Selling Props, Playing Stars: Virtualising the Self in the Japanese Mediascape

Zen Yipu

A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney

March 2005

For my family

Acknowledgements

The author is deeply indebted to those who generously helped during the past five years.

My discursive thoughts would not have been turned into a cross-disciplinary dissertation without the help of Dr Elaine Lally, who supervised my writing throughout the latter part of my candidacy. Her professionalism was an indispensable element of its completion. Its faults are mine.

Professor Ien Ang helped me making a theoretical transition, as well as an institutional one from the Australian National University (ANU) to the University of Western Sydney (UWS).

This work would not have materialised without those who shared their time and intellect. For many years since my undergraduate days at the ANU, Professor Geremie Barme gave guidance and inspiration. Dr Mandy Thomas offered generously of her time and support. My time at Canberra School of Art was crucial to my growth. Nigel Lendon and Martyn Jolly showed me the doorway to a journey that eventually led from art to sociology.

Many scholars have offered their thoughts. Amongst them Professor Yoshimi Shunya, Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Professor Gavin McCormack gave important clues for this thesis.

This work began at the ANU, continued at the University of Tokyo and concluded at UWS. During this time I was supported by an Australian Commonwealth Postgraduate Award and a Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbusho) scholarship – I am grateful for both.

This work would have not been possible, as an amusing journey would not be possible, without companions. I owe a long overdue apology to those who suffered from my chronically preoccupied company. This work, for all it is worth, is as tangible a ‘thank you’ as it can be to my friends and family. It was never more important – it was only my inability to manage the curiosity.

I certify that this thesis does not incorporate any material previously submitted for a degree or a diploma at any University. It does not contain any material previously published or written by any other person except where due reference is made in the text.

Zen Yipu

------Signature

Abstract

In the so-called postmodern era, when networked media are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life, where the ‘real’ and the ‘simulation’ become ever more indistinguishable; the physical and virtual intertwine; machines and man merge, and audience and stars transpose. To understand consumption in a time when realness and authenticity are no longer relevant, this thesis draws attention to the consumption and production of media content through case studies of consumer participation and social trends in Japan.

The work begins in a themed shopping mall, VenusFort in Tokyo Bay; continues with the reproduction of Audrey Hepburn‘s image; expands to the dramatised ‘realness’ of television; and finally moves to the omnipresent mobile phone and the impact of networked personal media on our idea of the ‘real’.

First, through an analysis of a themed consumption environment, it is suggested that a transition is taking place in consumption from objects to experiences, services and spectacle. Secondly, by showing Audrey Hepburn‘s transition from a Hollywood star to a virtualised idol, technologically-aided illusions are shown to make hierarchical realness irrelevant. Thirdly, via Reality TV dating programs, the focus shifts to the role of audience participation in the consumption of media content. These themes are demonstrated individually, then merged into the last example – the social and cultural evolution induced by the mass consumption of networked media, that promise to revolutionise the way we consume, communicate and connect between people, machines and consumer goods.

The thesis grounds its analysis of contemporary trends in the culture of consumption in Japan in theories of commodity and culture, the real and the simulation, speed and reality, the spectacle and the self in mediated spaces, and probes further into the collapse of demarcations between the virtual and the real, the event and the everyday and media and the self in the network society.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Issues of Consumption...... 3 The ‘Uniqueness’ of Japanese Consumption...... 5 Conspicuous Consumption and Distinction ...... 8 Simulation, Aura and Virtuality ...... 17 Structure of the Thesis ...... 21 Conclusion ...... 33

CHAPTER I Dramatic Stores, Real Simulations...... 35 The Story of VenusFort...... 36 The History of Daiba...... 43 The Reincarnation of Daiba ...... 48 Simulacrum of Southern Italy or replica of Las Vegas? ...... 61 Different Dramas – Tokyo Disneyland and VenusFort...... 72 Conclusion ...... 85

CHAPTER II Idols in Bytes, History Virtualised...... 90 ‘Postmodern’ Japaneseness and its Cultural Production ...... 91 The Enduring Popularity of Audrey Hepburn...... 95 Becoming Hepburn ...... 98 Virtualising the Idol...... 104 The Production and Consumption of Audrey Hepburn...... 112 The True Rebirth of Audrey Hepburn (in a Canned Tea) ...... 121 Conclusion ...... 128

CHAPTER III Watching Stars, Playing the Mundane...... 134 The ‘Ainori あい’ Story...... 135 The ‘Future Diary’ Story...... 137 Television, the Mall and Transportation for the Mind...... 140 Melodramatic Reality? – The Question of Genre ...... 146 Scripting ’Reality’...... 151 The Social Context of ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’...... 170 Conclusion ...... 176

CHAPTER IV From Consumers to Cyborgs...... 181 A Brief History of Consumer Mobile Phones in Japan...... 186 Third Generation Mobile Phone, or First Generation Teleportation of the Self...... 195 Merging Media ...... 199 From Wearable Gadgets to Added Limbs...... 207 Mingu and other Inventiveness via the Mobile Phone...... 213 Virtualising Consumption...... 222 The Node You Can See (or what does Virtuality Look Like?) ...... 225 Conclusion ...... 228

CONCLUSION Mediating Consumption: from Object to Content ...... 236 The Changing Media Landscape...... 236 ‘Post-Real’ Realities ...... 239 The Merge, the Network and the Evolutionary Self ...... 244 Mediating the Body in the Network Society...... 246

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 249 Japanese Sources ...... 258

LIST OF FIGURES

Chapter 1 figures Figure 1: HyperDrop from 58 metres in the air...... 41 Figure 2: Daiba map...... 42 Figure 3: Perry's Black Ships...... 44 Figure 4: The original batteries number 3 and 6...... 45 Figure 5: Statue of Liberty, Daiba, Tokyo ...... 46 Figure 6: VenusFort exterior and the once-biggest Ferris Wheel in Japan...... 62 Figure 7: ‘Mouth of Truth’, when ‘truth’ is matter of indifference...... 63 Figure 8: The computerised 'sky' in VenusFort...... 65 Figure 9: Copies of sculptures and simulated sky in VenusFort...... 65 Figure 10: Postmodern wedding at VenusFort...... 66 Figure 11: The façade of an imaginary church under an electronic screen...... 66 Figure 12 & 13: Daiba’s Hong Kong ...... 68 Figure 14 & 15: Forum Shops, Las Vegas...... 71 Figure 16: Dining with God in a restaurant themed like a church...... 80 Figure 17: The Prime Minister, Koizumi draws crowds in Shibuya...... 87

Chapter 2 figures Figure 18: The face of Audrey Hepburn ...... 90 Figure 19: Hepburn Vs. Monroe Test ...... 100 Figure 20: Hepburn Vs. Roberts Test...... 100 Figure 21: How to look like Audrey by make-up and hairdo...... 102 Figure 22, 23, 24: Kirin Afternoon Tea Commercials ...... 106 Figure 25: The Virtual idol - Fei Fei ...... 108 Figure 26: Fei Fei, a Virtual Idol presenting Samsung ...... 108 Figure 27: Dr. Aki, both the role and the performer...... 110 Figure 28: Still from Final Fantasy...... 110 Figure 29: Suntory Whisky with Yo-Yo Ma...... 113 Figure 30: Berlitz’s Audrey ...... 116 Figure 31: Asashi’s production of nostalgia...... 120 Figure 32: The model ‘girly’ girl: Takahashi Mariko...... 122 Figure 33: Hepburn presenting a series of cameras with retro designs...... 123 Figure 34: The face of Audrey Hepburn, as the face of working women ...... 124

Figure 35: A Japanese narrative for the Japanese Audrey...... 126 Figure 36: The face of Ōdorii ...... 133

Chapter 3 figures Figure 37: ‘Future Diary’, the scripted reality on TV ...... 134 Figure 38: The global trotting love-seekers on TV...... 137 Figure 39: Poster for ‘The Future Diary in Luna Park’...... 139 Figure 40: ‘Ainori,’ the ‘unscripted’ reality on TV...... 149 Figure 41: One of the ever-expanding Ainori’s publications...... 156 Figure 42: Ainori meets Cybertrance...... 156 Figure 43: Heroes of trends...... 157 Figure 44: The poster for ‘101th proposal’...... 157 Figure 45: Tokyo Disneyland...... 158 Figure 46: Universal studios Osaka...... 159 Figure 47: The mobile phone version of ‘Mirrainikki’...... 163 Figure 48: Televisual reality goes cinematic...... 164 Figure 49: When DoCoMo meets TBS...... 180

Chapter 4 figures Figure 50: Samsung’s ‘Rotating Realities’...... 181 Figure 51: A scene from Ghost in the Shell...... 182 Figure 52: The billboard for Ayu model...... 191 Figure 53: NTTDoCoMo’s M-stage...... 196 Figure 54: Video phone on mobiles...... 196 Figure 55: Vodafone’s TV phone...... 204 Figure 56: Vodafone’s mobile phone that plays music...... 204 Figure 57: NHJ’s TV that is worn like a wrist watch...... 205 Figure 58: Fossil’s watch that ‘plays’ Microsoft MSN Direct...... 208 Figure 59: NTTDoCoMo’s Wristomo...... 209 Figure 60: An example of picturish...... 215 Figure 61: Pioneer’s Happy Aqua...... 217 Figure 62: NTTDoCoMo’s multimedia player...... 222 Figure 63: The famous Tsutaya screen at Shibuya Crossing...... 226 Figure 64: Nokia’s Airtexting technology...... 226 Figure 65: Aerial image of the Shibuya Crossing...... 227 Figure 66: Aerial image of the Shibuya Crossing...... 227

Figure 67: Prototypes of wearable mobile phones...... 234 Figure 68: Tu-ka’s bone phone...... 235

Conclusion Figure: Figure 69: The cybernetic body visualised in Innocence ...... 248

INTRODUCTION

In 1997, I was living in Kyoto, the 1200 year old former capital of Japan. Seen by many as the symbol of the remaining soul of Japan, Kyoto still attracts visitors from around the world. The picturesque mixture of temples, Pachinko parlours and Kimono-clad Geishas holding mobile phones seemed to represent the clash of the old and new. Here I first saw Audrey Hepburn, the 1950s Hollywood star whose physical existence had terminated in 1993, but whose image had reappeared on television, posters and billboards selling a canned tea.

In late 1998, I visited for the first time a shopping mall themed after what can best be termed ‘Neoclassical Italy’. It was in Daiba, a vast piece of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, made predominantly from building rubble and urban refuse. The mall, which sold mainly women’s fashion and accessories, was aptly named VenusFort. It was built no less elaborately than a movie set – filled with fountains and small squares dotted with authentic-looking sculptures. Even the ‘sky’, projected onto the ceiling inside the massive rectangular container-like building, changed every hour to simulate the passing of the day in a compressed realism, courtesy of state-of-the-art computer technology. It was the first time I had ever been to ‘Italy’, albeit a simulated one.

In 1999, Tokyo Broadcasting Systems (TBS) and Fuji Television started to broadcast ‘The Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’. Both are love or dating shows of a particular genre known as Audience Participation Shows in Japan, or ‘Reality TV’ as it is commonly known in North America and European countries. ‘The Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’ gained immense popularity in Japan. Unlike ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Survivor’,’The Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’ centred on dramatised romance between the participants, for whom the most important precondition

1 of participation was to be ‘genuinely seeking love’. Both shows became so popular amongst young people in Japan that an entire industry spun off from them. There were books and magazines about the shows, variant forms and formats, and even public events simulating one of the shows, which enabled viewers to participate in person or via mobile phones.

Between 2000 and 2001, NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode, the largest of the three mobile internet networks in Japan, experienced a more than sixfold growth, from less than 4.5 million to close to 29 million subscribers. In 2003, the ownership of mobile phones reached 80 million in Japan. Thanks to the portability and technological functionality of the new internet-enabled mobile phones, more than 40,000 mobile Internet sites provide services from online shopping to dating, from news to porn, from miniature melodramas to ‘mobile literature’, from video conferencing to Global Positioning System (GPS) to network games. In 2004, the mobile phone is a 100g attachment to the human body – enabling its owner to communicate, access media services, to shop and play. The consumer, the communicator, the audience or the player can now be on the Net anywhere, anytime, becoming part of it.

Themed shopping malls, virtual idols, Reality TV and networked mobile phones are the newly arrived everyday realities of today. With the help of technology and media, we can carry on the routines of daily life, including shopping, hero worshipping, consuming media and communicating in revolutionary forms. But are these just old features of daily life in new forms, continuations of previous variations: arcade retail, pop heroes, serialised melodramas and analogue telephones? What is intrinsically different about shopping in a simulated environment, worshipping idols who do not have a biophysical form, watching dramatised ‘real’ everyday life and being constantly connected to the network with the help of new generations of mobile phones?

2

Theming the physical (the mall), worshiping the virtual (the idol), performing the self (Reality TV) and the networking of being, although seemingly new packaging of old content, may be signs of new social narratives, and by extension new worlds of consumption. Do the uses and social functions that come with these new ways of mediating consumption signal a qualitative transformation in ‘media’?

In this thesis the term media, as the plural form of ‘medium’, is used in referring to the various social and cultural forms that mediate consumption in the contemporary world, rather than the more specific but common usage to refer to the media industries, such as television, radio and newspapers. These senses are, however, related, in that the central product of the media industries is ‘content’. Because of the rapid development of the media landscape under the continuous impact of fast evolving consumer technology, the term ‘media content’ today must include not only the traditional media, but also the Internet, the connected gadgets (the terminals) and the ‘codes’ embedded in consumer products. This thesis explores examples from this evolving media landscape, which will not only influence, but also eventually change how we consume, what we consume and perhaps ultimately even why we consume.

Issues of Consumption

This work sets out to investigate a series of recent Japanese phenomena in themed retail, advertising, television programming and consumer communication technology. It attempts to establish links that may form a profound association between these new developments. The linkage between the four case studies examined forms the core of this thesis, which is first of all

3 an attempt to investigate, not so much the consumption of tangible goods, but the intangible consumption of social narratives, spectacle and everyday performances. The research on the consumption of media content inevitably leads to the media that disseminate them – namely the mall, advertising, the television and lastly networked personal gadgets. They are seen firstly as media of consumption, either for goods or for the services and content they provide. The initial analyses of the themed mall, the virtualised idol and Reality TV eventually lead to an analysis of the relatively recent mass adoption of the most prominent consumer communication technology – the mobile phone, which enables us not only to shop on-line for goods, services and media content, but also to produce media content and network with other consumers.

This work, therefore, is first of all a study of social narratives – themes and images of popular cultures created in the media – and trends in media of consumption (i.e. the themed mall, advertising and television), as well as an investigation of the new developments in these media and their connections with each other.

To achieve a structured study of production and consumption of content, and to understand the impact of the phenomena in retail, media and consumer technology, it is necessary to put these case studies in theoretical perspective. The most obvious issues are those of consumer cultures and the culture of simulation, idol worship and advertising, and television dramaturgy. These are investigated in the context of the case studies, and in conjunction with the more specific focuses of this work, namely: the performance of consumption with a themed simulation as the stage, examined in the chapter on VenusFort; the reproduction and virtualisation of the idol, in the case of Audrey Hepburn in Japan; the distinction between the ‘everyday’ and the dramatic, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, investigated in the chapter on Japanese Reality TV; and finally, the

4 study of the new generations of mobile phones, which includes all the above-mentioned issues. This raises a question for the future: how do we continue to distinguish the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ in simulacra on many fronts – in digitised nostalgia and revitalised dead idols, in dislocation and simulation of cultural icons, and in the consumption of media content produced by consumers themselves – all while constantly connected with each other in the virtual world?

The ‘Uniqueness’ of Japanese Consumption

I have chosen metropolitan Japan for these case studies because of its importance in consumer culture as a whole. Japan is not unique at the level of everyday consumption. It is, however, a useful example of an advanced capitalist economy where the citizens have comparatively high disposable income and, in particular, where sophisticated marketing strategies and widespread take-up of consumer technologies (such as internet-enabled mobile phones) in turn facilitate consumption of media content. Like many developed Western economies, Japan is often branded a ‘consumer society’ because its everyday consumption plays a crucial role in the health of its economy as a whole. As a result, so-called consumerism is a highly visible part of everyday life in Japanese metropolises.

In choosing to study consumer activities in Japan, I am in no way preaching the already numbing notion that Japan is ‘somehow’ different from the rest of the world, or that its economy has alleged peculiarities, which might constitute reasons for a unique consumption appetite. I chose the phenomena of consumption in Japan because its large middle class population and highly urbanised social space mean that phenomena of consumption can be clearly

5 seen and analysed, and furthermore, the development of consumer technologies have penetrated almost the entire market, as can be seen in the case of advanced mobile phone technologies. Yoshio Sugimoto points out that ‘an alien would come closer to the “centre” of the Japanese population by choosing a female, non-unionized and non-permanent employee in a small business’, and that public opinion polls taken by the Prime Minister’s Office have indicated that ‘eight to nine out of ten Japanese classify themselves as middle class’ (Sugimoto 1997: 2). According to Iwao, another survey conducted by the Prime Minister’s Office in 1989, on reasons for working, found that ‘the primary reason (57%) for women in their twenties to work is “to make money to use freely, without commitment”’ (Iwao 1993: 166). Because of these general characteristics of the Japanese marketplace, non-necessary, trend-based phenomena in consumption with a strong involvement of female consumers are clearly visible and exert great social influence.

Department stores and marketers of themed shopping centres like VenusFort have long known that most of their target customers are middle class, female, and aged between 20 and mid-30s. This proved to be true in the examples studied in this work of commercials, themed shopping malls and Reality TV dating programs – in each area, young women play an active role in consumption.

While this dissertation therefore has an emphasis on young single women and their consumption patterns, this study does not intend to be limited to an analysis of the relationship between shopping and women. Many scholars have tried to engender consumption as feminine (Kowaleski-Wallace 1997; Oakes 1994; Rappaport 2000) to the extent that that even psychological illnesses related to consumption are portrayed as somewhat female mental disorders (Baker 2000; Corbett 2000). Although many scholars have also pointed out that

6 television consumption too is largely a feminine act, especially with regard to soap operas (Modleski 1984; Ang 1985; Geraghty 1991; Mumford 1995; Brunsdon 2000), the target audience of trendy dramas and reality TV in Japan, is only incidentally feminine for the purposes of this study. The focus here is not specifically on gender, but on how Reality TV provides its audience with imagined opportunities and abilities to perform.

There are, however, undoubtedly some unique characteristics of Japanese consumption, as might be observed anywhere, precisely because consumption is a cultural practice of everyday life rather than a simple means to material possessions. Economic conditions and cultural specifics govern the character of consumption. Yet this dissertation analyses localised phenomena taking shape in an increasingly globalised media landscape.

Today, the media and the consumption of its content are no longer restricted to traditional forms, namely the television, radio and print. Our consumption spaces can be themed after places existing only in imagination, recreated in narratives played in the media. We can worship and imitate idols that either are dead, or have never been biologically born. We watch and are entertained on television by people with no particular entertainment skills, a lot like ourselves in living room parties. Will television and high street shops gradually be replaced by networked digital media with functions that include everything from communication to shopping, from display to recording, via a personal networked electronic gadget that is a ubiquitous multi-faceted, multifunctional, multimedia companion that is intimately incorporated with or altogether embedded in the body?

7 Conspicuous Consumption and Distinction

In the early stages of communist nation-building in China, Chinese consumers were allocated rations with coupons corresponding to the number of people in the family. These coupons were used in conjunction with money to purchase daily needs, which included everything from clothing materials to rice and flour. Some had more coupons because of their rank in the Communist Party hierarchy. These families were ostensibly higher on the social ladder, and were able to acquire better clothing or the ‘Phoenix’ (Feng Huang 鳳凰) bicycles1. In a later era of socialist consumption, the so called da sanjian 大件, the Big Three (acquisitions) – the bicycle, the sewing machine and the radio – were aspired to by millions. These became the ultimate symbols of affluence at the time. In the early 1980s, the much desired ‘big three acquisitions’ became the television, the refrigerator, and the washing machine. At around the same time, the ‘three highs 高’ – high annual income, (body) height and educational qualification, were required of men by young women to be considered as potential spouses.

The symbolic order of specific commodities was not limited to things with monetary value. As a young boy growing up in the 1970s in a small town across the Huangpu river from Shanghai, I remember playing a game with my friends which required triangular shaped cards made by folding cigarette packaging paper we found on the streets. Those triangle-shaped cards had their own hierarchy represented by the cigarette brands. The most powerful ones were usually the foreign brands, followed by domestic brands that could only be

1 Phoenix was a prestigious brand of bicycle. The prestige has now become nostalgic as imported technologies and other brands with more impressive marketing and higher price tags have taken over the market.

8 bought with coupons (allegedly consumed by high ranking cadres). The rest were ranked in the order of their street prices.

Just like the ‘big acquisitions’ in China, there were similar consumer aspirations in Japan. Simon Partner has argued that ‘electrical goods companies worked to create demand in the face of considerable public scepticism’ (Partner 1999: 139, italics in original) early in the 1950s, at a time when the common perspective was that ‘consumption in Japan had more to do with putting rice on the table than with the pursuit of pleasure’ (1999: 135). The marketers of the 1950s invented a well-known slogan, ‘bright life 明い生活’, implying an affluent lifestyle transcending the basic need for survival (see also Vogel 1963). According to Partner, the term ‘bright life’ not only conveyed the idea of a modern home with a middle-class standard of living, it also ‘implied ownership of certain talismanic possessions, notably electrical goods such as a television, washing machine and refrigerator’ (Partner 1999: 137). These electrical appliances came to be termed the ‘three sacred treasures’, which quickly evolved into the three ‘Cs‘ (car, room cooler, and colour television) in the 1960s, and three ‘Js’ (jewellery, jet travel, and jūtaku home) in the 1980s (Partner 1999:138).

Recalling his early life in Bombay, the Indian-born cultural critic Arjun Appadurai vividly describes watching B-grade Hollywood films and the aspiration of owning blue jeans as a ‘notably synaesthetic and largely pretheoretical’ experience of modernity (Appadurai 1996: 1). Today, the aspirations of ‘modernity’, as well as the commodification of aspirations, have been passed on to poorer regions. Japan may be to many an example of overachievement in modernity, at least in terms of its borrowing of (Euramerican) cultures – including everything from art (Clark 1998) to the art of

9 consumption (Clammer 1995, 1997) – but it has also become one of the most important consumer markets for goods, services and media content today.

Whether it is the bicycle, the sewing machine, or the ‘talismanic processions’ – the television, washing machine and the refrigerator – these objects are ‘big’ and ‘sacred’ because they are seen as the embodiment of social prestige. Even the hierarchy of discarded cigarette wrappings on the street could reflect or acquire mini hierarchies of its own. This prestige, as part of wider social narrative, is first of all disseminated by various forms of media – be that television or cigarette packaging. In other words, consumerism was first and foremost the consumption of social narratives and media content.

While consumer aspirations may no longer have clearly set terminologies such as the ‘Big Three’ or ‘Three Sacred Treasures’, as they did in the early days of the consumer society, the disproportionately high consumption of Louis Vuitton bags and Gucci watches in Japanese metropolises seems to suggest that a universally aspired-to iconic consumption is still alive and well today. Yet consumption choices now seem limitless and constantly proliferating, and the idea that aspirations might be limited to three seems increasingly incongruous.

The Cultures of Things

Long before intangible media were bought and sold in the form of television content, cultures were maintained and passed on via the symbolism of goods. Insightful scholars such as McCracken (1988) have pointed out that consumption has become a principal means of cultural production and communication. Douglas and Isherwood argue that goods ‘are needed for making visible and stable categories of culture’ (1996: 38). Indeed, ‘consumption

10 is an active mode of relations … on which our whole cultural system is founded’ (Baudrillard and Poster 1988: 21). Without goods and systems for their distribution, it is difficult to imagine the cultures we have today, which are deeply ‘encoded’ in objects and the acts of their acquisition.

The classic maxim of ‘supply and demand’ dominated the calculus of commodity values when rarity and production cost determined exchange value. Rarity and desirability make goods less accessible – and hence raise the prestige associated with their acquisition. Yet rarity and luxury follow prevailing social and economic forces. For highly symbolic goods, as in the fashion industry for example, demand, price and cultural value form a forever shifting equilibrium, independently of the logic of supply and demand (McCracken 1988).

In societies visibly divided by the distinction of class, Veblen’s theory of the leisure class (Veblen 1998; Veblen 1964) has provided the ground work for theories of consumption. Consumption, particularly of luxury goods, is based on the expression and demarcation of class. However, as Colin Campbell (1994) points out, the theory of the leisure class neglects the dynamism of modern consumption. It becomes problematic to regard goods as demarcations of class in situations where class differences do not play a central role. Consumption differences within social groups can only be the expression of ‘taste’ rather than class distinction. When over 90% (Yoshio 1997: 2) of Japanese people consider themselves ‘middle-class’, consumption patterns are likely not to be aspirationally middle class, but confirmatively so. If so, what motivates consumption of non-necessities in metropolitan Japan where most consumers are relatively affluent and where class distinction is irrelevant?

11 For Bourdieu (1984) class distinction is expressed by ‘cultural capital’ and ‘habitus’, and is not based on the acquisition of tangible materials alone, but also of knowledge, language and taste. In the case of fashion consumption among the young, mostly affluent and well-informed consumers of metropolitan Tokyo, for example, rather than obvious hierarchical classes there are –kei 系, or styles — Shibuya-kei, Harajuku-kei, Gyaru and ga-ri, and so on — where the hierarchy is temporary and transient. Here ‘habitus’ is more uniform than distinctive, and the acquisition of taste and knowledge expressed via consumption more fluid, transient and ephemeral than is consistent with the more stable symbolism of class. The purpose in shopping is both to conform to the conventions of a social group and at the same time to distinguish oneself.

The social function and mechanisms of gifting, to take another example, shows how monetary value may be deliberately erased during the exchange of gifts, but social value remains significant and visible. The customary removal of the price tag in the exchange of gifts in our society is ‘to refuse the logic of price, a way to refuse the calculation and calculability’ (Bourdieu 1998: 96-7). Yet the shared silence is in fact a shared common knowledge, an aspect of what many social scientists consider the ‘culture of consumption’ (McCracken 1988; Featherstone 1991; Lee 1993). Price indicates merely the economics in the exchange of gifts: the real value created in the exchange of gifts is mostly rhetorical and social.

More generally, the cultural significance of a commodity emerges predominantly from its social relevance (Appadurai 1986). McCracken demonstrates that ‘we use goods to keep alive some of our ideals and hopes’, and that ‘they serve as bridges to displaced meaning without compromising its displaced status’ (McCracken 1988: xv). For Bourdieu, a ‘symbolic good’ is not so much an object as an object containing meanings. Baudrillard goes so far as

12 to assert that ‘consumption, in so far as it is meaningful, is a systematic act of the manipulation of signs’ (Baudrillard and Poster 1988: 22; original italics).

Consumer goods can thus be seen as media which, in Hall’s words, ‘articulate meaning and messages in the circuit of encoding and decoding’ (Hall 1980: 128-38). If consumer goods are in effect part of the social code, then there must be times when goods are ‘decoded’, through various social interaction, or through the extraction of narratives from them. Further, if most consumer goods communicate, can the social narrative – from the transient symbolism of style to mini social trends encoded in consumer goods – be manufactured for consumption? Can ‘participation’ in this process of ‘encoding and decoding’ be produced and sold? Do consumers communicate with goods and their symbolism via social spectacles and participatory media events? Finally, with increased consumer participation in media content production, which forms an important part of the encoding process of consumer goods, will participation eventually become a necessary part of consumption?

My purpose in this dissertation is to find a link between these attributes of commodities: not only goods and services, but also purchased consumer participation in commodified social events and spectacles. Today these ‘commodities’ go hand in hand, exerting profound influence on one another, to the extent that they can no longer be seen as separate. These investigations of the reproduction of nostalgia via a dead and digitised Hollywood actress, the simulation of Neoclassical Italy via Las Vegas, and the mass participation in Reality TV programs offer contemporary examples of the relationship between commodity, spectacle and performance in the context of an increasingly integrated media landscape. It is hoped that these case studies of the structural interrelationship between commodified media products, situated as they are within the contemporary specificity of the Japanese mediascape, can contribute

13 to broader debates on social spectacle, performance and consumption, as well as on the fast evolving media landscape which enables it all.

Mediating consumption

While most marketing strategies are developed on the presumption that ‘all people have a vision of the good life’ (O'Shaughnessy 1987: 4, 22, 2; Marchand 1985), the defining elements of the ‘good life’ change as society adopts new cultures, trends and symbolisms while abandoning old ones. When the defining elements of a vision of the good life become cheaper and more accessible, the vision changes according to the current social milieu. The constant turnover of popular culture production also has a direct relationship with technological development. Television, the personal computer and the mobile phone were once prestige consumer goods that have lost their lustre over time. Today it takes far less time for expensive commodities to reach a vast majority of consumers (Satterthwaite 2001: 8-26). In the case of mobile phones in Japan, it now takes only a few months for a new model to experience an entire cycle from ‘prestigious’ to virtually ‘free’2.

Thus the term ‘commodity’ explicates a condition in which not only tangible things intended for exchange are commodities, but also intangible ‘things’ can be produced, capitalised and consumed – most commonly ‘information’, but also consumer ‘participation’, ‘nostalgia’ and ‘trendiness’ too. The commodity ‘candidacy’ of these intangible objects requires a sophisticated value system calibrated to the social milieu. As these intangible commodities are produced,

2 Some months-old models of mobile phone handset can be bought for ¥1 in Japan, where both the cost of calls and the cost of handsets have come down considerably since 1994. More detail is given in Chapter 4.

14 sold and, like other commodities, ‘wear’ and ‘tear’, their value fluctuates according to social trends. Not only are such things as knowledge and information increasingly being commodified, but the value of cultural products, including some highly commercialised popular products and media content, is becoming more and more symbolic, and at the same time extremely transient. Such is the case for many ‘brands’ marketed on the basis of constant newness or ‘armchair nostalgia’ — Swatch, for example, sells its constant newness, while its cousin, Blancpain sells expensive ‘traditions’ and ‘prestige’ — or on participation in media and social spectacles, such as dance parties, sports and theatre. These commodities are temporal and have at best exceedingly shifting value.

Rather than a way of gaining material objects, Campbell (1987) points out that everyday consumption in modern society in fact plays an important symbolic role. The basic motivation of the consumer is ‘the desire to experience in reality the pleasurable dramas which they have already enjoyed in imagination and each “new” product is seen as offering a possibility of realising this ambition’ (:90). Campbell suggests a resemblance between consumption and daydreaming, or even perhaps consumption as an extension of daydreaming, a ‘regular and daily activity for both sexes and all ages’ (1994: xx). Thus the ‘dynamic interplay between illusion and reality is the key to an understanding of modern consumerism’ (ibid) – for consumption is the means to attempt to ‘close’ an un-closable gap ‘between imagined and experienced pleasures’ – hence the perpetuation of wants and desires for novel products. The merit of this theory is that it provides a clue for the understanding of the popularity of novel products and shopping environments and, to some degree, theme parks. Whether or not consumers truly believe that by buying new products and services they are indeed ‘closing the gap’ between fantasies and reality, the decline of conventional department stores and the boom of theme parks and

15 malls do indicate that there is an increased preference to merge the consumption of goods and media content.

The ‘dreams’ of consumption are reflected in the marketing techniques employed by marketers when they ‘window-dress’ their stage-like stores. VenusFort, for example, is a shopping mall built in a manner often employed for theme parks. This ‘theme mall’ is a vivid example of how retailers are trying to provide shoppers with at least the appearance of the possibility to experience drama. The developers of VenusFort frequently promote it as a stage, a dream and an extraordinary place for people to shop – an otherwise mundane activity. This is not to suggest that all consumption is motivated by the consumer’s striving to realise dreams. In this dissertation I try to show how the consumer is drawn not only into a process of ‘dreaming’, but is increasingly involved in the making of these ‘dreams’, in the form of content consumption and production. This involvement blurs the traditional boundaries between the media and the consumer. The accessibility and ubiquity of media in everyday life may indeed be turning consumers themselves into another form of medium, producing and broadcasting as way of life.

This dissertation examines a series of cultural products that are closely intertwined with the production of media content and popular culture. Today, the processes of media production and consumption arguably influence our cultural environment more directly than consumer goods, as they often inform the consumers of the latest trends in ready-to-use visual narratives. The examples explored here are consumer products themselves, but more importantly, they are also media of consumption, in that they provide physical space (the mall), knowledge (the advertisement) and the means (the mobile phone and mobile internet) for consumption. These products are important points of departure for consumption, and they therefore need to be seen both as

16 consumer products and also as a means to produce culture. As McCracken puts it, ‘material culture makes culture material’ (1988: 132). Rather than a passive activity, consumption is indeed an activity which brings into existence and maintains the idea of culture in its many different forms (Miller 1987).

Media of consumption have been anatomised here into four areas exemplified by the case studies presented: the themed mall as ‘stage’; advertising deploying Audrey Hepburn as idol; the Reality TV show as ‘script and performance’ in television; and finally the mobile phone as a mediator of the production and dissemination of consumption. Together they map out a system in the ever-evolving media landscape, in which consumers are no longer the passive targets of market strategies but are collaborative players in the making of narratives behind so-called retail dramas.

Simulation, Aura and Virtuality

Like many people around the world, I grew up with Disney movies on TV and Disney toys at home, and have grown accustomed to the many forms of Disney imagery to the point that the ears alone are enough to recognise the mouse. Just before the much feared but ultimately irrelevant Y2K strike, I went to a Disneyland for the first time, in Tokyo. As an everyday consumer, I was amazed at the moment of the romance of my childhood imagination being realised in reality, and at my nostalgia being as tangible as the hand Mickey Mouse extended to me.

The works written by many scholars on the ‘mouse business’ around the world show that Walt Disney and his company have made and continue to make a handsome profit in the process of realising the dreams inculcated by Disney

17 movies. Yoshimoto’s (1989) and Yoshimi’s (1993) works on Disneyland made me question whether the Disney experience I had in Tokyo was real or just a simulation of a dream with its origins in a highly mediated everyday life in which the consumption of American cultural content played an important part. When he filmed Tokyo Ga (1985), Wim Wenders turned back just before entering Tokyo Disneyland, perhaps to avoid allowing an inauthentic Disney experience to disturb the order of his Japanese one (Yoshimoto 1989: 10); I went to Las Vegas instead of the ‘original’ Disneyland in California in my immediately subsequent trip to the US. The experience of Disneyland and the postmodern architectural style and visual pastiche of Las Vegas (Venturi 1977), spreading around the world, tell a story of the growing consumption of virtuality, fuelled by the production of meaning and desire, as well as the consumer’s imagination and participation.

The case studies in this work try to go beyond the simulated environment and venture further into other elements of virtuality – the digitised idol with upgradeable aura, the consumer participating in everyday spectacle, and the mediated virtual self in the network. The main contribution of this thesis lies, first, in its context, that puts Japanese consumption in relation to media and its content; second, with its case studies, which provide tangible examples of the changes in the cultures of consumption, merging of its media and the absorption of the consumer into its network; and third, in its conceptual framework, which links more traditional consumption theories with postmodern critiques and analyses of the social impact of technology.

18 Simulation

If for some the image of God is the ultimate embodiment of ‘truth’, then the only possible proof of this is the assumption of His ‘real’ existence – the rest, according to Baudrillard, is in the ‘epiphany of his representations’, behind which there is nothing (1983: 9). In his epic work on the phenomenon of ‘simulation’, Baudrillard problematises it by questioning the ‘truth’ of the iconic imagination – God. And the truth is, like the idea of simulacrum (a copy without original), a copy of God simulates nothing more than an imagined embodiment – there is no original. In the words of Baudrillard: ultimately there has never been any God, … only the simulacrum exists, indeed … God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. (1983: 9)

In the case of Disneyland, VenusFort in Tokyo Bay and, to some extent, the Japanese Audrey Hepburn, the simulation is indeed real – for their order of authenticity has never been rooted in the existence of an ‘original’, but precisely in the meaning of and the desire for the imaginary. Aided by the power of technology and our ability to inject meaning into iconic images, what is consumed in them is much more than a simple object of desire, but is also the virtual ‘aura’ induced by attendance to these images.

Aura

In his ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin points out that it is ‘aura’ that defines the authenticity of the art work. Benjamin’s aura comes not from the simple replication of the object or imagery, which modern technologies do so well, but from the essence ‘embedded in the fabric of tradition’ (Benjamin 2001: 52). Aura, in short, represents the distinction between

19 the real and the simulation; the original and the reproduction – even if technology has lent us the power to make indistinguishable reproductions.

Technology today has clearly succeeded in democratising art and, in many ways, the art of consumption—now, can it reproduce aura for the masses?

One of the American icons that represents so-called American values in the popular media, and attracts millions of tourists in reality, is the Statue of Liberty. While the idea of America, and perhaps American values, change and shift, the Statue of Liberty has stood firm as an iconic image of the ‘American dream’. Yet as many know, it is in fact France who gave the physical embodiment of this dream.

However, the French did not stop giving. Today, there is another Statue of Liberty, which stands in Daiba, Tokyo, which was also a gift of France. It is not clear whether it represents more than a generic foreignness on the man-made land reclaimed from the sea. The Daiba Statue of Liberty certainly does not have the history and aura its New York counterpart has accumulated since 1886. However, the double, together with its surrounding pastiche of themes explored in chapter one, gives a different kind of meaning and aura, making the simulation authentic. The mirror-image statues, one in New York and one in Tokyo, embody very different auras. It is no longer possible, however, to argue which more is more ‘real’ than the other.

Things become even more complicated when the original was virtual to begin with. Baudrillard’s God is by definition virtual. It existed in no form other than the mythic one. The Japanese Audrey Hepburn, referred to by the Japanese popular press as a ‘fairy’, as I will argue in chapter two, is a virtual reconstruction of a non-existent original.

20

Virtuality

Virtuality is nothing new. Slavoj Žižek points out that ‘the self has always been virtual. Even the most physical self-experience has a symbolic, virtual element in it’ (Žižek 2002: 42). Castells (1996, 2000) concludes after lengthy studies on the social and economic impact of networked multimedia that: ‘in this digital universe that links up in a giant, non-historical hypertext, past, present, and future … they construct a new symbolic environment. They make virtuality our reality’ (Castells 2000: 403).

In the new forms of consumption, virtuality plays a crucial role in the everyday life of the consumer. Reality TV, for example, is performed not by actors but by ‘participants’, who are supposedly a selection of the audience or the consumers. Their televised ‘performance’ is the media product sold back to consumers. What is bought is not the refined skills of a performing artist, but the spectacle of the virtual self. When Reality TV is coupled with the power of the networked participation of consumers, then virtuality becomes reality.

Structure of the Thesis

This thesis explores the conceptual themes of simulation, performance and consumption as essential elements of everyday consumption, through a detailed analysis of four case studies drawn from the contemporary culture of consumption in Japan.

21 Chapter 1 tracks the transitions of a physical location along with the narratives of its cultural, economic background over the last 150 years. In its current incarnation it is a themed retail environment-turned-iconic-destination for locals and tourists. The chapter analyses the role of ‘theme’ and ‘performance’ in the shopping environment and takes the thesis into areas of simulation and performance. Chapter 2 continues by examining the desire to identify and to be identified. The role of the idol Audrey Hepburn, whose fandom has expanded into three generations, has undergone a rather sophisticated process of adaptation to the Japanese market, culturally, physically and chronologically, transitioning from traditional to new media. After analyses of simulation and the reproduction of aura and consumer identification, in Chapter 3 Reality TV gives a perfect example of the role of the self in the process of content consumption. Lastly, while trying to integrate the earlier elements of simulation, instant aura production, and everyday identification in the mediascape, Chapter 4 contemplates the future of consumption. Through a study of the mobile phone in Japan, its history, its everyday usage aided by its network and image process functionalities, and its impact on the way we communicate and consume, this chapter reflects on the future of content production, virtuality and especially the role of the self in the evolution of the media of consumption.

CHAPTER I — Dramatic Stores and Everyday Simulacra Venus at Bay – Tokyo’s 18th Century Italy – VenusFort and Daiba 台場

Veblen and Simmel developed their sociology of consumption in Western societies at a time when department stores had first opened in metropolitan centres. These department stores offered shoppers a variety of goods such as groceries, furniture, clothing, crockery and kitchen utensils, all under one roof.

22 The department stores developed as tram tracks, trolley buses and railways were built to take people into the city centres from the outlying suburban areas. Modern patterns of consumption, therefore, resulted in part from urbanisation. Simmel pointed out that urbanisation in turn gave rise to a kind of individual who was anxious to preserve autonomy and individuality in the face of overwhelming social forces (Simmel 1957 [1904]: 541-8). The need to preserve autonomy and individuality has remained as the ‘overwhelming social forces’ have continued to evolve.

This descriptive analysis of the primitive versions of department stores seems to have much in common with the themed shopping malls of the late 1990s in Japan, with some variations – today the malls bring people out from the metropolis and give, in addition to a venue to shop, a place to ‘perform’ a ‘retail drama’. Like the very first department stores, VenusFort, built on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, continues to offer a large selection of goods and services. The Daiba area as a whole makes available a synergy of shopping, entertainment, amusement and leisure facilities, with a specifically built, unmanned state-of-the-art monorail linked to the mainframe of the Japanese rail system and thus capable of bringing customers in from every corner of the country. In addition, it provides a stage for the individual consumer, in Simmel’s terms, to preserve autonomy and individuality, and as the creators of the mall claim, provides an ‘urban theme park’ to consume. At VenusFort, consumption goes beyond just objects to a specifically designed experience, aided by technology and imaginative simulation. The anti-auratic (Urry 1990) simulation of the imagined ‘Italy’ gains its very own aura while gradually becoming a local icon rather than a simulacrum of the imagined exotic.

VenusFort is a shopping mall, as the developer claims, themed after 17th-18th century Italy. From the exterior of the mall, the Italian-themed ‘paradise for

23 women’ is no more glamorous than a massive shipping container – in terms both of its unimaginative cubic shape and its construction material, apparently the cheapest Japan had ever seen. From the inside, VenusFort is no less grandiose than a dedicated museum, decorated by paintings, sculptures and fountains. Its ‘sky’, projected on the ceiling, is controlled by state-of-the-art computerised technology, which changes hourly. In this theme mall, even ‘time’ is part of its simulated expression.

VenusFort, the first of its kind in the increasingly complex Japanese retailing industry, seems to have revolutionised the retail market dominated by department stores. A reproduced environment with visual references to history (17th –18th century) and location (Southern Italy), symbolising trends in fashion and good taste, the themed shopping mall gained serious momentum after millions of visits by shoppers and tourists from as far away as Tokyo’s surrounding prefectures and even neighbouring Asian countries. It became a new ‘must-go’ tourist destination on a par with famous historical sites and Tokyo Disneyland. Along with other entertainment, amusement and resort facilities, the Daiba area provides a one-stop shop, a fulfilling all-in-one experience, combining adventure, amusement, culture and fashion via consumption of goods and services within an endless staged event with ahistorical references answering only to the consumer’s imagination.

Beyond the easy accessibility offered by VenusFort and other such locations, how different are they from traditional department stores at a fundamental level? The first department stores in fact did present their shoppers with an unprecedented number of choices; and indeed the grandeur of the halls of department stores with their palace-like interiors impressed early department store customers, making them feel like kings and queens, or millionaires.

24 Debord has argued that ‘the spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time’ (1994: 158). In this chapter, the short history of the themed mall VenusFort is analysed, along with the history since 1853 of the site, Daiba. By studying the socio-political and economic background of its real estate developments at different stages, VenusFort is shown not as an isolated case in the construction of new iconic imageries, but as a phenomenon that may signal an important shift in the consumption of both goods and media content.

As such, VenusFort is a point of departure for analysing the roles of simulation, aura and virtuality in consumption. If aura, as Benjamin illuminates, is the vital criterion for the authentic, and if, as Baudrillard has argued, simulation indeed needs no original, then VenusFort is an example of the simulacrum becoming authentic.

CHAPTER II — Idols in Bytes, History Virtualised Remade in Japan: the case of Audrey Hepburn

Jean Baudrillard conveyed his lasting discomfort with the ‘hyperreal’ in the very beginning of his book Simulations: ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true’ (Baudrillard 1983: 1).

The Japanese Audrey Hepburn is the embodiment, or rather the imagery, of the fall and resurrection of an icon by way of simulation and digitisation. This chapter is an investigation of the popularity of the Belgian-born Hollywood star in Japan from its postwar history to the present day. Rising to stardom in her

25 role in Roman Holiday (1953), Audrey Hepburn has been an enduring fixture of Japanese women’s popular press from that time on. After Roman Holiday first arrived in Japan in 1954, there was an immediate trend in Tokyo to imitate her style or, more precisely, the style of her screen character. Since 1971, when Japanese advertising companies could first afford her presence in their commercials, she starred in a number of television commercials for Japanese products. However, her television commercial presence became even more frequent and successful after her death in 1993. Using state-of-the-art digital technology, and aided by look-alikes (both Japanese and Westerner), ‘Audrey Hepburn’ gained another significant lease of life. Her continued stardom in Japan more than a decade after her death raises important questions regarding charisma, audience identification, the reproduction of culture, and nostalgia in the digital age.

Through analyses of materials published in the Japanese popular press since 1954, most in weekly magazines, it is argued that even though obvious discrepancies between the image of Hepburn and Japanese womanhood existed (and were written about as early as 1954), the Japanese press and its readers found ways to identify with her image, culturally and physically, often by emphasising ‘similarities’. Further, like many modern nostalgias, her image has evolved through time to suit different generations of Japanese women, signifying a continuing reproduction and revision of her image, especially after her death. Today, the image of Audrey Hepburn is a modified, digitised and infinitely reproducible one. Apart from being a long-lasting idol for several generations of Japanese young women, her popularity is prolonged and at the same time exploited for its commercial value. The analysis of the role of Audrey Hepburn in Japan ultimately reveals more generally the modalities through which Japanese everyday consumption intersects with new media technologies,

26 at the same time as it is a balancing act between novelty and familiarity, innovation and belonging, the ‘real’ and the ‘simulacrum’.

CHAPTER III — Performing Virtualities in Everyday Spectacles Selling Props, Playing Stars: the Logic of Japanese Reality TV

After the analysis of the simulated retail environment and the virtualisation of the star, this chapter on the ‘realness’ of Reality Television offers an example of changes occurring in one of the lastingly influential traditional mass media – television.

