Here, the construction of Japanese-ness occurs only through relations with the West; the nostalgic moves of Kyoto Etrangere unsettle and re-code these binaries. The gannents with their nostalgic air, the mixing of scripts, the photographic effects blurring past and present become part of the creation of a new tradition, in a balance of Japanese and Western things.
The discourse of loss and the mourning for what Marilyn Ivy tenns the vanishing, endures. But so does a kind of ironic reappropriation of a Western gaze, the claiming of a cosmopolitan identity, and the construction of a postmodern world in which Dolce e Gabbana, Romeo Gigli, and Betty Jackson take their place alongside bamboo blinds and tatami mats.
This is premised on the reduction of both to elements of consumption, as consumer capitalism in advanced industrial societies gives us the capacity to consume both Kyoto and European clothing. Indeed, for the interpellated Japanese subject, snob is not an insult or an epithet; it is an ideal for which to strive, an index of postwar Japanese affluence.
At another level, the clothing, the atmosphere, the cosmopolitan gesture, claim for Japan certain elements of identity and mobilize fragments of desire, producing an autoexoticism and incorporation of Western elements and a Western gaze that beats the West at its own game and subverts, as it reinscribes, Orientalist tropes.
It marks a moment in historical, geopolitical relations, where autoexoticism and the appropriation of the West in a refigured, essential Japan indexes Japan’s accession to the position of powerful nation-state. It marks a moment of confidence, where the mourning for an essentially Japanese past, the contradictions of Japan’s status as an advanced capitalist nation and as a racially marked rival to the West are resolved, temporarily, through cheerful, confident consumption.
The article suggests that racial marking can in effect be counterbalanced, even effaced, through upper-middle-class purchasing power: Kyoto as snob resort. The problematic of identity as posed here is linked not only to a moment in the development of late capitalism, or to the development of the postmodern, with its implication of the equivalent decentering of all subjects and the elision of historically specific relations of power.
The slippery, multiple positionings of the Japanese in the magazine spread take up the slippery positionings of the Japanese nation-state in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when economic dominance, growing confidence, enshrinement/denigration of the West, and questions of race occur within a historical context of Japanese imperial aggression and defeat in World War II, Western penetration and the Occupation of postwar Japan.
The construction of a Japanese identity and the appropriation/domestication/enshrinement of Western objects must be seen within this sedimented political history; what is involved here is far more complex and specific than the autochthonous emergence of a postmodern, consumer, information society in late capitalism.
If Ryuko Tsilshin’s nostalgic blend of East and West constructed Japan’s firstworld identity through the figure of woman, the same month’s counterpart article in Ryuko Tsilshin for men figures Japan as male. Masculinized Japan here dominates a feminized, sexualized Southeast Asia, overlaying the gender binary onto the domestic/foreign binary.
Kyoto Etrangere adopts the subject position of woman in relationship to the West, that is, in a position of inferiority where the tropes of the Orient as feminine are recirculated. It also constructs single women as exemplary consumer-subjects, who are thereby endowed with the capacity to consume and hence rediscover their essential Japaneseness.
The men’s magazine creates Southeast Asia as the feminine, exotic Orient submissive to Japan’s masculine dominance. A history of Japanese military aggression, colonization, and ongoing forms of exploitation, such as the notorious Japanese and Western sex tours of Thailand, Korea, and the Philippines, form the subtext here.
In both the men’s and women’s issues of Ryuko Tsilshin, woman figures the essential purity of national identity that is endangered by outside intrusion. In the men’s issue, the article and accompanying photos pivot around axes of tradition/ modernity, Westernization/exoticism, and pastoral/urban difference.
Throughout, woman anchors the discourses on national identities, first standing for danger and corruption, then offering a point of entry into the culture, and finally serving as exemplar of the purity of essentialized Thai-ness soon to be despoiled by the inevitable encroachment of modernity and Westernization.
The title piece, “Oriental Oriented,” opens with a large, two-page spread. The first features a photo, presumably of a Bangkok skyline. On the left is a caption in small print: Haven’t we been seeing Southeast Asia through Westerners’ eyes?
