Cheerleaders stomp above the dugouts while the Tigers are at the plate, whipping everyone up into an orchestrated frenzy, and when things are going well, as they did last year {i.e. 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 alarm clock, wears the Tiger logo. At crucial moments, much of western Japan crowds onto a tiny bridge above the Dotombori River in central Osaka, and, one after another, boys take off their shirts and jump down into the freezing water. Afrer one such celebration last season, one fan never surfaced.
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 shamisen and 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 Thirties. When the Tigers hit a winning streak last year, pundits estimated that their success put an extra $1 billion into the national economy, and may even have helped trigger a small resurgence after ten years of recession.
One comes to see in Japan how fandom is at once an assertion of individualism–an attempt to brand oneself as a character–and a longing to join oneself into 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 train on the Hanshin line). Foreigners often talk of how there is a private and a public self in Japan–the language actually has different words for them–and, to us, the maintenance of two different faces suggests friction or hypocrisy. But the Japnese seem adept at keeping both in place, with equipoise. This is who I am to the world. This is who I am to myself. Observing the generic rules of the company by day and flamenco dancing by night.
On the collective level, fandom can be a subset of fashion in a culture more dominated by this season’s styles than any I know. Suddenly, one minute, every other teenager in Tokyo will dye her hair blonde and clomp around on eight-inch platform heels; just as suddenly, a new edict will come down, and she will color her hair red again, and place a Hello Kitty cell phone inside her Gucci backpack. Not long ago, much of Japan took up watching zany, three-hour song-and-dance Tamil movies from southern India, not much perturbed, it seemed, by the fact that they could understand not a word of what was being sung.
In a certain sense, part of the point of fandom, as revealed by Japan, is that 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. 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 next door, 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 fethisism is so dominant in Japan that at “Soaplands” massage parlors, as in many of the bars of the entertainment quarters, all the workers will be dressed in indistinguishable costumes, as schoolgirls or “Office Lady” secretaries or nurses.
Just ten days ago Neil Young came to play a huge arena in the shadow of ancestral Osaka Castle. I looked around me where I sat and realized that at least eighty per cent of the men I saw in attendance (all Japanese) were dressed in scuffed jeans, flannel shirts and wild, uncombed hair (sometimes with sideburns as defiant as Neil’s), the women beside them done up something like Coctaw squaws. As Neil delivered 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, in three hundred rows, scrutinizing the object of their devotion with rapt attention (their silence as clamorous as the roars 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.