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THE LAND OF
THE RISING FAN
BY PICO IYER |
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In Japan, it hardly matters what the object of your devotion is. It’s the devotion itself, the release of renegade energies, the creation of a private sanctuary, that counts.
The Japan we imagine from afar is placid, tidy, and seamlessly efficient, correct to the last place. Trains arrive on the dot, and crowds pour out of them, in streamlined rows of look-alike Chanel and gray suits, not a bead of sweat visible, even in the heat of summer rush hour. Japan has taken the Confucian model of old China and refined it to the digital nth degree; the sense of loyalty to the group is so advanced— and so perfected here—that the country can seem at times like a cult writ large, a capitalist version of Kim Jong Il’s earthly paradise, in which everyone is playing from the same score and everyone knows her part. |
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There’s truth, without question, to all of this. But what it ignores are the immutable Newtonian rules of engagement: the more rigorously a group mentality is enforced, the wilder the explosions of individual eccentricity. And even a group is made up, often, of separate sects and tribes, each eager at once to enjoy the comforts of being part of a massed force, and the pleasure of imagining themselves individual (original, after a fashion). Japan, in other words, is the spiritual home of fandom. Not just the collective fanaticism we associate with kamikaze pilots and teams of men, company pins on their lapels, tumbling out of buses to buy up our companies (or snap them up on digi-cams at least); but also an individual fandom that—I surprise myself by saying—is more rabid, more passionate and visceral, than anything I have seen in 30 years of visiting Brazilian soccer stadiums and hotels mobbed by Backstreet Boys aficionados. |
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NISHINOMIYA CITY, JAPAN, 2003
High school students look on as the
opposing team scores during the 85th
All-Japan High School Baseball
Tournament—a nationally celebrated
event since 1915.
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PHOTO BY TORIN BOYD |
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When you walk around a Japanese town, even a city of privacies like the ancient capital of Kyoto (near which I’ve lived now for 16 years), you pass through what is essentially a series of dream-chambers, custom-made homes for individual fantasies. (The love hotel, its beds made to look like Cadillacs, cavemen’s dens, Venetian gondolas, or rocket ships, is not just a product, but a reflection of contemporary Japan). This coffee shop on Sanjo-Dori has played only Mozart music, around the clock, for 20 years or more. That honky-tonk in the hills features locals in ten-gallon hats crooning Hank Williams, Jr., standards. I know a Zen monk in Nagoya who furnishes his temple with a complete set of CHiPs tapes from American TV, though California highway patrolmen have not always been regarded as intrinsic to the dissolution of self. I know an elegant gift shop, near the Temple of Pure Water, in which every item |
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| I SOMETIMES FEEL AS IF I AM LOST IN A CIRCUITBOARD OF MAD ENTHUSIASMS. |
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on sale is an owl.
Japan is a culture of hobbyists, you soon see, of connoisseurs who make their tics acceptable by turning themselves into fanatics. It is a place where you quickly grow unsurprised to hear that one old man has given his life to following salsa dancing, and another is in possession of every King Crimson CD ever released. I sometimes feel, around the narrow lanes, as if I am lost in a circuit board of mad enthusiasms. Four books on Hugh Grant came out before most in California had heard of him, and the long-forgotten movie Bengali Nights, in which Hugh plods around Calcutta speaking in a vaguely foreign accent, acting as a thinly disguised version of the mythographer Mircea Eliade, is featured this month at the local video store. Sobbing middle-aged women devote their lives to following a single actress from the campy, all-female Takarazuka troupe, which puts |
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on Vegas-worthy productions of Gone with the Wind and other classics. Over and over people question me earnestly about the popularity and meaning of such icons (almost unheard of in America) as Norman Reedus or Kip Pardue.
