In October 2023, Hibiya was hot like summer, and the city teemed with foreign tourists. Tokyo International Film Festival opened with Perfect Days, which was on everyone’s lips due to Koji Yakusho winning Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. Once I sat in my seat and the movie theater became dark, I watched Hirayama, played by Koji Yakusho, waking up in a small, old apartment room. I was drawn into it the second he awoke in his wooden six-tatami mat room. The film is set in Japan and is in Japanese, but there’s no doubt it’s Wenders’ film. I knew it would be an essential work even before the end credits played, especially for creators that go back and forth between Japan and abroad. No other film had succeeded in translating the image of Tokyo in the 2020s into a visual language. This visualization of the city will become a common language for those who live in Japan and those from abroad to communicate with. We’ll be able to say, “That Tokyo.” The new year has rolled in, and several months have passed, yet the reverberations of Perfect Days remain. 

The Tokyo portrayed in Perfect Days is unmistakably the reflection of Tokyo today. Hirayama, played by Koji Yakusho, is a bathroom cleaner who lives in a small residence on the east side of Tokyo with a view of Sky Tree. The area he works in is on the west side of Tokyo, and the public bathrooms he works at are part of The Tokyo Toilet project in Shibuya. On weekdays, Hirayama always wakes up early in the morning without an alarm because someone sweeping outside wakes him up. He brushes his teeth, waters his plants, changes into his cleaner uniform, and leaves the house after fetching his belongings like a watch and some cash. He’s a cash-only person; he doesn’t use QR code payment. He rides a Daihatsu Hijet Cargo, commonly used as a delivery van. It’s a car for laborers. Hirayama goes from the east to the west of Tokyo with a canned coffee for breakfast and music playing from a cassette tape. Here, Wenders illustrates a realistic rhythm of people living on the outskirts of Tokyo, heading from downtown to uptown. This scene, which realistically shows the stark economic differences between the east and west, is handled with perfect balance precisely because Wenders is the master of road movies. The view of the road, lit by the morning sun, will feel familiar to those who know his work. It also appears in Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Wenders’ 1989 film on Yohji Yamamoto. 

In pursuit of the image of Tokyo

The days when foreign tourists couldn’t be seen in the city have disappeared. In 2003, there were 5.21 million foreign visitors and 25 million by 2023. The number multiplied by 5 in two decades. After overcoming a period marked by a slump due to the pandemic, the number of monthly visitors entering the country at the end of 2023 surpassed the number in pre-covid 2019. Sightseeing destinations like Kyoto and Niseko are full of tourists from abroad, but Tokyo is the same. There are moments when it feels like over half of the people in Ginza and Omotesando are visiting from abroad. With the help of Japan’s weak yen, the number of people drawn to Tokyo has increased. What sort of idea of Tokyo are the foreign visitors chasing after? 

A famous example of a film that successfully visualized Tokyo in the past is Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). The film, which continues to enchant audiences abroad, offers a glimpse of Tokyo culture from an outside perspective. Conflicting cultures, such as technology, karaoke, cosplay, clubs, fetish culture, fashion, music, TV programs, and traditional culture, are mixed and woven within the city. She creates an unidentifiable image of Tokyo that “economic animals” reside in. Figures such as Hiroshi Fujiwara, the late chief editor of DUNE, Fumihiro Hayashi, Kunichi Nomura, who was involved in the location scouting process, and HIROMIX make cameos. The 2003 film captured the hearts of audiences, especially in Europe and America, who were searching for a city where novelty and exoticism coexisted. If you ask the hotel staff, you can actually listen to the tracks that Nigo selected at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, the backdrop for Lost in Translation. Even today, two decades after the film’s release, people visit the city and the Park Hyatt Tokyo to chase after the elusive idea of Tokyo in the film, and they haven’t ceased. I should point out that the film illustrates life in the west side of Tokyo, such as Shibuya and Shinjuku. 

On the contrary, in the sense that anyone can access it, the Tokyo depicted in Perfect Days is approachable. It’s not the kind of Tokyo you can’t tap into if you don’t know anyone; it’s not a best-kept secret. It comprises parks, izakaya bars, old bookstores, laundromats, apartments made from wood, bathrooms in west Tokyo, the landscape of a city where its urban development never seems to end, and streets that connect the east to the west. For many Tokyoites, such everyday views aren’t rare, as they’ve encountered them at least once. 

