Preface: “Why do so many Japanese people make the two-finger ‘peace sign’ in photographs?” is one of the perennial What’s Up With Japan questions. Sadly, the answer given usually derives from a half-assed Google search in which most of the pages found are just quoting Wikipedia anyway.

This article attempts to summarize what is reliably known about the matter at the present time, with links to related information online where possible. Readers are invited to add any evidence of their own, including verifiable sources, in the comment thread.

Part A: V for “Victory”

A1. V-sign for “Victory” (Europe): Promoted by various Allied groups during WWII to symbolize local cognates of “victory.” Gestural V-sign made famous worldwide when adopted by Winston Churchill.

A2. V-sign for “Victory” (Japan, post-war): Churchill-style V-sign hypothesized to have been introduced into Japan by Allied occupation. Evidence scarce.

A3a. V-sign for “Victory” (Japan, pre-Bubble): Enters popular consciousness in late 1960s via baseball manga/anime Kyojin no Hoshi 『巨人の星』 (”Star of the Giants”). Hero Hyūma believes father has not come to say goodbye at train station as he departs for Kōshien, but father appears at last moment and throws up V. Hyūma recognizes it as “the V-sign of victory!” (”Shōri no V-sain!“) and resolves to win.

A3b. V-sign for “Victory” (Japan, pre-Bubble): In 1969, creators of girl’s volleyball manga Sain wa V 『サインはV』 (”V is the sign”) are inspired by A3a to drench product in V-sign — like early hip-hop producers taking only best part of drum break and repeating over and over. Sain wa V adapted into live-action drama and, like Kyojin no Hoshi, became leading hit in ongoing “sports grit” (スポーツ根性, スポ根) boom. Meaning of V-sign is spelled out in opening lines of theme song: “V, I, C, T, O, R, Y/ Sain wa V!”

A3b-supplement. Comment from Jimbo Shirō 神保史郎, writer of original Sain wa V manga:

I respected [Kyojin no Hoshi writer] Kajiwara Ikki. He was the sort of writer I wanted to become. The scene in Kyojin no Hoshi when Hoshi Hyūma is about to set off for Kōshien, and then his father appears and thrusts out that V-sign made a big impression. In a meeting with the editors, I suggested that we call our new story V Mexico, since the Mexico Olympics were coming up and all. After a lot of debate, we decided that Sain wa V was more straightforward and worked better. (Source: Inose Naoki 猪瀬直樹’s Mikado no kuni no kigōron 『ミカドの国の記号論』 (”Semiotics in the land of the Mikado”), 1991.)

Part B: V for “Peace”

B1. V-sign for “Peace” (USA): Exact origins unclear, but seems to date from 1960s’ U.S. counterculture, and in particular, anti-Vietnam War (= pro-peace) sentiment. Gradual dilution to symbolize solidarity in struggle against The Man as well as simple “peace.”

B2a. V-sign for “Peace” (Japan): As elements of counterculture spread to Japan, so does V-sign. Adopted by student radicals of late 1960s as well as relatively apolitical followers of foreign fashions. (Possible inspiration for A3a?)

B2b-supplement. Many sources cite Japanese popularity of Janet Lynn, U.S. figure skater and heartwarming dojikko, during and after the 1972 Sapporo Olympics as likely inspiration, claiming that she was often shown in the Japanese media flashing the peace sign. No evidence located.

Part C: V for “Cheese”

C1. V-sign in photographs: “Victory” (?) (Japan): Current oldest known example in poster for 1960 film Oku-man choja 『億万長者』 (”The Millionaire”) clearly shows Nakahara Hitomi 中原ひとみ making V-sign and smiling at camera. (Discovery credit: Kepel-sensei.)

C2. V-sign in photographs: “Peace” (Japan): In 2007 episode of Downtown DX, Inoue Jun 井上順 claims to have popularized V-sign in photographs via 1972 Konika commercial, in which he ad-libbed use of the V-sign by photographed persons, inspired by anti-war movement.

C3. V-sign in photographs: “Cheese” (Japan): All sources agree that by 1980s, use of V-sign in photographs was unremarkable and spreading slowly up the age scale.

