Everything Good Happening Over There

Japan keeps sending things across that most of the world never sees, and it’s always bothered me. Not the obvious exports—the anime, the game design, the architecture that makes European modernism look self-conscious. The stuff in between. Small labels putting out records that will never leave a single Shimokitazawa basement. Fashion that makes French avant-garde look timid and cautious. A culture that absorbs outside influence and turns it into something entirely its own, usually funnier and more obsessive than whatever the source material was.

That’s the engine behind TOKYOPUNK, a project I started with a collaborator named Asumi—who has the actual cultural connection I’m working from the outside of—to carry that material across the language barrier. Music videos, art projects, street style, books, events. Not as tourism, not as exoticism, but as: here is something good that exists and you should know about it.

The problem with side projects is that they compete with everything else for the same finite hours. Asumi has a degree, a job, a life. My own schedule is what happens when you bundle all three of those things into an internet-shaped mass and try to manage it from inside. The project moves when we push it and stalls when we don’t, and I care too much about the subject to let it permanently stall.

There’s too much worth documenting. Too many artists making work that deserves an audience beyond their home market. Too many things disappearing before they ever cross the language barrier, consumed domestically and then gone. I want this dispatch to be the place where some of it lands—irregular, partial, imperfect, but present. The least a person can do for the things they love is pay attention.