The Japan we imagine from afar is placid, tidy and seamlessly efficient, correct to the last place. The trains arrive on the dot, and when the crowds pour out of them, in streamlined rows of look-alike Chanel and grey suits, not a bead of sweat is 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.
There’s truth, without question, to all of this. But what it ignores are the immovable 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 thirty years of visiting Brazilian soccer stadiums and hotels mobbed by Backstreet Boys aficianados.
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 sixteen years), you pass through what is essentially a series of dream-chambers, custom-made homes for individual fantasies (the love hotel, with its beds made to look like Cadillacs, cavemen’s dens and rocket ships, is not just a product, but a reflection of contemporary Japan). This coffee shop on Sanjo Dori plays only Mozart music, around the clock, for twenty years or more. That honky-tonk in the hills features locals in ten-gallon hats crooning Hank Williams, Jr. standards. This Zen monk I know in Nagoya 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. That woman runs an elegant gift shop, near the Temple of Pure Water, in which every item 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 soon grow unsurprised to hear that that old man has given his life to following salsa dancing, and that one has got every King Crimson C.D. every released. I sometimes feel, living near Kyoto, as if I am lost in a circuitboard of mad enthusiasms. Four books on Hugh Grant come out before most of us have heard of him in California (and the long-forgotten movie, Bengal Nights, in which Hugh plods around Calcutta speaking with a Romanian accent, acting as the University of Chicago 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 on unisex, Vegas-worthy productions of Gone with the Wind and other musicals. Over and over people question me earnestly about the popularity and meaning of such American icons (almost unheard-of in America) as Brad Renfro, or Germany’s national goalkeeper, Oliver Kahn..
This rampant fanaticism–the Platonic essence of fandom, it can sometimes seem, in a culture that trafficks in Platonic ideals–comes to a roaring culmination, inevitably, in the stadium. Living in Boston, I came to see that sports could be a religion to put the Catholic Church to shame; the fanaticism attending the Red Sox and Celtics is a danger to public and private health. Growing up in England, I came to learn never to go out on a Saturday afternoon because marauding bands of soccer hooligans would be tromping through the streets, taking out their frustrations on any passerby (and when the game was tied, two different groups of enraged thugs would be on the prowl). In England, as much as in South and Central America, soccer is war by other means. Yet all these forms of fury look pale compared with what I witness in mild-mannered, squeaky-clean Japan.
The center of worship near Kyoto 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 (with one championship in 68 years, they can put even the Red Sox to shame). 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 four hours serenading their heroes from within a swelling mass of Tiger flags and Tiger jackets, Tiger bullhorns and Tiger drums. They have, as the fans of all Japanese baseball teams do, an individual cheer–and song and dance–for every Tiger who comes up to the plate, and they roar it out for every moment of his every appearance, stopping to let off multi-colored, condom-shaped ballons in the “Lucky Seven” inning. At the end of the game, they often stand in place for long moments, singing the Tiger fight song, “When the Wind Blows Down from Mount Rokko,” as the players line up along the foul lines and bow, en masse, in every direction.
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.