Part D: Conclusions and unresolved questions

D1. Timeline synthesized from information above:

• V-sign becomes powerful, positive gesture during WWII
• Use of V-sign as part of photography pose dates back to at least 1960
• Revitalization of V-sign as counterculture “peace” sign in ’60s/’70s coincides with period in which Japanese youth was both interested in U.S. youth culture and had means to import its artifacts and habits
• However, early connection to “victory” was not forgotten: use of V-sign to mean “victory” had extremely high visibility in youth-targeted media around 1970
• Thus, at this time, “victory” and “peace” meanings may have reinforced each other, raising profile of gesture still higher. (E.g. Inose suggests that Kajiwara was inspired to write Kyojin no Hoshi V-scene by strong media presence of V-flashing anti-war demonstrators.)
• Meanwhile, rising incomes and many Japan-based camera makers meant more photos by non-professionals → space for photography folkways to develop (encouraged by camera companies, e.g. Inoue Jun’s CM story)
• Post-1980, gesture has lost emotional resonance and becomes part of “camera pose,” eventually to develop into modern variations that flatter face shape, emphasize eyes, highlight nail art, etc.

D2. Further questions:

• Could long /i/ sound in “peace” have made it particularly attractive to photographers looking for a hipper version of “cheese”?
• To what extent can the in-photo popularity of the “peace” sign, whatever its origins, be attributed to its nature as a widely recognized performance, protecting the subject from visual capture at an awkward or vulnerable moment? (cf pouty MySpace poses, throwing the horns, etc.)
• No relation to U.S. bunny-ears photo prank? (Would one not expect such horseplay to be much more common than bombastic Churchillian V’s among occupying GIs?)
• Did GHQ in fact use mind control or genetic engineering to impose “peace” sign on Japanese nation, as reportedly hypothesized by Igeta Seiichi (aged 17)?

Page thirty-odd years back through graphic design and art direction annuals and you will encounter, in the early seventies, an explosion in exaggerated Cancellaresca script hand lettering, popularized by Tom Carnase, a New York designer and associate of Herb Lubalin. This type of script resurfaced in popular consciousness last year when the New York Times Magazine ran a feature using Memoriam, a typeface family commissioned that same year from type foundry Canada Type — not surprising given the design world’s current seventies retro-fest and love for all things Lubalinian.

The Japanese design world, too, was smitten by the scripts like this in the seventies. This is something I’ve always noticed in old annuals, but never really paid attention to in terms of credit. In Okinawa recently, I finally got down to some research (i.e. trawling musty old bookshops in out-of-the-way places, as I often do) and came up with a collection of work by a Japanese designer from the seventies, full of examples in this style.

That designer was Miura Kōhei (三浦滉平). Born in 1941, he worked with Lubalin Delpire & Cie, the French wing of Herb Lubalin’s one-time graphic design family of businesses, from 1972 to 1976. He currently resides in Saitama, and a small collection of his work can be viewed here.

Néojaponisme presents a selection of Miura’s Cancellaresca script hand lettering, here: here.

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 literature racks at Tokyo’s free clinics look exactly the same as their equivalents overseas: a rank-and-file conglomeration of pastel colors and rosy images of happy people with infectious diseases, broken up by the occasional stark, dead-on portrait photography-driven HIV booklet.

This informational booklet, more in league visually with the packaging of Escalator Records‘ releases than any sexual health literature I’ve witnessed in Japan (or the U.S.), stands proud as a breakout piece of graphic design in its category.

Have A Nice Sex, a lovely little two-color booklet about the niceties of anal sex, is a commendably gigantic departure from the soft-focus world of STD pamphleteering. A strategically-placed HIV information sticker on the front cover easily peels off the glossy stock to reveal the cover illustration’s genitalia. Inside, it’s full of irreverent, scrappy illustrations, hand-lettering, and admirable typography, all in a punky, neon green and black print job on two considered paper stocks.

Before you go and open the gallery, be warned: NSFW.

I am happy to present my selection for the first annual Néojaponisme Graphic Design Award, the booklet Have a Nice Sex designed by MMKG for Rainbow Ring here here.