Commenting on the 25-year-old American June Houston, who installed 14 cameras in her house for webcasting, inviting all to see the ‘ghost’ allegedly present in her house, Virilio wrote in his now famously grim observation on the globally networked virtual spaces in The Information Bomb: With this voyeurism, tele-surveillance takes on a new meaning. It is no longer a question of forearming oneself against an interloper with criminal intent, but of sharing one’s anxieties, one’s obsessive fears with a whole network, through over-exposure of a living space. (Virilio 2001: 59)

Virilio calls this capitalisation of privacy and the self, ‘the visual market’ (Virilio 2001: 60). Reality TV is precisely a product made for this visual market. For Debord, the commodification of the private self ‘gives rise not only to private life as a distinct reality, but also to that reality’s subsequent conquest by the social consumption of images’ (Debord 1994: 140). ‘Image’ for Debord is the ultimate medium of consumption, and the commodity is a spectacle – therefore the ‘real consumer’ is the ‘consumer of illusion’ (Debord 1994: 25-34).

27

Television dramas of everyday life have evolved from the melodramatic soaps of the 1970s such as ‘Dallas’ (see Ang 1985) to the made-for-television ‘reality’ of today, such as ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Survivor’. The pleasure of televisual consumption and the social meanings produced and projected through television are a vital part of today’s cultural make-up. ‘Culture’ for Fiske is the ‘generation and circulation of the meanings and pleasures within society’ for which television is the ‘provoker and agent’ (Fiske 1987: 1). Thus, in the media phenomenon called Reality TV, Debord’s ‘consumer of illusion’ not only consumes, but also participates in the making of this ‘illusion’, which today is commonly known as ‘reality’ on television. A misnomer it is not. Rather, it is an increasingly fitting term to describe an ever more mediated world where the self becomes the involved participant and the consumer of the media event.

This chapter analyses two popular Reality TV dating programs in Japan, which first aired in 1999. By comparing the Reality TV genre with previous genres such as soap opera and melodrama, this chapter draws comparisons and connections between the fundamentals of Reality TV and previous incarnations. The development from the melodrama genre to today’s participatory ‘reality’ genre is seen as a key to understanding the workings of Reality TV and the consumption of media.

Also important are the roles of, and the relationship between, the ‘participant’ and the ‘viewer’ in Reality TV. For they not only provide the clues to understand audience transference (the basis for consumption of narrative and drama) but also serve as a point of departure for understanding the function of the medium – in this case, television, as the dramatised mirror-image of the simulated and mediated everyday life.

28 By looking at various by-products such as the variants of the analysed ‘Reality’ TV shows and events spun off from them, the thesis explores these events (and performances in these events by consumers) as extensions of television and its content.

In his famous book The Society of the Spectacle, Debord (1994) makes an explicit connection between the effects of ‘spectacle’ on the self and its relationship with the ‘world’, which is now increasingly saturated with more and more media: ‘the spectacle erases the dividing line between self and world, in that the self, under siege by the presence/absence of the world, is eventually overwhelmed; it likewise erases the dividing line between true and false, repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances’ (Debord 1994: 153)

Thus this chapter also attempts to present some examples of this ‘dividing line’ or rather the disappearance of it. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the links between the dramatic and the everyday, the event and the medium, the consumer and the performer, and lastly on the increasing void of comparison with the ‘real’ in Reality TV.

CHAPTER IV — From Consumers to Cyborgs Ghost in the Shell – (Broad)casting the Self via the Cellular Phone

Thus: the theme mall simulates the simulacra with a digitally controlled sky indicating compressed time and history; the dead icon comes alive in bytes, rendering her reassigned eternality and re-imagined youth an unrelenting trendiness; while the media absorbs the viewer and the ‘everyday’ life –

29 drawing an unending circle of the consumer and the performer, the everyday to the event. This circle is completed finally by the amalgamation of traditional media to the vast internet, in which the self becomes its own content. The epitome and media manifestation of this self is the mobile phone.

In the first of the three volumes of his study of the information age, The Rise of the Network Society, Castells (1996, 2000) concludes after a analysis of global media from television to the internet that: the most important feature of multimedia is that they capture within their domain most cultural expressions, in all their diversity. Their advent is tantamount to ending the separation, and even the distinction, between audiovisual media and printed media, popular culture and learned culture, entertainment and information, education and persuasion. Every cultural expression … come[s] together in this digital universe that links up in a giant, non-historical hypertext, past, present, and future manifestations of the communicative mind. By so doing, they construct a new symbolic environment. They make virtuality our reality (Castells 2000: 403, italics in original).

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the mobile phone was already on its way to reach market saturation in most advanced economies. Japan is no exception: as of February 2003, there were more than 80 million mobile phones in Japan (Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Post and Telecommunications 2003). As mobile technology has been developing rapidly in recent years, more and more handsets are now equipped with functions far beyond the traditional voice-centric communications. Today nearly every handset sold in Japan can handle much more than just voice communication: email, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), mobile internet, video and still camera and networked media content consumption (video, audio and network games and so on). In late 2003,

30 Vodafone started selling handsets that can receive free-to-air television. As in the early days of the Internet for the personal computer, to satisfy this vast appetite for mobile Internet content and services, websites designed for the mobile phone are growing at an exponential rate.

Today the mobile phone is part of everyday life and has absorbed the functions of all previously known forms of media from print to television, from the still to the moving image, from voice to email to video phone, and lastly from communication tool to a memory device – dragging the user into the vast World Wide Web, unwired. It has fused Virilio’s ‘speed’, Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’, Debord’s ‘spectacle’ and Castells’ ‘network’, presenting us with the doorway to the Matrix, first envisaged by William Gibson in Neuromancer two decades ago in 1984.

Mobile phones are indeed becoming a bodily attachment to consumers. They do not merely allow us to communicate by voice, but also help consumers, the individual bodies, to form a multimedia network. The mobile phone combines more traditional forms of media with still latent media such as the Internet and digital television. It, and its variant forms, is the embryonic form of future media. It is the point of access to a vast network, combining and absorbing the body into the mediascape. Display and increasingly sophisticated image production capabilities are coalescing with network functionalities to the point where what we now know as merely a mobile phone will act almost as an added limb with vastly enhanced senses; enabling the user to consume, perform and to live in the virtual spaces. As such it will be the beginning of the fusion between the human and so-called virtual reality, of which the current demarcation will (perhaps soon) be nothing but a blurred boundary between the physical and the digital.

31 Consumption of and via the mobile is an example that encompasses all the previously discussed issues such as simulation, virtuality and the performance of the self as media content. It also demonstrates the ability of this networked multimedia tool to combine all traditional media. Further, it explores the implication of the networked, media-bearing human body and the future direction of consumption in the increasingly media-saturated environment, ‘virtual’ or otherwise.

Conclusion

By examining the phenomena of themed shopping malls, the reproduction of a dead Hollywood star in Japanese advertisements, audience participation television programs (or reality TV), and third generation multimedia mobile phones, this study suggests profound links between the different media of consumption. This is not only in terms of their penetration in everyday life, but also in their interconnectedness in the construct of cultural production and consumption in the mega-polis today. These connections are explored in the Conclusion of the thesis.

The links not only signal changes in media, but also shape the production of ‘meaning’ attached to goods (McCracken), the ‘code’ embedded (Hall) and the ‘symbolism’ conveyed (Bourdieu) via consumption. By scrutinising the role of the self in these media of consumption, a different framework for looking at consumption today is suggested – that of looking at its media, the participation of the self, and the production of content and meaning.

The examples used in this thesis are usually considered to belong to different fields of study – the mall, the media idol, television and networked portable

32 personal gadgets. This work recognises them as pillars of transformation in the culture of consumption in Japan. As such, they are indications of a larger trend in a series of fundamental social and cultural changes, critical to understanding what, how and why we consume. The trajectory of these case studies shows the consumer of tomorrow becoming a networked ‘cyborg’, constantly consuming and producing media content. It is a journey from the mall to the network society, from the consumer to the virtualised self and from simulation to a state that I suggest we might think of as ‘post-reality’.

The use of the term post-reality is intended to call attention to an emerging state in which the more traditional perceptions of the ‘real’ are becoming less relevant. History is recorded and recalled in real time; an event can be known, sometimes even experienced, before it takes place; even the symbolism of authenticity is simulated after simulacra; and the aura, the intangible emotional patina, is the product of instant media content (cf. Baudrillard 2000). In post-reality, we don’t just consume things, we also consume the aura produced for them; in post-reality, we don’t just experience, we tailor-make; in post-reality we are not only the consumers of media content, we produce, perform and put to air our very own recorded, digitised, networked and real-time history.

Conclusion

This work is first of all a study of some Japanese media of consumption – the mall, the idol, the television and the networked consumer technology, the mobile phone. By closely investigating the market development and consumer acceptance of these media of consumption, links are made which lead to the core of the thesis – that there is a qualitative shift towards participation,

33 performance and amalgamation of media in both consumption and the production of media content. The case studies described in this work, it is suggested, represent not just a localised and temporary trend involving a particular demographic consumer segment, but indicate rather an evolution in media and consumption, driven by global social, economic and technological trends. Thus the analyses presented here aim to deepen understanding of the current relationship between consumption and media, as well as shedding some light on the shape of consumption in the networked world to come.

Consequently, this thesis describes a transition in how consumption is mediated in the contemporary globalised world. It follows the transition from the consumption of goods in the mall, to the consumption of the self in a mediated everyday life, illustrating this change by demonstrating an increasingly intimate relationship between the self and the network.

The motor vehicle and the passenger plane did not just change the way we travel from A to B, but its wide market acceptance made it possible for us to take foreign holidays. The radio and the television did not just change the way we receive information from a much wider world outside of the living room, but perhaps inspired us to want to take exotic foreign holidays at home, in local theme parks. A connected world, between people, and their gadgets, will not just change how we operate the machines, receive information and consume the content streamed down by someone who may be just like us – it has the potential to change what and why we consume too.

34 CHAPTER I

DRAMATIC STORES, REAL SIMULATIONS

Venus at Bay: Tokyo’s 18th Century Italy – VenusFort and Daiba

The mall is a ‘TV’ you walk around in. — William Severini Kowinski (Kowinski 1985)

35 People are looking for illusions; they don’t want the world’s realities. And, I asked, where do I find this world of illusion? Where are their tastes formulated? Do they study it in school? Do they go to museums? Do they travel in Europe? Only one place — the movies. They go to the movies. The hell with everything else. —Morris Lapidus (Lapidus 1970: 122; quoted in Venturi et al. 1977: 80)

The Story of VenusFort

After its opening on 25 August 1999, VenusFort quickly became one of the most visited destinations in Tokyo. Indeed, thanks to massive publicity campaigns,

VenusFort was made famous even before its opening. In its first twenty days,

1.6 million visitors came, 60,000 people on the first day alone (Takemura 1999); and 490,000 people visited over the first weekend. In that first twenty days, there were 50–60,000 visitors on weekdays, and 100,000 per day on weekends

(AMBusiness, 1999a). If calculated on the basis of these numbers, VenusFort would achieve more than 29 million visitors a year (Ōmae & Miyamoto 1999: 24,

49).

Judging only from the phenomenal social interest, one might think VenusFort is a newly discovered historical site, turned into a must-see tourist attraction. This view is almost right, though entirely by accident. VenusFort does have a symbolically important historical background, intertwined with that of Tokyo’s economic history and its city planning. Its interior resembles what a classic art museum would have been, and at the same time it offers similar pleasures to

36 those found in a theme park, and more.

VenusFort is a mall in Tokyo. To be more precise, it is a ‘theme mall’ with a general Neoclassical motif complete with indoor arcades which look as if from an Italian town, with paintings adorning its walls and sculptures filling its small indoor squares. It combines the ideas of a conventional department store and suburban mall, only without the dated frumpishness. It offers a great variety of shops selling fashionable women’s clothing and accessories, as well as an array of carefully decorated exotic dining spaces. In short, it offers everything

‘glamorous’, without the mundane living essentials. Its self-advocacy as the

‘theme park for women’ says much about its business target and clientele, clearly defined from the day the idea of VenusFort was conceived:

宮曓さういう手頃場都心型創 うういう提案あ い宮曓さ構想 あ従来型若い女性的絞 “” いう全新い

Miyamoto came up with the idea that building an ‘urban theme park’ in such an easily accessible location could work well. The type of place he had in mind was not the conventional attraction-and-game-centre. Rather, his idea for a theme was the completely novel concept of ‘beauty’ – fashion, aesthetics, cosmetics and the like – aimed at attracting young women. (Ōmae & Miyamoto 1999: 25-26)

Considering the historical and political background of the site, a ‘theme park for women’ in Daiba 台場 (also known as Odaiba) was indeed hard to imagine

37 before its actual creation. Daiba is a piece of artificial land that came into existence around 1853. Initially built towards the end of the Tokugawa shogunate to resist Commodore Perry, the construction continued, albeit erratically, well into the postwar period, mostly by filling Tokyo Bay with urban wastes (Minato-ku Kyōiku Iinkai 2001). Far from the fashionable image it enjoys today, the area was previously considered ‘unclean’ because of the waste beneath the surface – much of which had been accumulated through Tokyo’s reconstructions after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the rapid urbanisation after World War II. Also, despite its close proximity to Ginza, one of the city’s most prestigious altars of fashion and style, the lack of public transport meant Daiba was difficult to access from the Tokyo city centre.

There were many other plans to develop the Daiba site besides those for creating the current amusement centre and new must-see tourist destination in

Tokyo. As recently as three years prior to its current incarnation, a plan for developing a second business centre for Tokyo on the same site failed miserably.

It was considered to be a such a misjudgement that it was nicknamed the ‘Plan for Bankruptcy 破産計’ (Hiramoto 2000: 263). Earlier, the well publicised proposal for a World City Expo 世界都市博覧会 had been officially aborted in

May 1995 after much debate and political wrangling in the Tokyo Municipal

Government (Hiramoto 2000: 296) (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Bessatu, 1999a: 47).

However, the idea of making a ‘theme park for women’ on a previously

‘unclean’ and unfashionable site was not as illogical as it might seem. Miyamoto

38 and Mori, the owners of VenusFort, had an established reputation for developing businesses targeted at the young and fashionable. Miyamoto is the founder of both Square, a company which gave birth to Final Fantasy, one of most popular role-playing computer games, and DigiCube, a software company whose main business is to distribute such games. He also owns Final Stage, a chain of women’s apparel retailers. Mori Minoru is the owner of Mori Biru, a heavy-weight real estate development company which owns much of Tokyo’s most up-market real estate, such as the shopping centre Laforet in Harajuku, and Roppongi Hills, a massive vertical village opened in 2003, which itself contains everything from offices, galleries, stores and restaurants to cinemas, a square and a park filled with artworks. VenusFort came from a good deal of experience in real estate, retail and fashion.

In their book, Ōmae and Miyamoto (1999) detail the research behind the

VenusFort idea. They took into consideration everything from an analysis of the buying habits of the 20 to 35 year old female population in Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures (:29) with their hobbies and interests (:33), to the population flow towards the Daiba area and the transport occupancy hour by hour throughout the day (:41). They also analysed young women’s international and domestic travel habits (:35), and took into consideration the recurring business downturns experienced by traditional department stores (:31). With some ‘popular psychology’ also thrown in3, the idea for ‘a theme park for

3 The authors argued that ‘women are beings who cannot live without the stimulation of feelings’, unlike men who (they suggested) use the left side of the brain and are therefore

39 women’ seemed to be a logical outcome.

Still, the success of VenusFort came as a surprise to the business world, including the developers themselves. The original expectation was around 12 million4 visitors a year to the entire area known as Palette Town. As noted earlier, VenusFort alone had 1.6 million visits in the first twenty days, well over ten per cent of what was expected in the entire year (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō

Bessatu, 1999a: 49, Tamura 2000: 109).

The whole 72,830 m² area of Palette Town includes a range of leisure and shopping facilities. These include VenusFort and SunWalk5, as well as a set of themed resorts and amusement facilities, such as Toyota’s MegaWeb (a massive automobile show room) and a ‘Standing Live Hall’ called Zepp Tokyo. Built by

Hall Network ㈱ワ, a joint venture of Sony Music

Entertainment, AVEX and Tokyo Hōsō 東京送, Zepp Tokyo provides live performances by the latest pop musicians. There is also a general entertainment park, NeoGeo World, Tokyo Bayside, built by amusement facility maker, NSK, featuring forty-four bowling lanes, karaoke boxes and a pool hall. Palette Town also includes outdoor entertainment facilities such as the biggest Ferris wheel in the world at the time of completion (1999) and a ‘Hypershot and Hyperdrop’

more logical (:37) 4 There have been different statistics reported on the number of visits originally expected. 5 SunWalk is another brainchild of Miyamoto and Mori, a shopping mall filled mostly with sports shops, toys and pet shops, situated underneath VenusFort, and designed as a separate entity.

40 (figure 1), a kind of vertical roller coaster with only up-down movements, at extreme speed (Shopping Centre 1999: 48, AMBusiness, 1999(3)). The ‘palette’ indeed is a massive themed city dotted with shopping, entertainment and countless themed cafés and restaurants.

Figure 1: HyperDrop from 58 metres in the air.

Apart from Palette Town, there are also many other newly opened facilities in

Daiba – Hotel Nikko Tokyo opened in March 1996 and Tokyo Big Site and Fuji

Television Headquarters are just a block away (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Bessatu,

1999a). Across the street from Hotel Nikko, there is Aqua City Shopping Mall

and Mediage . Run by Sony Urban Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony, Mediage opened in April 2000. It alone expects twenty million visits a year (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Shiryō 2000).

A short walk towards the west (figure 2) is another entertainment-and-shopping

41 complex, Decks Tokyo Beach 東京. Opened on 12 July 1996, this popular spot has been nicknamed ‘Foreign Countries at Tokyo Harbour’. The enormous complex contains two shopping malls: the ‘Sea Side Mall’ in front of the water, and the ‘Island Mall’ immediately behind it. On top of the Sea Side

Mall there are two restaurant floors themed after the streets of Kowloon in

Hong Kong. At the eastern end, a massive game centre called Joypolis, owned by Sega Enterprise (the computer game maker), attracted 1.5 million visits between 12 July 1996 and 11 July 1997. Developed by Sumitomo Shōji and seven other companies, the ‘Foreign Countries at Tokyo Harbour’ has become an immense commercial success, attracting some thirteen million visitors in the first year (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Shiryō 1998: 139).

Figure 2: Daiba map

Today, looking at the seemingly endless variety of all-brand-new attractions and amusement facilities, it is hard to imagine that Daiba has had an intriguingly different past life. Today, it is a ‘trend-setter’ in fashion, a dating spot associated

42 with romantic night views of the harbour and a Tokyo must-see attracting young couples from as far as the surrounding prefectures. However, it only came into existence because of such historical events as the threat of a foreign power, the massive reconstruction after the 1923 earthquake, the rebuilding after World War II, the prolonged post-war urbanisation and, lastly, the still continuing endless dumping and processing of Tokyo’s urban waste.

The History of Daiba

Even the oldest history of Daiba is a relatively recent one. The land reclaimed from the sea 埋立地 can be traced back to the final bakumatsu period of the

Tokugawa era. Since then, Daiba’s 150-year history has been a telling reflection of Tokyo’s urban, cultural and economic development.

The prefix of the name’s alternative form, Odaiba, is not by any means a term of endearment, but a historical honorific. It is called the Honourable Daiba, because it was built by the shogunal administration. It was in fact a place (ba) intended to facilitate a battery (hōdai) to protect Edo-wan, today’s Tokyo Bay, from Commodore Perry’s gunships (figure 3).

On 4 April 1853, carrying the US president’s demand for the opening of Japan for western trade, Perry’s gunship arrived in Ryūkyū kindom, today’s Okinawa.

Two months later on 3 June, they arrived in Uraga 浦賀, at the entrance to Edo

43 Bay. Perry gave the Tokugawa government a year to think before he revisited

Tokyo in 1854, a return which resulted in the signing of the Kanagawa Treaty

(Treaty of Peace and Amity between the United States and the Empire of Japan

日米和親条). The Tokugawa government was in such shock after Perry’s first visit to Edo Bay that they ordered the construction of Daiba on 23 July 1853

(Satō 1997), in the hope that it would protect Tokyo from Perry’s imminent return (Minato-ku Kyōiku Iinkai 2001: 101-104).

Figure 3: Perry’s Black Ships

Nearly a century later, at the end of World War II, with the broadcast of the

Emperor’s surrender on 15 August 1945, Japan saw another American profoundly influence the course of its history. Douglas MacArthur’s rule over

Japan began with his first days spent in Tokyo Bay, a stone’s throw from Daiba, in Yokohama, where it would be easier to fend off potential attacks from guerrillas than in the middle of the enormous capital (Seidensticker 1990: 145,

44 146). A commodore and a general, both American, nearly a century apart, started two of the most important chapters in Japan’s modern history, in a harbour that is today almost exclusively dominated by the business of fashion, romance and pleasure6.

Figure 4: The original ‘Daiba’, batteries number 3 and 6, still remaining today, floating in the bay with the city of Tokyo in the background.

Back in the nineteenth century, to resist trade demands from the US, the

Tokugawa government first had to import the means of resistance from the

Netherlands, one of Japan’s oldest trading partners. Based on the blueprint for

6 Daiba is not the only place in Tokyo Bay filled with shopping malls and leisure facilities. Yokohama Bay, where MacArthur spent his first nights before Japan signed the surrender documents, also has its own version of fun. Minatomirai 21 or 21st Century Port City is itself 186 hectares of hotels, museums, conference centres and offices (Seidensticker 1990: 146). It cost two trillion yen by 2000 (McCormack 1996: 61). The two waterfront developments are often compared in the popular press.

45 coastal defence written by the Dutch engineer Engelberts in 1839 (Engelberts

1839), Tokyo started its first-ever reclamation construction, making land in the sea. It took the Tokugawa government barely ten months to build six land batteries in 30 metre deep water, of which two (nos. 3 and 6) still stand today

(Hiramoto 2000: 20).

Figure 5: Statue of Liberty, Daiba, Tokyo

The batteries could not be finished in time to resist Perry, but they laid the foundations for the 150 years of continuous effort that followed to claim land from the sea in Tokyo Bay. The four black kurofune warships from the US East

India Squadron 150 years ago not only changed the Tokugawa government’s

46 mind about keeping Japan closed to foreign trade and influences, but they were also the very first cause for Daiba’s existence. Today, marked with a (much smaller) replica of the Statue of Liberty – a present from the ‘real’ origin, France

– Daiba is seen without the slightest irony as a momentary getaway from everyday life and the trendiest place for imported goods and cultures (figure 5).

Apart from a few test-firings of the cannons, Daiba was never used in war to resist foreign powers. It occasionally provided storage for ammunition and operated as a shipyard. Between 2 August and 1 September 1913, Daiba for the first time found its leisure value when Tokyo Maiyū Shimbun 東京毎夆新聞 ran an event in which people could enjoy the ‘evening breeze’ for a month.

Typhoons and earthquakes shattered Daiba on various occasions, and different governments in Tokyo kept patching the base up. Even though it did not seem to be of any apparent use, at least not for its original purposes, successive Tokyo governments continued the construction of Daiba up until the 1980s (Satō 1997).

However, as noted above, one of the most important reasons for the reclamation work in Tokyo Bay in fact was to get rid of the wastes of urban growth. Before the war, this was the dirt and sand produced from dredging of the rivers and canals especially around the delta; after the war, it was the industrial and household wastes produced by Tokyo’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation

(Hiramoto 2000: 23).

The continued depositing of urban waste and the reclamation (or umetate) effort in Tokyo Bay created massive pieces of man-made land from sea. By the end of

47 1985, Tokyo had a total of 720 hectares of completely unused artificial land – an area approximately ten times the size of Tokyo’s Disneyland. With further reclamation continuing into the late 1990s (Honjo, 1998 : 127) it eventually became a necessity to find some kind of use for a total of some 1,090 hectares of empty land in the Tokyo Bay area (Hiramoto 2000).

The Reincarnation of Daiba

Teleport Town

The first blueprint to seriously include Daiba in Tokyo’s city planning and put the land to significant use was the ‘Teleport Town Plan’. It came out in a rush

(allegedly drafted in about a week) to meet the deadline on 25 February 1984 for a World Teleport Town Conference in New York. According to Hiramoto, one of the key witnesses of its formation and the author of The Story of Seaside

Sub-centre 臨海副都心物語, the Tokyo Teleport Town Plan was based on a similar blueprint to develop Staten Island, off Manhattan. The New York and New

Jersey Port Authority published a report titled ‘The Teleport’, which outlined a vision to build a high-capability communication link between Manhattan and a similar facility in London, via fibre optic cables (Hiramoto 2000: 31-5). Based on the New York and London teleport plan, Tokyo also put up an analogue for an

’Intelligent Business Centre’, which included a satellite communication centre, a telecommunication centre and other high-tech ‘Intelligent Buildings’. This

48 initial teleport town plan titled ‘Tokyo Teleport Kōsō 構想’ or ‘The Conception of Tokyo Teleport’ was to use 40 hectares, a fraction of the total reclaimed land in the Daiba area. The presentation to the Second World Teleport Conference on

2 April 1985 was claimed to be a ‘big success’ (Hiramoto 2000: 34, 36).

As the Bubble Economy ballooned towards the late 1980s, the Teleport Town Plan also swelled in size. The population in the metropolitan areas, especially in and around Tokyo, expanded along with the ferment of the Bubble Economy. By

1985, when the Bubble peaked, the Tokyo population and the demand for office spaces grown to unprecedented levels. Rural populations declined drastically as the young and hopeful poured into Tokyo, its satellite towns and other major cities7. There was rapid population growth in Tokyo and with it seemingly incessant growth in demand for office space in the traditional centres such as

Shinjuku, Ginza, Ikebukuro and Shibuya. Finally recognising this as a ‘social problem’, the government promoted the Teleport Town Plan as a visionary strategy aimed at relieving the pressure for both residential and office space in the old city centres8. By 1987, only two years after its debut, the Teleport Town

7 The population in the major cities has grown exponentially because of the rapid industrialization and urbanization that has been prominent in Japan over the last twenty years. The depopulation of rural areas in Japan is severe. By 1980, only 8.4 million people were living in the most heavily depopulated areas, which make up some 34 per cent of all towns and villages in the whole country, and account for about 44 per cent of the nation’s landmass (McCormack 1996: 52). By 1994, 20 per cent of the nation’s farming land had been abandoned, with young people continuing to leave farmland in their hometowns for urban areas (Ono 1994: 25; quoted in McCormack 1996: 124). For a well-written general description of rural population decline, see Smith (1998). 8 The purpose of relieving the population pressure on the major city centres was also

49 Plan had bloated to eleven times its original size, from 40 hectares to 448 hectares (Hiramoto 2000: 46), and the cost from 1,300 billion yen Asahi shimbun

[chōkan], 3 April 1985) to 1.89 trillion (Hiramoto 2000: 43)9.

By this time it was more than just a plan to build an ‘intelligent’ business centre, and had taken on the idea of turning Tokyo into a poly-centre city. It envisaged a second centre for Tokyo – a city of the future – or Waterfront Sub-centre, for its residents to ‘work, live and play’. According to a 1989 report, the Research on

City Development Regarding Tokyo Teleport Town (提案小分会 1989) the basic belief at the time was that, as hi-tech communication developed, small and medium sized enterprises would become more dominant in the economy – with the main work force becoming more knowledge-intensive. Based on this prediction, the report assumed that this ‘knowledge-intensive’ workforce would have more leisure time, therefore it recommended that the Waterfront

Sub-centre should meet these assumed needs of the ‘knowledge- and time-rich’ workforce.

Thus the plan included not only the most advanced technology for its communication capability, but also a set of facilities for its residents to mentioned in Seidensticker 1990. In the last pages of his socio-cultural history of Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake, Seidensticker thought the Teleport Town had a better chance of survival than most of the other ‘big and hugely expensive projects’ scattered around Tokyo. But if the prefecture government continued with the Teleport Town Plan, it would need big companies’ support for the massive cost, which was recorded at the time at a massive 30 billion dollars (Seidensticker 1990: 346).. 9 For another overview on the construction see McCormack 1996: 60.

50 experience the ‘comfortable living’ of the future. These facilities were to include: hotels, cultural facilities (theatres, concert halls, and even a stage on water), restaurants featuring gourmet cuisine from around the world, shopping centres, and vocational schools for water sports and the like (Hiramoto 2000: 113). The city was to be so advanced that it envisaged a so-called ‘three no-needs’ living: no need for cash, no need for maps and no need for umbrellas. The plan even had a ‘dual approach’ to two kinds of weather – sunny days and windy, rainy days — people would be able to walk under completely covered paths to their destinations (Hiramoto 2000: 18, 87).

The Tokyo International City Expo 都市博

The Tokyo Teleport Town Plan had become such a major development that political influences started to play an increasingly important role in its formation. In the two years between 1985 and 1987, its budget had swelled by more than 14 times, and the perceived size of the construction bloated to eleven times its original plan. The purpose of the plan had also changed from a Teleport for ‘an intelligent business centre’ to a sub-centre for Tokyo to include sizable residential areas. In February 1988, yet another plan was drawn up, this time under the leadership of the newly re-elected Governor Suzuki and Kanemaru, the Deputy Prime Minister at the time. The new plan was to build the Tokyo

International Exposition 東京万博 on this floating sub-centre, still only in the planning stage (Hiramoto 2000).

51

Politics aside, despite Suzuki’s efforts to rush through the realization of the

Tokyo Expo, it eventually faced tremendous opposition. The plan was again changed, this time to ‘Tokyo Frontier’. By April 1990, the ‘Basic Plan of Tokyo

Frontier 東京基曓計’ was completed with a target of 20 million annual visits (Hiramoto 2000: 168). In 1992, ‘Tokyo Frontier’ became ‘Tokyo

International City Expo’, to be held from March to October 1996, with an estimated cost of 1,000 billion yen. Eighty per cent of this enormous cost would come from the public purse (Hiramoto 2000: 169). At the expo, for 3,200 yen the visitor would be able to see and experience a mixture of modern and ancient cities, from Meiji era trams to magnetic-levitation vehicles and even a

NASA-sponsored space station (Hiramoto 2000; see also McCormack 1996: 61).

However, the bubble was soon to burst. By the early 1990s, the Nikkei stock exchange index dropped rapidly after peaking briefly at the end of 1989; the money supply reached the lowest point in a decade; and office prices slumped towards pre-bubble levels. In July 1993, the office occupancy rate in Shinjuku was as low as 32 per cent, and below 11 per cent in some buildings (Okabe 1993;

McCormack 1996: 60). Under these economic conditions, it became increasingly absurd to continue the development of Daiba for the purposes of gaining more office space to relieve the now non-existent pressure on inner city business centres. Even without the ‘Waterfront Sub-centre’, office space would exceed demand by some 1,000 hectares (McCormack 1996: 60)10. Because of the

10 Quoted in Suda, ‘Minjun ga shūchū’, Sekai, February 1991, 350-2.

52 mammoth expenditure on the project, the City Expo became a serious political issue for the prefecture government, and a gubernatorial one during the election in 1995. By 1996, the Teleport had cost the municipal government two trillion yen, while it was juggling a debt that was increasing by around 1 trillion each year since 1992 (Tokyo Finance Bureau 2004). Aoshima, best known in

Japan at the time as a comedian, ran for governor as an independent. With a campaign policy focused on cutting back on waterfront projects, specifically on axing the Daiba International Expo, he won by a huge margin (Japan Times, 1

June 1995). A month after the new governor came into office in May 1995 the

Tokyo International City Expo was officially suspended (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō

Shiryō 1998: 137; Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Bessatu, 1999a: 47; Satō 1997: 202, 296;

Cybriwsky 1998: 203).

Daiba’s Second Rebirth: from Teleport Town to Palette Town

Defying both political pressure and the stark economic consequences of shutting down the International Exposition, Aoshima kept his election promise.

His later trips abroad apologizing to would-be participants in that event were seen as signals that his predecessor Suzuki’s era of expansive bubble projects had come to an end (Japan Times 1 June 1995). The new governor from the world of entertainment led Daiba’s development in a rather different direction — this time all about leisure and fun.

53 The facilities which had originally been planned to profit from the Tokyo

International City Expo eventually opened one after the other, some after long delays caused by the cancellation. The new unmanned monorail, Yurikamome, opened in November 1995. It cost 1,702 billion yen, and was mocked for

‘transporting air’ 空気ぶ, because of the lack of passengers. The new transportation system had only thirty commuters a day at Aomi station, where

Palette Town is situated today (Mizogami 2000). Hotel Nikko Tokyo opened in

March 1996, expecting no more than half of the target occupancy. Decks Tokyo

Beach opened soon after in July 1996. After several postponements and changes of developer, it was eventually completed (at the lowest possible cost) by Sega

Enterprises.

But the bleak outlook did not continue for long. In late November 1995, Asahi

Shimbun reported that, rather than ‘air’, the new unmanned monorail specifically constructed for Daiba was, in fact, transporting 250,000 customers a week (Mizogami 2000). Many of the new passengers were couples seeking a

‘romantic night view’ of Tokyo Bay (Asahi shimbun1995: 4)11. Hotel Nikko Tokyo received many more guests than expected. Its occupancy reached 60 per cent on average, and 100 per cent on weekends (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Shiryō 1998: 139).

Decks Tokyo Beach had 1.4 million visitors in the first months, and 13 million in the first year after it opened, some 50 per cent above expectation (Gekkan Leisure

11Ashashinbum 25 November 1995 Yoruno ‚yurikamome futariwo nosete’ -- 46bun 720 yen shinmeijou ‚rinkai no yakei wo’ 夜人乗-- 46 分 720 新臨 海夜晙Asahishinbum Evening Edition:4

54 Sangyō Shiryō 1998: 140). The reincarnated Daiba filled with leisure facilities received some 730,000 visitors during the Golden Week holiday period (27

April–6 May 1996), 12 and another 2.7 million during the summer holidays (19

July to 31 August) (Hiramoto 2000: 225). These visitors were mainly tourists from Tokyo and surrounding prefectures, wanting to experience the ‘feel of a metropolitan resort 都会感覚’. The sub-centre – Tokyo Frontier,

Tokyo Teleport Town, Daiba – was about to reinvent itself again, as something entirely different. And this transformation was to be the start of another sort of cultural creation.

The Story of Palette Town

In 1997, two years after the cancellation of the Tokyo City Expo, two blocks — the ‘S’ and ‘T’ blocks — remained without development tenders. In April that year, these two blocks went up for public tender based on a ten-year lease. The successful bidders, including Mitsui Bussan 井物産, Toyota 自動車,

Dentsū 電通 and Daisei Kensetsu 大成建設 took T block, and Mori Biru 森 and Itōchū Shōji 伊藤忠商 won the tender to develop S block (Gekkan Leisure

Sangyō Bessatu, 1999a). The result of these developments was nothing less than an advertising, retail and entertainment phenomenon. They created a complete set of cultural artefacts and leisure facilities for the 150-year old dump in the

12 A series of national holidays which fall in quick succession in late April and early May. People often use this week-long vacation to take overseas and domestic trips.

55 bay, turning it into one of the most visited tourist destinations and making it a shopping paradise, as well as the most popular place for romantic excursions — something of an all-in-one package for an urbanite’s leisure lifestyle.

The original plan to develop high-tech office space became something entirely different. It is now ‘Palette Town’. And this time, the plan was here to stay, at least for the ten-year lease. Palette Town was a hit from the first day it opened, and its continuing success triggered a number of other similar ventures, all hoping to generate profit with the same winning formula combining shopping and leisure with a touch of the exotic. This is a formula already successfully used in Las Vegas and Disneyland around the world. However, in Daiba, the themed environment is no longer a place of excursion, but an actual everyday

‘reality’ for its residents. While its past is intrinsically connected with Tokyo’s city planning and economic development, its future will have significant implications not only on retail business but also on the consumption of leisure and media as a whole. As I will elaborate further, Palette Town’s vigorous confection of themed entertainment with cultural nuances and target-specific

(or specialty) stores all carefully coordinate with its environs and peripheral facilities. The aim of the layout and marketing tactics is to get consumers to come, to stay (or to live) and ultimately to buy its products and services. This kind of ‘theme mall’ now flourishes in major cities and their surrounding suburbs around Japan. The formula: part theme park, part mega store, part leisure facility, all consumption.

56 Thus in March 1999 a whole set of themed entertainment facilities opened at

Palette Town: Mega Web the massive themed exhibition hall with the single motif of Toyota cars, showing the ‘past, present and future’ of the automobile;

Zepp Tokyo, boasting the biggest live entertainment house in the world;

NeoGeo World Tokyo Bayside featuring karaoke rooms, pool halls and forty-four lanes of bowling alleys; and, as the icing on the cake, the groundbreaking blend of theme park and shopping mall, VenusFort and

SunWalk opened on 25 August (AMBusiness, 1999b).

The commercial outcome of this series of themed malls and entertainment centres is nothing short of a triumph on an epic scale, attracting record numbers of customers from the first days of opening and remaining immensely popular today. The image of Daiba has also changed completely since the opening of the various themed facilities. As developers continue to build more and more themed facilities, including Aqua City Odaiba (April 2001), Mediage (May

2001), and Little Hong Kong on the top floors of Decks Tokyo Beach (November

2001), Daiba has been reincarnated as a ‘must-see’ tourist destination in Tokyo.

It is now a seaside resort, a theme park and a shopper’s paradise, all in one package, within a 30-minute journey from central Tokyo.

Looking at Daiba’s planning history and its blueprints at different stages, one might assume that the current success is a commercial serendipity. However, as

I will elaborate later in this chapter, there were a number of reasons for this success, as suggested by the surveys and research conducted on the population

57 flow of visitors and their reasons for trips to Daiba. These reasons relate to the general trends of rapid urbanisation in the inner city wards of Tokyo, the eagerness of consumers to find new forms of entertainment and relaxation, and the need for investors to develop new sites and methods to stimulate consumer spending. These factors all point to a different story with a clear rationale for the theming of Daiba and other similar developments in and around Japanese urban centres.

The various earlier incarnations of Daiba and its current commercial success not only provide an example of how city developments can no longer be purely based on functional needs, but increasingly become the most grand (and expensive) medium for consumption. Daiba turned out not to be a hi-tech business hub, or Tokyo’s sub-centre providing city living of the future, but an amalgam of themed leisure and shopping facilities, offering a ‘stage-like’ background for otherwise not-so-ordinary activities – shopping, clubbing, amusement and other leisure facilities.

The initial success of Palette Town and Daiba has not faded since the first themed entertainment facilities such as MegaWeb and NeoGeo Tokyo Bayside opened in March 1999. If anything, the statistics show that its popularity is on the rise. During Golden Week 2000, there were more than 1.3 million visits to

Daiba, 100,000 more than at the same time in 1999. According to a detailed survey conducted by Nikkei Research, of the 606 people surveyed 82.2 per cent had visited Daiba more than once, and 44.9 per cent had been to Daiba five times or more as of 24 June 2000 (Nikkie Sangyou Kenkyusho, 2000: 9, 150).

58 According to another survey conducted by VenusFort itself, not one female answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘Do you want no future visit?’ (33)13. Admittedly, it is hard to take this particular result entirely at face value. However it is equally difficult to dismiss altogether the popularity of VenusFort and the themed entertainment facilities. The popularity of these leisure and shopping facilities is indeed making Daiba a major attraction for Tokyoites and residents from surrounding prefectures, helping it to gain iconic value in the tourism and leisure industries14 (Congress & Convention 1999).

Looking back at Daiba’s 150-year history, especially its more recent developmental failures, it is only logical to inquire why the developers were interested in spending an excessive amount of capital to develop a place with such a disastrous development record, and one that was difficult and expensive to access. How, after the many previous stages of transformation failed, did

Daiba achieve such immense popularity as an all-in-one package for themed consumption of leisure and goods?

To begin answering these questions, we first need to see if Daiba satisfies any

13 ‘Mō ichidō kitakunai to iu josei wa hitori mo inai う一来い言う女性人 いい’. Of course the question is flawed in the context of an objective statistical survey, and is little more than a marketing tactic. But a separate survey shows that indeed, by 2000, less than 20 per cent of the visitors to Daiba are first-timers, and of those who visited VenusFort, a little more than 63 per cent of those surveyed like to repeat the experience. VenusFort’s claim is limited, and is directed only at women, as almost all services and boutiques in the theme mall are exclusively targeted at young women. The claim however, does imply a strong advocacy from their targeted clientele—young female consumers. 14 東京新, or Tokyo’s New Famous Destination as it is often called, VenusFort is nearly always listed on periodicals on everything from shopping, to night life, to tourist guides.

59 needs for both developers and consumers. On a grander scale – in terms of the production and consumption of culture – Daiba’s current status as a new tourist attraction and as a fashionable ‘trend-setter’ raises the question of how prominent the role of themed environments is in the Japanese marketplace.

There are numerous themed environments on Daiba that clearly intend to simulate or replicate the imageries of real places, such as ‘Southern Italy’, ‘Hong

Kong’ and ‘New York’, sometimes of specific eras in the history of these places.

How, in the business of attracting and stimulating consumers, do these cultural icons work? If the simulated environments are becoming increasingly imperative elements of the ever new phantasmagoria of themed cityscapes, how do we continue to distinguish and divide our everyday (real) lives from that of a themed (or simulated) one? When cultural icons and themed spaces are no longer merely the medium of consumption, but a daily reality; and their narratives (newly constructed or imagined via media content) become part of our own, how can we continue to differentiate media from our-‘selves’?

The cultural production of Daiba and similar themed environments in cities such as Tokyo was succinctly described by Appadurai (1996) as imagination in the ‘postelectronic world’: the imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies. It has entered the logic of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered. … Now … it is no longer a matter of specially endowed (charismatic) individuals, injecting the imagination where it does not belong. Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. (Appadurai 1996: 5)

60

Indeed, the ‘ordinary people’, the consumers deploying their imaginations are no longer satisfied with the occasional distant admiration for what they see on

TV of the great cultural icons, the exotic and the latest fashions of all things.

Today, they want to live it. Las Vegas, for example, can no longer be seen merely as a jumbled replica of other authentic cultural icons, but as a true cultural icon in its own right, with its own kind of authenticity. Venturi, Brown and Izenour’s

1972 study of Las Vegas does more than question the hierarchy of architectural styles as, today, the cycle of contemporary style has become as short as a mere

30 years (Venturi et al. 1977), or in the case of VenusFort and Palette Town, merely 10 years. It also offers a view of Las Vegas as a style itself – one saturated with symbols and visual appropriations of other cultural icons

(Venturi et al. 1977: 129). To push the idea further, Las Vegas has become an original and an origin of style, producing culture of a particular kind. It is certainly not a construct of any conventional religion or dynasty, nor is it by some ‘charismatic individual’, but a kind of cultural object produced on the basis of, and via the imaginations of consumers from around the world.

Simulacrum of Southern Italy or replica of Las Vegas?

The promoters of both VenusFort and Little Hong Kong claim that the places indeed simulate (respectively) Southern Italy of the 17-18th century

61 (AMBusiness, 1999a:13), and Hong Kong before 199715. The claims are almost

plausible in terms of the images of the spaces alone. VenusFort indeed looks

very much like a ‘stage’ where old Italy is about ‘to lift its curtain’ (AMBusiness,

1999a:17). Little Hong Kong is filled with Chinese restaurants, posters of Jackie

Chan and advertisements for street medicines – and this image is completed by

souvenir shops selling Chinese foods and tourist paraphernalia.

Figure 6: VenusFort exterior, and the once-biggest Ferris Wheel in Japan

15 The ‘little Hong Kong’ in Daiba simulates the Hong Kong before the 1997 hand-over. Apart from the visual images of Hong Kong, more specifically Kowloon in the night (and night only), it also has sound simulations of aeroplanes flying overhead. Cramped with billboards and neon signs of recognisable text, together with the sound of airplanes coming down from the ceiling, it signifies signs of the times. The opening of new Hong Kong International Airport Chek Lap Kok meant that the planes no longer needed to fly over congested urban Kowloon as they did with the old Kai Tak airport before 1997.

62 The ‘stage’, however is hardly conspicuous from the outside. What contains the simulated Southern Italy is built with the cheapest construction materials. The exterior of the building resembles more an oversized shipping container box than anything remotely Neoclassical (figure 6). Inside of the box, however, it presents the visitors with an entirely different world. There are five squares and one plaza: Church Square 教会広場, Olive Square 広場, Fountain

Square 噴水広場, Happiness Square 幸福広場, Hope Square 希望広場 and Plazza

Del Flore (sic). All of these are decorated with replicas of Italian and other

European monumental sculptures.

Figure 7: The ‘Mouth of Truth’, when ‘truth’ is a matter of indifference and authenticity a matter of tautology. In VenusFort, the Neoclassical is part of ‘Californiazation’, and the Romans will do what the Californians do. The ’truth’ is supervised by a Roman Art professor, replicated by Roman artists, who know the original well.

63

The surface of every square metre of the walls is meticulously painted, in great detail with counterfeit vintage looks. Each wall, each individual shop front, and even the floors, are carefully constructed like a great artwork of fakery. There are paintings in Italian Quasi-mannerism styles, sculptures from Greek mythology, and even a replica ‘Mouth of the Truth’, reconstructed by Italian sculptors under the supervision of a professor from the Academy of Fine Art in

Rome (figure 7). The electronic ‘sky’, projected on the ceilings inside of

VenusFort, is an artwork of technology and great human imagination coupled with eagerness to imitate nature — it changes every hour, much faster paced than the sky outside, with filmic impression (figure 8).

At one end of the theme mall, one finds the ‘Church Square’. At the end of the square sits its namesake – a façade of a church looking as though it came out of real Neoclassical Italy or a movie set, except that the façade is all there is – the façade of a wall; there is no room, no statues of religious greats, nothing beyond or behind the wall – no contents. Young couples get married there – blessed by ceremonies performed outside of the church (under the wall that looks like a front gate into a church), and under a massive television screen above (figures

10 and 11).

64

Figure 8: The computerised ‘sky’ in VenusFort.

Figure 9: Copies of sculptures and the simulated sky in VenusFort

65

Figure 10: Postmodern wedding with a Neoclassical twist, at VenusFort.

Figure 11: In front of the façade of an imaginary church, under an electronic screen.

