The positioning of Japan on the present fashion scene arises directly from these geopolitical histories. Miyake Design Studio representative Jun Kanai foregrounded the salient issues when she linked the interest in Japanese culture and design to Japan’s economic success: Just as Japan emerged as an economic power, there is cultural or aesthetic power that developed.
That will be (architect Arata) Isozaki, (furniture designer) Kuramata Shiro, Issey in fashion or Comme des Gançons’s Rei Kawakubo, or Hanae Mori a little bit earlier, or the music of Kitaro. So there’s a whole group of artists that emerged at the same time…that had to do with the wealth of the nation and also the power, that sort of energy (1989).
Kanai resisted easy Orientalizing by describing Miyake’s generation as one for whom Rin Tin Tin and Coca Cola were as Japanese as, say, Kabuki. Her insights lead us into Japan’s sedimented relations with the West. The incorporation of American popular culture and Western clothing as part of a contemporary Japanese identity does not arise in a vacuum via spontaneous generation, simple diffusion, or the arrival of a postmodern information/consumer society in a free play of genres and cross-references in a ludic site beyond power.
Rather, it is directly linked to historically specific geopolitical relations and the forces of advanced capitalism: Western cultural, economic, and military dominance, on the one hand, and the increasing power of Japanese capital and the Japanese nation-state on the other.
The appropriation of Western popular culture is inseparable from the “opening” of Japan in the Meiji period and the outcome of World War II, centrally including the American Occupation of Japan, and the postwar emergence of Japan as a capitalist superpower.
These complex positionings are visible in the establishment of the Tokyo collections themselves. In an attempt to make room for themselves in world arenas, a consortium of well-known Japanese designers, including Miyake, Kawakubo, Yamamoto, Matsuda, Yamamoto Kansai, and Mori, initiated the first such collections in 1985. Their goal was “to wedge the country’s talent into the traditional fashion route: Milan, Paris, New York” (Cocks, May 19, 1986,92).
Four international designers were invited to Tokyo for a “Tokyo summit,” creating a meeting of “world powers” on the fashion scene. And the analogy is not taken in vain. The attempt is to establish Japan as a peer to the the West in geopolitical as well as cultural terms, to say that Japan as a nation-state is equal to the U.S. or to any European nation.
“‘I hope,’ Miyake remarked toward the end of the Tokyo shows, ‘that my contemporaries and I will be the last to have to go to Paris'” (Cocks, May 19, 1986, 94). Miyake’s statement is both poignant and imbued with Japan’s capitalist, first-world, imperialist histories.
The Tokyo collections and the fashion “summit” restage Japan’s status as a racially marked late-developer whose development must be measured largely according to Western standards, yet they also perform Japan as aspiring cultural peer and imperialist rival of Western nation-states.
“Japan,” like any identity, takes shape relationally, amidst historically specific, power-laden discourses, and the Orientalisms that racially mark Japan and Asia can be deployed, twisted, and redeployed in multiple and contradictory ways.
Fabrications of Japan vis-a-vis its Others are strikingly instantiated in three different sites: the first, Wim Wenders’s film on Yohji Yamamoto that images the Orientalizing gaze of the West in masculine, high-modernist terms; the second and third, the women’s and men’s editions of a Japanese high-fashion magazine that articulate complex forms of Japanese autoexoticism, counter-Orientalisms, and the Orientalizing of Southeast Asia. In these disparate sites, we see multiple, sometimes contradictory articulations of Japanese identity.
Wim Wenders’s film, A Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is a documentary based on the work of designer Yohji Yamamoto. Ostensibly a disquisition on postmodem identities, fashion, and creativity, it also transposes and recirculates familiar Orientalist tropes.
The film begins with the screen full of static snow. Credits roll, and the author/narrator’s voice intones a meditation on identity:
YOU’RE LIVING HOWEVER YOU CAN.
YOU ARE WHOEVER YOU ARE
“IDENTITY” …
of a person,
of a thing,
of a place.
“Identity.”
The word itself gives me shivers.
It rings of calm, comfort, contentedness.
What is it, identity?
How do you recognize identity?
We are creating an image of ourselves,
We are attempting to resemble this image …
Is that what we call identity?
The accord between the image we have created of ourselves and … ourselves?
Just who is that, “ourselves”?
We live in the cities.
The cities live in us…. time passes.
We move from one city to another,
from one country to another.
We change languages,
we change habits,
we change opinions,
we change clothes,
we change everything.
Everything changes. And fast.
Images above all …
The film cuts to a shot of a Tokyo freeway from the interior of a car. We see the freeway, but we also see a hand on the left holding a video screen/viewfinder where a video of the freeway plays. Wenders, clearly alluding to Benjamin (1969) and Baudrillard (1983), speaks of the differences between mechanical reproduction in photography and digital imaging in video.
In photography, “the original was a negative, but with an electronic image, there is no more negative, no more positive, everything is copy.” In such a world, “what is in vogue, but fashion itself?” We cut to a shot of Yamamoto in Paris, shot from above ground, apparently at or near his boutique in Les Halles, close to the Centre Pompidou.