Takemitsu Tōru 武満徹 (1930-1996) was a self-taught composer of concert and film music who came to professional maturity during the 1950s’ and 1960s’ world-wide flowering of sound and art. His earliest compositions, from the late 1940s, display a strong impressionist flavor — elegiac fragments of melody and color that lingered “quietly and with a cruel reverberation” (the title of an early piano piece). His sonic curiosity blossomed after his friend and fellow composer Ichiyanagi Toshi 一柳慧 returned to Japan in 1961 after studying with John Cage, entering a period that some Takemitsu scholars call “Cage shock.”

Among the many wayward developments spawned in those fertile times, graphic scores often provoke the most wonder. Their cultural span steps outside of the traditional composer-performer role as they appear on the walls of galleries and museums for everyone to see. Musician and layman alike share an initial reaction to graphic scores and think to themselves, how in the world would anyone play that? But paradoxically, graphic scores address themselves intimately to the performer alone, who must make personal and unique decisions to realize the graphics in sound. Western art music has a long-established tradition of detailed notation for pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and phrasing so that a Debussy prelude or a Bach fugue are instantly recognizable from one performance to the next. Graphic scores dispense with all of this and approach the composition process from scratch.

Takemitsu tried out graphic scores, at first on his own and later in collaboration with designer Sugiura Kōhei 杉浦康平. He composed four works using delicate, variously ornamented circles. The first one, Ring for Flute, Guitar and Lute (1961), combines standard musical notation with ring-based improvisational interludes. The rings, one specifically for each performer, are abstract polar projections with angles, lines and points connecting the inner meridians. For his second graphic score and the first with Sugiura, Corona for Pianists, Takemitsu created ring graphics on separate sheets for five Studies: Articulation, Conversation, Expression, Intonation, and Vibration. In each graphic, there is a narrow band for the circle, and each one has its own distinctive ornamentation both inside and outside the circle. Each sheet is printed in different colors and is cut from the middle of one edge to the center of the circle, so that the sheets can be overlaid to create unique configurations for each performance. And each sheet has its own performance instructions (ironically, except Conversation, which has no instructions or annotations whatsoever) which direct the pianist to perform inside the piano and on the keyboard. The score for Corona for Pianists has been displayed in museums and is a high point of Takemitsu’s aleatoric music.

After Corona for Pianists, he also created a Corona II for a string orchestra (1962) and Arc for Strings (1963), both of which have been incorporated into other orchestral works (Coral Island for soprano and orchestra and Arc for piano and orchestra, respectively). After one additional piano work with Sugiura in 1962 (Crossing for pianists, also later incorporated into Arc), Takemitsu’s final forays into graphic scores were two percussion works from the early 1970s, Seasons and Munari by Munari, neither of which used the circle motif in any way. The remainder of Takemitsu’s music would use standard notation, and although his musical language became more traditional and expressive, he had absorbed many of Cage’s ideas about the relation of sound to silence and about the plurality and spatialization of music.

During the heyday of avantgarde recordings of the 1960s, Corona for Pianists was recorded several times for the Japanese market, but its first exposure in the west was on Roger Woodward’s 1973 LP of Takemitsu’s piano music, where Corona — London Version takes all of side A. Woodward overdubbed four separate tracks, utilizing celeste and organ in addition to piano, and created a dramatic rendition, full of resonant gestures inside the piano and united by a short, recurring rhythmic motif, possibly from the Study for Vibration (the only page where specific pitches are identified). He introduces the organ during the decay from his signature gesture, changing the chords periodically before it settles primarily as a drone in the background, where it remains for the duration of the piece. The organ drones were most likely inspired by the different colors in the score, and the singular events to the structures and designs that pierce the circles. With few exceptions, Woodward plays inside the piano, but he made a live recording in 1990 that starts with the same rhythmic motif, but then veers into virtuosic dark runs concentrating in the low range of the keyboard but sprinkling into the upper registers as well. Accompanied by Rolf Gehlhaar on bowed cymbal, Woodward’s later rendition (which includes a simultaneous performance of Crossing for pianists) is more intense, a highly resonant cloud of sound, all the more uncanny for Gehlhaar’s metallic overtones.