A film that was born because it didn’t start out as one

According to the producer and co-screenwriter of Perfect Days, Takuma Takasaki, and co-producer and financer, Koji Yanai, this film was born from various coincidences. The film’s setting, The Tokyo Toilet, is a set of public bathrooms in the Shibuya ward. In terms of toilets, in In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki, he asserts that the mystique and distinct beauty of toilets lie in their gloominess, but what do you, dear reader, think? The Tokyo Toilet is a project in which legendary architects and designers shed light on the shadows of bathrooms. The 17 bathrooms, made by world-renowned architects and designers like Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Nigo, and Mark Newson, were born from Fast Retailing’s Koji Yanai’s curation. Perfect Days 
emerged from Koji Yanai and Takuma Takasaki casually brainstorming how to get people to use The Tokyo Toilet bathrooms cleanly. A conversation between Takasaki and Yanai detailing the film’s genesis is in the December 2023 issue, the Perfect Days issue, of SWITCH in Japanese, so I’d recommend you read it*1.

A film made from the opposite end of Hollywood

Wenders is undeniably the master of road movies. The trilogy of Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas (1984), a film set in Texas, USA, that cemented his icon status, are all road movies. Perfect Days, going back and forth between the east and the west side of Tokyo is also a road movie. Wenders is also known as a director with a rebellious spirit against Hollywood films*2. One of his inspirations is the films of Yasujiro Ozu, stemming from the opposite end of Hollywood. About the director, Wenders passionately says, “I still think his cinema is truly world cinema…by not being part of the empire of the American census… but by being its own empire.” 

When I think about Ozu’s body of work, I’m reminded of a debate between Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Junichiro Tanizaki in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Bungeiteki Na Amari Ni Bungeiteki Na (1927). Tanizaki posits that the most crucial factors for a novel are an exciting plot and narrative structure, while Akutagawa argues that there’s also a lot of value in a book that doesn’t have much of a story. Ozu’s films are made from elements that Akutagawa approved of. His works are quiet and have an atmosphere developed from movie sets with meticulous details and beautiful camerawork. There are no bizarre scenes or synopses, but what does exist is this richness born from the continuous changes in the subtle textures. That itself is a work of art. Wenders has been making films with the influence of Ozu, and Perfect Days is a perfect projection of the director’s experience of Japanese cinema. 

Ozu’s Hirayama, Wenders and Takasaki’s Hirayama

Takuma Takasaki gave the protagonist of Perfect Days the name Hirayama, which often appears in Ozu’s films, but according to Takasaki, it was a total coincidence*3. In Ozu’s films, the best-known Hirayamas are Shukichi Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), the protagonist in Tokyo Story (1953), and Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) in An Autumn Afternoon (1962). The everyday lives of the Hirayamas in Ozu’s films seem like they were the norm for Japanese people at the time, but that wasn’t the case. Japan was still poor in the 60s. Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den (1970) was made after An Autumn Afternoon, but it’s set in a poor and rough city. Nagisa Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan (1959) was created in the 50s, like Tokyo Story, but again, the setting is a rough Tokyo, and the protagonist is a poor child. Even though these films existed in the same Showa era, the worlds Ozu built were rich. 

In Tokyo Story, among Hirayama’s children are a private physician and a teacher, respectively, and in An Autumn Afternoon, the protagonist Hirayama holds an important role at a corporation in the Marunouchi area, and many of the characters are white-collar workers*4.

*1 An interview with the people involved in the making of Perfect Days is on the official account of Bitters End, the distribution company for the film. It’s interesting to watch it paired with the film. 

*2 Hollywood films are known for gun fights, war, heroic tales, love stories, the bottom pit of capitalism, and the American Dream. Many of them have scenes that could actually happen in American society. It can be said that the reality of American culture has given Hollywood films a sense of reality, but it can’t be said the same films seem realistic in other countries. 

*3 This anecdote is mentioned in a short interview with the co-screenwriter and producer of Perfect Days, Takuma Takasaki, in POSTGENDAI, an online magazine. 
https://postgendai.com/blogs/postgendai_dictionary/takuma_takasaki

*4 In An Autumn Afternoon, the marriage arrangement of Hirayama’s daughter, Michiko Hirayama (Shima Iwashita), comes up, and one can tell that Hirayama leads an affluent life from the fashion in the film. Hanae Mori designed the costumes for Shima Iwashita. Hirayama’s furniture and the Japanese restaurant in the film all look like they could be in Katei Gaho. 

In Perfect Days, in a scene where Hirayama’s sister appears in a Lexus with a personal driver, we discover that Hirayama comes from a wealthy family but left them of his own volition and lives quietly on the east side of Tokyo. It made me wonder if Hirayama from Perfect Days could be a relative of the Hirayamas from Ozu’s films. 

