Asian history essay draft

3

o entalizing

fa s h o n i n g II i a p a n II

IN THE EARLY 198 0 s, Japanese fashion exploded onto the international

scene. The work of designers such as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei

Kawakubo of Comme des Garc;ons was predicated on a revolutionary aesthetic

vision-loose, architectural shapes, asymmetry, unusual textures and somber

colors, " lace" made of holes and rips in fabric. To a Western public, these gar-

ments embodied unfamiliar notions of what counts as clothing and how cloth-

ing relates to human bodies. The fashion world reacted passionately. Detractors

labelled it the "Hiroshima bag-lady look," while enthusiasts welcomed it as

pathbreaking and subversive. Many dismissed it as destined only for shock

value, a passing fad. Yet Japanese fashion and its influence have been perva-

sive at all levels of the industry.1 The continuing success of designers such as

Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto, among others, has forced

Paris and New York to take notice, if sometimes grudgingly, and to recognize

Tokyo and Asia more generally as sites of creation in the fashion industry, not

merely as producers of designs conceived in the West.

Fashion provides us with an exemplary site for examining the constitu- 55

tive contradictions of Japanese identity at a moment when Japan had assumed

an acknowledged place as a global economic superpower. An advanced capi-

DORINNE KONDO

talist nation-state with an imperialist history and, arguably, imperial ambitions, it

is nonetheless racially marked. Constitutive contradictions similarly animate the

fashion industry: quintessentially transnational in its dispersal and reach, it

is simultaneously rife with essentializing gestures that refabricate national bound-

aries. Consequently, for Japanese designers and others, what counts as Japan-

ese is always a problematic issue. On the one hand, the entry of the Japanese

into high fashion ready-to-wear indexes Japan's status as an advanced capital-

ist power and a cultural leader, for fashion is a global industry in which devel-

oped nations, and more specifically, major urban centers in those developed

nations, assert hegemony as the sites of creation.2 Yet, Japan's subordinate sta-

tus as a late developer, forcibly compelled to modernize in Western terms, con-

tinues. Competition is still on someone else's ground, within an idiom and a

tradition developed elsewhere. This history is materialized in the very desig-

nation of the medium in which Japanese designers work: yofuku, "Western

clothing," rather than wafuku, "Japanese clothing." Inevitably, the work of

Japanese designers rearticulates a problematic of "Japanese" and "Western"

identities.

At stake in these questions is a politics in a broad sense---economic power,

cultural authority, world recognition, place in a world order3-at an historical

moment when national boundaries are contested, problematic, and highly

charged. Referentially unstable, defined through lack and difference as are all

identities, "Japan" has been unthinkable historically outside its relations with

the West and with other Asian nations.4 An overly schematic narrative of rela-

tions with the West would mark a legacy of inferiority symbolized in the "open-

ing" of Japan to Commodore Perry and the defeat in World War II, followed by a

postwar economic boom and an increasing sense of Japanese political confidence

as equal or, some might say, even superior to the West. At issue here are inter-

imperial rivalries among advanced capitalist nation-states. Yet, because the

Japanese are racially marked, the rivalry is laced with familiar Orientalist dis-

courses whose tropes circulate in the fashion world as they do in the realms of

politics. Even when some Japanese designers see themselves as part of a larger,

transnational narrative field, the sedimented histories of nation-states and vari-

ous essentializing practices resituate them in terms of their national, and often

racial, identities. On the other hand, in its relations with other parts of Asia,

5 6 Japan's mobilization as a nation-state in the late nineteenth century meant taking

on the colonizing imperatives of the nation; specifically, projects of imperialist

ambition and aggression manifested in the colonizations of Korea and Taiwan,

ORIENTALISMS

wartime militarism, aggressions m China, as well as continuing economic

imperialism in Southeast Asia. Western Orientalizing, counter-Orientalisms,

self-Orientalizing, Orientalisms directed at other Asian countries: the inter-

weavings of such constitutive contradictions produce "Japan".

This essay examines the fashioning of a Japanese national essence in a

variety of sites in the garment industry. First, the industry's transnational com-

plexity and the challenging of old forms of dominance emerge in the question

of what counts as Paris, where Parisian hegemony in the fashion industry is

simultaneously undermined and reasserted. This provides a broad context for

the analysis of multiple Orientalisms. International fashion commentary tends

to group Japanese designers on the basis of national essence rather than on

individual design achievement, as is the usual case for European and Ameri-

can designers. "The Japanese" are termed "avant-garde" or "experimental,"

and the distinctive features of their work are often traced to origins in culture,

such as a Japanese aesthetic, Zen, or regional costume.

Such essentializing gestures are for these designers centrally implicated in

geopolitical power relations and in discourses of Orientalism, and the final sec-

tion examines the reinscriptions and contestations of Orientalist discourses in

three sites. The first is a moment of Western Orientalizing. Wim Wenders's doc-

umentary about designer Yohji Yamamoto, despite its celebration of postmod-

ern identities, reinvokes a high modernist discourse of filmmaker as creator

deity and recirculates famili ar Orientalist tropes: Japan as miniature, aes-

thetic, feminized, exotic. A second moment examines processes of what Marta

Savigliano (1995) calls "autoexoticizing," through the appropriation of Western

gazes. Here I focus upon a 1989 feature entitled, "Kyoto snob resort" in a lead-

ing Japanese fashion magazine, Ryilko Tsu.shin (Fashwn News). The series of

photographs and articles initiates a nostalgic search for the essence of Japan-

eseness as it simultaneously claims a strongly cosmopolitan identity through

adopting/undermining a Western-usually French-gaze. It offers an exem-

plary instance of nostalgic essence fabrication, the provocation of consumer

desire through commodity feti shism, and the construction of a feminine con-

sumer-subject. The third moment enacts Japanese positioning as an imperial-

ist, advanced capitalist nation-state in a position to Orientalize others. Ryilko

Tsu.shin Homme, the men's issue of the same fashion magazine from the same

month, provides a revealing point of entry into this colonizing male gaze, as its

articles and fashion spreads perform Japanese male dominance over a femi-

nized, Orientalized Thailand and an exoticized, mysterious Bali. Through an

57

DORINNE KONDO

examination of these disparate sites, the contradictions and mutually constitu-

tive dialectics of nationalism/transnationalism and Japanese identity emerge in

their ambivalent complexity.

THE CENTER CAN(NOT?) HOLD

Questions of cosmopolitan and national identities are articulated in paradig-

matic form in the fashion world's complex relationship to Paris as the world

fashion capital. Strong contending sites of fashion design have arisen in recent

years in New York, Milan, and to a lesser extent, London and Tokyo. Yet even

as the fashion world proliferates and disperses, a strong centripetal force draws

designers to Paris. Compelling them is a sense that, after all is said and done,

only those designers who have made it in Paris have really made it. Certainly,

of the Japanese designers only the handful who regularly show in Paris can be

said to have achieved worldwide recognition: Hanae Mori, Issey Miyake, Rei

Kawakubo of Comme des GarQons, and Yohji Yamamoto notable among them.

To address the question of Parisian hegemony, however, one must also prob-

lematize what counts as French. Multinational financing, licensing, and the

hiring of foreign designers have wrought dramatic changes in the classic French

design houses, refiguring the boundaries of Paris. Chanel has been for years

the domain of German Karl Lagerfeld, who also designs for labels Chloe and

Lagerfeld and for the Milan design house Fendi. In 1989 Milanese Gianfranco

Ferre took over the House of Dior from the long regnant Marc Bohan. Last sea-

son, Ferre's successor, British designer John Galliano, showed his first haute-

couture collection for Dior. The venerable House of Gres was purchased by the

Japanese textile and apparel company Yagi Tsusho in 1988. Yagi then hired

Takashi Sasaki, a Japanese who had worked for 15 years at Pierre Cardin, to

replace the ailing Madame Alix Gres. Sasaki presented his first collection for

Gres, 80 pieces for the spring and summer of 1990. In the same year Cacharel,

symbol of soft French femininity, hired a new head designer, Atsuro Tayama,

head of the Japanese fashion atelier A.T.5 In 1995, hip London designer John

Galliano succeeded Hubert de Givenchy at the House of Givenchy, marking an

important shift in the traditions of haute couture. When Galliano moved to

5 g Dior, Alexander McQueen took over the helm at Givenchy. Moreover, France's

"Others"-designers from former colonial territories and denigrated European

nations-have also made inroads into Paris, including the highly successful

ORIENTALISMS

Azzedine Alaia, of North African descent, the House of Xuly Bet, of Sene-

galese origin, and Belgian deconstructivist Martin Margiela.6

To complicate matters, a designer of one national origin may have an orga-

nization financed by one or more multi- or transnational corporations, and

employees in the boutiques, the showrooms, and the production lines may be

scattered across the globe. Certainly, Paris is the site for increasing numbers of

international alliances in which Japanese capital plays a key role. For example,

Romeo Gigli, the sensation of the late 1980s, opened a Paris boutique owned by

Japanese department store Takashimaya-which also owns the exclusive on the

production and marketing of Gigli in Japan. Onward Kashiyama, a Japanese

firm, distributes Jean-Paul Gaultier in Asia and the U.S. and owns Gaultier's

Italian production facilities. In 1995 they inaugurated their own house line

designed by American Michael Kors.7 Production is also globally dispersed; for

example, Comme des Garc;ons and Yohji Yamamoto manufacture some of their

simple garments in their intermediately priced, or bridge lines, in France and

Italy. One can only guess what the origins of these workers might be: Turkish

Gastarbeiter? North African immigrants? If Paris is hegemonic, it is no longer

the Paris reigned exclusively by the French. Indeed, French fashion, itself

emblematic of French nationhood, is created by Germans, Italians, Japanese,

and North and West Africans, among many others.

On the Japanese side, the relation to the West is a complex mixture of

"mimicry" (Bhabha 1987), appropriation, synthesis, and "domestication"

(Tobin 1992). Western clothing has become the normative standard in Japan

after its introduction in the Meiji period (1868-1912), so that kimono either

mark special occasions or signify traditionalism. On the level of fashion design,

the 1990 Tokyo collections I attended were instructive. Mostly, designers

showed what I call "just clothes," garments indistinguishable from what you

might see on the streets of Paris, New York, or even middle America. The

mimetic reproduction of the West was further symbolized by the ovenvhelming

use of white models. One or two Asian models appeared in the shows of most

Japanese designers; only those from abroad, such as the recently deceased Bill

Robinson, featured numerous Asian models. In the Tokyo collections, when

Black models were used, they added "exotic" color, reproducing Western

industry practice. The predominance of white models and the just-clothes

quality of most of the collections can be thought of in multiple ways: one, as

poignant and racially marked. Another level might see in the collections a

thorough domestication of Western clothing, so that the garments Japanese

59

DORINNE KONDO

designers produce for the domestic market are no longer merely reproductions,

but thorough appropriations of Western clothing conventions. Another, taking

a cue from Bhabha's analysis of mimicry, would see the complex combination

of "not quite"-the almost realized reproduction of Western clothing-and

"not white," the racial marking that makes the notion of the Japanese entering

the domain of Western clothing slightly disturbing, even ominous. Indeed,

Japanese designers in their very entry into the domain of Western clothing

destabilize the East-West binary even as, at another level, they reinscribe it

through mimesis.

