“Notes” in “Ambient Media”
Notes
Introduction
The creators of the disc are video artists Kikkawa Hiroshi and Kodama Yūichi, musicians Furuya Kenji and Cube Juice, and photographer Suzuki Tokiko. The jellyfish are from the Enoshima Aquarium, a popular tourist spot on the Shōnan coast two hours south of Tokyo.
Tia DeNora writes of the use of aesthetic materials (rhythms, textures, musical structures) to provide forms of mediated physical entrainment, the “alignment or integration of bodily features with some recurrent features in the environment”—often in ways not entirely conscious. Greg M. Smith provides a useful model of how this kind of entrainment can produce sustained moods. Repetition plays a key role. Emotional responses to affective stimuli tend to be over in a matter of seconds and may differ depending on personal history and mode of attention. Smith notes films often work to get around this variability by presenting a wide spectrum of similar mood cues across the running time of a work. Aesthetic elements including lighting, music, sound effects, dialogue, editing, and camera work combine to present a unified emotional tone, ensuring that even if a viewer doesn’t respond equally or predictably to each and every “mood cue,” attunement with the overall atmosphere will eventually occur. As this book explores, this strategy of affective overdetermination to produce sustained moods functions similarly in other media like music, video art, and literature. DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 79; Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System, 149–51.
Cited in Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambience,” 39. For a fascinating approach to human perception building from this Newtonian understanding of air as an ambient medium, see Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 17.
Water can also be an ambient medium, should this body jump in the river to swim with the jellyfish.
Funiki was first coined as a translation of the Dutch term lucht in the mid-nineteenth century. As with atmosphere, the original meaning referred simply to the layer of air surrounding the earth. Near the beginning of the Meiji period (1868–1912) and the rush for modernization, the valence of funiki expanded to keep pace with the European notion of the feeling or mood of a place. “Funiki,” Seisenban Nihonkokugo daijiten.
Pinkus, “Ambiguity, Ambience, Ambivalence, and the Environment,” 91.
Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambience,” 39; Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 34. Rickert provides additional perspectives on the word’s origins in Ambient Rhetoric, 5–8.
I follow Thomas Lemke’s definition of neoliberalism as “a political rationality that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in (welfare) state services and security systems to the increasing call for ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘self-care.’ ” See Lemke, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” 203. On the social effects of neoliberalism in Japan, see Borovoy, “Japan as Mirror”; Hayashi, “From Exploitation to Playful Exploits”; and Allison, Precarious Japan. Though she doesn’t discuss neoliberalism specifically, Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s Beyond Computopia highlights related aspects of the Japanese government’s push for an “information society” starting in the late 1960s. To be clear, neoliberalism as an approach to national governance was established in Japan only gradually, with key neoliberal reforms enacted only in the late 1990s and early 2000s during the Hashimoto and Koizumi administrations. It is clear, however, the more cultural side of Japanese neoliberalism I focus on here has a much longer trajectory, growing through the 1970s and 1980s and intensifying in tandem with the government’s later neoliberal turn.
See McLuhan, Understanding Media; on ubiquitous computing and what it means for media aesthetics, see Ekman, ed., Throughout, and Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening, 1–19.
Foucault, Ethics, 225. Foucault’s les techniques de soi is often translated as “technologies of the self,” and his use of the term encompasses both “techniques” and “technologies” in their common English definitions. As I will be addressing a wide range of more specific technologies later in the book, I have chosen to use “techniques” to translate Foucault’s term and save “technologies of the self” to refer more specifically to the use of media technologies as tools of personal subjectivation.
Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 1–19.
“Being affected by sound or weather, while among the easiest and least obtrusive forms of experience, is, physically, a concrete encounter (in the literal sense of en-countering: meeting up) with our physical environment.” Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 4.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 132–33. Emphasis in original.
Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 7–8.
German philosophy was considered state of the art in Japan at the time, and Watsuji had traveled to Germany to learn as much as he could.
Watsuji, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku, 5. By the late 1990s Climate and Culture had gone through over fifty printings in Japan. See Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity, 51. On Heidegger’s own relationship with Japanese and Chinese thought, see May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources. Seven decades later, Peter Sloterdijk would describe a similar goal—writing the spatial companion to Being and Time—as a major motivation for his Spheres trilogy (1998–2004).
I have adopted Geoffrey Bownas’s translation here from Watsuji, Climate and Culture, 12–15; emphasis added. Note in the original Watsuji does not use the word funiki (atmosphere) but fūdo (climate) in the final clause, though for him the words are nearly synonymous: “Sunawachi wareware ha ‘fūdo’ ni oite wareware jishin o aidagara toshite no wareware jishin o miidasu no de aru.” Watsuji, Fūdo, 8.
Naoki Sakai draws our attention to the distinction in modern Japanese between shukan, or the ontological subject recognizing its identity in distinction to others, and shutai, the “agent of praxis who manufactures itself for itself.” As with the two Greek principles described earlier, shukan emphasizes self-recognition through cognition, while shutai shifts the conception of subjectivity toward an emphasis on interactive practices of self-formation. As Sakai argues, Watsuji’s work strains to essentialize the shutai—the varied practices of self of those living in a place called “Japan”—in order to help shore up an all-embracing nationalist shukan: “What is achieved in his use of the term shutai is, in fact, a displacement of the practical relation by the epistemic one.” Watsuji’s emphasis on a uniform national atmosphere, I would add, is central to how he achieves this displacement. See Sakai, Translation & Subjectivity, 145 and 198–99n10.
As Harumi Befu notes, Watsuji’s Climate and Culture was a major influence on the popular genre of Nihon bunkaron (theories of Japanese culture) emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity, 17.
Sakai, Translation & Subjectivity, 198–99n10. Arlie Russell Hochschild makes a similar point in the 2012 preface to her classic 1983 study of emotional labor, The Managed Heart: “The Japanese highly value the capacity to relate to the feelings and needs of others. So for the Japanese, emotional labor is more built in and therefore harder to see” (xi).
Yamamoto presents this “air” discourse as something uniquely Japanese and earlier included it alongside a host of other cultural essentialisms in his discussion of what he calls Nihonkyō (the Japan Religion) in his best-selling Nihonjin to Yudayajin (The Japanese and the Jews, 1970, published under the pseudonym Isiah Ben-Dasan). Other popular “theories of Japanese culture” often invoke the idea of ishin denshin (person-to-person telepathy), the idea that due to a high degree of shared assumptions Japanese tend to rely heavily on unspoken and/or implicit forms of communication. I see no reason to accept the idea there is anything exclusively Japanese about this practice, though I agree with Yamamoto that “air” discourse has served as a particularly powerful tool of indirect coercion in modern Japan. On ishin denshin, see Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity, 38–39.
Recent titles include Kōtari Yūji, Kūki no yomikata: Dekiru yatsu to iwaseru “shuzairyoku” kōza (How to read the air: “Collection power” course on how to be called a can-do guy, 2008); Doi Takayoshi, Tomodachi jigoku: “Kūki o yomu” sedai no sabaibaru (Friendship hell: Surviving the “reading the air” generation, 2008); and Matsumoto Chitose, Bijin ni mieru “kūki” no tsukurikata: Kirei no hiketsu 81 (Creating the “air” of a beautiful woman: 81 beauty secrets, 2012). As Doi’s title indicates, in recent years there is also a sense “reading the air” has become a more important social skill than ever before in an age where communication is often heavily mediated and identities are highly fluid.
This remains a problem with recent attempts to theorize atmospheric subjectivity through a Heideggerian framework, including Gumbrecht’s Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (2012) and Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric (2013).
The quote is from Heidegger, Being and Time, 132. Here, I am in part following Sakai’s critique of Watsuji, where he notes that what Watsuji “consistently evades is the undecidability of the social, inherent in the ‘being in common’ with others, which cannot be equated to the relational determination of an identity within the spatiality of synchronicity.” Sakai, Translation & Subjectivity, 145.
Rose, Governing the Soul, 222.
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 260; emphasis mine. As Rose notes, with the turn to the somatic there is also a general shift from the “molar” to the “molecular,” both literally with the spread of biotechnology focused on the molecular level and in the Deleuzian sense of a person understood as an assemblage of interwoven forces rather than a unified “molar” being with discreet boundaries. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 25–26.
Mark Driscoll explores the darker side of early Japanese biopolitics in Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque.
Ruth Benedict’s influential The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) set the tone for subsequent postwar Japanese attempts to identify a uniquely “Japanese” psychology, a project useful to proponents of cultural nationalism up through the present. On the history of psychoanalysis in Japan, see Cornyetz and Vincent’s introduction to Perversion and Modern Japan, 3–5.
See Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan, 171–78. The quote on Locke is from Maruyama’s Senchū to sengo no aida, cited and translated by Koschmann on p. 178. As Koschmann traces, Maruyama’s thought emerged amid a fervent postwar debate on the meaning of subjectivity (shutai) among Marxists, social scientists, and other intellectuals. This debate would largely end by the early 1950s with a return to more nationalist frames of reference. Two decades later, avant-garde filmmakers and theorists in the late 1960s again took up the question and produced many essays on subjectivity (shutairon) in the context of the political upheavals of the time. As Abé Mark Nornes notes, however, this discourse tended to lack a common conceptual framework and “would inevitably splinter into many directions at once.” The debate over the properly political subject would again fall into obscurity by the mid-1970s with the turn to more autonomous conceptions of self. See Nornes, Forest of Pressure, 26 and 57.
