“It was nearly five years ago now, but I lived next to a baseball field. This was during my third year of college. I say baseball field, but it really wasn’t anything all that spectacular, just a field with some tufts of grass. There was a backstop, a pitcher’s mound, a makeshift scoreboard next to the first base bench, and then there was a metal net that surrounded the whole thing. The outfield, instead of a nice grass, was a bunch of weeds, all dry and crumbly. There was one small bathroom, but there was nothing like a changing room or a locker room. The field belonged to this steel company that had a huge factory close by, and they hung a sign on the entrance that said ‘Unauthorized Entrance Prohibited.’ Whenever Saturday and Sunday rolled around, ad hoc teams of steel company businessmen and workers would come and play baseball. And then there was the official company team, which practiced on weekdays. Besides those there was also a women’s softball division. It looked like the company really liked baseball. But living next to a baseball field isn’t all that bad. My apartment building was just behind the third base bench, and I lived on the second floor. If I opened the window, the metal netting was right in front of my eyes. So whenever I got bored — and during the day I was bored every day of the week — I passed time by just gazing at the games or practices. But watching baseball was not the reason I came to live there. That was for a totally unrelated reason.”

After the young man said that, he paused his story, took a cigarette from his jacket pocket, and took a few drags.¹

Thus begins “Baseball Field,” one of Haruki Murakami’s lesser-known short stories. Part of the story was extracted, edited and expanded into “Crabs,” published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but the entirety has never been published in English. The young man in the story is at a café with Murakami himself. He mailed Murakami one of his short stories (the content of which the real-life Murakami later turned into “Crabs”), and Murakami, charmed by the young man’s interesting handwriting and somewhat impressed with the story itself, read all 70 pages and sent him a letter of suggestions. “Baseball Field” tells the story of their subsequent meeting over coffee. The point of view goes back and forth between Murakami, the young man, and, briefly, the characters in the young man’s story. Voyeurism is a major theme (the young man actually moved to the apartment to spy on a girl he had a crush on), and storytelling as an act of voyeurism, looking into other people’s lives, is the central theme of the collection in which “Baseball Field” was included: Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round 『回転木馬のデッド・ヒート』.²

In this collection, Murakami experimented with techniques he used in Norwegian Wood and later in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and by looking at how Dead Heat came into being, we can better grasp the development of Murakami’s thought process. Not only did he gain valuable experience writing “realistic” fiction, he was able to sharpen the point he wants to make with his writing: reality is strange, and humans have little control over the path their lives will take.

These early novels were written in first person, telling the story of an unnamed “I” (boku), his girlfriend, a bartender named “J,” and a friend named “the Rat.” In addition to the boku persona, another notable characteristic of Murakami’s early fiction was the use of the fantastic: girls with magic ears, talking pinball machines, and a “Sheep Man.” Murakami’s short fiction during the period — with the exception of a few stories, notably “A Slow Boat to China” and “Firefly” — was also very surreal.

In the fall of 1983, there were still four more years before Murakami would publish Norwegian Wood — the bestseller that changed Murakami “from a writer into a phenomenon.”⁶ The period from 1983 to 1985 was a formative one for Murakami, in which he can be seen honing his unique version of realism and developing a distinct worldview. He would later note that after finishing the Rat series, he wanted to try and write “a completely new type of fiction using completely different themes.”⁷ Murakami’s next set of stories would depart from his standard first-person narration and fantastic themes to directly address the shared reality around him in Tokyo.

In October 1983 Murakami started to serialize a set of stories in IN POCKET, a new, pocket-sized Kodansha magazine run by his former editor at Gunzō.⁸ The eight stories for the magazine were written under the collective title Views of the City (『街の眺め』), indexed along with other “short serials” (短編連作). The first story of the series, “Poolside” (「プールサイド」), begins in the third person. A man has turned thirty-five and decides that it is the middle point of his life. A recreational swimmer, he looks at life in the same way he looks at swimming laps; his thirty-fifth birthday is a confirmation that he’s halfway through the pool of life. After a few pages, Murakami abruptly switches to first person, addressing the reader directly:
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English / 日本語

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Wakamatsu Kōji’s latest film 『実録・連合赤軍：浅間山荘への道程』 (The True Story of the United Red Army: the Road to Asama-Sansō) is probably the final and definitive cinematic retelling of the United Red Army (URA) story. In early 1972, the URA terrorist cell achieved infamy for killing off twelve of its own members during ideological training and then battling police from the inside of a mountain lodge near Nagano’s Mt. Asama. Over the course of three hours, Wakamatsu covers the group’s entire history from their formation and eventual arrest, moving the viewer through a brief history of the student movement, the internecine fighting accompanying the foundation of the Red Army Faction (赤軍派), the brutal lynching of fellow members in its secret mountain training lodge, and the final standoff at Asama-Sansō.