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy opens with, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Many films made in the same period as Ozu’s are set in a world rife with social issues. Perhaps Ozu, who was drafted into the military in World War II and led a turbulent life, chose happy worlds of their own kind as the settings of his films because he felt his aesthetic could stand out precisely because the settings are alike. 

Hirayama from Perfect Days was given the role of cleaning bathrooms. Unlike the one in Ozu’s and Kurosawa’s era, the Tokyo he lives in is one after Japan’s rapid economic growth. Tokyo, which overcame the “lost 20 years” after the economic bubble burst, isn’t a place where Hollywood-esque stories could shine. Through Hirayama’s life, we’re reminded of the richness of everyday life in Tokyo, which we’re prone to forget. Watching him spritz water on his plants, taking photos of komorebi (sunlight through the trees)*5, falling asleep while reading, and dreaming, I can see that he understands the fulfillment of such a life. It makes me want to agree with him quietly*6.

Opposing the gaze of Orientalism

In 2023, Japan ranked first worldwide on the Nation Brands Index (NBI) for the first time*7. I believe rankings have little meaning, but I didn’t expect Japan to be number one worldwide in the same year a prominent film from Japan was released. 

Perfect Days is captivating audiences across the globe, not just in Japan. At the Cannes Film Festival last year, Koji Yakusho, who plays Hirayama, won Best Actor, and the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film this year. In January, it was number one at the box office in Italy, and the other day, an event held at the Chinese Theater the night before the American release was a success. 

Other countries will inevitably view Japanese films made with an international audience in mind through an Orientalist gaze. What they seek is the essence of the East. Many films have managed to meet such expectations. Akira Kurosawa, mentioned above, and Takeshi Kitano, who makes films about human relationships in the underbelly of society, could be examples. The same could be said about films that extracted social issues that became topical in Japan and illustrated them in a way foreign audiences can understand. The same gaze is probably on Perfect Days, but the Tokyo that Wenders, a foreign director, captured manages to neutralize such extreme expectations. 

The notion that imported things are supreme is ingrained in Japanese people. This is to be expected because people have been borderline overdosing on music, literature, and fashion from the West, and especially American culture. As a result, aside from the reverse import of Japanese content, a strange phenomenon in which Japanese people, living on the opposite end of Western society, don’t appreciate Japanese content tends to occur*8. It becomes clear that Hirayama is also strongly influenced by Western culture, as he prefers American music and novels. The production team, like Takuma Takasaki and Koji Yanai, is probably the same. They met Wenders, someone who has been following Japanese films for around five decades, and portrayed the contemporary image of Tokyo; that’s one significant story in itself. 

Perfect Days’ idea of Tokyo has given new meaning to Tokyo. The landscape of Tokyo that we know was spread to the world; one of the film’s successes lies in how we can talk about it regardless of where we’re from. The last scene where Nina Simone‘s ‘Feeling Good’ plays is inside Hirayama’s van as he drives it. The inside of a car is a small space that can exist anywhere in the world, not just in Tokyo. The scene stirs something within us; our own memories of life flicker in our minds. Much like Hirayama feeling the sound of the car engine in the driver’s seat as he goes from east to west of Tokyo, we, too, feel the hum of contemporary Tokyo in our seats in the movie theater. 

*5 Donata Wenders took some of the images of the komorebi in the film, which were exhibited at 104 Gallery from December 22nd, 2023, to January 20th, 2024, under the title KOMOREBI DREAMS: supported by THE TOKYO TOILET Art Project/MASTERMIND. 

*6 In an essay in Murakami Asahido, Haruki Murakami uses the term “simple pleasure” to mean small but certain happiness. This can also be applied to Hirayama’s daily life. It signifies the fulfilling feeling of mundane yet certain pleasures in everyday life, such as drinking a cold beer after working out. 

*7 Anholt-GfK Nation Brands Index uses six criteria to evaluate certain countries: culture, people, tourism, exports, governance, and immigration and investment. Japan was ranked first for the first time in 2023. 
You can look at the past rankings on Wikipedia. Until Trump got elected in 2016, the US was almost always at the top. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_branding 

*8 The dancing of Min Tanaka, who appears as a houseless person in the film, can be seen in Somebody Comes into the Light (music by Jun Miyake), a short film. Speaking on dancing, he touches on Ame-no-Uzume’s dancing, which appears in the Kojiki. Today, dance in the West is predominantly founded on ballet. Initially, different dances existed everywhere among indigenous groups, but they became extinct because of colonialism and the changing times. He mentioned that thinking within a Western framework can be limiting if we were to return to the idea of dance. It speaks to Wenders’ ideas regarding Hollywood films.