Besides Woodward, no other classical artist released a recording of Corona after the 1970s, but in 2006 an extremely impressive Japan-only release paired two studio realizations by pan-experimental musician Jim O’Rourke. O’Rourke’s resumé is long and extremely diverse, and includes participation in the avant-punk group Sonic Youth’s 1999 album of compositions by John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Japanese new music pioneer Takehisa Kosugi 小杉武久, Goodbye 20th Century, which included pieces with several different score approaches, including graphics. For Corona, playing small percussion, Hammond Organ and Fender Rhodes discreetly to support all manner of sound creation strategies inside and outside the piano, he recorded and mixed the two distinct Tokyo Realizations on July 11, 2006. In some ways his approach is similar to Woodward, and one can imagine connecting their sounds to different visual elements from the score. Both artists, for example, use an organ to create a slowly evolving drone that provides the horizon for detailed, amplified sounds on the parts of the piano typically hidden away. Both get color variation using keyboards with similar timbres, the celeste and electric piano. Including two realizations on the same release is a brilliant stroke and displays the possibilities inherent in open works.

Throughout his career, Takemitsu took inspiration from myriad forms of nature. He used circular imagery elsewhere in his work, such as his first orchestral work, Music of Tree, which was composed the same year as Ring. “Trees visualise time,” he wrote, citing J.M.G. LeClézio, “since the annual rings grow regularly but with subtle irregularities in the lines.” But a corona is more than just a ring, it is a crown, a halo, the light around the sun, metaphors of height and ascension. For Gaston Bachelard (one of Takemitsu’s favorite authors), material images of flight spur the imagination in an invitation to travel, a spiritual life dominated by elevation and light. Takemitsu remained true to these ideals, as dreams, gardens and oceans joined stars and trees among his symbolic archetypes.

O’Rourke’s superb recording notwithstanding, Corona has fallen into an undeserved obscurity. Despite its publication in the early 1970s, Takemitsu’s publisher, Editions Salabert, has withdrawn it, saying that its unusual nature makes it impossible to reproduce. It’s difficult to find copies in libraries, and even then it’s often a photocopy rather than the original. Virtually all recent recordings of Takemitsu’s “Complete Piano Music” omit it, with Woodward being the sole exception. Takemitsu’s mainstream reputation increasingly targets his early impressionist pieces or his later, more tonal work, but the uncomfortable middle, where he explored the widest variety of sound and composition approaches, is shunted aside. Conservative music publishers are less willing to undertake a complex art printing that steps outside their usual engraving and manuscript reproduction. Equally conservative performance venues want to know what their audiences (and donors) will hear, but graphic scores encourage unpredictable discoveries and don’t lend themselves to static computer previews.

Graphic scores take a special kind of musician to interpret successfully, and not necessarily the kind of training available from university music programs that turn out most of our new classical performers (in many cases, conductors arrange graphic orchestral scores into conventional notation for performance). Graphic scores are a spur to the imagination, and a channeling of the creative impulse, calling for more direct participation, a singular communication between the composer and the performer. Beautiful as they are visually, the musical collaborations between Takemitsu and Sugiura remain incomplete and require a performer whose nuanced understanding of the shapes and colors will produce a unique musical realization.

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 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.

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.

Tokyomango: Summary of Joi and Lisa’s session about Japanese obsessions at Foo Camp

Joi Ito and Lisa Katayama are two of the most influential voices on Japanese culture for a global audience, but I was a bit troubled by some of their analysis of otaku for the O’Reilly Foo Camp.

In trying to explain the obsessiveness of otaku culture, they were quick to whip out “cultural explanations” — Zen Buddhism, the Tokugawa caste system, and ukiyo-e. Apparently Japan, despite massive social changes over a thousand years, has somehow retained the same “spirit” over time, which oddly manifests not in the middle of society, but in its strangest marginal outcast subcultures.

The danger of using the blunt “culture” explanations, however, is that it neglects to look at the actual and specific mechanisms which maintain or change culture. In most cases, these mechanisms are political or economic, and values shift according to structural situations. And most importantly, those within the system are often actively fighting against it. For example:

For generations, people have been taught to be happy perfecting their role in society, without necessarily viewing social or financial gain as a measurement of their success—it’s the shokunin culture in which focusing on one job allows one to obsess with abandon until they reach perfection on a very local level.