Telling the “full” story of such a fractured and complex set of events forces Wakamatsu to use a no-frills “docudrama” approach, including plenty of on-screen text and voice-over narration. The story could not fit neatly into the conventional three-act film. Almost none of the Red Army members survive or stay free of police custody long enough to act as an emotional anchor or arch-villain for the entire three hours. Some characters are little more than historical bookmarks; for example, future Japanese Red Army leader Shigenobu Fusako shows up in the forward to bond with future URA victim Tōyama Mieko, but soon leaves for Lebanon to found the “international wing” of the Red Army. Likewise, Red Army founder and philosopher Shiomi Takaya is arrested in the first hour and taken completely out of the central story. But so goes the actual history.

Wakamatsu and fellow soft-porn filmmaker Adachi Masao were both Red Army sympathizers and chronicled the early proto-Japanese Red Army / Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Lebanon training camps in their 1971 documentary 『赤軍PFLP世界戦争宣言』Red Army-PFLP Declaration of War. In the last few years, both have apparently felt the need to create new films reflecting on the ’70s Japanese leftist terrorism. Adachi’s lackluster 『幽閉者テロリスト』Prisoner / Terrorist retold the story of Lod Airport Massacre attacker Okamoto Kozo losing his mind from years in an Israeli jail. With multiple Japanese fictional films about the United Red Army’s self-destruction already in circulation, however, it may seem odd that Wakamatsu went to such lengths to make yet another film on the topic. He has specifically stated a need to correct falsehoods in the 2002 film 『突入せよ！浅間山荘事件』(Choice of Hercules), which tells the story of the Asama-Sansō hostage crisis from the perspective of law enforcement. Wakamatsu protege Takahashi Banmei’s 2001 film 『光の雨』(Rain of Light) , on the other hand, very skillfully visualizes the horrific URA training deaths, but somewhat tempers it with a distancing meta-approach where the actors are shown “adapting” the novel that lends the film’s name. Although there are slight discrepancies between Takahashi and Wakamatsu’s versions, both generally work from the same historical chronicles and hit the same notes. Wakamatsu’s only real addition is combining the lynchings with the Asama-Sansō tale in a single epic-length film.

The other notable film to pick up the United Red Army narrative is 『鬼畜大宴会』 (Banquet of the Beasts) — Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s ultra-gory mondo-horror retelling of the early ’70s student movement disintegration — where post-gunshot head-wounds spew blood, men are castrated with knives, and limbs are frequently severed. Beyond twisting this important historical event into purely prurient content, Kumakiri does the URA story great disservice by recasting the event’s true horror — the legitimatization of comrade purging through Marxist utopian ideology — into the result of the evil female leader’s growing “insanity.” When the stand-in for female URA leader Nagata Hiroko is killed late in the movie (by brutal means which I never want to think about again), Kumakiri gives viewers the karmic revenge they ultimately desire. (The historical URA denouement is not so rewarding: sadistic leaders Nagata and Mori were unceremoniously arrested before the Asama-Sansō siege even starts. Mori’s later suicide is always reduced to an afterword.)
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My cable company just added two more music channels, meaning I have six total music channels to be upset about. But I agree with those new Wieden + Kennedy ads: MTV blows me. For all those people who whine about “I remember when MTV played videos,” I challenge you to spend time watching a music video from start to finish. You are also probably remembering back when “pop music was good.”

Since the Japanese music market is melting down like a butterscotch sundae in a toaster oven on Venus, we are limited to singles that the genius marketing teams have determined interlock perfectly with collected consumer research. Besides Denki Groove’s videos for “Shonen Young” and “Mononoke Dance” (amazing punchline), the suits no longer greenlight anything approximating a “creative idea.” Spike Jonze would be outright rejected as an arrogant auteur for daring to come up with his own concepts. The Sukima Switches, Monkey Majiks, and Yamada Yu’s have taken over 100% — dragging J-pop into a dark hole between the poles of pop-punk and uta-hime barefoot female singers. Now the rock bands have to be salt-of-the-eath, the idols have to be unambiguously robotic, and the song titles have to stick to words that everyone knows like “Arigatou.” Seriously, can you imagine naming a song “Thank You” and then performing it in front of a camera and letting your record label show it to other people? “I Just Called to Say I Love You”? You think these kids read Keats or something?!