Given this aesthetic/political history and the context of an industry defined

by cosmopolitanism, global dispersion, a contested European cultural hege-

mony, and mimetic/appropriative tendencies in the domestic fashion industry,

what counts as "Japanese" is, for Japanese designers-a label many them-

selves eschew-a highly vexed issue. Many desire not to be lumped together,

nor to be seen as designing out of a culture. Fashion, they say, should transcend

nationality (mukokuseki). Perhaps lssey Miyake's well-documented career and

his thoughtful disquisitions on the subject most eloquently illustrate these

complexities and ambivalences. After graduating from Tama Art University in

1964, he went to Paris to work at the houses of Lanvin and Givenchy for four

years. In an address at the Japan Today Conference, he describes his awaken-

ing to possibilities for synthesis of Japanese and Western forms in his creations:

Away from the home country, living and working in Paris, I looked at myself

very hard and asked, 'What could I do as a Japanese fashion designer?' Then I

realized that my very disadvantage, lack of Western heritage, would also be my

advantage. I was free of Western tradition or convention. I thought, 'I can try

anything new. I cannot go back to the past because there is no past in me as far

as Western clothing is concerned. There was no other way for me but to go for-

ward.' The lack of Western tradition was the very thing I needed to create con-

temporary and universal fashion. But as a Japanese I come from the heritage

rich in tradition ... I realized these two wonderful advantages I enjoy, and that

was when I started to experiment creating a new genre of clothing, neither West-

ern nor Japanese but beyond nationality. I hoped to create a new universal

clothing which is challenging to our time (Miyake 1984).

Predictably, Miyake feels uncomfortable with the label "Japanese designer"

6o precisely because it enforces stereotyped limits to his vision of a design with

universal appeal. He fears that his association with Japonaiserie will make the

interest in his clothing simply a fad. Miyake wryly stated, "I have been trying

ORIENTALISMS

to create something more than Japanese or Western for over ten years and, iron-

ically, I find myself as one of the leaders of the new Japanese craze. I hope I

will be around a lot longer than this sudden interest" (1984).

Miyake's claim on universality reproduces the contradictions animating

Japanese identity formation from the 1970s. On the one hand, his appeal for uni-

versality fuels the forces of consumer capitalism. "Universality" means clothing

that will sell anywhere in the world, and more specifically, in Europe and the

United States. Claims for universality reveal desires for parity with the West as

a nation-state, as a capitalist power and as a cultural producer. On the other

hand, "universality" reaches for recognition outside essentialized Japanese

identity. Here, the salient feature is racial marking, which preserves the

unmarked category of universality for "white". Who, after all, is allowed the des-

ignation "designer," not "Japanese designer?" Miyake's move toward universal-

ity on this level is a common, if problematic, move to escape ghettoization.8

This dilemma, how to play on someone else's field as a racially marked,

artistic, capitalist, geopolitical rival, faces all Japanese designers who have

international reputations, and each deals with the dilemma somewhat differ-

ently. According to Harold Koda (1989), former curator at the Fashion Institute

of Technology and currently costume curator at the Metropolitan Museum of

Art, the arrival of the Japanese in Paris can be conceived in generational

terms. The trailblazer in the field of international fashion design and a highly

powerful force in the industry is Hanae Mori. She first went to Paris in 1961,

showed for the first time overseas in New York in 1965, and in 1977 became

the first Asian to be admitted to the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture:

the exclusive ranks of those who are allowed to design haute couture, garments

made-to-order for the world elites.9 Mori is known for her feminine, classic gar-

ments, clothing for the elegant, well-heeled, mature woman. The shapes of her

clothing draw from classic draping and tailoring as much as from regional cos-

tume. The garment in the photograph exemplifies these influences. The coat

echoes kimono in its flowing shape, but the sweater dress it covers is slim, rec-

ognizable in terms of Western clothing conventions as feminine, sexy, soigne.

The Japanese elements in her work often lie in the patterns of the fabrics she

uses: her well-known butterfly motif, for instance, in clothing and accessories

in the late '70s and early '80s, or patterns on her luxurious evening gowns that

evoke motifs from kimono.

Kansai Yamamoto's Japan draws on the stylishness of Edo townsman cul-

ture. Understated aestheticism has no place here; instead, Kansai boldly

DORINNE KONDO

1990-1 Autumn-Winter Ready-to-Wear Collection

Paprika cashmere turtleneck dress

6z Paprika wool long coat printed with black spots

Mamoru Sakamoto, photographer

Used by permission, Hanae Mori International

ORIENTALISMS

appropriates Edo stripes and Edo firemen's gear, among other motifs, to create

wildly patterned tops, electric bright, multicolored sweaters with padded

shoulders reminiscent of samurai armor, and dramatic combinations of strong

colors and bold graphics in his space-age/Edo-retro look. Kenzo Takada has

been resident in France since 1965 and showed his first Paris collection in

1970 (Sainderichin). Kenzo's bright, folkloric styles, his recreations of boxy

kimono shapes in quilted and flowered fabrics in the 70s, his continued spo-

radic references to kimono in later collections allude to regional costume even

as they modify it. Mitsuhiro Matsuda and to some extent Takeo Kikuchi of Bigi

claim for Japan a different version of Japanese-ness that alludes to the Japan-

ese appropriation of Western clothing in earlier parts of this century. One of

Bigi's labels, Moga, explicitly invokes the heritage of the flapper, the mo(dan)

ga(aru) (modem girl) of the 1920s. Matsuda stresses the romantic aspects of

fashion in his work, through nostalgic evocations of prewar elegance in beau-

tifully tailored suits, rich patterns and colors, embroidery, and passementerie.

All these designers tend to use Western tailoring techniques or adaptations of

regional costume for their work.

This tendency to group Japanese designers together-a move this chapter

makes as well, even as I try to deconstruct that essentializing category-proves

understandably frustrating to people who pride themselves on their distinc-

tiveness and creativity. Certainly, to lump together Hanae Mori's lavishly

printed silks, Miyake's technology of pleats, Matsuda's nostalgic retro mode,

and Kawakubo's radically deconstructive vision, suppresses the differences

within this highly diverse group. The fashion world and the larger cultural and

historical discourses of which it is a part circulate the tropes of both individ-

ual creativity and national identity. For the moment, I am highlighting the

racial/political elements at work in the construction of a national identity, but

both the trope of individual genius and the trope of national essence must be

interrogated.10

Indeed, essentialist national identities are most strongly asserted in the

case of the so-called avant-garde of Japanese fashion. "Japanese designer"

usually designates one of the three-Miyake, Kawakubo, Yamamoto--who,

according to New York designer Diane Pemet, gave fashion its "last big shock"

(1989). Fashion commentators categorize their related yet distinct work in

terms of its experimental moves, which are then traced to Japanese aesthetics, 6J

traditions, and costumes, or to some overarching postmodernity. Generally,

journalists and fashion analysts single out several distinctive features of

DORINNE KONDO

"Japanese fashion" in the early 1980s, and with some ambivalence about the

essentializing effects of these discourses, I reproduce that commentary here.

First is the premium placed on the cloth as a point of departure for

design. The fabrics themselves are often in-house designs, specially com-

missioned, artisanally produced textiles, or startling synthetics that draw on

the best of available technology. Yohji Yamamoto speaks of nuno no hyojo , the

expression of the cloth, "displaying what is inherent in the cloth: wrinkles in

linen, puckers along a seam, the texture of hand-washed silk satin"

(Stinchecum 74). Miyake explicitly likens fabric to "the grain in wood. You

can't go against it. I close my eyes and let the fabric tell me what to do"

(Cocks 1986, 70). Like the others, Kawakubo experiments with new textures

and dyes. Her inspiration "is different types of fabric she has seen in her life-

time-not necessarily clothing but perhaps a piece of paper or carpeting"

(Sidorsky 18). She is known for her aesthetic of imperfection and asymme-

try, 11 and has reportedly been known to loosen a screw on a loom in order to

introduce the surprise of the imperfect, the trace of the handmade, into the

process of mechanical reproduction. Yamamoto, like Miyake and Kawakubo,

appreciates the playful and innovative use of a variety of unexpected materi-

als. In an interview, Barbara Weiser of the boutique Charivari voiced to me

her surprise at finding Yohji garments made from the fabric used to cover ten-

nis balls (1989). Similarly, Issey Miyake both draws on artisanal production

from Japan and other sites12 and explores the technologies of synthetic fab-

rics. In recent collections, he has pursued the technology of pleats in gar-

ments that are often described as museum pieces, evoking images of

Fortuny.13 Kawakubo works closely with textile designers and producers;

their innovations are often featured motifs in her collections. For example, in

the 1990 spring-summer collection I saw in Paris, "non-woven, man-made"

fabric was such a theme.

A second commonality costume curator Harold Koda labels "terse

expression": that is, a respect for the integrity of the material and an aversion

to cutting into the cloth. He links this aesthetic to the use of cloth in kimono

and regional costume, where the bolt is used virtually in its entirety, with rel-

atively little cutting and little waste. "The minimum is used to maximum

effect" (1989). Examining the pattern pieces of one of these garments reveals

6 4

this tendency toward terse expression. Even in constructing a simple skirt,

Miyake uses one entire piece of cloth to achieve the draping (rather than

depending, for example, on multiple pieces cut on the bias). A conventional

Western skirt involves greater waste of the material, as pattern pieces are laid

Bonded cotton dress from 1986 collection

Photographed by Steven Meisel

Courtesy Comme des Gargons

ORIENTALISMS

out and then cut from fabric; if the pattern is arranged on the bias of the fab-

ric, the waste will be even greater. 14 On the body, the two skirts may seem

similar, even identical, to the untrained eye; however, at the level of con- 65 struction, the differences are stunning. For example, Miyake is said to work

with the fabric first, draping it over himself, then draping it on a model, and

only then making up sketches (Cocks 1986, 70).

