deeply buried into the basic structure of Japanese society, even if no one goes around calling themselves a “Confucianist.” Confucian principles came to Japan with the major importation of Chinese civilization back in the first millennium, and for years and years, provided the core educational materials for the civil service exams. In the late 19th and early 20th century Confucian ethics formed much of the moral code for State Shinto and modern Imperial Japan. The Imperial Rescript on Education? Chock full of Confucianism. Although Japanese elites tweaked and adapted Confucian morality to fit their own state structure, anybody interested in Japan should probably be familiar with The Analects for deep background.

Second, anyone who hasn’t read The Analects most likely has a warped view of the material. Confucianism has been mostly condemned as patriarchal and slightly soulless orthopraxy. Or at worst, a collection of sayings on par with “Man who walks through airport security gate sideways is going to Bangkok.” Yet, reading the Analects is relatively enjoyable, and I want to encourage others to take a look.

This brings us to the third point: there are “universal” principles at work in Confucian thought. The Analects sometime feels like a self-help book, but that may be its greatest quality. Almost anyone can apply at least some of its lessons to their contemporary life. In this re-reading, I am especially interested in the question, what has modern society rejected from this most ancient of ethical guides and what remains an accepted ideal for social behavior?

So join me in blogging The Analects. I welcome hardcore Confucian scholars to challenge my thoughts on hermeneutical grounds, as I have not read the few thousand years of subsequent debate on what Confucius really meant. (Blogging Mencius coming soon!) And I hope newcomers will take this opportunity to read the chapter online (the James Legge translation is available for free on Gutenburg. Each chapter should only take about ten minutes to read.) I am reading the D.C. Lau translation (Penguin Classics). Numbers in brackets (#) refer to the stanza within that chapter.

Things that Confucius likes: modesty, patience, sociability, constant pursuit of learning. Hard to really challenge that list or what follows in the rest of the chapter. Like us modern and post-modern types, the ancient Confucian camp does not like the braggart (14), the hypocrite, the glutton (14), the stubborn-headed, or the narcissist. The gentleman always works for others, rather than himself. As Confucius states in (16), we should worry more about appreciating others rather than others appreciating us. The only self-indulgence Confucius allows for is going crazy with more learning and greater virtue — and if you have some time to kill, fixing past mistakes.

Being nice to others, however, is not always about self-discipline. Good behavior has its rewards: for example, in (10) Confucius’ politeness opens doors to better information when visiting a new state.

In just the simple guidelines of the first chapter, Confucius’ emphasis on social bonds and social ritual — rather than purely individual action — are immediately clear. This is not “democratic” social network building, however. Filial piety and hierarchical obedience — in other words, being subservient to those above — are both key parts of the philosophy. Yet today there is no word with more party-pooping connotation than “filial piety.” Modern society has absolutely thrown it out the window. Imagine the ratings difference between MTV and the Filial Piety Network (FPN) for the key 18-24 youth male demographic. Modern society has basically told kids, it’s totally fine to hate and disobey your parents.

But maybe for good reason. Confucius is a “conservative” in the most direct sense of the word: in (2) he rejects the validity of rebellion and in (11) he shows that filial piety is more about protecting an unbroken line of tradition than just pleasing parents for its own sake. The virtuous man does not just follow the way of the parents while they are alive, but always and forever. Western contemporary society has come to fear and loathe cultural inertia, while Confucius is pretty clear that constancy is the solution to our problems. In the United States, youth rebellion is not just tolerated but has become a major part of the post-industrial economic structure. This seems utterly irreconcilable with Confucian thought.

Some may try to wiggle out of the dilemma — thinking that parents can be obeyed and pleased while revolution is pursued. But Confucius saw all broad social virtue — and even statecraft (5) — starting with the correct individual performance of human relations. They are intractably linked.

Okay, so you can be a self-disciplined good guy but still have ragtag friends, right? Like the lawful good Paladin of an AD&D game hanging out with bards, thieves, and warriors. Doesn’t work that way for Confucius: “Do not accept as friend anyone who is not as good as you” (8). Being a true virtuous gentleman is a challenge. And possibly very lonely.

