Moreover, the photos highlight small elements of what could be read as underdeveloped building construction: a light switch, for example, or exposed pipes that have been painted white. Wittingly or not, such practices reinscribe an implicit condescension toward Thailand’s “developing” status in the world of design.
These Thai men are cast as fellow Asians, brothers to the Japanese author. Yet they remain little brothers, in a position to learn from Japan’s example. Japan stands as masculine penetrator of Thailand as woman, and as benevolent elder sibling to Thai men.
If Thailand is exoticized and rendered inferior in gendered terms, a second spread entitled “Bali, Hi” constructs Bali as another kind of Orient-this time, a tropical paradise and site of spiritual renewal, mysticism, and unspoiled nature.
Bali becomes a playground available to the purchasing power of Japanese and Western tourists alike; as an unpopulated natural paradise, it becomes a stage setting for idealized masculine leisure consumption: male pleasure as resort activity.
The men’s fashion spread opens with a shot of Club Med Bali at night. Lights glow from within the rooms, while greenish lights illuminate pool and foliage, palm trees fringing the indigo sky. Green is the operative color, signifying nature, paradise, the tropics, in contrast to the exotic, Oriental red used for Thailand.
Lettered in green we find the opening caption: Seeking a rest for spirit and body, we fly to the south. A paradise far from our urban lives spreads out before us. We want to move toward a vacation where we can spend our time as we please. Not the typical Japanese vacation, pressed by time and driven by a tour schedule.
Let us introduce you to this summer’s resort fashions that match up with Club Med Bali’s exotic charms, offering us the pleasures of dressing with style (46).
The photographic spread features a young white couple in their twenties; he has thick, wavy blond hair, while the woman is brunette and encodes a Mediterranean or Latin exoticism. The photos feature the couple in various settings at Club Med Bali: eating, kissing, staring at us from among palm fronds, lounging at the pool, dancing, riding a bike, posing at the beach.
The man is clearly the protagonist, and occasionally he is portrayed alone: in the gym, floating in the water in a flowered shirt, lounging in a rattan chair. The consumerist message figures masculinity through crisp, capitalist realism, rather than the oblique poetic romanticism of Kyoto etrangere.
Here, the photos are fully in the present, a tourist brochure for Club Med. Showing the clothing in various Club Med settings highlights the resort’s diverse offerings.
The borders between travelogue, advertisement and fashion journalism are further transgressed in the only insert written in the copywriter’s voice. It is set against the background of the man floating in the pool, as the copy extols the virtues of the active, sports-oriented vacation for men available at the resort.
Again, for men the keynote is activity in the present-Japanese masculinity articulated through athletics and leisure activity-not the hazy nostalgic fantasy presented in its women’s counterpart.
This interpellation of the masculine consumer articulates with the article’s figurations of race. The use of white models positions Japanese readers in contradictory ways. On the one hand, it reinscribes white ideals of attractiveness and reinforces the allure of racial mimicry.
This impression is strong, given the fact that neither model seemed to be familiar to Western readers; one suspects that neither would be as successful in the U.S. or Europe as they are in Japan, continuing a neocolonial practice that offers lucrative Japanese careers to dubious Western “talent” who can capitalize on their exotic cachet.
On the other, the use of white models makes a racial substitution in a gesture of parity, signifying the cosmopolitanism and the equality with the West the Japanese have presumably attained through consumption.
Such cosmopolitanism will only heighten, the spread implies, through their journey to Club Med Bali, where Japanese can leave behind the stereotypical, group-oriented, scheduledriven vacation for a more European, fancy-free independence.
The piece both enshrines a Euro-American ideal and suggests that Japan has caught up with the West, so that Japanese readers can join ranks with Westerners in positions of neocolonial dominance over Bali as consumers of its natural paradise.
Here, the great equalizer between Japan and the West is capital, and the fashion magazine collapses various forms of difference into commodified opportunities for consumption. Places, objects, clothing, and experiences offer themselves on the glossy pages as equally available to our consuming touch.
A transitional spread heightens these impressions, eliding fashion photograph and advertisement. The male model featured in “Bali, Hi” appears against green foliage and red hibiscus.
The photos have no captions and would be indistinguishable from the rest of the spread except for the absence of captions and the discreet company trademark in the bottom-left corner.
