Though some of these qualities can be granted to Yamamoto, in the end, there is no question of who is on top. The Orient Within: Kyoto Etrangere In the face of a West that continues to Orientalize, what of Japanese identity formation from a Japanese position?
Perhaps nowhere are these contradictions more complexly articulated than in the world of Japanese fashion magazines. Here, profound ambivalence, simultaneous and alternating gestures of paritylinferiority/superiority to the West occur in tandem with ambivalent dominance toward the rest of the world.
Striking to a Western reader of Japanese fashion magazines is an unproblematized enshrining of things Western, particularly in those journals catering to youthful, hip, urban audiences. The enshrinement takes many forms.
Western models abound on these pages, particularly in high-fashion journals such as Ryilko Tsilshin (Fashion News), Hai Fasshon (High Fashion), and Japanese versions of international magazines, like W, Marie-Claire, or Elle. Indeed, sometimes there is scarcely a Japanese face to be seen. The prestige of Western luxury designer goods-Hermes, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Celine-continues unabated.
Magazines for young men and young women are often detailed guides to consumption, describing trends in various Western countries in lapidarian detail: the street-by-street, gallery-by-gallery tour through Soho or Venice Beach in Popeye and Brutus, the shop-by-shop tour of Honolulu or Paris in Hanako, the consumer guide for “office ladies.”
Things Western still embody the fashionable. Yet, in a world of the 1980s and early 1990s in which Japan was an undisputed world capitalist presence with a strong currency and considerable buying power, this presentation of Western goods had another side.
Fashion magazines enshrine Western consumer items and Western ideals of beauty, but they also present the world to Japanese consumers as commodities available for consumption. The world displayed in the glossy pages invites appropriation and participation through engaging consumer desire.
The enshrinement of things Western coexists with a drive toward appropriation, where the world is at the disposal of the now powerful, much sought after Japanese consumer-a consumer both desired and feared in the West. These senses of simultaneous distance and participation in world currents of style, of inferiority and of dominance, circulate in the metadiscourses of fashion.
The contradictory twists animating Japanese identity formation in its relation to Europe and America were strikingly visible in the July 1990 issue of Ryilko Tsashin, a large-format, high fashion magazine for women.
The nostalgic construction of the “neo-japonesque” and “exotic Japan” Marilyn Ivy describes emerges strongly here, as the issue skillfully, compellingly, and seductively interpellates the reader as consumer-subject, mobilizing alluring appeals for the recovery of a lost Japanese-ness that can be attained through travel, garments, restaurants, objects: that is, through consumption.
Ryilko Tsashin first invokes this essentially Japanese identity via the surprise of the cover. Though most of its cover models are Western, this time we see the face of a young Japanese woman staring at us from a sepia-toned photograph. She wears garments reminiscent of prewar schoolgirl uniforms, recalling a past era of innocence; her unrelenting gaze directly engages us.
Opening the pages, we begin our encounter with Japan through Kyoto. A sumi painting of mountains covered with forest is illuminated as a red globe-rising sun? harvest moon?-rises in the distance. Above the picture floats the English title, “Kyoto, snob resort,” followed by the caption: “With a ‘snob’, ‘etrange’ feeling, you can go out into Kyoto, a town enveloped with an Oriental atmosphere.”
Through its mix of scripts and languages, the phrase exoticizes Kyoto as repository of essential Japanese-ness and locates the reader as an upper middle-class cosmopolite-or someone with those pretensions. Kyoto is rendered in the Western alphabet; “snob,” “etrange,” and “Oriental” in the syllabary reserved for foreign words (katakana), while the rest of the sentence utilizes the standard mixture of Sino-Japanese characters (kanji) and the Japanese syllabary (hiragana).
The piece imagines a trip to Kyoto for a cosmopolitan Japanese who adopts the shifting gaze of a sometimes French, sometimes British, or American foreigner. The journey to Kyoto becomes more than mere tourism; it is a Proustian quest to recapture lost time and a lost identity, a time/space of essentialized Japanese-ness.
The constitutive paradox of the piece lies in a double move that Ying Hu, in another context, has called the vis-a-vis: on the one hand, exposure to the foreign has thrown into question that identity; on the other, Japan is itself (re)constituted through appropriating the West.
The figure of woman as privileged metonym for nation compels commentary. The inextricability of gender and nation has elicited commentary from numerous quarters. Ivy (1995) describes two Japanese advertising campaigns promoting domestic tourism in which young women are prominently featured. In these campaigns, ad executives cast women as consummate consumer-subjects, seducible by consumer desire and available to seduce men into the pleasures of consumption.