But really, this all comes down to the “Man in the Mirror” principle: global change starts with yourself and your own enactment of proper social relations. This makes a lot of sense. And yet, in our modern society, we have conceded that most of our cultural heroes and artistic legends were drunks, lechers, megalomaniacs, and otherwise horrible to their friends and family. Is our newfound allowance of personal foibles a more efficient way of letting creative geniuses do their work without prejudice? But who needs genius when everyone in society is working hard to make themselves smarter and treat their fellow brother/sister/father/mother/neighbor/ruler with civility and proper ritual?

But wait, how do we know that works? For all the talk about Confucianism being a “moral practice,” maybe we need faith to believe that such small actions will actually cause big social change?

The latest in a series of visual excerpts from the out-of-print book 和英文字レタリング (Japanese and English Lettering) by Tsunetoshi Hurusawa (古沢恒敏), a collection of assorted lettering styles culled from history.

Originally published in 1978, the book is a great study of lettering used by typical “fancy”/ファンシー businesses — mainly cafés, “snack bars”, cake shops, and assorted 1950s-1990s service-oriented businesses. A number of the lettering styles within the book became the blueprints for these types of businesses’ lettering.

『和英文字レタリング』 is a great compendium of work that helps explain much of the Tokyo letterscape of recent history. This visual series will continue in weekly installments.

Unearthed outside of the city of Sano in Tochigi-ken, this portrait photography series documents Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taishō Periods.

The latest in a series of graphic design tools for Néojaponisme readers: a number of red, white, and black patterns based on Modern Japanese graphic design from the 1950s.

These patterns are free to use for non-commercial applications. (For commercial applications, please contact us for a license.)

The patterns are provided in Illustrator CS3, Illustrator CS, and Adobe PDF format. You can download a zipped file containing all three formats here.

The following interview originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of Japanese magazine Cyzo (previously available online, but currently unavailable; Google cached part one and two). We have published this translation without the publisher’s express permission. We do not confirm, condone, or endorse the content, but merely provide the translation as a way to view into the discourse of the Japanese printed media on the Japanese entertainment world.

In the interview, veteran entertainment reporter Honda Kei discusses Suhō Ikuo — CEO of management company Burning Production and widely understood to be the most powerful single person in the Japanese entertainment world. (He is often called the “Don of the geinoukai.”) Despite such power, Suhō almost never appears in the media, is rarely photographed, and few people outside of the industry would know his name. Many publications (and previous incarnations of his Wikipedia entry) have subtly hinted at Suhō’s alleged relationships with the so-called “underworld,” but Cyzo’s Honda interview is one of the few times where someone has made claims of this matter on the record.

Burning CEO Suhō’s True Face and Means of Power, as Seen from a Man Who Continues to Fight with the “Don”

Entertainment journalist Kei Honda is a man who continues to offer outspoken criticism of the (management company) Burning Production and its CEO Suhō Ikuo — normally said to be a “taboo of the entertainment industry.” In an entertainment mass media that is uniformly “Burning-friendly,” Honda has, up to this point, been sued five times by Burning. He also says he has been intimidated by mob members… so why does this man keep fighting with his pen?

—Mr. Honda, how many times have you been sued for slander by Burning Production’s Suhō Ikuo for writing critical articles about him?

Honda (H): I have been sued five times, for writing about Suhō’s dark associations with crime syndicates, the nature of his media control, and his true face. He demanded compensation for damages for the slander and I was sued. Out of the five, he withdrew the charge or we settled out-of-court four times. None of the suits reached final court judgment. The remaining one is currently pending in appeals court. Suhō apparently is telling people, “Even though we settled, it’s a crime of conscience that he keeps writing very similar things.” But no matter how many times I write, Suhō doesn’t ever change his ways.

—When did you first encounter President Suhō?