On the postwar marketing of the “bright life” as a consumer ideal, see Partner, Assembled in Japan, 137–92. The Japanese student protest movements of the late 1960s, while oriented toward a very different social project, nonetheless paralleled this collective emphasis in their demands for solidarity and self-sacrifice.
I adopt the term “therapy culture” (serapii bunka) from Japanese sociologist Koike Yasushi. See Koike, Serapii bunka no shakaigaku, 14–15. See also Saitō, Shinrigakuka suru shakai. For a critical perspective from the United Kingdom, see Furedi, Therapy Culture. On micromasses, see Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” 252–53. On the new forms of consumer spirituality, see Haga, “Wakamono no taikan shikō to gendai shūkyō būmu,” 100.
Ueno, <Watashi> sagashi gēmu, 115.
Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect,” 165.
Rose, Governing the Self, 153.
Mita Munesuke dubs the mid-1970s to 1990s as the “age of fiction,” which Miyadai Shinji rephrases as the “age of self.” The transition away from grand narratives as a framework for understanding contemporary Japan was led by Ōtsuka Eiji starting in the 1980s and revisited by Azuma Hiroki in the new century. Azuma highlights moe, or “desire elements,” as the affective glue organizing anime otaku spectatorship. Gabriella Lukács makes a similar point about Japanese television dramas in the 1990s, noting how as consumer tastes were rapidly diversifying, the one thing studios could find to reach across demographics was not story or message but positive affect, “elevating the mood” of viewers regardless of a show’s plot. My reading of ambience here is largely complementary with these historical arguments, though the ambient attunement I describe is not dependent on the presence or absence of more traditional narrative forms. See Mita, Social Psychology of Modern Japan, 523; Miyadai, “Transformations of Semantics in the History of Japanese Subcultures,” 233; Ōtsuka, Monogatari shōmetsuron; Azuma, Otaku, 42; Lukács, Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, 41.
We might question Miyadai’s use of the term “homeostasis” here, as—along with the general therapy culture emphasis on “balance”—it imagines self-regulation as if it were a closed system capable of being tuned up like an engine, rather than as something integrated with more open-ended forms of social subjectivation not necessarily tending toward equilibrium. Miyadai, “Transformations of Semantics in the History of Japanese Subcultures,” 235. For Miyadai’s original argument, see Miyadai, Ishihara, and Ōtsuka, Sabukaruchā shinwa kaitai.
Asada, “Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism,” 276.
Rose, Governing the Soul, 261.
Bull, Sound Moves, 154–57. The relationship between somatic rhythms and everyday media is the subject of chapter 3.
See Allison, Precarious Japan.
As Yuriko Furuhata argues, Matsuda’s “landscape theory” (fūkeiron) can be understood as a prescient example of a theorist recognizing the need to focus not just on explicit ideological debates but on how governmentality is inscribed within the urban landscape itself. Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality, 118.
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Queer Phenomenology, and The Promise of Happiness; Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; Hochschild, The Managed Heart; Berlant, The Female Complaint and Cruel Optimism; Ngai, Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories; Stewart, Ordinary Affects. As Rickert notes, the increasing attention to nonrepresentational elements of subjectivity is also reflected in a wide range of more recent attempts to counter the long-held bias toward language, will, and representation in models of subjectivity and social interaction: the nonhuman agency of objects and things argued for by both Bruno Latour and the object-oriented ontology thinkers, the rising attention to environmental design and ubiquitous computing, and the push in both cognitive science and affect theory for understanding the role played by preconscious affective forces.
Ahmed notes how feminists, for example, can come to be regarded as “killjoys” because by insisting on pointing out gender inequalities they “ruin the atmosphere” for others more comfortable with the unspoken status quo. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 65 and 67.
As Sianne Ngai points out, the tone or mood overlaying a social situation can be thought of as supremely ideological, as it governs the ways people behave and interact while largely escaping conscious reflection. Following Lawrence Grossberg, Ngai defines ideology as “the materially embodied representation of an imaginary relationship to a holistic complex of real conditions” and notes how mood clearly shares this “virtual, diffused, but also imminent character.” Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 47; emphasis in original.
Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling,” 57.
See Guattari, Chaosmosis; Maurizio Lazzarato develops this argument further in Signs and Machines.
Gumbrecht calls this a “Stimmung that emerges from resistance to Stimmung.” I explore the avant-garde resistance to mood in chapter 1. Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 129.
I am working here from DeNora’s highly corporeal definition of agency, which includes “feeling, perception, cognition and consciousness, identity, energy, perceived situation and scene, embodied conduct and comportment.” Music in Everyday Life, 20.
Böhme, “The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics of Atmospheres,” 2–9. See also Böhme, Atmosphäre, translated into Japanese as Funiki no bigaku.
DeNora, Music in Everyday Life; McCarthy, Ambient Television; Bull, Sound Moves; Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening.
Scarry, Dreaming by the Book; Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry; Ngai, Ugly Feelings; Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung.
“I recommend [reading for Stimmung] not least of all because this is the orientation of a great number of non-professional readers (readers who are not—and, of course, need not be—aware of the fact).” Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 3, 5, 18.
Koike, Serapii bunka no shakaigaku, 121.
As Timothy Morton writes, “One function of ambience is to permeate and trouble the inside with the outside.” Morton, “ ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem,” n.p.
There are of course often internal and external pressures on contemporary Japanese artists to situate themselves in relationship to this imaginary lineage, particularly when operating abroad, but this is tangential to the questions I am pursuing here. For more on the relationship between atmosphere and exoticism, see chapter 2, fn30.
For a wonderful study of the class politics of noise-cancelling headphones, see Hagood, “Quiet Comfort.”
1. Background Music of the Avant-Garde
BGM is a commonly used Japanese acronym for background music (much easier to say than the fully transliterated bakkuguraundo myūjikku). While not frequently found in English, it is nonetheless convenient to use here as well, so I will.
Osaka, Kankyō ongaku, 90.
Ibid., 108.
Ibid., 88.
The misuse of sound and vibrational technology was a particular obsession of Unno, who early in his literary career worked as a government radio researcher for the Communication Ministry’s Electrical Experiments Division. A staunch nationalist during the war years, Unno maintained a strong belief in science as the key to the nation’s future. He was distraught by the wartime government’s misuse of scientific research for political ends, however, and often aimed his fiction at a moral critique of the government’s “science without conscience.” Along with Edogawa Rampo and Yumeno Kyūsaku, Unno pioneered the proto–science fiction genre of the kagaku shōsetsu (science novel), a genre of speculative fiction warning of the dangers of scientific development without a guiding moral authority. Unno, “Jyūhachijikan no ongaku yoku”; Kawana, “Science without Conscience,” 64.
Osaka, Kankyō ongaku, 96, 113.
For a concise history of Muzak, see Lanza, Elevator Music, 22–30.
Osaka, Kankyō ongaku, 219.
Ibid.
Kotler, “Atmospherics as a Marketing Tool,” 50.
Quoted in Owen, “The Soundtrack of Your Life,” n.p. For an insightful ethnographic study of background and foreground programmed music in retail space, see Sterne, “Sounds Like the Mall of America.”
Quoted in Owen, “The Soundtrack of Your Life,” n.p.
There is, of course, the possibility stimulus progression–style Muzak is being deployed with nostalgic, humorous, or ironic intent, though this does not seem to be the case in most places I have encountered it in Japan.
Osaka, Kankyō ongaku, 79–80.
Midori Yoshimoto positions the society’s diverse approach to the question of environment as part of an emergent interest in creating immersive, mixed-media event spaces, an approach Japanese artists would further in the late 1960s under the banner of “intermedia.” The goal of intermedia was to eliminate the frames separating established media genres and combine them into immersive experiential events. However, understanding the Environment Society as simply an early intermedia experiment risks overlooking the group’s main concern: the relationship between media and the aesthetic dimensions of the urban environment. Quote from Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment,” 40 (Yoshimoto’s translation).
Akiyama et al., “Kankyō kara X e,” 65.
As Yoshimoto notes, the latter performance didn’t go exactly to Ichiyanagi’s instructions, with Tōno crawling under his chair and Ay-O falling off his. The piece literalizes Erik Satie’s “furniture music,” attempting to rethink the chair as a threshold of bodily instability. In this instance of “environmental music,” an object usually affording bodily support tips into a precarious and uncertain balancing act. Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment,” 29, 36. A recording of Akiyama’s piece is included on Obscure Tape Music of Japan, vol. 6, Tape Works of Akiyama Kuniharu 1 (Omega Point Records OPA-006, 2007).
Osaka, Kankyō ongaku, 4.
Environmental historian Nakagawa Osamu documents the more objective, scientific understanding of the environment emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, one focused on identifying generalizable properties acting on human perception in dependable ways. Nakagawa, Fūkeigaku, 102.
Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment,” 45. For example, the expo serves as the final chapter in Havens, Radicals and Realists, and one of the closing scenes of the “season of image politics” in Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality. See also the special issue of Review of Japanese Culture and Society edited by Yoshimoto and dedicated to the expo.
Particularly the pieces emerging from the NHK Electronic Music Studio. See also Loubet, “The Beginnings of Electronic Music in Japan, with a Focus on the NHK Studio.”