DORINNE KONDO

A related innovation prevalent in the clothing of the early 1980s and less

apparent in contemporary designs are garments in one size. This commenta-

tors link to the conventions of kimono, which come in a single size and are

adjusted to fit the body of the wearer through wrapping and tying. Barbara

Weiser (the owner, with her mother and brother, of the highly successful

Charivari boutiques in Manhattan) described for me her first encounter with

Yamamoto's work:

It was ... maybe 1979 ... What happened was that I was in Paris for the collec- tions ... rather disappointed and bored with what we saw that season, and I decided

to go hunting. I went to Les Halles ... into a shop on the rue du Cygne, and there

were these garments that had the oddest look. They looked slightly like hospital

gowns in fabrics and forms that I had never seen, and they were all one size, which

was in itself radical, and they were moderately priced at that point. I took about 15

or 20 pieces into the fitting rooms, and tried them all on and found that they were

fascinating when I put them on the body. Actually you couldn't tell how interest-

ing the forms were when they were just hanging on the racks. I remember calling

my mother at the hotel and said that she had to come immediately and see them,

because they were the most interesting garments I had seen. I didn't know if I loved

them or what: I just am utterly stunned. My mother and I, who are not the same

size, she started trying on the exact same pieces, which was also odd in itself. And

she immediately asked them if they had a collection, and it turned out that they

had just opened the store, so it was in the back or upstairs. They wheeled out the

racks, and we were buying the collection. (November 13, 1989)

Weiser is literally invested in Yamamoto's clothing as the retailer who intro-

duced his line to the U.S., and she portrays them accordingly in the most lauda-

tory terms. Still, her encounter is eloquent testimony to the shock Japanese

garments provoked when they first appeared in Paris.

Finally, Japanese designers are credited with the predominance of the color

black during the early 1980s. Indeed, in Japan the unrelenting black-on-black

aesthetic earned devotees of Kawakubo and Yamamoto the nickname karasu-

zoku, the crow tribe. In the U.S. Kawakubo and Yamamoto's explorations of

black defined the 1980s all-black, hip, downtown/art-world look in New York.

Jeff Weinstein of The Village Voice argues that for Kawakubo "'black' becomes

a full spectrum, an examination of the relationship between fiber and dye"

(1989). Certainly, the emphasis on black permeated fashion in advanced capi-

66 talist nations, as did the loose cuts of clothing prevalent during this period. In

the early 1980s, then, the Japanese avant-garde are grouped through their

experimentation with fabrication, the use of black, the innovation of one-size

ORIENTALISMS

garments, and traditions of wrapping: layering the body in various configura-

tions of cloth and using materials to form an architectural/sculptural space

around the body, rather than tailoring clothing close to the body.

There is a level at which these observations from fashion commentators are

perceptive and revealing of themes and continuities. Yet at another level the

very act of labelling these designers and tracing their commonalities to cultural

continuity remains problematic. In my interview with Comme des Gan;ons

designer and president Rei Kawakubo, I explicitly asked about her take on pri-

marily Western journalistic reactions to her work that emphasized its putative

Japanese elements. Kawakubo responded with some asperity:

DK: I'd like to ask in some detail about aesthetics .... In the foreign press,

there's usually a lot of talk about Japanese aesthetics, like sabi/wabi.15 ••• I'm

wondering how you feel the clothing has been covered in the foreign press.

RK: Do you feel sabi/wabi? About Japan? Something ... that exists only in

Japan, even though it doesn't exist in your country? Do you have that sense?

DK: I wonder ... I think it probably exists elsewhere ...

RK: So, I don't especially ... feel it. It's not important. For me.

DK: Others give that interpretation.

RK: I've seen so-called 'traditional' culture maybe once in school, when I had

to. Things like Kabuki, one time only, for a class in elementary school. (my

translation)

In this interchange, Kawakubo impatiently resists definitions of Japanese iden-

tity that reinscribe conventional notions of traditional culture. Her world is

transnational, more "Western" in conventional terms than "traditionally Japan-

ese." More important, this new version of identity itself displaces and shifts the

terms of an East/West dichotomy, in a Japan that is itself constituted through

incorporation of the West.

Further, Kawakubo goes on to comment on the label "Japanese designer."

Joining our discussions was the Comme des Gan;;ons international press liai-

son Jan Kawata:

DK: And what do you think of being grouped as a "Japanese designer"?

RK: I wonder whether they say it elsewhere: "American designer, American

designer."

JK: They don't.

RK: It's the individual's name, probably.

JK: The top countries are America and France, and the other countries ...

RK: ... are number two, so they use the name of the country.

DORINNE KONDO

Clearly, for Kawakubo and her staff, as well as for other Japanese designers,

grouping on the basis of race and nationality undermines the distinctiveness of

her work, assimilates it lo an essentialized notion of tradition that she eschews,

and indexes Japan's secondary status in the fashion world.

As Kawakubo's responses indicate, troping in terms of national essence can

easily be turned toward Eurocentric and Orientalist ends. In these appropria- tions, the Japanese are "not quite/not white:" simultaneously inadequate "imita-

tors" of Western fashion and a racial threat. Racial overtones emerge blatantly, in

the Associated Press coverage of the Paris collections in the early '80s: "Rei

Kawakubo for Comme des Gar9ons proved as usual to be the high priestess of the

Jap wrap."16 Women~ Wear Daily and other unsympathetic gatekeepers dubbed

the black, asymmetrical garments "the Hiroshima bag-lady look." Condescen-

sion and dismissal are sometimes shown in subtle ways. Writer and publisher

James Nelson pointed out to me (1989) the frequent misspellings of the names of

Japanese designers in early articles in Vogue and in British fashion magazines.

He passionately contends that such mistakes would be neither committed nor tol-

erated with European or American designers. The misspellings, though seem-

ingly trivial, are gestures that tell us who counts and who does not. In 1989, the

year before I attended the Paris collections, the misattributions continued. The

expensive ($300) trade publication The Fashion Guide-a supposedly compre-

hensive who's-who in the industry--contains numerous errors in their informa-

tion on Japanese designers. Comme des Gan;ons, Rei Kawakubo's company, is

listed as French. And Kawakubo's name is given, in the introduction to Japanese

fashion, as "Hai Kawakube"! Misspellings proliferate: "Harajuku," a trendy

Tokyo hangout, is rendered "Harajuka"; Hiromichi Nakano comes across as

"Wakano," the Bigi group as "Higi," and so on (416). American, French, British,

and Italian designers suffer no such orthographic indignities.

Reception among retailers seemed equally mixed. Jeff Weinstein of the Vil-

lage Voice described to me the "shabby little Japanese design corners" in major

department stores during the heyday of Bloomingdale's in Manhattan. "It's not

treated well; you walk in and you look at their Ralph Lauren boutique-it's all

very prim and proper. This they don't give a damn about" (1989). The margin-

alization of the work of Japanese designers he attributed lo racism and to a cli-

mate of Japan-bashing.17 Like Weinstein, in her interview Barbara Weiser

68 noted the anti-Japanese reaction in the fashion world, linking it to wider issues

of trade and economic competition during a period when Japan-bashing was

(and continues to be) in the air.

ORIENTAllSMS

Just as the daring of Japanese clothing has provoked virulent negative

response, so has it attracted acclaim. Hanae Mori was awarded the Chevalier

des lettres, from the French government. The Musee des Arts Decoratifs

mounted an exhibition of Miyake's work in the winter of 1988, and costume

curator at the Museum, Yvonne Deslandres, calls him "the greatest creator of

clothing of our time" (Cocks 1986, 67). Innovative designers Claude Montana

and Romeo Gigli acknowledge lssey Miyake as a major influence. The corps of

French fashion journalists presented Miyake with an "Oscar" of fashion as the

best international designer at their first awards ceremony in October 1985.

Indeed, his work earns him the greatest accolade the fashion industry can

bestow: "son style depasse les modes" (Elle, Feb. 3, 1986, 58), "his style goes

beyond fashion." 18

But praise can be in the form of a backhanded compliment; it can also con-

struct limits and create a colonizing distance, even as it celebrates. Take, for

example, the trendy downtown magazine Details (before it became a Conde

Nast publication and a mainstream men's magazine), which described the 1988

Mori haute-couture collections with this Orientalizing gesture:

Hanae Mori happily returned to her roots with fabulously painted panels on silk

crepe, their motif lifted from ancient Japanese art screens. The fabric, uncut,

formed flowing kimono evening dresses. What a lovely surprise to see Madame

Mori return to her original source of inspiration after years of misguided

attempts to imitate European style (Cunningham 121).

Laudatory though this passage may seem to be, the subtext is "East is East and

West is West," and attempts to blur the boundaries are "misguided." Only when

the motifs are "ancient" and recognizable as kimono are they successful. Mori's

transgression---designing Western clothes indistinguishable from the work of

Western designers-produces Cunningham's anxiety and condescension. The

racial menace of "not white" provokes the dismissive term "imitation," mini-

mizing the racial threat by consigning her work to the "not quite." "Stay Japan-

ese"-according to some stereotyped view of Japanese-ness-the passage tells

us. This familiar operation of Orientalism typically results in a Western com-

mentator's melancholia in the face of the Westernization of a Third World or

racialized Other. Orientalist melancholia is in part a form of mourning the per-

ceived impending loss of his/her object of study and the concomitant threat to 6 9

the commentator's site of privilege, as Rey Chow (1993) acutely demonstrated

in her critique of East Asian Studies in the U.S. In a similar vein, an editor with

DORINNE KONDO

a major French fashion magazine told me that many fashion professionals in

France are fascinated with Japan, for they consider it to be the only country truly

able to appreciate and understand French fashion on an aesthetic level. What

appears to be a lavish compliment seems less flattering on closer examination.

In fact, the utterance reasserts the centrality of French fashion as standard

which only Japan can appreciate or approach. Surely the elevation of Japan to

the position of France's appreciative audience scarcely constructs the relation-

ship as an equal one. In both cases, Japan is "not quite/not white," almost but

not quite France's equal in the latter example, contained within a "culture gar-

den" (Chow 1990) of kimonos, butterflies, and silk in the former.

Recirculated Orientalist discourses and racial marking provoke counter-

Orientalist responses. The late Tokio Kumagai offered this view:

I'm working in the "fashion" world, but I also have hopes for political trends

and such to go a certain way. In the latter half of the twentieth century, there

exist many different. .. ways of life. But I think it is wrong to invade or to negate

another culture .. .in other words, another way of life, through an economic sys-

tem or political might, simply because of the fact that one part of the popula-

tion has more power. I think we have to make a world where different cultures

can cooperate and move forward. Even in Japanese fashion, the inclination

toward white people has been strong. There's something wrong with thinking

that white people's culture created at the end of the nineteenth century is more

beautiful and powerful than any other. "Beauty" is something found in different

ways among Japanese, in Chinese, in Black people; the notion that a fixed pro-

portion is beautiful is nothing more than a prejudice. Because "beauty" is not

something you can dictate from a position of authority.19 (1986)

In this statement, Kumagai explicitly links the present state of the Japanese

fashion world to political events such as the "opening" of Japan in the Meiji

period, and he passionately argues against the enshrinement of "white people's

culture" in Japan, where power and standards of beauty are directly related. In

arguing for a multiplicity of definitions of beauty, Kumagai enacts an opposi-

tional gesture, contesting hegemonic European and American aesthetic canons.