It may be all right for them (i.e., Westerners; the masculine pronoun is used) to reflect on themselves, to take a new look at Asia and see it a kind of spiritual authority and all that. But it’s a mistake forJapan to take that approach and swallow it whole. We took a data-gathering trip to Bali and Thailand, not just out of Orientalism, but as part of inhabitants of the same era in Asia. (29)
Here, the men’s magazine differentiates itself from the Orientalism of the West and posits a time-space of Asian identity that Japan shares with Thailand. The putative goal is to avoid Western-style Orientalism, but the passage articulates the contradictions of Japanese identity:
an ambivalent oscillation between equality and superiority, between Asian solidarity with Thailand and Bali and a desire for equality with the West as a First-World power that colonizes other Asian nations. Despite the writer’s intentions, unequal geopolitical positionings cannot be erased.
Their arrival at the airport prompts a guilty avowal of the awkwardness of Japan’s relation to Southeast Asia. The author notes Japanese commentary on Southeast Asian poverty and Japanese wealth, intimating that the latter is achieved at the expense of the former.
While admitting the persuasiveness of this view, he marks the irony of thereby reinscribing Japanese superiority and fixing Southeast Asia in a position of inferiority. Instead, he wants to look at Thailand in afuratto (flat) perspective, as presumed equals.
Accordingly, he and his all-male crew dine with fashion designers, the owner of Bangkok’s only fashion school, and a translator, at a nouvelle Thai restaurant full of “snob” Thai and Westerners. Japan’s position within a g endered political economy emerges clearly the following day.
The men happen upon a Japanese student, who utters a cautionary tale for the unwary Japanese man. Lured by a sexy Thai girl into a strip club, he is presented with an exorbitant bill and threatened with violence unless he pays. His quick tongue saves him, but the author reports the student’s experience, both for his readers and because his female guide (who becomes a confidante and an object of desire) asks him to do so.
Women here represent the exotic but dangerous lure of Thailand. Unremarked, however, are the relations of extraction that allow Japanese men to travel to Thailand precisely as consumers in the sex industry. Predictably, the author alternates between professions of surprise at Thai modernity and guilt-laden realizations that his very surprise reveals his own assumptions of Japanese superiority.
From the seductions of the red-light district and a visit to Chinatown, the crew ends the evening in a disco called NASA. The space theme and the MTV videos prompt authorial musing, as he notes that trends come as quickly to Thailand as they do to Japan.
He then reflects that since Bangkok is a huge metropolis, new information would be disseminated in “real time.” In a move redolent with liberal guilt, he avows in spirited fashion that this world of discos and MTV is indeed part of contemporary Thailand and that those who insist on seeking “exotic Thailand” are misguided. “Thailand’s future should be decided by Thais,” he avers (34).
The refrains of East/West, tradition/modernity, pulse through the next sections. The men make trips to a weekend market where international goods are available, a Thai restaurant that offers a pan-Asian menu, and the house of a famous expatriate Westerner in Bangkok, where the interior embodies an East/West synthesis.
A visit to the floating market calls up associations with the soft-porn flick Emanuelle-an association heightened by a condom that comes floating down the river. The author’s comment reveals his own assumptions about Thai exoticism: “After all, people here are living their lives.
That’s right, it’s natural that such a thing would come floating along” (37). In a related remark, the author notices TV antennas amidst the exotic scenery, and comments, ”The residents around here are living in the same 1989″ (37).
These attempts to de-exoticize the landscape succeed in reinscribing the author’s implicit condescension. Later tradition and modernity shift into the registers of the pastoral and the urban. Bangkok stands for a blend of the exotic and the cosmopolitan, but visa-vis the Thai provinces, it embodies the corruption of the big city.
Taking leave of Bangkok, the crew flies to Chiang Mai and to the village on the border of Burma where their guide was born. Text and photos amplify impressions of pastoral exoticism: people swimming and playing in the river against a backdrop of traditional architecture, monks sitting and drinking Fanta, wooden puppets, and outdoor merchants selling animal skins.
Their return to the Bangkok airport ends the piece, as the author describes an interaction with a waitress. She responds to their stares with embarrassment and shy self-consciousness, prompting an authorial diatribe against Japanese women who have forgotten their femininity.
Nostalgically, he invokes a prelapsarian past through the figure of the waitress, who stands for the purity of Thai identity before the encroachment of Westernization. “But with such rapid Westernization and urbanization, perhaps everything, like the waitress’s self-consciousness, will disappear.