H: It was when I just started out as a novice writer for Shukan Post (Shogakukan), so it must have been 35-36 years ago. At the time, I found out about a sex scandal involving singer Minami Saori (currently married to Shinoyama Kishin), who was in Burning. I got a tip that a writer from Shukan Shincho got into a fight with Suhō about the incident and had his glasses broken. In order to confirm the story, I went to the Burning office and asked “Is Mr. Suhō here?” Suddenly the man who was cleaning the office wielded his mop like a sword. I remember that the mop guy was Suhō.

—Was that grievance what made you point your spear of criticism towards President Suhō?

H: No, it wasn’t anything personal. The big thing was, at that time, the owner of a big management company had told me in real grief, “The Japan Association of Music Enterprises has finally allied with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to try to sever the ties between the yakuza and the entertainment world. And even though they are cleaning everything up, Suhō is doing the exact opposite.” Suhō, through wielding power, was able to further cultivate associations with the mob.

—Why does Suhō associate with the crime syndicates?

H: Maybe he likes them? When Suhō came into the entertainment world, the mob was involved in running management companies and promoting singers. So there would have been points of contact all over. And I think that world of “duty and obligations” maybe agrees with his skin. It’s just that kids look up to the entertainment world and so it must conform to social norms. We can’t allow those kinds of associations. There was a consensus in the industry to move towards getting rid of the mob, but if the leader of the industry, Burning, wasn’t following those rules, what can you do?

—Why do you think President Suhō came to be called the “Don of the Entertainment World”?

H: This is my theory, but Suhō focused on the music publishing business, and at the time, he partnered with Watanabe Masafumi (now deceased), who dominated TBS’ music shows. Suhō turned the “race” for the Japan Record Award into a business. He took the sports paper writers and music critics involved with the awards out to high-end clubs and threw them big parties on their birthdays. He gave them presents. For weddings and funerals, etc. he would send unprecedented amounts of money, and with that, he was able to create cozy relations with the entertainment media.

So all the management companies and record labels that wanted to win a Japan Record Award would rely on Suhō, and in return, he would get that singer’s master recording rights or publishing rights. And if the singer won the award, those rights would create even more money. Using the conduit to the entertainment media he cultivated at that point, he could then suppress scandals. And Suhō, who had amassed huge financial power, was able to bring in great people working for him. He would also assist aforced the music publishers in his keiretsu to give him copyrights and the entertainment companies to give him business rights, and he created a money tree. He had money, controlled the mass media, and created a real business model. If you can do that, you are absolutely “the Don.”

—As an entertainment reporter, what do you think of the mass media people who are subservient to Burning?

H: I though it was inexcusable! After all this, I quit my job at Shukan Post and became a freelancer, doing a lot of work for Tokyo Sports. The bureau chief at Tokyo Sports at that point approached me and said, “Our Culture Department is way too cozy with the management companies. So you should do as you like.” I thought, “what, am I a bullet?” No one in the Culture Dep’t liked me, but I started to cover the entertainment world. Even though the mass media knew about Suhō’s dark associations and scandals about Burning talent, they stayed quiet. I thought, if that’s the case, I will just cover it all myself and bring scandals about Burning talent to light in not just Tokyo Sports but in media like Asahi Geino (Tokuma Shoten) or Tsukuru (Tsukuru Publishing), or Hanashi no Channeru (Nihon Bungeisha).

—President Suhō never tried to win you over?

H: He did. I don’t know if it was him acknowledging defeat from my attacks, but about twenty years ago, through a friend, he had a couple of plans for conciliation. As a result, I had the chance to dine with Suhō, and for a while, we had friendly relations. I was taken to a performance by Hosokawa Takashi at the Shinjuku Koma Theatre and got to go backstage. There, I heard Suhō ask Hosokawa, “Did you greet oyabun Noda?” “Oyabun Noda” was the godfather of a huge crime syndicate. Discovering these clear associations with the mob made me realize that I just shouldn’t be hanging out with Suhō. So I separated from Suhō about a half-year later, and because of that, I was told suddenly by him, “Tomorrow I am going to wire ¥2 million to you, so could you tell me your bank account?” I refused, saying, “I have no business receiving that,” and that was it with Suhō.

—After that, how were your relations with Suhō?