66 VenusFort is truly an artwork of a themed environment. It might have successfully created the feeling of an Italian street from the old times, especially for people who have no other visual reference for 17-18th century Italy. The

European ‘streets’ and ‘sky’ are inside this construction called VenusFort; and inside the streets, one finds the shops. When we wander off the ‘streets’ into the shops, the outside is the ‘Italian streets’ with pan-European sculptures, and quasi-Neoclassical paintings. The real outside, that is Daiba or Tokyo, is successfully eliminated. VenusFort is a world of its own. There are no clocks in

VenusFort – the computerized ‘sky’ gives a shorthand impression of time passing by. There are no windows – thus eliminating the uncontrollability of natural light, which may remind the consumer in this constructed anachronistic

‘Italy’ of the other reality outside. We are supposed to, and often do, forget that we are in Tokyo, or even in Japan for that matter. Indeed the reality inside of

VenusFort is rendered by the mastery of ‘natural’, realistic surroundings and ancient European city sceneries.

Daiba’s Little Hong Kong is also filled with such paraphernalia: from painted billboards to junked washing machines and from a fake real estate agency on a wall (also a façade) to Jackie Chan posters plastered on poles supporting nothing. The supposed noise of Kowloon plays in the background, including, a little too frequently, the sounds of a passenger airplane hovering above just before landing at the old Kai Tak Hong Kong International, imagined not far away. There is also a tea house, a Feng Shui shop, a tourist shop selling things not from Tokyo but from Hong Kong; even a little park with a gate and nothing

67 else but stereo sound of birds singing in the background — all with a postcard view of Hong Kong, just a bit smaller than the famous island also by the sea.

The nostalgic Little Hong Kong and Italy nearby have made the past and exotic profitable for Daiba. As David Lowenthal puts it insightfully, ‘If the past is a foreign country, nostalgia had made it “the foreign country with the healthiest tourist trade of all.”’(Lowenthal 1985: 4)

Figures 12 & 13: Daiba’s Hong Kong. The uncanny reality of the simulacrum — in this case, the Hong Kong of postcards and as imagined. It is strangely real being in Daiba’s Little fake Hong Kong, which provokes not the memories of Hong Kong the island, but nostalgia for ‘Hong Kong’.

Tokyo is far away now. First, one needs to get out of the shops, get out of the shopping mood, and then emerge to the ‘European street outside’ to recognize that indeed the ‘outside’ is still inside. The ‘real’ outside is a place called Daiba,

68 which again is just as artificial. Here, the effort involved in questioning the constructed reality and finding the ‘real’ is ever more futile – the result is perpetually an ironic one.

It is ironic, because ‘real’ here is no longer relevant. Tokyo today is Tokyo partly because of VenusFort, little Hong Kong and such like. Today, VenusFort symbolises not 17-18th century, not Italy – it symbolise first Daiba, then Tokyo.

The simulated reality is indeed part of Tokyo’s reality. For those who live in

Daiba, work for the developers, play in the endless variety of leisure facilities and shop in VenusFort and eat at Daiba’s Little Hong Kong, this themed reality is as real as everyday life.

Despite what the developers claim, the immediate model for VenusFort is not the faraway, long-ago Southern Italy, but rather it is based on the very same idea of the famed Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace, in Las Vegas (AMBusiness,

1999b). It is built to look we may imagine Italy to have been in 17th Century, but the experience it offers is that of Las Vegas. Travelling to Las Vegas is not to see

New York, or Paris, but ‘New York New York’ or ‘Paris Paris’. The images of

New York, Paris or Italy are simulations – not of the original, but of an imagination of the original. The master imageries are mere ‘references’, and the simulacra are ‘hyper-real’. As Baudrillard (1983: 96, 97) so eloquently puts it: They will no longer have to counterfeit, since they are going to be produced all at once on a gigantic scale. The problem of their uniqueness, or their origin, is no longer a matter of concern; their origin is technique, and the only sense they possess is in the dimension of the industrial simulacrum …

69

Whether there are two or n identical objects: The relation between them is no longer that of an original to its counterfeit — neither analogy nor reflection — but equivalence, indifference. In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other.

The result, like Las Vegas, is that the new construct becomes astonishingly ‘real’. At Daiba, the desire for the exotic is no longer for the master imagery, but for the newly constructed thematic environments, known as VenusFort or Daiba’s Little Hong Kong. The connections between VenusFort and Las Vegas go beyond appearance: VenusFort was in fact built in co-operation with designers from Dougall Design Associates Inc. from California – the very people who built the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. During the construction Wakabayashi, the president of VenusFort, visited Los Angeles and Las Vegas ‘tens of times’ to learn the trade and to organize co-operation between VenusFort and the renowned West Coast designers (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Shiryō 2000: 47).

The cost of realizing this Italian Neoclassical imagery on what was essentially Tokyo’s wasteland was fantastically high. At 300 billion yen, the exterior of VenusFort is anything but imaginative. The interior, however, was constructed with the cooperation of the most experienced American theme park designers and artists. Following in the steps of Forum Shops in Caesar’s Palace, VenusFort incorporated the most sophisticated technology for its lighting, sound and surface coding techniques, to create the ‘virtual space’ (Tamura 2000: 109). The end-product is an all-weather 17th Century Italy, the Daiba version – and a ‘stage’ where the consumers can discursively ‘perform’ a retail ‘drama’, (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Bessatu, 1999a), all without seeing one Italian person or

70 building. Just as Baudrillard (1983) argues, here the relation between the counterfeit and the original is no longer relevant.

Figures 14 & 15: Forum Shops, Las Vegas

71 If the function of the imagery of Disneyland is to conceal the fact that the rest of

America is no longer real (Baudrillard 1983: 25, 96-7), Yoshimoto argues that on a political level, Japan’s internationalisation is to ‘transform the real into the imaginary’ – referring to the indirect contact with ‘real’ foreignness as everything is pre-packaged before entering Japan. He then continues, arguing that, facilitated by both internationalism and neo-nationalism, the process of duplicating the foreign inside Japan first gives an illusion that Japan is opened up to the world and can afford expensive imitations and even the real thing; secondly, it erases the concrete social situations from the foreign, and re-organises the imported ‘free-floating signifiers’ into the master narrative, which situates Japan at the centre of the world (Yoshimoto 1989: 22).

Different Dramas – Tokyo Disneyland and VenusFort

Disneyland essentially offers a re-enacted narrative where the audience and consumers are buying an experience based on well accustomed, well-known and heavily mediated fantasies, mostly in the form of Disney movies and television series. Contrary to what many have believed, Disneyland is not a simulation of America – it is a true simulacrum, simulating nowhere real. Baudrillard wrote in his famous book Simulations that ‘Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation’ and in it ‘the objective profile of America may be traced throughout.’ The ‘simulation’ he refers to is an ideological and imaginary one. Disneyland does not duplicate American images but simulates its imaginaries, such as the ‘play of illusions and phantasms: Pirates, the Frontier, Future World’, all based on media narratives.

72 And nor is Tokyo Disneyland, contrary to popular misunderstanding, a replica of the Disneyland in Los Angeles. They are not imageries of the same order. Disneyland in America simulates first of all fantasies, illusions and phantasms (Findlay 1992; Wasko 2001). Disneyland in Japan simulates first the idea of ‘America’, then the exotic fairytales. As Yoshimi writes, in a paper titled ‘The Politics of Disneyland – Tokyo Disneyland and Commercial Culture in Contemporary Japan’: Disneyland slowly replaced the American military base and became the central symbol for mass image ‘America’, and accordingly the American image became more closely associated with the consumer society and American culture. (Yoshimi 1993)

He also analyses the spatial arrangements of Tokyo Disneyland and its novelties, and the parallels with Japanese society that ‘has become a Disneyland’ (see also Brannen 1992, and Raz 1999: 155). Moreover, Yoshimi also makes an important point regarding the symbolism of Tokyo Disneyland, namely that its image of both Disney and ‘America’ ‘is merely a theme’. In the case of Tokyo Disneyland, it does not really correspond to a ‘native culture’, in fact according to MacCannell (1976: 155) ‘the disillusioned tourist no longer takes part in a quest for authenticity’. The idea of ‘native’ in Disneyland is a perpetually contradictory one. As I have argued, it was never a simulacrum of a place or a reality, it only tries to materialize fantasy.

VenusFort on the other hand, claims to be a simulation with particular topographic and historical specificity. No doubt some of the visitors to

VenusFort have visited Italy, as it is one of the most popular holiday destinations for young Japanese ‘Office Ladies’. However, they are not in

VenusFort for an authentic Italian experience. They go to VenusFort for an

73 otherwise mundane everyday routine – shopping, which can be performed elsewhere. VenusFort does not simulate an Italian experience; it at most induces the thought of one. Like many such constructions in Las Vegas, VenusFort is a simulated imaginary with a disconnected reference. VenusFort requires the knowledge (or at least some impression) of Italy. Disneyland without America is still just that, Disneyland. It is always intended to be part of a fantasy world.

Without television and other narrative media as the source of this fantasy world, Disneyland would not be Disneyland as we know it. As Walt Disney announced at the beginning of Disneyland’s history on 17 July 1955, when the first Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, ‘I don’t want the public to see the world they live in while they’re in the park. I want them to feel they are in another world’ (Findlay 1992: 92).

However, both Tokyo Disneyland and VenusFort are stages for performances, with different ‘casts’. Disneyland hires actors to perform the fantasies and narratives; VenusFort invites consumers to perform their own. Both have a formula for creating an instant mise-en-scène of everyday life. On the whole, they supplement everyday life with novelty, lending the mundane a tad of the extraordinary, making a temporary departure from ordinary life an affordable cultural and dramatic experience. But building on what Disneyland has done, VenusFort and other themed malls have gone one step further — they have brought consumers onto the ‘stage’ previously only occupied by the hired ‘cast’. In so doing they have turned the otherwise extraordinary experience into an everyday reality.

74 The Economics of Simulation

At over 15,000 persons per km2 in the early 1990s (Masai 1994: 121), and in some areas up to around 20,000 people per km2 in some of the metropolitan areas in

200416, Tokyo metropolis is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Business and shopping districts such as Shinjuku, Ikebukuro and

Shibuya are crammed with large office buildings and endless department stores. The major railway stations are often the easiest point of reference to find ways around in these areas. They are not only the nodal points of transportation links and population flows; they often are also the local town centres. The railway companies built the stations, then the department stores, bringing in commuters and turning them into shoppers.17 Shibuya and Ikebukuro stations are typical examples in Tokyo. Eventually the expansion of department stores and main streets connected the stations, such as Shibuya with Harajuku and

Ebisu, Ginza with Yūrakuchō and Shimbashi, Roppongi with Azabu and

Aoyama. The city centres are running out of space to develop.

Rising land prices in these city centres at least partially caused residential depopulation in these inner city wards in the core of the Tokyo city inside of the

Yamanote loop train route (Wedge 1998: 32-3). This emptying out the core areas

16 Tokyo Statistic Bureau, Tokyo Population Statistics 2004 www.toukei.metro.tokyo.jp/jsuikei/js-index.htm 17 A good example of gentrification of real estate around railway stations is the Tsutsumi family’s Seibu-Saison department stores developed in conjunction with railway stations such as Shibuya and Ikebukuro in Tokyo. For a detailed account see Havens 1994.

75 with most expensive land prices is often referred to as the ‘Yamanote phenomenon’. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the population inflow to these areas shrank and the number of residents moving out of the centres to satellite towns continued to increase. The over-crowded city drains drastically every night after the last train leaves for the surrounding satellite towns and suburbs. The daily population fluctuates in major metropolitan areas between the early mornings when workers arrive from the satellite towns and suburbs, and late night when they go home. Barthes’ early semiotic description of the stations as ‘prosaic landmarks’, whose concentration is thwarted by its

‘incessant departure’ (Barthes 1982: 38,39) is backed up by statistics. Since the

1980s, two million commuters arrive daily in the three central wards, ten million commute on the Yamanote line and seven million commuters and 2500 trains stop at Tokyo Station, which is also the major rail hub linking trains across the entire country. In the 1990s, the population in the three central wards dropped to under 265,000 during the night (Noriyuki and Junjiro 1996).

Another factor which plays an important role in the changing patterns of consumption is the percentage of young people in Japan, who usually have more disposable income than financial commitment. After the Oil Shock in

197318, the proportion of this group in the population has increased rapidly in

18 According to the 1995 Japanese census (Kokusei chōsa 国勢調査)Nakamura & White (1988: 123 - 157) both single males and females aged between 25- 29 have increased quite drastically after 1975, from 48.3% to 66.9% and 18.1% to 48%, respectively. The same kind of increase also occurred in the age group between 30 and 34, from 14.3% to 37.3% for male, from 7.7% to 19.7% for female.

76 step with economic growth. Much of the migration from less urbanised areas came to Tokyo19 during the high growth period of the 1980s. This was mainly single workers without families20. This vast group of unmarried consumers provides a massive market for consumer goods and at the same time demands a more tailored style of goods and service from the developers and retailers.

The increasing young population in urban city centres, where rental prices are often disproportionately high for the young, may also have contributed to yet another social phenomenon – the ‘parasite singles’. According to the 1998 Public

Welfare White papers 厚生書 published by the Ministry of Public Welfare

Information Secretary 厚生大臣官統計情報部国民生活基礎調査, the proportion of single working females who lived at home with their parents increased from

70.8 per cent of the total in 1975 to 83.6 per cent in 1996 for the 20-24 age group, and from 68.5 per cent to 79.5 per cent for the 25-29 age group. As the term implies, ‘parasite singles’ live in their parents’ homes, mostly without paying

19 Even before the real boom started in the early 1980s and before the bubble period started, according to Nakamura and White (1988), young people in their 20s were moving into Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures. But after getting married and having children, 5 to 15 year after their initial migration to Tokyo, they started to leave. This second outward migration from Tokyo however is not in the manner of the phenomenon commonly understood as ‘U turn’, meaning returning to their original home-towns. Rather, they tend to move to Tokyo’s outer suburbs and the three satellite prefectures, namely Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama. The populations in these three prefectures grew from 7.4 million in 1955 to 18 million in the early 1980s (124, 125, 126) 20 According to Honjo, even though Osaka and Nagoya lost population, Tokyo’s ‘in-migration of people of reproductive age continued’, and the population growth in Tokyo was far greater than the rest of the country (Honjo, 1998:117).

77 rent or board of any kind, and are therefore able to spend most of their earnings as disposable income. In Japan, this group of consumers is considered an extremely important element of the market makeup, and has been targeted by businesses across the board. According to Rinkou 林 (2000: 63-6) the

‘parasite singles’ are in fact leading a specific trend in consumption, which demands a personal (as opposed to familial) orientation towards goods and consumption. They consume mostly leisure goods, such as fashion, cosmetics, accessories, mobile phones, personal electronics, beauty salon services, overseas trips and even cars (mostly not for commuting to work). This lifestyle has provided a breeding ground for specific patterns of consumption that emphasise novelty.

The data in the 2000 Leisure White Papers suggests that the industry in the life-style/leisure sector that most needs to develop is overseas travel (Yoka

Kaihatsu Sentā 2000 ). In the Statistical Data of Leisure and Resort 2000, of the

2,551 people surveyed, 66.9% ranked ‘travel’ first as their preferred means of

‘relaxation’ (Shokuhin Ryūtsū Jōhō Sentā 2000, 250). The purpose of taking these trips is said often to be ‘release from everyday banality’, or to ‘rest the mind’, relieve mental stress. This is also why recently the Japanese leisure and tourism industry is taking a strong interest in the business of stress relief (iyashi

癒). The retail industry is also combining the characteristics of the tourism and recreation sectors. Based on these recent consumer trends, it is not surprising to see VenusFort on Daiba becoming a popular must-see, as it provides a temporary getaway, a stage for an instant mise-en-scène, rendered

78 with exoticism, both in time and space, all just a short trip from the centre of

Tokyo.

Around the World in a Day: other Themed Environments

VenusFort and Daiba’s Little Hong Kong are by no means alone in the business of themed consumption spaces. The number of themed retails stores, restaurants (see figure 16) and even residential developments is increasing rapidly around Japan. The Parco department store in Shibuya has opened up a

Tōdaimon Ichiba 東大門市場 themed after the famous market (of the same name) in Seoul, Korea21. To make the ‘atmosphere’ more authentic than mere visual and textual references to Seoul, the operators of Tōdaimon Ichiba in

Japan even brought shops directly from Korea complete with Korean sales staff who speak little or no Japanese. If the themed shopping centres are indeed the

‘stages’ for the customers to perform dramatic consumption, the paraphernalia and the stage-set are no longer just inanimate symbolic objects, but they now include humans with ‘authentic’ origin – a technique previously only systematically employed by Disneyland, Las Vegas and more recently the newly opened Universal Studio in Osaka22.

21In Osaka too there is at least one other Tōdaimon Ichiba, to feed the so-called ‘Korean boom’. 22 Tokyo Disneyland has always employed gaijin or foreigners as ‘cast’ to increase the ‘realness’ of its exoticism. Osaka Universal Studio, which opened in 2002, advertised for ‘people who can sing and dance’ in the Sydney Morning Herald to recruit non-Japanese cast members.

79

Figure 16: Dining with God. A restaurant in Shinjuku, Tokyo, themed like a church. Preaching to the converted? Or the irreverent? Or has the preaching lost its meaning? People can have an atmospheric meal in the church of trend worshipping not the symbolism of the Virgin Mary or of Christ, but a mood decorated with them.

Facing the obvious threat from themed malls, traditional department stores are also changing their way of doing business to fit the trend. The Kansai-based

Hankyu Department Stores 阪急店, for example, has been actively growing its business in themed shopping centres. In 1992, it joined its business with Harbour Land in Kobe. In 1996, it opened Mosaic Box

in Hyōgo Prefecture. In March 2000, it opened its amusement shopping centre, Mosaic Mall 港 in Yokohama, its first in the

Kantō area. With a built-in Ferris wheel and 126 specialty shops, the shopping mall has a target of 8 million visitors and 240 billion yen business a year.

80 Similarly, Tōkyū Railways 東京急行電鉄, who also owns Tōkyū Department

Stores in major stations around Tokyo, invested 50 billion yen to build

Cranberry Mall in Minami Machida — 40 minutes on the train from Shibuya station in the centre of Tokyo. Themed after images of

Southern California, the mall eliminated entirely the use of Japanese language on their signs, in an attempt to provide as much as possible the quality of

‘performing (shopping) with the sense of hinichijō 非日常, or extraordinariness’23

(Architecture 2000: 50-57). Even the supermarket group Daiei recognised the possible benefit of this ‘extraordinariness’ for their more down to earth clientele.

The supermarket chain invested 70 billion yen to build a new shopping centre called Shoppers Mall Marina Town in

Fukuoka. The shopping centre stocks mostly low cost goods and services with a suburban ‘American Santa Fe’ theme to target the 70 per cent of its customers aged in their teens to thirties (Architecture 2000: 58-62).

Various kinds of theme park have also spread across the Japanese archipelago.

Themes include Japanese gardens, Space World, UFO museums. There are volcano eruption experience galleries, a Dutch village with a castle moved brick by brick from the Netherlands to the recently opened Universal Studio in

Osaka, and a Japan-only DisneySea. The list of themes is as endless as the parks themselves, and continues to expand24. Universal Studio Japan and DisneySea

23 As the theme mall developers put it ‘trying to get the visitor to perform the extraordinariness 訪非日常性演出狙い’. 24 For a more detailed depiction and analysis of various themes and ‘historical parks’ see Hendry 2000. See also Raz’s account of this ‘theme park boom’ (Raz 1999: 147-155).

81 are both newly-opened theme parks with massive investments and occupying vast landmasses. More such theme parks are either in construction or will open to the public soon.

To join the competition with a long list of large-scale theme parks, Lotte World plans to build a new theme park, Urayasu, next door to Tokyo DisneyLand and

DisneySea. If their plan materialises, this will almost completely eliminate the previous local culture – replacing it with instantly renewable narratives and short trips to foreign fantasy land(s) at a price and distance easily accessible to everyone. As Urry analyses: Isolated from the host environment and the local people, the mass tourist travels in guided groups and finds pleasure in inauthentic contrived attractions, gullibly enjoying the 'pseudo-events' and disregarding the 'real' world outside. As a result tourist entrepreneurs and indigenous populations are induced to produce ever-more extravagant displays for local people. Over time, via advertising and the media, the images generated of different tourist gazes come to constitute a closed self-perpetuating system of illusions which provide the tourist with the basis for selection and evaluating potential places to visit. (Urry 1990: 7)

Indeed, for the residents of Urayasu, their reality is by default that of themed city spaces with narratives and media content. The previous boundaries between the everyday and the novelty, the real and the simulacrum, the authentic and the simulation are inevitably becoming blurred. These themed environments are filled with ubiquitous broadcasting of the ever-evolving narratives via traditional media and networked digital media such as the

82 Internet and mobile phones. The consumers in these ‘environments’ are living not only physically in the themed spaces, but metaphysically in the themed narratives.

Not every theme park is built for fast amusement, or ease of faster replacement in the near future. The theme park Huis Ten Bosch in Omura Bay, Nagasaki prefecture, for example, blurs the line between temporary cultural recreation and permanent cultural establishment. As noted by McCormack, in trying to recreate medieval Dutch life, the theme park was extremely carefully and expensively constructed with stones and specially fired bricks imported from

Holland. With a network of six-kilometre-long canals, three times the scale of the Dutch equivalent, it is ‘no more Dutch than Kyoto is Chinese’ (McCormack

1996: 98). In other words, its construction hints at a rather prolonged and possibly deeper-rooted cultural establishment. At the cost of 2,200 billion yen just for the first stage of its construction (Asahi shimbun 1992), the permanence of the structure will no doubt be part of its long-term influence on the local culture.

Moreover, Huis Ten Bosch also has blurred the line between themed leisure and real life. The park is built on 152 hectares of land, almost twice the size of Tokyo

Disneyland. It has 53 restaurants, twelve museums and galleries, eleven amusement facilities, four hotels and other structures such as Domutōru

Church Tower, and Huis Ten Bosch Palace (Asahi shimbun 1992). With this kind of abundance and permanence in its facilities, the park intends to offer more

83 than just a quick escape from everyday life. Huis Ten Bosch offers real estate for people who would like to live in a medieval Dutch town, as a durable way of life. In autumn 1992, soon after the park opened, more than half of the 41 houses were already sold (Asahi shimbun 1992). For the people who have now lived in this theme park for more than ten years, the ‘medieval Dutch’ way of life is not merely a ‘momentary dream 一時夢’, as most of the theme parks offer, but indeed their everyday reality.

Even though the scale and intended permanence of Huis Ten Bosch are rare, the basic concept of building something foreign, exotic and occasionally unfathomable is far from exceptional. The above list of theme worlds of various kinds is unlikely to be exhaustive25. With the theme park market estimated at

5000–6000 billion yen annually (Suga 2000: 80), there will be continued interest and incentive for developers and city governments to dream up more motifs to satisfy consumers seeking ever more extra-ordinary experiences.

25 Namuko Wonder Egg 東京子玉都市型 ワ is a ‘city-type theme park’, also creating a ‘leisure space of a different dimension’ 異次元 空間. There is also Space World in Kitakyūshū City ワ 九市, Canadian World in Hokkaidō ワ海芦別市, Sanrio Pure Land in Tama City in Tokyo 東京都多摩市 and Harmony Land in Hinode Machi Ōita Prefecture 大分県日出, to list only a few which opened in the space of two years before 1992. More recent examples are: Ikusupiari in Chiba, which opened on 7 July 2000; Universal Studio, Japan, opened in Osaka in late 2001; Tokyo DisneySea in Chiba, opened in September 2001; also named and themed after the ‘father of Japanese manga’, Tezuka Osamu World is planned to open in 2007 in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture.

84

Conclusion

Staging the everyday

Whether or not VenusFort, Little Hong Kong and other themed retail, leisure or residential environments will be able to take consumers away from either their everyday life or previous ‘ordinary’ realities, these themed spaces without doubt play an increasingly visible role in everyday consumption in Japan.

VenusFort is far from a unique case in creating a stage-like retail environment for the consumers to ‘perform’ their very own (retail) dramas. Many stores around the world have recognised that their retail spaces are indeed part of the medium for consumption26. Themed environments provide narratives, physical

‘stages’ and more often than not, exoticisms that are only another link in an established chain of media content for consumption. The themed environments is to consumption space what television is to the otherwise eventless living room – in that they both are media to other narratives and imaginations, which in Morse’ words are ‘simulacra of fictitious situation of enunciation rather than a world outside’ everyday life (1990: 201). The themed physical spaces exemplified by retail environments such as VenusFort often work together with

26 Creating media stages for shoppers is one of the new tools of retail. Prada for example has elevated its stores to spaces of media stages and its products to art exhibits. One of their ‘key concepts’ is to introduce ‘non-commercial typologies’ so ‘cultural events could be hosted in stores’ (Project for Prada, Rem Koolhaas, e. a. (2001). The construction of media stages is important in achieving such goals, such as is the case in the second floor of their LA store, ‘where all of Prada can be browsed – real or virtual’ to create an aura for the media stage.

85 the mediascape: the television, the print media and the networked media.

The developmental histories of VenusFort and, to a larger extent, Daiba, are of course first of all illustrative stories of how readily the emphasis of city planning and development changed in response to the economic and political climate. However, they also offer evidence that the city is in fact a consumption medium. VenusFort led the way on Daiba and showed, in many ways, a trend in the construction of stages and dreams as part of a consumption package.

On a larger scale, cityscapes have long served the purpose of providing a ‘stage’ for performances, be that political, cultural or commercial. At the bottom of the valley in Shibuya, the only open space is marked by the biggest intersection in the area where the currents of pedestrians and traffic meet. It is the centre stage where fashion, information (it is also dubbed ‘bit-valley’) and even political sales pitches meet. At this spot outside the Tōkyū department store/Shibuya train station, pop stars, buskers, and even Prime Minister of the day Koizumi, have drawn large crowds (figure 17).

As Yoshimi (1988) points out, together with the surrounding pockets of city spaces, commercial establishments such as the Seibu Railway company and their subsidiaries such as the Seibu and Parco department stores, have employed ‘strategic spatial management’ in Shibuya, and turned it into an active performance space for the consumers.

86

Figure 17: Prime Minister Koizumi disseminates his policies, drawing a crowd in Shibuya. Commodities embody dreams, and this is what VenusFort tries to perfect further with their themed ‘stage’. As Zukin (1995) concludes in her analysis of the politics of consumption in the city of New York, Shopping cultures are not important simply on the level of individual preferences or even consumption practices … they are an important part of building the spaces of cities, and by virtue of the importance of seeing and being seen, they build public cultures, offer opportunities for the representation of group identities, and for the inclusion of those identities in a larger, urban public culture (253-4)

The narratives and private dramas will no doubt continue to include the city as part of their perpetuating props, in which pockets such as Shibuya, Harajuku and VenusFort dominate as centre stage. The difference with VenusFort,

87 however, is that it will be a less permanent feature of the metropolitan dramas of everyday life in Tokyo, as its story-worthiness is delimited by its ten-year lease. Whether ephemerality, like the fashion and trends that they sell, will be a permanent feature of constructions of this nature remain to be seen. Themed malls such as VenusFort have potently demonstrated their ability to produce instant popular cultures and trends with the constant renewal of their props. In a mere five years VenusFort has turned itself into an icon for urban tourism and part of consumption reality for Tokyoites. It did so by constantly staying in the media limelight. While the boutiques sold fashion and accessories, VenusFort sold ’17th Century Italy’ as part of its narrative. It brought the consumer to the shops, gave them a reason to enjoy their stay on the meticulously built ‘stage’, and made buying part of the realisation of the narrative. But, just as importantly, it made this whole consumption process ‘media worthy’ through its success and through use of both traditional and new media.

However, VenusFort did not create the narratives – they were already on TV, billboards, and in the movies. The narratives behind retails dramas staged by developers and performed by consumers were already part of the social consciousness disseminated through an array of media. Before the consumers arrived in the reconstructed Neoclassical Italy on Daiba, they already knew about Italian haute couture. Before they picked up their fashion of choice, they were already aware of the social symbolisms attached to the brands and styles.

The city we live in is a medium itself, of which themed spaces such as

VenusFort are a part, bringing with it media content, narrative and a backdrop.

88 Themed city spaces not only signify a merging of narrative and everyday life, they make the consumption of fantasies seem possible. However, if VenusFort has given the consumers a stage, then who has provided the scripts? If the consumers are performing a so-called retail drama, who is the star they have in mind?

In the next chapter, I will move to advertising, another important medium for consumption, which at the same time is a form of media content for consumption. In the next case study, the focus turns specifically to advertisements using the Hollywood actress Audrey Hepburn, whose undying popularity was unaffected by her death in 1993. By analysing the history of

Audrey Hepburn’s career as a television commercial star in Japan, I hope to give insight into the role of media in consumption of both goods and the ‘codes’ attached to them.

89 CHAPTER II

IDOLS IN BYTES, HISTORY VIRTUALISED

Figure 18: The face of Audrey Hepburn (AsahiGraph Extra 1999)

Remade in Japan: the case of Audrey Hepburn

… the face of Audrey Hepburn […] is constituted by an infinite complexity of morphological functions. As a language, Garbo’s

90 singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance. The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event. (Barthes 1957: 56-7)

Generations of Japanese female audiences who have idolised and imitated Audrey Hepburn must know precisely what Barthes meant. In 1998, five years after her death, Kirin Beverages Co. made a television commercial featuring Audrey Hepburn drinking a canned tea. A year later, Asahi Graph (AsahiGraph Extra 1999) published a special issue on Audrey Hepburn. In it, twelve Japanese idols told the readers how much they themselves idolised Audrey Hepburn. She herself, of course, does not know about her new-found career as a tea aficionada and TV commercial star in a foreign land. Were she alive, however, she might be glad to know that this time around she will remain eternally young and beautiful. She has been reproduced, digitised and saved, in bytes – a computer language enabling many visual forms. Is this the same Audrey Hepburn Barthes talked about in 1957? Does it matter?

‘Postmodern’ Japaneseness and its Cultural Production

One of the most visible themes of studies on Japan since 1980s has been the ‘postmodernity’ of Japanese society. Many of the phenomena in the current Japanese consumer society seem to be rooted in its ‘generic postmodernity’ (Clammer 1995), visible in its mass media and commodification of cultures, and made more acute by the revival of semiotic and semantic interpretation of the Japanese domestication of the foreign (Tobin 1992) and exoticisation of the native (Ivy 1988; Ivy 1995: 21-29).

91 This view of Japan arguably rests on a theorisation of postmodern culture, revolving around the notion of cultural authenticity, whether in terms of ‘de-differentiation’ (Lash 1990), ‘cultural pastiche’ (Urry 1990), ‘mechanical reproduction/copying’ (Benjamin 1973) or the idea of the hyperreal and simulation (Baudrillard 1983). All lay significant emphasis on the idea of ‘original and copy’. In large part, this view presumes a hierarchical order of authenticity in cultural production – in terms of a chain of ‘copies’ of an assumed ‘original’ in the ‘culture industry’ (Adorno 1995).

However, the question of authenticity, as I have elaborated in the study of VenusFort in the previous chapter, does not provide a sufficient point of departure in understanding the structure of consumption today, especially in the case of metropolitan Japan where there is a high level of media saturation. In the case of VenusFort and Daiba, ‘authenticity’ holds no relevance to the image presented, and the idea of the original often barely serves as a base for parody.

For Benjamin, ‘aura’ is essentially a by-product of the ‘authenticity’ of art, the loss of which signifies the decay of authenticity. Authenticity is ‘the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’ (Benjamin 1973: 221). Thus, this ‘aura’ is the privileged experience tied to the inaccessibility of singularity and history. In his famous work ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin gives an example of how aura contributes to the uniqueness of art: The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the cleric of the Middle

92 Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. (Benjamin 2001: 52)

What will ‘aura’ and ‘authenticity’ mean in a time when digitisation and networked communication are the norm in our media landscape? If the loss of ‘aura’ causes the decay of authenticity, what happens to ‘aura’ when authenticity is no longer the question? Benjamin points out that technology detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. (Benjamin 2001: 221)

Urry puts it from a different angle: Postmodernist culture is anti-auratic. Such forms do not proclaim their uniqueness but are mechanically and electronically reproduced. There is a denial of the separation of the aesthetic from the social and of the contention that art is of a different order from life. The value placed on the unity of the artistic work is challenged through an emphasis on pastiche, collage, allegory and so on. … Postmodernism is anti-hierarchical, opposed to … vertical differentiations. (Urry 1990: 85)

This is precisely the case in Daiba, where Tokyo’s Italy and Hong Kong are as ‘authentic’ as the originals. Taking into consideration the current conditions of culture production and consumption, this thesis attempts to rethink the relationship between the traits of modernist culture (which puts emphasis on aura and authenticity) and ‘postmodernist’ culture (which, as Lash points out, puts emphasis on ‘pastiche, collage and allegory’). As I have shown in the previous chapter, Little Hong Kong and VenusFort in Tokyo Bay have attained

93 an ‘aura’ that is detached from the histories, cultures and geographies of the ‘originals’, through the process of consumption.

Culture, the other attachment to the idea of authenticity, is also often seen as the result of time and adherent historical narratives. However, Appadurai sees ‘culture’ simply as a ‘thing/object’ which ‘in the contemporary world … is part of the capitalist civilising process’ (Appadurai 1986: 7). In this view, ‘culture’ in the form of ‘code’ attached to goods and media can be seen as no more than a by-product of the production and consumption process. In other words, alongside other commodities, the immense flow of information and knowledge produces ‘culture’ – one more addition to go with other non-essential ‘things’ for the masses. Baudrillard calls this highly mediated culture ‘kitsch’, and the products, ‘gadgets’. He suggests that ‘kitsch is a cultural category’ produced as a pseudo-event in ‘current affairs’ or as a pseudo-object in advertising. It can also be produced from the medium itself and its referential code is integrated with what is being produced and consumed (Baudrillard, Pefanis et al. 1990: 66).

This chapter is an analysis of ‘auratic culture’ in the age of digital production, an age in which the question of ‘copy’ and ‘original’ has become irrelevant. The production, in the case of the Japanese Audrey Hepburn, is very much cultural, and indeed is produced from the ‘medium itself’ and comes as a ‘standard package’ in the process of commodification.

I analyse the phenomenon of Audrey Hepburn’s popularity among Japanese women to provide an example of how the image and its ‘aura’ can be effectively commodified, and then either attached to goods or sold as a form of media content. I argue that Hepburn’s lasting popularity is not just a passing fad, like many other imported foreign trends; rather, the (re)production of the Japanese Hepburn symbolises an integral part of the local ‘tradition’ of how female idols

94 are perceived. This can be seen by analysing the functions of such idols in Japanese popular culture and comparing the rhetoric employed to describe Hepburn’s image in the popular press, mainly women’s magazines. I argue that the Japanese Audrey Hepburn is indeed ‘authentic and original’. Although different from that of the western, European, Hollywood Audrey Hepburn, the ‘culture’ and ‘aura’ which her presence signifies in Japan is no more exotic than that of her American counterpart. As it is the case with the reproduction and commodification of the symbolism of Europeaness in VenusFort, I will argue that the Japanese reproduction of Audrey Hepburn not only unsettles the order of authenticity, it produces a particular kind of ‘authenticity’ and adopts an instant ‘aura’ that is only relevant to the current social milieu. Moreover, in the case of the Japanese Audrey Hepburn, the reproduction of authenticity and aura goes one step further – VenusFort re-authenticates the aura of ‘Neoclassical Italy’ in Tokyo, while Japanese consumers re-authenticate themselves in the imagination of the reproduced virtual idol.

The Enduring Popularity of Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn, or rather, Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston, the Belgian-born Hollywood film star of the 1950s and 60s, remains vastly popular in Japan. She is popular not only among middle-aged women who have grown up watching her movies, and who therefore might have nostalgic memories of her, but also among young women in their 20s who would have no such ‘recollections’ of her. This latter group has learnt about her either through watching old films or through seeing her ‘reincarnations’ in the marketplace. There is no other Western idol who enjoys the same level of perpetual popularity in Japan, which endures even today more than a decade after her death.

95

Japan is popularly believed to be racially homogeneous, culturally singular and monolingual. However, in the environs of post-war rapid economic development and the maintenance of continual economic growth, an essential feature of its fashion, culture and other trends has been ‘transience’. It is commonly expected that today’s pop stars will be seen as trivial passing fads by tomorrow. Like fashion, the idols of variety shows, pop singers, models, and serialised TV drama actresses will be out of vogue when the boom they embody is over. Like the fast changing worlds of fashion and rapidly developing consumer electronics, the idols too are transitory indicators of pop culture. However, since Audrey Hepburn’s first popular film Roman Holiday arrived in the antiquated fashion centre of Ginza in Tokyo in 1954, her popularity has continued, flourished, and even been ‘renewed’ through time to the present day. With an audience who cannot racially, culturally and linguistically identify with her, one cannot help but ask a seemingly simple question: why would a Hollywood film star of European descent from the bygone days defy the power of time and passing fashion and continue to be idolised by an anachronistic audience who are so different in race and culture?

The idolisation of film stars often can be expected where ‘authenticity’ of the star, real or constructed, occurs (Dyer 1979). By the same token, with the involvement of nostalgia and identification, the revival of popularity of old film stars might not be extraordinary. In many cases star-audience relations take the form of ‘the desire to become’, ‘imitate’, and ‘copy’ – all involving identification with the physical appearance of the star (Stacey 1991). However, judging by the surface, Hepburn’s popularity in Japan certainly does not offer the so-called cultural ‘aura’ for ‘authenticity’. Here it is difficult to imagine a straightforward identification process, whether cultural or physical.

96 This might lead to a simple dismissal of Audrey Hepburn’s popularity as entirely accidental and irrelevant, a conclusion which would be rather inattentive, for her popularity in Japan has now continued for some 50 years. Her magazine cover appearances rank first amongst all foreign stars in the last half a century and still remain popular amongst the readers of the popular press (Shūkan shinchō 1993). What precisely then is it about her that generations of Japanese women admire, ‘desire to become’ (Stacey 1991: 133-141), and identify with? And if her popularity in Japan is comparable with that of other idols in Japan, then what provides the ‘aura’ for the authenticity of a Japanese Audrey Hepburn?

The Importance of Being Familiar – Physical Resemblance?

Hepburn’s appearance is the feature most often cited in the Japanese popular press, commanding praise notably for her dark eyes, dark hair, small physique, and even her small breast size and skinny body. In one of the very early articles about Hepburn written in 1954, it was her androgynous looks that first attracted comment: 澄大眼型顔棒様細い身體 ほいい情熱感さ個性鋭さ Her eyes are clear and large, her face heart-shaped; she is capable of arousing powerful passions even though her body almost completely lacks ‘volume’ and is stick-thin. (All Yomimono 1954)27

The description of her small physique as a component of her popularity has not changed some 40 years later:

27 Thanks to David Kelly for the translation of this paragraph.

97 []日曓人黒い髪黒い眼体型彼 女容姿金髪い女優 い日曓女性親近感抱 [Hepburn] has black hair, black eyes and a slender physique just like the Japanese. Unlike the blonde glamour of a [Marilyn] Monroe type, her appearance has a feeling of familiarity with that of the Japanese female (Dime 1992: 115).

Comments on the smallness of her features and her dark hair and eyes are still prevalent in almost all articles appearing in the popular press. Analysing the relationship between female spectators and their idols, Stacey has noted: … there are numerous points of recognition of similarities between the spectator and the star. These are not based on pretending to be something one is not, but rather selecting something which establishes a link between the star and the self, based on a pre-existing part of the spectator’s identity which bears a resemblance to the star (Stacey 1991: 154).

This insight explains, in part, one of the important reasons for Hepburn’s popularity in an environment that would normally be perceived as unfamiliar. The recognition of similarities between Hepburn and her Japanese female audience might give hints as to why Hepburn has been perceived as a locally identifiable idol rather than just another imported foreign star.

Becoming Hepburn

The coverage accorded Audrey Hepburn in women’s magazines indicates that her popularity came from both the dramas and facts that rendered her. The dramatic ones are the screen roles she played during her career as a film star. The facts are the ‘real life’ stories in which Hepburn herself is the main

98 protagonist. Typical of the former are stories of a young girl falling in love, with happy endings blessed by wealth, glamour and (of course) good taste. Sabrina (1954) is a typical example, and Roman Holiday is another. As for her real life, the most common version is that she was born in 1929 into a wealthy aristocratic family, and endured the World War II Nazi invasion of the Netherlands as a teenager. She worked hard and eventually made her break acting in Roman Holiday in 1953, which won her world-wide acclaim and an Oscar. She continued to flourish on the silver screen until the early 1970s. In 1986, she became a Goodwill Ambassador and spokesperson for UNICEF. She is seen first and foremost as a beautiful Hollywood actress with a European aristocratic background and, at the same time, a person of kindness who helped the poor and unfortunate in her role at UNICEF. The combination of her screen appearances and real life stories is seen as providing an ideal model for women, and indeed imitated and admired in manners widely transcendent of social classes and age groups in Japan.

A comparison between her and contemporary local Japanese pop idols would suggest similar ‘qualities 品’ said to be possessed by both current Japanese idols and Hepburn. Despite her foreign attributes, Hepburn is being idolised and emulated in similar ways as the local stars. However, although Hepburn’s foreign-ness has not significantly distanced her audience, I suspect it remains an essential element at play in the construction of her popularity. She is more identifiable in her physical features when compared to other Western stars (such as Monroe and Julia Roberts), but she remains unachievable in the identification process at the same time, precisely because of her physical differences (however small) and her Euro-American background. Thus the image of Audrey Hepburn is admired but forever inaccessible, identified with but unachievable.

99

Figure 19: Hepburn Vs. Monroe Test Figure 20: Hepburn Vs. Roberts Test

To bring her closer to the local audience, Hepburn is often differentiated from other famous Hollywood stars – both ones from around the same period, such as Marilyn Monroe (More 1995), and more contemporary examples of the American female star such as Julia Roberts (Josei Jishin 1991: 94-7) (see figures 19 and 20). These comparisons indicated that they are seen as women of fundamental difference – as might well be expected to happen if they were done in the United States. In the Japanese popular press, however, the comparisons and analysis have gone as far as comparing the different types of love-life one would have (‘Hepburn type or Monroe type’) – with a descriptive test supplemented by graphs showing the result (More 1995). Monroe and Roberts are seen primarily as representatives of American women, perhaps in similar ways as Tokyo Disneyland represented America and VenusFort, Italy. These analyses in the popular women’s magazines suggest that Hepburn is compared against the quintessential western stars, contributing to her unique status in the local media. It may also explain why, despite the fact that she is

100 considered as identifiable and even emulate-able for her Japanese fans, she is rarely ever being compared with any Japanese media stars. She occupies a special position as the ‘fairy’, as claimed by many popular women’s magazines since 1954 (All Yomimono 1954), amongst the pedestrian stars, representing beauty and transcendental feminine values to Japanese women.

Comparing descriptions of Hepburn and the most popular Japanese idols in women’s magazines will help to demonstrate the common ground. Hepburn is seen as an eternally young (Wolff 1997), pure, child-like woman, with desirable female elegance and good work ethic, as well as being a good mother to her son. Amongst innumerable similar articles, More (a magazine targeted at 20 to 25 year old women) published an analysis in 1999, giving ten essential qualities of the most idolised Japanese female pop stars (More 1999). The first example was the immensely popular Matsushima Nanako, a model, who is also active in television dramas and popular movies. The description of her in the article is strikingly similar to that of Hepburn. Her face is said to be amiably Japanese 親 い, her physique to be slender; she is described as having ‘a clear voice, a body with no superfluous flesh and an overwhelming sense of cleanness 澄 声い肉い体倒的清潔感あ’. All this has also been said about Hepburn (see e.g. Dime 1992; All Yomimono 1954). Matsushima is also said to have a ‘good work ethic’ – an attribute also often used to describe Hepburn. Qualities of other popular stars include ‘maiden strength’, ‘personal maturity’, ‘charisma’, ‘strength of the eyes’, ‘strength of continental beauty’, just to list a few. Compared with the commentaries on Hepburn, it is not difficult to see the commonalities in popular perceptions.

There are also manuals teaching how to dress like Hepburn, behave elegantly like her, attain her hair style and even travel like her—all indicating the desire to ‘become Hepburn’. Dressing up to look like the idolised is a common practice

101 and an important trait in female spectatorship and idolisation (Herzog, 1991: 74, 91; Stacey 1991: 133, 141). For the admirers of Audrey Hepburn in Japan, there is no shortage of manuals in the popular press for just this purpose (Jinbutsu Hyōron 1971: 321; Non.no 1990:111-117; More 1996: 332-3; With 1999: 74-79). In these manual-type analyses of the Hepburn style, readers are encouraged and given detailed instructions for how to do makeup, hairdo, dress up as Audrey Hepburn, and even cook using her recipes (More 2000) (see figure 21). Such manuals and feature stories on Hepburn and her style have become a regular event for popular women’s magazines since 1954 (see: Shūkan Uriyomi 1954 ). Some of the examples given earlier were published well after her death in 1993. Today, more than a decade after Hepburn’s death, the idolisation of her continues.

Figure 21: How to look like Audrey through make-up and hairstyle

102 But what distinguishes this from dressing up like Joan Crawford (Gaines 1991) or imitating Betty Grable (Stacey 1991) in the US is that dressing up like Hepburn is far distant from the Japanese cultural environment. For her Japanese fans Hepburn’s European flavour provides yet another layer of dramaturgy. In traditional and cultural terms, there is no previous historical background for Hepburn style in Japan, making her imitation both topographically erroneous and anachronistic – much the same way that Disneyland and Mickey Mouse are consumed in Japan. In fact, a popular writer Nakatani Akihiro interestingly claims that Audrey Hepburn ‘died at the age of 23! (sic)’ by which he means that Audrey Hepburn is idolised in the same way as Mickey Mouse – in that, neither of them age. Indeed, Hepburn is mostly presented in the visual context of her films from the 1950s and 60s, especially in Roman Holiday, made when she was 23. Like Mickey Mouse, she is also idolised by three generations of fans (Nakatani 1993). To make the point even more complete, both Mickey Mouse and Hepburn have been culturally ‘de-odoured’28 and now both sit comfortably in the Japanese marketplace.

Today, Disneyland or VenusFort, Audrey Hepburn or Mickey Mouse, none present discrepancies with the ‘native’ culture – rather, these media products are very much part of the local media staple. Today, it is hard to imagine a Tokyo without Tokyo Disneyland, Daiba without VenusFort and Japanese women without their ‘Ōdorii’ (Audrey), in one incarnation or another.