Translation Lena Grace Suda

The post Notebook on Fashion and Society Part 3: A New Vision of Tokyo in “Perfect Days”—A Quiet Beauty Born from an Imperfect City and Its People appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.

Issey Miyake, a man of both the past and future  

Issey Miyake has left us. The day his passing was announced, people in the fashion industry all over the world posted words of condolences online. People praised him, saying he was a revolutionary and legendary designer. They wrote about their memories of the designer, such as how they met him. As someone in fashion who’s never directly worked with Issey Miyake, some of the surface-level messages of condolences didn’t sit right with me, as they didn’t fully capture his work. I’m writing this piece today to verbalize what I felt then. I hope this paints a picture of who Issey Miyake was and could positively contribute to Japanese creativity.  

From designing to inventing clothes　

People in the Japanese fashion industry feel a strong emotional connection to designer Issey Miyake. The younger generation associates his name with being a past designer, which isn’t necessarily bad. Issey Miyake became a person of the past–an icon–early in his career because of his distinctive creativity. His innovative spirit can be broken down into three features.  

First, he was an inventor of various fashion products. We can split Issey Miyake’s career as a fashion designer from his pre-Pleats era in 1994 and post-Pleats era. Kenzo Takada was based in Paris and accepted as a designer through an Orientalist gaze, while Issey Miyake was based in Japan. As a result, he created the catalyst for brands in and from Japan to become approved in Paris. Before Issey Miyake started Pleats Please, he incorporated contemporary art ideas into his Japanese identity in search of a new expression of physicality. Unlike Kenzo Takada, I believe he neutralized the Orientalist “clothes made by people from the East” view by engaging with contemporary art ideas. He poured his heart into building contemporary fashion, namely deconstruction, a technique Asian designers still use in their work. Issey Miyake cultivated the practice of deconstruction, and the likes of Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto harvested it once the technique was ripe enough. A satirical poem from the Edo era: “Oda pounded the rice, Hashiba made the rice cakes, and Tokugawa ate them while he sat there.” In the context of deconstruction in Japanese fashion, Kenzo Takada could be likened to Oda, while Issey Miyake could be compared to Hashiba.  

The designer’s creative trajectory took an interesting turn after he created Pleats. One well-known idea of his is how he used one piece of fabric for clothes. In the East and West, people probed the relationship and space between a person and their clothes. To get to the root of this relationship, they worked to develop materials, starting with threads. It’s not a stretch to say Issey Miyake was the first brand to produce products with the overarching concept of using one piece of fabric per clothing item. His research, which started around 1988, came to fruition in 1994 as Pleats Please Issey Miyake. Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949), a Spanish designer and artist who was based in Venice, made dresses out of pleats. By having the material development and a manufacturer in place, Issey Miyake was able to recontextualize and mass-produce the idea behind Fortuny’s dresses in a contemporary manner (with the cooperation of Shiroishi Polytex in Miyagi prefecture).  

After that point, Issey Miyake deviated from the tradition of designers updating the context of Parisian fashion history each season. His innovative spirit is reflected in how he came up with inventing fashion products that people could wear for a long time. A-POC (A Piece of Cloth), in which self-produced clothes were made with a computer using a tube of fabric, cemented his position as an inventor. The project was founded by Dai Fujiwara, who was a staff member in his fourth year at the brand (and later the creative director of Issey Miyake), under the leadership of Issey Miyake in 1998. 

Thanks to Issey Miyake’s collection in Paris in 1999, which introduced A-POC, the brand showed the world that it develops and showcases products instead of being a fashion house that simply showcases clothes every season. However, it came with a cost: after reaching the apex of fashion, I’m sure he found it difficult to move forward with the context of fashion that already existed then. It’s impossible to develop new inventions on par with Pleats and A-POC every six months for the runway. While his long-lasting designs transcended the ebb and flow of trends, they were incompatible with the fashion industry because the industry demanded something new every season. Revolutionary inventions become a thing of the past once the media and people get used to them, as they only pay attention to what’s new. Because of his inventions, Issey Miyake became more than a designer’s name; his name became a world-renowned symbol.  