Tanaka, Denshi ongaku in Japan, 25–26.
A recording is included on Obscure Tape Music of Japan, vol. 5, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Music for Tinguely (Omega Point Records OPA-005, 2006).
I thank Ken Yoshida for introducing me to this essay.
Indeed, background listening as a practice of mood regulation is nothing new and, from a larger historical perspective, might even be considered the dominant way music has been engaged with over the centuries. Hosokawa Shūhei, building on the work of Hanns-Werner Heister, notes how the modern idea of an autonomous musical practice based on concentrated listening has its roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European moves to rationalize and objectify musical materials. This turned music audition into a specialist activity, bringing it off the street and into the concert hall and the domain of high culture. In the long history of music, concentrated listening was established as a cultural ideal only during this short period—and of course, even then the practice was restricted to privileged classes in certain parts of the world. With the emergence of mechanical reproduction, the cultural hegemony of concentrated listening gradually began to weaken. Upending the usual narrative of attentional decline, Hosokawa presents the history of recorded music not as a story of the gradual erosion of concentrated musical experience figured in the quiet and attentive concert hall but as a return to a form of listening long present in earlier times. Hosokawa, Rekōdo no bigaku, 115–22. On the role of architecture and musical acoustics in the culture of focused listening, see also Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity.
Akiyama, “Dezain suru ongaku,” 17.
Ibid.
Ngai is describing the “confident” tone of capitalism in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 69.
Akiyama, “Dezain suru ongaku,” 17–18.
“New age” music reached the Japanese market in the late 1980s and often featured Satie’s softer compositions in its repertoire. Windham Hill Records, based out of Palo Alto, California, is often credited with establishing the genre. The company was founded in 1976 and grew steadily into the mid-1980s, though it was only around 1986 when they began to apply the term “new age” to their releases. While at first new age music was available only through specialty metaphysical bookstores, record stores in the United States began adding new age sections around 1985. Radio also began to take notice in the late 1980s, and new age radio programs began to appear. Stephen Hill’s Music from the Hearts of Space (first created in 1973 at KPFA in Berkeley, California) had the greatest success, entering syndication in 1983 and being picked up by NPR and sent out to 230 national affiliates by 1986. In Japan, Kitaro (real name Takahashi Masanori) emerged as another key player in the new age scene. He achieved international notoriety following his soundtrack for NHK’s long-running documentary series Silk Road (1980–90). Building off this success, Kitaro signed a contract for worldwide distribution with Geffen in 1986, pushing him into the forefront of the new age music scene just as it was reaching its zenith. The “world music” boom in Japan started in the mid-1980s, propelled by popular musicians like Hosono Haruomi. Gregorian chant rose to popularity after Angel Records rereleased the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos’s 1973 recording Chant in 1994. The album went triple platinum in the United States and sold six million copies worldwide, becoming one of the key records of the so-called world music and new age genres. The Gregorian chant underlying the Ichiyanagi piece echoes Erik Satie’s own strong interest in early monastic music and anticipated the centrality of the style—and modal music in general—in later ambient and relaxation genres.
Templier, Erik Satie, 45.
Quoted in Schlomowitz, “Cage’s Place in the Reception of Satie,” n.p.
After being introduced to Satie’s work by Virgil Thompson, in 1949 Cage successfully applied for a grant to go to Paris to research Satie’s furniture music. From Satie, Cage developed his own theory of how music might engage with environmental sounds, becoming more fully integrated with “life” as lived in everyday environments rather than in the concert hall. “For Satie,” Cage writes, “art was the art of living and through living creating artworks. Art was not separated from living or from life. In a sense, it is the same as doing the dishes.” At the time, the European avant-garde did not take Satie’s playful miniatures seriously, and Cage’s lectures from the period see him engaged in a playful pro-Satie polemic: “Insist upon Furniture Music. Have no meetings, no get-togethers, no social affairs of any kind without Furniture Music. Don’t get married without Furniture Music. Stay out of houses that don’t use Furniture Music. Anyone who hasn’t heard Furniture Music has no idea what true happiness is.” To defend Satie against those who viewed his output as too slight to count him as a major composer, Cage often drew on an example of a short form that nonetheless was respected as a serious art: the haiku poetry of Japan. See Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage, 89.
There was scattered interest in Satie’s music in Japan in the early part of the century. Koizumi Osamu published what appears to be the first Japanese essay on his work in 1923, “Kindai jiyū ongaku-ha no senkusha Sati to sono kaiki” (Satie, pioneer of the style of modern free music, and his mystique). This was followed by Sakaguchi’s translation of Cocteau’s writing on Satie, appearing in the literary coterie magazine Kotoba at the start of the Showa period (1926). Following Sakaguchi’s lead, much of the early interest in Satie in Japan would come from poets arriving at Satie via Cocteau. Soprano Mitsuma Makiko gave the first Japanese performance of Satie’s music in 1927, as part of a concert of modern French vocal music, and Sakaguchi and a few other writers invited her back to sing Satie’s Je te veux in the spring of 1929. Composers Matsudaira Yoritsune and Hayasaka Fumio also introduced a few of Satie’s piano pieces. In the immediate postwar period, there were a few scattered Satie concerts, including a young Takemitsu Tōru introducing the first performance of the piano version of Satie’s Parade at the opening of an Okamoto Tarō exhibition. This was followed by the Performance of Contemporary Works (Gendai sakuhin ensōkai), held at the Ichigaya Joshigakuin, August 9, 1952. This concert claimed to introduce works by “largely unknown” European composers including Satie, Samuel Barber, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen, as well as works by three “new” Japanese composers: Takemitsu, Suzuki Hiroyoshi, and Yuasa Jōji. The latter three, like Akiyama, were members of Jikken Kōbō, which put on the event. In this pre–Satie boom concert, Satie is presented in the context of twelve-tone music rather than the iconoclastic gymnopédist image he would later acquire. See Akiyama,“ ‘Nashi no katachi o shita ongaku’ no shikō,” n.p.; Cocteau, Erikku Sati; Miwa, “Kokutō būmu yobu”; Akiyama, Erikku Sati oboegaki, 498. On Satie and Ango, see Ōhara, “Bungaku to ongaku no kōsaku.”
Takahashi, “Erikku Satie to ‘Kagu no ongaku,’ ” n.p. Satie was already well known enough by 1968 for the Yomiuri newspaper to cover the Italian publication of Aldo Ciccolini’s Satie Complete Piano Works. See “Sati no ‘Piano ongaku zenshū.’ ”
The first seven concerts were held at Jean-Jean, Shibuya, beginning on September 17, 1975; subsequent concerts were held at the Nichibu kaikan (Maison Franco-Japonaise) in Ochanomizu. Other major Satie events included The Essential Eric Satie in 1977, part of Ichiyanagi Toshi’s Music in Museums series; monthly Satie concerts throughout 1981 by Shimada Lily; and a 1984 reprise of the Complete Works by Takahashi Aki at Shibuya’s Eurospace. A wide range of Satie books and recordings were also published around this time, including Nakajima Haruko’s Nemureru nashi e no fūga: Erikku Sati ron (Fugue for a sleepy pear: On Eric Satie), a reprint of Cocteau’s Erik Satie translated by Sakaguchi and Satō Saku, and Takahashi Aki’s best-selling recording Aki pureizu Sati: Hoshitachi no musuko (Aki plays Satie: Son of the stars, 1985), timed to the sixtieth anniversary of Satie’s passing. Kusahara Machiko recalls often hearing Satie’s music piped into the crowded central shopping arcades in Shibuya, Tokyo, during the 1980s as well. See “Ishoku sakkyokuka Sati” and “Eiga to ongaku de Sati no sakuhin.”
Alongside the music, these concerts often incorporated elements of Satie’s famously idiosyncratic tastes. For example, a 1980 Satie concert at the British House in Yokohama included food and wine of only white colors, since Satie wrote in his diary he ate only white-colored foods. See “Shiroi chūshoku o tabe.”
See Shibata, “Bunjin fū no hitogara nijimu.”
Akiyama, Erikku Sati oboegaki, 498. See also Takahashi, Parurando, 91–94.
Vexations, a work never performed in Satie’s lifetime, is the major touchstone for later composers asserting Satie’s credentials as an avant-garde agitator. The piece calls for 840 repetitions of a short piano phrase and demands “serious immobilities” (immobilités sérieuses). The first full performance of Vexations in Japan took place on December 29, 1967, the second worldwide after Cage’s 1963 premiere in New York. Held at the American Culture Center in Akasaka-mitsuke, Tokyo, fifteen avant-garde composers participated, including Mayuzumi Toshirō, Ichiyanagi Toshi, and Irino Yoshirō. The concert started at 11 a.m. and was scheduled to last over twenty hours. Pianist Shimada Lily later transformed Vexations into an even more extreme test of endurance, performing the entire piece solo on a number of occasions.
Akiyama, “ ‘Nashi no katachi o shita ongaku’ no shikō,” n.p.
See “Sati eranda Kamiya Ikuyo-san.”
Takahashi, “Erikku Satie to ‘Kagu no ongaku,’ ” n.p.
Ibid.