28 Koichi Iwabuchi has written extensively on the subject of Japanese cultural ‘transnationalism’ in Asia. Iwabuchi identifies ‘cultural proximity’ to Asia and the ‘odourless-ness’ as some of the main reasons for the acceptance of Japanese poplar cultural products in many East Asian countries (Iwabuchi 1999, 2000, 2002). Whether or not ‘Japan’ can be seen as a unified political entity in relation to the dominance of Japanese pop in Asian marketplaces, I think the idea of ‘odourless culture’ gives a fitting description in the context of a highly networked global media landscape and constant interflow of popular culture.

103 VenusFort and many other themed malls in Japan were built without the cultural odour of Neoclassical Italy or other claimed ‘originals’. If anything, they are repackaged mini-Las Vegas(es), without the poker machines. Cultural products such as Mickey Mouse and Audrey Hepburn provided a foundation for the localisation of the foreign. It can be argued that they have effectively become ‘Japanese’ – both as media products and, in more ways than one, as cultural icons.

Virtualising the Idol

Hepburn’s popularity today in the Japanese media presents important evidence of her posthumous existence, albeit in the binary form of 0s and 1s that assemble her digitised image. This new lease of life is founded on a new career as an advertising star. Her reincarnation lives on television screens and billboards – the ultimate embodiment of the commercial nature of her posthumous existence. In other words, Hepburn is only ‘alive’, quite literally, when her audience is buying. Her existence is preconditioned by her own commodification, as a product styled by the ‘aura’ produced by pre-existing media narratives.

Here ‘aura’ must also include Hepburn’s face, the darkness of her hair and eyes, and the shape of her physique. None exist in physical form today, but together they make up the basis for her identification by a Japanese audience. ‘Aura’ must also include her ‘feminine’ qualities with a hard working morality, a good mother elegantly fashioned in styles from 1950s. These qualities will be maintained, and perfected, to suit the current trend, through aspiration and idolisation. The relationship will not be disrupted by uncontrollable public appearances and unexpected Public Relation disasters — all of which are

104 common hazards of the analogue form of stardom today, and which fans know only too well. Hepburn’s pristine image may even be further refined with future technological developments, together with the creative flair of her future modifiers. This may be done directly, by computer graphics (CG) artists, and indirectly, by marketers and the market. Indeed, the death of her virtual incarnation can be achieved only by the abandonment of the market – an unlikely scenario, considering how perfect and adaptable she has already become29.

The current technology will allow the production of future generations of Hepburn. In fact, after the initial success of using a virtual Hepburn, Kirin Beverages used her image again to sell their Gogo no kōcha, or Afternoon Tea, in 1998. The commercial must have been popular and economical, as Kirin continued making advertisements featuring Audrey Hepburn, in one form or another. By 2002, Kirin made at least four Audrey Hepburn commercials for Afternoon Tea30 (see figures 22, 23 and 24).

29 In fact Hollywood has recently explored the impossible death of a popular virtual idol in a film titled S1MøNE (Dir. Andrew Niccol, 2002). The film concludes that it is not easy to kill a computer image by simple erasure of data. The tired creator of the virtual idol, played by Al Pacino, decides to ‘kill’ the eponymous Simone using a computer virus, only to face massive protests by her fans after announcing her death. In the end, not untypical of a Hollywood film, the data is saved by the creator’s daughter, and the virtual idol is revived and this time lives happily ever after. Hollywood, of course, is not the inventor of this idea of the virtual idol. William Gibson (1996) wrote in 1996, in his novel Idoru, of the realness of a virtual idol with both entertaining novelty and profound understanding of the ‘soul’ in the digital form. 30 Of course the idol used for Kirin’s Afternoon Tea changes according the most current trend. A couple of idols have been on the Afternoon Tea commercials since they discontinued the Audrey Hepburn series.

105 Figure 22 Figure 24 Figure 23 Kirin Afternoon Tea Commercials

Hepburn, however, is by no means the only virtual idol – Dick Tracy, Tom Raider and an array of newly ‘rendered’ 3D virtual idols are becoming permanent residents of virtual worlds. With the technology behind the creatures becoming increasingly sophisticated, the ‘realness’ of the idols is also being perfected by the day. A famous example of such virtual existence is Date Kyoko, the world’s first virtual idol created entirely from imagination and pixels.

Date Kyoko (also known as DK96) was launched in 1996 by HoriPro Inc31, not a graphic design firm, but a ‘talent (tarento)’ agency. On 21 November 1996, a CD titled ‘Love Communication’ was released in her name. Apart from audio tracks, the CD also included video clips of her in motion, walking on the streets of Tokyo and New York (Wolff 1997)32. Although entirely virtual, and without a

31 See their homepage: http://www.horipro.co.jp/ 32 See his homepage: http://www.wdirewolff.com/jkyoko.htm

106 physical form, Date Kyoko has a profile, a younger sister, a birthday, a personality and even a career. She was purportedly born to a Japanese couple who ran a sushi bar in Fusso, Tokyo on October 26, 1979. She likes to hang out in a Chinese restaurant called Seiryūmon33. She is a ‘spokes-model’ for Oz Interactive, a (physically existing) San Francisco firm that creates virtual worlds for computers (Kadrey 1998).

Date Kyoko eventually faded as a market product. However, she symbolises an important development in the domain of idol worship. Her worldwide fandom shows not only that physical form is no longer required of idols but, more importantly, that emotional attachment to a virtually embodiment are entirely possible.

Iida on the same subject (and the same Virtual Idol) sums it up well: the fact that the object of one’s affection lacked a historical referent does not matter; rather, the pleasure of the products stems from the consumption of images one knows full well are virtual. This marketing of virtuality, however, goes beyond the realm of possessing images of desired objects to the repossession of the self. (Iida 2000: 429)

In the case of Audrey Hepburn in Japan, virtualisation does have a ‘historical referent’, only the referent itself is also the subject of virtualisation. Both in Japan and elsewhere, the memories of Audrey Hepburn are first of all from a series of performances which are already highly mediated, relative to which her ‘real’ life story plays a supporting role. The virtualisation goes even further in Japan. As I will describe below, she was first replaced by a double, a model who is also her fan, in a television commercial. Then in addition, the ‘idea’ of Audrey

33 As a market phenomenon, Date Kyoko had faded quickly after her 1996 debut, but seven years later in 2004, she continue to live in websites recounting her story in considerable detail. See for example: http://members.tripod.com/~chinyankeat/dk96.htm

107 Hepburn has been incorporated in a costume drama, set in Japan’s post-war era in a quintessential Japanese locale, broadcast on the government-funded national television network.

Figure 25: The Virtual idol - Fei Fei Figure 26: Fei Fei presenting Samsung, on a billboard at Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo

Another example is Fei Fei 飛飛, one of the more recent digital creations from a company called e-frontier Inc/Blue Moon Studio34. According to her ‘Official Homepage’, Fei Fei was born in 1999 in Cyber City Layer 7 Chungking area. She likes the Cyber City layer 23 area where she can see the spring times of Jupiter and Mars (e-frontier 1999) (figure 25). Like Date Kyoko, Fei Fei is created with highly sophisticated computer software (Shade) with even more painstaking attention to detail (Kanimiso henshūkyoku 2000). And like her predecessor Date Kyoko, she has a career in the commercial world, only more successful and current. Fei Fei is the star of Samsung commercials for its LCD

34 for detail of Fei Fei and e-frontier’s other ‘digital beauties’ see their homepage: http://www.e-frontier.co.jp/digitalbeauty/feifei/index.shtml

108 televisions, on both TV and billboards (Samsung 23 May 200235; e-frontier 1999) (figure 26).

Coupled with ever more powerful computer processing and storage capacities, computer graphics programs can now handle complex tasks such as rendering three-dimensional images and movement. The film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001),36 for example, was created entirely on computers, with the help of extremely sophisticated 3D rendering software called LightWave. In other words, the film was ‘built’ and ‘rendered’ with powerful processing chips rather than ‘filmed’ with cameras. And thanks to the power of technology and human imagination, the images and movement of its digital actors are so realistic that they are comparable to, if not in some ways better than, the results of a movie camera.

Here is how the film was reviewed on the popular film site Hollywood.com: now there's a whole new way of looking at CGI technology-‘hyperReal’ human characters. That's right. Computer-generated people that look just as real as any Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts. (Bowen 2001)37

Indeed, not only do they ‘look’ comparable to stars of the physical world, they are capable of inducing a similar kind of emotional attraction in some as Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts. According to the film's producer, Christopher Lee, the main character Dr Aki Ross was voted one of the 50 sexiest people in Maxim magazine (Bowen 2001) (figure 27).

35 See: http://www.samsung.co.jp/PressCenter/Japan/020523_1.html 36 Directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi and Moto Sakakibara. 37 See: http://www.hollywood.com/celebs/features/feature/468436

109 Figure 27: Dr. Aki, both the role Figure 28: Still from Final Fantasy, a movie produced entirely and the performer digitally.

Iida draws a connection between the Virtual Idols and the Japanese Purikura (a Japanese word derived from the English ‘print club’). Purikura was extremely popular in age groups spanning from school children to university students. It is a specially made camera typically installed in game arcades or sometimes specialised Purikura game centres. It allows the ‘player’ to take photos with instant printouts of many small duplicates (mostly stickers of small stamp size). Many schoolgirls have a collection of hundreds of these Purikuras, tiny photos of themselves, often taken with various friends.

It can be argued that this is a form of self admiration and virtualisation, as the prints not only are portraits of the self, but the mechanics (its instantaneousness, low cost, various forms) and popularity, shorten the process of a personal narrative. Purikura also allow the player/the self to stage and perform an otherwise forgettable moment – or rather, the medium allows the participants to perform for the sake of performance just because the medium is there. The fun of this game is not derived from any difficult techniques – there are none – but from the fantasy in which the self is the star. As Iida puts it:

110 … the core pleasure of this form of play … is acting in the context of the framed narrative and possessing a purely imaginary sequence of the story of oneself that has little to do with the outside world.

Further, it … Suggest[s] … an enclosure of the pleasure loop, the emergence of a form of pleasure induced by artificially created images; although specific commodities are chosen to be admired, the true object of this self-referential pleasure economy is one’s own consciousness and its ascription of value to particular objects as worthy of admiration. (Iida 2000: 428, 429)

In the same light, neither the current fast-developing imaging technology nor the market appetite will limit the possibility for Audrey Hepburn to become an infinite number of digital bytes, re-represented, re-reproduced, re-cultivated as a pin-up and a media star, immortalised in the ‘post-real’ world.

This is also why the idolisation of Audrey Hepburn in Japan is vastly different from that of, for example, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan or Brad Pitt. First, these current American pop stars are still physically alive. Their parallel existence cannot be either modified or reconstructed easily. Because their analogue existence leaves traces in the media, their personal lives produce or induce materials in the gossip columns and paparazzi photos. This provides documentary-like evidence, creating continuing history and narratives, which in turn ‘authenticate’ them. Therefore it is difficult to construct parallel versions of the living idols completely in digital media38.

38 Difficult, but not impossible – there are now many computer games starring the digital version of their analogue counterparts in the physical world. The Taiwanese Japanese actor Kaneshiro Takeshi 金城武, for example, has an alias starring in the computer game called Oni musha 鬼武者. Today, the practice of making computer games paralleling block buster movies is common. Examples are the 007 computer game and more recently the game

111

Like the virtualisation of Neoclassical Italy in the form of a shopping mall in Tokyo Bay, analysed in the previous chapter, Audrey Hepburn in Japan is not a simple ‘simulation’ of the ‘real’. If anything, VenusFort is a simulation of the Forum Shops in Las Vegas, which is a reconstruction of a mediated imagination of the Neoclassical Italy. The virtualised Audrey Hepburn is a reproduced image of the Hollywood actress, which also existed mostly in mediated forms. Both VenusFort and Hepburn are first of all media products – neither are simulations of an ‘original’. They are reconstructions of market imaginations, on which their future existence and evolution depends.

The Production and Consumption of Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn started appearing in commercials in Japan as early as May 1971, for Japan Exlan Co., Ltd. 日曓工業(株), selling a wig, a booming fad at the time (Shūkan Heibon 1971). The shooting of the commercial was originally planned to be filmed in Japan, but reportedly had to be moved to Rome, because Hepburn did not want to leave her one-year-old child behind. It was eventually filmed around the old city in Rome, showing Hepburn strolling in front of a classic Italian backdrop, with the seasons morphing in the background. During the commercial, Hepburn utters only one word: Variie (Varié), the name of the wig. The commercial reportedly costed ¥50,000,000 (US$139,895).

released with the Matrix are examples. The reverse can also be true – Final Fantasy, the movie, was based on the long running computer game of the same title.

112 The original plan to shoot the television commercial in Japan was not without significance. Hepburn was to sell a Japanese local fad, in an ‘authentic’ Japanese milieu with clearly defined seasons as the backdrop – a quintessential Japanese motif (Asquith and Kalland 1997) – morphing through in less than 30 seconds. She was to be seen strolling in the old quarters of Kyoto (instead of Rome), alongside kimono-clad maiko and geishas in Gion and Pontochō through the picturesque four seasons, from falling cherry blossoms to the stone garden covered with snow – just as the American cellist Yo-Yo Ma would do for Suntory whisky later in 1990s (figure 29). The commercial would have given Hepburn a Japanese ‘aura’ from the very beginning of her commercial career in Japan.

Figure 29: Suntory Whisky with Yo-Yo Ma

During the entire 1970s, Hepburn starred in only two feature films – Robin and Marian (1976) and Bloodline (1979). After that, she appeared in one documentary-style film, They All Laughed (1981), and in a made-for-television movie Love Among Thieves (1987), a sequel to her famous 1966 film How to Steal a Million. None of these later films are as memorable as the ones she stared in during the 1950s and 60s. Hepburn’s last movie was the not-so-well-known film Always (1989), directed by Steven Spielberg, at which time her current fans under thirty today would have been less than 15 years old. The contemporary

113 Hepburn fans have seen her far more often on Japanese television commercials, billboards and magazine covers than in Hollywood films. Thus, it can be argued that the Audrey Hepburn in the Japanese marketplace is more of a transformed television idol than a Hollywood film star.

Ten years after her 1971 commercial, the then 52-year-old Hepburn appeared in another commercial for Ginza Liza – a trendy fashion boutique during the heyday of the Bubble period. Josei Jishin, a magazine with a readership predominantly in their mid-20s and over, reported: ‘Hardly looking 52, she exhales elegant mood, and shows off eight costumes’ (Josei Jishin 1982). In 1987, she appeared in a commercial for House Foods Co. 食品工業 (CM Connection 2003). This was probably the end of Hepburn’s appearances in Japanese commercials by her own (living) consent. However, her death in 1993 in no sense brought an end to her career as an advertising star in Japan—in fact it continued, with her popularity going through spurts of revivals throughout the years that followed.

In 1994, hardly a year after her death, Audrey Hepburn was reincarnated, younger and more active in the Japanese marketplace. Her image was used in commercials targeted at young females, such as the one for VO5 hair care products (Hayamizu 1994). The pragmatic decision to recycle her from old Hollywood films and awaken her from the dead was a result of market research. According to a survey conducted by WOWOW (a subscription-based satellite TV station), her popularity did not fade, much less disappear, after she died. She continues to rank first as ‘the most remembered actress’ and her most famous screen appearance – Roman Holiday, as most memorable by far (Okamura 1993; Hayamizu 1994). Based on these survey results, it is not difficult to see why advertising agencies would decide to (re)use, and reconstruct her as their eternal heroine.

114

The periods of revival of Hepburn in the media are sometimes called mini-booms or ‘chotto shita boom’ (Dime 1992). These mini-booms have inspired magazines such as Anan, Non.no, More, Crea, Josei jishin, Shūkan Josei, Josei Seven – all geared toward female readers. Even men’s magazines like Playboy Weekly and Shūkan Hōseki ran articles on her (Shūkan Hōseki 1993). To supplement men’s comparatively limited knowledge of Hepburn, the Japanese version of Playboy published a manual on ‘basic knowledge for Hepburn Mourning’ (Shūkan Playboy 1993). If a manual was not enough, people could take a guided tour to Europe and the US for a living experience of mourning a dead idol (Shūkan shinchō 1993: 32, 3) (Non.no 1993: 166-179).

Hepburn’s commercial value in Japan seemed only to increase once her physical existence vanished. An entire industry arose after her death. Magazines have published innumerable articles on her life, commentaries on her films, analyses of her lifestyle, manuals on how to mourn her, and many more on how to be her. In women’s weekly magazines, one can regularly find manuals and analyses on how to dress, put on make up, and have hairstyles to look like her. There have been detailed A-Zs of almost every aspect of her life, including such items as ‘Diet’, ‘Flower’, ‘Hotel life’, ‘Intelligence’, even ‘Neurosis (shinkeishitsu)’ (More 1998; More 1996; With 1999). The entry under ‘J’ was, of course, ‘Japan’, said to be ‘a country which Audrey favoured, where the film Roman Holiday was especially successful, and where Audrey Hepburn also starred in a television commercial for a Japanese fashion maker’ (Non.no 1990). Apart from the demand for knowledge about her, and the knowledge needed to be like her, the knowledge industry (predominantly the English language teaching industry) also recognised the commercial value of Hepburn’s image. Berlitz, one of the longest running English schools in Japan, employed one of

115 her most famous screen appearances in Japan, a still from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) (figure 30).

Figure 30: Berlitz’s Audrey

Perhaps the most creative commercials featuring her appearance are the ones made by Kirin Beverages for a canned tea brand called Gogo no kōcha (Afternoon Tea). Kirin Beverages is one of the biggest beverage companies in Japan. In 1998, the company made a hit commercial showing Hepburn drinking Gogo no

116 kōcha, in a scene cut from her first Oscar-winning film Roman Holiday39. The commercial was an industry first, not only because it used very complex computer graphics, but also because it was the first commercial to re-employ a digitised ‘Hepburn’, to re-enact a scene from an old film for the purpose of selling a product. The commercial was again not made in Japan, nor in European high cultures as surroundings, but was composed and fabricated in Australia by a Sydney CG company called Ambience (Kirin Co. 2001). Hepburn did not attain another Best Actress Oscar for her performance in the tea commercial, but the implication of her virtualised appearance in the consumption of media content is perhaps even more significant.

Kirin Beverages clearly recognised the potential market value of the digital version of Audrey Hepburn, and has since then made more advertisements using her image for this particular tea. In 2000, with another scene cut from Roman Holiday, and the same technique, Kirin made another TV commercial (Kirin Co. 2001b). The success was highly visible, especially in Tokyo’s fashionable city centres, such as Ginza, Harajuku and Shibuya. At the end of each year Tokyo is imbued with a ‘Christmas atmosphere’ that has no relation to Christ or the Virgin Mary, but has everything to do with the latest fashion trends and romance. At the end of 2000, on the exterior surface of the entire Tōkyū department store building/Shibuya JR (Japan Rail) station, hung a massive billboard poster showing Hepburn drinking the canned tea – Gogo no kōcha.

39 Roman Holiday had some 10 Oscar nominations. Audrey Hepburn won Best Actress for her performance in the film (www.oscar.org/events/roman_holiday/index.html).

117 Ga-rii (Girly) Culture and Pizzicato

Having gone through various transformations, Shibuya’s status as a fashion centre continues today. The fashion lingo ‘Shibuya Kei’ describes the young people who principally shop, play and wander in Shibuya. In the early 1990s this area was dominated by ‘Ga-rii’ culture. Written in katakana, Ga-rii is a ‘loan word’ from the English ‘girly’ or ‘girlie’. For the most part, it just meant ‘feminine’, or onna no ko rashii. For the Girly girls, in addition to the usual kawaii or cuteness, and purity (junsui), it was also important to be simultaneously stylish, fashionable, and look intelligent (Tanaka 1990). The young women of the late 1980s and 90s consumed not only big European brand names40, but also more knowledge. As a marketing strategy, department stores such as Seibu offered a variety of courses to inculcate in young women knowledge of western habits and customs, and in-house art museums to attract the increasingly cultured consumers (Creighton 1992; Creighton 1998; Ueno 1998; Havens 1994).

Although ‘Shibuya-Kei’ has now morphed into new styles and trends, Girly culture was its main component in early 1990s. For some, Girly fashion would be typically ‘postmodern’ – it mixed, matched and borrowed heavily from fashions of the 1950s and 60s. Amongst the phenomena of Girly culture was a zealous consumption of the so-called Hepburn style. An example of this was

40 The consumption of European brand-name shoes, for example, is nothing short of extraordinary. According to a detailed survey done on the consumption of brand-name shoes by Ide Yukie (1998), on average, working women in their 20s, have about 6 brand-name shoes, buy about 2 pairs a year, and more than 40% of those surveyed spent between ¥40,000 – 70,000 (US$1 = ¥110 roughly) on each pair. This means that on average each Japanese working woman in their 20s would own between ¥120,000 and ¥210,000 worth of shoes at any one time, and spend around ¥80,000 to ¥140,000 a year on shoes. The most sought-after brands are firstly Chanel, then Louis Vuitton, Prada, Ferragammo, and Fendi, all of them European.

118 the band named Pizzicato Five which only went out of fashion as late as 2001. The Pizzicatos were a group of ardent impersonators of Hepburn, and just like Girly fashion, their style of music was a collage of rearranged nostalgia. One of their songs was entitled ‘Audrey Hepburn Complex’41. Girly girls liked both the Pizzicatos and Hepburn, for they complemented each other, helping to turn each other into something conservatively contemporary; more than just a style dug out of their mothers’ old closet.

Thus this ‘overwhelming boom’ in the revival of Audrey Hepburn is not just because of the continuing nation-wide female admiration for her image. It is also closely linked to the revival of nostalgic fashions in the early 1990s. Moreover, this more recent generation of Japanese consumers of the ‘Hepburn style’ is influenced by their own mothers and women of earlier generations. The ‘nostalgia’ is not merely for the exotic, but rather for a version already domesticated by the previous generations. The later construction of Hepburn’s image is now linked to locally manufactured styles and products. Therefore Hepburn, with her perceived exoticisms from either her European background or her Hollywood film career, is not really the motif of the contemporary Hepburn style. Rather, her reappearance and reconstructed image signifies, in Jameson’s words, ‘nostalgia for the present’, used as a sales pitch for ‘now-ness’ (1989: 517, 537). In other words, the Japanese Hepburn has been localised and detached a couple of generations away from the Hollywood one. Today’s Hepburn in Japan is a contemporary construction of a Japanese image of her, in the same way that ‘armchair nostalgia’ is produced for advertising targeted at young people (Appadurai 1996) (figure 31).

41 The song was a confession of a woman who falls in love with a man just a day before getting married to another. She felt the ‘Audrey Hepburn Complex’, apparently describing a sentiment or/and paranoia of being watched, and felt ‘headaches and faint’ http://www.rain.org/~mills/pizzlyrics/pizzicatomania.html.

119

Figure 31: Asashi’s production of nostalgia.

In many women’s magazines Hepburn has been repeatedly enshrined as an yōsei 妖精 or ‘fairy’, implying the perpetuation of her popularity and reverence for her beauty. In one of the very first Japanese articles about her, published in April 1954 by All Yomimono 物, Hepburn was already idolised as a fairy (All Yomimono 1954). Her film Roman Holiday was an unexpected hit for the Hibiya Movie Theatre, where the film was released and where it had a five-week long run (Hanamori 1954). What followed was a nation-wide trend to imitate Hepburn’s fashion from Roman Holiday, including her hairstyle (Shūkan Uriyomi 1954), her clothes, and even the kind of bicycle she rode. A couple of months later, a contemporary popular culture critic, Hanamori Yasuharu, wrote an article criticising the trend of imitating Hepburn, and gave detailed analysis of why it was impossible for Japanese women to achieve Hepburn’s style by imitation. The article, entitled ‘Dissecting Hepburn 解剖’, gave both cultural and anatomic analysis of what Hanamori saw as a fatal

120 marriage of style and substance – how slacks (the ones Hepburn wore in Roman Holiday) do not suit the Japanese women whose physiques would make the outfit ‘unbalanced’, and how tatami rooms would kill the ‘Hepburn beauty’ (Hanamori 1954). Hanamori asked readers to imagine sitting Hepburn in a Japanese room where, the culture critic concluded, the ‘Hepburn beauty will just die!’42

It seems that Hanamori’s early criticism missed the point of the ‘postmodern’ phenomenon half a century later. Developments over the following decades prove that neither cultural nor anatomic differences would deter Hepburn from becoming part of the Japanese female psyche, and those ‘imbalanced’ slacks and tatami rooms fit both the Japanese girls and their Hepburn imaginations just fine. In fact, the popular cultures developed in the half a century that followed Roman Holiday, indicate that Japanese women have acquired a taste for things with European flavours. The ‘Hepburn style’ has evolved into something that suits the local women. Hepburn, after all, is a ‘fairy’, who proved capable of metamorphosing according to the aura around her. For her image in Japan, perpetuation is essential, history is irrelevant, and locale unimportant.

The True Rebirth of Audrey Hepburn (in a Canned Tea)

In 2001 Kirin made yet another commercial featuring Hepburn, this time in colour. Further, Hepburn had a co-star, an actress of hybrid descent (Japanese and American, or Nichibeha-fu) Takahashi Mariko, an archetypal model of Ga-ri fashion (figure 32). The commercial claims to be ‘an encouragement for

42 The original text was: い日曓部屋坐あ 美さ死うう(: 69)

121 hardworking women’, and is another acrobatic computer-generated collage. It cut and pasted another scene from Roman Holiday, this time combined with live action shooting using living people. Audrey Hepburn’s alter ego this time is not just the Hepburn from the archives. It is combined with a look-alike (Kirin Co. 2001b). To make it, the scene was first shot with the look-alike and then, with the help of digital technology, Audrey Hepburn’s face was inserted in place of that of her double. The commercial was shot in Japan but with European-esque surroundings. The filming site was Oka kōen in Yokohama, a park which was opened in 1962 on the ruins of an old English military post. The flower shop in the commercial is a working florist. The first shot in the commercial, showing ‘Hepburn’ racing down the hill, was filmed in the vicinity of an old cemetery for past expatriates, which all fit well, and without irony, with the theme of Hepburn as ‘the fairy watching over’ a hardworking girl – that is her fan, Takahashi Mariko. It is hard to pick out which part of this commercial is fiction and which is ‘real’.

Figure 32: The model ‘girly’ girl: Takahashi Mariko

This commercial has a number of significant implications. It is the first ‘Audrey Hepburn’ commercial set in Japan, finally putting her in the Japanese milieu,

122 giving a newly acquired pedigree of local-ness to Hepburn’s image. Secondly, it is shot in colour, in a current and known location. This replaces the previous visual rhetoric of nostalgia, signifying a departure from the historical Hepburn and her European/American background, while giving her a contemporary Japaneseness. Thirdly, not only did she become a contemporary in this television commercial, but she also acquired a Japanese co-star, thus putting Hepburn on a par with a Japanese idol. Fourthly, her reputation as a ‘fairy’ is finally materialised and commodified, signifying a departure from her old black and white, nostalgic archival identity. It marks a point in time where history becomes irrelevant. ‘Hepburn’ and imaginations based on her from this point on become accessible and modifiable. ‘Audrey Hepburn’ can now be entirely locally produced according to market requirements at the time, locally presented and selling a local commodity. The image of Audrey Hepburn will continue to be woven into the local cultural tapestry, contributing commercial value to the local economy by being the fairy of female aspiration, representing beauty, talent and the forever intriguing combination of nostalgia and now-ness (figures 33 and 34).

Figure 33: Hepburn presenting Sharan, a series of cameras with retro designs from Canon.

123

Figure 34: Audrey Hepburn as the face of working women, for Pasona, a temp agency.

Regarding the visual presentation of pseudo patina in mass merchandising, Appadurai (1996) describes how the idea of ‘nostalgia for the present’ (Jameson 1989) is being used as a technique in advertisements targeted at young consumers. It is used as a ‘stylised presentation of the present as if it has already slipped away’, which underlines ‘the inherent ephemerality of the present’. This technique is taken one step further in the Afternoon Tea commercials, which repeatedly re-employed Hepburn’s image, and effectively created separate narratives for her. Not only are these commercials representations of ‘nostalgia for the present’ that ‘underlines’ ephemerality, but they undermine the idea of time altogether. The reconstructed narratives give the current trend for ‘present nostalgia’ instant patina and at the same time making (re)rendition of history immediately applicable to any given era and locale. This not only signifies that culture is indeed an object which can be constructed, exchanged, and then bought and sold, but also that identities can

124 be effectively digitised. The consequence is that any idea of a hierarchical realness is made redundant, not only in terms of original/copy but also in terms of history and contemporaneity (see also Yoshimoto 1996: 111). It repudiates the traditional inaccessibility of a historical idol and essentially updates and democratises it, by making the reconstructed image impervious to the idea of authenticity, to historical narrative, and to real topographical settings43.

‘Audrey Hepburn’ is now subject to future modifications at the will of the marketplace. Since the first Kirin commercial using a digitalised Hepburn, ‘she’ has acquired new narratives. History, or in Hepburn’s case, Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s – already novelties themselves, became part of the mediated aura, reusable for new narratives constructed to lend a sense of drama to the purchase of everyday consumer goods.

Hepburn Nationalised

Just to make history and topography yet more irrelevant to the idea of Audrey Hepburn than they already are, NHK, the government-founded conservative television network, produced a serialised TV drama called ‘Audrey’ or ‘Ōdorii’ in Japanese. Aired between October 2000 and March 2001, it achieved a rating of 20.5% in the Kantō area (East Japan). The scheduling clearly indicates that the drama was targeting mostly housewives. It was shown first for 15 minutes in the morning from 8:15 to 8:30 each day of the week from Monday to Saturday.

43 Kirin is not the first to play with the idea of history; nor is Hepburn the first ghost to come alive. Films such as Blade Runner, and the anime Ghost in the Shell, and more recently the Matrix film series all used nostalgic and exotic visual presentations to render the future. The contemporary use of the ‘past’ to express the idea of the ‘future’ deserves a more thorough analysis in terms of the meaning of history in the digital era than is possible here.

125 Then the entire week’s drama would be compiled and re-shown on Saturday mornings from 9:30 to 11:00am on NHK’s Satellite 2 (figure 35).

Figure 35: A Japanese narrative for the Japanese Audrey, courtesy of NHK.

The story of this Audrey started in 1953, the year Audrey Hepburn starred in Roman Holiday. A translator named Haruo lived in Kyoto, which used to be called the Japanese Hollywood. His wife Aiko gives birth to a baby girl, later named ‘Audrey’, or in Japanese Ōdorii. Little Ōdorii is brought up speaking English with Haruo in Kyoto. Two years later, in 1955, Audrey Hepburn’s Roman Holiday won critical acclaim in Japan (NHK 2000).

126

The TV drama was a typical jidaigeki (costume drama), a genre consisting mostly of historical soap operas. These costume dramas often narrate history in more ways than textbooks can perfect and reach wider audiences through television. The show Ōdorii is not about Audrey Hepburn, but about the dramas of Haruo’s family in Kyoto. The setting is quintessentially or perhaps ‘exotically Japanese’ (Ivy 1995) with most of its costume being the traditional kimono. The show tells the story of post-war Japan and the growing up of the Ōdorii generation. Here, Audrey Hepburn’s name is treated as semantics, localised with a Japanese historical background, then inserted with a Japanese face, not so different to what Kirin has done in their commercials. By the time the show went off air in 2001, Ōdorii would have been 48 years old. If she married around 25 and give birth in the following couple of years, her daughter would have been one of the Girly girls and a Hepburn fan. The Ōdorii show tells a post-war history in a most iconic Japanese Kyoto, with three generations of devotion to a Hollywood fairy. It might not be the most entertaining, but it gives a pseudo-historical background to what is in vogue. Importantly it makes Audrey nostalgically Japanese, in an environment ‘exotically’ Japanese, renewing a reconstructed ‘experience’ for the current Audrey fan – an ‘experience’ they not only did not have, but the experience itself never existed. If Kirin’s new commercial signifies a materialisation of Audrey Hepburn’s virtuality (and her ‘fairy’ status), then Ōdorii provides the instant patina for this virtuality.

127 Conclusion

More than a decade after her death, the idolisation of Hepburn is alive and well in 2004. The sold-out exhibition aptly titled ‘Timeless Audrey’44 in Tokyo, which went on to tour the nation, seems to signifying further the irrelevance of time to the ‘fairy’, and confuses further the order of history, now and what will become of her in the future. It is no longer meaningful to try to argue for a ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ Audrey Hepburn. What we now see is the ‘real’ Hepburn in an exhibition about the ‘timelessness’ of her idolisation is stemmed in the various visual representations of a beautiful fairy in different roles.

In a fascinating essay written on Postmodernity and Tokyo Disneyland, Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro argues: Disneyland cannot be parodied because as it is a simulated fatal space, it is also already a parody of what it simulates . . . Consequently the Tokyo Disneyland cannot be either an imitation or a reproduction of Disneyland in Los Angeles: it is a 'real’ that is, simulated Disneyland. (Yoshimoto 1989:10) And: Tokyo Disneyland epitomizes the cultural logic of postmodern Japan which has nothing to do with the logic of Americanization. On the contrary, Tokyo Disneyland, superficially the epitome of Americanization, completely repudiates the notion of Americanization as the dead remnant of modernization theory. (Yoshimoto 1989:13)

Nor are VenusFort in Tokyo an ‘Italianisation’, and the Japanese Audrey a ‘Hollywood-isation’ – they are mediated imaginations and commercialisation of

44 The exhibition started in Tokyo’s fashion centre Shibuya (22 May – 4 July 2004) causing long queues of fans waiting outside of ‘The Museum’ in Bunkamura. ‘Timeless Audrey’ tours the nation until 11 February 2005, ending in Takashimaya department store in Namba, Osaka.

128 cultural icons. As I have shown, the Japanese marketplace has reconditioned the Hollywood Hepburn into one that has most effective commercial value and has given her image an appeal that fits the local and current Japanese female consumers. It is not as simple as another example of Americanisation or westernisation of Japanese culture. Hepburn’s initial popularity in Japan may be because of a certain amount of admiration for western consumer cultures in the early days of the 1950s when her films started to win popularity world-wide. But her more recent iconic status in Japan is very much a local commercial and cultural product. Scholars such as Brannen (1992), Yoshimi (1993) and Yoshimoto (1989) argue that Tokyo Disneyland is a Japanese Disneyland, which makes Mickey Mouse in Japan a Japanese Mickey Mouse, both culturally and economically45. By the same token Ōdorii, indeed can only be a Japanese Audrey.

The Japanese Audrey presents us with an interesting case of cultural reproduction in a seemingly incompatible and improbable cultural environment. It is a successful example of how, with the collaboration of willing consumers, marketers are able to regenerate interest in old narratives, and reproduce with contemporary relevance. In the case of Audrey Hepburn, Japanese marketers have localised or ‘domesticated’ what might have been a foreign cultural product into something intrinsically local. They have given it a new lease of life, in a new era, in a new environment. Thus the ‘Hepburn of the day’ acquires renewed commercial value and continues to inspire the consumers.

45 In the case of Mickey Mouse, it is a matter of its licensing agreement that came with Tokyo Disneyland (TDL). Financially Mickey Mouse is no more ‘American’ than TDL itself and no less Japanese than the approximately 90 percent of all its sales and profits owned by the Japanese Oriental Land Ltd (see Findlay (1992) and Wasko (2001)).

129 Moreover, the marketplace has effectively made it possible for identities to be part of cultural production, virtual or otherwise. The Japanese Hepburn means that an identity, body and soul, can be digitised and modified without losing ‘integrity’, by nature of the progression of digital media. In fact, as I have demonstrated here, the traditional concepts of cultural integrity and authenticity are irrelevant in the case of digital reproduction. The postmodern ideas of simulation, of simulacra, and of the hyper-real, problematise recent social and cultural phenomena such as the reproduction and localisation of Audrey Hepburn. However, these different versions of ‘Audrey’ (in different commercials and in different dramatic uses) are incomparable. From the point where her image is digitised, the concept of hierarchical realness effectively becomes redundant. For in digital media, no one copy can be more real than any other.

Thus ‘Audrey Hepburn’, by definition, is ‘virtual’, in more ways than one – she existed mostly in the media when she was alive; and was further mediated to the point of reconstruction when she was dead. ‘Audrey Hepburn’ is from the beginning a name created for the media. Her ‘real’ name, Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston, is virtually unknown (A&E Televison Networks, 2003).

Virtual identities are possible not only as aliases. At the cultural level and in terms of consumption, they help the market and the consumer to adjust to current trends. The possibilities of reproducing identities not only give marketers the ability to constantly reposition their products, but also enable consumers to switch at appropriate life stages between products and brands, and hence identities.

In an era in which consumer products have come to resemble each other in functionality, in quality and even in appearance, the only thing setting them

130 apart is ‘branding’, a process which arguably started with advertising of various kinds. With poignant examples, Twitchell demonstrates that the only thing advertising sets out to do (and is doing well) is creating ‘stories’ and ‘meaning’ for the products it tries to sell (Twitchell 2002: 154-9; see also Twitchell 1996). That is why an Audrey Hepburn from 1950s is being used for commercials to sell a tea she did not know existed. Kirin Beverages Co. has successfully borrowed, and in the process re-authored Hepburn’s aura, the associations she has with European good taste, and her perpetual youth in old films and their romances.

As the protagonists of styles and role models of consumption, media stars sit comfortably with advertising at the tip of the ‘story’ and ‘meaning’ creation. Klapp recognised during the 1960s that styles ‘are a set of props for casting oneself in a character, rather than a means of expressing one’s true self’, while ‘idols provide a shared temporal journey of identity-seeking for the fans’ (Klapp 1969: 80, 218). Hepburn is a good example of this process. The Japanese adaptation and resuscitation of her screen life is a pivotal story of everyday consumption. Amongst vast varieties of goods, only brand association or the stories and meaning created by the media can tell the tale of difference – not in what they do (their function) but in what they imply; in the consumer’s taste and their everyday ‘dramas’ of consumption in such things as drinking a canned tea.

Japan’s Audrey Hepburn is just another example of how mass aspiration either generated or induced by popular media is closely linked to consumption. In the same way, the royal wedding in April 1959 between crown prince Akihito and his commoner princess Shōda Michiko was accompanied by a media event which in many ways induced, and indicated the beginning of a taishū tennosei, or ‘Mass Emperor System’, giving the audience the chance to imagine being ‘in

131 her white satin shoes’ themselves46 (Partner 1999: 173-5). This story of aspiration will continue to be created by public demand in a broad spectrum of media, with or without the idols to star in them. In fact the trends in media long ago suggested that one day the audience would not only want to be in the shoes of their idols; their aspiration would eventually take them to the stage (and screen) masquerading as stars. As Featherstone puts it, the ‘new petit bourgeois is a pretender’, one whose ‘search for expression and self expression, the fascination with identity and appearance, makes … a natural consumer’ (1991: 90).

The image of idols will eventually be democratised to the point that they become one of their own fans, and the fans will be elevated to the positions previously only occupied by stars. ‘Audrey Hepburn’, is thus merely an ‘alias’ in the rapidly virtualising media and physical landscape. ‘The face of Audrey Hepburn’ therefore inevitably will have many versions of embodiment (figure 36). Today, the stories in the media are designed for nothing but their own consumption – where the protagonists and the audience have become the same people. This, we call ‘Reality Television’.

46 According to Partner (1999: 174), the extensive media coverage on the commoner princess, Michiko (as she is familiarly known by the Japanese) also included detailed description on the so called Michi-style fashion: clothing sported by Shōda Michiko, with instructions on where to buy them, and how much they cost.

132

Figure 36: The face of Ōdorii

133

CHAPTER III

WATCHING STARS, PLAYING THE MUNDANE

Figure 37: ‘Future Diary’, the scripted reality on TV

Scripts for Everyday People: the Logic of Japanese Televised Reality

The rules of ‘Ainori’: ♥Four men and three women, looking for lovers, ride the Love Wagon on a trip around the world. ♥During the trip, as one decides on ‘the one’, s/he asks for the Japan-bound ticket, and declares love to ‘the one’. ♥The person being courted, after a night thinking carefully, kisses the suitor (if s/he accepts the courtship). ♥If their feelings are mutual, then they officially become a couple, and return to Japan together47. ♥New participants (Ainori) fill their vacancies in the next stop.

47 And if their feelings are not mutual, the suitor will be sent home alone.

134 ‘Ainori’, Fuji Television (Uchiyama et al. 2000: 15)48

The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its general manifestation. Guy Debord (1994: 47)

Following on from the analysis of idol worship and media content as manuals for the acquisition of style as part of the repertoire of personal consumption, I will now turn my focus to a medium which allows the individual to perform publicly in a highly dramatized and mediated environment – ‘Audience Participation Shows’, the Japanese variant of Reality TV. In this chapter, I analyse two popular series that illustrate different strategies based on the idea of televised ‘reality’. The two programs create different means for audience participation with different formats and styles.

The ‘Ainori あい’ Story

The ‘Ainori’ phenomenon started as a 15-minute pilot show by Fuji Television. Commencing in October 1999, it featured a group of seven young people almost all in their twenties, four male and three female, travelling around the world in a van, which is famously dubbed ‘the Love Wagon’ in Japan. ‘Ainori’, however, is not a show about globe-trotting, but a popular dating game, televised. The protagonists, or ‘participants’, are chosen because they ‘seriously want to fall in love’ (Uchiyama et al. 2000)49. The show, along with the famous Love Wagon, was first launched in Daiba, a place famous for its themed retail and leisure

48 My translation. 49 This was the first of the prerequisites for candidacy set by the producer Nishiyama.

135 environments (chapter one). The Love Wagon then proceeded to Shimonoseki City, then crossed the Korea Strait via ferry, and arrived at its first foreign destination, Pusan, Korea. This trip marked the inauguration of a long trek replete with love stories that traversed the world, from Asia to Europe, from the Americas to Oceania.

As of May 2004, the ever-changing passengers of the Love Wagon have pursued love in some 50 foreign countries (Japan is not included in the show), and have delivered to their eager home audience more than 221 episodes of love (and still counting) (figure 38). The love stories will go on as long as the ratings of the show stay high. As the copy for the show declares: 男女７人＆恋愛ワ舞台 始 Seven men and women started an endless survival50 love trip, with the Love Wagon as its stage51. (Uchiyama et al. 2000)

‘Ainori’ is a low-budget TV show featuring amateurs, or ‘real people’, as ‘cast’. Unlike what professional actors in a popular television program would demand, the ‘stars’ of ‘Ainori’ are given only minimum living allowances depending on the country in which they are travelling. This can be as little as ¥1,500 (approximately US$10-12) per day. There are four people in the production crew: a director, an assistant director, a cameraman, and an audio controller. They are normally on a two-week roster, at the end of which they bring back to Japan an enormous quantity of videotape taken in the two weeks, to be edited into a 30-minute show. The show also includes a commentary by three well known comedian MCs. ‘Ainori’ is popular, especially among the

50 Instead of using common Japanese words, the copy writing directly borrows the English words ‘endless’ and ‘survival’ (written in katakana) which suggest an emphasis on trendiness in its nuance. 51 My translation.

136 twenty-something audience. The ratings averaged 15% nationwide during September 2000 (Tani 2000). Since then it has been quite consistently over 16%, except for periods such as during the Sydney Olympic Games.

Figure 38: The global trotting love-seekers on TV, with their famous ‘Love Wagon’.

The ‘Future Diary’ Story

In July 2000, a little less than a year after ‘Ainori’ first went to air, TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting Systems) started broadcasting a show called ‘Mirainikki 曑来日記 ’. At the beginning of every episode the participants, a young man and young woman who are strangers to each other, are given a ‘scenario’ in a notebook, which is called ‘Mirainikki’ or ‘Future Diary’52. The audience is shown pieces of the scenario on the screen. The participants have to ‘go along’ with the story. Like ‘Ainori’, ‘Future Diary’ often places the participants in dramatic but easily surmountable difficulties, such as pushing a car that is out of petrol together, or the man piggy-backing the woman while climbing up a flight of 100 stairs. Even though the ‘lines’ are left to the participants to improvise, the end of each scene

52 ‘The Future Diary’ is the official translation of ‘Mirainikki’.

137 is decided by the ‘Future Diary’. The audience is told only the ending. The progression and development between the scenarios make up the show. That is, the supposedly real human interaction and reaction to the predetermined dramatic outcomes are the real content of the show – not the narrative, which is already known to the audience during the early parts of each episode.

The protagonists are given separate diaries outlining different beginnings of the story, based on which they will carry out their performance in front of the camera. Because of the difference in the scenarios they receive before the show, the participants act and react differently, thus creating tension and interaction for the show. The audience, however, is always one step ahead of the cast. This reverses the roles of actor and audience. Here, the participants or performers of the show are thrown into a situation in which they are completely ignorant of the story development – that is the love they are ‘living’ out. The audience, however, is told in advance the twists and turns. What makes the show are the supposedly natural emotions of the ‘ordinary’ participants during the unexpected events and ‘fateful’ progress of their love stories.

According to Arai Masaya 荒井昌也, the producer of ‘Future Diary’, the protagonists do not have each other’s contact information, and are forbidden to meet anywhere outside of the show. Their contact with each other happens entirely during shooting, and their conversations are carried out only while the camera is rolling (Arai 2000). That is to say that their ‘love’, real or otherwise, can only commence, develop and end in front of the camera. Thus, the nature of the show prohibits happy endings, for the couple must in the end separate, both on and off the show – when the show is over, so too is ‘love’. Arai insists that apart from the diary itself, which also serves as a story guideline (without lines for actors to read), everything about the show is a ‘documentary’ (Arai 2000: 64). The show averaged 14% ratings as of September 2000 (Tani 2000: 127).

138

‘Mirainikki’ was first aired on TBS and became exceedingly popular, especially amongst audiences aged from their 10s to 20s. Since then many different formats of media entertainment have been developed based on the same idea, creating a media synergy spreading to novels, movies, magazines, and even entertainment events to experience the ‘Future Diary’. In July 2000, TBS and the amusement park Kōrakuen 後楽園 staged an event ‘Future Diary at Luna Park’, where the visitors were given especially designed ‘Future Diaries’ to carry out their very own version of the show (figure 39). This event attracted a mass participation of 213,000 visitors to the amusement park (Nikkei Trendy 2000).

Figure 39: Poster for ‘The Future Diary in Luna Park’.

‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ seemingly have very different formats. ‘Ainori’ is a ‘documentary’ of love stories lived by ordinary people in extraordinary milieus. ‘Future Diary’ is a succession of ‘documentaries’ of ordinary people living out scripted love stories. They also work on different audience psychologies. ‘Ainori’ offers the quasi-real-time development of multiple love stories between the participants in little known exotic locales. ‘Mirainikki’ shows the improvisations and reactions of ‘ordinary people’ to their unfolding fate in pre-told love stories. They both somehow belong to the Reality TV category, the

139 ‘realness’ of which is projected either through ‘real people’, ‘real emotions’ (as opposed to ‘acting’), or ‘real life’. In short, the protagonists of the shows are supposed to be no different from a random sample of the audience.

Improvisation, or ‘going along’ with predetermined story lines, borders closely on what would be generally perceived as ‘acting’. The difficulty here is that the Reality TV genre is projected as ‘real’ or documentary-like. However, the show’s claim to ‘reality’ relies, first, on the participants being supposedly non-professionals and second, on the participants’ supposed (re)actions based on ‘real’ emotions. The ‘act’ here is therefore extremely murky, questioning the boundaries between ‘acting’ and showing a ‘reaction’ based on true emotions, albeit scripted for television.

Television, the Mall and Transportation for the Mind

The TV actor does not have to project either his voice or himself. Likewise, TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or ‘closing’ of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Marshall McLuhan (1994: 317)

According to McLuhan, the high level of audience participation in television is ensured, not by the content of television programming, but by the technology of the television screen, which offers only a ‘low definition’ image. In his words, ‘if the medium is low intensity, the participation is high’. Hence television is an example of what McLuhan calls a ‘cool’ medium. McLuhan goes on to give an

140 example of how Hollywood movie stars in public are instantaneously recognised by their fans; not so for TV stars in the same situation, who only remind their audience of their presence on television. The reason, according to McLuhan, is that the audience wants to see their TV stars in role, but movie stars in real life. The ‘role of the TV star seems more fascinating than his private life’ because ‘with TV, the viewer is involved and a participant’ (1994: 318-9).

As a cool medium, television’s low image resolution and minimum requirement for concentration invites the audience’s participation rather than deliberate appreciation. The television has long become a tool of ‘everyday distraction’ (Morse:193), its ubiquitous low definition image serving as a background to daily chores; or as a medium for other entertainment (such as spectator sports) rather than a form of art that demands extensive concentration. ‘High definition’ artistic forms such as film and the theatre create a distance between art and everyday life, and between the actor and the audience. Thus the stage presence of the actor is clearly defined and their work recognized as a form of artistic performance. On the other hand, the TV star is much closer to ‘real life’ – the everyday experience that indeed forms the television ‘stage’. Rather than viewing the ‘stage’, the TV audience in fact ‘shares’ it with the actor, participating in an endless non-narrative of mundaneness. McLuhan’s movie fans ‘know’ that their stars are acting on screen, and thus their private lives off-screen are intriguing. On the other hand, television fans may unconsciously feel that they already know the star intimately in their very own living rooms. This is partly because the frequency of seeing them on television in private spaces, partly because of what McLuhan calls the ‘low definition’ of the screen, and partly because of the non-performing, or casual presence of the stars on this low-definition screen. Hence, an even more ‘private’ image of their already intimately known star on

141 the streets provokes more of an impression (as would a look-alike) than a more definite recognition of the star.

For the television consumers, the staged acting and the private life of a TV star is reversed. The private life of the consumer is in fact shared with the televisual stage life of the star. The star’s performance on television is what in part makes up the private life of his/her audience. So much of the star’s private life is now presented to the audience, there is hardly any reason left for the audience to imagine yet another private life of the television star that is not already on the screen.

The distinction between cold and hot media, between stars of the silver and the electronic screen, will of course shift because of new development in the media landscape and technology. The phenomenon of ‘unrecognisable’ television stars may cease to be true as both technological and qualitative distinctions between the media become smaller as they integrate, and as more actors work across media. However, conceptualising television as a ‘cool’ participatory medium has an especially pointed rationale in the case of Reality TV.

Transporting Medium

Margaret Morse likened the highly segmented television programs to a permanent daily distraction in that they have ‘an attenuated fiction effect in everyday life’, similar to the discursive segments of freeways and shopping malls. For freeways, shopping malls and television are ‘not truly places’ and ‘cannot be localized within the geometrical grids’. The freeway can be a shelter and an escape from all the other social and geographical locations; malls are enclosed and privately governed by marketers, providing commodities with

142 roles in retail dramas, disconnected from the necessities of everyday life; television is dislocated because it offers no real geographical reference in its source and destination. All are practices of everyday life, performed ‘semi-automatically’, without locus (Morse 2000: 196-200).

The essence of the idea that television is the escape, the shelter and everyday ‘distraction’ is in the nature of its virtuality, which has no origin and no destination. Morse here points out that the connection between television, the freeway and the mall is that they all are highly segmented pieces of everyday life; all are, in fact, in Augé’s term ‘non-places’, where no organic interaction is possible (Augé 1995). They are by nature virtual, and always in-between places. The freeway is the line that connects A and B, from origin to destination. The mall is ‘B’, the destination, the highly controlled enclosed stage or the prop for the so-called retail drama, of which television is the scenario. Television, ‘reality’ or not, has by its nature been a fundamental part of everyday practice, ritual and performance.

As I have discussed in chapter one on themed environments, the stage-like space, such as VenusFort, provides consumers with both the backdrop for, and props with which to consume, a block of otherwise eventless time. The freeway links the ordinary everyday life and the slightly extraordinary retail dramas, with other consumption spaces, and takes us there. The television provides both the freeway and the distraction for the mind. While drama, talk shows and news of distant locales break the continuity of everyday life, the distraction of the advertisement, ‘infotainment’ and product placement are indeed doing what the marketing professionals describe as ‘driving’ people to the stores.

Before Morse, many had attempted to link together phenomena of modern life, such as transportation, shopping malls and the television, in sometimes

143 provocative ways. Rudolf Arnheim, for example, remarked in 1979 that ‘television turns out to be related to the motor car and the aeroplane as a means of transport for the mind’ (cited in both Morse 1990 and Rath 1985)53. This gives a perfect introduction to the potential of television in affecting the ‘minds’ of consumers in everyday life – perhaps serving as a medium of transportation for imagination and desires. In his famous book The Malling of America, William Severini Kowinski simply pronounces that the mall is a ‘TV you walk around in!’ (1985: 51) For Kowinski, the mall effectively provides a place for the ‘viewers’ to obtain what is desired via television in tangible goods, under one roof, at convenient highway intersections. By the same principle, today’s airports around the world, intersections for international airlines – famously Hong Kong, Singapore and Los Angeles, but also Moscow and Shanghai – are the trans-national, trans-continental tax-free malls, providing a filtered selection of trans-cultural symbols and icons in consumer goods for a still relatively wealthier, more sanitized and mobile crowd.

It is difficult to measure the ‘television audience’. As Eileen Meehan (1990) and Ien Ang (1992) have argued, television ratings simply do not show how television programs are consumed by the audience, in what manner and with what attitude. Ratings cannot tell us how many viewers are delivered to the television advertisers, let alone which of those watched the commercials in between programs and which were ‘channel-surfing’, how many are ‘driven’ to the stores, and how many finally do make the purchase. This is because the audience does not just sit there and ‘watch’ television; they ‘live’ the television as part of everyday life. Television has channels to suit different moods, and commercials to break them into segments. People channel-surf not to look for

53Arnheim’s original remarks can be found in Rundfunk als Hörkunst, trans. Phillip Drummond, Munich, Hanser, 1979:164)

144 another channel, but because the current one ceases to engage or, in Morse’s term to ‘distract’, the viewer from continuous everyday mundaneness. The advertising breaks between dramas and shows weave television into everyday life – the chores, the conversations and continuation of lived reality.

One can safely assume that television has been a main source of advertisements and flows of images, which are dominant forces in providing popular imaginings and narratives in everyday life. In 1978, television sets occupied 86.3 million American households and ‘millions watched for eight to sixteen hours a day’ (Ang 1992: 117-118), in every domestic territory imaginable, from kitchen to bedroom, fun room converted garage, guest room and of course the TV room. TV, as Lynn Spigel (1990) puts it, is not only a central representation of family relationships but had also become the cultural symbol par excellence of (American) family life (Spigel 1990: 73, 77). In 2002, 84.4 percent of Americans and 71.9 percent of Japanese owned a television set (Nihon ITU Kyōkai 2002).

Television, as it turns out, is more than a mall, a transportation medium and a perpetual spectacle – it is all of them combined into one. One can shop and at the same time be educated, in every subject imaginable, or just be ‘taken away’ by the afternoon soap operas. It is an uninterrupted image machine intertwined with everyday life. Its programs, as Livingstone argues, are ‘multilayered texts, open and incomplete in meanings, providing multiple yet bounded paths for the reader’ (Livingstone 1998: 171) – such is everyday life.

As Reality TV became popular in the global media market, Japanese TV stations localised the genre and produced shows with their own characteristics. Instead of revealing and encouraging the most unbecoming human traits — ‘the lowest common denominator’ as they are often referred to by the critics of Reality TV (Kilborn 1994, Dauncey 1996, Dovey 2000) — in monitored and constructed

145 environments that are more like ‘fish-tanks’ than TV studios (such as the ‘Big Brother’ series), the Japanese programs put the emphasis on inducing ‘love’ between the ‘participants’. Beside the conventional voyeurisms, the most popular Reality TV-type shows in Japanese television seem to revolve around a more dramatic and romantic element. While Australian audiences agonized over who should be evicted from the ‘Big Brother’ household and thereby be erased from their television screens, the Japanese television audience was worried about whether its girl- and boy-next-door would be successful in the game of courtship and end up going home together in conjugal bliss.

Melodramatic Reality? – The Question of Genre

Reality Television is now a distinctive genre, typified by such programs as ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Survivor’. As the Reality TV genre has spread around world, many highly standardized formats have emerged, showing ‘realities’ in all areas – (un)real family life in ‘The Osbournes’, adventures in ‘Survivor’, even surreal plastic-surgery-aided bodily transformations in shows such as ‘Extreme Makeover’.

However the term ‘reality’ here is hardly a meaningful description in the context of television. Apart from the typical ‘Big Brother’-type shows, many shows project ‘reality’ as one of their important premises. Programs that use authoritative tones and documentary techniques, often with the aid of handheld camcorders, show dramatized ‘real’ lives, making the term ‘reality’ in the context of television programming a very muddy one. ‘Black Mail’ and ‘Stinger’ in Japan, ‘America’s Most Wanted’ and Jerry Springer’s ‘Real Life Sex Confessions’ in the US, ‘RPA’ and ‘My Restaurant Rules’ in Australia – to name just a few examples, in some ways share a common characteristic that they all

146 are about so-called real lives. However, as Jon Dovey points out, ‘the way the material is packaged is essential’. The disparate elements in ‘eco-disaster film, the studio based confessional, the “triumph over tragedy” documentary … are strongly narrativised in ways that conform to conventional fictional police dramas or to the form of melodrama’ (2000: 80). The narrativised and televised reality more often than not differs greatly from what we normally would consider as the ‘reality’ of everyday life. If we do not consider having to survive on raw bugs and confronting FBI fugitives as part of our daily reality, why then should television shows shot in these surreal situations be called ‘reality’ TV?

Reality TV proves to be remarkably popular in many countries54 while terminological confusions remain. When awarded for being extremely popular, ‘Big Brother’ won awards in nearly as many categories as there are countries in which it was produced. It won Italy’s best ‘Customs and Culture Show’, France’s ‘Best Game Show’. The most confusing of all is that in the UK the first series of ‘Big Brother’ won ‘Best Light Entertainment’, the second series won ‘Most Popular Factual Program’, and the third won ‘Entertainment and Non-Drama Production’ (Johnson-Woods 2002: 51, 52).

The Japanese producers of both ‘The Future Diary and ‘Ainori’ have clearly stated that the concepts for these reality dating shows, rather than ‘reality’, were either developed for or based on dramas. If this is so, how different are the

54 Programs such as ‘Crimewatch’ and ‘999’ in the UK have regularly attracted more than 10 million viewers (Dovey 2000: 82). ‘Big Brother’ has achieved similar success in the UK – 7.7 million voted in, and 10 million watched, the final eviction. Three million Australians watched the final episode of ‘Big Brother’ which topped the national 16-39 demographic (ratings) for nine weeks. Worldwide, ‘Big Brother’ has been watched by 69% of the Italian population, 52% of Americans, 64% of the population in Germany, and two billion viewers around the world (Johnson-Woods 2002).

147 fundamentals of these ‘Audience Participation Shows’ as they are called in Japan, from the soap operas or melodramas which attracted even more viewers in the heyday of television drama?

Reality TV programs are routinely visually characterized by their ‘raw’ footage. The ‘rawness’, however, is often selected and edited from a very large amount of filming (Johnson-Woods 2002: 55, 80; Uchiyama et al. 2000: 200). Both ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Ainori’ are based on 24-hour quasi-surveillance filming on all participants, whether in the house or on a bus. The final product delivered to the audience, however, is less than 30 minutes of selected ‘reality’, heavily edited to tell a story designed to attract as many viewers as possible. Its edited realities frequently borrow from game shows for their rules and from the documentary, for their presentation styles. However, with their typical melodramatic ‘cliff-hanging’ endings and continuing airing schedules, their narrative form works on much the same principles as that of the soap opera. Indeed, the original producers of ‘Big Brother’ much prefer the term ‘docusoap’ (Johnson-Woods 2002: 53). The producer of ‘Ainori’ claims to have based the show on an early-nineties classic of the ‘trendy drama’ genre, ‘Ai to iu na no moto ni 愛いう’ (Uchiyama et al. 2000: 198). And ‘Future Diary’ was first intended as a movie (Arai 2000: 64; Yamada 2000). In terms of their target audiences, both ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ are designed to attract young viewers from teens to early 20s – as did the trendy dramas of the late 1980s and early 1990s, on which I will elaborate in more detail below.

Both ‘Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’ have theme songs performed by very popular pop groups, which all sold exceedingly well. ‘Ainori’ used groups such as ELT, Glay and Yuzu – all best-selling Japanese pop bands. Songs like ‘Tsunami’ and ‘Sakura Zaka’ from the shows ranked first at one time in the pop charts, both in sales and in karaoke parlours. The requirement for a catchy theme song

148 performed by famous singers or groups was also an essential element in the making of trendy dramas. Reality TV or ‘audience participation TV’ uses the very same techniques to increase ratings especially among the younger audience.

Figure 40: ‘Ainori,’ the ‘unscripted’ reality on TV

In summarizing the characteristics of soap opera, Ang concludes that there are three important characteristics. These are ‘…continuous coming and going of narratives’, with ‘many main characters’, whose lives the ‘soap opera selectively follows in the community’ (Ang 1985: 57, 59). Or as Laura Stemple Mumford defines it, ‘soap opera is a continuing fictional dramatic television program, presented in multiple serial instalments each week, through a narrative composed of interlocking storylines that focus on the relationships within a specific community of characters’ (Mumford 1995: 18).

I am aware that there has been debate in defining the genres, mostly about the characteristic differences, such as air-time slot (prime time, or daytime), manner in which the episodes are divided (cliff-hanger ending or independent episodes), and frequency (daily or weekly) of air time (Mumford 1995: 15-46).

149 However, for the purpose of this thesis I do not attempt to define the differences between soap opera and melodrama. It is the similarities and overlapping characteristics between the two that are of concern in this chapter. Ang, for example, makes a definitional note on the differences between melodrama and soap opera while classifying ‘Dallas’ as both a melodrama and a soap opera (Ang 1985: 62; see also Cassidy 1989: 42). The qualities and characteristics of both soap opera and melodrama have no doubt provided some of the most important references for romance-oriented Reality TV programs such as ‘Ainori’ and ‘The Future Diary’. This fundamental connection between dramas of the older generation and the newer Reality TV-type shows is of principal importance to explicate the workings of ‘reality’ on TV in Japan.

The fundamental difference between the melodramatic soap opera and Reality TV programs such as ‘Ainori’ and ‘The Future Diary’, it seems, is simply their projection of ‘realness’, marked by the choice of non-(professional) actors, the visual characteristics of documentary or home video camerawork and often authoritative background narration of all details with dramatic potential. The success of Reality TV is not dependent on the (lack of) intricacy of the stories or the complexity of the characters, but rather being real is the primary premise. The acceptance of this premise by the audience, i.e. if, and to what extent, the audience identify with the participants’ performances as ‘acting’ or as being ‘real’, determines its shelf life.

This is less a question of defining the ‘real’ in the television program, specifically in Reality TV, as a question of the negotiations between the audience and the so-called participants, much the same way as the audience negotiates story lines in soap operas or melodramas. Again, ‘Dallas’ is a good example of how a globally successful show could fail in certain markets when the audience refused to accept the premises on which the show based itself.

150 ‘Dallas’ was popular in ninety countries, but failed in Brazil and Japan (Iwao 1990: 5, 6) precisely because of the audience rejected the show’s ‘inconsistencies’. The Japanese complained about ‘Dallas’ that ‘it is inconsistent within itself, with its title, with the genre in which it presumes to belong, with the romantic expectations the Japanese have of this genre, with their aesthetic criteria for the construction of a television narrative, with their image of post-war American society, with their image of themselves, and with their image of men’ (Liebes 1990: 138). Thus, how ‘real’ a show is, be that Reality TV, or melodramatic soap, largely depends on whether the audience can first of all accept the basic reality of the premises, settings, and narrative development.

Scripting ’Reality’

Being ‘real’ in Reality TV is the central focus of the array of globally formulated programs in this category. ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Survivor’ for example revolve around the ‘natural’ development of the relationships between the participants. The script – or the lack of one – is what sets reality shows apart from the soap opera. One of the interesting dissimilar developments in the incarnation of the Japanese Reality TV shows however, plays precisely on a predetermined ‘script’. ‘Future Diary’ features an intriguing twist on its version of ‘reality’, compared to other reality shows – it has a script, albeit without dialogue. The ‘script’ in the case of ‘Future Diary’ is the ‘diary’, which set out the plot of the predetermined beginnings and outcomes of each episode. The plots are shown to the audience as the story develops, always one or two steps prior to the participants. The participants are would-be lovers who have never met before. Without knowing what will happen in the story in which they are the protagonists and what to do in the next scene, the non-actors must ‘act’ or rather ‘react’ to a very short descriptive scenario – the eponymous ‘Future

151 Diary’ which, in most cases, only contains the end of each mini-scenario, one step behind the audience. This is another twist and a major attraction for the audience in the concept. Even though these ‘real people’ have a script – the ‘Future Diary’ – which they must follow, the show projects the emotions induced by the diary as non-acting, real emotions. However, real or not, they must fall in love, be happy, break up, and then be devastated, all according to the prescriptions of the diary. The drama here is first of all the (re)action of the participants to the drama. The enjoyment for the audience is to see what their reaction will be. The traditional ‘cliff-hanger’ of the soap opera has shifted from the viewer’s anticipation of the narrative development to the reaction of the protagonists to the scenarios already known to the audience.

‘Ainori’, on the other hand, is supposed to be entirely unscripted, spontaneous and participated in by ‘real people’. The show theoretically unfolds in a ‘direction-free’, acting-free natural environment (although with a director on site). The emotions erupting during the progress of the show are projected as ‘real’, and the situations ‘authentic’. The only task for the ever-changing seven young members globe-trotting on a bus is to seek love, amongst themselves. The relationships which develop between the suitors and competitors are the central themes of the show. When love is found, the time on the show is over and the couple is sent back to Japan on the next flight. In fact, once a public courtship is declared, if declined, the suitor will also be sent home, alone. His or her vacancy will be taken by a new member of the troupe. Thus, the trip has no destination, the dramas have no story and the show has no fixed members. The real participants of the televisual event are not the ever-changing passengers on the Love Wagon; the only real participants are the audience. The show, and the watching of the show in fact, is a larger event in a wider social context in which the audience empathises with the participants, and where they

152 imagine their own position in the dramatised non-narrative and discuss with other viewers the participants’ personalities and development of their love.

For ‘Ainori’, the courtship and the competition between the suitors, the audience’s nervous expectations and guesses of love found and lost, make up the main part of the show. Throw in some friendship and painless travel-related disasters, and the show tries to make, quite literally, ‘real-life’ love stories happen in front of a camera. ‘Future Diary’ not only puts the participants into extraordinary situations, but also readymade love stories, one step at the time. The emotions, real or not, induced by the extraordinary set-up, and their actions are the main content of the show. Their love stories develop and end according to the show and the ‘diary’, however ‘real’ the love is presented to be. Both ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ are about the ‘realness’ of their romances, albeit in highly organized and heavily structured settings. Both shows rely for their success on strong audience empathy, or ‘kanjō inyū 感情移入’. Both shows are about giving otherwise ordinary people a chance to experience a period or moment of ‘extraordinary 非日常的’ life.

‘Future Diary’ makes it clear that the participants are carrying out their own actions, or improvising without artistic direction to the scenarios which eventually take the couple to the predestined love story finale. The premise of ‘Ainori’ is quite the opposite – there is supposedly no script, no predestined fateful finale and no artificial interference from the directors and camera crew who are constantly watching from an intimate distance. The basis on which the show rests is that the participants are doing what they do, only in front of a camera and with every dramatic turn in their love life projected as a real and natural progression of their own being.

153 The two shows bear significant theoretical relevance to my thesis, as they demonstrate a shift in the consumption of contemporary media contents. Here the element of audience empathy, which arguably is one of the most significant ingredients of the Reality TV phenomenon, in effect also provides a channel for media consumers to imagine the media space as a stage set – a venue for the performance for ‘the self’. That is to say, Reality TV makes explicit that the ‘participants’ are a sample of everyday consumers, reducing the distance between viewers and performer, making it effortless for the audience to empathise with the participants. Further, although the ‘participants’ of Reality TV are not significantly different from ordinary consumers, the situations or the props set up for the show are anything but ordinary. The situations created for the cast, whether it is the dramatic beginnings and finales of love in ‘Future Diary’, or seven young people bussing on in a love wagon, are indeed extraordinary props and situations not normally imaginable in everyday life. They add a dramatic element to the otherwise mundane identification between the consumers and the participants of the shows. Hence, in both ‘Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’, the ordinariness of the cast and extraordinariness of the props are, in fact, complementary conditions, making them vivid examples of everyday performance in everyday media content.

Unlike many of the ‘Big Brother’-type Reality TV programs, the Japanese adaptation of the Reality concept is concerned with dramatisation and beautification of the characters, or ‘participants’. Both ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ are essentially about everyday people, shirōto 素人, in highly dramatized, romantic situations, set in exotic environments. The situations, which often shape the storylines, are planned by the producers and directors of the show, for example, boy and girl are left stranded on an uninhabited island for eight hours, without food and water, but with two pieces of chewing gum (Uchiyama et al. 2000: 37). The shows, conforming to stereotypical romantic scenarios, often

154 put the participants in situations which would be most improbable in everyday life, but most typical of dramatic romance. This gives the audience, who are not qualitatively different from the participants, the ‘endless’ opportunity to imagine the self acting out the diary and trotting the world with mate-seeking potential lovers, as the ‘stars’ of ‘reality’.

Trendy Dramas

‘Ainori’ is a romantic construction that offers a drama-like ‘reality’ that is a spin-off, and indeed follows the principles of, the trendy dramas format of the 1990s. In fact, according to the first book of what is now an ever-expanding series of publications on the show55, ‘Ainori – the Real Love Story’, is ‘imagined’ after the immensely popular serialised drama, ‘Ai to iu na no moto ni’. The drama was one of Fuji Television’s best rating and popular (as of March 2001)56. It averaged 32.6%, on a par with other exceedingly popular dramas such as the ‘101th Proposal’, ‘Long Vacation’, ‘Love Generation’, ‘Tokyo Love Story’57. Some of these also did remarkably well in other parts of Asia, especially in Hong Kong (Leung Yuk Ming 2002) and Taiwan (Iwabuchi 2000).

55 As well as other spin-offs from the show: as of February 2004, there is a recipe book titled Ainori Love Recipes, an ‘Ainori’ Textbook for Love and even a CD called ‘“Ainori” meets CyberTrance’, featuring remixes of its famous theme songs (figures 41 & 42). 56 Depending on the timing of the survey, the drama is generally ranked at 7th or 8th in 2001 (see: www.fujitv.co.jp/jp/golden/bub/01-88.html). 57 For ratings of the shows mentioned here see: ww.fujitv.co.jp/jp/golden/pub/o1-104.html

155

Figure 41: Ainori meets Cybertrance, the techno rendition of Ainori soundtracks, with the worldly Love Wagon on its cover.

Figure 42: One of the ever-expanding Ainori publications. This one is ‘Endless Love Story’.

Trendy drama is a format concerned little with ‘drama’, but much with everything ‘trendy’. As one of the pioneering producers of trendy dramas in the early 1990s, Ōta Tōru has defined them in straightforward terms: the three main criteria for making a trendy drama were location, fashion, and music, all more important than the story (2001:19). Trendy dramas were mostly designed to attract a young female audience, who were apparently losing interest in more traditional melodramas and soap operas. They revolved entirely around fashion and trendiness, with ‘love’ as the medium to deliver the mini stories to the audience. Trendy dramas were also, as it happens, often called ‘catalogue drama’, ‘materialist drama 物欲’ or ‘idol drama’ (Ōta 1996) (Ōta 2001); these terms sum up the main concerns of this genre well.

156 Trendy dramas such as ‘Tokyo Love Story’ (1991), ‘101st Proposal’ (1991), ‘Ai to iu na no moto ni’ (To the Origin of Love, 1992) were enormously popular58, not only in Japan, but they also dominated the TV screens in other Asian countries where, according to Iwabuchi, Japan’s consumer culture can be easily identified and adopted because of its ‘cultural proximity’ (Iwabuchi 2000). A more straightforward hypothesis might be that there is so little else in trendy dramas other than fashion and well-presented idols that they are in many ways universal. In terms of appearance, East Asians are practically identical to the Japanese, their major cities are comparable to Japanese metropolises and their aspirations imaginable in the Japanese environs. It is therefore not surprising that Japanese metropolitan life can be seen as a model for its close Asian neighbours.

Figure 43: Heroes of trends. Figure 44: The poster for ‘101th A poster for one of the most proposal’. popular trendy dramas.

58 The highest ratings for ‘Tokyo Love Story’, ‘101st Proposal’, ‘Ai to iu na no moto ni’ were 32%, 36%, and 32% respectively.

157 The consumption experiences offered either by trendy dramas or their more ‘real’ incarnations, ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’, are arguably easily transferable, in that the locales, the ‘real people’ participants and narratives induce a type of aspiration that seem to be almost readily achievable for the everyday consumer. For city dwellers in Japan, the fashionable neighbourhoods of Tokyo featured in Trendy Dramas are easily accessible, even part of their daily commute. For ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ viewers, the ordinary participants are no different from themselves; given the opportunity, they too could perform as well, perhaps better. Once the consumers can imagine themselves being on the shows, the narratives may also be easily their very own.

Figure 45: Tokyo Disneyland

158

Figure 46: Universal studios Osaka.

The ability to ‘experience’ the media narratives offered by ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ is nothing new. The success of Disneyland is a prototype example, in which the characters of Disney stories are also consumed as products and experience – ranging from merchandise to clothing and accessories, right to the referential experience of visiting Disneyland, which essentially offers a quasi-stage set for Disney consumers. Universal Studios offers the same referentiality to its famous movies, along with an array of merchandised stage characters and other props. Both experiences in Disneyland and Universal Studios in Japan give the consumers a sense of novelty – albeit an educated, familiar and controlled novelty. Tokyo Disneyland, for example, always tries to keep its ‘actors’ foreign – Peter Pan is very often a ‘real’ exotic Anglo foreigner.

159 Osaka’s newly opened Universal Studios, for its part, hires foreigners to dance and sing59 on its movie set-like stages.

Public Participation: the Consumer as Performer

The experience of ‘Future Diary’ offers similar referentiality – the difference is that the premises have shifted from existing narratives, be they Disney or Universal Studio, to the ‘self’ as the referent – which is embodied by the ‘participants’ who in theory could have been ‘me’ on Reality TV. The audiences are not watching famous actors performing a complex and extraordinary love story, but rather are watching two ‘real people’, the epitomes of the self, reacting to a predetermined narrative. The show is the experience, in which the narrative and the television are the media through which the viewer can consume. Nothing on the show is unachievable for the consumer, since the participants are supposed to be no more than a sample of everyday people, who happen to be in an organized romantic situation. And indeed, even if not selected to appear on the television screen, there is a wealth of opportunities to participate in various forms of the show.

For most of the summer holiday in 2000, between 8 July and 17 September, a consumer could experience Reality TV in person. For the cost of ¥2,300 (about US$20), some 130,000 people, mostly couples in their late teens and early twenties, went to an event called ‘The Future Diary in Luna Park’, at Kōrakuen

59 During July and August 2002, Osaka Universal Studio was hiring entertainers outside of Japan. A job description in the Sydney Morning Herald read: ‘Come and be part of the most successful new theme park in history with exciting shows such as “WaterWorld”, “The Wild, Wild, Wild West” Stunt Show – and Universal Monsters Live Rock and Roll Show. Looking for […] dancers who can sing, singers who can move well, celebrity look-alikes’ (28 July and 10, 11 August 2002).

160 amusement park in Bunkyō-ku, Tokyo. During the event, just like on TV, one could experience the popular Reality TV show in ‘real’ life. (Moronaga 2000: 79-80; Josei Seven 2000: 54-57)

The event was cleverly facilitated by TBS, ‘Future Diary’, and the Kōrakuen amusement park. Just like the TV show, each participant received a ‘Future Diary’, with the beginning and the end of their imminent love stories. Just like on TV, the participating couple in fact received two different diaries. As the couple followed the story by taking the rides in the amusement park, they arrived at each attraction to receive a new diary giving the predetermined result of their next effort in the love affair. And just like on TV, they must also separate once before reuniting again, all in the space of a short afternoon (Josei Seven 2000).

‘It is a common sight’, wrote the reporter for Josei Seven, that ‘the men and women acting out the diary embrace at the location of reunion with tears and passionate kissing’. With the passion flowing, one can also purchase on site ‘Future Diary’ merchandise, such as the actual ‘diary’ used, the Love Ring featured in the show, and the theme songs, ‘Sakura Zaka’ or ‘Tsunami’. Both singles sold extremely well – 2,228,550 copies and 2,821,460 copies respectively (Shūkan Hōseki 2000a: 180; Josei Seven 2000: 56). For more specialized merchandise, one can log on to the TBS website, which has an entire section devoted to ‘Future Diary’ goods – from VHS tapes of the show to the sketch book featured in one of the episodes, from mobile phone straps to trading cards (to meet the demands of the younger audience in schools)60. The sales of this ‘Future Diary’ paraphernalia alone exceeded 10 million yen during the 10-day event at Kōrakuen (Nikkei Trendy 2000).

60 See: www.tbs-v.jp/shop/mirai_goods.html

161

The successes of these organised ‘Future Diary’ events go beyond the realm of the amusement park. The ‘Future Diary’ experience has spread to a wide range of participatory media formats, such as novels, movies and variant television shows. Apart from these traditional media, it has also spread to networked media allowing more frequent consumer participation via the mobile phone, publicly accessible networked electronic billboards and Internet sites similar to discussion groups and weblogs.

The high rate of ownership of mobile phones and the highly competitive market have produced Internet-enabled mobile phone services at affordable prices in Japan. The mobile phone today is packed with diverse technologies and functions, turning it into an entertainment and communication centre that does everything from accessing the Internet to emailing, taking and sending digital photographs, voice recording and, best of all, accessing information nodal points. All this can be less than 100 grams, constantly attached to the consuming body61. Companies have set up large numbers of Internet sites specifically to service mobile phones. Just like on the the home computer, strangers are able to meet and chat, and instantaneously send each other photos with their mobile phones. Some technologies that were previously not feasible for consumer level personal telecommunications, such as Internet accessibility and the video phone, have been incorporated into the mobile phone in recent times. This rapid technological development in the mass market has become something of a fad, especially among young consumers. To capture a potentially fickle audience who tend to be in constant search of novel consumption experiences via their mobile phones and other networked personal gadgets, media companies, including television stations, have to react

61 For detailed analysis see chapter four.

162 quickly to new trends, creating content for this highly personal, extremely portable and ubiquitous form of consumption. The ‘Future Diary Mobile’ version is a good example, in which the participants of the game can download ‘Future Diary’ to their phones, and perform the script for a fee62.

Consuming the experience of media content via different media (event, Internet and mobile phone) is not limited to Japanese media corporations and their consumers. ‘Big Brother’ has a website in most of the countries that bought the rights and formula; some of them charged a hefty fee of up to US$20 to access the live feeds. CBS made a total revenue of US$1 million from webcasting alone (Johnson-Woods 2002: 6).63

Figure 47: The TV advertisement for the mobile phone version (i-mode) of ‘Future Diary’, turning all users into participants, and television ‘Reality’ to everyday reality.

62 The Australian production of ‘Big Brother’ is another example of massive public participation and viewing at information and entertainment nodal points. According to Toni Johnson-Woods, who has written an entire book on the so-called ‘Big Brother’ phenomenon, some viewers in the United Kingdom have set their computer clocks to Eastern Australian time to sync with the Australian version of Big Brother’s internet broadcasting, and an estimated ‘£300,000 per day was lost due to people logging into the Big Brother website’ (Johnson-Woods 2002: 6). 63 Citing (Katz 2001).

163

This development of highly personalized, yet collective use of technology and accessibility to information nodes provided by major media corporations to create a cultural synergy is in no way unique to a couple of Reality TV shows in Japan. The media synergy created by the television stations for the two shows cannot be seen as independent of the global trend in technological development and its consequential impact on a series of cultural, identity and socio-economic issues.

Figure 48: Televisual reality goes cinematic. The film adaptation of the television adaptation of everyday people in scripted love.

‘Future Diary’ did not limit itself to the living room and the television. After seven seasons of high ratings on television, and various media synergies

164 created around it, the show has become a household name. The producer went on to make yet another version of ‘Future Diary’, this time on the silver screen, as a movie. Instead of using adults as participants in the mediated, televised game of love, the movie moved on by using high school students, apparently because ‘adult relationships are too serious and regulated’64 (Arai 2000). The movie did much better than expected, and sold 400,000 tickets – a sizable success considering that it is a movie with no actors, no script and not much of a story, and is only a spin off from a TV show (figure 48).

The recruitment for both ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ is well known (Shūkan Post 2000) and was advertised at the end of each episode. Many viewers do go beyond mere empathising with the participants of the televisual reality and want to experience the extra-ordinary experiences of performing for real on television. For some, the desire to be a star of televised reality motivates not only viewing but also performing in the shows. In response to the advertisement for the three roles in the movie version of ‘The Future Diary’, TBS received 20,000 applications (Shūkan Hōseki 2000a: 180) and 12,000 people reportedly ‘rushed in 殺到’ to the studio (Moronaga 2000: 80).

Melodramatic Reality or Reality Melodrama?

The movie version of ‘Future Diary’ significantly changes the order of drama and literature in connection with everyday life. The conventional practice of

64 The producer of ‘Future Diary’ gave as his reason for the choice of younger participants for the movie version that “大人恋愛ほうい”, which can be directly translated as ‘aren’t the love relationships of adults more inflexible?’, meaning mostly that the adult relationship are boring, uncreative and too regulated for the movie.

165 making screen adaptations based on literary or real life stories is reversed. Here, the audience spends a day at an amusement park to live as if they were participants on a television show. The movie adaptation refers not to a piece of famous literature, but to the public knowledge of the televised version of reality. While the show stays in the living room in close proximity with and as part of everyday life, the transformation to the big screen in the cinemas claims a distance from the everyday by way of the cinematic medium. Thus, the process of adapting a Reality TV show, which contains no literary narrative and no distance from the humdrum of daily life, in turn elevates the everyday to the dramatic, and the mundane to an event. ‘Reality cinema’, where the ‘coolness’ of the television medium is re-heated by film’s high definition images, breaks down the boundary between the media, further dramatises and mediates the simulacra of the everyday.

The boundary between drama and everyday life, therefore, is becoming increasingly blurred. Even the producers of such Reality TV shows are not quite sure how to distinguish the ‘real’ from the dramatic in Reality TV. The producer of ‘Future Diary’ claims that ‘apart from the “diary”, everything in the show is a documentary’65, but the most important writer for the show, Itō – who writes some of the ‘diaries’ and supervises the series – claims that it is neither simply a documentary nor a drama, but both (Itō 2000). And, similar to the notion of ‘docusoap’ claimed by the producers of ‘Big Brother’, Itō claims ‘Future Diary’ to be a new genre called ‘dramentary’.

65 The producer, Arai Masaya, has explained that ‘apart from the directives from the diary, it’s a documentary – there is no script 日記指示以备台詞あ ’ (Arai 2000). Moreover, during one of the interviews, he claimed ‘the show is in effect more “real” than your usual documentaries いう逆 実“曓当”’ (Yamada 2000).

166 Such vagueness surrounding the argument on genre is hardly new. As discussed earlier, both the American soap ‘Dallas’ in the early 1980s and ‘Big Brother’ today are globally successful, and both have provided cause for debate around the question of genre. However, the premise of ‘reality’ itself is more important for my thesis than the genres the producers claim their shows to exemplify. Whether ‘Future Diary’ is a documentary or a drama, or both or neither, or a ‘dramentary’, the principal element in these claims is that the show connects real life with dramatic performance.

The connection between real life and performance becomes fuzzier when scrutinising the details of the ‘performance’ and ‘real emotions’ on the show. First, the foundation of being ‘real’ in Reality TV is that the participants are real everyday people who are not professional actors. It is rather contentious as to where the line is drawn between professional and otherwise, and more importantly between performance and just being ‘real’. Does it depend on the length of one’s training in acting? Or, the length of one’s career on stage, television or in films? A professional actor can surely be an everyday audience member sometimes. And by the same token, an untrained viewer can be quite capable of acting either in real life or on television. If by participating on the show, the person becomes a gifted professional actor in the future, from which point can one draw the line between ‘real emotions’ and ‘acting’ on the show?

Claiming the performers as ‘real people’ is also to say that the camera is only documenting ‘real love’ and ‘real emotions’ (Josei Jishin 2000; Tani 2000; Yamada 2000). This realness, however, can only be validated if one makes quite impossible and contradictory assumptions about the show and its participants. First, one must believe that the television stations have not established conditions that induce acting of any kind (e.g. opportunity for fame), no directives were given to the participants, and the participants have no

167 knowledge of the cameras being present. Secondly, one must also presume that the ‘participants’ are indeed expressing their ‘real’ emotions towards each other – a qualification that is extremely difficult to define. Both presumptions seem to be contrary to the facts – critics of popular culture and television have written widely, as also have many on the Internet, that shows like ‘Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’ in fact do have semi-professionals, ‘star wannabes’, participating on the shows (Shūkan Post 2000; Nishi 2000).

Contradictions and suspicions certainly discount the ‘reality’ in ‘Reality TV’. Furthermore, even if we can presume the validity of such qualifications as ‘everyday’ people as participants, it is still difficult to make clear distinctions between ‘acting’ and ‘real emotions’. The participants have first signed a business contract with the television producers and then a social contract with the audience. For anyone, ‘real’ or professional, to live a scripted life without ‘acting’ is fundamentally oxymoronic. As academic Kayama Rika points out, in writing about the ‘realness’ of love on ‘Future Diary’, ‘to live a life under the directives of the “Diary” 24 hours a day, one must first bury “the self”’; and, ‘the instalment of the “Diary” is a simple but effective device to make the characters lose track of the difference between television and reality at the moment of appearing on the show’ (Kayama 2000: 10, 11). ‘Reality’, therefore, in the context of Reality TV, is a fundamental misnomer. It in fact causes great misunderstanding of the relationships between the increasingly overlapping constructs of our lives – reality, TV, drama and, indeed, the first dramatised then televised vision of ‘reality’. What the televised reality does to everyday life is that it confuses and ultimately turns the lived reality into a virtual one.

Dumble (1989) has provided some insights into the reality courtroom dramas of the late 1980s in the United States. Based on studies of three popular ‘real’ courtroom dramas, ‘The People’s Court’, ‘Superior Court’ and ‘Divorce Court’,

168 Dumble writes that ‘all three programs downplay the effects of casting and editing’, and goes on to note: the elimination of tedious and lengthy procedural concerns is a dramatic device to make justice seem accessible. Dramatically, it makes sense to introduce the main characters and move directly to the action. The entire program can thus be devoted to developing the relationships among the characters in order to ascertain the truth about the case. This emphasis on characters has the additional benefit of increasing audience identification with the characters. (1989: 105, 106)

This insight seems to apply to other Reality TV shows as well, such as ‘Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’. Both provide a kind of shortcut to the extremely complex task of building a relationship and finding love. Both shows use ‘ordinary people’ and provide them with ready-made extraordinary romantic situations. The use of so-called real people provides the possibility for easy identification by the audience. Further, by putting the participants in unlikely romantic situations, it eliminates altogether the dangers involved in the normally prolonged, complex, possibly excruciating mundane process of meeting a potential partner, negotiating a personal relationship and then maybe, or maybe not, falling in love. As for the even more unpredictable task of maintaining love, it is entirely missing from the shows. As Dumble aptly puts it, ‘by linking ordinary people with extraordinary situations, the extraordinary is made ordinary’ and indeed ‘wealth, fame, adventure and fun are less mysterious when “real people” are seen enjoying themselves. The purpose of reality programming is to make personal and accessible the mysterious influences that pervade our lives’ (1989: 118). Furthermore, the everyday is spiced up with an element of drama, and elevated as media content, broadcast and validated. The distinction between ‘real people’ as consumer and as performer has disappeared, a disappearance that is celebrated on television and beyond.

169

The Social Context of ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’

Both ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ have an clear lineage with one of the oldest mating procedures in Japan – omiai 見い, and its more modern incarnation, gōkon . It is a difficult task to give a totalising definition for gōkon. Put simply, gōkon may be seen as a newer version of omiai, which traditionally served as a mechanism for arranged marriages since the Edo Period (1603- 1868) in feudal Japan, and remained the norm in rural Japan into the 1960s (Buckley 2002). For the most part it gave way to the new democratic concept of renai kekkon 恋愛結婚, or love marriages, in more recent times. Although omiai no longer plays a dominant role in marriage arrangements, it has never disappeared entirely. Today, it remains mainly to serve the purpose of providing a means for potential marriage-minded couples to meet. Its newer and more casual incarnation, gōkon, can perhaps be described as a group omiai – only the main objective is more likely to be finding someone with potential, than confirming the marriageability of a potential candidate.

However, the old fashioned omiai has had a recent comeback with even the old-fashioned catch phrase san-kō 高 or ‘three highs’ (body height, high qualification and high income) as the prerequisite for the prospective male spouse (Nagatomo 1997). However, this returned omiai is fundamentally different from its previous form. Although it still serves the purpose of facilitating the ‘meeting’ between marriage-minded couples, it is no longer a fateful moment – as was the case when parents made the final decision in feudal Japan. Its modern social function is to introduce a prospective spouse who satisfies the social and financial requirements.

170 Renai kekkon 恋愛結婚, or ‘love marriage’, is of course still considered to be more romantic than going to an introductory service with a shopping list. However, to begin a ‘love marriage’ one must first have romantic encounters. For those who find it difficult to meet people for various reasons, friends and acquaintances often help each other to arrange the encounters, romantic or otherwise. These arrangements often take the form of gōkon , a term which originated from the expression gōdō konpa . (Like many other abbreviations in modern Japanese, gō and kon are the first syllables of the two words.) As the two words in the expression suggest – gōdō (jointly) and konpa (a loanword from the English ‘companion’) – this is a group encounter to facilitate meetings between the opposite sexes, mostly in equal numbers. Today, an entire industry has evolved around organising various kinds of gōkon meetings for different purposes. One can easily organise or attend a gōkon through many specialised websites on the Internet. Tabloids often give clear listings of these sites, with detailed information on their services, prices and locations (Shūkan Hōseki 2000 b: 175), as well as the professions and income levels of their clientele. One can also easily find manuals and analyses of the strategies and the etiquette of gōkon (Shūkan Bunshun 2001) and deai 出会いょ(which simply means ‘encounter’), a similar form of meeting (Noda 2000: 168, 169).

Unlike omiai, gōkon is not about marriage – it is an organised event and an opportunity for romance. This functional difference is clearly understood socially and exercised appropriately. Women and men who attend omiai and gōkon make clear distinctions between the two, and they are not necessarily seen as conflicting with one and other. Many go to omiai even if they already are in relationships they are happy with (Nagatomo 1997). The same goes for gōkon – it is not at all unusual for people who are already in relationships to attend those organised, self-staged and calculated ‘romantic encounters’.

171 Thus the main function and aim of omiai and gōkon are worlds apart – omiai is to inspect the potential of a social contract; and gōkon, on the other hand, is to facilitate a stage for potential romance. The main condition and prerequisite of the two are of course vastly different, hence the different performances required, for different audiences. Developed in the 1980s, gōkon might have derived from omiai parties, designed to provide the stage for meeting the opposite sex, but it is now sometimes more about the fun of performing in a social environment than about finding the right partner. The events and affairs which happen during and after gōkon are a source of gossip (hanseikai no neta 省会) (Kawano 2000), which provides prolonged enjoyment beyond the event itself, in a manner similar to reading the tabloids, only the stars are the readers themselves.

Thus one can certainly draw the analogy that watching Reality TV dating shows such as ‘Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’ is a kind of virtualised participation in gōkon parties. In fact, as far as some of the shows’ participants are concerned, both ‘Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’ resemble a prolonged, or in the case of ‘Ainori’ endless, gōkon party (Uchiyama et al. 2000: 40). For the audience who also participates in Reality TV shows, the difference between daily life and performance is insignificant. As television content comes closer to everyday life, and as more and more of everyday life is featured on television, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the two. Everyday life has, in more ways than one, become a television event; and television, the staging of everyday life.

‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ are not the first time that omiai and gōkon-inspired television shows have turned into social phenomena. In 1987, Fuji Television launched a show called ‘Neruton Benikujiradan 鯨団’ (1987-1994). It was received extremely well and became a true social phenomenon in the following years. Like ‘Ainori’, it was also shown at 11 pm on Saturdays for 30

172 minutes, a time slot not normally expected to attract good ratings. However, it achieved near record ratings, capturing around 18–20% of the television audience (Shūkan Asahi 1988; Shūkan Gendai 1988). It became enormously popular especially amongst young viewers. Soon after, many social events and omiai operators started to use the same concept and even the title ‘Neruton’ to attract business. One of Tokyo’s most authoritative youth fashion centres, Harajuku, had a shop called Valentine House, specialising in Neruton ‘character’ goods. Eventually the word ‘Neruton’ became a household name, and the show along with its dating format became the Neruton genshō, the Neruton phenomenon.