At this early, point, he articulates the dilemmas surrounding Japanese identity, for in Japan he defined himself as a Tokyo person, not a Japanese. Later, he comments on how this self-conception was forced to change upon his arrival in Paris.
Yamamoto did not intend that his clothes appeal to people based on nationality, nor did he expect to be constantly subjected to racial categorizing. But “when I came to Paris, I … was pushed to realize I am a Japanese. I was told, “You are representing mode japonaise,” and, despite his protests, that label continued to be pinned to his work. It was, he says, a major realization.
Echoing Issey Miyake’s complex claims for universality, Yamamoto finds that racial essentializing is always already part of the story when Japanese travel to the West. Similarly, Yamamoto articulates the complexities of Japan’s geopolitical positioning given the legacies of World War II, when he invokes the death of his father, who was drafted and died in China.
His father’s buddies were in Siberian camps. Yamamoto relates his reaction to their letters: I realize that the war is still raging inside me; there is no ‘postwar’ for me. What they wanted to achieve I am doing for them. It’s a role I f el compelled to play…. When I think of my life, the first thing that comes to mind is that I’m not fighting alone; that it’s the continuation of something else.
Here Yamamoto gestures toward Japan’s imperialist project in World War II and uncritically invokes his own implication in that project. He further suggests that vis-a.-vis the West, the goal is precisely to achieve equality or parity, extending the war into the realms of business and aesthetics, winning on Western ground as the racially marked rival.
Wenders, on the other hand, manages throughout to maintain the position of Master Subject through thematizing authorship and high-modernist assumptions of individual, masculine creative genius. He talks to Yamamoto about the dangers of becoming imprisoned in one’s style, condemned forever to imitate oneself.
Yamamoto replies that “the moment [he] learned to accept his own style… suddenly the prison… opened up to a great freedom….” Wenders proclaims, “That for me is an author. Someone who has something to say in the first place, who then knows how to express himself with his own voice, and who can finally find the strength in himself and the insolence necessary to become the guardian of his prison, and not to stay its prisoner.”
The reinscription of modernist tropes of man as creator deity, the source of originary genius and the owner of a unique vision and voice, with an arrogant belief in himself, strongly emerges here. Tellingly, this sequence is followed by a reference to Yamamoto’s love for a photograph of JeanPaul Sartre by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Here all the men-Yamamoto, Sartre, Cartier-Bresson, and especially, Wenders-are linked in a patriline of genius. However, within this patriline, not everyone is equally masculine. Gendered hierarchies first emerge with Wenders’s discussion of the differences between film and video. Cinema is associated with the masculine auteur.
Wenders intones that filmmaking is a high modernist Art form created in the nineteenth century, suited to the expression of the “grand themes” of “love and hate, war and peace.” Film and video differ in that the classic 35-mm. camera requires constant reloading, while the video camera operates on real time, making it better suited to passively recording images and thus to recording the (women’s) domain of fashion.
In cinema, the director is auteur, and Wenders finds Yamamoto to be an auteur in another medium. Just as Wenders himself works in the two languages of cinema and video, Yamamoto must work in two languages, balancing the ephemerality of fashion with his affinity for the past. Here Wenders stresses similarities between his work and Yamamoto’s.
However, a subtle hierarchy begins to emerge. Again highlighting similarities between Yamamoto and himself, he includes a segment demonstrating the ways both filmmaker and designer work with form and image.
Yamamoto describes the creative process, which for him begins with the fabric, the touch, and then to considerations of form. Yamamoto does not conceive the process to be one of making something, but of waiting for something to come. Wenders then cuts to a shot of his camera, and makes his Orientalizing gesture through feminizing both the camera and Yamamoto.
“You have to wind her by hand,” says he of the camera, and “she knows about waiting, too.” The video camera is similarly feminized; in the car, “she was just there.” Juxtaposing Yamamoto’s waiting with the female camera waiting for Wender’s touch to wind her, makes an equivalence between the feminized Yamamoto and the feminized camera, recirculating Orientalist tropes of Asia and Asian men as passive, feminized.
In both cases, Wenders maintains his position as Master Subject; Yamamoto is almost, but not quite, an equal. Further inscriptions of the director as masculine auteur emerge at the conclusion, when Wenders shows us the aftermath of the Paris collections.
Yamamoto’s staff sits, raptly watching a video of the day’s runway show. Wenders extols their virtues, speaking of Yamamoto’s “tender and delicate language. His company … reminded me of a monastery. They were his translators … whose care and fervor assured that the integrity of Yohji’s work remained intact.”
Wenders labels the staff “the guardian angels of an author.” He makes explicit the parallels between Yamamoto’s work as a designer and his own work as a director, likening the design staff to “a kind of film crew, that Yohji was a director of a never-ending film never shown on screen.”