Identifying a similar contrast, Yoshimoto notes the works presented in From Space to Environment “shared the industrial and hard-edge aesthetics of concurrent trends in the West such as Minimalism, Op art, light art, and kinetic-art.” This emphasis on discreet lines and sharp juxtapositions was also central to the Environment Society members’ work at the various Expo ’70 pavilions. But it was difficult to find a hard edge over at the Pepsi Pavilion, where Nakaya Fujiko was exhibiting her first fog sculpture in collaboration with the American group Experiments in Arts and Technology (EAT). Curator Nakai Yasuyuki suggests it was the Pepsi Pavilion that most successfully carried forward the quest for dynamic environmental experience the Environment Society had sought, even though Nakaya and EAT were not associated with the group. While I agree with Nakai the Pepsi Pavilion most successfully marked the transition from the environmental aesthetics of the midsixties to the new decade of comfortable environmental design, we might also note the aesthetic differences between Nakaya’s fog and the former Environment Society members’ installations elsewhere on the expo grounds. The fog presents a softer and more amorphous landscape, a more permeable and ambiguous border than the one policed by Akiyama, with his concern to distinguish between art and design. Takahashi, “Erikku Satie to ‘Kagu no ongaku,’ ” n.p.; Nakai is cited in Yoshimoto. “From Space to Environment,” 44.
Schlomowitz, “Cage’s Place in the Reception of Satie,” n.p.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 143.
With his solitary quirks, the Satie persona also served 1970s and 1980s Japan as an archetype of the contemporary intermedia celebrity. Journalists covering the Satie boom portray him as an odd but affable loner, as illustrated by his eccentric fashions (his identical velvet suits, his huge number of umbrellas), his acerbic wit (in ample evidence in his Memoirs of an Amnesiac), his famous friends (Cocteau, Claude Debussy, Tristan Tzara), and his Dadaist provocations (like publishing real estate advertisements for nonexistent, imaginary buildings). In his lifetime Satie often shuttled between commercial contexts (composing tunes for music hall and cabarets) and avant-garde, conceptual works. His career served as an important precedent for later Japanese musicians like Sakamoto Ryūichi, who would similarly move fluidly between art music and pop music. The Japanese fascination with Satie has yet to abate, as evidenced by a major summer 2015 exhibition at the Bunkamura museum in Shibuya, Erikku Sati to sono jidai (Erik Satie and his time, July 8 to August 30, 2015). Thanks go to Anne McKnight for reminding me of the many Kitano–Satie connections in her blog post of February 15, 2012.
In his formulation of ambient music, Eno draws directly from Satie, as well as John Cage, British minimalist composers such as Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars (both of whom Eno would later release on his Obscure Records label), and the studio experiments of German bands like Can.
Eno, “Ambient Music,” n.p.
For what it is worth, Eno has told Japanese interviewers he was heavily influenced by “Japanese thought” at the time he was working on the Ambient series—particularly, the concepts of wabi (austere refinement and spiritual solitude) and sabi (quiet simplicity). Code, ed., Unfinished, 132.
Böhme, “Acoustic Atmospheres,” 16. As Hosokawa writes, the Walkman became emblematic of the “autonomy” of the 1980s: “The Walkman is neither cause nor effect of that autonomy, neither evokes nor realizes it. It is the autonomy, or rather autonomy-of-the-walking-self.” Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect,” 166; emphasis in original.
I draw here from Eric Tamm’s insightful structural analysis of Eno’s ambient work. See Tamm, Brian Eno, 131–50.
2. The Sound of Embodied Security
This section of the expressway, near Sangenjaya, was recently featured in Murakami Haruki’s novel 1Q84 (2009–10).
Soundscape researcher Barry Truax describes the “acoustic horizon” simply as “the farthest distance from which sound may be heard.” See chapter 3 for further discussion. Truax, Acoustic Communication, 26.
Thibaud, “The Sonic Composition of the City,” 330. This potential for blocking out the listener’s surroundings has long been a point of contention surrounding portable media technology: one of Sony’s original Walkman designs featured two sets of headphone jacks, with an orange button enabling the sound source to be “shared” between two listeners. Morita Akio, one of Sony’s cofounders, noticed when he listened to the research models at home his wife became annoyed, as she felt shut out. So he ordered a second jack to be installed. More recently, Noah Vawter’s Ambient Addition (2006) sought to address the “isolation” of the portable music player. Ambient Addition is a Walkman-style device Vawter designed at the MIT Media Lab as an attempt to reintegrate mobile headphone listeners into their surrounding environment. As the listener walks around a space, an onboard microphone records environmental noise, and an audio processor uses various techniques to soften the sounds and make them more “musical” before transmitting them to the headphones. The device gives these found sounds a sense of rhythm by repeating samples, filtering and transposing tones to approximate melodies, and filtering or masking frequencies that do not fit into the dominant musical harmonics. Vawter hoped Ambient Addition would add a sense of curiosity and interactivity to a listener’s relationship to their landscape. For example, they may alter their path through space in order to explore novel sounds for the Addition to process. According to surveys distributed to Vawter’s test subjects, however, most reported the Ambient Addition was a socially isolating experience. Vawter sees this as a failure, but I would argue this partial isolation is for many listeners one of the primary appeals of ambient listening—the way it provides a buffer between self and surroundings. See Vawter, “Ambient Addition,” 15, 90. For an early study on urban headphone listening, see Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect.”
For example, Truax writes disparagingly of how recorded music “is used to fill a gap or deficiency in the environment, whether psychological or physical. . . . If an activity is boring or frustrating, pleasant music will make it seem easier to endure. . . . The problem, if there is one, with the role of background sound as a surrogate in these situations is that, at the very least, it does not change the problem or fill the deficiency—it only appears to. . . . The surrogate relationship often becomes a dependency that prevents, or at least discourages, the person from taking any action that will lead to a lasting solution.” Truax, Acoustic Communication, 169–70.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 493.
Ibid. As Guattari notes elsewhere, mood arrives first and orients the emerging subject by affectively consolidating the surrounding environment: “One says to oneself: Isn’t it boring here? Isn’t it nerve-racking? Isn’t the ambience great? The first given constitutes a disposition or a situation which is that I’m here, in the room, and the enunciation takes on consistency.” Cited in Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, 218.
Milutis, Ether, 172.
Problems of security, of course, have been central to debates over neoliberalism and its incorporation of calculated risk into ever more areas of everyday life. The larger issue of neoliberal (in)security is beyond the scope of this book, though I hope to imply here some of the ways ambient media are sensory technologies with a complex relation to larger conditions of personal and collective security, both actual and felt. For a detailed analysis of security issues with particular attention to the role of atmosphere and affect, see Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy (1998–2004; first two volumes translated as Bubbles and Globes).
DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 67.
Ibid., 84–85; emphasis in original.
Ibid., 87–88.
Eno, liner notes to Ambient 4: On Land. Cage is again an important precursor here, with his Imaginary Landscape series of compositions (1939–52).
Quoted in Tamm, Brian Eno, 4.
Korner, “Aurora Musicalis,” n.p.
Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices, 295; quoted in Sun, Experiments in Musical Performance, 85.
This material was republished in book form, followed by a sequel and then another discography from another publisher, each edited by Mita Itaru. Mita and Studio Voice, eds., Anbiento myūjikku 1969–2009; Mita, ed., Ura anbiento myūjikku 1960–2010; and Mita, ed., Anbiento difinitivu 1958–2013.
On Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra, see Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, 159–94.
Eno began the EMI sublabel Obscure Records (1975–78) as a way to use his popularity to secure the distribution of then-unknown British composers like Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman, as well as releasing recordings by Cage and his own early ambient experiment, Discreet Music (1975).
Hosono, Hosono Haruomi intabyū, 209–10.
Ibid., 230.
“Loom” features the work of YMO sound programmer Matsutake Hideki, who in the early 1970s was an apprentice to the groundbreaking Japanese electronic composer Tomita Isao. Matsutake was reportedly turned on to electronic music at the age of eighteen when he heard Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach (1968) at the American Pavilion at Expo ’70. Tomita is in many ways Carlos’s Japanese equivalent, producing electronic synthesizer renditions of composers like Debussy and Stravinsky.
Hosono, Hosono Haruomi intabyū, 236–38.
Hosono and Yoshinari, Gijutsu no higi, 66–67.
Both Eno and Hosono have lengthy résumés not just as musicians but also as record producers, where they use electronic sound technology to work at length with the spatial and textural qualities of an artist’s sound. The similarities do not end there. Hosono—born ten months before Eno—followed Eno’s lead in expanding his style from vocal-based pop music to more abstract instrumentals. Both describe themselves as dabblers and experimenters rather than professional musicians. And both have cultivated an androgynous celebrity image, working to undermine the machismo of the traditional rock star. Eno often performed in drag during his Roxy Music years, while Hosono plays with his gender appearance in images like the cover to the Haruomi Hosono with Friends of Earth album S.F.X. (Another Record Company, 1984). Nakazawa Shinichi proposes Hosono’s music is about exploring femininity from the guise of a male musician. See Hosono, “Taidan: Nakazawa Shinichi,” 73.
See Hosono, Rekōdo purodyūsā wa sūpāman o mezasu. On the spatialization of music production more generally, see Doyle, Echo & Reverb.
Hosono would later make a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to visit a Hopi reservation for the television documentary Subarashiki chikyū no tabi: Damatte suwatte jitto kike ~Neitibu Amerikan oto no tabi~ (Traveling the Wonderful World: Be quiet, sit down, and listen—the Native American soundquest; aired December 15, 1996).