The passionate and ambivalent reactions to Japanese fashion from all play-

ers suggest that the stakes exceed the purely aesthetic, as though such a realm

could exist beyond history, politics, economics, or the Law of the Father. At

issue are global geopolitical relations, where the historically sedimented terms

"Japan/Europe" and "Japan/U.S." bristle with significance. Though this essay

can but gesture toward these wider contests for power, surely the arrival of

Japanese fashion in Paris in the early 1980s, when the Japanese economy was

ORIENTALISMS

burgeoning, cannot have failed to engender both admiration and fear in the

fashion industry as elsewhere. The rhetoric of war recurs in fashion trade

papers and popular fashion magazines just as it does in the popular press and

in mainstream business journals. For example, in Vogue's retrospective of the

major fashion influences of the 1980s, Japanese designers are grouped together

in a series of photos labelled "the Japanese invasion." They were the only

designers to be categorized on the basis of nationality, even as their work was

acknowledged to be classic. Similarly, a French article on Japanese fashion

trumpets its headline "L'o.ffensif japonais," demonstrating that the language of

war and race circulates in Europe as it does in the U.S. The use of martial

metaphors reminiscent of other such terms deployed in "the trade war,"

reminds us of the inextricability of fashion from capitalist accumulation and

interimperial rivalry.

The positioning of Japan on the present fashion scene arises directly from

these geopolitical histories. Miyake Design Studio representative Jun Kanai

foregrounded the salient issues when she linked the interest in Japanese cul-

ture and design to Japan's economic success:

Just as Japan emerged as an economic power, there is cultural or aesthetic power

that developed. That will be (architect Arata) lsozaki, (furniture designer)

Kuramata Shiro, lssey in fashion or Comme des Gan;ons's Rei Kawakubo, or

Ranae Mori a little bit earlier, or the music of Kitaro. So there's a whole group

of artists that emerged at the same time ... that had to do with the wealth of the

nation and also the power, that sort of energy (1989).

Kanai resisted easy Orientalizing by describing Miyake's generation as one for

whom Rin Tin Tin and Coca Cola were as Japanese as, say, Kabuki. Her insights

lead us into Japan's sedimented relations with the West. The incorporation of

American popular culture and Western clothing as part of a contemporary

Japanese identity does not arise in a vacuum via spontaneous generation, sim-

ple diffusion, or the arrival of a postmodern information/consumer society in a

free play of genres and cross-references in a ludic site beyond power. Rather, it

is directly linked to historically specific geopolitical relations and the forces of

advanced capitalism: Western cultural, economic, and military dominance, on

the one hand, and the increasing power of Japanese capital and the Japanese

nation-state on the other. The appropriation of Western popular culture is insep-

arable from the "opening" of Japan in the Meiji period and the outcome of World

War II, centrally including the American Occupation of Japan, and the postwar

emergence of Japan as a capitalist superpower.

7r

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DORINNE KONDO

These complex positionings are visible in the establishment of the Tokyo

collections themselves. In an attempt to make room for themselves in world

arenas, a consortium of well-known Japanese designers, including Miyake,

Kawakubo, Yamamoto, Matsuda, Yamamoto Kansai, and Mori, initiated the first

such collections in 1985. Their goal was "to wedge the country's talent into the

traditional fashion route: Milan, Paris, New York" (Cocks, May 19, 1986, 92).

Four international designers were invited to Tokyo for a "Tokyo summit," cre-

ating a meeting of "world powers" on the fashion scene. And the analogy is not

taken in vain. The attempt is to establish Japan as a peer to the the West in

geopolitical as well as cultural terms, to say that Japan as a nation-state is

equal to the U.S. or to any European nation. "'I hope,' Miyake remarked toward

the end of the Tokyo shows, 'that my contemporaries and I will be the last to

have to go to Paris"' (Cocks, May 19, 1986, 94). Miyake's statement is both

poignant and imbued with Japan's capitalist, first-world, imperialist histories.

The Tokyo collections and the fashion "summit" restage Japan's status as a

racially marked late-developer whose development must be measured largely

according to Western standards, yet they also perform Japan as aspiring cul-

tural peer and imperialist rival of Western nation-states.

ORIENTALIZING GAZES

"Japan," like any identity, takes shape relationally, amidst historically specific,

power-laden discourses, and the Orientalisms that racially mark Japan and Asia

can be deployed, twisted, and redeployed in multiple and contradictory ways.

Fabrications of Japan vis-a-vis its Others are strikingly instantiated in three dif-

ferent sites: the first, Wim Wenders's film on Yohji Yamamoto that images the

Orientalizing gaze of the West in masculine, high-modernist terms; the second

and third, the women's and men's editions of a Japanese high-fashion magazine

that articulate complex forms of Japanese autoexoticism, counter-Orientalisms,

and the Orientalizing of Southeast Asia. In these disparate sites, we see multi-

ple, sometimes contradictory articulations of Japanese identity.

Avant-garde Orientals

Wim Wenders's film, A Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), commissioned by

the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is a documentary based on the work of designer

ORIENTALISMS

Yohji Yamamoto. Ostensibly a disquisition on postmodern identities, fashion, and

creativity, it also transposes and recirculates familiar Orientalist tropes.

The film begins with the screen full of static snow. Credits roll, and the

author/narrator's voice intones a meditation on identity:

YOU'RE LIVING HOWEVER YOU CAN.

YOU ARE WHOEVER YOU ARE

"IDENTITY" ...

of a person,

of a thing,

of a place.

"Identity."

The word itself gives me shivers.

It rings of calm, comfort, contentedness. What is it, identity?

How do you recognize identity?

We are creating an image of ourselves,

We are attempting to resemble this image ...

Is that what we call identity?

The accord

between the image we have created

of ourselves

and ... ourselves?

Just who is that, "ourselves"?

We live in the cities.

The cities live in us ....

time passes.

We move from one city to another,

from one country to another.

We change languages,

we change habits,

we change opinions,

we change clothes,

we change everything.

Everything changes. And fast.

Images above all ...

The film cuts to a shot of a Tokyo freeway from the interior of a car. We see the

freeway, but we also see a hand on the left holding a video screen/viewfinder

where a video of the freeway plays. Wenders, clearly alluding to Benjamin

(1969) and Baudrillard (1983), speaks of the differences between mechanical

73

74

DORINNE KONDO

reproduction in photography and digital imaging in video. In photography, "the

original was a negative, but with an electronic image, there is no more nega-

tive, no more positive, everything is copy." In such a world, "what is in vogue,

but fashion itself?"

We cut to a shot of Yamamoto in Paris, shot from above ground, apparently

at or near his boutique in Les Halles, close to the Centre Pompidou. At this early

.Point, he articulates the dilemmas surrounding Japanese identity, for in Japan

he defined himself as a Tokyo person, not a Japanese. Later, he comments on

how this self-conception was forced to change upon his arrival in Paris.

Yamamoto did not intend that his clothes appeal to people based on nationality,

nor did he expect to be constantly subjected to racial categorizing. But "when I

came to Paris, I ... was pushed to realize I am a Japanese. I was told, "You are

representing mode japonaise," and, despite his protests, that label continued to

be pinned to his work. It was, he says, a major realization. Echoing lssey Miyake's complex claims for universality, Yamamoto finds that racial essential-

izing is always already part of the story when Japanese travel to the West.

Similarly, Yamamoto articulates the complexities of Japan's geopolitical

positioning given the legacies of World War II, when he invokes the death of

his father, who was drafted and died in China. His father's buddies were in

Siberian camps. Yamamoto relates his reaction to their letters:

I realize that the war is still raging inside me; there is no 'postwar' for me.

What they wanted to achieve I am doing for them. It's a role I feel compelled

to play .... When I think of my life, the first thing that comes to mind is that

I'm not fighting alone; that it's the continuation of something else.

Here Yamamoto gestures toward Japan's imperialist project in World War II and

uncritically invokes his own implication in that project. He further suggests

that vis-a-vis the West, the goal is precisely to achieve equality or parity,

extending the war into the realms of business and aesthetics, winning on West-

ern ground as the racially marked rival.

Wenders, on the other hand, manages throughout to maintain the position of

Master Subject through thematizing authorship and high-modernist assumptions

of individual, masculine creative genius. He talks to Yamamoto about the dangers

of becoming imprisoned in one's style, condemned forever to imitate oneself.

Yamamoto replies that "the moment [he] learned to accept his own style ... sud-

denly the prison ... opened up to a great freedom .... " Wenders proclaims, "That

for me is an author. Someone who has something to say in the first place, who then

ORIENTALISMS

knows how to express himself with his own voice, and who can finally find the

strength in himself and the insolence necessary to become the guardian of his

prison, and not to stay its prisoner." The reinscription of modernist tropes of man

as creator deity, the source of originary genius and the owner of a unique vision

and voice, with an arrogant belief in himself, strongly emerges here. Tellingly, this

sequence is followed by a reference to Yamamoto's love for a photograph of Jean-

Paul Sartre by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Here all the men-Yamamoto, Sartre,

Cartier-Bresson, and especially, Wenders-are linked in a patriline of genius.

However, within this patriline, not everyone is equally masculine. Gendered

hierarchies first emerge with Wenders's discussion of the differences between film

and video. Cinema is associated with the masculine auteur. Wenders intones that

filmmaking is a high modernist Art form created in the nineteenth century, suited

to the expression of the "grand themes" of "love and hate, war and peace." Film

and video differ in that the classic 35-mm. camera requires constant reloading,

while the video camera operates on real time, making it better suited to passively

recording images and thus to recording the (women's) domain of fashion. In cin-

ema, the director is auteur, and Wenders finds Yamamoto to be an auteur in

another medium. Just as Wenders himself works in the two languages of cinema

and video, Yamamoto must work in two languages, balancing the ephemerality of

fashion with his affinity for the past. Here Wenders stresses similarities between

his work and Yamamoto's. However, a subtle hierarchy begins to emerge. Again

highlighting similarities between Yamamoto and himself, he includes a segment

demonstrating the ways both filmmaker and designer work with form and image.

Yamamoto describes the creative process, which for him begins with the fabric,

the touch, and then to considerations of form. Yamamoto does not conceive the

process to be one of making something, but of waiting for something to come.