This rampant fanaticism—the Platonic essence of fandom, as it can sometimes seem, in a culture that traffics in Platonic ideals—comes to a roaring culmination, inevitably, in the stadium. And the center of local worship is the Hanshin Tigers of Osaka, a baseball team owned by the Hanshin Company and roughly equivalent, as a lovable emblem of enduring failure, to the Chicago Cubs (the Tigers have run off with two championships in 70 years). Fans go en masse on Hanshin trains from the Hanshin department store in central Osaka to the team’s weathered old stadium, Koshien, and there spend hours serenading their heroes amid a swelling mass of Tiger flags and Tiger jackets, Tiger bullhorns |
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IZUMO, JAPAN, 2000
Families gaze upward at fireworks
celebrating the great snake of
yamata no orochi. |
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PHOTO BY CHRIS STEELE-PERKINS |
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and Tiger drums. They have, as the fans of all Japanese baseball teams do, a team cheer—and a song and a dance for every Tiger who comes up to the plate, which they roar out for every moment of his every appearance. They stop to let off multicolored, condom-shaped balloons in the “Lucky Seven” inning. At the end of the game, they often stand in place for long moments, singing the Tiger fight song, “The Wind of Mount Rokko,” as the players line up along the foul lines and bow as one in every direction. Cheerleaders stomp above the dugouts while the Tigers are at the plate, whipping everyone up into an even greater frenzy. And when things are going well, as they did in 2003, convenience stores, electronics outlets, and TV stations start brandishing Tiger logos. Politicians appear dining on sushi dishes in the shape of the Tiger insignia; men invite TV cameras into tiny, cell-like apartments in which every single item, from bedspread to |
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alarm clock, wears the Tiger logo. After especially important wins, much of western Japan crowds onto a tiny bridge above the Dotonbori River in central Osaka; boys take off their shirts and jump down into the freezing water. After one such celebration last season, one fan never surfaced alive.
It is hard to convey quite how furious and consuming this fandom is; even at summer festivals honoring those ancestors who have moved on to another world, kimonoed grandmas play the Tiger fight song on the shamisen and the bamboo flute. The Hanshin department store offers bargain sales after Tiger victories, and the scenes of housewives storming the aisles brings to mind famine-stricken China in the ’50s. When the Tigers hit a winning streak last year, pundits estimated that their success put an extra billion dollars into the national economy, and may even have helped trigger a small resurgence after a 14-year |
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series of recessions.
You come, in time, to see in Japan that fandom is at once an assertion of individualism, an attempt to brand yourself as a character, and a longing to join yourself to a chanting group—in a different key (I will become one among a sea of people wearing yellow-and-black Tiger shirts, instead of just another flannel-suited commuter, nodding off on the 8:43 express.) Foreigners often talk of how there is a private self and a public self in Japan—there are actually different words for them in Japanese—and, to outsiders, the maintenance of two different faces suggests friction or hypocrisy. But the Japanese seem adept at keeping both in place, with equipoise. This is who I am to the world. This is who I am to myself.
In a certain sense, part of the point of fandom, as revealed by Japan, is that it hardly matters what the object of your |
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TOKYO, 2003
Bra and panty set inspired by
Hanshin Tigers baseball team.
Retail price: 10,000 yen ($89) |
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devotion is; it’s the devotion itself, the release of renegade energies, the creation of a private sanc-
tuary, that counts. Sometimes people will give themselves to a long-haired, half-blind man who tells them to plant sarin gas in the subway; sometimes they will decide David Beckham—or Beatrix Potter—is a godsend. It’s not so different from the 200,000 people who gather on lawns in South Korea, throwing their hands in the air and weeping at evangelical camp-revival meetings—or the crowds I saw in North Korea practicing the mass card games that are a source of national pride, each of them with a picture of the country’s president on his lapel. Uniform fetishism is so dominant in Japan that at soapland massage parlors, as in many of the bars of the entertainment quarters, all the workers will be dressed in identical costumes as schoolgirls or “Office Lady” secretaries or nurses.
Not long ago, Neil Young came to play a huge arena |
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in the shadow of Osaka Castle. I looked around where I sat and realized that at least 80 percent of the men I saw in attendance (all Japanese) were dressed in scuffed jeans and flannel shirts and had wild, uncombed hair (sometimes with sideburns as defiant as Neil’s); the women beside them were done up like Choctaw squaws. As Neil delivered songs from his completely incomprehensible folk opera, Greendale (the only reason to watch TV, one of its typical lines avers, is to see shows like Leave It to Beaver), the fans sat silently, three hundred rows scrutinizing the object of their devotion with rapt attention (their silence as clamorous as the roar at the Tigers stadium). After about three songs, Young looked out at the sea of flannel shirts, absorbing his eccentric version of hippie Republicanism, and said, “You’re a wonderful audience.” He might have meant it, I realized.
In California, people would have shown up looking like themselves.
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