Garlic Cola and Rebel Youth
Two people in Harajuku named Machi Katsune and Neko—who together are apparently over two hundred years old, give or take, and whose favorite artists are Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and MUCC—are currently dressed better than anyone in Berlin will ever be. I say this without resentment. In Berlin, wearing fluorescent sneakers is considered a personality. In Harajuku, the animals are better dressed than the rest of the world combined, and the people who live there don’t seem to think this is unusual or worth commenting on.
Meanwhile I’ve been listening to BOMI, one of the rare Japanese artists who isn’t assembled from a talent-agency production line with forty-eight interchangeable faces. Her new album is called BORN IN THE U.S.A., which is either a joke or a statement or both, and I haven’t managed to track down a copy yet. What I do have is the track 月曜のメランコリー—Monday Melancholy—which is everything I want from Japanese pop when it stops trying to be adorable and just commits to being good.
Shirobako is an anime about making anime, which sounds like the most self-indulgent premise imaginable and is instead one of the better things I’ve watched this season. The show follows a group of young women navigating deadlines, creative crises, and the specific exhaustion that comes from loving something enough to build your entire life around it. It’s funnier and more honest than it has any right to be, and it occasionally makes Disney look lazy by comparison.
The Gaki No Tsukai twenty-four-hour endurance game—four men spending a full day being systematically terrorized inside a gymnasium—is available on YouTube and runs considerably longer than any reasonable person needs. Anyone who has spent time with Japanese variety television will know roughly what to expect. Everyone else will be confused in the best possible way.
The Sailor Moon Super Famicom game I found years ago in a bargain bin two villages from where I grew up, and I played the hell out of it. You run from left to right as Bunny Tsukino or one of her friends and punch monsters until the first season is over. That is the complete description. It holds up better than most things from that era and I will not hear a word against it.
Hikari Shiina’s photobook Hikari Hatachi no Ryoiki does exactly what you’d expect from a Japanese idol turning twenty and releasing a photo collection—it leans very deliberately into the schoolgirl-adjacent aesthetic that occupies a strange, legally interesting space in Japanese popular culture. The photography is good. She knows precisely what she’s doing. I’m not going to pretend I haven’t already looked at it twice.
For manga I keep returning to Satoshi Urushihara’s Plastic Little, about a seventeen-year-old named Teeta who lives on a spaceship and catches whale-like creatures with her chaotic, frequently underdressed crew. Urushihara’s relationship with the female form is uncomplicated in the extreme—he loves breasts approximately as much as I do, possibly more—and the story is genuinely fun beneath all the fanservice. It’s cheap secondhand and worth every cent.
A company in Japan has released a garlic-flavored cola called Jats Takkola. I have no intellectual framework for this. The only theory I can construct is that if everyone drinks enough of it, garlic breath becomes universal and stops being a social liability. That’s either utopian thinking or the worst product decision of the year. Possibly it’s both at once, which is a very Japanese outcome.
Michael Rougier’s photo series Teenage Wasteland documents rebellious Japanese youth in 1964—faces carrying the exact ratio of defiance to boredom that is correct for being young and angry and not yet knowing how it ends. Looking at these images I want to have been there. Not because it was better—it probably wasn’t, for most people—but because that combination of style and revolt and not-yet-knowing is something that only exists once, and Rougier caught it.
Tokyo’s annual fetish festival happened at the end of January, and Tokyo Kinky has a full photo report. Consensual pain, underarm hair appreciation, blood-smeared goddesses in full costume—the complete range of what people want when given a designated space to want it openly and without apology. Japan contains multitudes, and most of them are more interesting than anything else on the schedule this month.