Wenders then cuts to a shot of his camera, and makes his Orientalizing gesture

through feminizing both the camera and Yamamoto. "You have to wind her by

hand," says he of the camera, and "she knows about waiting, too." The video cam-

era is similarly feminized; in the car, "she was just there." Juxtaposing

Yamamoto's waiting with the female camera waiting for Wender's touch to wind

her, makes an equivalence between the feminized Yamamoto and the feminized

camera, recirculating Orientalist tropes of Asia and Asian men as passive, femi-

nized, "waiting."20 In both cases, Wenders maintains his position as Master Sub-

ject; Yamamoto is almost, but not quite, an equal.

Further inscriptions of the director as masculine auteur emerge at the

conclusion, when Wenders shows us the aftermath of the Paris collections.

75

DORINNE KONDO

Yamamoto's staff sits, raptly watching a video of the day's runway show. Wenders

extols their virtues, speaking of Yamamoto's "tender and delicate language. His

company ... reminded me of a monastery. They were his translators ... whose

care and fervor assured that the integrity of Yohji's work remained intact."

Wenders labels the staff "the guardian angels of an author." He makes explicit

the parallels between Yamamoto's work as a designer and his own work as a

director, likening the design staff to "a kind of film crew, that Yohji was a direc-

tor of a never-ending film never shown on screen." Wenders extends the paral-

lels, comparing the consumer's confrontation with the mirror image with a

"private screen ... so that you can better recognize and readily accept your

body ... your appearance, your history, in short yourself-that is the story of the

continuing screenplay of the friendly film by Yohji Yamamoto." Yamamoto's

staff act as guardian angels, in the same way that Wenders's crew plays the

angel to his own version of masculine creator deity.

Here Orientalism laces Wenders's characterizations. Though Yamamoto is

a fellow creator, a fellow author, he is clearly not equally masculine. Wenders

labels Yamamoto's artistic language "tender and delicate," recirculating typi-

cal Orientalist tropes of the East as feminine, aestheticized, fragile.

Yamamoto's "tenderness" is exhibited in the film through his particular under-

standing of women; presumably this is because Yamamoto himself possesses

feminine qualities. Indeed, Yamamoto says that were he not a designer, he

would be a kept man (himo) who stays home and takes care of the woman-a

position that feminizes Yamamoto while preserving his heterosexual status.

Further, Wenders's reference to a monastery alludes to characterizations of

Yamamoto and Kawakubo's work as "monkish," both in Japan and abroad, and

simultaneously recirculates stereotypes of Japanese asceticism, spirituality,

and asexuality.

However, the film's most striking Orientalist feature is a recurring visual

motif. Wenders frequently depicts Yamamoto through the small viewfinder!fV

screen of the video camera; this screen is usually tilted, at an angle, and off to

one side. Always, a hand-Wenders's hand, presumably-holds the camera

aloft. Here, Yamamoto is miniaturized, marginalized, and manipulated by the

Auteur. This relation of Orientalist dominance recurs in many ways. At one

juncture, we hear Yamamoto talking about and apparently leafing through a

7 6 book of photographs, entitled Men of the 20th Century, a book Wenders also

owns and loves. (Again, modernity is troped as masculine.) In the large screen,

we see hands leafing through the pages of a book; we presume these are

ORIENTALISMS

Yamamoto's hands. At the top-right corner of the screen is the small video

screen, with another scene of hands leafing through pages. Suddenly, we realize

that the hands in the small screen are gesturing according to Yamamoto's speech

rhythms, and the pages are turned the Japanese way, from right to left. Appar-

ently, the small screen is Yamamoto, while the large screen shows us

the hands of the creator/auteur Wenders, who is simulating Yamamoto's page-

turning. He has appropriated Yamamoto's gestures, reducing Yamamoto's

image to the small screen of the less privileged medium of video.

Other moments are rife with Orientalist motifs. As Yamamoto describes his

company as an inverted pyramid where he stands not at the apex but rather at

its base, a hand holds the video screen of Yamamoto against a picture book

opened to a woodblock print of Mount Fuji. "Yamamoto," Wenders informs us,

"means at the foot of the mountain." At other moments, we see the hand hold

the miniaturized Yamamoto against backdrops of woodblocks depicting feudal

battles, as Yamamoto discusses men's clothing. The miniaturized Yamamoto

again appears over photos of prewar Japanese women, photos of men in samu-

rai costume, and once, as the left hand of the auteur holds a toy fighter plane,

manipulating it to simulate flight. Presumably these are meant to signify the mar-

tial, perhaps the kamikaze. In all cases, Yamamoto embodies Orientalist stereo-

types, both new and old: the miniaturized, high-tech Oriental shown against the

background of older Orientalist figures. And ultimately, it is Wenders's hand of

God that orchestrates the action.

Other segments heighten the Orientalist tone. One sequence shows

Yamamoto signing his name-his signature is the trademark for his brand

name-on a plaque outside the door of his new boutique. Attempting to get it

right, he appears to redo his signature to the point of absurdity. What are we to

make of this sequence? Are we to assume, as Western viewers, that the Japan-

ese are inept at signature, the sign of individuality? The segment is tellingly

placed between the highly serious, political sequence showing Yamamoto's

serious avowal that for him, there is no end of the war, and the depiction of

Yamamoto in miniature against the Mt. Fuji background. The Orientalist hege-

mony of Wenders's gaze reasserts itself by rendering absurd Yamamoto's seri-

ous statements about geopolitics that claim a parity with the West. After

trivializing Yamamoto's attempt to appropriate Western individuality through

the signature, Wenders can then depict Yamamoto in stereotyped miniaturized

form against the most hackneyed Orientalist image: Mt. Fuji. Thus Wenders

maintains his dominance and the dominance of the Western viewer.

77

DORINNE KONDO

A Notebook on Cities and Clothes is a purported homage to Yamamoto's

work, and on one level, it is indeed highly valorized. However, Bhabha's mim-

icry applies here. The homage recirculates universalist notions of "creative

genius" based on male bonding among auteurs, but race intrudes as the differ-

ence that fractures and destabilizes the universalist gesture in that homage.

Never quite as masculine, never allowed full accession to genius, Yamamoto is

contained by Wenders's deployment of neocolonial, avant-garde Orientalisms.

This enshrining of Yamamoto's work occurs within an Orientalist context that

provides a platform and a screen for the reassertion of Wenders's own high-

modernist, masculine, Master Subject status and his notions of authorial genius

and creativity. Though some of these qualities can be granted to Yamamoto, in

the end, there is no question of who is on top.

The Orient Within: Kyoto Etrangere

In the face of a West that continues to Orientalize, what of Japanese identity formation from a Japanese position? Perhaps nowhere are these contradictions

more complexly articulated than in the world of Japanese fashion magazines.

Here, profound ambivalence, simultaneous and alternating gestures of par-

ity/inferiority/superiority to the West occur in tandem with ambivalent domi-

nance toward the rest of the world .

Striking to a Western reader of Japanese fashion magazines is an unprob-

lematized enshrining of things Western, particularly in those journals catering to

youthful, hip, urban audiences. The enshrinement takes many forms. Western

models abound on these pages, particularly in high-fashion journals such as

Rruko Tsashin (Fashion News), Hai Fasshon (High Fashion), and Japanese ver- sions of international magazines, like W, Marie-Claire, or Elle. Indeed, some-

times there is scarcely a Japanese face to be seen. The prestige of Western luxury

designer goods-Hermes, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Celine-continues unabated.

Magazines for young men and young women are often detailed guides to con-

sumption, describing trends in various Western countries in lapidarian detail:

the street-by-street, gallery-by-gallery tour through Soho or Venice Beach in

Popeye and Brutus, the shop-by-shop tour of Honolulu or Paris in Hanako, the

consumer guide for "office ladies." Things Western still embody the fashionable.

Yet, in a world of the 1980s and early 1990s in which Japan was an undis-

7g puted world capitalist presence with a strong currency and considerable buy-

ing power, this presentation of Western goods had another side. Fashion

magazines enshrine Western consumer items and Western ideals of beauty, but

ORIENTALISMS

they also present the world to Japanese consumers as commodities available

for consumption. The world displayed in the glossy pages invites appropriation

and participation through engaging consumer desire. The enshrinement of

things Western coexists with a drive toward appropriation, where the world is

at the disposal of the now powerful, much sought after Japanese consumer-a

consumer both desired and feared in the West. These senses of simultaneous

distance and participation in world currents of style, of inferiority and of dom-

inance, circulate in the metadiscourses of fashion.

The contradictory twists animating Japanese identity formation in its rela-

tion to Europe and America were strikingly visible in the July 1990 issue of

Ryako Tsashin, a large-format, high fashion magazine for women. The nostalgic

construction of the "neo-japonesque" and "exotic Japan" Marilyn Ivy describes21

emerges strongly here, as the issue skillfully, compellingly, and seductively

interpellates the reader as consumer-subject, mobilizing alluring appeals for the

recovery of a lost Japanese-ness that can be attained through travel, garments,

restaurants, objects: that is, through consumption.22

Ryako Tsashin first invokes this essentially Japanese identity via the sur-

prise of the cover. Though most of its cover models are Western, this time we see

the face of a young Japanese woman staring at us from a sepia-toned photo-

graph. She wears garments reminiscent of prewar schoolgirl uniforms, recalling

a past era of innocence; her unrelenting gaze directly engages us. Opening the

pages, we begin our encounter with Japan through Kyoto. A sumi painting of

mountains covered with forest is illuminated as a red globe-rising sun? har-

vest moon?-rises in the distance. Above the picture floats the English title,

"Kyoto, snob resort," followed by the caption: "With a 'snob', 'etrange' feeling,

you can go out into Kyoto, a town enveloped with an Oriental atmosphere."

Through its mix of scripts and languages, the phrase exoticizes Kyoto as repos-

itory of essential Japanese-ness and locates the reader as an upper middle-class

cosmopolite-or someone with those pretensions. Kyoto is rendered in the

Western alphabet; "snob," "etrange," and "Oriental" in the syllabary reserved

for foreign words (katakana), while the rest of the sentence utilizes the standard

mixture of Sino-Japanese characters (kanji) and the Japanese syllabary (hira-

gana). The piece imagines a trip to Kyoto for a cosmopolitan Japanese who

adopts the shifting gaze of a sometimes French, sometimes British, or American

foreigner. The journey to Kyoto becomes more than mere tourism; it is a Prous-

tian quest to recapture lost time and a lost identity, a time/space of essentialized

Japanese-ness. The constitutive paradox of the piece lies in a double move that

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DORINNE KONDO

Ying Hu, in another context, has called the vis-a-vis: on the one hand, exposure

to the foreign has thrown into question that identity; on the other, Japan is itself

(re)constituted through appropriating the West.