Objectively, however, I learn more and more about this elusive “youth generation” with every video. For example, the band Monkey Majik’s new single “Together.” Japanese youth apparently love hearing their own hack pop lyric conventions improperly coming out the mouth of Canadian English teachers. Monkey Majik are the musical equivalent of the giant posters of white people that decorate the façades of discount suit stores in the Japanese suburbs, but hey, those suit stores sell a lot of suits! Between MM, Jero, and Leah Dizon, North America seems to be the new recruiting ground for Japanese talent. The mirror phenomenon would be Japanese people moving to the USA and joining the American Enterprise Institute.

More seriously, the new Kato Miriya — sorry, Kato Miliyah — song “19 Memories” is probably our greatest possible window into the female Japanese psyche. First and most importantly, the song “samples” Amuro Namie’s “Sweet 19 Blues,” which only came out 11 years ago and is probably the worst Amuro Namie song of that era. Miriya must have heard from a friend that recent “Black Music” likes to “sample,” and immediately demanded that they sample her last single for her new one. But when they told her to sample an “old song,” she went all the way back to her roots in 1996, when she was 8.
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In Mr. Kawabata’s works, delicacy joins with resilience, elegance with an awareness of the depths of human nature … they are modern yet directly inspired by the solitary philosophy of the monks of medieval Japan. … For many writers in modern Japan, the claims of tradition and the desire to establish a new literature have proved well-nigh irreconcilable. Mr. Kawabata, however, with his poet’s intuition, has gone beyond this contradiction and achieved a synthesis. …I feel honored to recommend him, who more than any other Japanese writer, is truly qualified for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mishima Yukio wrote these words to the Swedish Academy in 1961, officially nominating him for the prize. It was seven more years before Kawataba would win, with the committee citing his “narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind”:

True, of his production only three novels and a few short stories have so far been translated into different languages, evidently because translation in this case offers especially great difficulties and is apt to be far too coarse a filter, in which many finer shades of meaning in his richly expressive language must be lost. But the translated works do give us a sufficiently representative picture of his personality.

Kawabata’s banquet speech also addresses the issue of translation:

In view of the complexities presented by differences in language, and in view of the fact that my works, no doubt more than those of others, have had to be perused in translation, I must indicate my deep and undying gratitude and respect for the resolve shown by Your Excellencies of the Academy. This first award to an Oriental in fifty-five years has I believe made a deep impression upon Japan, and perhaps upon the other countries of Asia as well, and upon all countries whose languages are little known internationally.

Speaking to the Japanese media, he was even blunter:

If I could have been read by the judges in Japanese that would have been best, but … the fact is that I am heavily indebted to translation. (日本文で審査してもらえれば一番ありがたいわけですけども…翻訳のおかげを非常に被っているわけですね)

“Do you not, my esteemed master, find this a rather impenetrable passage?” [I would ask Kawabata]. He would dutifully scrutinize the passage, and answer: “Yes.” Nothing more.

Similar themes are visible in Kawabata’s correspondence with Mishima Yukio, published in 1997 as Kawabata Yasunari/Mishima Yukio: Ōfuku Shokan (『川端康成・三島由紀夫往復書簡』). As early as 1951, Kawabata asked Mishima for the name of “that American translating Confessions of a Mask,” because he wanted his advice as “a Japan-based foreigner who reads Japanese literature” on the question of which short stories to send to the US college magazines that Wallace Stegner had put him in touch with.
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In Part Two of “Otaku Research,” Nakamori Akio breaks down (or reinforces, depending on your view) stereotypes involving the mating habits of the otaku. Even more bombastic than his original missive, this column is an intriguing window into contemporary views of the subculture during the early 1980s.

A few definitions for the uninitiated: Minky Momo and Nanako are both examples of a proto-”moe” genre of anime based around super-cute girls with magical powers. And “Gekisha” is the name of a long-running series of cheesecake photos of young women in swimsuits that proved incredibly popular among the otaku in the mid-Eighties.