Given the tropings of women as emblematic of the inauthentic- “frivolous, easily manipulated, narcissistic, seductive” (43)-lvy argues that the campaign’s narrative trajectory became one of authenticating this inauthenticity through domestic travel.
Indeed, it is precisely the domestic that must be highlighted in Kyoto etrangere. Through their participation in transnational circuits of commodities and capital, women as consummate consumer-subjects fracture totalized cultural identities through the fissures of the foreign into the national body.
Consequently, it is they who must also figure the reconstitution of domestic identity; they who must stitch together its fragments. Kyoto as metonym for essentialized tradition is itself associated with femininity, as in the feminine, graceful lilt of the Kyoto dialect, or the Kyoto beauty as an iconic figure of woman.
What, then, could more aptly narrativize the quest for renewed authenticity than a young woman’s journey to Kyoto? Indeed, Kyoto becomes a metonym for authentic tradition and renewal for the postmodern Japanese.
The section begins with a nostalgic, hazy pictorial spread, where unfolding before us is the journey of a solitary young Japanese woman to sites of tradition in Kyoto: tea houses, famous mountains, famous traditional restaurants. The first shot in a blue photographic wash shows the model looking dreamily off into space, seated in front of a thatched roof tea house.
Captioned Kyoto etoranjeru, Kyoto etrangere, the piece is subtitled, “Fascinated by ekizochikku (exotic) town, Kyoto.” The introductory text addresses the cosmopolitan reader: While (we) are Japanese with black hair and black eyes, we’ve become too accustomed to collections of foreign brand names, to the latest Italian restaurant, to modem interiors, and we’ve come to experience objects in the Japanese style as exotic.
If you are such a person, won’t you come and visit Kyoto? To remember what you’ve forgotten. To encounter things you never knew. And to find a balance between beautiful Japanese things and beautiful Western things” (18).
The voice positions the reader as a cosmopolitan Japanese who has adopted a Western gaze and for whom Japanese-ness becomes exoticized and located in particular places and in particular objects emblematic of Japanese tradition.
The icons of authentic difference are those that might attract a Westerner, and captions to subsequent photographs in the spread define for the Westernized Japanese reader terms like bamboo blinds, incense, tatami mats, even “black hair” (a poetic usage of the term in classical verse) or fix on some metonym of tradition, such as Arashiyama, the famous mountain near Kyoto.
This shifting between and blending of Eastern and Western in a nostalgic version of the present suffuses the piece. A sense of authentic Japanese-ness as the undifferentiated past is imparted by a nostalgic aura concretely encoded in clothing, editorial voice, and photographic techniques. As she appears in identifiably Japanese scenes of the traditional-a thatch-roofed tea house, on a mountain path, holding a lantern, near a shrine-the model wears clothing difficult to place in space or time.
Whatever their thoroughly cosmopolitan origins, the garments allude to the past: the poetic styles of Italian designers Dolce e Gabbana and Romeo Gigli are reminiscent of ballet tutus or Pierrot costume; in the context of Kyoto, they also conjure associations to ju-ni hitoe, the multilayered kimono of the Heian court.
This past is blurry, generalized: the neo-retro styles of Kensho Abe look vaguely 40s, Kazuko Yoneda’s demure dress recycles turn-of-the-century motifs, Alpha Cubic’s good-girl sweater could be any sweater from anytime after the war, London designer Betty Jackson’s print dress is pure 50s retro. All keep us in some undifferentiated space of nostalgia.
The photography heightens these effects. A cyan or bluish wash irregularly alternates with sepia tints reminiscent of old photographs, where the effects of distance in place and time are achieved through hazy softness and faded color.
The location of the editorial voice is equally blurry. As it defines for a “postmodern” Japanese the icons of “authentic Japanese” identity-brocade, lanterns, black hair-it speaks distantly, anonymously, authoritatively, a voice from nowhere, from no particular time.
The floating, omniscient voice invoked within the frame of the picture dominates a second voice, the hard copy that gives us the mundane details we consumers need to know: who designed the garment, where to get it, how much it costs.
The practical information on consumption in the present is located outside the frame, leaving undisturbed the hazy nostalgia of the clothing, the authoritative voice, the atmosphere of the photograph. Japaneseness as nostalgic essence is encoded through these material practices, producing a blurry, elegiac past-a past you, too can find, if you journey to Kyoto.
The journey continues in a more discursive mode in following sections, giving us multiple perspectives on Kyoto from a variety of observers. Its narrative line takes us on a journey from outside to inside. Beginning with a section called “Kyoto from Outside” (the title is in English), we see Kyoto through the perspectives of Pierre Loti, author of Madame Chrysantheme (the prototype for Madame Butterfly), Paul Claudel, and Roland Barthes, followed by David Hockney’s witty photocollage of Ryoanji temple, musician David Sylvian’s fragmented photographs, and finally, the films of Kenji Mizoguchi (a Tokyoite by birth), that depict the Gion district and the lives of geisha.