The following article, “Club Med Bali,” further blurs reportage and advertisement in a description of Club Med and its facilities. The two-page piece describes typical days at Club Med and gives us information on prices, packages, and facilities.
The copious photos feature no Japanese as guests; rather, we see scenery, the white models, or shots where all the guests are white. Balinese are conspicuous by their absence, save for the one or two smiling employees who stand behind serving tables.
Here at Club Med Bali, race doesn’t matter, the photos seem to say. Japanese can take their place among the tourist-consumers of the world untouched by racial discomfort vis-a-vis white Westerners and unbothered by the brown natives, who appear only to serve the needs of First-World consumers.
The final section combines information, travelogue, and advertising in an article entitled “Bali Marathon.” Sponsored by the Japanese Nittoh corporation, the marathon is figured as part of the sporting, active vacation whose virtues were extolled in Club Med Bali, wedding male athleticism to stereotypes of Bali as mysterious, exotic, spiritual and close to nature.
The writer’s voice imagines the reader running in such a setting, complete with a map of the course and an account of sights and sounds runners will encounter.
In a typical Orientalizing tropicalizing move, Bali becomes a means for the tired, jaded Japanese man to renew himself physically and spiritually, promising him a disciplined body and replenished masculine energy.
Bali in the guise of a (precapitalist) natural paradise is offered to the capitalist Japanese as a consumer object. Here we see the continuing construction of differentiated Asian Orientalisms that write the contradictions of Japanese identity.
Both Asian and advanced capitalist/imperialist, Japan can construct Thailand and Bali as related yet disparate Others. Here, the graphic design motifs are instructive.
The use of red in the Thai section paints Thailand as hot, exotic, cosmopolitan, and ultimately alien, while the green of Bali figures the natural, the unspoiled, the tropical. Both are sites for masculine pleasure.
In Thailand, a group of men travels-as in a sex tour-to discover contemporary Thailand, redolent of feminine sexuality, exotic splendor, and high-tech, urban leisure. In Bali, men are heterosexually coupled in a wholesome, athletic vacation-swimming, working out, running marathons, or relaxing outdoors by the sea or at the pool.
In each, Asian-ness is differently thematized, foregrounding the contradictions of Japan’s status as a racially marked capitalist power. Japan constructs solidarity with an Asian Thailand, but cannot help but dominate it-as male seducer or as older brother.
With Bali, the shared Asian-ness recedes in preference to a gesture for parity with Europe and the U.S.; here, the use of white models and the travelogue on Club Med Bali writes Euro-style as both object of emulation and the subject-position of the Japanese reader.
Bali becomes an undifferentiated site of renewal, a trope of the tropics. Balinese people do not appear to disturb this vision of untrammeled exotic beauty, except as nameless features of the resort landscape. Here, racial anxieties are both thematized and allayed.
The potentially threatening natives exist, but as non-people, naturalized fixtures of the landscape. Of course the threat can never be entirely contained, for their very presence, however marginalized, is the return of the repressed, the excess that eludes containment.
Vis-a.-vis the West, the message is that consumption and economic power can perhaps offset racial marking, for Japanese can ostensibly travel to Bali in a position equivalent to a Westerner’s. Yet equality can never be fully achieved.
Anxieties return through the white models, who reinscribe Euro-American hegemony even as that hegemony is claimed as Japan’s shared prerogative.
Anxieties are embodied in the shadowy figures of the natives, who cannot be entirely erased in the attempts to consume Bali as depopulated tropical paradise.
Both the white models and the Balinese stand as uneasy reminders of the forces of neocolonial economic expansion, the colonization of consciousness, the simultaneous ambivalence toward racial marking and its utter inescapability.
In these disparate sites, the fashion industry weaves the complexities of Japanese subject formation during a period of Japanese economic confidence and power.
Despite this burgeoning economic power, however, Japan remains a relatively marginalized force in the fashion industry: almost a peer, but not quite.
Old Orientalisms are transposed into new, historically specific figurations, as the Japanese now appear under the sign of high-tech experimentalism, innovators of fabric and shape who redeploy culturally specific costume conventions or as cutting-edge creators who play the feminized almost-equal to the European Master Subject. Not quite/not white.
Given this racialized geopolitical context, the autoexoticism and reappropriations of Orientalism in Kyoto etrangere acquire new significance. Commodity fetishism here becomes a solution to Japanese anxieties over loss of identity and its contradictory position as a racially marked capitalist nationstate.