Issey Miyake: a doer and thinker

Issey Miyake’s second innovative attribute is how he spread the value of fashion among cultural figures abroad and the masses in Japan and otherwise. Today, most people associate fashion with contemporary art or product design, but when Issey Miyake worked in the field, people considered it dressmaking rather than design. He put time and energy into improving the status of fashion design in society. The designer devised a way of thinking similar to a contemporary artist: producing products using one fabric and concept. We could view his work with artists and designers like Lucie Rie, Ikko Tanaka, and Irving Penn as him joining hands with other fields to set a higher standard for fashion. They weren’t mere collaborations. It might make more sense to say he tried to “design” society’s recognition of fashion. Since its heyday, his clothes have become beloved by not only celebrities like actors but also many artists and cultural figures in and out of the country, such as architect Arata Isozaki and Steve Jobs. This phenomenon stems from none other than his long-standing community and cultural relevance.  

The pioneer, Kenzo Takada, was a fashion designer, but Issey Miyake was someone who unconsciously provided uniforms to those who related to his world, which wouldn’t have been possible without society’s increased understanding of fashion. The act of making clothes that end up as uniforms has been passed down to future designers.  

He could connect with communities in different fields because of his extraordinary proactiveness. One incident gives us a glimpse of this character trait. When he was a 22-year-old Tama Art University student, he submitted a questionnaire about why fashion wasn’t part of the World Design Assembly held in 1960. After graduating from university, he left Japan to study at Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture in Paris in the 60s and became an assistant at Givenchy. This might not strike some people as a noteworthy thing, as it’s not rare for Japanese people to graduate from prestigious schools and work at fashion companies like LVMH and Kering and even prominent tech companies in Silicon Valley such as GAFAM and Tesla. But Issey Miyake went to Paris when there still weren’t many Japanese people to work at Givenchy, the brand that provided clothes for Audrey Hepburn in the 60s and made its way up as the top haute couture fashion house. After his work as an assistant, he flew to America after seeing the potential in ready-made clothes. He worked with Geoffrey Beene, established an office, entered the market in Paris, and expanded into the international market in just four years. The designer’s ability to take action was extraordinary indeed. When Kanye West and Virgil Abloh went to Antwerp to knock on Raf Simons’ door, so to speak, it became news in the fashion world. Similarly, Issey Miyake excelled at going to places he deemed necessary and knocking on doors to get people involved.  

Issey Miyake, a businessman who assembled a group of people and nurtured them

Issey Miyake’s third innovative attribute is his work as a businessman. While he was still working as a designer, pushing out products for L’eau De Issey, the company’s perfume line and money maker, and Pleats Please, he left the in-house designers in charge of the Issey Miyake brand. For many designers in their 30s and 40s, the Issey Miyake products they remember well were made under Naoki Takizawa as well as Dai Fujiwara post-2007.  

Issey Miyake stepped away from the spotlight around 1999 to 2000, an act that required courage, considering he was 60 years old. He appointed Naoki Takizawa to be the creative director of the menswear line in 1993 and the womenswear line in 1999. In the following year, 2000, he put Nobuyuki Ota, a journalist with knowledge about New York and the director of Matsuya Ginza, in charge of running the company. I digress, but there’s an anecdote in which Nobuyuki Ota loved to wear a Commes des Garçons suit despite being the president of Issey Miyake. This exemplifies Issey Miyake’s open-mindedness.  

Further, he established A-net, a spinoff group comprising in-house designers of Issey Miyake, in 1996. As a result, talents such as Akira Onozuka (Zucca), Chisato Tsumori (Tsumori Chisato), Kosuke Tsumura (Final Home), Kazuaki Takashima (Ne-net), and Eri Utsugi (mercibeaucoup) came out of the group. Akira Onozuka’s Zucca defined an era as a Japanese brand and became a lucrative business. Designers outside of the Issey Miyake brand have become successful, too, such as Maiko Kurogouchi (Mame Kurogouchi), Yusuke Takahashi (CFCL), and Keita Ikeuchi and Mihoko Mori (andwander). 

As far as I can tell, no other designer, domestic or otherwise, has kept their independence and ethos while still working in the company and simultaneously leaving the company’s direction up to a successor. Issey Miyake was able to step back while maintaining his presence; this is one of his ingenious feats.  

From a narrow scope to a broad one 

As a fashion designer, Issey Miyake peaked in 2000 and left the spotlight. By inventing innovative products, he abandoned the traditional role of the fashion designer and became a person of the past. Viewing Issey Miyake from this lens, I feel like what he had done as a designer could be summed up as doing a wide range of fashion designs. He worked not only with clothes. Thanks to him paving the way, what used to be called dressmaking in Japan became costume design, “mode” (akin to high fashion), and fashion. He changed the public’s perception and broadened the gates for young people to work in the industry. As I write this, someone in Japan or another Asian country is telling their parents they want to become a fashion designer. The parents must be picturing Issey Miyake, a role model, in their minds. Fashion design has caught up with Issey Miyake and is now at the forefront of the field of design. His range of designs shifted from the now to the future. He was a fashion designer who designed clothes and tried to change the face of society.  