The figure of woman as privileged metonym for nation compels commentary.

The inextricability of gender and nation has elicited commentary from numer-

ous quarters.23 Ivy (1995) describes two Japanese advertising campaigns pro-

moting domestic tourism in which young women are prominently featured. In

these campaigns, ad executives cast women as consummate consumer-subjects,

seducible by consumer desire and available to seduce men into the pleasures of

consumption. Given the tropings of women as emblematic of the inauthentic-

"frivolous, easily manipulated, narcissistic, seductive" (43)-Ivy argues that

the campaign's narrative trajectory became one of authenticating this inauthen-

ticity through domestic travel. Indeed, I would argue that it is precisely the

domestic that must be highlighted in Kyoto etrangere. Through their participa-

tion in transnational circuits of commodities and capital, women as consummate

consumer-subjects fracture totalized cultural identities through the fissures of

the foreign into the national body. Consequently, it is they who must also figure

the reconstitution of domestic identity; they who must stitch together its frag-

ments. Kyoto as metonym for essentialized tradition is itself associated with

femininity, as in the feminine, graceful lilt of the Kyoto dialect, or the Kyoto

beauty as an iconic figure of woman. What, then, could more aptly narrativize

the quest for renewed authenticity than a young woman's journey to Kyoto?

Indeed, Kyoto becomes a metonym for authentic tradition and renewal for

the postmodern Japanese. The section begins with a nostalgic, hazy pictorial

spread, where unfolding before us is the journey of a solitary young Japanese

woman to sites of tradition in Kyoto: tea houses, famous mountains, famous tra-

ditional restaurants. The first shot in a blue photographic wash shows the model

looking dreamily off into space, seated in front of a thatched roof tea house.

Captioned Kyoto etoranjeru, Kyoto etrangere, the piece is subtitled, "Fasci-

nated by ekizochikku (exotic) town, Kyoto." The introductory text addresses the

cosmopolitan reader:

While (we) are Japanese with black hair and black eyes, we've become too

accustomed to collections of foreign brand names, to the latest Italian restaurant,

to modem interiors, and we've come to experience objects in the Japanese style

80 as exotic. If you are such a person, won't you come and visit Kyoto? To remem- ber what you've forgotten. To encounter things you never knew. And to find a bal-

ance between beautiful Japanese things and beautiful Western things" (18).

ORIENTALISMS

The voice positions the reader as a cosmopolitan Japanese who has adopted a

Western gaze and for whom Japanese-ness becomes exoticized and located in

particular places and in particular objects emblematic of Japanese tradition.

The icons of authentic difference are those that might attract a Westerner, and

captions to subsequent photographs in the spread define for the Westernized

Japanese reader terms like bamboo blinds, incense, tatami mats, even "black

hair" (a poetic usage of the term in classical verse) or fix on some metonym of

tradition, such as Arashiyama, the famous mountain near Kyoto.

This shifting between and blending of Eastern and Western in a nostalgic

version of the present suffuses the piece. A sense of authentic Japanese-ness as

the undifferentiated past is imparted by a nostalgic aura concretely encoded in

clothing, editorial voice, and photographic techniques. As she appears in iden-

tifiably Japanese scenes of the traditional-a thatch-roofed tea house, on a

mountain path, holding a lantern, near a shrine-the model wears clothing dif-

ficult to place in space or time. Whatever their thoroughly cosmopolitan origins,

the garments allude to the past: the poetic styles of Italian designers Dolce e

Gabbana and Romeo Gigli are reminiscent of ballet tutus or Pierrot costume; in

the context of Kyoto, they also conjure associations to ju-ni hitoe, the multilay-

ered kimono of the Heian court. This past is blurry, generalized: the neo-retro

styles of Kensho Abe look vaguely 40s, Kazuko Yoneda's demure dress recycles

tum-of-the-century motifs, Alpha Cubic's good-girl sweater could be any

sweater from anytime after the war, London designer Betty Jackson's print dress

is pure 50s retro. All keep us in some undifferentiated space of nostalgia. The

photography heightens these effects. A cyan or bluish wash irregularly alter-

nates with sepia tints reminiscent of old photographs, where the effects of dis-

tance in place and time are achieved through hazy softness and faded color. The

location of the editorial voice is equally blurry. As it defines for a "postmodern"

Japanese the icons of "authentic Japanese" identity-brocade, lanterns, black

hair-it speaks distantly, anonymously, authoritatively, a voice from nowhere,

from no particular time. The floating, omniscient voice invoked within the frame

of the picture dominates a second voice, the hard copy that gives us the mun-

dane details we consumers need to know: who designed the garment, where to

get it, how much it costs. The practical information on consumption in the pre-

sent is located outside the frame, leaving undisturbed the hazy nostalgia of the

clothing, the authoritative voice, the atmosphere of the photograph. Japanese- Sr

ness as nostalgic essence is encoded through these material practices, produc-

ing a blurry, elegiac past-a past you, too can find, if you journey to Kyoto.

DORINNE KONDO

The journey continues in a more discursive mode in following sections, giv-

ing us multiple perspectives on Kyoto from a variety of observers. Its narrative

line takes us on a journey from outside to inside. Beginning with a section

called "Kyoto from Outside" (the title is in English), we see Kyoto through the

perspectives of Pierre Loti, author of Madame Chrysantheme (the prototype for

Madame Butterfly), Paul Claudel, and Roland Barthes, followed by David

Hockney's witty photocollage of Ryoanji temple, musician David Sylvian's frag-

mented photographs, and finally, the films of Kenji Mizoguchi (a Tokyoite by

birth), that depict the Gion district and the lives of geisha. A second section

takes us closer to Kyoto, offering us the thoughts of two Japanese born else-

where who are now Kyoto residents. One, an artist/designer of jewelry, is an icon

of cosmopolitanism; he works with Tiffany and regularly travels an international

circuit. The other embodies the invention of tradition. He is a television actor

who also owns a coffeehouse and occasionally offers ricksha rides, literally

enacting tradition for tourists in this picturesque neighborhood. These men offer

us two ways of combining our presumed cosmopolitanism with Kyoto tradition-

alism: traveling the world while living in Kyoto or "acting" traditional. The fol-

lowing section, "Inside Looking," offers us the perspectives of a Kyoto resident

who amusingly debunks and explains stereotypes of Kyoto, especially the

politesse and reserve (some would say coldness) of its people. Photographs high-

light unusual views of Kyoto--views of the street from the inside of a temple, a

small gargoyle one might miss if one walked by too quickly. Featured in the mar-

gins are further interviews with Kyoto natives that a tourist might encounter in

her travels: shop proprietors, hotel managers. Their presence signifies "authen-

tic Kyoto" not only through what they say, but in the lilt of the Kyoto dialect.

The problematic of identity articulated in Kyoto Etrangere-how to achieve

the balance between Japanese and Western things-is resolved in the final sec-

tion of the spread, "Shopping Around Kyoto." The quest for the essence of

Japanese-ness finds its culmination in Kyoto boutiques and restaurants, which

offer us the animated, lovable objects that embody Japanese identity, both tra-

ditional and cosmopolitan. We have only to consume them zestfully in order to

become truly Japanese. This involves the literal incorporation of place and of

identity through the body: wearing the lovable garment, ingesting the nouvelle

japonaise cuisine, touching the traditional object. "Shopping Around Kyoto"

g2 (again, in English) offers us a tour where we can shop and eat our way through

Kyoto. Postmodern cosmopolitanism and authentic Japanese-ness are offered to

the reader/consumer as equally important aspects of Japanese identity, for most

ORIENTALISMS

of the featured shops combine Japanese and Western elements in a new syn-

thesis that simultaneously maintains and destabilizes the East/West binary. The

haziness of time and place in the first photographic spread, the anonymous,

authoritative voice from nowhere, have disappeared. We are now fully in the

present, with vibrantly colored photographs, a lively editorial voice, and seduc-

tive shots of beautifully presented objects. A description of a store where one

can purchase traditional fans (a complement, we are told, to even the most mod-

em interior decor) is juxtaposed to a jazz bar, "My One and Only Love," that

combines a high-tech environment with offerings that include sixty varieties of

bourbon and unusual traditional seasonal tsukemono, Japanese pickles. The

final page of the spread is especially eloquent, showing us an an elegant cafe

which serves tea and Westernized versions of a famous Kyoto confection, ya-

tsuhashi, and, in our final take-home message, a shop selling antique porcelain.

"Don't think about displaying them like precious objects," we are told. "[We)

want you to use them every day on your dinner table, maybe for your special

home-cooking." (47) Even if you don't, the magazines continues, the objects are

so "lovable" that they make you want to make them part of your everyday life.

The dreaminess of Kyoto etrangere has evaporated into a crisp, lively, totally

present world where objects offer themselves up to the reader just as the

woman's figure was offered up to our gaze in the fashion spread. Objects become

lovable, animated, eager to be part of our lives, in a vivid demonstration of com-

modity fetishism; indeed, the personification of objects heightens in the use of

a suffix usually used for groups of people, not groups of objects (monotachi). The

editorial voice in the piece directly addresses us; it is chatty now, rather than

formal and authoritative. Hard copy and distant authority are recombined and

transposed into an informal register, giving us both the buying information we

need and evoking the vibrant atmosphere we will enter when we visit the shop.

This time, we are located in the present and the future, not in a hazy past. The

voice constructs our subject-position and provokes our desire through its lively

depiction of the ways we can purchase our Japanese identities. Perhaps, it sug-

gests, we will splurge for a whole set of porcelain, or perhaps we'll indulge in a

different style of buying, adding one piece at a time. Our individuality is thor-

oughly constituted through consumption; we are distinguishable by the way we

buy. "Shopping Around Kyoto" shows us that authentically Japanese identity

can combine the cosmopolitan and the traditional; Japaneseness can be part of g 3

our lives through the lovable objects that beckon from the photographs, await-

ing only our consuming touch.

DORINNE KONDO

Thus, "Kyoto Snob Resort" eloquently catches up the contradictions of nos-

talgic identity formation in a regime of commodity aesthetics and commodity

fetishism. It creates a postmodern, transnational space inhabited by the denizens

of economically powerful Japan. Here, the construction of Japanese-ness occurs

only through relations with the West; the nostalgic moves of Kyoto Etrangere

unsettle and re-code these binaries. The garments with their nostalgic air, the

mixing of scripts, the photographic effects blurring past and present become part

of the creation of a new tradition, in a balance of Japanese and Western things.