During the Tokugawa era, the rigid class system attempted to keep society stable by dividing society into four classes (five if you count the burakumin). At the bottom of society, however, the merchants actively worked against the system by pushing further and further with financial success. And you can make a case that this uneven financial gain of those at the bottom of the caste system led to the system’s downfall. Furthermore, when this class system was abolished in the Meiji Restoration, there was a huge rush of farmer’s and merchant’s sons successfully increasing their station in life — despite some kind of eternal Japanese “taboo” against this. In other words, there is no straight line of social stratification from the 17th to 21st century, and plenty of people have fought against the pre-determination of social class.

The real question, which these issues do little in addressing, is why otaku in particular tend to go to extremes of perfection. Surely there are cultural factors at work, but this kind of behavior is almost universal for subcultural units: in which participants tend to push further and further within accepted codes in order to show dedication to the group. There were surely British mods in the ’60s who were identical to otaku in their obsession with mastering their subcultural language of fashion signifiers. Some factors of Japanese culture make this more extreme, but there must be something about the unique social position of the otaku — and their birth in the high consumer years of a mature post-industrial capitalist economy — that serves as the best explanation.

Lisa mentioned that, when she was interviewing people for her 2D love story in the NY Times magazine, several sources likened the ability to fall in love with a body pillow to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness training.

I am sure if I openly loved an inanimate object, I too would be desperate to justify that love with some kind of ancient Japanese spirituality. I am not sure, however, that we are supposed to take this self-diagnosis seriously. Is there a way to demonstrate a path between these Buddhist values and a fringe sexual subculture? How did the pillow-humper access these Zen Buddhist principles? Are they just in the “ether” of Japanese society? Then why doesn’t everyone hump pillows? Again, the question about the otaku is less about their adherence to Japanese values, but their reason for anti-social and mostly frowned-upon behavior.

But this one bothered me the most:

While young Japanese people might have the outward appearance of rebellion, the majority follow a certain set of social rules. They will probably wait in line to get on the train just like any other good citizen. For example, Joi once bumped into a guy wearing a button that said “fuck off and die.” The guy promptly bowed, apologized, and walked away.

Note that the button did not say “Fuck Off and Die” in Japanese. And Joi did not run into a yankii guys who told him「死ね!」. The fact that the button was in English explains everything.

Now, I am sure the guy wearing the button generally understood the meaning of the statement, but we have to think about the actual mechanics of foreign culture importation in Japan. Punk culture —from which the button’s attitude comes — came to Japan explicitly through consumerist mass media in the late ’70s and early ’80s, mostly marketed to and read by the upper middle classes. This process automatically tends to purge the signifier of its original meanings and turn it into pure “fashion.” The media in which the message was spread in general does not spread or advocate a real “punk” view of society. Punk kids — whether in the UK or US “punk” mold — have always been primarily drawn from the consumer classes, and this consumer activity is correlated with higher placement in the social ladder. This ironically means that punk attitude has a real social risk for those most likely to buy punk fashion.

Japan’s real punks — the yankii, the bosozoku — are not a part of this consumerist world and embrace a “punk” attitude as part of their lifestyle. They would not bow to you if you accidentally bumped them.

So the reason that “rebellious-looking” teens follow the set rules is because they have imported a “rebellious” look as a look. Otherwise, their values are aligned with other members of middle-class society. This explanation that “punks are really polite,” however, only accounts for middle class teens. Working-class delinquent teens, who are not officially パンク系 but are punks in the broadest sense, are less likely to follow social rules.

I don’t mean to suggest that nothing in Japan can be explained by cultural heritage, but there are always enough exceptions and breaks in the straight timeline to warrant closer scrutiny. Furthermore, Japanese people themselves tend to use cultural tradition as a way to justify their own actions. This is basically true everywhere in the world. In the U.S., conservatives and liberals constantly fight over who has the most accurate interpretation of the Constitution and the Founding Father’s values. It’s officially our job to not take culturalist claims at face value, or at least, to discover the engines and pathways that make culture continue throughout time. Some of the otaku’s behavior is very Japanese. But in the end, they probably have little or nothing to do with Zen Buddhism.