Issey Miyake was one of the people who came up with the concept of using one fabric. He was an atomic bomb survivor born in Hiroshima and an Asian person who overcame adversities to create designs for the world. I can’t determine whether this was his intention, but his designs eventually ranged far and wide. Issey Miyake designed an ecosystem within the brand and explored the limits of expanding people’s perception of fashion in society. We and future generations will surely encounter the areas Issey Miyake designed.  

“We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end.” 　

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1623-1662)

The post The Innovative Spirit and Panoptic Fashion Design of Issey Miyake  appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.

Yusuke Koishi is a producer and consultant for both domestic and international brands, and an artist and critic. He explores the present and future of society through the lens of fashion in this series. In the second installment, he elaborates on the ever-growing presence of China. He explains the approach and mindset we need to engage in new, budding cultures.

“If Biden wins, China wins”

The American presidential election in November 2020 concluded with the win of Joe Biden. What stood out was the fashion industry and many others celebrating his victory. Nonetheless, the direction we’re heading in remains unclear.

One thing left an impression on me. Mass media, including various media outlets and celebrities, made it seem like Biden had the upper hand, but the difference in votes in swing states was much smaller than expected. The outcome was reminiscent of how public polls on the election missed the mark four years ago. As a result, the world witnessed around 74 million people, which makes up almost half of the voters, voted for Donald Trump, who has been harshly condemned for his ongoing failures. On top of the election being held during a pandemic, people ridiculed it for having the least popular and likable candidates. However, the candidates received the largest number of votes in American history. Biden came in first, and Trump came in second.

“If Biden wins, China wins.” I was following American discourse on social media, and I saw that this message from Trump resonated with potential voters, including blue voters in America, where the pandemic has been only getting worse. His words also reached different people across the globe. People increasingly became bitter towards Asians. Amid this, it seemed as though Andrew Yang, the energized Taiwanese-American candidate who earned the support of a sizable number of youths, felt inferior about himself.

Trump’s message only further actualized people’s awareness of China. For months, Americans and non-Americans interested in the election have been talking about China online. But the topic is always regarding Chinese politics and economics, based on information gathered on social media and Western mass media. Liberal, cultural figures and critics are seen as people with a broad education, but when these people engage in discussions surrounding China, they also only speak about money and politics.

During the election cycle, the mic was handed to public figures and public poll companies that predicted Trump’s presidency. Among the numerous interviews, one, in particular, stuck out to me. And that was an interview with a young owner of a factory that manufactured both parties’ campaign merchandise in Yiwu, Zhejiang province.

He lightheartedly says, “We’re getting many orders for Trump merchandise at the moment, so I think he’s going to win this time too.” It’s incredibly ironic to see a factory owner in China, who’s making massive profits off of such merchandise, talk about the election with a smile while both Trump and Biden supporters are cautious of China’s emerging dominance. In the video goes on to illustrate some factory workers making TRUMP PENCE 2020 flags in front of a casually stacked mountain of MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN merchandise, while other workers make BIDEN HARRIS 2020 flags right next to that. It’s a modern comedy. But the surreal scene also represents the complexity of global society.  If Charlie Chaplin were still alive, he would surely make this scene a laughing stock. As President Trump said, the owner of this factory must have been the winner of the election. The The New York Times has covered similar situation “Forget the Polls: This Chinese Indicator Is Flashing ‘Trump’“

Whenever we discuss what’s going on in the world, we tend to create a one-dimensional narrative and hastily reach a conclusion. However, things aren’t that simple; the world conceives complexities, carries contradictions in its womb, and yet, it continues to move forward. What makes China so fascinating to me is how you can’t sum up the things that happen there with a simple story. It seems like a myriad of people in China live life to the fullest while accepting the fundamental inconsistencies, multiplicities, and uncertainties of a global society.

Perhaps what the Higher Brothers sang about in “Made in China” must be the complexity of reality as described here.