Last time, we got as far as naming the hordes of gloomy, obsessive boys you see everywhere these days as “otaku.” I think most of you can figure out the origins of the word, but it’s like this: don’t you think it’s a little creepy to see junior high school kids addressing each other with “otaku” [「お宅」] at manga and anime conventions?

The minute these twerps hit puberty, some of ‘em are inevitably gonna turn into stone-cold pervs. But you know what? With the way they dress, the way they talk, the way they act, they don’t stand a chance with a woman. See, these otaku are definitely lacking something in the masculine behavior department. Most of them leer over cutouts of Minky Momo and Nanako they’ve got stuffed into their commuter-pass holders — you could call it a 2D complex, or something — yet can’t bring themselves to speak to an actual woman. Those with milder cases tend towards androgynous idol girls without much feminine appeal or obsess over lolicon. A nude photo of a normal young woman does absolutely nothing for guys like this. There’s this one dude I know who flips out — “get that away from me! It’s dirty!” — if someone kindly offers him a porn magazine, but then again, this he’s the editor of [dojinshi anthology magazine] Comic Box, so I guess it comes with the territory.

Anyway. The one thing these guys are into is Kishin [Shinoyama’s] “Gekisha” series [gravure idol photos], which runs in the otaku magazine Goro. You know what I’m talking about — they always run stuff like “Write Kumiko a letter! She’ll reply to the ones that catch her fancy!” Now that I think about it, I bet you anything the editor’s mailbox is packed with tens of thousands of letters from otaku. Gag me. Just take a look at the readers’ column in any recent Gekisha compilation — it’s filled with love letters from the otaku! The guys writing about how they couldn’t wait for the next issue to come out so they went to the bookstore in the next town over; the 26 year-old salaryman who cuts out the pics of his favorite babes and saves them, and this is the real otaku part, only to get in hot water with his wife after she stumbles across the file; the guys who write poems devoted to miss-so-and-so, and so on and so on until you start getting a headache. But they’re out there, the guys who have mint-condition copies of every back number of Goro lining the bookshelf of their filthy, four-tatami-square hovels. There are even some who buy two copies apiece, one to preserve and one to use for… whatever.

Maybe it’s because they’re lacking in the male performance department or something, but these guys all seem kinda effeminate to me. These are people well into their twenties who, upon getting a new poster or something with their favorite anime character on it, get so happy and excited that their legs come together, their knees bend, and they start to bounce (this legs-coming-together-and-hopping thing being a peculiar characteristic of theirs). And whenever they screw up, they make these exaggerated fake boo-hoo sounds. It really makes me sick. There’s no way the majority of these guys will ever get a woman.

Then again, you know what they say: there’s a marriage partner out there for everyone. I’ve always sort of wondered what kind of woman an otaku might marry, but recently I had a scary thought. If an otaku marries an otaku woman, their child will be an otaku kid. And so it goes.

Sight unseen, Japan’s first truly contemporary art fair opens tonight. Scheduled on the same week as the Art Fair Tokyo, the 101 Tokyo Art Fair forces the megalopolis into its first Tokyo Art Week.

The world looks to Tokyo for what’s next, casually ignoring that what is there now consists of a tangled and underdeveloped infrastructure. It’s akin to many folks’ experience of moving to Tokyo and learning that it actually takes months to even get an internet connection installed. Compared to Basel and New York, Tokyo is a relative village of hovels when it comes to fine art as a commercial system.

On the macro scale, there is a severe lack of support unparalleled in other first world nations. No zaibatsu has a contemporary (or even modern) collection of note, and there is a complete lack of consumer awareness regarding fine art, though magazines like Brutus and Art-It have slowly been attempting to educate their readers about art history and the contemporary milieu. On the micro level, most Tokyo apartments lack adequate systems to actually hang art and real-estate agents charge exorbitant fees to plug holes in walls. There is a complete lack of a support network for emerging artists age 20 to 30 who more often than not leave their art careers in the dust in order to pursue a regular paycheck.

What has been present is an art fair that is more akin to a trade show than an art fair in both look and spirit. The Art Fair Tokyo would do well to look at the 101 interlopers as a source of inspiration. In lieu of a hodgepodge, non-curated mishmash of different genres, eras, and stuffed walls of the work that hasn’t sold for the year, 101 Tokyo offers another option. Namely, it’s a cultivated, highly curated sampling of exhibition spaces. Each gallery involved with 101 is permitted to show three artists maximum, and only new work is exhibited. The 101 Tokyo organizers are committed to educating their audience. They have gone as far as offering two separate seminars on art investing in Tokyo’s market in both English and Japanese, as well as a seminar on Collecting Art in the Context of Wealth Management.