The idea was simple. Fuji Television advertised and recruited from the public for the show – usually 30 participants who were looking for love (as does ‘Ainori’ today). The fifteen pairs were then put together for an hour for mutual introductions. This section was shown on television in a slot called ‘free time’. Then the male participants chose the girls they liked and asked them out in the next scheduled time termed ‘courtship time 告’66. The entire process of meeting the person, impressing her/him, and the final courtship, is filmed and aired on television (Shūkan Gendai 1988; Shūkan Hōseki 1988: 54). The program had around 500-1000 applicants a week to participate on the show. Eight months after the program first went on air in June 1988, a couple in their early twenties who had started dating on the show married in real life (Shūkan Asahi 1988). Within a year, there were 200 couples ‘established 成立’ on the show. In short, ‘Neruton’ was basically a group omiai or gōkon with media support, under public inspection.

66 The dictionary translation of kokuhaku 告 is normally ‘confession’. Socially, in the context of courtship, it means to confess one’s feelings for the other party. Here, in the Neruton program, ’kokuhaku’ is the time in which everyone gets up and courts the one they like.

173

Earlier, in the mid 1970s, there was a similar show called ‘Proposal Super Operations’ or ‘Propose Dasakusen 大作戦’. It was a game show on which five ‘feeling couples ’ asked each other out in front of television cameras. At the end of each show, the participants would choose their potential target by pressing corresponding buttons. There was always one or two couples established on the show (Izumi 1991). Before ‘Propose Dasakusen’, there were yet other similar shows on newly-weds. Starting in January 1971, the show ‘Shinkon-san irasshai 新婚さいい’, was one of the earliest, most successful and long running ‘audience participation shows’. The show lasted for more 30 years and produced over 1500 episodes (Onoue 2000: 264). It reached ratings as high as 32.5% in April 1980 (Aera 2000).

Now the ‘audience participation show’ is a fully developed category, which has spread to topics ranging from ‘therapy for troubled relationships 男女 系’ん to ‘loving relationships 系’, from ‘troubled household budgets 系’, to ‘investigation of extra-marital flings 浮気調査系’, and of course, not to forget the ‘marriage arrangement meetings shows 見い系’ (Kurihara 1999). Most of these shows involve exposure of privacy of some kind, dramatised, often to the extreme (Yamauchi 1999). When dramatisation fails, extraordinary ‘personal’ lives have to be arranged to happen on TV. The entirely appropriate term ‘[spuriously] staged’ (yarase ) is now common in the context of variety TV shows, describing how the producers make up false stories to show on television. When evidence of yarase leaks to gossip columns, popular shows can flop at the height of their popularity. Fuji Television’s ‘Aisuru futari, wakareru futari’ disappeared completely after its fakery of ‘reality’ was exposed in the popular press (Kentaka 2000: 40).

174 ‘Propose Daisakusen’ in the mid 1970s, ‘Neruton’ in the late 1980s, ‘Ainori’ and ‘Future Diary’ in the early 21st century (and many similar programs in between), are all based on the idea of staging, mediating and broadcasting events in common lives. Whether it is the relatively private omiai, or the more public gōkon, they generally revolve around love, romance and marriage. Like ‘Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’ today, ‘Neruton’, during its lifespan from the late 1980s to 1994, also influenced real life behaviour. Many group omiais (shūdan omiai 団見い), ranging from ‘Neruton Parties’ to ‘Neruton Tours’, were based on the show’s format of scheduled ‘self-introduction’ and ‘courtship’ (Watanabe 1991). Similar to today’s ‘Future Diary’ and ‘Ainori’, the events often happened in theme parks (Watanabe 1991). Both the ‘Neruton’ and ‘Future Diary’ phenomena are good examples of mass simulation, adaptation and participation in media events. Or, it may well be argued that everyday life has become a media event of sorts, as well as vice versa.

In the US, Nielsen Media Research data shows that with ratings at 18.0%, ’Survivor II’ often ranked first on the chart for free-to-air television programs (for the period 26 February to 4 March 2001) (Nielsen Media Research 2001). In Japan, ‘Future Diary’ averaged around 15% before it went off air (although many variants of ‘Future Diary’, such as ‘The 24 Hour Future Diary’, came into existence later). ‘Ainori’ averaged better and is still doing well in the ratings (16.6%, 15 March 2004)67. Although neither ‘Ainori’ nor ‘Future Diary’ topped the Japanese chart, their ratings are comparable to the most popular Reality shows in the US.

Reality TV as a television format may go out of fashion, but the impact of its popularity and its influence on its viewers go beyond mere media consumption.

67 From Video Research: www.videor.co.jp/data/ratedata/backnum/2004/vol12.htm

175 The comedian Ben Elton went so far as to write a murder mystery novel based in a Big Brother-like household (Elton 2001). In the real world, the police in the United States were talking via the media to the infamous ‘Washington Sniper’ who, during a 22-day rampage (2-24 October 2002) shot 13 people, 10 fatally. In March 2003, hundreds of journalists were ‘embedded’ in the US army to report in real time how Iraq is ‘surgically’ bombed, Iraqis ‘disarmed’ and ‘neutralised’, all without bloodstain on television screens in the living rooms of the on-looking world. Traditionally secretive businesses and their devastating effects are now carefully staged and broadcast on television sets around the world in the form of daily media feeds, entertainment and virtualised events. Today, private lives, global wars and the media are well and truly intertwined. The rise of the network society and increasingly digitised and virtualised personal media consumption will change the way we view media and their content. Reality TV is an important stage in the development of media content production and consumption, in its trend to a more involved audience in an amalgamated media landscape.

Conclusion

From TV to Reality: the Spectacle of the ‘Self’

As TV shows present themselves as the televisual reality, their popularity largely stems from their ability to induce identification between the audience and the characters on the shows – commonly known as ‘audience empathy’, or ‘transference’. 68 According to Lacanian theory, seeing the self in the position

68 I use the term ‘transference’ here because it is a close term and origin for the Japanese term kanjō inyū, rather than in the precise psychoanalytic sense. Kanjō inyū describes the audience identification with the characters in media narratives, or the ‘character

176 aspired to is an ‘act’ itself (Lacan and Miller 1977). In the case of Reality TV, the ‘actor’ performs a character from everyday life on the screen – the aspired to is a not-too-distant version of the one aspiring. In the case of drama, the actor plays a ‘hero’, whose ‘mask’ the actor assumes, and the actor ‘becomes’ the hero via the performance. It is the ‘symbolic efficiency of the “mask” [that] makes us what we feign to be’ (Žižek 2001: 34). In Reality TV, the role is the dislocated ‘self’, and the ‘mask’ is merely the location and situation (the exotic, the dramatic setup, and the pseudo stardom) where the hero remains as the ordinary self in the not-so-ordinary milieu. The transference in Reality TV, therefore, is not in becoming the role, but in being in the same situation as the role. The distance between the aspired to and the self vanishes during the process of audience identification in the case of reality TV – the aspired to is the self. The performance here is a mere dislocation – the mundane in dramatic settings. Being on Reality TV is to stage the ordinary, but the participants have become heroes of mass media. Their daily chores leap into the realm of theatrics, for which the city and the themed shopping malls provide a backdrop and a stage.

In terms of genre, Reality TV is melodrama with characteristics of ‘realness’ achieved by using non-professional, ‘everyday people’. It breaks down the boundary of the everyday and the dramatic, offering a channel for audience transference, that is, for audience members to imagine being in the dramatic situations. The ‘narrative’ in Reality TV depends on the medium – the dramatic set-up and the television screen – to unfold. The distinction between the actor and the viewer is all but denied. This is not only the fundamental premise of the immersion’ for the actor. Therefore, the term fits well with my argument on Reality TV, that the medium is in fact staging the audience, providing a channel of imagined performance for the audience as protagonist, which in the larger scheme of the thesis, signals a collapse of boundary between the two.

177 genre, but also the basis for audience empathy. Consequently, it brings the medium, television, even deeper into everyday life, becoming both a stage and medium for content consumption – virtualising the self and its everyday life in the process.

The popular acceptance of Reality TV as a daily staple of media consumption therefore signifies a shift in the media landscape, in which the distinction between the performer and the viewer collapses; the boundary between the medium and the self evaporates (as the self becomes the medium in the case of Reality TV), and lastly the everyday and event amalgamate.

In retail, theme malls such as VenusFort are built to serve as a stage set. Whether it intends to simulate an imagined Italy in the 17th–18th century or a replica of Forum Shops in Las Vegas becomes a question of inconsequence. In advertising, another daily media feed, the reconstruction and virtualisation of Audrey Hepburn recreates and revises a nostalgic narrative, giving the image – ‘Audrey Hepburn’ – a new lease of life in the fluid virtual world, where time is non-linear and authenticity irrelevant. If the star can be virtual, history is without chronology, narrative without contextual content, and aura and patina can only be a matter of instant and transient adaptation. Television is the event consumed, where the spectacle is ‘the self’ imagined on stage. The question is this: if indeed the viewer and the performer are no longer distinguishable and the consumption of media content is itself a media event, what happens when the consumer, by way of mass penetration of gadget-ised media technology, truly becomes the medium itself?

‘Reality’ in Reality TV does not have meaning. The event recorded and broadcast is understood to have taken place, the cast is supposedly a selection of the audience, and the narrative (or the lack thereof) is substituted by the

178 medium and its consumption itself. ‘Reality’ therefore in Reality TV is in fact a transformation of the mundane routine of everyday into the routine events of the virtual, the consumer into a performer and the self into the medium.

Reality TV, its implication and the ever more mediated ‘real’ in the everyday it prefigures is significant.

When the self finally becomes the vehicle for the event, there can be no longer any meaningful distinction for ‘realness’ in television and in everyday life. Reality TV in many ways signifies a disappearance of dramaturgy and narrative in television and the consumption of other similar participatory media. At no other time is it more appropriate to quote the famous line devised by McLuhan: the medium is the message. And indeed, the spectacle is the narrative. Whence the consumer acquires the ability to produce and broadcast their own lives as media content; once the body is transformed into a medium by the constantly connected gadget attached to it, the boundaries between the ‘self’ and the media, the consumer and the content, and the event and real life will no longer be meaningful. And more importantly, what is left that can distinguish between media content and the everyday mundane-ness of being? Today, with ‘always on’ mobile technology, the body itself is being absorbed into the networked mediascape. The boundary (if it ever existed) that previously separated us – the ‘real’ – from the virtual, has once again moved closer to our daily physical existence. Daily reality is therefore broadcast, with or without television. In the light of the media turning into event, the self becoming part of the media landscape, and authenticity no longer relevant to chronological history, what then, in relation to the consumption of content and existence in the increasingly virtualised everyday life, will become of our sense of being?

179

Figure 49: When DoCoMo meets TBS, mobile meets television, reality meets media, the everyday meets the dramatic, consumers and their networked limbs meet each other. The performance of the ‘real’ is at its best and most ‘authentic’.

180

CHAPTER IV

FROM CONSUMERS TO CYBORGS

Figure 50: Samsung’s ‘Rotating Realities’. The mobile phone is the bridging device between virtual (the Matrix) and physical realities.

Ghost in the Shell – (Broad)casting the Self via the Cell phone

High-resolution screens and broadband communication channels aren’t widget-making machinery but sense-capturing, imagination-stimulating, opinion-shaping machinery. Howard Rheingold (2003: 184)

181 If man realises a technology is within reach he achieves it, like it is damn near and instinctive. Look at us for example, we are state of the art—controlled metabolisms, computer enhanced brains, cybernetic bodies, not long ago this was science fiction. So what we can’t survive without regular high level maintenance – who are we to complain? I suppose an occasional tune-up is a small price to pay for all these. Oshii (1995)69

Figure 51: A scene from Ghost in the Shell visualising the battle between the cyborg and the computer virus.

In Oshii’s 1995 epic anime Ghost in the Shell, the worlds in 2029 are connected by vast computer networks. Humans, machines and half-human, half-machine creatures – the cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) – coexist and cohabit on Earth. They not only live together and share the same resources, but they are also connected to each other through the computer networks. Humans and computer-enhanced humans control the networks together – until a computer

69 A line by Kusanagi Motoko, Cyborg from 2029, a Major for Section 9, Department of Public Security in a country visually resembling Hong Kong with recognisable signs and billboards in Chinese. From Ghost in the Shell, English Version, Dir. Mamoru Oshii (1995)

182 virus deliberately written for information-related crimes grows conscious of its own existence. The ‘bug’, nicknamed Puppet Master, eventually gains access not only to the prohibited government gateways, but also to the consciousness of cyborgs who share the same networks. Eventually it decides to merge with a Major from the Department of Public Security, a cyborg sent to stop the ‘bug’ (figure 51). The finale of the story is a prophetic vision of the new world and even a new kind of being. After the ‘merge’ and the annihilation of Major Kusanagi’s physical being, with the help of another cyborg colleague, her brain and thus her consciousness of being adopts a new body, that of a female child.

Four years after Ghost in the Shell, the Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix (Wachowski 1999), much of which references to Ghost in the Shell, paints a more chilling version of the scenario, in a grimly visualised world known as ‘the Matrix’. The world is completely taken over by computers, computer controlled hardware and a dominant program with its viruses – and thus humans, such as the protagonist Neo, have to fight to survive and to reclaim the world.

Science fiction writers such as William Gibson have fictionalised similar networked environments for our future. In these visions, humans are constantly connected to the Net, and virtual beings with ‘consciousness’ not dissimilar to that of humans have developed from computer programs (Gibson 1986, Gibson 1996). Without elaborate science fiction-like descriptions, this consciousness of being is perhaps a result of vast quantities of information and Artificial Intelligence – programmed to respond to varied environments, situations, as well as to its old master, the human.

It is, of course, still science fiction. The term ‘cyborg’ was first coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and co-author Nathan Kline, in a story called ‘Cyborgs and Space’ (Gray ed. 1995). The term describes a human being with augmented

183 brain and sophisticated gadgetry attachments. Twenty years later, a high-school student packed an Apple II computer into a backpack to control photographic systems, with a head-mounted CRT (cathode-ray tube) as the viewfinder (Rhodes 2003). The high school student later became known as one of the earliest cyborgs in the real world, and one of the best known scientists in the field of wearable computing. Today, Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, wears a much more sophisticated computer than two decades ago. Usually with 16 to 32 wires under his shirt, Mann is constantly connected to the world wide web. The computer he wears is both a server and an access device to the Internet. His ‘eyetap’ – both a camera and a display mounted in front of his eyes – is constantly recording and broadcasting (Makulowich 2001). In 1993, another academic became a fulltime cyborg. For Professor Thad Starner, a wearable computer has become an ‘extension of his mind, allowing him to remember more, communicate faster’ (Martinez 2000).

Mann and Starner are just two of the forerunners of a technology with the potential to reshape not only the way we communicate, but also the way we live and perceive the world, as prophesied by writers such as William Gibson and visualised in Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix. Today, the everyday use of the Internet, from PCs and mobile phones to other network terminals, is already showing the signs of profound changes in the ways we access, manipulate, produce, trade, and consume information with the ever-expanding network.

In his all-encompassing analysis of the profound impact of the Internet and information technology on our economic and social structures, Manuel Castells points out: The emphasis on personalized devices, on interactivity, on networking, and the relentless pursuit of new technological breakthroughs, even when it apparently did not make much business sense, was clearly in discontinuity with the somewhat cautious

184 tradition of the corporate world. … Yet, as soon as new information technologies diffused, and were appropriated by different countries, various cultures, diverse organizations, and miscellaneous goals, they exploded in all kinds of applications and uses that feed back into technological change, and diversifying its sources’. (1996: 5, 6)

The new world economy, governance and social conditions mapped out in Castells’ work indicate the changes we are and will be facing in the coming years. However, even with his extensive observations on countries, corporations, labour and economic trends, it is still nearly impossible to predict the implication of a world completely connected – not only between people and organisations, but also between machines and all imaginable gadgets. It is simply too difficult to grasp the amount of information an all-connected world will put into the ever-expanding network, and the amount of processing power that will be available when millions of computers in the network start working with each other. The network is becoming more intricate by the day, not only because more and more groundbreaking technologies are coming out of corporate research labs and responsive strategies out of government think tanks around the world, but also because the network communication technologies are becoming exponentially democratised. Individuals are adopting, inventing and in many ways shaping the networked world as we speak. The overwhelming question is: what will happen when the 665 million (and growing) Internet users (ITU 2003), start doing what Starner and Mann have been doing for more than a decade? After all, even some of the most basic models of mobile phone today are much more sophisticated and powerful than the Apple II Steve Mann carried on his back more than twenty years ago.

185 A Brief History of Consumer Mobile Phones in Japan

In Japan, the first consumer mobile phone service was made available in 1979. It was in the form of a car phone, and was one of the earliest such services in the world. Of the approximately 2,000 applicants for the service, 1,600 were granted the privilege of using it, becoming the first generation of mobile phone users in Japan. Nine years later, the physical size of the mobile phone had reduced, while the user base had grown to 100,000 or about 0.1% of the population. Between 1989 and 1993, ownership grew by roughly 400,000 annually, and reached 3.12 million or 1.7% of the population in 1993. In 1994, 15 years after the service first began, the ownership of mobile phones was still only just over 2.45% in Japan (Nakamura 2001)70. Despite the fact that North America and Europe started their consumer mobile phone services a little later than Japan, ownership rates in those markets were much higher by 1994, mostly because ownership was much more affordable in those countries. North America had 6.5%, England had nearly 5% and Sweden had 13% (Ino 1997: 64) at around the same time.

By 2001, the ownership of mobile phones had grown exponentially worldwide, especially in Asian regions. 74.6% of the Hong Kong population, 56.31% in South Korea, nearly 80% in Finland, and 67.32% in the UK had mobile phones in 2001 (Shūkan Diamond 2001a: 47). In China the proportion stood at just 6.85%, but this indicates some 86.5 million users, twice as many as in England, and 20 million more than Japan in 2001. And with a fast growing middle class, the growth rate of mobile users in China is mind boggling – 5 million every month in 2001 (Shūkan Diamond 2001). By the end of 2004, mobile phone

70 As a point of reference, this was similar to the 3% in 1993 in Australia (Sun Herald 27 April 2003).

186 penetration is expected to reach one in every four people in China, according to the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (Richardson 2004a). In Taiwan, the ownership of mobile phones passed the 50% mark in 1999, and a little over a year later, at the end of 2000, the figure grew rapidly to 79% (Newsweek 2001). In Australia, 70% of the population owned 14 million mobile phones in 2003 (Sun-Herald 2003).

The reason for the lower coverage for Japan before 1994 is mostly attributed to the cost of its mobile phone service, which was many times more expensive than in North America and Europe (Ino 1997)71. The situation changed rapidly after the mobile phone market was deregulated in 1994. More competitors such as Tu-ka and Digital entered the market, and subsequently transformed the landscape of the previously monopolised mobile phone market, bringing the prices down dramatically (Ino 1997: 65). In 1994 the contract fee reduced to 25% of its previous level, and by January 1995, one could already find handsets at ¥100 (less than US$1), reduced from ¥100,000 in 1994 (Nakamura 2001). The massively reduced price led to large increases in subscribers. In the single year of 1994, 1.5 million new consumers signed up for the service – about the same as the number of users in the entire previous 15 years. Merely a year and a half later, in June 1996, the number of mobile phone users grew to around 14 million – approximately ten times the entire new subscribers in 1994 (Ino 1997: 65, 66).

Five years on, in March 2001, the mobile population grew to around 70 million (Shūkan Diamond 2001: 51; Nikkei Communications 2001: 101). This represents a six-fold increase in five years; in other words, the number increased 10 million every year during these five years. In 2001, Nomura Research Institute

71 At the time the service cost about the equivalent of ¥5,000 plus ¥10,000 to ¥50,000 for the mobile phone itself in the US, while in Japan it cost ¥37,000 for the service and ¥100,000 for the phone. The cost of calls in Japan was also twice as much as it was in North America.

187 predicted that by March 2006, mobile phone subscriptions will reach 81.2 million (Passingtime 2001). The real growth of mobile phone subscriptions turned out to be much more rapid than the prediction that seemed radical at the time. As of February 2003, there were more than 74 million mobile phone subscribers, and around 5.5 million PHS (Personal Handy-Phone System)72 subscribers, which adds up to a staggering 80 million, or over 60% of the entire Japanese population (127 million) (2000 Census 2001).

Technology is reaching consumers much faster than ever before. It took five years for the Internet to reach 5 million users. Radio took 38 years, and it took 13 years for television to do the same thing (Satterthwaite 2001: 201). Compared with previous consumer technologies, digital technologies (mobile phones being only the most recent example) have developed much more rapidly, both in terms of functionality and in the speed of market acceptance and commercialisation.

The high penetration of mobile phones in Japan translates into a massive industry. In 2001, when there were just over 60 million mobile phones, it was already a 5 trillion yen market. It is dominated by DoCoMo who enjoys about 59% of the market share, but in intense competition with other major players such as KDDI-AU (18%), J-phone (now Vodafone) (16%) and Tu-ka (6%) (Shūkan Diamond 2001: 30).

72 PHS: Personal Handyphone System, a TDMA-based cellular phone system introduced in Japan in mid-1995. Operating in the 1880-1930MHz band, PHS uses microcells that cover an area only 100 to 500 meters in diameter, resulting in lower equipment costs but requiring more base stations. Using the PHS Internet Access Forum Standard (PIAFS), PHS provides up to 64 Kbps of data transfer. Although PHS was touted as a global standard, it never took off outside Japan (Star Daily, July 16 2004).

188 Japanese consumers upgrade their mobile phone handsets on average just under annually. Not dissimilarly to a fashion label, mobile carriers put new models onto the market almost seasonally. The demand for mobile handsets has not weakened despite the massive numbers of existing working units already in the hands of consumers. This means the demand for new models should not decrease rapidly; consumers are constantly upgrading their phones, as they grow smaller and smarter all the time.

Speaking Fashionably

To capture this growing market, the competition between the three major service providers is constant and fierce. As with many other consumer technologies, a major segment of the market is made up of young and fashion-conscious consumers. Moreover, the mobile phone is not only high-tech, but it is also a constant functional accessory to fashion and lifestyles. Apart from the technology itself, brand and image are paramount factors in gaining younger and younger subscribers, and hence future market share. Marketing strategies are seen as one of the keys to success in the mobile phone business, for technology, quality and even pricing are for the most part indistinguishable between the brands and providers. The only things setting them visibly apart are marketing, design and the stars used for their advertising. After all, many started using mobile phones not because it is essential for daily life, but because it is essential to their lifestyle and fashion. According to a survey conducted in 1995-96, 23.2% of users took up mobile phones because it was ‘trendy 流行’. In 2001, 38.3% of new mobile phone owners started to use the technology because ‘others are using it’ (Nakamura 2001).

189 The war for new subscribers is fought with ever more advanced technologies as well as image creations for the brands. By using major show biz stars, the mobile phone companies hope the consumers will distinguish their virtually identical services and technologies. In March 2000, Tu-ka started using one of the most popular idols amongst young women and teenage girls, Hamasaki Ayumi, a strategy which reportedly has contributed to a steady increase in its twenty-something female clientele. The ‘Ayu model’, named after Ayumi the pop idol, sold 38,000 units ‘instantly’ (figure 52). J-phone, on the other hand, used Fujiwara Norika, a ‘bombshell’ model considered something of a ‘new type’ of Japanese woman for her Caucasian-like body features, and then the international soccer star Nakata Hidetoshi, perhaps to appeal to more ‘internationally minded’ young metropolitans. Both advertising campaigns are thought to have succeeded in attracting new subscribers to the respective services (Shūkan Diamond 2001: 58).

The mass consumption of mobile phones has not only influenced fashion and style but sometimes also social behaviours, in profound ways. Young people are often the driving force behind fashion and fads. And unlike many other consumer technologies, female consumers are the active and influential force behind the styling of mobile phones. They are often the target of major advertising campaigns. All three major service providers have put considerable energy and money into market campaigns directed at young female consumers. Experience and research have confirmed that young female users indeed possess swaying power over the direction of the market image of mobile phones.

190

Figure 52: The billboard for Ayu model (Nooper 2003)

A survey conducted in 2001 by Watanabe Wasuka was specifically designed to study if there is a relationship between personal monthly spending on mobile phones and spending on fashion items such as clothing and cosmetics. The survey found that girls who spend more on mobile phones also spend more money on clothing, more time working in part-time jobs, and that more of them colour their hair (Watanabe 2001: 102).

Unlike other consumer electronics, young women are the most treasured customers for mobile phone companies in Japan. Data from retailers shows that teenagers and young women in their twenties have a shorter cycle of changing

191 their mobile phone compared to young males. The usually tech savvy 20-30-year-old male consumer surprisingly holds on to his mobile phone for much longer (Nikkei Mechanical 2001: 32). Often the sales of a new model go through the roof if it is readily accepted by young female consumers as fashionable. This female acceptance of consumer technology by way of fashion is evident in the number of gadgets designed for them, such as increasingly fancy ringing tones, screen ‘wallpaper’, and in the design of handsets. There are also countless accessories made for mobile phones such as ‘skins’, various kind of mobile phone holder and especially mobile phone straps, which are considered by some as essential props for expression of personality (Dime 2000). On the other hand, if a new model is rejected by young female consumers, it often flops in the entire market (Nikkei Mechanical 2001: 33). Marketing and sales people consider this group of consumers, namely high school girls and young ‘office ladies’, as the critical mass for the survival and success of a new product. To capture this most fickle group of consumers, mobile phone manufacturers are starting to treat their technology-laden products as if they are fashion items. Mobile phones in Japan today are made in soft colours, have cute designs, and are smaller than ever. They are even water and shock proof so that users can take them into the snow fields while skiing and into the bathroom while showering (Nikkei Mechanical 2001).

Internet Population

According to the 1998 White Paper on Communications issued by the former Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the ‘Internet population’ was highest in North America at 57.7 %, 22.1% in Europe, and 16.3% in Asia and Oceania. In Japan, close to 17 million or 11% of households (13.4% of the population) had access to the Internet in 1998 (The21 1999: 9, 10). But in the five

192 years after 1998, the Japanese Internet population grew at a faster pace than pre-1998 levels. By 2003, 81.4% of Japanese households, containing more than half of the country’s population, have internet access (see table below).

Table: Japanese household PC Ownership and Internet usage (1996-2002) Year Number of PC Ownership Household Internet response (%) Internet usage (%) Population (%)

1996 4,159 22.3 3.3

1997 4,443 28.8 6.4 9.2 1998 4,098 32.6 11.0 13.4 1999 3,657 37.7 19.1 21.4 2000 4,278 50.5 34.0 37.1 2001 3,845 58.0 60.5 44.0 2002 3,673 71.7 81.4 54.5

(Sōmushō jōhō tsūshin seisaku kyoku 総務省情報通信政策局 2003)

With this high ownership of mobile phones and their versatile functionality, portability and ease of use, it is not hard to see that new services, as well as technologies will be developed constantly to take advantage of these unique characteristics. Next-generation models already combine many functions, making them multi-purpose communication and entertainment machines. Users are not only able to talk to and email each other, but can also watch multimedia content on the mobile net. If they fancy, they can record and broadcast their own lives, via the same machine. All these functions were previously offered only via separate gadgets.

193 The functional differences between the PC based Internet and the mobile net is becoming smaller as mobile phones become more interwoven into all aspects of personal life. The marketers and developers are also trying hard to make mobile net a viable media channel for both advertising and content consumption.

In May 2000, there were just about 10 million mobile Internet users in Japan. The number increased threefold to 30 million in merely one year in 2001. To satisfy the demand for content, and to seize the commercial opportunity mobile net presented, the number of content providers increased from 300 companies in 2000 to 9000 in 2001 – a thirty-fold increase in one year. The cost of developing a site is relatively low – between 10 and 20 million yen, compared to a few billion yen to develop a computer game (Shūkan Diamond 2001a: 68). The income generated from the mobile Internet can be astronomical, with millions of users paying their dues at ¥100-400 per month for access privileges. These figures make Japan the biggest mobile internet market at present – with China set to overtake it soon (Shūkan Diamond 2001b).

Mobile Internet portals, such as i-mode, have been taken up as convenient real-time information centres for people on the move. The mobile Internet gives directions on everything from how to get to the coolest places and events in town, to where to get the hottest fashion items, to the newest media feed. According to NTTDoCoMo, the proprietor of i-mode, still the most dominant mobile internet protocol today, its service had around 4.5 million users in February 2000, and nearly 29 million in November 2001 (Shūkan Josei 2001). In other words, the number of mobile Internet subscribers to just one of three protocols grew sevenfold in the space of a mere 20 months. J-Sky, J-phone’s (now Vodafone) answer to DoCoMo’s i-mode, also grew sixfold during the same period, reaching some 6.7 million subscribers. In 2001 there were already forty thousand mobile Internet sites (Economist 2001), covering themes from

194 horoscopes to share prices to information on the nearest boutiques as the user travels through the city. As the usage of the mobile phone and its functionality matures, and as the number of sites increases, the difference between PC-based internet and mobile net decreases – except that the mobile net gives more portability, and more time- and location-sensitive content.

Third Generation Mobile Phone, or First Generation Teleportation of the Self

In May 2001, further developing on the existing mobile net, DoCoMo started testing yet another new technology – Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access, or FOMA. Widely known in the West as the Third Generation mobile technology or 3G mobile, the technology enables high speed, high volume data transmission. The higher speed and bandwidth allow consumers a much faster connection to the mobile servers, enabling video and imaging communication between users and, on some occasions, even on-demand video on their phones (Galac 2002: 29).

At 384 kbps, many times the speed that traditional fixed lines can transmit, the fast connection provided by the FOMA protocol means it is possible to transmit video on the mobile phone. Although in real-life application the video images still frequently look like slow motion sequences, the consumer level video-enabled mobile phone is the first step towards turning everyday conversations into constant video streams. The real Reality television is well on its way. The service is fittingly named ‘M-stage visual’ and ‘i-motion’ (Galac 2002), officially turning telephony into both a conversation and a performance.

195

Figure 53: NTTDoCoMo’s M-stage for i-motion FOMA, its 3G mobile phones.

Figure 54: Video phone on mobiles.

The high-speed connection available to FOMA mobile phones also means easier and faster access to email and web pages. Before FOMA, mobile phones could only transmit small amounts of data, mostly for short messages, simple emails, and basic mobile internet (Galac 2002: 29). FOMA makes it feasible in the

196 everyday context to transmit large amounts of data between users, such as much longer emails with audio and visual attachments. Downloading data files such as video clips, photos and music can now be performed on mobile phones anywhere, anytime (Nikkei Communications 2001; Nikkei Communications 2002).

At ¥169 per 100 kb, motion picture and audio services designed for FOMA mobile phones were still expensive in 2000. This price meant that downloading a 4-minute song could cost up to ¥20,000, or 15 seconds of video for ¥170 (Aera 2000: 31). However, as technological history has shown, the cost of FOMA was sure to come down, thereby promoting the popular acceptance of the technology, just as the mobile phone itself did a decade before. In fact, by 2004, there are already service packages allowing users of 3G mobile phone to download unlimited data for under ¥5,000 per month. DoCoMo is hoping to achieve 1.5 million users for FOMA-enabled mobile phones in the near future, and 60 million (as many as today’s mobile phone users) by around 2004 (Shūkan Diamond 2001: 30). To create this market and achieve extensive market share, DoCoMo decided to invest around a trillion yen to further develop the FOMA technology. The wide availability and ownership of FOMA mobile phones and accessories will have serious implications for traditional media, which arguably already is a changing landscape since the popularisation of the Internet. FOMA phones, and their future generations, will be sure to have even faster network connection. On-demand audio and video will be one of the default functions offered to users.

A mere two years after FOMA was launched in Japan, the mobile networks and hardware manufacturers are already planning the adaptation of Fourth Generation (4G) mobile technology. 4G mobile phones will be able to handle much more data transfer and enable better integration between voice and

197 imaging. Some predict that 4G will have a very fast network connection at between 20 and 100 MB per second – or tens of times the best possible 3G technology today in Japan (Economist 2001: 47). This means that many network functionalities only available on computers on advanced network infrastructures today will be possible on a tiny handset tomorrow.

Mobile phones today not only communicate with each other, but they also communicate with other networks and machines. In a interview, Tachikawa Keiji, the president of NTTDoCoMo, has articulated DoCoMo’s intention to expand the new 3G FOMA technology from mobile phones to everything from computers to home electronics (Shūkan Diamond 2001: 31). Soon, not only will people be able to talk to each other via mobile phones, but personal computers, refrigerators and microwave ovens too will be able to communicate with the all-in-one communication machine weighing around 100 grams.

In fact, mobile phones are already used in many places to replace the wallet and petty cash. It is now possible to buy soft drinks with mobile phones at some vending machines. They will soon have the ability to replace tickets for public transport and concerts, and even airline tickets. Always-on networking enables mobiles on many occasions to replace traditional media – news services, subscription-based magazines and information services such as the weather, share prices and public announcements. It can also function as an identification tag in many ways far superior to the old swipe card (Nakajima 2001: 28).

With the new possibilities offered by these always on, always connected highly personal multimedia gadget, banks, engineers and big businesses are ever more enthusiastic to realise the future social and commercial potential of mobile technology. At Hyundai department stores in South Korea, mobile phone users are using their phones in place of credit cards. MasterCard and Nokia, Visa and

198 NTTDoCoMo are also working together trying to marry their phones with ‘plastics’ (Timson 2003).

NTTDoCoMo released its first generation FeliCa-enabled phones in July 2004 (Nikkei Electronic Asia 2004). FeliCa technology and the range of service it enables are a joint development of NTTDoCoMo and Sony. FeliCa itself is a contact-less IC (integrated circuit) chip; it allows data storage and instant non-contact data transmission, and can be used as electronic money, ticket, and identification. When coupled with a personal networked mobile, its usage expands, and offers significant potential to merge identification, credit cards and cash in the mobile phone.

In the science fiction movie Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), Tom Cruise is recognised and greeted in 2054 by the billboard advertisements he passes. This is already a possibility today. With non-contact data transmission coupled to personal communication technology, we will be able to consume goods and services without ever presenting a physical coin or banknote. Service providers, marketers and governments will be able to recognise us individually and at the same time collect, centralise, manage and use information sent out by our mobile phones. The political and commercial implications are profound, and deserve extensive research and discussion.

Merging Media

The rapid increase of the Internet population with the ownership of internet ready PDAs (personal digital assistants) and other communication devices means that the make-up of the media landscape is changing by the day. According to research conducted by the Dentsū Communication Institute 電通

199 総研, Internet usage in Japan increased 9.5% between 2000 and 2001, and 35% between 2001 and 2002; mobile phone conversation time increased 9.1% between 2000 and 2001, and 17% between 2001 and 2002. Most tellingly in terms of digital communication via the mobile phone, mobile phone-based emailing and content consumption via mobile internet increased 11.3% between 2000 and 2001, and 182% between 2001 and 2002 – all at the expense of traditional media consumption, such as radio, newspapers and books. Although television consumption increased by about 10% nationwide, for young females in their teens and twenties television viewing decreased by 10.7% (2000–2001) and 4.2% (2001–2002) (Yoshimoto 2003: 61).

Looking more into the detail of this research, when the figures are broken down into sex and age groups, we see more dramatic changes in the daily consumption of media, especially in the lives of young people. Mobile phone-based emailing and content consumption via mobile Internet increased some 267% for males in their twenties and 294% for teenage males, who actually reduced their conversation on mobile phones by some 24.3% (Yoshimoto 2003: 61)73. The same trend can also be found in female consumers in their 30s, where mobile phone data transfer increased by 133.7% and mobile phone conversation reduced by 45.2% (Yoshimoto 2003: 63).

These figures show that while media consumption as a whole is increasing, new media such as the internet and mobile phone are contributing most to the increase, while traditional media consumption is decreasing. Television is still prevalent and does contribute to the general growth of media consumption. Taking into consideration its decline amongst young females in their teens and

73 This is perhaps because voice communication is still much more expensive compared to emailing on the mobile phone. Emailing on the mobile is often free if the correspondents subscribe to the same network.

200 twenties, however, it is doubtful that television will remain unchanged in terms of technology and manner of viewing.

The blurring of boundaries between traditional forms of media, such as newspapers and television, started with the rapid development and wide availability of the internet, and the digitisation of communication on the infrastructural level (Hamelink 1996). FOMA and its future generations are both an opportunity and a fundamental threat to traditional media such as television and newspapers. It is a threat because consumers no longer need to hook themselves to the static television set with limited, pre-decided programming, over which the viewer has little immediate control apart from switching to another channel with another set of pre-arranged programs. It is an opportunity, because it is not only a new medium for content delivery, but also coming with the medium are new-found blocks of time for media consumption, be that commuting time to work or school, or the five minutes idle time before the next appointment. Television stations are already making some of their services available to 3G mobile users. At a monthly rate of between 200 and 300 yen, Nihon Television, TBS, Fuji Television, Television Asahi and others are providing everything from news services to TV drama previews, from weather forecasts to economic analysis on the mobile phone (Galac 2002: 32).

It is now inevitable that the PC will combine the functionalities of conventional media, turning it into a Personal Media Centre; and the mobile phone will do no less, plus the portability. In fact, in many situations PC and the mobile phone today can be treated just as different options to the same end.

In the last couple of years, the growth of mobile phone ownership in Japan has surpassed the ownership of home PCs. Ownership of mobile phones has grown 11.2 per cent over 2000 to 75.4%; personal computers grew from 37.7% in 1999,

201 to 50.5 % in late 2000 (Gekkan Leisure Sangyō 2001: 49). Separate research conducted by Dentsū shows that internet access via the mobile phone represents nearly half of the entire internet usage in Japan. Many internet users do not have PCs, but mobile phones enable them to access the net all the same (Senden kaigi 2000: 80). These surveys demonstrate that for many consumers existing mobile technology already can realistically replace the PC for many everyday needs. Its portability makes the vast network constantly available to the consumer, and vice versa. Home computers are at the same time combining the functions of television, game console, internet, image (media content) processing, production and broadcasting together, while the mobile phone is becoming more and more of a bodily attachment constantly with the consumer, connecting to the net.

Home Computer or Domestic Appliance

As the digitisation of information and the availability of the Internet spreads further, the idea of television viewing is sure to change. The signs of new types of television are already visible. Launched in December 1998, WebTVPLUS integrates many of the functions and interface previously only available to PCs. It allows viewers to surf the Internet, check and write emails and have much more control and interactivity when viewing television content. Viewers can also, at the push of a button on the remote control, access on-screen information on current and future programming (The21 1999).

It is true that since the popularisation of the Internet, many, especially in the business world, have hoped to reap unreasonably large profits unreasonably soon from an imminent convergence of media. It is evident that theoretical and technological possibilities coupled with wishful thinking in the last decade have

202 aften resulted only in mammoth losses, especially during the ‘tech crash’ of the late 1990s. The most apparent and plausible causes behind this, however, are not the principles of media convergence, but the speculative nature of an emerging economy (ecommerce), immature technology (narrow bandwidth) and the timing of market acceptance (Castells 2001: 188-195).

Timing often plays a crucial role in the process of commercialisation of a technology of this magnitude, and with such fundamental social impact. The technological and theoretical possibility of content streaming and media convergence through the Internet is one thing, the industrial and market take-up is completely another. It might still be the case that most ‘people accept TV and video as entertainment, keep radio as companion, and use the Internet for content oriented interests’ (Castells 2001: 193), but what if there is a device that does all of the above and much more, with ease of use, and at an affordable price?

The mobile phone is already doing just that, albeit still in a slightly clunky fashion. The recent mobile phones in Japan already have TV and radio built in, (figure 55) and they record and play audio and video – all with a constant network connection. ‘The merge’, the ultimate convergence, with widespread market acceptance is not here yet, but it does not mean that it will not come. With more and more computer chips embedded into everything from fridges to DVD players, computers becoming no more complicated to use than a conventional television, and broadband becoming the norm, it can only be a matter of time.

203

Figure 55: Vodafone’s TV phone

Figure 56: Vodafone’s mobile phone that plays music.

Operating systems are becoming more integrated with previously disconnected media – the stereo, the television, the radio, the Internet. The home PC is becoming less and less a workstation, both in its looks and manner of operation, with keyboard buttons and remote control, instead of command lines and complicated software applications. With the PC marrying television and other forms of media content, it means not only that the idea of television viewing will change, but the manner of overall content consumption and production will be aided and influenced by digitisation and network. As Microsoft already

204 implies with their newest operating system – we are no longer just buying a personal computer, but a ‘media centre’, absorbing all conventional media into one, plus the Internet. The Internet is the key to this amalgamation. Microsoft’s Media Centre does not just pack one ‘box’ into another; it adds network functionalities to existing media and enables consumers to digitise the content. Now, not only can we choose what to watch and when to watch, but we can virtually ‘manipulate’ a live event!

Now, the effect of speed and network is in the World Cup, the Olympics and the next Gulf War. CNN’s live coverage can be relived anytime we care for it. No longer do we need to stay up until 4 am for a soccer match to kick off in Mexico, or interrupt our dinner party to watch the Americans send their first guided missile at the next opponent; we can have it all at 8:00 am at breakfast before we go to work.

Not only have PCs absorbed TV – it is in mobile phones too. In 2003, Vodafone introduced a handset with a built-in function which allows free-to-air television viewing. A company called NHJ in Tokyo has made a wearable TV comparable in size to a wrist watch, and a digital camera with a built-in TV which also is a video and still camera that plays MP3 audio (NHJ Ltd.) (figure 57).

Figure 57: NHJ’s TV that is worn like a wrist watch. Yes, it also tells the time.

205

In other words, the merge of media is already a daily factor, and with the miniaturisation of each electronic element, it is only a matter of time before the idea of gadgets with clear separation of roles will completely vanish.

The distinction between the PC and the mobile phone is dissolving fast, as manufacturers packing more technologies into the mobile phone. In 2003, Smartphones, phones that operated either on the variant Windows OS or other operating systems similar to those in PDAs, already become more and more commonplace in North America and Europe. Symbian, one of the operating systems for Smartphones, is allowing phones to operate like sophisticated PCs as well as being a platform for the development of new applications (Siezen 2004). Palm, the most popular OS for PDAs, is also making mobile phones behave more and more like PDAs with telephony being just one of its many functions. The most straightforward and obvious merge, would be a mobile phone that works together with the PC. NTTDoCoMo’s F900i made by Fujitsu for example, is built on the Symbian OS, and its internal data can sync with the Windows PC. The handset not only allows video telephony and emailing, but also network functionalities such as connectivity with a PC, synchronise Microsoft’s Outlook (Personal Information Management Software), as well as playing music and video (NTTDoCoMo 2004, IT Media 2004). Combining these functions with HDDs (hard disc drives) that are getting smaller in size and bigger in capacity constantly, it is only a matter of time before the distinction between the mobile phone and PC becomes entirely irrelevant. IBM’s Microdrive, for example, developed in 2000, is the size of a 500-yen coin, but holds 340 gigabytes of storage – many times more than most home PCs produced in the same year, and enough to store some 15 hours of video footage at VHS quality (Shūkan Tōyō Keizai 2000: 40). As technologies further develop, physical dimensions will continue to shrink while storage capacities expand.

206 This will no doubt enable further merges of multimedia devices on the network, eventually bringing communication, content (audio and video) consumption and data storage together into one.

From Wearable Gadgets to Added Limbs

For those who are eager to experience what Starner and Mann have done for nearly 20 years, there are designer ready-to-wear computers at a cost of US $2000 – $10,000. In 1998, IBM’s wearable computer was 12 cm long, 8 cm wide and 2.6 cm thick, with a HMD (Head Mount Display) as light as 50g, comparable to common spectacles. The American Xybernaut Corp. made a ‘mobile assistant IV’ even smaller for ¥798,000 (around US$7000 in 1999; Nikkei Electronics 1999). They are fully-functioning computers attached to the wearer, enabling the human body to input, record, compute and access the hard disc and the wider communication network.

Even for everyday non-cyborgs, watches are no longer the only technology we wear today. Perhaps we still do not ‘wear’ computers to work, but many people nowadays certainly do wear pocket PDAs, mobile phones and digital music players. Fashion makers are already making clothes to accommodate the vast number of gadgets in Japan and around the world. Burton Snowboards have teamed up with Apple Computer to make jackets with a slot for Apple’s digital music player; IBM has a jewellery line with bracelet displays and necklace mobile phones. Today, watches can deliver news, weather forecasts, stock information and the time around the world (figure 58).

207

Figure 58: Fossil’s watch that ‘plays’ Microsoft MSN Direct. It displays the weather, stock prices, the news, and of course the time, in all major cities around the globe.

Although ordinary consumers are yet to be able or perhaps ready to become full time cyborgs like Mann and Starner, many of us already customarily carry a considerable amount of technology that enables us to perform similar tasks, only to a lesser extent. The idea of wearable computing is now merging with mobile phones in real life. In March 2003, NTTDoCoMo put their first wristwatch mobile phone to the market. Weighing merely 113g, resembling a normal wristwatch in both size and construction, the Wristomo is everything but an ordinary wristwatch. Like the new generation mobile phone, it surfs the mobile internet, sends emails, is fitted with a GPS (Global Positioning System) and synchronises with a computer (NTTDoCoMo 2003; Wristomo.com 2003) (figure 59).

208

Figure 59: NTTDoCoMo’s Wristomo, which sends emails, connects to the Net, fitted with a GPS, and is a mobile phone, all fits on the wrist.

The impact of Third Generation mobile phone and its infrastructure everyday life go far beyond the manner of communication. Like many previous generations of electronic media such as the telephone, the radio, the television, and the early days of internet, their impact goes beyond how we communicate, but often becomes the catalyst for much greater social changes. Meyrowitz pointed out two decades ago that the widespread use of electronic media has played an important part in many recent social developments […] a broad, seemingly chaotic

209 spectrum of social change may be, in part, an orderly and comprehensible adjustment in behaviour patterns to match the new social situations created by electronic media.’ (1986: 9)

In Japan, with the ownership of mobile phones growing to near full saturation at 98% in universities (Matsuda 2001: 168) and over one in five students in primary schools and one in three in junior high schools owning mobile phones in Japan (Shūkan Diamond 2001), the social impact of this medium is profound. Academics in Japan have already found that, among their students, heavy users of mobile phones and mobile emails tend to be more sociable. At the same time, nearly 48% of male students and over 56% of female students admitted that they may have reduced their frequency of contacting people who do not own a mobile phone (Matsuda 2001: 167, 170). For university students in Tokyo, the mobile phone is considered ‘most essential’ for university life, much more so than a PC; and mobile email is the most preferred means of communication, much more so than PC-based emails (Tanaka 2001). The mobile phone is no longer an option but a presumed necessity.