Hosono, Globule, 175; originally in English. Cited in Thaemlitz, “Globule of Non-Standard,” 97.
Hosono and Nakazawa, Kankō. On Exotic Japan, see Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 42–48. For more on the turn to the exotic in 1980s Japan and Hosono’s relationship with the more “cosmic” horizons of outer space, see Roquet, “A Blue Cat on the Galactic Railroad.”
Hosokawa argues Hosono’s solo projects in the mid-1970s sought to complicate images of exotic Asia through complex forms of mimicry and auto-orientalism. Describing Hosono’s Soy-Sauce Music trilogy (Hosono purposefully uses the English term rather than the Japanese), Hosokawa writes that “what is central to the Trilogy is less the North American approach to exoticizing Japan and the Japanese than the Japanese way of exoticising American exoticism.” See Hosokawa, “Soy Sauce Music.” The trilogy includes Tropical Dandy (1973), BonVoyage Co./Taian yōkō (1976), and Paraiso (1978).
While Hosono’s “globule” image was new, exoticism and atmosphere have long been close associates. David Toop traces the origins of ambient music back to Claude Debussy’s visit to the Paris Exposition of 1889, where he first witnessed performances of music and dance from Java, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Japan. The more dispersed modes of attention called for in these musical styles emerged soon after in Debussy’s compositions. Toop cites this as a crucial moment in the lineage of ambient listening leading up through Eno’s work and on toward the present day. Debussy was of course not alone in his growing interest in an atmospheric “Asia,” an aesthetic trajectory shared by many of the most influential European writers and artists of the period. Later ambient musicians in Japan, meanwhile, drew freely from the work of these European and American composers as well as from the work of pioneering Japanese electronic musicians drawing on this work, such as Tomita Isao’s early synthesizer renditions of Debussy, Snowflakes Are Dancing (1974). This proclivity to locate ambience in a more illegible and unfamiliar foreign locale—be it the exotic East or the exotic West—is also found in ambient literature. Ann Sherif writes of Yoshimoto Banana’s interest in the “supernatural potential of exoticized Asian otherworlds,” pointing to the Bali setting of Amrita (1994). In other texts, the healing exotic is located in Europe, as in the Greek isles of Murakami Haruki’s Sputnik Sweetheart (Supūtoniku no koibito, 1999) or the Francophile hotel of Kurita Yuki’s Hôtel Mole (discussed in chapter 6). Toop, Ocean of Sound, 18; Sherif, “Japanese without Apology,” 288. See also Clark, Oriental Enlightenment. On “world music” and Deep Forest, see Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.”
Hosono, “Taidan: Nakazawa Shinichi,” 73; Hosono, F.O.E. Manual. On the history of the Earth image, see Garb, “The Use and Misuse of the Whole Earth Image.”
Hosono, Anbiento doraivā, 18.
The term Hosono uses here, “oceanic feeling,” is often associated with Sigmund Freud but comes from his friend and interlocutor, the religious studies scholar Romain Rolland. Freud sent a copy of his The Future of an Illusion to Rolland after its publication, and Rolland responded in a letter that though he agreed with the book’s comments on religion, he felt the “true source of religious sentiments” had been left out: a feeling of limitless, unbounded eternity Rolland described as the “oceanic feeling.” In the opening pages of Freud’s following work, Civilization and Its Discontents, he describes being greatly troubled by the letter and admits to being unable to discover this oceanic feeling within himself. He then attempts an explanation, describing a process where the ego begins with this feeling of wholeness, with no distinction between inside and outside, but as it matures “gradually separates off an external world from itself.” What becomes the oceanic feeling for adults is a remnant of this original feeling of eternity. While this lingering feeling “might seek something like the restoration of limitless narcissism, it is ousted from its place in the foreground.” Notably, Freud ends the discussion on a conciliatory note, admitting there may indeed be something more to Rolland’s feeling than the “feeling of infantile helplessness” but that “for the present it is wrapped in obscurity.” As William B. Parsons suggests in his study of the concept, two contrasting attitudes are proposed in Freud’s reading: the oceanic feeling as “regressive and defensive,” on the one hand, and “therapeutic and adaptive,” on the other. As Hosono notes, the atmospheres afforded by ambient music often work toward this feeling of oceanic limitlessness, and it is not surprising debates over the social implications of the style (discussed in chapter 6) play out along similar lines to the Freud–Rolland exchange. One way of understanding the role of the “oceanic” in the 1980s is to consider the shift from Freud’s earlier psychological explanation (with reference to the ego) to a more somatic understanding, in which the oceanic feeling marks a particular sensory situation rather than a problem of identity or maturity. I consider this issue further later in the book as well as in Roquet, “A Blue Cat on the Galactic Railroad.” See Minato et al., “Towards a Culture of Ex-stase,” 168–79; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 15, 20–21; Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling, 109.
Cooper, “KALX Berkeley Interview,” n.p. This new home-listening model was put forth most directly in the Warp label’s highly influential Artificial Intelligence compilation from 1992 (the first in a series). The cover shows an android asleep in an armchair in front of a stereo system, with Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd record sleeves scattered nearby. According to Warp cofounder Steve Beckett, this design was chosen in order to signal the arrival of a new type of electronic music not intended for dancing. See Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 183.
Ibid.
Inoue uses the French spelling of “ambient” (ambiant) perhaps as one way to assert his work’s departure from the ambient music preceding it.
On the influence of American pulse-pattern minimalist music on techno, see Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 56.
On the image of the otaku in the 1980s and 1990s, see Ōtsuka, “Otaku” no seishinshi.
This small image of the globe appears on all the releases of FAX’s “world” sublabel, home to artists Namlook releases from outside Germany.
Cooper, “KALX Berkeley Interview,” n.p.
Reynolds, “Chill.” The term itself comes from Kevin Martin, who used it as the title for the fourth volume in Virgin UK’s A Short History of Ambient series, Isolationism (AMBT4, 1994).
Reynolds, “Chill.” See also Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear, viii.
Miyadai points to earlier influential manga like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Miyazaki Hayao, 1982–94) and AKIRA (Ōtomo Katsuhiro, 1982–90). For a sense of the postapocalyptic ambience of the decade, listen to Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score during the ending sequences of the AKIRA anime feature (1988). Later postapocalyptic styles tend to start out after everything has already been swept away (not unlike Hatakeyama’s music). A prominent example in manga is Ashinano Hitoshi’s Yokohama kaidashi kikō (Yokohama shopping log, 1994–2006), discussed in Hairston, “A Healing, Gentle Apocalypse.” In music, consider Ōtomo Yoshihide’s transition from his work with Ground Zero in the early and mid-1990s to the reductionist onkyō-ha styles of the late 1990s and 2000s. On stage the quiet theater movement led by Hirata Oriza in the 1990s made a similar move. Chapter 5 considers this desire to subtract in more detail.
The move to reintegrate electronic music with more traditional instrumentation has led some to use the term “postclassical” to describe recent ambient and minimalist approaches incorporating recognizably classical instrumentation with more contemporary electronic styles.
Another noteworthy album marking this shift in Japan is Onodera Yui’s Entropy (2005).
Hatakeyama Chihei, interview with the author, October 14, 2013. It is difficult to imagine what Adorno would have made of ambient music given his concerns over the “deconcentration” of listening. But there is something in the darker strains of Hatakeyama’s ambience that seems to echo his attempt to find a negative dialectics in sound.
Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear, 24.
Allison’s Precarious Japan provides an overview of these issues and also, in the cumulative experience of reading the book, gives a feeling for the gloomy atmosphere I am describing here.
3. Moving with the Rhythms of the City
For the fascinating story behind the design of a station melody for Shinjuku station, see Ide, Mienai dezain, 8.
Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 67–68.
Ibid., 74.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 89.
For example, Ann Adachi’s touring selection of early Japanese video art, Vital Signals (2009), uses “Body Acts” as one of three main curatorial themes, along with “Explorations of Form” and “Collective Memory.”
Krauss writes of “a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre.” Krauss, “Video,” 50–52; emphasis in original.
Nornes, Forest of Pressure, xxiv, 135.
Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 83.
Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 51–84.
Deleuze and Guattari describe how attempts to depersonalize the self and reach the level of the “cosmos” (achieving a kind of elemental mobility akin to wind and water) always bring with them the danger of dispersing oneself “too quickly,” leading to a fall into an isolated vacuum, what they call a “black hole.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 344.
See Saitō, Hikikomori; Fukue, “Elderly Living Alone Increasingly Dying the Same Way.”
McCarthy, Ambient Television, 225–27.
The two most influential are Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929).
Visual music goes back to early twentieth-century painters like Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger, who began using film to animate their abstract art practice. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Whitney brothers began introducing more psychedelic forms of sound and imagery into the genre. John Whitney later became one of the earliest proponents of computer-based visual music, the most prominent form today. On the landscape tradition in experimental film, see MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine.
See Ross, “Site et spécificité dans le cinéma élargi japonais.”
Anna McCarthy’s Ambient Television (2001) describes the diversification of viewing styles accompanying the spread of television screens into public space. Many writers on television have pointed out the oftentimes distracted nature of television viewing in the home—viewers are often multitasking, having simultaneous conversations, running off to the bathroom, and going off to do other activities during commercial breaks. McCarthy adds to this an awareness of all the ways television screens now serve to shape attention in public spaces as well, with televisions in bars, hospital waiting rooms, airport lounges, and restaurants. Smartphones and tablets have opened up even more opportunities for personal and portable viewing.