Wenders extends the parallels, comparing the consumer’s confrontation with the mirror image with a “private screen …so that you can better recognize and readily accept your body…your appearance, your history, in short yourself-that is the story of the continuing screenplay of the friendly film by Yohji Yamamoto.”
Yamamoto’s staff act as guardian angels, in the same way that Wenders’s crew plays the angel to his own version of masculine creator deity. Here Orientalism laces Wenders’s characterizations. Though Yamamoto is a fellow creator, a fellow author, he is clearly not equally masculine.
Wenders labels Yamamoto’s artistic language “tender and delicate,” recirculating typical Orientalist tropes of the East as feminine, aestheticized, fragile. Yamamoto’s “tenderness” is exhibited in the film through his particular understanding of women; presumably this is because Yamamoto himself possesses feminine qualities. Indeed, Yamamoto says that were he not a designer, he would be a kept man (himo) who stays home and takes care of the woman-a position that feminizes Yamamoto while preserving his heterosexual status.
Further, Wenders’s reference to a monastery alludes to characterizations of Yamamoto and Kawakubo’s work as “monkish,” both in Japan and abroad, and simultaneously recirculates stereotypes of Japanese asceticism, spirituality, and asexuality.
However, the film’s most striking Orientalist feature is a recurring visual motif. Wenders frequently depicts Yamamoto through the small viewfinderrrV screen of the video camera; this screen is usually tilted, at an angle, and off to one side. Always, a hand-Wenders’s hand, presumably-holds the camera aloft.
Here, Yamamoto is miniaturized, marginalized, and manipulated by the Auteur. This relation of Orientalist dominance recurs in many ways. At one juncture, we hear Yamamoto talking about and apparently leafing through a book of photographs, entitled Men of the 20th Century, a book Wenders also owns and loves. (Again, modernity is troped as masculine.)
In the large screen, we see hands leafing through the pages of a book; we presume these are Yamamoto’s hands. At the top-right corner of the screen is the small video screen, with another scene of hands leafing through pages. Suddenly, we realize that the hands in the small screen are gesturing according to Yamamoto’s speech rhythms, and the pages are turned the Japanese way, from right to left.
Apparently, the small screen is Yamamoto, while the large screen shows us the hands of the creator/auteur Wenders, who is simulating Yamamoto’s pageturning. He has appropriated Yamamoto’s gestures, reducing Yamamoto’s image to the small screen of the less privileged medium of video.
Other moments are rife with Orientalist motifs. As Yamamoto describes his company as an inverted pyramid where he stands not at the apex but rather at its base, a hand holds the video screen of Yamamoto against a picture book opened to a woodblock print of Mount Fuji.
“Yamamoto,” Wenders informs us, “means at the foot of the mountain.” At other moments, we see the hand hold the miniaturized Yamamoto against backdrops of woodblocks depicting feudal battles, as Yamamoto discusses men’s clothing.
The miniaturized Yamamoto again appears over photos of prewar Japanese women, photos of men in samurai costume, and once, as the left hand of the auteur holds a toy fighter plane, manipulating it to simulate flight. Presumably these are meant to signify the martial, perhaps the kamikaze. In all cases, Yamamoto embodies Orientalist stereotypes, both new and old: the miniaturized, high-tech Oriental shown against the background of older Orientalist figures.
And ultimately, it is Wenders’s hand of God that orchestrates the action. Other segments heighten the Orientalist tone. One sequence shows Yamamoto signing his name-his signature is the trademark for his brand name-on a plaque outside the door of his new boutique.
Attempting to get it right, he appears to redo his signature to the point of absurdity. What are we to make of this sequence? Are we to assume, as Western viewers, that the Japanese are inept at signature, the sign of individuality? The segment is tellingly placed between the highly serious, political sequence showing Yamamoto’s serious avowal that for him, there is no end of the war, and the depiction of Yamamoto in miniature against the Mt. Fuji background.
The Orientalist hegemony of Wenders’s gaze reasserts itself by rendering absurd Yamamoto’s serious statements about geopolitics that claim a parity with the West. After trivializing Yamamoto’s attempt to appropriate Western individuality through the signature, Wenders can then depict Yamamoto in stereotyped miniaturized form against the most hackneyed Orientalist image: Mt. Fuji. Thus Wenders maintains his dominance and the dominance of the Western viewer.
A Notebook on Cities and Clothes is a purported homage to Yamamoto’s work, and on one level, it is indeed highly valorized. However, Bhabha’s mimicry applies here. The homage recirculates universalist notions of “creative genius” based on male bonding among auteurs, but race intrudes as the difference that fractures and destabilizes the universalist gesture in that homage.
Never quite as masculine, never allowed full accession to genius, Yamamoto is contained by Wenders’s deployment of neocolonial, avant-garde Orientalisms. This enshrining of Yamamoto’s work occurs within an Orientalist context that provides a platform and a screen for the reassertion of Wenders’s own highmodernist, masculine, Master Subject status and his notions of authorial genius and creativity.