”My chains, new gold watch, made in China We play ping pong ball, made in China 给bitch买点儿奢侈品 made in China Yeah Higher Brothers’ black cab, made in China.”
［Higher Brothers x Famous Dex – Made In China (Prod. Richie Souf)］

The Great Firewall and the wallpaper on it

Despite China having the world’s second-highest GDP, rational information on the country in either English or Japanese is scarce. It’s not a stretch to say that no other country receives the amount of both praise and criticism. Japan and other English-speaking countries disseminate heavily biased information on China through a heavy filter. When you look up China-related information in English, you’ll see visuals and narratives told through an Orientalist gaze, making it easier for the West to take in. If you do the same in Japanese, you’ll see that most of the information is framed with passe biases such as pro-Japanese and anti-Chinese rhetoric.

“Western media exaggerates China’s bad side too much. Chinese media praises China too much.” These are the words of Ryo Takeuchi, a documentary filmmaker living in Nanjing, China. His documentary, Long time No See, Wuhan, is a portrayal of Wuhan post-pandemic and has garnered over ten million times views on Weibo. His show, The Reason I Live Here, which shows Chinese people living in Japan and foreigners living in China, is intriguing.

There still aren’t that many media like his that show honest portrayals of everyday people in China. If you want to look up relevant, current information related to your interests, then you would have to search in simplified Chinese and interact with real people via services like Weibo, Dian Ping, and Baidu. While I type in simplified Chinese and do research, I get hit with a realization: the limits of the internet and the vastness of reality. When we look up non-English speaking countries online, we’re prone to think that the results that show up in English are the world itself. In reality, such results are just the tip of the iceberg because they’re all put through a filter geared towards English speakers.

One design team made up of different nationalities shares opinions like the ones above among themselves. Together, they founded a genderless uniform brand called BIÉDE. The brand is produced and managed by KLEINSTEIN, and the visuals are done by Quentin Shih, a photographer and film director based in Beijing (his interview is also on TOKION). He works with clients such as Dior and Louis Vuitton, and yet, he never gives in to the Orientalist gaze of the West. Instead, he continues to create works that criticize the “West” and “China” binary.

Karima Fumitoshi is a film researcher and scholar of literature who has been introducing Chinese culture and movies, including Chen Kaige who won the Palme d’Or at 1993 Cannes Film Festival, to Japan since he visited China during the latter years of its Cultural Revolution and interacted with various cultural figures . In an essay, he touches on poetry. He writes that poets and writers, who respected and trusted each other, would drink and recite satirical poetry and prose about society, only to throw them away into the trash can. Written works that picked up on the zeitgeist at the time disappeared right there and then in a second.

We must evade surface-level, wallpaper-like information made for foreigners and overcome the Great Firewall. Once we do so, we must also go through layers upon layers of hurdles. What awaits us on the other side is the silhouette of cultures and new, blooming scenes that can’t be boxed into Orientalism, ethnicism, ideology, money, and politics.

In the Analects of Confucius, Confucius says, “You need to confirm facts by yourself even if many people dislike it, even if many people like it.” These words, written 2,500 years ago, reverberate strongly today.

Scenes that could only be seen within the “wall” are being born as you read this essay. It’s up to us to take notice of them.

Transration Lena-Grace Suda

The post Notebook on Fashion and Society Part 2: “What we talk about when we talk about China” appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.

Yusuke Koishi is a producer and consultant for both domestic and international brands, and an artist and critic. He explores the present and future of society through the lens of fashion in this series. In the first installment, he discusses the emergence of counter-fashion in the Trump era. 

“Politics and fashion” might sound a bit too heavy; why don’t we go with “influencers and fashion”? I’m sure you’ve seen this topic before, but I’d like to pick up on lesser-known news and talk about fashion that way. 

A world in which Donald Trump is an influencer

This June, Dazed Media published The Era of Monomass, a trend report investigating current youth culture on top of going through the past few years. I came across some interesting topics. The study goes through phenomena that have occurred during the pandemic, such as the increase of YouTube, Tik Tok, and Instagram users, and analysis of Gen Z. The most memorable page for me was “Who’s Influential Now” (The Era of Monomass, page 212). 

There are photos of people like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Billie Eilish, Travis Scott, G Dragon, Greta Thunberg, and Barack Obama on the page. The photos have a circular outline. Meaning, the bigger the circle, the bigger the influence. Everyone on the page is influential in their own right, and though the size of Kanye West’s photo is decent, there is one person whose circle is bigger than his: a MAGA hat-wearing Donald Trump. Even as someone living in Japan, I feel as though it’s harder to not come across his name nowadays. That was not the case during the Obama administration. Things are much more chaotic since the genesis of the Trump administration, both online and offline. It must be more intense for people living in the States. Who would’ve known a grim joke from Back to the Future Part II would come to life? 