A second section takes us closer to Kyoto, offering us the thoughts of two Japanese born elsewhere who are now Kyoto residents. One, an artist/designer of jewelry, is an icon of cosmopolitanism; he works with Tiffany and regularly travels an international circuit. The other embodies the invention of tradition. He is a television actor who also owns a coffeehouse and occasionally offers ricksha rides, literally enacting tradition for tourists in this picturesque neighborhood.
These men offer us two ways of combining our presumed cosmopolitanism with Kyoto traditionalism: traveling the world while living in Kyoto or “acting” traditional. The following section, “Inside Looking,” offers us the perspectives of a Kyoto resident who amusingly debunks and explains stereotypes of Kyoto, especially the politesse and reserve (some would say coldness) of its people.
Photographs highlight unusual views of Kyoto–views of the street from the inside of a temple, a small gargoyle one might miss if one walked by too quickly. Featured in the margins are further interviews with Kyoto natives that a tourist might encounter in her travels: shop proprietors, hotel managers. Their presence signifies “authentic Kyoto” not only through what they say, but in the lilt of the Kyoto dialect.
The problematic of identity articulated in Kyoto Etrangere-how to achieve the balance between Japanese and Western things-is resolved in the final section of the spread, “Shopping Around Kyoto.” The quest for the essence of Japanese-ness finds its culmination in Kyoto boutiques and restaurants, which offer us the animated, lovable objects that embody Japanese identity, both traditional and cosmopolitan. We have only to consume them zestfully in order to become truly Japanese.
This involves the literal incorporation of place and of identity through the body: wearing the lovable garment, ingesting the nouvelle japonaise cuisine, touching the traditional object. “Shopping Around Kyoto” (again, in English) offers us a tour where we can shop and eat our way through Kyoto.
Postmodern cosmopolitanism and authentic Japanese-ness are offered to the reader/consumer as equally important aspects of Japanese identity, for most of the featured shops combine Japanese and Western elements in a new synthesis that simultaneously maintains and destabilizes the East/West binary.
The haziness of time and place in the first photographic spread, the anonymous, authoritative voice from nowhere, have disappeared. We are now fully in the present, with vibrantly colored photographs, a lively editorial voice, and seductive shots of beautifully presented objects.
A description of a store where one can purchase traditional fans (a complement, we are told, to even the most modem interior decor) is juxtaposed to a jazz bar, “My One and Only Love,” that combines a high-tech environment with offerings that include sixty varieties of bourbon and unusual traditional seasonal tsukemono, Japanese pickles.
The final page of the spread is especially eloquent, showing us an an elegant café which serves tea and Westernized versions of a famous Kyoto confection, yatsuhashi, and, in our final take-home message, a shop selling antique porcelain.
“Don’t think about displaying them like precious objects,” we are told. “[We] want you to use them every day on your dinner table, maybe for your special home-cooking.” (47) Even if you don’t, the magazines continues, the objects are so “lovable” that they make you want to make them part of your everyday life.
The dreaminess of Kyoto etrangere has evaporated into a crisp, lively, totally present world where objects offer themselves up to the reader just as the woman’s figure was offered up to our gaze in the fashion spread.
Objects become lovable, animated, eager to be part of our lives, in a vivid demonstration of commodity fetishism; indeed, the personification of objects heightens in the use of a suffix usually used for groups ofpeople, not groups of objects (monotachi).
The editorial voice in the piece directly addresses us; it is chatty now, rather than formal and authoritative. Hard copy and distant authority are recombined and transposed into an informal register, giving us both the buying information we need and evoking the vibrant atmosphere we will enter when we visit the shop.
This time, we are located in the present and the future, not in a hazy past. The voice constructs our subject-position and provokes our desire through its lively depiction of the ways we can purchase our Japanese identities.
Perhaps, it suggests, we will splurge for a whole set of porcelain, or perhaps we’ll indulge in a different style of buying, adding one piece at a time. Our individuality is thoroughly constituted through consumption; we are distinguishable by the way we buy.
“Shopping Around Kyoto” shows us that authentically Japanese identity can combine the cosmopolitan and the traditional; Japaneseness can be part of our lives through the lovable objects that beckon from the photographs, awaiting only our consuming touch.
Thus, “Kyoto Snob Resort” eloquently catches up the contradictions of nostalgic identity fonnation in a regime of commodity aesthetics and commodity fetishism. It creates a postmodern, transnational space inhabited by the denizens of economically powerful Japan.