H: I personally strengthened my criticism of him. When I did that, I received anonymous calls to my home. My wife picked up and the guy said, “I am a classmate’s of Suhō. Because the Anti-Organized Crime Law has made things complicated, I can’t say the name of my syndicate, but tell your husband to make nice with Suhō.” The substance of the call made it clear that it was a threat. I could not allow this intimidation of my wife, who is not involved in the industry. I eventually figured out who called, and it wasn’t his classmate, but a guy who was in one of the mob groups that he runs with. But even after that, I kept writing about scandals related to Burning. When I did that, I was finally sued for slander.

—Do you think President Suhō hates most when you write about his relations to crime syndicates?

H: Maybe he hates that, but in my memory, he has never really said that my concrete statements about his connections to the mob have no basis in fact. Basically, he insists that the entire article is slander. He sued me for my book The Crumbling of the Johnny’s Empire (『ジャニーズ帝国崩壊』) published by Rokusaisha, and in there, there is an eyewitness account that when Fifth-Generation Yamaguchi-gumi’s Lieutenant Takumi Masaru (now deceased) came to Tokyo, Suhō went to meet him frequently at the ANA Hotel in Roppongi. But that particular part was not challenged.

—From what you saw, has Suhō’s power only risen over the years?

H: They say that Suhō got scared and stopped coming to the office after the shooting incident at Burning in 2001 [where someone shot a bullet through the office window] . Around then, he purchased a golf course in Okinawa and started working as the owner. He got hooked on golf, and they said that he started to slowly lose the unifying force worthy of a Don.

But from my point of view, I just couldn’t see where he had lost power. At that time, Suhō had expanded his conduit with the financial world. He was beloved especially by a now-deceased former chairman of a giant paper company. He also created connections with powerful politicians and had a honeymoon relation with former NHK Chairman Ebizawa Katsuji. And he built up connections even with people in the judiciary. They say that Suhō’s son is even involved with the company Japan Risk Control, which employed Norisada Mamoru (who lost his job at the Tokyo High Court Counsel because of a sex scandal) as a top advisor.

When K-Dash chariman Kawamura Tatsuo came to prominence, the entertainment industry was a flutter with things like “Suhō’s power has fallen” or “the Suhō era is over,” but that’s ridiculous.

In the fuss over the marriage between Fujiwara Norika and Jinnai Tomonori last year, Suhō wielded power behind the scenes to the degree that Yoshimoto Kogyo (Jinnai’s agency) couldn’t move hand or foot. From the leaked information about their engagement to the exclusive live broadcast rights given to Nihon Television, that was all Suhō’s own work. I wrote about this in the magazine Kami no Bakudan (”Paper Bomb”, Rokusaisha), which brings us to the fifth suit against me I mentioned earlier, currently pending. Just as always, Suhō sues with legal means those who cannot be controlled by the carrot and the stick. But the fact that Suhō has come to do it like this, I think is a reason why the mass media succumbs to him.

I love the entertainment world and all the people who work hard so hard in it. But I don’t plan on dropping my pen as long as the industry is being controlled by dirty people.

Raymond Fernand Loewy will always be remembered as a pioneering industrial designer first and foremost — his automobile designs for Studebaker and the Greyhound bus. His streamlined objects, incorporating motion lines and intimating motion through their composition, are still indelible symbols of classic American design.

Loewy was born in France in 1893, having studied engineering there and serving in the engineer corps from 1914-1918. After moving to America in 1919 he began a short-lived career in fashion illustration before shifting his focus to product design. At the time “brand marketing” was still a primitive science, and the concept of “industrial design” was unknown to the big corporations. Product “design” was simply left up to the engineers. It was Loewy’s high-minded intention to turn corporate perceptions around.

Ever the self-publicist, Loewy carried business cards emblazoned with the legend “Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.” Perhaps not as zippy as today’s catch phrases but it did the trick. Although he ran up against incredulity in conservative quarters, he gained the confidence of more forward-thinking executives who, struggling with increased competition in the aftermath of the Depression, began to see that good design could be a selling point. In many cases — for example, that of the Frigidaire refrigerator that Loewy designed for General Motors in the 1940’s — the companies saw sales skyrocket.