The discourse of loss and the mourning for what Marilyn Ivy terms the vanish-

ing, endures. But so does a kind of ironic reappropriation of a Western gaze, the

claiming of a cosmopolitan identity, and the construction of a postmodern world

in which Dolce e Gabbana, Romeo Gigli, and Betty Jackson take their place

alongside bamboo blinds and tatami mats. This is premised on the reduction of

both to elements of consumption, as consumer capitalism in advanced industrial

societies gives us the capacity to consume both Kyoto and European clothing.

Indeed, for the interpellated Japanese subject, snob is not an insult or an epi-

thet; it is an ideal for which to strive, an index of postwar Japanese affluence.

At another level, the clothing, the atmosphere, the cosmopolitan gesture,

claim for Japan certain elements of identity and mobilize fragments of desire,

producing an autoexoticism and incorporation of Western elements and a West-

ern gaze that beats the West at its own game and subverts, as it reinscribes, Ori-

entalist tropes. It marks a moment in historical, geopolitical relations, where

autoexoticism and the appropriation of the West in a refigured, essential Japan

indexes Japan's accession to the position of powerful nation-state. It marks a

moment of confidence, where the mourning for an essentially Japanese past,

the contradictions of Japan's status as an advanced capitalist nation and as a

racially marked rival to the West are resolved, temporarily, through cheerful,

confident consumption. The article suggests that racial marking can in effect

be counterbalanced, even effaced, through upper-middle-class purchasing

power: Kyoto as snob resort. The problematic of identity as posed here is linked

not only to a moment in the development of late capitalism, or to the develop-

ment of the postmodern, with its implication of the equivalent decentering of

all subjects and the elision of historically specific relations of power. The slip-

pery, multiple positionings of the Japanese in the magazine spread take up the

g 4

slippery positionings of the Japanese nation-state in the late 1980s and early

1990s, when economic dominance, growing confidence, enshrinement/denigra-

tion of the West, and questions of race occur within a historical context of

ORIENTALISMS

Japanese imperial aggression and defeat in World War II, Western penetration

and the Occupation of postwar Japan. The construction of a Japanese identity

and the appropriation/domestication/enshrinement of Western objects must be

seen within this sedimented political history; what is involved here is far more

complex and specific than the autochthonous emergence of a postmodern, con-

sumer, information society in late capitalism.

Orient Oriented: Neo-Colonialism and The Male Tourist

If Ryuko Tsu.shin's nostalgic blend of East and West constructed Japan's first-

world identity through the figure of woman, the same month's counterpart arti-

cle in Ryuko Tsu.shin for men figures Japan as male. Masculinized Japan here

dominates a feminized, sexualized Southeast Asia, overlaying the gender

binary onto the domestic/foreign binary. Kyoto Etrangere adopts the subject

position of woman in relationship to the West, that is, in a position of inferior-

ity where the tropes of the Orient as feminine are recirculated. It also con-

structs single women as exemplary consumer-subjects, who are thereby

endowed with the capacity to consume and hence rediscover their essential

Japaneseness. The men's magazine creates Southeast Asia as the feminine,

exotic Orient submissive to Japan's masculine dominance. A history of Japan-

ese military aggression, colonization, and ongoing forms of exploitation, such

as the notorious Japanese and Western sex tours of Thailand, Korea, and the

Philippines, form the subtext here. In both the men's and women's issues of Ryuko Tsu.shin, woman figures the essential purity of national identity that is

endangered by outside intrusion. In the men's issue, the article and accompa- nying photos pivot around axes of tradition/ modernity, Westernization/exoti-

cism, and pastoral/urban difference. Throughout, woman anchors the

discourses on national identities, first standing for danger and corruption, then

offering a point of entry into the culture, and finally serving as exemplar of the

purity of essentialized Thai-ness soon to be despoiled by the inevitable

encroachment of modernity and Westernization.

The title piece, "Oriental Oriented," opens with a large, two-page spread.

The first features a photo, presumably of a Bangkok skyline. On the left is a

caption in small print:

Haven't we been seeing Southeast Asia through Westerners' eyes? It may be all right for them (i.e., Westerners; the masculine pronoun is used) to reflect on

themselves, to take a new look at Asia and see it a kind of spiritual authority

DORINNE KONDO

and all that. But it's a mistake for Japan to take that approach and swallow it whole. We took a data-gathering trip to Bali and Thailand, not just out of Ori-

entalism, but as part of inhabitants of the same era in Asia. (29)

Here, the men's magazine differentiates itself from the Orientalism of the West

and posits a time-space of Asian identity that Japan shares with Thailand. The

putative goal is to avoid Western-style Orientalism, but the passage articulates

the contradictions of Japanese identity: an ambivalent oscillation between

equality and superiority, between Asian solidarity with Thailand and Bali and

a desire for equality with the West as a First-World power that colonizes other

Asian nations.

Despite the writer's intentions, unequal geopolitical positionings cannot be

erased. Their arrival at the airport prompts a guilty avowal of the awkwardness

of Japan's relation to Southeast Asia. The author notes Japanese commentary

on Southeast Asian poverty and Japanese wealth, intimating that the latter is

achieved at the expense of the former. While admitting the persuasiveness of

this view, he marks the irony of thereby reinscribing Japanese superiority and

fixing Southeast Asia in a position of inferiority. Instead, he wants to look at

Thailand in afuratto (flat) perspective, as presumed equals. Accordingly, he

and his all-male crew dine with fashion designers, the owner of Bangkok's only

fashion school, and a translator, at a nouvelle Thai restaurant full of "snob"

Thai and Westerners.

Japan's position within a gendered political economy emerges clearly the

following day. The men happen upon a Japanese student, who utters a caution-

ary tale for the unwary Japanese man. Lured by a sexy Thai girl into a strip

club, he is presented with an exorbitant bill and threatened with violence

unless he pays. His quick tongue saves him, but the author reports the stu-

dent's experience, both for his readers and because his female guide (who

becomes a confidante and an object of desire) asks him to do so. Women here

represent the exotic but dangerous lure of Thailand. Unremarked, however, are

the relations of extraction that allow Japanese men to travel to Thailand pre-

cisely as consumers in the sex industry.

Predictably, the author alternates between professions of surprise at Thai

modernity and guilt-laden realizations that his very surprise reveals his own

assumptions of Japanese superiority. From the seductions of the red-light dis-

86 trict and a visit to Chinatown, the crew ends the evening in a disco called

NASA. The space theme and the MTV videos prompt authorial musing, as he

notes that trends come as quickly to Thailand as they do to Japan. He then

ORIENTALISMS

reflects that since Bangkok is a huge metropolis, new information would be dis-

seminated in "real time." In a move redolent with liberal guilt, he avows in spirited fashion that this world of discos and MTV is indeed part of contempo-

rary Thailand and that those who insist on seeking "exotic Thailand" are mis-

guided. "Thailand's future should be decided by Thais," he avers (34).

The refrains of East/West, tradition/modernity, pulse through the next sec-

tions. The men make trips lo a weekend market where international goods are

available, a Thai restaurant that offers a pan-Asian menu, and the house of a

famous expatriate Westerner in Bangkok, where the interior embodies an

East/West synthesis. A visit to the floating market calls up associations with

the soft-porn flick Emanuelle-an association heightened by a condom that

comes floating down the river. The author's comment reveals his own assump-

tions about Thai exoticism: "After all, people here are living their lives. That's

right, it's natural that such a thing would come floating along" (37) . In a related

remark, the author notices TV antennas amidst the exotic scenery, and com-

ments, ''The residents around here are living in the same 1989" (37). These

attempts to de-exoticize the landscape succeed in reinscribing the author's

implicit condescension.

Later tradition and modernity shift into the registers of the pastoral and the

urban. Bangkok stands for a blend of the exotic and the cosmopolitan, but vis-

a-vis the Thai provinces, it embodies the corruption of the big city. Taking

leave of Bangkok, the crew flies to Chiang Mai and to the village on the border

of Burma where their guide was born. Text and photos amplify impressions of

pastoral exoticism: people swimming and playing in the river against a back-

drop of traditional architecture, monks sitting and drinking Fanta, wooden pup-

pets, and outdoor merchants selling animal skins. Their return to the Bangkok

airport ends the piece, as the author describes an interaction with a waitress.

She responds to their stares with embarrassment and shy self-consciousness,

prompting an authorial diatribe against Japanese women who have forgotten

their femininity. Nostalgically, he invokes a prelapsarian past through the fig-

ure of the waitress, who stands for the purity of Thai identity before the

encroachment of Westernization. "But with such rapid Westernization and

urbanization, perhaps everything, like the waitress's self-consciousness, will

disappear. Thinking of the prospect, [I feel] a little melancholy, but that can't be

helped. Because the fate of Thailand belongs to the Thais. Still, I just want g 7

them to be able to avoid the strains that Japan experienced, if only in small

measure. (41)"

DORINNE KONDO

Here, the author voices capitalist and imperialist nostalgia for the purity of

a past before capitalist (Japanese and Western) intrusion. As Renato Rosaldo

(1989) and other analysts have noted, nostalgia enshrines a golden age before

a destruction wrought precisely by the one who mourns the destruction-in this

case, by Japanese capital. Exposure to Japanization, Westernization, urbaniza-

tion, and other worldly forces will despoil this Thai flower's shy purity and turn

her into a tough, threatening hussy-like the prostitutes who lured the hapless

Japanese student or like contemporary Japanese women. By mourning the fate

of Thailand through his projection of the waitress's fate, the journalist also

mourns what he clearly perceives to be the ravages of modernization and the

loss of identity undergone in Japan.

The gendered nature of this mourning is striking. As in the Kyoto

Etrangere piece, essentialized national identity is figured through woman.

Japan's relationship to Thailand is cast in gendered terms as one of male dom-

inance, in which Japanese men penetrate through the gaze directed at the

waitress and through friendship and intimacy with their female guide.24 The

protective regret the author feels vis-a-vis the waitress and the increasing

romanticism/eroticism of his relationship with the guide are informed by the

neocolonial relationship of foreign men to Thailand through the sex industry.25

Ultimately, for the author getting to know Thailand is like becoming intimate

with a woman; indeed, the two processes are virtually coextensive. Here, then,

Japan adopts the position of endangered seducee, prostitute's john, masculine

gazer, protective older brother, and prospective lover to feminized, exoticized

Thailand.