For these university students, the mobile phone is either replacing or absorbing other media in their everyday lives. If previous generations of electronic media changed our behaviours and were the catalyst for social change, it is likely that the highly networked interactive medium with extreme portability and all-in-one communication functionalities (more advanced than to what we know as the mobile phone today) will go much further in terms of social impact and behavioural changes. Because it is not just a medium that transfers content, it transforms the carriers. The mobile phone, together with its network and social infrastructure, has already started to bleed into the physical environment. Together they already form an increasingly established mediascape, a primitive

210 Matrix (as chilling an analogy as this may be) that is also absorbing us, the consumer, into the network.

The medium is again bringing us prospects for new techniques and manners of communication, information dissemination and behavioural changes that include the presentation of the self in a networked environment. FOMA and other similar 3G mobile communication technologies are indicating early signs of what is to come. We can now be visually present, and thus ‘presenting’ ourselves when we talk with each other; our new ability to constantly access nodes in the network turns the body into a medium for information; and the ability to interact and communicate without being physically present breaks down the physical limitations of our body, demarcations of space, and separation of roles in different social environments.

Again, this trend was visible to Meyrowitz, tweaking the theory of self presentation and mediation of information long before we wired ourselves wirelessly to the nodes of the vast internet. By bringing many different types of people to the same ‘place’, electronic media have fostered a blurring of many formerly distinct social roles. Electronic media affect us, then, not primarily through their content, but by changing the ‘situation geography’ of social life. … the distinctions between our private and public selves and between the different selves we project in different situations might not entirely disappear, but they would certainly change. (Meyrowitz 1986: 6)

As conventional media are integrated into the PC and the Internet, the mobile phone is turning into a computer on the move. Many in the media and advertising industries are eager to seize the opportunities an obliquitous and constant medium in the consumer’s life may bring. The mobile Internet allows the marketer to tap into large amounts of the consumer’s time where home

211 computers cannot go. The targeted consumers literally keep the advertisement in their pockets wherever they go, and can read and respond to the advertisement when they have a moment of free time. This, in theory, allows the marketer to constantly interact with the consumers, giving information in real time, and theoretically always in time, in location – a critical difference with PC-based Internet. The response rate for the banners or interactive advertisements on the mobile net is unsurpassed. PC-based email advertising is said to have a response rate of 1-3%, while mobile net can achieve anywhere between 15% to 20% (Senden kaigi 2000: 81). Behind the marketing strategies, the mobile phone has also made marketing research easier than ever. Research firms such as Mitsubishi Research Institute 菱総研 and NTTX developed mobile internet market research sites to take advantage of those free moments of consumers’ time. In one of the surveys they conducted via the mobile internet site, 25% of those surveyed responded, 70% of response came within five hours (Senden kaigi 2000: 83).

Consumers can already program their phone to work with situational information. With the help of JAVA, a cross-platform programming language, for example, one can program the alarm clock in the phone to ring fifteen minutes earlier than usual on a rainy day (Shūkan Diamond 2001: 76). And is there any reason why we cannot soon tell our phone to send an email automatically to a friend who lives in the vicinity of the coffee shop where we happen to be killing some time on Sunday with a Long Black we just bought with the credit-card-enabled phone? For those who know about Lovegety, this would be an old idea. As early as in 1998, there was a product called Lovegety in the Japanese market – a kind of beeper which finds virtual love in the physical world. The device alerts the wearer when a potential match (also a wearer of the device), is in the vicinity (Ring 2003). It sold some 400,000 units within a few months of its release (CNN 1998).

212 Mingu and other Inventiveness via the Mobile Phone

Although the functionality of the mobile phone is becoming increasingly sophisticated, not all its usages are hi-tech. Its ubiquity plays an important role in exerting its impact on social behaviour en masse. As Yoshimi Shunya and others argued in 1992, the telephone is indeed a medium through which many social relations are established and consolidated in everyday life (Yoshimi 1992: 16). More recently, Hayashi Eiichi has studied a list of mobile-phone-specific relations common to younger users, especially high school girls. He argues that the ubiquity of mobile phones in everyday life in Japan, has made them a daily utensil, similar to that of mingu, a term used to describe pieces of equipment ‘used in all situations 日常生活場面使わ’ in traditional Japan (Hayashi 2001: 1).

One ring calls

Hayashi listed a few known usages common amongst high school girls in his study of young female students’ mobile phone use. The one-ring call, or one-giri for example, is a common code amongst friends as a signal of confirmation. For example, shortly after giving someone a one-ring call, when the other party returns with the same, it means the other side is ready to chat on the phone. Or, when arriving at a pre-arranged meeting place, one-ring calls would inform those who are yet to make it to the place. Or, friends can give each other ‘one-ring calls’ after a session of emailing each other on the mobile phone, which is a friendly way of saying ‘good bye’. One-ring calls can also mean ‘good night’, and sometimes ‘happy birthday’ if used at midnight on the eve of a friend’s birthday (Hayashi 2001: 98). This variant mobile usage is hardly

213 unique to the Japanese consumers. In Italy, there is something called ‘Squillo’ of very similar nature amongst university students (Fletcher 2002).

Emoji

The ring tone codes are just one of the many ways of communicating with the mobile phone. Since 21 September 2000, i-mode users have been sending each other pictures or signs called emoji or ‘picture language’. A couple of years later, emoji had acquired a complete set of meanings and become something almost similar to a simple written language (Sunday Mainichi 2000). Many young people write (punch) the signs in emails to express emotion and often entire emails contain nothing but these pictures. To give a rudimentary example: if one sends an email with pictures of a glass of beer and a heart sign in emoji, this decidedly means, ‘I love beer’. This ever-expanding emoji can express sometimes complex meanings, and the usage is often mind-boggling. It was common in 2002 to find popular television variety show hosts giving detailed explanations of the meanings of the symbols found in emails from teens’ mobile phones. Emoji has evolved to the point that many social commentators have decried the threat that this new ‘picturish’ would pose to the Japanese language.ょ (see figure: an example of Emoji vocabulary)

214 Figure 60: An example of picturish.

Emoji is not the first language invented by young Japanese to take advantage of a telecommunication technology. As early as 1968, NTT started the pager service which has a rather fittingly cute name, Pokeberu or Pocket Bell. Unlike emailing on the multimedia phone today, the Pocket Bells showed no more than digits. With this single function, young people were able to develop a pseudo-language consist of nothing more than just that – numbers. By combining numbers in ways so their pronunciations resemble something in ordinary Japanese, young people could communicate by sending numbers to each other’s pagers. It was quite a linguistic achievement that may more resemble a military code than a social trend. This code language was so popular that it became legible to most high school girls. In its latter days, it became sophisticated enough to express simple meanings. 0840 for example, meant ‘good morning’, because the numbers themselves are pronounced in Japanese as ohayō (good morning). Similarly, 0833 meant ‘good night’, 4649 meant yoroshiku, a greeting, 5731 meant ‘I am sorry’, and 14106, ‘I love you’. If one wanted to say ‘I will go at 7:30 pm’, this would be rendered as 194-117-1193 (Miyake 2001). This ‘digital’ language remained popular amongst high school girls until at least 1994. One of the biggest hit items in 1994 was a booklet of these codes, called Pokeberu Code Book 暗. But as vastly superior mobile phones become cheaper and reached 50% of the entire population in 2000, there was little incentive left for the consumer to continue to use pagers. In 1999 the giant pager producer TCC (Tokyo Tele-message 東京) bankrupted. In 2001, NTT officially terminated the service (Miyake 2001: 8).

215 ‘Telephon-itis’

Like the previous mass consumption of technologies such radio, television and home computers, the rapid marketisation of multimedia mobile phones is not without profound social ramifications. Without a mobile phone today a young university student in Tokyo will perhaps lead a less eventful social life. On the other hand, social commentators have lamented that excessive use of mobile phone has caused something of a ‘mobile-phone dependency’ (Aera 2001), ‘phonoholism 中毒’ (Iwami 2001) or ‘telephon-itis’ (Passingtime 2001), some even going so far as to claim that the popular use of mobile phone email endangers the Japanese language (Sunday Mainichi 2000).

Terms arise frequently to describe the more extreme forms of mobile phone usage. Oyayubi-zoku 親指族, or ‘Thumb Tribe’, for example, originally came from the booming days of pachinko, describing the pachinko players spending all waking hours gaming on pin-ball machines. A trendy phrase from 1951 (Aera 2000), it has now came back to describe a quite different ‘tribe’ wrestling with a different type of machine. A member of ‘Thumb Tribe’ today is more likely to be young and trendy who can speed-type emails on the mobile with thumbs flying across the tiny keyboard – a skill commonly on display in subways, on the side of a road, or even in classrooms today. Stronger is the term keitai izonshō 携帯依存症 or ‘mobile dependency’, a syndrome of constantly talking, checking or typing emails on mobile phones (Aera 2001).

New terms emerged to describe the ‘dysfunctions’ which came with the rapid rise of excessive use of mobile phones in everyday life. Among those newly defined ills of the mobile phone, ‘terefonitis ’ (or, if one must, ‘telephon-itis’) must be the most straightforward in its negative nuance. It describes a compulsive use of the mobile phone to such an extreme that it has

216 become an illness (Passingtime 2001). In November 2002, the market might have found a solution for those who are truly ill with the disease, and made it profitable. The electronic company Pioneer made a device called Happy Aqua, fitted with water-proof speakers and a compartment for the mobile phone. Designed for people who cannot go to the bathrooms without their mobile phones, the showering user can listen to music and answer incoming calls without wetting their most important ‘Daily Utensil’ (Zdnet 2002). Armed with this Happy Aqua (figure 61), people who are afflicted with ‘telephon-itis’ no longer have to risk missing a beat – or call.

Figure 61: Pioneer’s Happy Aqua, waterproof speakers for the mobiles phone, to be used in the bathroom.

The Thumb Keyboard

The impact of the pervasiveness of mobile phone use in everyday life is made more visible in a graduate thesis from University of Tokyo. A student has gone

217 as far as to develop a computer keyboard that requires not two hands and ten fingers – but only a thumb. The term oyayubi-zoku will not be a special description for the young spending too much time emailing on their phones, if this keyboard turns out to gain popular acceptance. The student’s invention is a Japanese thumb keyboard which, according to the inventor, can be mastered in a couple of hours – instead of days of hard training for the conventional keyboard74 (Passingtime 2001: 73).

In December 2001, Dime published a survey showing that male users under 30 years of age on average receive 8.3 and send 7.2 emails via their phones each day. Of those surveyed, 43.4 % admitted that their rate of communication had become more frequent after acquiring a mobile phone, 30.8% ‘felt communication became more fun’, and 20% of them completely ‘stopped using their landlines at home’ after they bought a mobile phone (Dime 2001: 173). Surveys like this confirm that the medium not only makes communication more efficient, but it induces communication and shapes relationships. And, some forms of communication and relationship that have materialised via this ubiquitous ‘daily utensil’ may not be readily accepted by some.

Mobile Omiai

The new generation of mobile phones not only helped to create new ways of communication but its multimedia functionalities have also spread into one of the oldest Japanese social institutions. The business of omiai, or marriage

74 On a curious note, the economist Ormerod, the author of the international best seller Butterfly Economics (1999), noted that the QWERTY keyboard was an inferior technology from the day it was conceived. (See also ‘Consider QWERTY...’ on website: All About Antique Typewriters http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html)

218 arrangement meetings, also took up the technical advantages offered by 3G mobile phones – materialising the televised dating game discussed in the previous chapter in everyday life, and enabling the consumers to re-enact the mediated simulation. 3G’s video telephony functionality is helping to revive the traditional way of mating. One can now find and choose a potential spouse entirely on a mobile phone, without the constraint of time and location (Dacapo 2000: 12). In Reality TV, producers are dreaming up ever more dramatic set-ups for potential couples, delivering media content to the living rooms in the ‘real world’, where mating is aided by ever more sophisticated consumer technologies. It is no longer possible to distinguish the two. In the highly mediated everyday life, consumption of media content is a constant event; meanwhile, made-for-TV ‘reality’ looks more and more like a media event in the living room. The networked personal multimedia device merges the virtual with the physical, everyday life with media content and the consumer with spectator, and lastly the self with the entire mediascape.

The truth is that ‘reality’, whether virtual or televised, physical or organic, is rarely without mediation in the metropolis, by the mobile phone, the television, or the Internet. Already for many people living in and around Tokyo, it is increasingly acceptable to renegotiate time and place for informal appointments because of instant and constant mobile communication. By contrast, it is almost unacceptable to forget one’s mobile phone in the same situation. Does the unmediated body already virtually mean a disconnection with one’s ‘reality’? Today, not only can people choose, meet and ‘date’, they can even ‘live’ together virtually, via the power of the mobile phone and its future incarnations.

Apart from revolutionising omiai, the traditional mating process, the mobile phone may also help in maintaining relationships, of sorts. It might even be on

219 its way to revolutionising aspects of love and other human relations. In a special issue for women, Aera in September 2000 presented readers with stories of longstanding love from the virtual world of mobile networks. The stories, however virtual, are reportedly real life stories. The protagonists in the reportage rarely meet physically, but are in constant contact with each other via mobile phones. Apparently unlike ‘virtual love’ on the Internet, with frequent chat sessions and emails, love via the mobile phone is maintained by a projection of voice which expresses emotions closer to the ‘real’ world. The partners are usually already familiar with each other, and have much more immediate prospects of meeting each other (but choose not to). This kind of virtual relationship was aptly termed by one interviewee in the report as the ‘state of mobile cohabitation 電話都いい棲状態’ (AeraSpecialIssue 2000).

Portable Literature and Mobile Drama

The impact of multimedia mobile consumption en masse is clearly visible, not only in terms of vastly more convenient and portable new ways of delivering media services from conventional sources such as newspapers and television stations. The extensive use of mobile phones has also spurred entirely new means of content production, both in means and in genre.

There is a new kind of literature in Japan today – it is read and written entirely on mobile phones. The mobile phone is becoming a medium not just to display content, but also to produce content from scratch, to the point that there is now a new genre of literature which is written (punched in) with around 15 keys on the mobile phone. The writers are called Keitai Writers or Portable Writers. The first women’s popular literature award 婦人公論文芸賞 went to an 18-year-old girl whose novel was first published on the mobile internet. Because of the

220 obvious limitation of the mobile phone keyboard, it apparently helped to create a style that is ‘short and clear, with a unique rhythm’ (Dias Weekly 2001: 10,11).

Merely a couple of years later in 2003, the print version of a keitai shōsetsu or ‘mobile novel’ called Deep Love reached one million sales in book stores. In October 2003, a screen adaptation of the novel, with the writer herself in the leading role, was announced and made news in the media (J-Wave-Shibuya Style 2004). The film was released in early 2004.

Keitai writers are not the only people taking advantage of the technologies provided by multimedia mobile phones, nor are their literatures the only new genre of media content spun from the popularisation of this medium. Content providers such as television stations, communication companies and movie studios are planning to either make specific content or to adapt their content to the new 3G mobile phones. As early as 2000, some movie producers in Tokyo started to make serialised dramas especially for the mobile phone’s tiny screens. One of the early works of this genre is a story revolving around the everyday lives of high school girls on their phones, emailing, talking and consuming the content (Nikkei Business 2001: 23). At 1 to 1.5 million yen per episode, the made-for-mobile drama is short, banal and most importantly, cheap to make. The vision behind this new kind of media content, however, is nothing short of prophetic. Predicting a substantial demand for this made-for-mobile drama and other multimedia content services, DoCoMo made new handheld viewing devices fitted with bigger screens and more buttons for controls (figure 62).

221

Figure 62: NTTDoCoMo’s Eggy, a mobile phone and a multimedia player especially designed for content consumption on the mobile Internet.

Virtualising Consumption

The massive and rapidly developing networks together with increasing market penetration of consumer-level internet-ready devices certainly provide reason for euphoric imaginations for marketer and retailer alike (Stein 2001; Bergeron 2001). These network technologies are literally attached constantly to the consumer. This enables retailers to market their products via home computers and mobile phones twenty-four hours, seven days a week – and, at the same time, allowing consumers to shop for just as long. For retailers, internet shopping means consumers no longer need to be kept within the confines of stores for as long as possible – the network society is like a giant department store without walls or closing times.

222 eCommerce

In reality, it is not nearly as simple as this. Being able to buy does not necessarily result in sales. How these networked devices will change the way people consume is not yet clear. The hype of online retailing in the late 1990s is still yet to be realised in the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2001, estimated online shopping accounted for only about 1% of all American retail (Underhill 2000), despite the fact that over 50% of its population is online. However, this small percentage of virtual consumption is growing, as more and more individuals and businesses get used to the idea of purchasing without the touch-and-feel, as well as the huge amount of legwork. With the internet population already over 665 million globally (International-Telecommunication-Union 2004), and mobile phone sales to reach some 600 million by the end of 2004 (Richardson 2004b), the growth of spending via the internet is only a matter of time.

In 2003, according to Ross Rubin, a senior analyst from eMarketer, 73% or 101.7 million American Internet users aged 14 and older shopped on-line in 2003. And by 2005, the number of Internet shoppers will grow to 121.1 million (Rubin 2003). Between 1997 and 1999, according to the Standard and Poor’s Industry Survey on retailing, sales generated on the internet rose approximately ten times from around $2.4 billion to $20.2 billion. And it is estimated that online sales will reach $41 billion by 2002 (Satterthwaite 2001: 172).

In dollar terms, US retail e-commerce reached $44 billion or 1.4% of the total retail in 2002 – an increase of 29% from 2001. In the fourth quarter of 2003, US e-sales were $17 billion, or 1.9% of the total retail. The US Department of Commerce estimated that e-retail will reach $55 billion or approximately 1.6%

223 of the total retail sales for 2003 (United States Department Of Commerce 2004: 8). This, however, represents only a very small part of e-commerce. Looking beyond the retail sector, US e-commerce shipments accounted for 19.6% ($752 billion) of the total value of manufacturing shipments. Merchant Wholesalers e-commerce sales represented 11.7% ($320 billion) of the total sales (United States Department Of Commerce 2004: 8)

Apart from existing mobile networks, wireless Internet hubs facilitating PDAs and other portable computing devices, or ‘hotspots’, have also sprung up in major metropolises in developed countries. According to eMarketer’s report Wi-Fi: Trends & Prospects, even the most conservative estimate for the number of Hotspots in 2003 is 28,000 worldwide (Allied Business Intelligence (ABI), July 2003) with some 1.5 million users (eMarketer 2003) (Datamonitor, September 2003). It is conceivable that with the widespread of Hotspots, information we get and give out will be more and more location and situation-specific.

Network technology is without dispute the most effective means for the consumption of digital media content. Movies, music and information services can flow freely without the constraint of time and locale. As newspapers are made available online, television turns digital, and books are written, sold and read on digital devices, it is only a matter of time before many media formats are produced and consumed without ever adopting a physical form. New kinds of media content are being invented, such as networked role-playing games, can exist only in the network environment (Hill 2003). That is not to say, however, that the network is completely an isolated environment, for the very foundation of the Internet is the nature of its inter-connectedness. Increasingly, as we consume, communicate and come together on the net, the virtual will intermingle with the physical, one becoming part of the other.

224

The Node You Can See (or what does Virtuality Look Like?)

Shouting into the Crowd

The mobile phone is no longer the ‘telephone’, which only allowed voice conversations. The mobile phone, on the other hand, allows access to information nodes, data transmission and voice and visual communication that is many to many. At the other end of the ‘line’, the mobile phone no longer only communicates with one known person; nor is the communication always private. New generations of mobile phones allow a much more participatory manner of communication with a much wider network. Weblogs and Internet message boards are early examples of more sophisticated community-based interactions on the net. ‘Q’s Eye’, the massive screen in the middle of Shibuya is another example of ‘many to many’ communication that crosses the border between the virtual and the physical. The giant screen is also the surface of the centrally positioned building, QFront, the Shibuya branch of the mammoth ‘media supermarket’, a video and music rental chain called Tsutaya. Q’s Eye is accessible from mobile phones. One can often find on the giant screen a public declaration of love, from a private individual to another – all thumbed in on a mobile phone, then sent to the node in the vast media network (figure 63). Or interestingly, on a much smaller scale, people can also ‘air-text’ with their phones today. One can write a digital message on the mobile phone, and wave it in the air – and the mobile phone automatically forms the light-traced message in mid-air for all to see (Nokia 2004) (figure 64).

225

Figure 63: The famous Tsutaya screen at Shibuya Crossing, a physical node, a confluent space where people and information gather and disseminate.

Figure 64: Nokia’s Airtexting technology, allowing the user to project text messages ‘on air’, for many to see.

226

Figure 65: Aerial image of the Shibuya Crossing (where Tsutaya is situated).

Figure 66: Aerial image of the Shibuya Crossing, when Prime Minister Koizumi was disseminating his policies before an election.

227 Conclusion

Virtualising the Self: Technological Revolution or Symbiotic Evolution?

The identities of our mobile phones (and their future incarnations) will in many ways double as our own identities. Our behaviours, preferences and thus our translated personalities will be traceable, searchable and verifiable most of the time. The concepts of self and privacy will be redefined over and again as we grow more and more connected with each other. If an action with a perceived audience is a performance, then this will soon become a true aspect of the self.

The newly established usages of the mobile phone and its peripherals signal not only a trend of more consumer involvement in the media landscape, but profound social transformations on quite fundamental levels. It is a ubiquitous ‘daily utensil’, virtualising even the most trivial aspects of daily life. This is to say that the consumption of the mobile phone deeply lies in what the technology accesses, namely the net, and communities, services made possible by the net. It is consumed not only as a desirable object, the desirability of which generally expires when the next new model arrives in the market, but also more significantly as a medium, a gateway and an increasingly essential attachment to the self and the body.

This is because, first, it is a constantly renewed fashion accessory for the body – an added limb that enhances the sense in an increasingly virtual world. Second, it is a gateway leaving the physical world that takes us to the edge between the virtual and physical worlds and turns us into the vacillating medium that both separates and merges the two. Third, it is not the end of telephony as the state of the current mobile phone seems to suggest – but the beginning of teleportation of the very self – presenting without physical presence,

228 performing without separation from the self and with its growing virtuality, living without being.

Goffman taught us that our social life is indeed a drama in which we, the individuals play changing roles according to the needs of the audience (Goffman 1969). Today, with the constant connection to the net, the individual often has to play a few roles for different audiences all at the same time. We can move in and out of different spaces, physically by transportation and virtually via networked devices; performing different roles in different dramas and parallel narratives: Being everywhere at once.

Or, are we?

Meyrowitz (1986) pointed out nearly two decades ago that the electronic media will change not only what we view and how, but more profoundly, the content that gets put into the public domain and thus impact on social behaviour as a whole. His analysis was not simply an analysis of the changes to the media landscape, but how the changes influence our being, recognising that electronic media have altered the way we interact with each other.

Weaving together McLuhan’s media theories and Goffman’s behavioural theories, he asks us to consider a qualitative shift in senses of place in the age of electronic media: (1) … social roles (i.e. social ‘place’) can be understood only in terms of social situations, which, until recently, have been tied to physical place, and (2) that the logic of situational behaviours has much to do with patterns of information flow, that is much to do with the human senses and their technological extensions. Evolution in media … has changed the logic of the social order by restructuring the relationship between physical place and social place and by altering the ways in

229 which we transmit and receive social information. (Meyrowitz 1986: 308)

Thus, he proposed an analogy in which we have become the ‘hunters and gatherers’ of the information age. For our social and political forms have come to resemble in many ways to the people of ‘primitive’ ages, in that we are also losing loyalty to territory and our ‘behaviours are not (no longer) tightly fixed to specific physical settings’ (Meyrowitz 1986: 315).

Physical settings are not the only thing virtualisation has detached from us in the ever more mediated environment. Cultural nuances of landmarks are already detached from the sense of authenticity (as shown in the chapter on VenusFort), history has de-lineated from specific points in time (as discussed in the chapter on Audrey Hepburn), and finally the presentation of the self is pulled away from fixed social and physical milieus (as described in the chapter on Reality TV). The mobile phone is only the beginning of an era in which bodily attachment combines commuting and networking. It will not only mix the virtual with the physical, but is in the process of remaking our consciousness of the self to include the newly acquired electronic senses. The virtual self? In simulacra? Of inauthentic aura of non-linear history?

In a volume of interviews with ‘Virtual Intelligentsia’ by Geert Lovink (2002), the German media theorist Dietmar Kamper, who refers to Greek mythology in his analyses, offers an astute way of deciphering the idea of simulation vs. authenticity, which deserves to be quoted in full: People are used to opposing simulation to authenticity; a deception is considered to be the opposite of realness. In our relations with the media, it’s been apparent to me for some time that both authenticity and simulation are on the same side. They belong together. If you long for something authentic because of a lack, then you yourself are not.

230 Someone who is alive doesn’t know this desire at all. If one wishes to be authentic, one has only the means of simulation at one’s disposal. Then one journeys into history in search of moments that radiate realness, which, in my opinion, never came into being because of an urge to be authentic – one already simply was. The simulated realness that results from this is ultimately not real either, causing one to dispatch it as simulation. That’s an endless spiral. (Kamper 2002: 14)

What is the authenticity of the self in a panoptic world filled with simulated reality and artificially enhanced senses, all in real time? One can now be ‘present’ in networked virtual spaces without being physically attached to geographical locations. One can seek, love and cohabit, all without the physical body. One can now speak, perform and present in different situations simultaneously without revealing, being known or possessing a permanent identity. What is authenticity if virtuality is by default part of reality? If our desire for authenticity, as Kamper points out, is because of a ‘lack’, then are we by nature virtual?

In the same volume, Slavoj Žižek gives his Lacanian point of view: What impresses me is the extent to which these virtual phenomena retroactively enable us to discover to what extent the self has always been virtual. Even the most physical self-experience has a symbolic, virtual element in it. [In virtual sex games] the possibility of satisfaction already counts as an actual satisfaction … in the symbolic order the potentiality already gives actual satisfaction. (Žižek 2002: 42)

Indeed, there is no evidence that the virtual self is vastly different from the analogue one. The virtual reality is by default part of today’s reality. We have aliases on the net, but they have become part of our makeup and often are the representation of the analogue self in the virtual world (Žižek 2002: 29) – only now we can perform the self with a bigger imaginary audience (Wallace 1999:

231 34). The virtual topography, such as the ‘SimCities’75 populated by the Sims, or Simulated Citizens, are often the representation and alias of the physical cities and citizens, with similar, albeit ‘hyperreality-generated crisis’ (Soja 2000: 338- 344). The arrival of television did not cause the disappearance of reality: it became part of it. The absorption of networked virtual reality today will not digitise or ‘virtualise’ reality – it adds yet another layer to the existing one, bring with it new crisis and predicament.

In a widely distributed paper entitled The Cyborgs are Coming, the cyborg and pioneering scientist Thad Starner proposed in 1994 that ‘we are on the edge of the next stage of human development: the combination of man and machine into an organism more powerful than either’ (Starner 1994). The topic of the well known paper is in fact Wearable Computing, which is, in his fellow cyborg Steve Mann’s words, ‘an existential technology, dropping the boundaries between man and machine’, helping humans to finally achieve this symbiotic relationship first clearly contextualised in 1960.

The conventional function of ‘telephone’ is spread into computers and PDAs, and mobile phones are able to surf the Internet and store data. The fourth generation mobile is predicted to have IP (Internet Protocol) built in, which will allow direct peer-to-peer networking without going through a centralised node. The constantly networked and sense enhancing gadget we call mobile phone

75 SimCity is a computer simulation game, which allows the player to build virtual cities from the ‘ground up or take over existing cities such as San Francisco, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro’. During the process of building cities, or performing the Simulated Citizens in the virtual world, one must face ‘the same dilemmas that mayors all over the world are facing’, such as dealing with ‘the planning and environmental issues of today, as well as disasters like fires, floods, earthquakes, air crashes, and an occasional monster’ Bremer (1993a).

232 today will be part of our body with far more computational powers and have far-reaching effects.

The mobile phone in fact is at the beginning of a bodily attached networking technology, and the end of what we know as ‘the telephone’. More advanced technology will shrink it further in size, spread it wider in the ever expanding internet and integrate it deeper into the fabric of our daily life. Our behaviours and personal narratives will be recorded constantly and broadcast as part of media content – as Starner and Mann have been doing for nearly two decades. Thus, in terms of consumption of media, we can no longer make the division between media and the audience, not only simply because the ‘audience’ are often the authors of media content, but also because we, the consumers, are in fact becoming part of the media landscape.

The accessibility of mobile phones to major nodal points in the cityscape, such as Tsutaya’s mammoth screen in the heart of Shibuya, enables individuals with their mobile phones to perform in the network and project content into physical public spaces. Increased portability and an eventual merge with the physical body will turn future generations of such devices into functional limbs, transforming physical beings into virtual identities. It is a tool oscillating between the virtual and physical; a means for the consumption of both tangible objects and intangible narratives interwoven with the network simply as content; it is above all, an evolutional self, the alias and expression of which will continue to improve and perfect with technology.

This will be looked back on as a fundamental change in the conventional logic of media and their influence on ‘consumer culture’. Traditionally dominant media forms such as television and print media will no longer monopolise the authority and the ability of media-based cultural production and re-production.

233 The traditional image of the audience sitting in front of a television set, staring into the screen while it projects light (and content) onto them, is over. The networked body now has a different position in relation to the media – she/he is now behind the lens, streaming her/his very own everyday performance to millions of other bodies. The audience is the media and the content.

Figure 67: Prototypes of wearable mobile phones for the near future. Not only will the shape of what we know as the mobile phone change, but the ways in which the devices are incorporated with the body will also change. They are becoming new body parts for the user (Nooper 2004).

The long-term impact of mobile network technology will go beyond the social and cultural implications analysed in this dissertation. As science fiction pioneered by writers such as William Gibson have envisaged and scientists/cyborgs such as Steve Mann and Thad Starner have experimented with in real life in the last 20 years, it is increasingly clear that more radical merges will occur between man and machine, with the mobile phone and other similar personal devices resembling more and more mass produced and mass consumed limbs. The US Army’s Land Warrior System, much like Mann and Starner’s wearable computers, connects to a wireless network, collects vital signs of the wearer and at the same time provides the soldier with battlefield information and orders via the helmet-mounted display (Ring 2003). His life is

234 conveyed into the network by his armour. Killing the armour has much the same effect as killing the soldier.

When this symbiosis takes place in the mass market, what will be the definitional element for the self? I shall conclude, again with an ambiguous assertion made by the cyborg from Ghost in the Shell: There are countless ingredients that make up human body and mind. Like all the components that make me as an individual with my own personality … my thoughts and memories are only unique to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny. … Each of those things is just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience. – Kusanagi Motoko, cyborg, Major, Section 9, Department of Public Security, in a country visually resembling Hong Kong, in year 2029, (Oshii 1995)

Figure 68: Tu-ka’s bone phone. It transmits voice, not via a receiver at the ear, but through the bones.

235

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABC-News. 2002. Serial Sniper Attacks, ABC-News. 2004. A&E Televison Networks, ‘Hepbrun, Audrey’, Biography.com, 2003 Adorno, Theodor W. & Max Horkheimer. 1995 [1947]. The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, pp. 120-167. New York: Continuum Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination, trans. Della Couling. London: Methuen. Ang, Ien. 1992. Living room wars: new technologies, audience measurement, and the tactics of television consumption. In Consuming technologies, edited by Roger Silverstone & Eric Hirsch. London: Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Asquith, Pamela J. & Arne Kalland, eds. 1997. Japanese images of nature: cultural perspectives. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London: Verso. A&E Television Networks, 2003, ‘Hepburn, Audrey’, Biography.com Baker, Adrienne ed. 2000. Serious shopping: psychotherapy and consumerism. London: Free Association Books. Barabási, Albert-Lazló. 2003. Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life. New York: Plume. Barthes, Roland. 1957. The Face of Garbo. In Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Barthes, Roland. 1982. Empire of signs, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations, trans. Paul Foss et al. New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, Jean. 1990. The revenge of the crystal: selected writings on the modern object and its destiny, 1968-1983, edited and trans. Paul Foss & Julian Pefanis. Leichhardt: Pluto Press Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Selected writings, edited by Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994 The Illusion of the End. Cambridge: Polity; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press

249 Baudrillard, Jean. 2000 The Vital Illusion. Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California at Irvine. New York: Columbia University Press Benjamin, Walter. 1973. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations. H. Arendt. Glasgow, Fontana: 278. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The arcades project, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press. Bergeron, Bryan. 2001. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Wireless Web. McGraw-Hill (E-book). Bocock, Robert.1993. Consumption. London ; New York, Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Practical reason: on the theory of action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowen, K. 2001. We're not in Kansas anymore, Hollywood.com. 2004. http://www.hollywood.com/celebs/features/feature/468436 Bradbent, L. 2002. Ratings to die for - those seeking an extra dimension in reality TV are tuning in to the other side. The Weekend Australian Magazine. September 21-22 2002: 11. Brannen, Mary Yoko. 1992. "Bwana Mickey" Constructing Cultural Consumption at Tokyo Disneyland. In Re-made in Japan: everyday life and consumer taste in a changing society, edited by Joseph J. Tobin, pp. 216-234. Yale University Press. Bremer 1993. Sim city: the Original City Simulator. User Manual. Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2000. The feminist, the housewife, and the soap opera. Oxford University Press. Buckley, Sandra. 2002. Arranged marriages. In Encyclopedia of contemporary Japanese culture, edited by Sandra Buckley. London: Routledge. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Campbell, Colin. 1987. The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell. Campbell, Colin. 1994. Consuming goods and good of consuming. Critical Review Fall 1994(8). Cassidy, Marsha F. 1989. 'Dallas' refigured. In Television studies: textual analysis, edited by Gary Burns & Robert J. Thompson, pp. 41-56. New York: Praeger. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The information age: economy, society and culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, Manuel. 2000. The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, Manuel. 2001. The Internet galaxy: reflections on the Internet, business, and society. New York: Oxford University Press. Cees J. Hamelink, Trends in World Communication, www.ehu.es/zer/zer1/1arthame.htm, 2004 Clammer, John R. 1995. Difference and modernity : social theory and contemporary Japanese society. London: Kegan Paul International. Clammer, John R. 1997. Contemporary urban Japan : a sociology of consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Clark, John. 1998. Modern Asian art. Sydney: Craftsman House / G+B Arts International. CNN 1998. Japan's lonely hearts find each other with 'Lovegety', CNN. 2003.

250 Corbett, G. 2000. Women, body image and shopping for clothes. In Serious shopping: psychotherapy and consumerism, edited by Adrienne Baker. London: Free Association Books. Creighton, Millie R. 1992. The depāto: merchandising the West while selling Japaneseness. In Re-made in Japan: everyday life and consumer taste in a changing society, edited by Joseph J. Tobin, pp. 42-57. Yale University Press. Creighton, Millie. 1998. Something more: Japanese department stores' marketing of 'A Meaningful Human Life'. In Asian department stores, edited by Kerrie L. MacPherson, pp. 206-230. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Cybriwsky, Roman A. 1998. Tokyo : the shogun's city at the twenty-first century. Chichester, N.Y.: J. Wiley & Sons. Dauncey, Hugh. 1996. French reality television: more than a matter of taste? s Journal of Communication 11(1), pp. 83-106. De Landa, Manuel. 1997. A thousand years of nonlinear history. New York: Zone Books. Debord, Guy. 1994. The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Douglas, Mary and Baron C. Isherwood. 1996. The world of goods : towards an anthropology of consumption, rev. ed. London: Routledge. Dovey, Jon. 2000. Freakshow: first person media and factual television. London: Pluto Press. Dumble, Wende Vyborney. 1989. And Justice for All: the messages behind 'real' courtroom dramas. In Television studies: textual analysis, edited by Gary Burns & Robert J Thompson, pp. 103-118. New York: Praeger. Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars. London, BFI Publishing. e-frontier 1999. Fei Fei's Official Homepage, e-frontier Inc. 2003.Fei Fei's profile and efrontier's other 'digital beauties'. www.e-frontier.co.jp/digitalbeauty/feifei/index.shtml Elton, Ben. 2001. Dead famous. Sydney: Transworld Publishers. eMarketer 2003. Wi-Fi: Trends & Prospects, November 2003, eMarketer. eMarketer 2004. Broadband Worldwide 2004: Subscriber Update, eMarketer. Ettinger, B. L. 2002. From transference to the aesthetic paradigm: a conversation with Félix Guattari. In A shock to thought : expressions after Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Brian Massumi. London: Routledge. Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. 1940. The Nuer, a description of the modes of livelihood and political institution of a Nilotic people. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Featherstone, Mike. 1991. Consumer culture and postmodernism. London: Sage. Findlay, John M. 1992. Magic lands: western cityscapes and American culture after 1940. University of California Press. Fiske, John. 1987. Television culture. London: Methuen.

251 Fletcher, L. 2002. With this ring. The Age. Melbourne. Frisby, David. 1984. Georg Simmel. London: Tavistock. Geraghty, Christine. 1991. Women and soap opera: a study of prime time soaps. Cambridge: Polity. Gibson, William. 1986. Neuromancer. West Bloomfield, Mich.: Phantasia Press. Gibson, William. 1996. Idoru. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Goffman, Erving. 1969. The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Allen Lane. Gray, Chris Habels ed. 1995. The cyborg handbook. London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In Culture, media, language: working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79, edited by Stuart Hall et al., pp. 128-138. London: Hutchinson. Hamelink, Cees J. 1996. World communication: disempowerment and self-empowerment. London: Zed Books. Harvey, David. 1989. The urban experience. Johns Hopkins University Press. Havens, Thomas R. H. 1994, Architects of affluence: the Tsutsumi family and the Seibu-Saison enterprises in twentieth-century Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. Hendry, Joy. 2000. The Orient strikes back: a global view of cultural display. Oxford: Berg. Herzog, Charlotte Cornelia & Jane Marie Gaines. 1991. "Puffed sleeves before tea-time": Joan Crawford, Adrian and women audiences. In Stardom: industry of desire, edited by Christine Gledhill, pp. 74-91. London: Routledge. Hill, J. 2003. Mobile Playground. The Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney: 6 - 7. Honjo, Masahiko. 1998. The growth of Tokyo as a world city. In Globalization and the world of large cities, edited by Fu-chen Lo & Yue-man Yeung, pp. 109-131. Tokyo: United Nations University Press Iida, Yumiko. 2000. Between the technique of living an endless routine and the madness of absolute degree zero: Japanese identity and the crisis of modernity in the 1990s. Positions 8 (2). IMDb.com 2004, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within 2001) Still image, http://us.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0173840/Ss/0173840/july2_19.jpg?path=gallery&path_key=0 173840 ITU (International Telecommunication Union). 2003. Key Global Telecom Indicators for the World Telecommunication Service Sector. ITU, 2004. ITU (International Telecommunication Union). 2004. Top 15 economies by 2002 broadband penetration. ITU, 2004. Ivy, Marilyn. 1988. Tradition and difference in the Japanese mass media. Public culture 1: 21.29. Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the vanishing : modernity, phantasm, Japan. University of Chicago Press.

252 Iwabuchi, Koichi. 1999. Returning to Asia - Japan in the cultural dynamics of globalisation, localisation and Asianisation. Ph.D. thesis, The School of Cultural Histories and Futures, Sydney, University of Western Sydney. Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2001. Becoming 'culturally proximate': the a/scent of Japanese idol dramas in Taiwan. In Asian media productions, edited by Brian Moeran, pp. 54-74. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2002. Recentering globalization: popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. Duke University Press. Iwao, Sumiko. 1993. The Japanese woman: traditional image and changing reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Iwao, Sumiko. 1990. Neither here nor there: why Dallas failed in Japan. In The export of meaning: cross-cultural readings of Dallas, by Tamar Liebes & Elihu Katz, pp. 129-139. New York: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Frederic. 1989. Nostalgia for the present. South Atlantic Quarterly 88(2), pp. 517-537. Johnson-Woods, Toni. 2002. Big Bother: why did that reality TV show become such a phenomenon? University of Queensland Press. Kadrey, Richard. 1998. Importing a Virtual Star. Wired 6(4): 60. Kamper, Dietmar. 2002. "We don't know what it is we invented": an interview with Dietmar Kamper. In Uncanny networks: dialogues with the virtual intelligentsia, edited by Geert Lovink, pp. 12-17. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Katz, D. 2001. Webcasting of "Big Broz" Shows, Net Can Be Profitable. Variety. September 2001. Kilborn, Richard. 1994. 'How real can you get?': recent developments in 'reality' television. European Journal of Communication 9(4), pp. 421-439. Kirkup, Gill et al. eds. 2000. The gendered cyborg: a reader. London: Routledge. Klapp, Orrin E. 1969. Collective search for identity. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. 1997. Consuming subjects: women, shopping, and business in the eighteenth century. Columbia University Press. Kowinski, William Severini. 1985. The Malling of America: an inside look at the great consumer paradise. New York: William Morrow. Kwinter, Sanford. 2001. Architectures of time: toward a theory of the event in modernist culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Lacan, Jacques and Jacques-Alain Miller. 1977. The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, trans. Alain Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lapidus, Morris. 1970. Progressive Architecture September 1970, p. 122. Lash, Scott. 1990. Sociology of postmodernism. London: Routledge.

253 Lee, Martyn J. 1993. Consumer culture reborn: the cultural politics of consumption. London: Routledge. Lessig, Lawrence. 2000. Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books. Leung, Lisa Y. M. 2002. Romancing the everyday: Hong Kong women watching Japanese dorama. Japanese Studies 22(1), pp. 65-75. Liebes, Tamar & Elihu Katz. 1990. The export of meaning: cross-cultural readings of Dallas. New York: Oxford University Press. Livingstone, Sonia M. 1998. Making sense of television: the psychology of audience interpretation. London: Routledge. Lovink, Geert. 2002. Uncanny networks: dialogues with the virtual intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. [query inclusion] Lowenthal, David. 1985. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge University Press Makulowich, J. 2001. The Ultimate Wearable Computer. USA Today. 25 June 2001. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/ccmak000.htm Marchand, Roland. 1985. Advertising the American Dream: making way for modernity, 1920-1940. University of California Press. Martinez, M. 2000. Merging With the Machine: Wearable Computers Offer Constant Access, for Better or Worse. ABCNews.com. 2003. Masai, Y. 1994. Metropolitization in Densely Populated Asia: The Case of Tokyo. In The Asian city: processes of development, characteristics, and planning, edited by Ashok K. Dutt et al. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press. MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. London: Macmillan. McCormack, Gavan. 1996. The emptiness of Japanese affluence. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin McCracken, Grant D. 1988. Culture and consumption: new approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities. Indiana University Press. Mcgillion, C. 2002. Adventures in cosmic air space ... to be taken with a grain of salt. The Sydney Morning Herald. : 13. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994 [1964]. Understanding media: the extensions of man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Meehan, Eileen R. 1990. Why we don't count: the commodity audience. In Logics of Television: essays in cultural criticism, edited by Patricia Mellencamp, pp. 117-137. Indiana University Press. Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1986. No sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. Microsoft 2004. Windows XP Media Center Edition. 2004.

254 Miles, Steven. 1998. Consumerism: as a way of life. London: Sage. Miles, Steven, Alison Anderson & Kevin Meethan eds. 2002. The changing consumer: markets and meanings. London: Routledge. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Modleski, Tania. 1984. Loving with a vengeance: mass-produced fantasies for women. New York: Methuen. Morse, Margaret. 1990. An ontology of everyday distraction: the freeway, the mall, and television. In Logics of Television: essays in cultural criticism, edited by Patricia Mellencamp, pp. 193-221. Indiana University Press. Mumford, Laura Stempel. 1995. Love and ideology in the afternoon: soap opera, women, and television genre. Indiana University Press. Nakamura, H & James W. White. 1988. Tokyo. In The Metropolis Era vol. 2: Mega-cities, edited by Mattei Dogan & John D. Kasarda. London: Sage. Newsweek 2001. 11 July 2001. Nhjapan 2004. http://nhjapan.com NHK 2000. http://www.nhk.or.jp/pr/bangumi/asadra/story/001.html. Nikkei Electronic Asia 2004). NTT DoCoMo to Release FeliCa-Capable Mobile Phone, Aiming for i-Mode Success, Nikkei Business Publications Asia Ltd. Nokia 2004). Feel the game. Let the light speak for you., Nokia. 2004. Oakes, Philip. 1994. Shopping for women. London: Deutsch. Ormerod, Paul. 1999. Butterfly economics: a new general theory of social and economic behaviour. London: Faber. Oscar.Org, (2003) http://www.oscar.org/events/roman_holiday/index.html http://us.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0173840/Ss/0173840/july2_19.jpg?path=gallery&path_key=0173840 O'Shaughnessy, John. 1987. Why people buy. Oxford University Press. Partner, Simon. 1999. Assembled in Japan : electrical goods and the making of the Japanese consumer. University of California Press. Rappaport, Erika Diane. 2000. Shopping for pleasure: women in the making of London's West End. Princeton University Press. Raz, Aviad. 1999. Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Asia Center. Rehr, Darryl, All About Antique Typewriters – Consider QWERTY... http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html, Accessed 2004 Rem Koolhaas, e. a. 2001. Projects for Prada Part 1, Fondazione Prada. Rheingold, Howard. 2003. Smart mobs: the next social revolution. Cambridge: Basic Books.