There are other aspects of 101 Tokyo that are quite a change from the other gig in town. The fair is a stark contrast — the Director is an artist, and the crew running the fair is genuinely excited about visual work. All are young, a 32 year-old being the eldest, and they are decidedly international. 101 Tokyo stands as a series of events of inclusivity, something that must be cultivated if contemporary fine art as a commercial sector is to grow into something viable in Tokyo. They even have parties where you can shake your ass and even potentially get laid by someone your age whom you enjoy talking to about contemporary aesthetics with — more than can be said for elsewhere.

As purportedly over-invested in design and architecture as Tokyo is (which is debatable and a whole lot of lip service to say the least), contemporary fine art in Tokyo could really use a kick in the pants. With luck, 101 Tokyo will deliver a decent bruise.

While neither long, in-depth, nor politically correct, the following 1983 article by essayist Nakamori Akio represents a watershed moment in subcultural journalism: the official debut of the word “otaku” as the definition of a then-new social demographic. Prior to its introduction, this anime- and manga-obsessed group was known under a variety of names, including mania (“maniacs”), nekura-zoku (loosely, “the gloomy tribe”), and even byōki (a play on the word “sick”), but none captured the diverse crowd’s distinctive esprit de corps — or lack thereof — symbolized by the word “otaku.”

When this first installment of “Otaku no Kenkyu” (『おたく』の研究,　“Otaku Research”) first appeared in the pages of an obscure weekly soft-core porno comic magazine called Manga Burikko, Nakamori probably had little idea that the word would eventually take a life of its own. It’s important to note that he didn’t coin the actual word, which is nothing more than a politer-than-polite way of saying “you” in Japanese. Perhaps because of this, “otaku” wouldn’t gain widespread popularity until 1989, after a one-two PR punch of Nakamori using the term in his biography of notorious serial killer Miyazaki Tsutomu, combined with the publication of pop-culture commentator Machiyama Tomohiro’s bestselling book Otaku no Hon (“The Otaku Book”) the same year.

From humble roots, “otaku” flowered to become the de facto term for individuals who pursue their hobbies with a single-minded passion bordering on obsession. As part of a series, here is our original translation of Nakamori’s first column in “Otaku no Kenkyu” — which we believe has never before appeared in English.

Ever heard of “Comiket” (also abbreviated as “Comike”)? I only went for the first time myself last year, at the ripe old age of 23, and let me tell you: it was a trip. It’s like a festival for manga freaks. More to the point, it’s a place to sell amateur comic books and fanzines. As to what was so surprising, it wasn’t so much that over ten-thousand young men and women gathered from all over Tokyo, but rather their eccentricities. How can I put this? They’re like those kids — every class has one — who never got enough exercise, who spent recess holed up in the classroom, lurking in the shadows obsessing over a shogi board or whatever. That’s them. Rumpled long hair parted on one side, or a classic kiddie bowl-cut look. Smartly clad in shirts and slacks their mothers bought off the “all ¥980/1980” rack at Ito Yokado or Seiyu [discount retailers], their feet shod in knock-offs of the “R”-branded Regal sneakers that were popular several seasons ago, their shoulder bags bulging and sagging — you know them. The boys were all either skin and bones as if borderline malnourished, or squealing piggies with faces so chubby the arms of their silver-plated eyeglasses were in danger of disappearing into the sides of their brow; all of the girls sported bobbed hair and most were overweight, their tubby, tree-like legs stuffed into long white socks. Now these unassuming classroom corner-dwellers with their perpetually downcast expressions have come out of the woodwork and swelled their ranks into a really rather surprising TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE. And just because they’re here, they’re channeling all of their normal gloominess into freaking out. Some are dressed in costumes of anime characters, others look like a shady character from a Azuma Hideo comic, still others constantly try foisting off their “lolicon” fanzines on unsuspecting girls, the shit-eating grins never leaving their faces all the while. Others just run around aimlessly… Man, it’s enough to make your head explode. The vast majority are in their teens, mostly junior and senior high school students.

