THE IMAGE FACTORY
Fads and Fashions in Japan
by DONALD RICHIE, with photographs by ROY GARNER
London: Reaktion Books, 2003. 176 pages, $24.95 (paperback)

reviewed by Leila Wice

Both from within and from beyond its borders, Japan has often been described as unique among nations. But just what is it that actually sets the country apart? Donald Richie, in his sleek new book The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan, grapples with just this issue. His search for the essential qualities of popular culture in contemporary Japan is peppered with a refrain of disclaimers that "in this they are no different from anyone else." Even as Richie repeatedly challenges assumptions about Japan's inalienable difference, however, he ultimately reasserts them. Characterizing a culture of commodified "image" that saturates Japanese society, he ironically finds a country distinctive mainly for its lack of originality or intrinsic meaning.

The topics of the book's ten brief chapters range from comics and cuteness to clothing and costume to prostitution and "love hotels," with hourly rates. Forty-eight photographs by Roy Garner accompany the verbal snapshots. The photographs, like the cinematic prose with which Image Factory is jam-packed and like the consumer fantasyland of Japan they purport to represent, are at once absurd (young adults masquerade as heavy-metal stars and comic-book characters), sexy (bare breasts abound), and alienated (rows of pachinko-parlor patrons hunch in solitude with their booty of buckets of steel balls). Garner's captionless photographs encourage the reader to join Richie in an interpretive free-for-all.

Richie's verbal romp through city streets full of cell phones, outrageous outfits, and pornography vending machines hearkens back to Roland Barthes's 1970 L'Empire des Signes (The Empire of Signs). Richie's Japan is a land of surfaces barely concealing an empty center, a land of titillation and of repression, a nation of followers who import and adapt, a field of floating signifiers, unmoored and inviting endless interpretation. Richie uses Barthes's linguistic model of reading everyday life in Japan as blank metaphor, unburdened by history or context. Barthes, however, acknowledged the arbitrariness of his analysis, which was based on a brief visit to Japan in the late 1960s; the trip, Barthes said, merely "afforded a situation of writing" for his semiotic exercises of making meaning of his unfamiliar surroundings. Richie, instead, draws on a half-century of working in Japan as a film critic, fiction writer, and essayist. So although Richie's account of Japan as an "image culture" builds on Barthes's theme of the empty center, suddenly we're supposed to take Japan not just as an occasion for making theory, but as the actual subject itself.

This is a problem. A chapter entitled "Fake Foreigners" opens with a photograph of alienated youth that could have been made in any large, postindustrial city at the turn of the twenty-first century. A young couple stride down a busy street, their earnest costumes of teen rebellion accessorizing their blasé glares. Are we to infer from the chapter title that the young man in his modified punk duds is any less authentic than a Caucasian counterpart decked out in the paraphernalia of a Sex Pistols fan outside of the band's home country?

According to Richie, fashions in Japan are never truly original; they are only an aping of someone else's ideas. Any change in style becomes an example of the "illiterate nature of Japan's importation." So high collars borrowed from Victorian matrons and D.A. hairstyles taken from 1950s rockers are somehow more meaningless in Japan because they quote styles that never existed there. These hollow references to "someone else's nostalgia," however, belie the fact that Japan has its own nineteenth-century history of Victorian style and mid-twentieth-century history of rock and roll. Odder still, Richie admits and even overstates these histories elsewhere to argue that the earlier examples of appropriation were also "illiterate." At one point, he matter-of-factly asserts that "The kimono was ousted by Western clothing when Japan decided to join the rest of the world after its long seclusion." Both "ousted" and "seclusion" are wild exaggerations. Neither the isolation from the Western world nor the adoption of imports to replace native styles was as abrupt or complete as his statements describe them.

When St. Francis Xavier arrived from Portugal in the mid 1500s with the mission of introducing Christianity to a Japan torn by civil wars waged among wildly individualist warrior elites, he complained that the Japanese had a "high opinion of themselves" that led them to "look down on all foreigners." Xavier declared, in agreement with the warlords he encountered, that the country and its people were unlike any other. In the centuries since, countless other observers, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, have reached the same conclusion. While these extreme characterizations waver between arrogance and condescension, they all share an exoticizing foundation of professed uniqueness. So Richie is in good company. This book, stylish and entertaining, often insightful and occasionally infuriating, adds yet another chapter to the mythology of "those crazy Japanese."