Confident consumption becomes a way to overcome racial marking and to resolve anxieties about loss of innocence, purity, essential Japanese-ness, and tradition. Perhaps one could say that this confidence always and only occludes loss.
But here, race is the difference that makes a difference. In the face of Orientalizing discourses deployed from Western sites, Kyoto etrangere redeploys these Orientalisms for its own ends, appropriating a Western position as it also draws upon nativist discourses of cultural uniqueness, Nihonjinron. “Kyoto, snob resort” advances the proposition that Japan, too, has entered the first ranks of advanced capitalist nationhood.
Kyoto as snob resort signifies a recovery of pride-that Kyoto, too, is worthy of our consuming attention, even as the appellation “snob resort” enshrines upper-middle-class hegemony.
So confident is this Japan that it can ironically view itself from the gaze of the West and redeploy Western Orientalisms, a Japan so powerful that through consumption it can blend the best of East and West in a figuration of the “truly Japanese.
Japan’s accession to the ranks of first-world consumer constructs its version of the Orient as a site of (pre)capitalist nostalgia, whether it is a trip to Kyoto, a vacation that ensures masculine prowess and dominance, or clothing that blends East and West in a new Oriental synthesis.
Fashion fabricates the commodity fetishisms that invite such consumption, while simultaneously fostering a capitalist nostalgia for a purer, precapitalist past reigned by use value.
Yohji Yamamoto, for instance, articulates his vision of a time when function ruled people’s lives. “They [the Japanese] think they can consume everything…. They think they can buy everything. That is very sad. So I am very happy to go back to that time when people cannot buy anything, when people were forced to live with very simple things around them” (Notebook on Cities and Clothes).
Yamamoto’s yearning for a precapitalist past is in part the product of the very industry that provides his own livelihood. He is thoroughly enmeshed-as we all are-in the reproduction of such a system and longs for a history that he has participated in destroying.
Similarly, Thailand and Bali function as differentiated sites of nostalgia: in the Thai case, for a time of innocence and tradition before modernization and Westernization, as the site for staging regret for the loss of precapitalist Japan; Bali, for an untrammeled nature before urbanization and as consumable site of spiritual renewal.
The fashion magazine suggests that both Thailand and Bali remind the Japanese of what they have lost, but the loss is not irrevocable. Through consumption, Japanese can (re)experience their lost innocence without jeopardizing the comforts of advanced capitalism that ensured its originary loss.
Japan’s neocolonial economic dominance assures access to spiritual renewal. Yet such seeming certainties are never certain. Japan is constructed through constitutive contradiction, through the constitutive lack at its corefor identities are always constructed in relations of difference.
To suppress this contradiction requires always already ambivalent peformances of national identity that assert nationhood as unique and timeless essence. Essence fabrication must therefore be continuous, repeated in multiple sites, in multiple registers.
In the fashion world, as elsewhere, “Japan” assumes a form against the West, as it both emulates and challenges Western hegemonies in the process reinscribing and contesting Orientalist discourses. Pan-Asian solidarities are riven with contradiction, as Southeast Asia becomes a locus for Japanese consumption enabled by neocolonial relations of dominance.
These complex contradictions figure “Japan” at an historical moment of Japanese economic strength and a concern with Asian history and Asian exoticism that accompanied the appearance of a n ewpostwar generation for whom earlier Japanese history was indeed exotic.
A key message circulated among these sites is that race matters. Race figures the space of difference between Japanese colonial projects, Japanese capitalism, and those projects in the West, racially marking those interimperial rivalries.
Race figures the space of contradiction when Japanese expansionist projects colonize other Asian nations, despite invocations of Asian solidarities. Invocations of East and West and essentialized Japanese culture, the neocolonialism and capitalist dominance of the Japanese nation-state, occur within a field that is always already racialized.
Racial tropes are in tum imbricated with gender, as woman embodies essentialized national identity, vulnerable to the masculine penetration of Westernization and urbanization.
She writes the figure of inferiority, whether it is Yohji Yamamoto in the miniaturized viewfinder, the blushing Thai waitress at the Bangkok airport-or Madama Butterfly.
Enmeshments of gender, race, and geopolitics permeate the Orientalisms I have described as they circulate and recirculate in disparate and contradictory ways in the discourses of fashion, writing new, historically specific stories in all-too-familiar ways, fabricating and refabricating the contradictions of Japanese identity.