His accomplishments as a graphic designer are secondary in notoriety, though just as striking. In particular, his company’s logo design for Shell Oil and the ubiquitous Lucky Strike cigarette packaging are some of the best known examples of his work that carry on today, albeit in revised form.

However, it was another piece of Loewy’s cigarette packaging design that struck a chord in Japan — his project to redesign the packaging for Peace cigarettes.

Some of the first people in Japan to acknowledge the power of graphic design were the tobacco merchants in Meiji era Japan. From traditional woodcut print packaging to packaging utilizing elaborate design work and fine printing techniques, tobacco products from numerous merchants competed wholesale for public appeal. Coinciding with a marketing battle came an increased monopoly on the manufacture and sale of tobacco products — an increasingly limited number of companies offered their wares to the public in ever more elaborate packaging.

This came to a halt in the 1940s as World War II saw cigarette packaging become more reductive in both design and printing quality.

Loewy’s 1952 redesign of the packaging for Peace was a return to form for the Japanese tobacco market. Pre-war images of happy children and fireworks were eschewed in favor of an iconic, though oddly positioned geometric rendering of a dove in Loewy’s steamlined style. That the bird appears to be plummeting instead of flying upward is an odd stylistic choice, however it was elegantly rendered and the package has remained virtually the same since its inception.

What really caught the public’s attention was Loewy’s design fee for redesigning the ubiquitous brand. Unheralded in any sector of graphic design in Japan, the project fee for Loewy designing the packaging was a crisp ¥1,000,000 — a fortune at that time. The sheer amount had the nation atwitter and instantly skyrocketed public opinion of the work of commercial artists. Graphic designers and illustrators saw an increased perception of value in their work, as well as a noted increase in design fees in the years immediately following the Peace re-branding project. Other benefits in the Japanese workplace saw no such commensurate raised valuation, however, the elevated position of graphic design as a viable and valuable cultural practice through increased budgets for design was a boon for Japanese graphic designers.

It is worth noting this footnote in history in hopes of prominent designers working in Japan and abroad for the Japanese market making an effort to push both for an increase in client budgets and for a subsequent public disclosure of design fees. In a country where good design is considered both essential and integral to project success, design fees are estimated to be one-third to one-half of their analogs in North America and the Continent. Simultaneously, the social status of design workers continues to rise as the Japanese public becomes increasingly design-conscious and sophisticated in their design taste. Budgets, however, seem to be firmly fixed in place, though the global economic woes of late have taken their toll, as well.

Where is the modern-day Mr. Loewy now when we need him so desperately?

Fujoshi kanojo 腐女子 (”Fujoshi girlfriend”) is a new movie based on a blog by “Pentabu” that rode the original post-moe fujoshi boom to bestselling book status a few years ago. (Pentabu is currently blogging part 2.) I don’t have anything in particular to say about the movie itself, but the way it is being marketed is an excellent example of how the media misunderstands — or at least misrepresents — fujoshi.

Media treatment of the fujoshi concept has always been problematic. The root of the problem is, as usual, otaku culture. When the Akiban hordes first spread across the steppes of the mass media, triumphant cat emoticons unfurled, they brought their own women with them: maids, underground idols, voice actresses, cosplayers, and underage cartoon characters. That virtually all of these women were either personae played for cash or entirely imaginary did not prevent these ideals of womanhood establishing themselves in the public mind as a badly-needed feminine yin to Akibacentric otaku culture’s hypertrophied yanginess.

As a result, when media attention eventually turned to actual fujoshi, the elevator pitch — “They’re otaku, except girls!” — was more or less accurate (granting a broad reading of “otaku”), but the implications were misunderstood. If fujoshi were girl otaku, they must be the girls usually appearing alongside otaku in those TV specials and magazine articles, right? You know — the maids.

But no. As you might expect, although fujoshi and otaku often turn to the same texts for raw cultural material, they have very little to do with each other as cultural actors. There are fujoshi stores in Akihabara, but the main fujoshi center is in Ikebukuro — and it developed around a core of bookstores, not transistor hustlers.