255 Rhodes, B. 2003. A Brief History of Wearable Computing, MIT Wearable Project. 2003. http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/lizzy/timeline.html Richardson, T (a). 2004. China goes large for mobile phones. The Register. Richardson, T(b). 2004. Global mobile phone sales soar. The Register. Ring, B. 2003. Techno Fashion. Sydney Morning Herald. : 6,7. Rubin, Ross. 2003. Retail Industry Online, eMarketer: 121. Satterthwaite, Ann. 2001. Going shopping: consumer choices and community consequences. Yale University Press. Seidensticker, Edward. 1990. Tokyo rising: the city since the great earthquake. New York: Knopf Siezen, S. 2004. Symbian OS Version 8.0: Product Description, Symbian Ltd: 5. Simmel, Georg. 1957 [1904]. Fashion. American Journal of Sociology 62(6), pp. 541-8. Singer, Jerome L. 1966. Daydreaming: an introduction to the experimental study of inner experience. New York: Random House. Smith, Patrick L. 1998. Japan: a reinterpretation. New York: Vintage Books. Soja, Edward W. 2000. Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Spigel, Lyn. 1990. Television in the family circle: the popular reception of a new medium. In Logics of Television: essays in cultural criticism, edited by Patricia Mellencamp, pp. 73-97. Indiana University Press. Stacey, Jackie. 1991. Feminine fascinations: forms of identification in star-audience relations. In Stardom: industry of desire, edited by Christine Gledhill, pp. 141-163. London: Routledge. Starner, T. 1994. The Cyborgs are Coming or The Real Personal Computers. 2003. Stein, J. S. M. 2001. User Experience in the Pervasive Computing Age: Trends, Technologies and Applications in Mobile Computing. Special Report from the IEEE. Sydney Morning Herald, Job Advertisement, My Career, , 28 July, 2002 and 10, 11 August Sugimoto, Yoshio. 1997. An Introduction To Japanese Society. Cambridge University Press. Sun-Herald 2003. 'Digital Dialling Turns 10'. The Sun-Herald (Sydney): 20. Takashi, Junjiro & Sugiura, Noriyuki 1996. The Japanese urban system and the growing centrality of Tokyo in the global economy. In Emerging world cities in Pacific Asia., edited by Fu-chen Lo & Yue-Man Yeung. Tokyo: United Nations University Press Tanaka, Keiko. 1990. Intelligent elegance: women in Japanese advertising. In Unwrapping Japan: society and culture in anthropological perspective, edited by Eyal Ben-Ari, Brian Moeran & James Valentine, pp. 78-96. Manchester University Press. Timson, L. 2003. 'Phones that make you go mmm'. Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney: 1. Tobin, Joseph J. ed. 1992. Re-made in Japan: everyday life and consumer taste in a changing society. Yale University Press.

256 Tokyo Broadcast System, Merchandise for ‘The Future Diary’ www.tbs-v.jp/shop/mirai_goods.html, 2004 Twitchell, James B. 1996. Adcult USA: the triumph of advertising in American culture. Columbia University Press. Twitchell, James B. 1999. Lead us into temptation: the triumph of American materialism. Columbia University Press. Twitchell, James B. 2002. Living it up: our love affair with luxury. Columbia University Press. Ueno, Chizuko. 1998. Seibu department store and image marketing: Japanese consumerism in the postwar period. In Asian department stores, edited by Kerrie L. MacPherson, pp. 177-205. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Underhill, Paco. 2000. Why we buy: the science of shopping. London: Texere. United States Department of Commerce. 2004. United States Department of Commerce E-Stats. Washington D.C.: United States Department of Commerce. Urry, John. 1990. The tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London: Sage. Veblen, Thorstein. 1964. What Veblen taught: selected writings, edited by W. C. Mitchell. New York: Kelley. Veblen, Thorstein. 1998 [1899]. The theory of the leisure class. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown & Steven Izenour. 1977[1972]. Learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of architectural form. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Virilio, Paul. 2001. The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso Books. Virilio, Paul. 1998. The Virilio reader, edited by James Der Derian. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Virilio, Paul & Sylvère Lotringer. 2002. Crepuscular dawn, trans. Mike Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Vogel, Ezra F. 1963. Japan's new middle class: the salary man and his family in a Tokyo suburb. University of California Press. Wachowski, Larry & Wachowski, Andy 1999. The Matrix, Warner Bro. Wallace, Patricia M. 1999. The psychology of the Internet. Cambridge University Press. Wasko, Janet. 2001. Understanding Disney: the manufacture of fantasy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wolff, W. D. 1997. Kyoko Date - Virtual Idol: A Retrospective View, W. Dire Wolff. 2003. http://www.wdirewolff.com/jkyoko.htm Wristomo.com 2003. About Wristomo, Wristomoto.com. 203. Yoshimi, Shunya. 1993. The Politics of Disneyland - Tokyo Disneyland and Commercial Culture in Contemporary Japan (Conference Paper). Mexico. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. 1989. The Postmodern and Mass Images in Japan. Public Culture 1(2), pp. 8-26.

257 Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. 1996. Real Virtuality. In Global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary, edited by Rob Wilson & Wimal Dissanayake, pp. 107-118. Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999 (a). Is it possible to traverse the fantasy in cyberspace? In The Žižek reader, edited by Elizabeth L. Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999 (b). Otto Weininger, or 'woman doesn't exist'. In The Žižek reader, edited by Elizabeth L. Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Enjoy your symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out, rev. ed. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Civil society, fanaticism and digital reality – an interview with Slavoj Žižek. In Uncanny networks: dialogues with the virtual intelligentsia, edited by Geert Lovink. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The cultures of cities. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

Japanese Sources

Aera. 2000. Shin oyayubizoku ga jinrui kaeru 新親指族人類変え. Aera, 5 June. Aera. 2000. “Atsuatsu shuroku” butai ura ni “irasshai”録舞台い い. Aera, 25 September. Aera. 2000. IT renai kakumei IT 恋愛革命. Aera (rinji zōkan), 30 September. Aera. 2001. Keitai izonshō no chotto byōki 携帯依存症病気. Aera, 14 May. All Yomimono 物. 1954. Personality spot: Audrey Hepburn 人物 . All Yomimono April 1954: 297. AM Business 1999. Venus Fort chūsei Europa no machinami o saigen shita “Josei no tame no tema park” 中世街並現“女性 ”. AM Business. No. 29: 12,7. AM Business 1999. Entertainment-sei ga motomerarete iru kore kara no shisetsu ni koko de eta know-how o ikasu 性求い施設得 活. AM Business No. 29: 4-7. AM Business 1999. Shōgyō shisetsu ni okeru entertainment shisetsu no saishin keikō 商業施設 施設最新傾向. AM Business. No. 28: 78. Arai Masaya 2000. Omoshiroi koto 面い, Hen na koto 変. Passingtime (Shin Chōsa Jōhō 新調査情報) 11-12, 2000(26): 64. Nikkei Architecture. 2000. Cranberry Mall America o ishiki shita teisō mall –意識層. Nikkei Architecture 15 May 2000: 58-62.

258 Nikkei Architecture. 2000. Shoppers’ mall Marina Town – Graphics de tanoshisa enshutsu ょ ょ ょ 楽さ演出. Nikkei Architecture 15 May 2000: 50. AsahiGraph . 1999. Yōsei tanjō 70 shūnen kinen tokubetsu henshū 妖精生誕７ 周記念特別編. Asahi graph bessatsu 別, 10 May 1999. AsahiGraph. 1999. Nihon no joyū ga kataru. My Dear Audrey 日曓女優語. Asahi graph bessatsu 別, 10 May 1999: 112-7. Asahi shimbun. 1992. Tema park hanazakari - kyokō to genjitsuょ konzai hakaru park-nai de jūtaku mo hambai: jūkō chōdai ‘Haus ten bosu’花盛虚構現実ょ 混 図宅売厚長大朝日新聞 Asahi shimbun. 2 March 1992, 2 版, 東京: 18. CM Connection, 2003. (12March 2003 accessed) Hepburn appeared in a commercial for House Foods Co. (食品工業).ょ http://www.geocities.co.jp/hollywood/7269 /cinema06_01.html Dacapo. 2000. Omiai seiritsu made nanto saitan 5-fun. 見い成立最短５分 Dacapo, 6 September. Dentsu. 2001. National Digital Lifestyle Survey. Tokyo, Dentsu P&D Digital Lifestyle Research: 9. Dias Weekly. 2001. Oyayubi de shōsetsu o tsukuru “keitai sakka” ga tanjō shita 親指小創 携帯作家誕生. Dias Weekly, 24 September. Dime. 1992. “Audrey de manabu eikaiwa” made tōjō: A. Hepburn wa naze joseitachi no risō na no ka?学ぶ英会話場ょ Ａ女性理想 ？. Dime, 3 December: 115. Dime. 2000. Otona datte keitai strap de shuchō suru 大人主張. Dime, 19 October: 17. Dime. 2001. Mail ga konai hi wa samishii? Keitai fukyū de gekihen shita Nipponjin no communication-kan 来い日寂い？晘激変人 感. Dime, December: 173 Congress & Convention. 1999. Odaiba ni shin-spot ‘Palette Town’ tanjō!台場新 誕生！, Congress & Convention April-June 1999, 40-41. Economist. 2001. Dai-3 sedai no kaihatsu tōshi to sono kaishū time lag 第世代開投資 回. Economist, 24 July: 43-47. Fuji Television. 2001, Ranking of ratings, Pabupepa No. 01-88 7 March 2001. also in: www.fujitv.co.jp/jp/golden/bub/01-88.html Galac . 2002. FOMA wa keitai terebi ni naru no ka? FOMA ょ 携帯 Galac, February 2002: 28-32

259 Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Shiryō 月刊産業資料. 1998. Rinkai fuku-toshin Odaiba: toshi keikaku wa shukushō suru mo shūkyaku area to shite ninki 臨海副都心台場: 都市計 縮小人気. Gekkan Leisure Sangyō (bessatsu)月刊産業 [別冊], March 1998: 137-142 Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Shiryō 月刊産業資料.. 1999. Kono natsu, rinkai fuku-toshin ni tanjō shita “VenusFort”: sono tanjō ni itaru keii to kongo no toshi sangyō kaihatsu ni motarasu imi o kangaeru 夏臨海副都心誕生: 誕 生至経緯今後都市産業開意味考え, Gekkan Leisure Sangyō (bessatsu)月刊産業[別冊], October 1999: 46-51ょ Gekkan Leisure Sangyō Shiryō 月刊産業資料. 2000. Mediage Sony ga Tokyo/Odaiba ni toshigata goraku shisetsu o open 東京台場都市型娯楽施 設, Gekkan Leisure Sangyō (bessatsu)月刊産業[別冊], January 2000. Hanamori Yasuharu 花森治. 1954. Hepburn o kaibō suru 解剖. Maru 丸, July 1954: 66, 72. Hayamizu Yukiko 水起子. 1994. Joyū no keizai kōka: business no sekai de mo Hepburn ninki 女優経済効果ょ 世界人気. Aera, 7 November: 38. Hayashi, Eiichi. 2001. Cellular Telephones as Vital Tools: How They are Utilised recently by Female High School Students. Bulletin of the Folklore Society of Japan, February. Hiramoto Kazuo 曓一. 2000. Rinkai fuku-toshin monogatari: ‘Odaiba’ o meguru seiji keizairikigaku 臨海副都心物語:台場治経済力学. Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha Ide Sachie 井手幸恵. 1998. Burando to Nihonjin 日曓人. Tokyo, Hakutō shobō Ino Kenji 猪健治. 1997. Shin seishun note. 新青春 Part 27, Kōhyō 公評, January 1997: 64-67. IT Media. 2004, F900i de ‘iPod’ irazu? F900i iPodい？ www.itmedia.co.jp/mobile/articles/0407/22/news060.html. 22 July IT Media. 2004. F900i, keitai denwa toshiteno tukai kattei wo tamesu. F900i携帯電話 使い勝手試 www.itmedia.co.jp/mobile/articles/0402/13/news091_2.html. 13 February Itō Seikō いうょ いう. 2000. Eigaka kettei! Mirainikki ga wakamono ni ukeru riyū 映 決定！曑来日記若者理. Dacapo, 19 July: 36. Iwami Takao. 2001. Futatabi keitai chūdoku o ureeru 中毒憂え. Sunday Mainichi, 18 November. Izumi Asato 泉麻人. 1991. Neruton teki renai game 的恋愛. Gekkan Asahi, February: 114, 115 Japanese 2000 Census, 2001 http://www.stat.go.jp/data/kokusei/2000/kakutei/zuhyou/kakutei-00.xls

260 Jinbutsu Hyōron 人物評論. 1971. Oshare no o-tehon 手曓. Jinbutsu Hyōron, September: 321. Josei Jishin 女性自身. 1982. (gravure) Konshū no photo digest: Audrey Hepburn ga 10-nen buri ni Nihon no CM ni kao o miseru ょ 今週 ぶ日曓 CM 顔. Josei Jishin, 18 March: inside back cover. Josei Jishin. 1991. Audrey Hepburn vs. Julia Roberts – dotchi ga kawaii Vs. ょ わいい. Josei Jishin, 16 April: 94-7. Josei Jishin. 2000. Dakara nakeru “Mirainikki”泣曑来日記. Josei Jishin, 9-16 May: 202, 203. Josei Seven 女性. 2000. Minna ōnaki! “Mirainikki” ururun taikenki 大泣！曑来 日記う体験記. Josei Seven, 14 September: 54-57. J-Wave-Shibuya Style. 2004. Shibuya hatsu keitai shōsetsu no eiga-ka ga kettei 渋谷 小映決定. Shibuya keizai shimbun 渋谷経済新聞. April, 2004. http://www.shibukei.com/special/2003/11/07/index.html Kanimiso henshūkyoku 編局, ed. 2000. Fei Fei 3D Data Collection Official Book: Shade ga unda cyber na sekai Shade 生世界. Osaka: e-frontier. Kawano Seiichirō 河正一郎. 2000. ‘Gōkon hanseikai de otoko no shina-sadame 省会 品定. Aera, 31 July: 67-69 Kayama Rika 香山. 2000. ‘“Deawasareta” couple no “shinjitsu no renai” ni namida suru wakamono to wa?出会わさ真実恋愛涙若者？. Kōza 講, November: 10, 11. Kirin Beverages Co. 株式会社 2001. http://www.beverage.co.jp/info/cm/gogo/hana/index.html. Kirin Beverages Co. 株式会社 2001. http://www.beverage.co.jp/info/cm/gogo/new_gogo/a_cm2.html. Kentaka M 兼高聖男. 2000. 27.4% o hajikidashita shichōsha shinri27.4%出視聴者心 理.’ Galac , February: 40-42. Kurihara Akiko 栗原貴子 1999. Terebi detagari shirōto-san sono “dōki” to “shutsuengo” ［ さ］動機出演後. SPA!, 13 January: 20-23. Matsuda Misa 松美. 2001. Daigakusei no keitai denwa, denshi mail riyō jōkyō 2001 大学生 携帯電話電子利用状況 2001. Jōhō kenkyū 情報研究, No. 26.ょ Minato-ku Kyōiku Iinkai 東京都港区教育委員会. 2001. Minato-ku-ritsu minato kyōdo shiryōkan henshūhen Daiba: uchiumi Odaiba no kōzō to chikuzō 港区立港郷土資料館編編台場海 御台場構築.

261 Ministry of Public Management, H. A., Post and Telecommunications (Sōmushō 総務省) 2003. INFORMATION on subscribers of Cellular telephone , Pager and PHS (Personal Handy-phone System) in Japan. Miyake Kazuko 宅和子. 2001. ‘Pokeberu kara keitai mail e rekishiteki hensen to sono hitsuzensei.’ Nihongogaku 日曓語学, ょ 史的変遷 必然性, Nihongogaku, September 2001 Mizogami Yukinobu 溝幸信. 2000. Odaiba boom no “kachigumi/makegumi”台場 勝組組. Gekkan Keiei, May: 52, 53 More.1995. Anata wa Hepburn type? Soretomo Monroe type? あ？ ？. More, May. More. 1996. Beauty Special. Kyōi no eyeline-teku de Audrey-gao ni naru / Audrey no eye-make no himitsu 驚異顔｜秘 密. More, January: 332, 333.ょ More. 1998. Ima sugu mane shitai. Cinema wa sense no hōko / Watashi no nichijō-gi. O-tehon wa ano eiga no ano joyū Audrey Hepburn 今真似い宝庫｜わ 日常着手曓あ映あ女優ょ －. More, March: 172, 173. More. 1999. Ano josei o kagayakaseru 10 no chikara: kanojo ga Venus de aru riyū あ女性輝 力: 彼女あ理. More, November: 304, 310. More. 2000. O-ryōri ni mo, ai ga ippai musuko ga kataru Audrey no recipe sekai hatsu-kōkai 料理愛いい息子語世界初公開. More, September: 342-7. Moronaga Yūji 諸永裕. 2000. Renai no kyakuhon kudasai 恋愛脚曓さい. Aera, 4 September: 78-80. Nagatomo 長 1997. ‘Kareshi wa iru kedo kekkon wa omiaiyo 彼氏い結婚見い ’. Aera, 15 September: 21-23. Nakajima, Hiroshi 中島洋. 2001. Keitai denwa kara kētai e – Nihon IT kakumei no ikkyokumen 携帯電話-日曓 IT 革命一局面." Mita hyōron 評論 No. 1034, April 2001. ょ Nakamura, Isao 中村 2001. Keitai denwa no fukyū katei to shakai no imi 携帯電話晘過 程社会意味. In Kawaura & Matsuda eds, Keitai denwa to shakai seikatsu 携帯電話社 会生活. Tokyo: Shibundō. Nakatani Akihiro 中谷彰宏. 1993. Audrey wa 23-sai de shinda 死. Shūkan Post 週刊, 12 February: 221. Nielsen Media Research. 2001. American Television Ratings (26 February - 4 March). Hōsō Bunka 送文, May: 43.

262 Nihon ITU Kyōkai. 2002. 2002 World telecom visual data book, Nihon ITU Kyōkai. Nikkei Business. 2001. Wakate producer tsukanda DoCoMo shintanmatsu shōgyō shugi ni kyori, arata na eizō contents umareru ka 若手新端曒商業 主義距離新映像生. Nikkei Business, 15 January. Nikkei Communications. 2001. Dare ga miru? Keitai denwa dōga service 誰見？携帯電話動 ’. Nikkei Communications, 3 December. Nikkei Communications. 2002. 30-byō no dōga o sūbyō de nyūshu30 動数入手. Nikkei Communications, 4 February.ょ Nikkei Electronics. 1999. Wearable computer . Nikkei Electronics, 11 January. http://wearables.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/timeline.html Nikkei Mechanical. 2001. Wakai josei o hard de miryo 若い女性魅了 Nikkei Mechanical,September: 31-33 Nikkei Trendy. 2000. 2001 Hot chart. Nikkei Trendy, December: 9 -11 Nishi Tadashi 西正. 2000. Honto ni shirōto na no ka to utagaitaku naru “Mirainikki”素 人疑い曑来日記. Shūkan Gendai, 10 June: 67. Noda Mayu . 2000. Otoko o get suru ni wa “Itsumo no watashi” de shōbu 男 ょ い私勝. Aera, 25 June: 158, 159.ょ Non.no. 1990. Audrey Hepburn ima nao “aisareru riyū” 今愛さ 理. Non.no, 5 December: 111, 117. Non.no. 1993. Memorial travel Hepburn ga aishita machi SuisuRozannu －愛街. Non.no, 5 August: 166, 179.ょ NTTDoCoMo. 2003. Tokeigata PHS okaihatsu 時計型 PHS 開. http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/new/contents/03/whatnew0326.html NTTDoCoMo 2004. FOMA product line-up. http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp Okabe, Y. 1993. Rinkai 10 chō en project sei-kan-zai yuchaku no kōzō.臨海10億 官癒着構 Sekai世界, December. Okamura Ryō 岡村良. 1993. (gravure) Tokubetsu album Nihon de ichiban aisareta Hollywood joyū eien no heroine Audrey Hepburn ょ 特別ょ 日曓い愛さ 女優ょ 永遠ょ －’, Josei Seven 女性, 1 January: 251, 258.ょ Ōmae Ken’ichi 大前研一 & Miyamoto Masashi 宮曓史. 1999. Kandō keieigaku – VenusFort tanjō hiwa 感動経営学—誕生秘話. Tokyo: Shogakukanょ Ono Kazuoki 大和興. 1994. Nō to shoku no seiji keizaigaku. 農食治経済学 Ryokufū shubban 緑風出版 Tokyo Onoue Takashi 尾. 2000. “Shinkon-san irasshai!” chōju no riyū新婚さいい ！長理. Chūō kōron, December: 264, 271.ょ

263 Oshii Mamoru 押井. 1995. Ghost in the Shell, Masamune Shirow/Kodansha Ltd. Bandai Visual Co., Ltd/Manga Entertainment, Ltd. Ōta Tōru 大多亮. 1996. Hit man – Terebi de yume o uru otoko ―夢売男. Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten. Ōta Tōru. 2001. Why Japanese TV dramas attracts young viewers in Asia. Feeling "Asian" Modernities: TV Drama Consumption in East/Southeast Asia, International Christian University, Tokyo, Conference organized by Institute of Asian Cultural Studies, International Christian University Passingtime. 2001. March - April, no. 28 2001. Rain.org 2001. http://www.rain.org/~mills/pizzlyrics/pizzicatomania.html. Rinkou 林. 2000. Yūga na jiyū seikatsusha no shōhi keikō o saguru – Kojingata no shōhi/service ni iyokuteki 優自生活者消費傾向探個人型消費 意欲的. Gekkan leisure sangyō shiryō, June: 63-6. Samsung (23 May 2002). Japan Samsung LCD television digital image character Fei Fei is born! 日曓液晶 ょ "飛飛"誕生！Samsung. 2003. http://www.samsung.co.jp/PressCenter/Japan/020523_1.html Satō Masao 藤正夗. 1997. Shinagawa Daiba shikō – bakumatsu kara gendai made 品台場史考ょ 幕 曒現代. Tokyo: Rikōgakusha 理工学社ょ Senden kaigi. 2000. Keitai denwa wa interactive-sei o sonaeta mass media de aru 携帯電話 性備えあ. Senden kaigi 伝会議 December: 80ょ Shokuhin Ryūtsū Jōhō Center 食品流通情報. 2000. Yoka/leisure sōgō tōkei nenpō 余暇 総統計報. Statistical Data of Leisure and Resort 2000. Tokyo: Shokuhin Ryūtsū Jōhō Center Shopping Centre. 1999. VenusFort (Tokyo-to Kōtō-ku) (東京都江東区). Shopping Centre , December: 48, 51 Shūkan Asahi 週刊朝日. 1988. Naze ka ō-uke Neruton benikujiradan taainai miai waku wakamono no nori 大ょ 鯨団ょ 他愛い見い沸若者. Shūkan Asahi, 19 August. Shūkan Bunshun 週刊文春. 2001. 30-dai josei ga gōkon hamatte iru 十代女性 い. Shūkan Bunshun, 13 September: 47, 48. Shūkan Diamond 週刊. 2001. Interview with Kurt Hellstrom Shūkan Diamond, 8 December: 112 Shūkan Diamond. 週刊 2001. Kinō no tayōka to kokusai tenkai de keitai shijō wa ima, daibakuhatsu zenya 機能多様国際展開携帯市場今大爆前夜. Shūkan Diamond, 21 April: 30 - 76ょ

264 Shūkan Gendai 週刊現代. 1988. Kekkongumi mo deta! Tonneruzu ga torimotsu shinjinrui-shiki “koibito sagashi” no uragawa 結婚組出！新人類式 恋人さ 裏側. Shūkan Gendai, 29 October. Shūkan Heibon 週刊凡. 1971. Hepburn ga Nihon no CM nanto, hitokoe dake de ¥50,000,000 日曓 CM 声 5000 万. Shūkan Heibon, 22 April: 160.ょ Shūkan Hōseki 週刊宝石. 1988. Neruton benikujiradan ni shutsuen shita “Imadoki gyarutachi”! 鯨団出演い！ Shūkan Hōseki, 14 October: 54-56.ょ Shūkan Hōseki 週刊宝石 (a). 2000. Mirainikki no ōbōsha-sū 曑来日記応募者数. Shūkan Hōseki, 21 September: 180. Shūkan Hōseki 週刊宝石 (b). 2000. Gōkon setting service de bōnenkai wa yume kibun! 忘会夢気分！ Shūkan Hōseki, 21 December: 172-175. Shūkan Josei 週刊女性. 2001. Ninki no haikei 人気背晙. Shūkan Josei, 11 December.ょ Shūkan Playboy 週刊. 1993. Ojisan & obasan no ‘sekaiteki idol’ wa donna hito? Audrey Hepburn tsuito no tame no kiso chishiki LOCK-ON ＆世界 的人？追悼為基礎知識. Shūkan Playboy, 9 February: 236, 237. Shūkan Post 週刊. 2000. Net kokuhatsu de barechatta! “Ainori” Fuji ninki shinya bangumi mata yarase 告！あい人気深夜番組 . Shūkan Post, 9 June: 54, 55. Shūkan Shinchō 週刊新潮 1993 Nihonjin wa naze Hepburn ga suki na no ka 日曓人 －好.February 4, 1993: 38.ょ Shūkan Tōyō Keizai 週刊東洋経済. 2000. DoCoMo no “shikaku”, Toyota no “Yabō”死 角望. Shūkan Tōyō Keizai, 17 June 35- 40 Shūkan Uriyomi 週刊売讀. 1954. Kijo mo watashi mo Hepburn – Tokyo musume no hairstyle o bunseki suru 貴女私東京娘分析. Shūkan Uriyomi, 16 May: 3, 14. Sōmushō jōhō tsūshin seisaku kyoku 総務省情報通信策局. 2003. Tsūshin riyō dōkō chōsa hōkoku setaihen 通信利用動向調査報告世帯編. Tokyo: Sōmushō jōhō tsūshin seisaku kyoku.ょ Spa 1999. ‘Wakamono ni manensuru odoroki no keitai kankei 若者蔓延驚 関係.’ Spa, 24 March: 45 - 48 Suga Minoru 須賀稔. 2000. Tema park zokuzoku tanjō suru tema park survival sensō ga hajimaru 続々誕生戦争始. Economist , 25 July: 80.ょ Sunday Mainichi. 2000. Nihongo ga abunai 日曓語危い. Sunday Mainichi 毎日, 22 October.

265 Takemura Yūko 竹村優子. 1999. 10-nenkan no tanki kessen – VenusFort wa josei shijō no kyūkyoku o mezasu10 間短期決戦女性市場究極目指.ょ Jitsugyo no Nihon 実業日曓, November 1999: 67- 69.ょ Tamura Yōzō 村洋. 2000, “Josei tema park” ni 10-nen saki o miru女性 見. Hambai kakushin 売革新/Revolution in Retailing, May: pp. 106-113ょ Tanaka Yukari 中. 2001. Daigakusei no keitai mail communication 大学生携帯 . Nihongogaku 日曓語学, September. Tani 谷 [sinc.]. 2000. Drama yori mo dramatic! – Shirōto sanka no renai variety bangumi, ！- 素人参恋愛番組 Zaikai 界, 26 September: 127. The21. 1999. Internet shakai no mirai 社会曑来. The21, August special issue: 9-18. Tokyo Statistic Bureau 2004, Tokyo Population Statistics 2004 www.toukei.metro.tokyo.jp/jsuikei/js-index.htmょ Uchiyama Kyōko 山京子 et al. Real Love Story. Renai kansatsu variety: Ainori – tabi no kiseki, ai no kiseki 恋愛観察あ– 旅軌跡愛奇跡. Tokyo: Gakushū kenkyūjo (Gakken).ょ Watanabe W 渡辺明日香. 2001. Keitai denwa, PHS o tsukaikonasu hito wa oshare shōhi mo dai 携帯電話PHS 使い人消費大. Keshō bunka 粧文 No. 40: 99-102 Watanabe Tetsutarō 渡辺哲外郎. 1991. Shūdan omiai “Neruton tour”団見い ’. Mainichi Graphic, 3 November: pp. 68-72. Wedge. 1998. Nihon rettō o jūdan suruOdaibagenshō no nazo 日曓列島縦断台場 現象謎. Wedge, November: pp. 32, 3. With. 1999. Audrey Hepburn, anata no fashion ga ima de mo o-tehon desu －ょ あ今手曓. With, September: pp. 74, 79.ょ Yamada 山 2000. HOSO Specialist File. Hōsō bunka 送文, October. Yamauchi, Kōji 山浩 1999. Roshutsukei no hitotachi 露出系人. Aera, 19 April: 10-13 Yoka Kaihatsu Center 余暇開買. 2000. Leisure hakusho 2000 – Jiyū jikan o design suru 書 2000 - 自時間. Tokyo: Yoka Kaihatsu Center.ょ Yoshimi Shunya 見俊哉. 1988. Toshi no dramaturgy: Tokyo / sakariba no shakaishi 都市 東京– 盛場社会史. Tokyo: Kōbundō 弘文堂. Yoshimi Shunya. 1992. Media to shite no denwa 電話. Tokyo: Kōbundō 弘文堂 .ょ Yotsumoto Masahiro 四元正弘 2003. i-life 2003 –Jyouhouka syakai ni ikiru 情報社会生. Media Shishutsu, Sesshokuji kan ni miru jyōhō media kankyō no genjyō to dōkō bunseki 支出, 接触時間見 情報環境現状動向分析 Tokyo: Dentsū Communication Institute: 78.

266 Zdnet 2002. Yokushitsu de mo keitai denwa tebanasenai hito ni – happia fon 浴携帯電話 手い人. Mobile News, http://www.zdnet.co.jp/mobile/0210/10/n_yokushitu.html, 10 Octoberょ

267

CONCLUSION

MEDIATING CONSUMPTION: FROM OBJECT TO CONTENT

Consumption is neither a material practice, nor a phenomenology of ‘affluence.’ It is not defined by the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the car we drive, nor by the visual and oral substance of images and messages, but in the organisation of all this as signifying substance. Baudrillard (Baudrillard and Poster 1988: 21,22)

The Changing Media Landscape

One must note that the consumption of media content that has been discussed here is specifically focused on a particular group of consumers, mostly affluent and young and living in one of the wealthiest economies, in this case Japan. They do not in any way represent an all-encompassing group often too simplistically termed as ‘consumers’, if such a group exists at all. As discussed in the Introduction, the culture and social function of consumption change from one social environment to another, from one culture and subculture to another. The social value of many consumer products and services vary greatly from one economy to another. Even under similar cultural and economic conditions, the content of shopping bags and mobile phone hard discs often have qualitative differences amongst shoppers in different ages and sub-cultural groups, which conceivably play different roles in bigger social trends.

Consumer taste for non-essential things in everyday life is hardly a matter determined by economic rationales, such as needs and the balance of benefit and cost. Paul Ormerod’s analysis of the modern economy as a whole likens its

236 unpredictability to that of organic transmorphosis; hence he calls his theory ‘butterfly economics’ (Ormerod 1999). He points out that one of the driving forces behind the economy today, more powerful than governmental intervention based on orthodox economics, is human behaviour involved in economic life, from brokerage of currencies and stocks to the purchase of everyday goods. ‘Popular products sustain their popularity in part simply because they are popular’, he states, acknowledging the fact that human behaviour and the influences that consumers have on each other often play the deciding role in the shelf life of a product (Ormerod 1999: 191). Popularity, according to Ormerod, is often fickle, precisely for the same reasons that cause that popularity at the first place – that is, human behaviours, which change often in response to external influences.

Everyday consumption is thus closely connected to the dynamics of culture and to a variety of social influences. Amongst all the social influences we receive as part of everyday life, I place emphasis on the influence from what we can broadly call the media. Media, as I have shown in this thesis, are no longer a one-sided force in which we, the audience and consumer, are always at the receiving end. Technology and knowledge, together with the changing nature of demand for media content, not only allow the audience to play an important role in media consumption, but also make it possible for them to be the broadcasters and authors of media content. Striving for distinction of class in a ‘grand narrative’ is no longer the only motif in everyday consumption. Metropolitan Japan provides an acute example of ‘conspicuous consumption’ that is not based on a singlular narrative of class aspiration or distinction. Rather, in its more-or-less uniformly middle-class construct, at least at the level of social consciousness, consumers have found themselves buying into different aspirations and roles that have emerged from narratives authored, performed, broadcast and influenced by groups of consumers themselves. Reality TV and

237 the often inventive ways of using the mobile phone are good examples of consumers’ influence and contribution to media content.

The desires motivated by Veblen’s notion of ‘conspicuous consumption’ may still in some ways motivate consumption today. In the case of Tokyo, by and large, symbolism in goods is becoming the semiotics of roles and characters, referencing narratives disseminated by media of various kinds. Affiliations to certain brands are not always sufficient to signify a higher social status in a comparatively wealthy society. Brands today are often closely related to mini narratives in commercials and affiliations to media stars. Under such conditions, the value of being ‘conspicuous’ is realised only when there is a perceived audience, real or imagined. The stars are idolised often not for their acting ability, but rather in the art of reflecting the targeted audience. A themed shopping mall is not so much a place to buy functional things, but a place to acquire style, where shop assistants give advice on the latest repertoires. Television is no longer only a stage occupied by professional performers, but has become a screen for dramas in which ‘real life’ is produced and audience empathy are the content.

Rapid development within the media landscape is also qualitatively changing the relationship between the consumer and the media. In this evolving relationship, we, ‘the consumers’ are also changing. The mobile phone and similar networking, multimedia and multifunctional devices are penetrating deeper into all imaginable aspects of our everyday lives – starting with the ways we communicate, produce and consume. The extensive infiltration of network deeper into our social and political life will also have a profound influence, going beyond communication and media, and reaching such fundamental concerns as the nation state and personal identity (Castells 2000).

238 Changes undergone in the media of consumption, one of the fundamentals in the fabric of capitalist economies, will be among the most visible.

With the mobile phone and other networked computing ‘limbs’ attached to the body, the consumer is transformed into the cells of a new kind of organism (Barabási 2003) or ecology (Rheingold 2003: 179, 180) which we call the Internet. Geographical spaces are now interwoven with the virtual. The city becomes a gigantic stage, where residents position themselves according to the strata of cultural coordinates, geographic or virtual. Today, the negotiations one carries out to establish the projection of ‘the self’ in the social environment (Goffman 1969) are in fact, with networked media, an everyday performance in which the individual is the star in ‘galaxies ’, from the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ (McLuhan 1964) to the Internet Galaxy (Castells 2001). Media content is no longer confined to just a few hours in front of the television. Networked electronic attachment to the body facilitates the interactive consumption of mediated experiences: performance, communication, collaboration and experimentation. The consumer, the self and the new being with added functionalities, constantly connected with each other and to the Net and networked machines, will be the impetus for further changes in this increasingly symbiotic relationship between the individual and the media.

‘Post-Real’ Realities

The networked, chip-imbedded, sensor-added, consciousness-broadening ‘limbs’, be that the mobile phone today or the more advanced Networked Electronic Limb (NEL) linked to our augmented brains tomorrow, does it all. Providing a reality constrained only by the imagination; where the alias of the self and virtual idols cohabit, perform and transform; constantly recording and

239 reloading the ever evolving social and personal narratives in the physical world; and where identities need not be anything more than a visualised lumps of information, exchanged and broadcast. It is an expression of the self in the physical world, and an extension of the self in the virtual one. The medium constantly connects the two. It is a new limb in physical space, and a projection of the self in the ‘galaxy’ of ‘non-places’, where ‘organic interactions’ is both unnecessary and impossible (Augé, 1995).

The mobile phone is a case in point, indicating the coming changes in the mediascape. It in many ways has already crossed boundaries between the geographical, virtual and even into the biological spheres (figure 68). It signifies the need to reconsider many previous demarcations between the private and public, the virtual and the physical. I have gone so far as to introduce the idea of a merge of the body and networked media in the discussions of consumption, social narratives and spaces – a topic in general taken more seriously by network scientists and cyberpunk novelists. Scientists such as Mann and Starner have materialised the idea of networked bodies through their own beings, indicating the possibilities of a kind of human-network symbiosis, in a new kind of ecology, in which existence of each is dependent on the other. In the not too distant future, the rise of the network will change the fundamentals of media and its content, both in terms of its production and consumption, as well as its infrastructure.

In sociology, we have quickly consumed the ‘modern’, ‘postmodern’, ‘hypermodern’ and ‘supermodern’ (Augé, 1995). Nostalgia in popular visual presentations routinely includes the future. The ideas of simulation, simulacrum and postmodernity are insufficient today to illuminate a world in which the ‘real’ is defined by interactivity, virtuality and ‘real time’.

240 As Žižek puts it: In short, today, in the digitalized universe of simulation, the Imaginary overlaps the Real, at the expense of the Symbolic (Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio). This position is at its strongest when it insists on the difference between appearance and simulacrum: … what gets lost in today’s digital ‘plague of simulations’ is not the firm, true, non-simulated real, but appearance itself. (Žižek 1999: 111)

This is to say, from a Lacanian psychoanalytical point of view, what becomes indistinguishable are not ‘reality’ and ‘the simulation’, but rather the simulation and the symbolic. For ‘simulacrum is imaginary (illusion)’ (Žižek 1999: 111) while the ‘appearance is symbolic (the fiction)’ (Žižek 1999: 120). Thus, it is possible for one to be anything – so long as one accepts the ‘fundamental impossibility’ (Žižek 1999: 114) of overcoming the medium. And it is indeed possible to achieve the ‘authentic act’ in cyberspace, for ‘fantasy is the little piece of imagination’ via which we ‘gain access to reality’ (Žižek 1999: 122).

The idea of the postmodern, if it still holds meaningful critique today, is by definition modernist. First coined in the field of architecture, the term is fatally rooted in the physical world and its functionalist aesthetics. Prefixes such as ‘post’ or ‘hyper’ suggest, first of all, ‘after’ (Soja 2000: 325), and hence a linear historical timeline. To base the idea of virtuality and hyperreality in the framework of the postmodern, that is to say inside a modernist point of view, is by nature anachronistic. In his provocative work on this subject, Manuel De Landa points out that ‘human history did not follow a straight line, as if everything pointed towards civilised societies as humanity’s ultimate goal. On the contrary, at each bifurcation alternative stable states were possible, and once actualised, they coexisted and interacted with one another’ (De Landa 1997: 16). Thus, methodologically, De Landa continues, ‘this implies a rejection of the philosophical foundations of orthodox economics as well as orthodox

241 sociology’. Donna Haraway, in her famous manifesto for cyborgs, tells us that ‘totalising theory is a major mistake’ and that what we need is a ‘powerful infidel heteroglossia’ (Kirkup 2000: 56).

Massumi (2002) presents a more moderate view of the subject of methodology as one of spheres of applicability: Einstein’s theories of relativity did not prove Newton’s laws wrong. [They] showed them to be of limited applicability: accurate, but only at a certain scale of things (where the law of entropy holds). … Cultural laws of positioning and ideology are accurate in a certain sphere (where the tendency to arrest dominates). Right or wrong is not the issue. The issue is to demarcate their sphere of applicability – when the ‘ground’ upon which they operate is continuously moving. This ‘limitation’ does not belittle the approaches in question. In fact, it brings wonder back into them. (Massumi 2002: 7)

The critique of the real and the virtual, the simulation and authenticity lays important groundwork in problematising the virtual and the hyperreal. To understand the social and political impact of ‘virtual reality’, or rather just reality, we need to go beyond the idea of ‘authenticity’ and the distinction of the real and the hyperreal. Even with enormous works by thinkers such as Castells, the complexity of the impending global changes caused by the ‘rise of the network’ (Castells 2000) is hardly understood. Whether it is the ‘network society’, the ‘age of the internet’, the ‘internet revolution’, or just the reality in which we are part of the media landscape, we first of all need to accept that the exponentially developing cybernetic network is becoming part of our everyday life and will be interwoven with all strands of our social fabric.

Virilio talks about the ‘accidents’ in the development of technology as the very nature of technology itself, and that ‘cybernetics is indeed a bomb’ which will lead to the ‘Total Accident’ of the end of humanity (Virilio & Lotringer 2002:

242 135-167). But before the eventual actualisation of this ‘Total Accident’, before we lose completely the ‘organic society’ to the expanding ‘non-places’, and before we connect our nerve system to a global network, and augment our brains (as visualised in such films as Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix and more recently Innocence (2004)) – what will happen to the so called ‘Consumer Society’ in the nearer future? (See figure 69.)

This work has focussed on the virtualisation of consumption and its media – physical space, advertising narrative, and audience transference. Where it led to is the networked medium, the mobile phone – the protocol for a networked limb; and to the ultimate virtualisation, the merge – the immersion of the consumer in the media landscape.

In the short term, it means a gradual change in consumption, qualitatively shifting from object to content to experience. However, it does not mean that the consumer will stop buying goods, it just means that s/he won’t buy without an ‘experience’ to go with them.

We are perhaps still some distance away from being able to purchase memories from a catalogue, but the increased interdependence between the social, the economical and political with the virtual symbiosis we are developing with the networked media is already evident today. ‘Consumerism’, as it had been termed, can no longer pass as an ideology, condemnable for its ‘immorality’; nor is the ‘consumer society’ a social variety, critique-able for its dysfunctions; nor, is the consumer a lifestyle, deprecate-able for her (somehow it is often feminine) decadence and neurosis: consumption of media is no longer a preference. As I have tried to point out in this work: What we consume in media is not simply a product, but an experience, often emotional, interwoven

243 in everyday life and the social narrative as a whole. Yes, the consumer is part of the product. The consumer is the medium.

The Merge, the Network and the Evolutionary Self

If ‘the medium is the message’ (McLuhan) in the era of television, then the ‘network is the message’ (Castells 2001: 1-8) in the era of ‘network society’. McLuhan had claimed four decades ago that the medium is not only the message, it is in fact ‘the extension of man’ (McLuhan 1994 [1964]). Today, the penetration of the mobile phone in our lives proves that McLuhan and Castells are right: ‘the network is the message’ and the extension of ourselves.

So what, in the end, really is the message? The extension of man is no longer only the medium to reach men: our extension (the medium) has effectively mediated ourselves. We, our bodies and part of our consciousness, are the building blocks of our very own extension. The internet, according to Barabási’s study, resembles more to an organism than a massive computer (Barabási 2003: 149). With the soon-to-be over 3 billion mobile phones and 16 billion computers of various kinds connected to the internet, the complexity of this vast network is more sophisticated than our very own brain (Barabási 2003: 158). If we are part of this ‘organism’ and the medium, then what is it saying?

The trend of virtualisation in the developed economies is not a matter of speculation – it is penetrating our everyday lives at a faster pace in each developmental cycle. The clock-speed of our computer chip is doubling every eighteen months – a good indication of the fearful ‘speed’ grimly described in Virilio’s many essays. These developmental factors will no doubt contribute to an even more digitised, networked and virtualised ‘hyperreality’. Rather than

244 excluding the hyperreal, virtual and simulation as part of our daily realities, new ways other than the modernist framework need to be developed to analyse the social and political impact of this networked society. Issues such as security and governmental control, analysed by Lawrence Lessig (2000), point out that counter to the common belief that the cyberspace is effectively ‘free’ and without conceivable means of control, it in fact is a highly regulate-able sphere, which in many cases, easier to control than physical spaces. Whether we will have a future scenario in which humans are dominated by networked machines depicted in such films as The Matrix is still uncertain, but the issues of civil liberty and public security will affect the society on infrastructural levels – in the same way they do in the physical world. Castells’ totalising work on the ‘Information Age’ (Castells 1996) laid groundwork for more specific studies on its future political, social and economic impact. There are many more important issues, including the consumption of media content analysed in this thesis, that still need to be debated. Concepts such as nonlinear history and time discussed by Manuel De Landa, and by Kwinter (Kwinter 2001) from a different point of view; the relationship between physical urban spaces and ‘hyperreality’ as discussed in by Edward Soja (2000); the relationship between man and machine, experimented by Steve Mann and Thad Starner are central to our understandings of ‘the self’ in the new era where many previous ideas of distinctions and demarcations can no longer effectively apply.

As postmodern global citizens, we are no longer just consumers – we have become part of what we consume and what mediates us. The involvement of the consumer has helped the formation and evolution of the changing media landscape – the consumer will continue to be an integral part of its future reconfiguration. The media influence on culture and consumption can no longer be viewed as simple causative process, where we are either the victims of media campaign or the collaborator of capitalist consumer society. Our changing sense

245 of self in the continually evolving economic environment, the rapid market penetration of personal network technology and shifting division of private and public lives, all will have a profound impact on the production of culture and its consumption. With these considerations, this thesis is an attempt to provide concrete examples of the continuing merges of media, the self and consumption.

Mediating the Body in the Network Society

After the first two revolutions – the revolution of transportation (railroads, airports), and the revolution of transmission (radio, television) – we are experiencing a third revolution, the revolution of transplantation: In the future, just as the geographic world was colonised by means of transportation or communication, we will have the possibility of a colonization of the human body by technology. That which favours the equipping of territories, of cities, in particular, threatens to apply to the human body, as if we had the city in the body and not the city around the body. … Here there is a sort of anthropomorphism of technology. … we are on the verge of the biomachine. (Virilio & Der Derian 1998: 20)

This thesis has taken a journey of changes: from the consumption of objects to the consumption of content; from the location-specific culture of Japan to the virtualisation of signs; from nostalgia to history delineated; from consumers to cyborgs. We are at the point at which our past and future mingle, and the self oscillates in between.

The merging of media, while most visibly aided by the constant development in

246 science and technology and their marketisation, is most fundamentally a result of popular acceptance. Their adoption in every aspect of our lives is the main cause behind the social impact of such technologies as the automobile, the television, the Internet and the mobile phone. Therefore, the focus of this work is not on the virtualising technology itself, but on why, in the area of media consumption, the network will have a fundamental impact. Even in the case of the mobile phone, its social impact is not because of its technological functions, but because of the society-wide adoption of these functions. Before the mobile phone, there is already VenusFort, the Virtual Idol and Reality TV. The mobile phone did not virtualise reality – it makes Virtual Reality real, that is, tangible, concrete and pervasive.

How will we live, when cities are no longer built with visual reference to history and local culture? What will be the source of the aura of locality, when the only coherent style is an absence of nativity? What will aura mean, when it comes from a pure simulacrum, a virtual imagination of locality?

What happens when fictional ‘personalities’ can be constructed and virtualised?

What happens to idolisation when ‘idols’ are perfected constantly by the public imagination?

What kind of impact will it have on our sense of reality, when our realities are constantly recorded, broadcast and consumed as media? How can we clearly distinguish ‘performance’ and real emotions, when even ‘raw emotions’ are scrutinised by the consuming masses? How can we continue to insist on a

247 division between media content and real life when we are constantly consuming other people’s ‘private emotions’ and ‘personal narratives’ in our living rooms? And finally, what will happen to our sense of self when we are no longer clearly separate entities from the network and the networked community? What will be the impact on our memory, sense of time and even physical existence, when so much of their formation is shaped by electronic limbs that extend our senses and consciousness? Today we have mobile phones and on-line head mounted displays connected to a central processing unit; will we have augmented reality and cybernetic bodies tomorrow?

What will we consume then?

Figure 69: The cybernetic body visualised in Innocence (Oshii 2004)

248