Come to think of it, manga freaks and Comiket are only the start of it. There’s those guys who camp out before the opening day of anime movies, dudes who nearly get themselves run over trying to capture photos of the “blue train” as it comes down the tracks, guys with every back issue of SF Magazine and the Hayakawa science-fiction novels lining their bookshelves, science fair types with coke-bottle glasses who station themselves at the local computer shop, guys who get up early to secure space in line for idol singer and actress autograph sessions, boys who spent their childhoods going to the best cram-schools but turn into timid fish-eyed losers, guys who won’t shut up when the topic of audio gear comes around. These people are normally called “maniacs” or “fanatics,” or at best “nekura-zoku” (“the gloomy tribe”), but none of these terms really hit the mark. For whatever reason, it seems like a single umbrella term that covers these people, or the general phenomenon, hasn’t been formally established. So we’ve decided to designate them as the “otaku,” and that’s what we’ll be calling them from now on.

The question of why we’re calling them “otaku,” and the debate over exactly what “otaku” means, we’d like to explore in leisurely detail over subsequent installments. But in the meantime, take a good look around yourself, and we think you’ll see them — that’s right, there they are — the o…ta…ku….

So, what kind of otaku are you?

Harajuku is the Disneyland of global youth culture. Just as the Magic Kingdom has spacially-divided “Lands” to represent different parts of the human imagination (Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, etc.), Harajuku has Punks browsing at Vivienne Westwood, Mods shopping for authentic surplus army parkas, Skinheads scuffing up their red Docs on the curb in front of Londsdale, clean-cut 21st C. Hip Hoppers laying down Fukuzawas for some Ice Cream, Skaters at Stüssy, college Preps bouncing between Lacoste and Ralph Lauren, ’60s girls with decal eyes storming Courrèges, and Paris-dreaming Art Students in deconstructed garb floating down the hill from Comme des Garçons. This one Tokyo neighborhood has more stores dedicated to youth street fashion than anywhere else in the entire world. And not only does Harajuku singlehandedly preserve dead subcultures, the district has created some of the most unique fashion looks of the last two decades: namely, Decora-chan/Hyper-Cutie Punk (as seen in FRUiTS) and Gothic Lolita. No matter how much attendance declines in the next decade due to anemic Japanese birth rates, Harajuku has secured an almost-permanent place as one of the Seven Wonders of the Pop Culture World.

In light of this, an entire book on the Harajuku neighborhood is almost criminally overdue, and we are blessed that fashion writer and editor Tiffany Godoy finally delivered with her colorful new work Style Deficit Disorder. Godoy — probably one of the very few Westerners to ever have worked as a real-deal editor for a real-deal Japanese art or style magazine — hits all the most critical points for understanding the historical development of this youth culture sanctuary. Japanese fashion critic Hirakawa Take, KERA editor Suzuki Mariko, and Honeyee.com boss Suzuki Tetsuya pop up to provide short essays of macro-level analysis, but the book mostly tells the story of Harajuku through photographs and short profiles. Godoy offers introductions to the most important people, places, and brands — from the Central Apartments (locus for the birth of young independent brands in 1970s), Yacco Takahashi (Japan’s first stylist), brand Bigi, An•An’s original model Kaneko Yuri, seminal high-fashion magazine Ryuko Tsushin, New Wave band The Plastics, Comme des Garçons, iconic Takarajima magazine CUTiE, stylist Sonya Park, hyper-cute brand Super Lovers, beyond-weird street couture label 20471120, original A Bathing Ape graphic designer Skatething, and over-hyped, under-stocked Ura-Harajuku brand Bounty Hunter. SDD somewhat lacks an overarching narrative to link together these encyclopedic references, but redeems itself by addressing topics that have never seen the daylight of English: in particular, Rockabilly brand Cream Soda and iconic punkish designer and Godmother to Ura-Harajuku, Ohkawa Hitomi from Milk. For anyone who wants to know the whos and whats of the neighborhood, I highly recommend the book. (Reactions will be divided on the in-your-face graphic design.)

Style Deficit Disorder greatly succeeds at its goal of laying out the facts behind Harajuku’s development. The subtext, however, may be even more interesting. By taking a step back and doing a meta-reading, the book allows us to glimpse into the organizing myths the West has built up around this sacred fashion neighborhood. The Harajuku of SDD’s introductory chapter is quite literally the most amazing place on earth: masses of youth successfully fighting to create their own trends at a “grass-roots” level in the face of an increasingly-irrelevant global fashion market pushing industry-decided clothing on a rigid seasonal basis.

This “Harajuku Myth,” as I understand it, is comprised of five statements:
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