1. The Great Divide

I know it's hard to grasp the idea of Japanese fandom if you're a fan of Japanese music living overseas. Overseas fandom of Japanese music is an especially weird animal.

Why? Mainly because, even in this age of airplanes and international English and global internet culture, Japan is still isolated geographically, culturally, and sociolinguistically. This “isolated Japan” claim may be a something of a cliché, but the longer I live here, the more I realize just how deep the isolation still goes. Japan never rose to the level of global cultural hegemonic power predicted by the futurists of the Bubble years, and so, despite the worldwide popularity of anime, in most parts of the world, the Japanese culture and language remain obscure, if not nearly unknown. Sure, stereotypes abound, but actual knowledge is thin on the ground. Chances are, if you're an overseas fan of Japanese music, you've never been to Japan, and have no idea what it would be like to live there (sorry, but anime is not a good yardstick for measuring real life!) You also probably don't speak any Japanese, or at any rate, not enough Japanese to share your fandom with the Japanese fans in any meaningful way.

Just as the outside world has little knowledge of Japan, most Japanese people have limited knowledge of the outside world. Sure, there are plenty of cosmopolitan people in Tokyo – people who have lived abroad, who speak foreign languages, who do have a sense of their place in global society. But I'm not talking about individuals in this article, I'm talking about trends – and the fact is that a majority of Japanese people are surprisingly ignorant of the world outside their islands. The same argument could be made about people in a lot of other countries, too, not least of which the United States of America...but when it comes to the music industry, Japan takes navel-gazing to a special level. The Japanese music industry is about as self-obsessed as they come. Whether or not Japanese bands are aware that they have overseas fans, in most cases, the record companies simply don't care. They're only interested in the domestic market. As you are all doubtlessly aware, with a very few exceptions, Japanese music isn't marketed globally. Of course these days, there's YouTube – but these days, Japanese record companies are just as likely to scrub videos from international YouTube viewing than they are to leave them up. They don't need your stinking foreign money! The Japanese music scene is a world unto itself.

In short, there's a Great Divide at work here.

For my part, being English-Japanese bilingual, living in Tokyo, and operating a website aimed at overseas fans of Japanese music has put me in the unique position of straddling both sides of this Great Divide. I've had the opportunity to develop close relationships with both overseas and Japanese fans, and the opportunity to observe the behaviors of both groups of fans in their home environments. I've seen Western bands perform in Japan, and Japanese bands perform overseas. I've personally explored rock music subculture on three continents (Asia, Europe, and North America), so I've had a lot of opportunities to observe trends, compare and contrast. And the longer I've been doing it, the more I've noticed that the Great Divide is defined by more than geographical distance or lack of a common language. There really is a strong, marked difference between Japanese and Western fan mentality.

Of course, this Great Divide is far older than teenybopper visual kei internet fangirls. Westerners and Japanese alike have been fetishizing and pontificating about “unique Japan” for centuries now and a lot of it is self-aggrandizing and/or Orientalist blather.

[Note: in comparative culture scholarship, the term “Orientalism,” coined by Edward Said in his book of the same name, refers to the condescending way in which Western cultures exoticize “the Orient” – meaning all cultures East of Turkey on the Asian continent. Whether the intention of this exoticism is racist or laudatory, it's all fundamentally offensive toward people of Asian descent, because it reduces them and their cultures to caricatures while simultaneously casting them as “others” to be observed, studied, fetishized, lusted after, or looked down upon, rather than active agents to be engaged with as equals. Some examples of Orientalism toward Japan in Western pop culture: Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, Gwen Stefani's “Harajuku Girls”...you get the picture. A massive volume of academic literature has been written on this topic so if you're interested I encourage you to go look it up, assuming you can stand to read mile-long sentences packed with words I refuse to use, such as “heuristics,” “hegemonic,” “epistemological,” and “hermeneutic.”]

However, when it comes to rock music fandom, how unique could we expect Japan to be? After all, rock music and rock fandom were born in the USA and raised in Europe, and only really blossomed as a domestic phenomenon in Japan in the 1970's. Buck-Tick's generation of Japanese rock musicians grew up listening predominantly to Western rock-n-roll. Everything Japan learned about rock-n-roll, it learned from the West. How different could things in Japan possibly be?

The answer is: pretty damn different. The more time I spend immersed in the Japanese rock music subcultures, the more I'm forced to admit that much of the Japanese domestic music scene is dominated by a peculiar solipsistic yet virulent strain of fandom, the essence of which can be distilled down to a few key phrases: idol worship, personality cult, and identity erasure. While I've encountered these phenomena elsewhere in the world, I've never seen it manifest in such a dominant and systemic fashion anywhere but here in Japan.

Beyond this, there's a further Great Divide within Japanese music fandom itself: Japanese fans of Western music and Japanese fans of Japanese music behave nothing alike.

.

>>On to 2. The Inferiority Complex>>
<<Back to The Fangirl Phenomenon<<