Japanese BGV producers include major labels such as Pony Canyon (home of the Virtual Trip series), BMG Japan, and Nihon Columbia, as well as smaller outfits like Takeo (Synforest) and Vicom (Healing Islands). A personal favorite—edging on the ambient—is Nihon Media Play’s Gensō kōjō/Industrial Romanesque series (2006–12), featuring nighttime views of abandoned factories.
Eno’s exhibition is referenced—often critically—in many of the essays in the ambient music special issue of the Japanese magazine UR (1990). While not as explicitly ambient in orientation, Nam-Jun Paik also held exhibitions in Japan a number of times in the early 1980s, culminating in the solo Mostly Video exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (1984).
For an overview of Yamaguchi’s video installation work, see Yamaguchi, Eizō kūkan sōzō.
Video artist Taki Kentarō of Video Art Center Tokyo has led the push for outdoor video art installations in Japan, part of a larger explosion in projection mapping and site-specific video installations.
The work is included on the Vital Signals: Early Japanese Video Art DVD collection (Electronic Arts Intermix, 2010).
Traux, Acoustic Communication, 67.
Arai won the Noma Literary New Face Prize for Vekusashion (Vexations, 1987) and the Akutagawa Prize for Tazunebito no jikan (The time of missing persons, 1988). The title of the first novel is an homage to Satie’s piece of the same name. The condensed milk comment is in Arai, Kankyō bideo no jidai, 10.
See, for example, the Speedometer albums Private (1999) and Sense of Wander (2002).
On the earlier genealogy of the term eizō, see Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality, 39.
This work and Summer Afternoon can be seen on Ise’s Late Then Never DVD (Nibi, 2006).
On the turn to landscape in Japanese photography, see Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan, 180–200.
Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 89.
On list making and its relation to environmental awareness, see Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 35–59.
ARS Electronica, “ARS Electronica Festival 2010.”
Hosono, Anbiento doraivā, 45. This orientational instability is reflected in Tokyo’s wonderful street and subway maps, which are oriented not toward a particular cardinal direction but in whatever direction the map itself happens to be facing.
Michel Chion locates a shift in the balance between sound and vision with the arrival of television. Steven Shaviro provides an eloquent summary of Chion’s argument: “In traditional analog cinema, the images are primary. The coherence of a film comes mostly from its mise en scène, cinematography, and editing. The soundtrack serves as a support for the images. . . . But all this changes in post-cinematic media like television and video. Sound now operates overtly instead of covertly. Instead of sound providing ‘added value’ to the image, now a visual element is ‘nothing more than an extra image,’ working ‘to illustrate or rather decorate’ whatever is spoken on the soundtrack. . . . In this way, ‘television is illustrated radio’; for ‘sound, mainly the sound of speech, is always foremost in television. Never offscreen, sound is always there, in its place, and does not need the image to be identified.’ ” Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect, 78; Chion, Audio-Vision, 158.
DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 87.
4. Soft Fascinations in Shallow Depth
Jansen’s brother and former Japan lead singer, David Sylvian, has long maintained ties with artists in Japan (the country), including collaborations with Sakamoto Ryūichi in the early 1980s. In recent years his Samadhisound label has often worked with Japanese ambient video and visual artists, including Ise and Takagi Masakatsu.
This live version is included on a Japanese DVD of the concert: Steve Jansen, The Occurrence of Slope (P-Vine Records, 2008).
The quote is from Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, 8. For an overview and critique of this discourse in Japan in the context of Murakami Takashi’s “superflat,” see Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 111–14.
This was typical of the postmodern theory of the “new academicism” in the early 1980s, as well as Azuma’s much later study of postmodern “database” aesthetics. See Asada Akira’s best-selling Kōzō to chikara and Tōsōron and Azuma’s Otaku.
As Lamarre notes, the “exploded projection can implicate a greater degree of instrumentalization and rationalization than Cartesian perspectivalism, because it operates well under conditions of movement, and it proves amenable to temporary inhabitation by a variety of modern subject effects.” Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 113–23, 308.
Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 77.
Lamarre argues that “it is only in relation to Western geometric perspective that orthogonal perspective has been deemed unsystematic or disorderly” and proposes the need to “acknowledge the instrumentality and rationality implicit in the distributive image.” The Anime Machine, 120, 122, 308.
Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 15. For a related argument about surface as the basis of self in a Japanese online context, see Nozawa, “The Gross Face and Virtual Fame.”
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 260.
Manovich, Software Takes Command, 267.
Ibid., 281. See my earlier discussion of Eno and Hosono as producers in chapter 2.
Ibid., 261.
Brian Eno, for example, asks, “Why not regard [television] as the late 20th Century’s way of making paintings?” See Eno, “My Light Years.”
Ibid., 285.
See Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 65–92.
Kaplan, Kaplan, and Ryan, With People in Mind, 18–19.
Kaplan, “The Restorative Benefits of Nature,” 173.
Kaplan, Kaplan, and Ryan, With People in Mind, 2.
The term uncanny valley comes from robot researcher Mori Masahiro, who uses it to describe the revulsion triggered when the ability to visually perceive the difference between human and robot begins to blur. See Mori, “Bukimi no tani genshō.”
Ishida, “STILL/ALIVE,” 99.
On the triptych and figure/ground relations, see Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 62–70.
Takei and Keane, Sakuteiki, 54, 189. I know I said I would resist comparisons with earlier moments in Japanese aesthetic history, but I couldn’t resist this one.
For example, Moriyama Daidō is a Japanese photographer well known for shooting photographs in the streets with a small point-and-shoot-style camera. For Moriyama the point-and-shoot camera, though it may not have all the manual controls and high image quality of larger models, has the crucial advantage of being unintimidating to the random passersby on the street he chooses to photograph, allowing him to capture them at their most unguarded. This style of environmental engagement has affinities with the “actualities” of the early days of filmmaking, when the camera setup was similarly self-contained and lenses were often trained on the everyday movements of humans, cars, and animals, as in the films of the Lumière brothers. My thinking in this chapter is inspired in part by Mary Ann Doane’s argument this early interest in seemingly random urban events might be understood as a search for contingency in a social environment both increasingly chaotic and increasingly controlled. Furuhata notes connections between these early actualities and the late-1960s landscape theory movement in Japan. The latter’s turn to “diagramming the landscape” provides an interesting contrast to the type of environmental engagement I describe here. See the documentary Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog of Tokyo (Fujii Kenjirō, 2001); Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time; Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality, 124.
Journal for People was released as a two-disc CD/DVD set by Carpark Records in 2006.
These works are available on Kawamura Yuki, Slide (DVD, Lowave, 2005). The music in these videos is by Hanno Yoshihiro.
Rama and Aura are available on Takagi Masakatsu, World Is So Beautiful (DVD, Daisyworld Discs, 2003, and Carpark Records, 2006), while Birdland, mentioned later, appears on Journal for People.
Included on Ise’s Late Then Never DVD.
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 322; Bizzocchi, “Video as Ambience,” n.p.
These videos are included as bonus material on The Occurrence of Slope DVD (see note 2).
5. Subtractivism
Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 41.
Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 4.
For example, see Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness.
Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film, 324.
Oshii, for example, notes the central importance of the drifting, atmospheric, and plotless montage sequences in his anime features, like the rainy night sequence in Ghost in the Shell (Kōkaku kidōtai, 1995). For Oshii these scenes are important for depicting “not the drama itself, but the world that the characters inhabit.” Quote from Jonathan Ross’s interview with Oshii in episode 1 of the BBC documentary Asian Invasion (aired January 10, 2006).
Murakami’s “Tony Takitani” first appeared in 1990 in the literary magazine Bungei shunjū and then in a longer version the following year. It was later anthologized in the 1996 Murakami collection Rekishinton no yūrei (The ghost of Lexington). The New Yorker published an English translation by Jay Rubin in 2002. The film version traveled widely and won a number of awards, including the Fipresci Prize and the Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Locarno International Film Festival, runner-up for Best Soundtrack at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the Grand Prize at the Takasaki Film Festival, as well as a string of nominations, including the Grand Jury prize at Sundance. The film received positive reviews in all the major American papers, with Variety posting one of the few skeptical pieces. See Elley, “Review: ‘Tony Takitani.’ ”
For a thorough comparison of differences between the short story and the film, see Thornbury, “History, Adaptation, Japan.”
The 2006 DVD of the film released by Axiom in the United Kingdom includes a making-of documentary focusing on this outdoor shoot.
Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul, 82.
Ibid., 65. This in itself was already a step away from the “molar” model of the Cartesian self toward a more “molecular” understanding of the employee as an assemblage of traits and skills. For an insightful parallel history of management psychology in the United Kingdom, see Rose, Governing the Soul, 55–119.
Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul, 103.
Maeda, Text and the City, 203.
Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought, 46.
Maeda traces this shift toward self-improvement as an end in itself by following its emergence in popular fiction, particularly the novels of Kikuchi Kan. He demonstrates how this strand of popular literature gradually abandoned larger social themes and narrowed its focus to documenting upper-class familial concerns. This helped reimagine Meiji social imperatives through a framework of individual success, just as the private sphere was becoming increasingly visible as a topic for public discussion and government regulation. Maeda, Text and the City, 203.