“fujoshi syndicate”, a group of self-described “fujoshi OLs” from Tokyo (the only named member is one Ōta Maki 大田真樹) address this exact point in their recent book Naze, fujoshi wa danson-johi na no ka?『なぜ、腐女子は男尊女卑なのか？』 (”Why are fujoshi male chauvinists?”), discussing the cover of another book from 2007: Bokutachi no ki ni naru fujoshi 『僕たちの気になる腐女子』 (”Those fascinating fujoshi”), which also featured maid imagery on the cover.

Let’s start with the “face” of the book, its cover. The cover of Bokutachi no ki ni naru fujoshi is a girl in a maid outfit. — So at this point, it’s already failed. It’s true that there are a few fujoshi among the girls working in Akihabara’s maid cafes, but most of the staff there are not fujoshi but “Akiba girls” (アキバ系女子).

What are “Akiba girls”? By this we mean girls who love the anime and manga subcultures, but who also go to Akihabara to be made a fuss of. [...] They are otaku, but they don’t do the earthy “Let’s party, just us girls!” thing; they’re on good terms with male otaku too. One representative example would be Nakagawa Shōko (Shokotan).

In other words, otaku girls who wear maid outfits are not part of fujoshi culture, but rather Akiba culture. [...]

The syndicate then relate an apparently true story about how they once asked a maid cafe employee where they could find Messe Sanoh, a specialist retailer of woman’s video games, and that maid didn’t know: incontrovertible proof that she, at least, was no fujoshi.

The fujoshi syndicate actually spend more of Naze, fujoshi wa on this and other misconceptions of fujoshi by non-fujoshi (especially men) than they do on the title question. One argument they keep returning to is that the cosplaying, go-shujin-sama-ing media fujoshi addresses a deep psychological need within post-Bubble men. High salary, highly respected alma mater, and physical height: two of these three Bubble-traditional status markers are much harder to obtain than they used to be, and the idea of a secret caste of women — maybe there are some right there in your office! — who prefer the company of low-status, sensitive, intellectual types, and will even play along with their fantasies — this is bound to have appeal.

(Ironically, argue fujoshi syndicate, real fujoshi are just as status-conscious as ever, and have no interest in otaku as a rule. The syndicate traces this state of affairs to fujoshi reading material and its emphasis on status and power differentials as a source of eroticism.)

The argument here is not that there aren’t any otaku women who genuinely enjoy cosplay and Akiba culture, or that this is somehow inauthentic. Arguments about terminology and authenticity are a dead end. The question is to what extent the prominence given to these individuals impedes understanding of broader “fujoshi culture.” There is also arguably a political element involved: you can see this as the co-option of the idea of the fujoshi to reinforce sociosexual norms, the replacement of a uniquely female culture identity with one defined only in relation to male interests.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not a fair fight. As long as keen interests in fancifully-depicted gay romance and other distinguishing features of non-Akiba fujoshi don’t show up in photos, the media will always prefer the women dressed as frilly maids.

The latest in a series of visual excerpts from the out-of-print book 和英文字レタリング (Japanese and English Lettering) by Tsunetoshi Hurusawa (古沢恒敏), a collection of assorted lettering styles culled from history.

Originally published in 1978, the book is a great study of lettering used by typical “fancy”/ファンシー businesses — mainly cafés, “snack bars”, cake shops, and assorted 1950s-1990s service-oriented businesses. A number of the lettering styles within the book became the blueprints for these types of businesses’ lettering.

『和英文字レタリング』 is a great compendium of work that helps explain much of the Tokyo letterscape of recent history. This visual series will continue in weekly installments.

Unearthed outside of the city of Sano in Tochigi-ken, this portrait photography series documents Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taishō Periods.

The latest in a series of graphic design tools for Néojaponisme readers: a number of red, white, and black patterns based on Modern Japanese graphic design from the 1950s.

These patterns are free to use for non-commercial applications. (For commercial applications, please contact us for a license.)

The patterns are provided in Illustrator CS3, Illustrator CS, and Adobe PDF format. You can download a zipped file containing all three formats here.