Thinking of the prospect, [I feel] a little melancholy, but that can’t be helped. Because the fate of Thailand belongs to the Thais. Still, I just want them to be able to avoid the strains that Japan experienced, if only in small measure. (41)”
Here, the author voices capitalist and imperialist nostalgia for the purity of a past before capitalist (Japanese and Western) intrusion.
As Renato Rosaldo (1989) and other analysts have noted, nostalgia enshrines a golden age before a destruction wrought precisely by the one who mourns the destruction-in this case, by Japanese capital. Exposure to Japanization, Westernization, urbanization, and other worldly forces will despoil this Thai flower’s shy purity and tum her into a tough, threatening hussy-like the prostitutes who lured the hapless Japanese student or like contemporary Japanese women.
By mourning the fate of Thailand through his projection of the waitress’s fate, the journalist also mourns what he clearly perceives to be the ravages of modernization and the loss of identity undergone in Japan.
The gendered nature of this mourning is striking. As in the Kyoto Etrangere piece, essentialized national identity is figured through woman. Japan’s relationship to Thailand is cast in gendered terms as one of male dominance, in which Japanese men penetrate through the gaze directed at the waitress and through friendship and intimacy with their female guide.
The protective regret the author feels vis-a-vis the waitress and the increasing romanticism/eroticism of his relationship with the guide are informed by the neocolonial relationship of foreign men to Thailand through the sex industry.
Ultimately, for the author getting to know Thailand is like becoming intimate with a woman; indeed, the two processes are virtually coextensive. Here, then, Japan adopts the position of endangered seducee, prostitute’s john, masculine gazer, protective older brother, and prospective lover to feminized, exoticized Thailand.
Similar ambivalences clearly emerge through the photography and design that, like the text, oscillate between figuring Thailand as an equal and assuming Japanese economic, cultural, and political superiority.
Shots thematize the exotic/Western, traditional/modem, rural/urban binaries: photos of teeming urban streets and the train station portrayed in harsh, grainy daylight are followed by exotic shots of the floating market, dolls and puppets; temples on one page alternate with a photo of the very chic receptionist at the design school;
women selling slabs of meat and packages of produce appear in dark photos illumined only by the golden halo of exoticism, while the opposing page features another crowded street scene complete with prominently displayed Sony advertisements.
A red border used for design continuity throughout the piece encodes exoticism through graphic design. The bright, deep red, when paired with the caption “Orient Oriented,” conjures associations with Chinese red and tropes of decadence and foreignness.
Pictorially and visually, Thailand is constructed as exotic Other, reinforcing the exoticizing authorial voice. The second section shifts focus from place to people. In a bright-red panel that heads this section, graphic black characters inscribe the rationale for the piece:
“In order to come in contact with the new Bangkok facing its future as a mass consumer society, we decided to meet the talented people who would highlight the ‘now'” (42).
Pictured on subsequent pages are the three subjects of the interviews: a clothing designer; his brother, an interior designer; and the owner of the only Thai design school. The presumed fledgling stage of Thai development in these fields emerges as the theme of this article, despite the professed intentions of the authors to the contrary.
For example, significant Japanese influence is always noted: the designer read Japanese comic books in childhood, while the head of the school won a Japanese design competition and spent several months in Tokyo during his youth.
The interviewees contrast Japan with Thailand. On the one hand, they say, the upper echelons are as hip and as well-informed as anyone in Tokyo; on the other, the relatively high degree of class stratification means that the average level of Thai style needs what they call a “level up.”
Nostalgic regret for the loss of traditional Thai identity is inextricable from the need to jettison traditional (toradishonaru) Thailand-at least for the moment-in order to create socalled “New Thailand.”
However, perhaps the most striking assertion of Thai underdevelopment occurs through photography. Each of the three interviewees are shot in a striking interior: a stylish black chair against white background, an ultramodern desk against rounded bookshelves, the graphic black and white of the design school.
Yet in each case, the lighting is simultaneously harsh and dim, as though the electricity had been inadequate; as a consequence, each photo has a retro feel that contrasts sharply to the beautiful haziness of Kyoto etrangere. It is as though these men do not in fact inhabit the same “real time.”