Rose, Governing the Soul, 118.
Japan’s first “self-development seminar” (jikokeihatsu seminā), based on the American self-realization model, was held in 1977. Koike, Serapii bunka no shakaigaku, 90. See chapter 6 for more on the emerging “healing boom.”
This idea of the 1960s student movements being driven by unruly emotion is a common theme in Murakami’s work, as in his breakthrough 1987 novel Norwegian Wood. The therapeutic orientation toward life is also readily evident in Murakami’s own writing practice, in which he emphasizes self-discipline and parallels with his long-distance-running practice. In memoirs like What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, Murakami envisions writing as a potentially “toxic” practice that needs to be paired with healthy exercise—implicitly casting earlier Japanese author’s tendencies toward alcoholism and suicide as (to paraphrase Tony) “just immature.” For more on Murakami’s role in the development of ambient literature, see the following chapter.
Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 6. Ichikawa himself started out as a director of television advertisements in the mid-1980s. An early spot won the Golden Lion at the 1985 Cannes International Advertising Festival, and this led to an invitation to direct his debut feature, BU-SU (1987). While their films have little in common, Ōbayashi Nobuhiko’s move from television advertising to feature film directing in the late 1970s served as an important precedent for Ichikawa’s later career. The slower aesthetic available in film proved appealing to others in the television industry as well, most notably Kitano Takeshi, who from the late 1980s began pairing his persona as an over-the-top television personality with a more contemplative and minimalist approach to filmmaking. Ichikawa’s early films were still in a faster style, but with the part-fiction, part-documentary Dying at a Hospital (Byōin de shinu koto, 1993) and subsequent series of Ozu Yasujirō–inspired works, he began to slow everything down. At the turn of the century, Ichikawa tried, with mixed results, to eschew his restrained style for something more upbeat in films like Tadon and Chikuwa (Tadon to Chikuwa, 1998), Tokyo Marigold (2001), and Ryoma’s Wife, Her Husband and Her Lover (Ryoma to tsuma to sono otto to aijin, 2002). In adapting Murakami’s short story, however, he moved back toward the quiet style for which he was known. On Ōbayashi’s career, see Roquet, “Obayashi Nobuhiko, Vagabond of Time.” Abé Casio’s Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano is a full-length study of the relationship between Kitano’s film and television personas. For more on Ichikawa’s career, see the posthumous tribute volume edited by Kawade shobō shinsha, Ichikawa Jun.
Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, 336.
DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 149–150. McGuinness and Overy gloss cosubjectivity and intersubjectivity as a difference between “communion” and “communication,” hinting at the important role religious architectures once played in affording cosubjective experience. McGuiness and Overy, “Music, Consciousness, and the Brain,” 245.
Edo (as Tokyo was known prior to 1868) was different in this respect. Comparing Edo travel guides and those from the Meiji era (1868–1912), Maeda notes a shift in focus: whereas Edo guides led visitors to places where people gathered to interact with one another in work and play, Meiji guides pointed to where the individual traveler could go on their own and see the sights. If Edo’s appeal still focused on intersubjective encounters, then Meiji Tokyo offered cosubjective sights for the solitary tourist. In this Meiji model of sightseeing, however, a visitor was still attending directly to the space itself. A different relationship to the environment emerged moving into the postwar period, when Japanese cities gradually became more rationalized and anonymous through the emergence of spaces designed first around mobility and efficiency and later around the comforts of amenity culture. Maeda, Text and the City, 83. See also Yoshimi, “The Market of Ruins.”
On the Polis urban studies website, Peter Sigrist blogs what he calls an “Embarrassing Ode to McDonald’s as an Open Public Office Space.” He describes spending long hours working at a McDonald’s restaurant chain, despite thinking McDonald’s is “completely lame.” Why? He cites dependable Wi-Fi access, no pressure to buy anything, the energy of having other people around, efficiency, cleanliness, low prices, and a smoke-free environment. As Nick Kaufman points out in the comment section, “Whereas at the indie coffee shop you might feel like you are imposing or that someone is breathing down your neck, at big chains you can find anonymity [and] a lack of guilt.” As Kaufman points out, the appeal of the big generic chain café or family restaurant is how it can serve as a mostly anonymous container for private use. The store design and the people who temporarily inhabit it provide a baseline energetic vibe but otherwise remain as ignorable as possible. In turn, customers can expect to be ignored themselves as long as they contribute an unobtrusive but amiable energy to the shared space. Rather than simply write off these generic containers as culturally empty “nonplaces,” Sigrist proposes we might acknowledge what these spaces of anonymity afford. Standardized and generic environments allow for a specific form of public engagement—or perhaps more accurately, public disengagement. They provide a space to be with others but not have to attend to them as discreet individuals. Sigrist, “Embarrassing Ode to McDonald’s as an Open Public Office Space.”
Fukasawa, Shisō toshite no “Mujirushi ryōhin,” 17.
On discourse surrounding postmodernism in 1980s Japan, see Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts.”
Saitō’s argument here echoes Christopher Lasch’s much earlier analysis of postmodern art and literature in The Minimal Self (1984). Unlike Lasch, however, Saitō (rather vaguely) asserts this apparent form of social withdrawal, at least when “used intentionally in an artistic context,” also “does reality a service.” He doesn’t elaborate what this means but gives a clue in his description of the works of sculptor Ōmaki Shinji (1971–), which “bring discontinuity to the experience of the observer and force a mood change.” Saitō, “Floating and Disassociation,” 85–87.
Arai, Kankyō bideo no jidai, 92–94. Ueno describes a similar impulse in <Watashi> sagashi gēmu, 86.
Arai, Kankyō bideo no jidai, 9, 84.
Ibid., 19–20, 95.
Thomas H. Davenport has pointed to an “attention crisis” emerging as a result of the rapid growth of information exposure in everyday life, particularly with the more recent rise of networked digital media. Davenport argues contemporary information societies are moving toward an “attention economy.” His logic runs as follows: it is wrong to speak of an “information economy,” since information is overabundant. The main resource information consumes is attention, and thus in an age oriented around information, attention becomes the true commodity. Davenport thus sees the currency of this new economy gradually shifting from money to attention. See Davenport, The Attention Economy.
Richard Lanham notes how the attention economy puts a greater emphasis on rhetorical style: “The devices that regulate attention are stylistic devices. Attracting attention is what style is all about. If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style. It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance switch places.” Copious examples could be put forth here, but I’ll stick with one clearly working with both novelty and scale: the exploding-sound (bakuon) film screening. Pioneered by rock critic Higuchi Yasuhito and the Baus Theatre in Kichijōji (Tokyo), the exploding-sound screening brings large rock concert speaker stacks into the movie theater and presents films with the volume turned up to eleven, often accompanied by a remixed soundtrack designed to make the added loudness more effectively visceral and pummeling. As a way to draw film viewers back into the theater, exploding sound brings scale and novelty home viewing cannot hope to compete with (of course, the novelty will eventually wear off, and hearing damage might dull bakuon’s volume advantage). Meanwhile, advertisers continually seek to tap preconscious forms of awareness not requiring focused attention but nonetheless influencing behavior. For example, Steve Goodman has written of “earworms,” advertising jingles designed to wiggle their way into a person’s unconscious without the need for them to consciously attend to the sounds themselves. See Lanham, The Economics of Attention, xiii–xii; Higuchi, Eiga wa bakuon de sasayaku 99–09; Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 141.
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 157, 143.
Ibid., 271, 128–29. The quote is from Muschamp, “Blueprint.”
While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, the subtractivism I describe here might be productively contrasted with Koichi Iwabuchi’s arguments for why Japanese consumer electronics like the Sony Walkman can pass as “culturally odorless” when exported abroad. See Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 27–28.
Yoshimi links this directly back to the atmosphere of the late-1960s student protests: “Far from being postmodern, the extremely independent and provocative spirit foregrounded in Parco’s advertising was an avant-garde as if it had been directly inherited from the young radicals of the ’60s.” Yoshimi, “The Market of Ruins,” 293.
Ibid., 298–99.
Yoshimi presents this as the third major overhaul of the Tokyo landscape in the twentieth century. The first followed the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, which led to an urban structure based on “living in a residential suburb, commuting to a city-centre office on one of the private railway lines spreading out from central termini, and shopping in Ginza at the weekends.” The second emerged during the period of rapid economic growth spurred by the massive infrastructure projects accompanying the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, like the bullet train and the Metropolitan Expressway. Unlike these first two historical moments, the 1980s transformation consisted not of large-scale construction projects but of the blending of the various urban districts into a more homogenous transnational information culture built around global capital. Once-distinct neighborhoods like Shibuya were overrun with discount national and transnational chains of the type once found only in the suburbs. Yoshimi, “The Market of Ruins,” 297.
Tanaka, Tezawari no media o motomete. Cited in Yoshimi, “The Market of Ruins,” 296–97.
Quoted in Holloway and Hones, “Muji, Materiality, and Mundane Geographies,” 557.
Ibid., 558. As the authors go on to note, there is an inherent paradox in branding the no-style style: Muji’s products claim not to attract attention to their presence, and yet this mundaneness itself “becomes the keynote of its recognizable Mujiness.” See also Fukasawa, Shisō toshite no “Mujirushi ryōhin.”