Fashion isn’t just a trend- it’s the face of society 

This already-chaotic world became even more tumultuous with coronavirus. Now is the time to rethink fashion. Is it correct to say that making garments, shoes, bags, and accessories equates to “fashion design”? Or does the term extend to something more all-encompassing, like styling and visual direction? 

When we talk about fashion, we unconsciously touch on not just actual clothing we wear, but things beyond that too. Fashion includes the music we listen to (or the music we no longer listen to), favorite writers and artists, sports, people we follow on social media (or people we’ve blocked on social media). It includes mannerisms, attitudes, and words. In September, Naomi Osaka showed her support for the Black Lives Matter movement by wearing a mask at the open championships. She’s one of the biggest fashion icons for progressive people, and whenever she wears something, it blends with her attitude and creates a new identity.

The direction in which identity moves is outward: from the individual to society. Identity is supported by the relationship between an individual and society. Over 30 years ago, Wim Wenders talked about this at the beginning of Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), which is a documentary on Yohji Yamamoto. Rather than being limited to mere clothing and trends, fashion is a means of self-expression, and it points to how people change the way they dress and how people change the way they behave. In short, it’s about social dynamics. 

Because there isn’t a Japanese word for fashion, I use “様装,” read as “yousou.” It refers to how people dress, appear to others, and the entire behavior. (Sidenote: the root word of fashion is “factio” in Latin, which means “to do or make something.” In French, the connotations of the term, “mode” is “style” and “state of being.”) 

Upon rethinking the meaning of fashion, it could be said that one role of fashion design is to create waves in society. 

Culture has always breathed life into a hopeless situation

In the past five years, the person who made the most massive wave is Donald Trump. Calling him a designer is a stretch, but there’s no doubt that every single move he made had an immense effect on the direction of the fashion scene and the mindset of designers. In response to Trump becoming a symbol of the world’s “strongest” and biggest economic empire that is America, protests have sprung up everywhere. Now, more than ever, diversity is an imperative topic in fashion.

Ironically, because of the birth of the Trump administration, interesting fashion movements have emerged. In most cases, innovation in fashion comes from being against something. 60s counterculture and 70s fashion wouldn’t have been born without the upheaval of post-WWII, the Nixon presidency and the Vietnam War, and the antagonism between Eastern Communist nations and Western Capitalist nations. If it weren’t for social unrest, the cultures of the times wouldn’t have been as powerful. 

In a similar manner to the eras I just mentioned, new fashion scenes popped up around mid-2015 to 2016, when Trump started his campaign. For instance, designers from former Soviet nations such as Gosha Rubchinskiy and Demna Gvasalia rose to prominence. Pop culture related to such designers became popular too. I’m sure we’ve all seen people wearing shirts with Cyrillic lettering on them during this period. The influence of K-pop stars was already tangible in fashion by then, but things snowballed in the States after Trump became president. 

America was descending into anti-progressivism when Trump won, and so it’s no coincidence that the focus was on “Non-American entities” and “Non-white culture.” Progressives took to Instagram to visit alternative spaces, to find “Non-American” and “Non-Western” places that they had previously never been to. 

Today, rejecting the symbol of Trump is seen as the opposition to the status quo of America. The message behind the “Make America Great Again” hats have long lost their meaning, and for progressive people, they’re nothing but a representation of being against diversity and progressive values. Most people might remember how Kanye West got harshly criticized for wearing a MAGA hat before. 

40 years ago, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols desecrated Queen Elizabeth and caused a scene on stage when he wore the socially taboo Hakenkreuz as an act of blasphemy against the status quo of his time.  His extreme style gained the support of many young people (among such supporters were older people too), as he was seen as a symbol of anti-authority. 

Today’s political landscape is a sharp contrast; logical, sensible beliefs such as progressivism, diversity, and environmentalism are regarded as anti-authority and anti-establishment. If Trump were a saint-like figure, this would’ve never happened. A new, unprecedented window of avant-garde expression is opening up.

November 3rd of this year is election day. The world became a chaotic place because of coronavirus, and the BLM movement picked up steam in America. This situation is creating waves against the government and is also influencing fashion at a fast pace.

Our society is in a turbulent disorder indeed. However, new countercultures always come in troubled times. Historically, culture has always breathed life into hopeless situations. As such, the world of fashion is on the cusp of seeing a new horizon. 

Photography and Illustration Yusuke Koishi

Transration Lena-Grace Suda

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