Space travel, interstellar configurations and the expanses of the universe – even in Keigo Oyamada's most recent musical work, »Point of View Point« (October 2001), references pile up. These would be nothing new for electronic pop music if another leitmotif were not added to the sci-fi imagery: in 1995 he recorded the song »Volunteer Ape Man (Disco)« on »69/96« together with Sugar Yoshinaga: »Apes go back to Planet Earth!« he cries in a Vocoder-distorted voice to thumping beats and Black Sabbath guitars, while the Inlet artwork on the next album, »Fantasma« (1997), is also decorated with chimpanzee faces. What's more, two years ago he produced the album »Ape Sounds«for Nigo. But although Oyamada's latent ape fixation fills an entire drawer, it can be classed in the same series as ape references ranging from those of the Yellow Magic Orchestra to Takuya Matsunoki's »Yellow Monkey Kingdom«, situated in an art context, and thus be understood as a self-ironical reevaluation of a discriminatory ascription. The talk of the »yellow ape" cultivated at the height of the Japan-bashing thus hits, in a recontextualized, or even reconquered form, the core of debates about the ethnic identity of the Japanese. Oyamada's universe also invites one to extend the conceptual field to territories such as multiculturalism. It is no coincidence that the perhaps greatest Japanese pop star hope is named after one of the best-known apes in film history: Cornelius, a scholar on the Planet of the Apes who has learnt the human tongue.

When Tim Burton was playing with the idea of refilming the sixties classic¹, the story on which the film is based had more or less taken place in Japan already. At the start of the nineties, masses of South Americans began to settle in the Kanto region. Almost the exact opposite of the green-card action in Germany occurred: the descendants of those emigrants who took the long trip to Brazil, Peru and Argentina after 1899 were favored. The so-called phenomenon of»return migration« meant there were passengers on board countless ships who met Japanese demands for homogeneity as regards blood relationship, but otherwise had nothing in common with their ancestors and the Japanese contemporaries who awaited them. The so-called Nikkeijin were low-wage laborers without special training or a specific interest in Japanese culture. They came to the Empire of the Rising Sun attracted solely by economic dreams of a more luxurious existence, and ended up redefining the status of the foreign worker without knowing it. However, there was no question of it being a home match. The Nikkeijin did not only throw the media into a turmoil, but people again had the feeling of being abroad:² a short time later, tanned bodies, and a southern-style mentality and everyday culture were to profoundly change the face of the streets of Tokyo. Moreover, there were bleached hair, platform soles, decorative cosmetics and an excessive use of portable gadgets³ – the female representatives of this group in particular became a talking point.

These women, who were at first called Ko-gyaru, and today are called Yamamba, indicate that the island of Okinawa was the origin of this trend. Years of protest against the U.S. military presence, vociferous demands for independence from the imperialistic mainland – the colonial problems on this Pacific island, which was known as the kingdom of Ryukyu until it was annexed in 1897, have perhaps even contributed to the fact that it could suddenly be perceived not only as a trouble spot, but also as a projection surface for both cultural and technological utopias. At the end of the nineties, even the telecommunications giant NTT began developing visions centering on Okinawa. The powerful telephone company saw how the center for national IT interests had moved down to the deep south; the sunny archipelago was to be made into a technological oasis, where entertainment, research and internet economy could be tied together to form an effective strategy package. As headlines like these, which were outrageous for those times, did the rounds, filmmakers from Takeshi Kitano to Yosuke Nakagawa discovered Okinawa as a film location. The director Ishii Sogo, who is known in the West mainly as the father of Japanese cyberpunk, also wended his way to the south to immortalize the new nerve center on celluloid. In »August in the Water«(1995), he showed the completely opposite poles of technology and nature magically combined: a coexistence that has imaginary roots in Japanese cultural tradition and was to provide an example for the whole of Asia: Fukuoka, where Ishhii's psychedelic SF/Heimatfilm [»Heimatfilm« = a sentimental film shot in a regional setting. Tr.] was shot, is situated, like Okinawa, in symbolic proximity to Taipei and Hong Kong, and at an equally symbolic distance from Tokyo.

It was then that the region began to assert itself not only as a projection surface, but also as a laboratory and source of trends that were to rock the mainland. The core of these transfers is Japan's »idoru« industry, which went into mass production as a passing craze, rose to temporary fame as the personified face of a manga character, as a voice or body in a pop group, and finally as a model for a computer game. The once-accepted theory – that incompetence is also O.K. ⁴ – has changed completely with the triumphal rise of the Okinawa-style idoru. In Japan's best-known talent factory, the Actors School, they learn to sing, act, and above all, dance. A new form of physicality has been growing here for years, a physicality also reflected by the go-getting Kano sisters in their way in books like »Fabulous Body«; a ravening appetite for pumping rhythms conducive to the physical discharge of energy is looking for outlets.

Namie Amuro, who by now is past her use-by date, has triggered and embodied this trend like no one else. Numerous bands, mostly girl groups, were to stir up the J-pop landscape in her wake. This has led to a country-wide Okinawa fever and even to the introduction of a new bank note (the 2000 yen note shows the gate of the old palace of the Ryukyus). But it all has a forerunner. As the cultural researcher and media activist Toshimaru Ogara observes regarding the culture that grew up on US military bases , youth culture trends of the hippy era, particularly rock, were filtered on the tropical island before reaching their mass audience on the mainland. An example of this is a band like Murasaki, which at first worked as a cover band in clubs exclusively reserved for American GIs and there developed an extremely hard, animalistic style that was later to shock the kids in Tokyo, Osaka and Sapporo. This is why is seemed not only tempting, but even advisable, to consider the "animal" as a post-human model even in the post-Namie Amuro era.

As shown by Tim Burton's remake of »Planet of the Apes« (2001), apes have long been seen as a better sort of cyborg. Their archaic-futuristic armor seems fused with their preternaturally strong bodies; they can speak, and have taken on other human characteristics as well. The state of their civilization does not bring some sort of highly developed future culture to mind, but rather the sheer horror and brutal primitivity of the Middle Ages. Here, too, Burton's version is pure cyberpunk, and here, too, he departs from the '67 film and raises considerable doubts about his ability to put across the anti-racist subtext of the original. Psychological dimensions of existence as an ape seem to have been pushed to the background, and all that seems to count is how realistically the animal can be presented as a threat. In the same way that the discourses about multiculture are rationalized away here on the digital surface of photo realism, the Okinawa codes also remain in a depoliticized state of suspense on the mainland. When filmmakers are asked how much they reflect the cultural history of their tropical locations, they become vague, almost naive. Their stories revolve around mythological local atmospheres without critically examining the roots of national questions of identity. It is, however, only partially true that it has been the increasing presence of Okinawa images in the inner-city zones of Tokyo that has caused a shift of balance. As has already been mentioned, Japan's center seems to have been moving further and further southwards for years. Even Tokyo is increasingly coming under the spell of the endless summer, both on an urban and a medial level. But although these images and codes have been on a journey or imply a journey, their lure at first seems to navigate the gaze only into an immaterial space, where the animalistic element that diametrically opposes the urban hygiene mania is only measurable on a virtual scale of values. The excessive culture of the mobile phone as practiced by the Ko-gyarus and Yamambas makes it seem even more dubious to what extent these really are »livable geographies.«⁵

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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