See the next chapter for more on the gender politics of the healing style persona.
There are other connections to 1980s Japanese fashion among the makers of the film as well. As noted earlier, Ichikawa first gained recognition as an award-winning creator of TV commercials in the 1980s, including many fashion ads. Hirokawa Taishi, the director of photography, first achieved recognition as an art photographer in the mid-1980s for a project in which he took a wagon full of clothing by then-prominent Japanese designers like Yamamoto, Kawakubo Rei, and Miyake Issey to rural parts of the country and asked farmers, fishermen, and other laborers to pose in the outfits while he took their photographs. See Hirokawa, Sonomama sonomama. For more on Japanese fashion in the 1980s, see Skov, “Fashion Trends, Japonisme, and Postmodernism.”
As Billboard magazine notes in an article entitled “Sakamoto’s ‘Energy Flow’ Enlivens Japan.”
See Ichikawa’s comments in the liner notes to the soundtrack (Commmons/Avex, 2007).
See Yamane for a fuller reading of the position of Tony’s wife in Murakami’s original story (in which she is nameless). Thornbury notes if Eiko is fifteen years younger than Tony, she was born around the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. This means she grew up amid the heights of the high-growth period and, I would add, as part of the first generation to fully embrace personal mood regulation as a way of life. Yamane, “Zettai-teki kodoku no monogatari,” 21; Thornbury, “History, Adaptation, Japan,” 163.
The classic study is Mertens, American Minimal Music.
Yamane, “Zettai-teki kodoku no monogatari,” 23.
Seo, “Namae kara no tōhi,” 63.
It is worth noting the album version of Sakamoto’s score does feature moments of hesitation mixed in with the melancholic drift; places where the melody seems to get stuck on a single note, as if the repetition was threatening to break down. Little of this made it into the film itself, however.
Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 135–48.
Discussed in Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 14–15.
Dargis, “He’s an Isolated Fellow; She’s Addicted to Shopping.”
Washida, Mōdo no meikyū, 8.
6. Healing Style
Iyashi is a nominalization of the verb iyasu, meaning to heal or mend both physically and psychologically. The word in its current usage first appeared in the context of anthropologist Ueda Noriyuki’s medical ethnography of a Sri Lankan village entitled “Akumabari: Iyashi no kosumorojii” (Exorcizing devils: The cosmology of healing; later published as Ueda, Kakusei no nettowāku). The term was picked up by a Yomiuri shimbun journalist covering an Ueda lecture and emerged—seven years later—as a popular expression in advertising and other media.
McNicol, “Designs for Life,” 35.
The Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995, killed, injured, and displaced thousands. As investigations progressed into the inordinate number of “earthquake-safe” buildings that had collapsed, it became clear widespread government corruption and graft had been the mainstay during the years of high economic growth. Barely two months later, doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyō committed Japan’s worst terrorist attack to date, spreading toxic gas through rush-hour Tokyo commuter trains just steps away from the national legislature. Again, details of the attack showed the incident had social implications reaching well beyond the event itself. Many members of Aum were highly educated young men and women from comfortable backgrounds. That such “ordinary” Japanese youth had turned against the nation reinforced the impression Japanese society as a whole was at fault. These incidents came in the wake of intensive media coverage of a number of brutal homicides committed by young boys alongside less violent but more widespread instances of youth delinquency such as compensated dating (enjo kōsai), bullying, and chronic absenteeism from school. See Leheny, Think Global, Fear Local, 27–48.
Tanaka, Kenkōhō to iyashi no shakaishi, 9.
See Watanabe, Ninniku kenkōhō.
Tanaka, Kenkōhō to iyashi no shakaishi, 30. The natural healing boom built on the growing interest in personal health management. Japan’s first fitness center, Nakano’s Tokyo Athletic Club, started in 1969, and others soon started opening around the country following the arrival of the Big Box fitness center in Takadanobaba, Tokyo, in 1974.
Ibid., 32–34.
Rose describes this as a “sense that some, perhaps all, persons, though existentially healthy are actually asymptomatically or pre-symptomatically ill.” Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 19.
Nakamata, Bungaku, 32.
Ibid., 32–34.
Sherif, “Japanese without Apology,” 279.
Literary critic Yoshida Nobuko discusses these three authors in “Banana Girls,” n.p.
The critical establishment has also taken note: Kurita won the 2002 Subaru Literature Prize for her debut work, Hamizabesu, and Onuiko Terumii (2003), Oteru Moru (2005), and Maruko no yume (2005) have each been nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most high-profile literary award. For a more recent Kurita novel revisiting many of the ambient strategies and healing themes discussed here, see Tamagomachi (2014).
Higashi, “Shohyō ‘Oteru Moru’ Kurita Yuki,” 347.
Yoshida, “Shohyō ‘Onuiko Terumii’ Kurita Yuki,” 291; Kakuta, Yotte iitai yoru mo aru, 102.
Kurita, Hamizabesu, 203. Nakamata also connects an easy-to-read style with the healing quality of Murakami Haruki’s novels. Nakamata, Bungaku, 32.
Kurita, Hamizabesu, 204.
Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 9.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 12.
Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 25.
Ibid., 12.
Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System, 149–51. See note 2 of the introduction.
The spiritual retreat is among the Sri Lankan healing traditions described in Ueda, Kakusei no nettowāku.
The small pocket-size Japanese paperback format (bunkobon) was first produced by Iwanami in the 1920s.
Nakamata, Bungaku, 29. Murakami explicitly invokes the camera as narrator in Afutā dāku (2004, translated by Jay Rubin as After Dark, 2007).
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 3. Deleuze describes how with such an empty subjectivity “the connection of the parts of space is not given, because it can come about only from the subjective point of view of a character who is, nevertheless, absent, or has even disappeared, not simply out of the frame, but passed into the void.” Deleuze, Cinema 2, 8. Gumbrecht similarly notes how a literary atmosphere “enables the reader to inhabit worlds of sensation—worlds that feel like physical environments.” Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 75.
Kakuta, Yotte iitai yoru mo aru, 102. On the writerly/readerly distinction, see Barthes, S/Z, 5.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7.
Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 75.
Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” 34.
Kakuta, Yotte iitai yoru mo aru, 103.
Ibid. Note the parallel here with the flexible controls of neoliberal governmentality Foucault points out: as long as the overall system continues to function, a high degree of freedom can be tolerated at the local level.
Quoted in Kuroko, “ ‘Iyashi-kyō’ ni kogareru wakamonotachi,” 158.
Ibid., 160–61. Notably, gustatory concerns seem to be a common feature of the debate. Murakami’s characters relish their meals as much as Yoshimoto enjoys her cake. In both cases, advocates of a literature of critique cannot seem to stomach bringing fiction down to the level of more proximate (and supposedly less rational) senses like taste and touch.
Sherif, “Japanese without Apology,” 299–300.
Morioka, Mutsū bunmeiron; Asada, “Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism;” Yoda, “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society,” 884.
Lasch, The Minimal Self, 19.
Ibid., 58.
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 10.
Oguma and Ueno, <Iyashi> no nashonarizumu; Yagi, <Iyashi> toshite no sabetsu. For a critique of the influence of therapy culture on education in the United Kingdom, see Furedi, Therapy Culture. For a recent argument similar to Yagi’s but in an Anglophone context, see Ahmed, Willful Subjects.
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 153.
For example, Elizabeth Le Guin writes of using relaxation music as a retreat from the stresses and pressures of a patriarchal society—even as she simultaneously recognizes the music itself does nothing directly to remedy the situation. Le Guin, “Uneasy Listening.”
The blanket dismissal of “trigger warnings” by some self-identified leftists during recent debates in the English-language academy falls prey to a similar problem: by diagnosing any and all content warnings as capitulation to an oversensitive therapy culture, the diversity of possible student responses to course content is erased in favor of an idealized and unemotional critical subject. On the lure of the strong critical persona for the reader, see Bull, Anti-Nietzsche. Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid reading in Touching Feeling (123–52) raises similar points. For an excellent analysis of the figure of the oversensitive student and its complex relationship to neoliberalism, see Ahmed, “Against Students.”
Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul, 19.
Ibid., 20.
Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan, 9.
See McGee, Self-Help, Inc.
“Black corporation” (burakku kigyō) is a Japanese term referring to a company engaged in exploitative labor practices, often related to forced overtime, power harassment, and poor working conditions. The term first emerged in the IT industry around the turn of the century. See Mie, “Black kigyo.”
Kurita, “Kurita Yuki.”
Higashi, “Shohyō ‘Oteru Moru’ Kurita Yuki,” 347.
See Matsuura, “Dai 26-kai Subaru bungakushō jushōsha intabyū,” 186. For the classic study of emotional labor, see Hochschild, The Managed Heart.
Conclusion
Rose, Governing the Self, 260.
For one version of this story, see Toop, Ocean of Sound, 139.
Hosono and Yoshinari, Gijutsu no higi, 66–67.
Code, ed. Unfinished, 31–33.
Arai, Kankyō bideo no jidai, 88.
Matsuura, “Dai 26-kai Subaru bungakushō jushōsha intabyū,” 186.
Hosokawa traces the emergence of weak listening through Muzak, John Cage, and Brian Eno. Hosokawa, Rekōdo no bigaku, 303–38.
See Washida, <Yowasa> no chikara.
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 148; emphasis in original.
See Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger.
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