Similar ambivalences clearly emerge through the photography and design

that, like the text, oscillate between figuring Thailand as an equal and assum-

ing Japanese economic, cultural, and political superiority. Shots thematize the

exotic/Western, traditional/modem, rural/urban binaries: photos of teeming

urban streets and the train station portrayed in harsh, grainy daylight are fol-

lowed by exotic shots of the floating market, dolls and puppets; temples on one

page alternate with a photo of the very chic receptionist at the design school;

women selling slabs of meat and packages of produce appear in dark photos

illumined only by the golden halo of exoticism, while the opposing page fea-

tures another crowded street scene complete with prominently displayed Sony

88 advertisements. A red border used for design continuity throughout the piece

encodes exoticism through graphic design. The bright, deep red, when paired

with the caption "Orient Oriented," conjures associations with Chinese red and

ORIENTALISMS

tropes of decadence and foreignness. Pictorially and visually, Thailand is con-

structed as exotic Other, reinforcing the exoticizing authorial voice.

The second section shifts focus from place to people. In a bright-red panel

that heads this section, graphic black characters inscribe the rationale for the

piece: "In order to come in contact with the new Bangkok facing its future as

a mass consumer society, we decided to meet the talented people who would

highlight the 'now"' (42). Pictured on subsequent pages are the three subjects

of the interviews: a clothing designer; his brother, an interior designer; and

the owner of the only Thai design school. The presumed fledgling stage of

Thai development in these fields emerges as the theme of this article, despite

the professed intentions of the authors to the contrary. For example, signifi-

cant Japanese influence is always noted: the designer read Japanese comic

books in childhood, while the head of the school won a Japanese design com-

petition and spent several months in Tokyo during his youth. The intervie-

wees contrast Japan with Thailand. On the one hand, they say, the upper

echelons are as hip and as well-informed as anyone in Tokyo; on the other,

the relatively high degree of class stratification means that the average level

of Thai style needs what they call a "level up." Nostalgic regret for the loss

of traditional Thai identity is inextricable from the need to jettison traditional

(toradishonaru) Thailand-at least for the moment-in order to create so-

called "New Thailand."

However, perhaps the most striking assertion of Thai underdevelopment

occurs through photography. Each of the three interviewees are shot in a strik-

ing interior: a stylish black chair against white background, an ultramodern

desk against rounded bookshelves, the graphic black and white of the design

school. Yet in each case, the lighting is simultaneously harsh and dim, as

though the electricity had been inadequate; as a consequence, each photo has

a retro feel that contrasts sharply to the beautiful haziness of Kyoto etrangere.

It is as though these men do not in fact inhabit the same "real time." Moreover,

the photos highlight small elements of what could be read as underdeveloped

building construction: a light switch, for example, or exposed pipes that have

been painted white. Wittingly or not, such practices reinscribe an implicit con-

descension toward Thailand's "developing" status in the world of design. These

Thai men are cast as fellow Asians, brothers to the Japanese author. Yet they

remain little brothers, in a position to learn from Japan's example. Japan stands g 9

as masculine penetrator of Thailand as woman, and as benevolent elder sibling

to Thai men.

DORINNE KONDO

If Thailand is exoticized and rendered inferior in gendered terms, a second

spread entitled "Bali, Hi" constructs Bali as another kind of Orient-this time,

a tropical paradise and site of spiritual renewal, mysticism, and unspoiled

nature. Bali becomes a playground available to the purchasing power of Japan-

ese and Western tourists alike; as an unpopulated natural paradise, it becomes

a stage setting for idealized masculine leisure consumption: male pleasure as

resort activity. The men's fashion spread opens with a shot of Club Med Bali at

night. Lights glow from within the rooms, while greenish lights illuminate pool

and foliage, palm trees fringing the indigo sky. Green is the operative color, sig-

nifying nature, paradise, the tropics, in contrast to the exotic, Oriental red used

for Thailand. Lettered in green we find the opening caption:

Seeking a rest for spirit and body, we fly to the south. A paradise far from our

urban lives spreads out before us. We want to move toward a vacation where we

can spend our time as we please. Not the typical Japanese vacation, pressed by

time and driven by a tour schedul~. Let us introduce you to this summer's resort

fashions that match up with Club Med Bali's exotic charms, offering us the plea-

sures of dressing with style (46).

The photographic spread features a young white couple in their twenties; he has

thick, wavy blond hair, while the woman is brunette and encodes a Mediter-

ranean or Latin exoticism. The photos feature the couple in various settings at

Club Med Bali: eating, kissing, staring at us from among palm fronds, lounging

at the pool, dancing, riding a bike, posing at the beach. The man is clearly the

protagonist, and occasionally he is portrayed alone: in the gym, floating in the

water in a flowered shirt, lounging in a rattan chair. The consumerist message

figures masculinity through crisp, capitalist realism, rather than the oblique

poetic romanticism of Kyoto etrangere. Here, the photos are fully in the present,

a tourist brochure for Club Med. Showing the clothing in various Club Med set-

tings highlights the resort's diverse offerings. The borders between travelogue,

advertisement and fashion journalism are further transgressed in the only insert

written in the copywriter's voice. It is set against the background of the man

floating in the pool, as the copy extols the virtues of the active, sports-oriented

vacation for men available at the resort. Again, for men the keynote is activity

in the present-Japanese masculinity articulated through athletics and leisure

activity-not the hazy nostalgic fantasy presented in its women's counterpart.

This interpellation of the masculine consumer articulates with the article's

figurations of race. The use of white models positions Japanese readers in con-

ORIENTALISMS

tradictory ways. On the one hand, it reinscribes white ideals of attractiveness

and reinforces the allure of racial mimicry. This impression is strong, given the

fact that neither model seemed to be familiar to Western readers; one suspects

that neither would be as successful in the U.S. or Europe as they are in Japan,

continuing a neocolonial practice that offers lucrative Japanese careers to

dubious Western "talent" who can capitalize on their exotic cachet. On the

other, the use of white models makes a racial substitution in a gesture of par-

ity, signifying the cosmopolitanism and the equality with the West the Japan-

ese have presumably attained through consumption. Such cosmopolitanism

will only heighten, the spread implies, through their journey to Club Med Bali,

where Japanese can leave behind the stereotypical, group-oriented, schedule-

driven vacation for a more European, fancy-free independence. The piece both

enshrines a Euro-American ideal and suggests that Japan has caught up with

the West, so that Japanese readers can join ranks with Westerners in positions

of neocolonial dominance over Bali as consumers of its natural paradise.

Here, the great equalizer between Japan and the West is capital, and the

fashion magazine collapses various forms of difference into commodified

opportunities for consumption. Places, objects, clothing, and experiences offer

themselves on the glossy pages as equally available to our consuming touch. A

transitional spread heightens these impressions, eliding fashion photograph

and advertisement. The male model featured in "Bali, Hi" appears against

green foliage and red hibiscus. The photos have no captions and would be

indistinguishable from the rest of the spread except for the absence of captions

and the discreet company trademark in the bottom-left corner. The following

article, "Club Med Bali," further blurs reportage and advertisement in a

description of Club Med and its facilities. The two-page piece describes typi-

cal days at Club Med and gives us information on prices, packages, and facil-

ities. The copious photos feature no Japanese as guests; rather, we see scenery,

the white models, or shots where all the guests are white. Balinese are con-

spicuous by their absence, save for the one or two smiling employees who stand

behind serving tables. Here at Club Med Bali, race doesn't matter, the photos

seem to say. Japanese can take their place among the tourist-consumers of the

world untouched by racial discomfort vis-a-vis white Westerners and unboth-

ered by the brown natives, who appear only to serve the needs of First-World

consumers.

The final section combines information, travelogue, and advertising in an

article entitled "Bali Marathon." Sponsored by the Japanese Nittoh corporation,

91

92

DORINNE KONDO

the marathon is figured as part of the sporting, active vacation whose virtues

were extolled in Club Med Bali, wedding male athleticism to stereotypes of Bali

as mysterious, exotic, spiritual and close to nature. The writer's voice imagines

the reader running in such a setting, complete with a map of the course and an

account of sights and sounds runners will encounter. In a typical Orientaliz-

ing/tropicalizing move, Bali becomes a means for the tired, jaded Japanese man

to renew himself physically and spiritually, promising him a disciplined body

and replenished masculine energy. Bali in the guise of a (precapitalist) natural

paradise is offered to the capitalist Japanese as a consumer object.

Here we see the continuing construction of differentiated Asian Orien-

talisms that write the contradictions of Japanese identity. Both Asian and

advanced capitalist/imperialist, Japan can construct Thailand and Bali as

related yet disparate Others. Here, the graphic design motifs are instructive.

The use of red in the Thai section paints Thailand as hot, exotic, cosmopolitan,

and ultimately alien, while the green of Bali figures the natural, the unspoiled,

the tropical. Both are sites for masculine pleasure. In Thailand, a group of men

travels-as in a sex tour-to discover contemporary Thailand, redolent of fem-

inine sexuality, exotic splendor, and high-tech, urban leisure. In Bali, men are

heterosexually coupled in a wholesome, athletic vacation-swimming, working

out, running marathons, or relaxing outdoors by the sea or at the pool. In each,

Asian-ness is differently thematized, foregrounding the contradictions of

Japan's status as a racially marked capitalist power. Japan constructs solidar-

ity with an Asian Thailand, but cannot help but dominate it-as male seducer

or as older brother. With Bali, the shared Asian-ness recedes in preference to

a gesture for parity with Europe and the U.S.; here, the use of white models and

the travelogue on Club Med Bali writes Euro-style as both object of emulation

and the subject-position of the Japanese reader. Bali becomes an undifferenti-

ated site of renewal, a trope of the tropics. Balinese people do not appear to dis-

turb this vision of untrammeled exotic beauty, except as nameless features of

the resort landscape. Here, racial anxieties are both thematized and allayed.

The potentially threatening natives exist, but as non-people, naturalized fix-

tures of the landscape. Of course the threat can never be entirely contained, for

their very presence, however marginalized, is the return of the repressed, the

excess that eludes containment. Vis-a-vis the West, the message is that con-

sumption and economic power can perhaps offset racial marking, for Japanese

can ostensibly travel to Bali in a position equivalent to a Westerner's. Yet

equality can never be fully achieved. Anxieties return through the white mod-

ORIENTALISMS

els, who reinscribe Euro-American hegemony even as that hegemony is claimed

as Japan's shared prerogative. Anxieties are embodied in the shadowy figures of

the natives, who cannot be entirely erased in the attempts to consume Bali as

depopulated tropical paradise. Both the white models and the Balinese stand as

uneasy reminders of the forces of neocolonial economic expansion, the colo-

nization of consciousness, the simultaneous ambivalence toward racial marking

and its utter inescapability.

FABRICATING "JAPAN"

In these disparate sites, the fashion industry weaves the complexities of Japan-

ese subject formation during a period of Japanese economic confidence and

power. Despite this burgeoning economic power, however, Japan remains a rel-

atively marginalized force in the fashion industry: almost a peer, but not quite.

Old Orientalisms are transposed into new, historically specific figurations, as

the Japanese now appear under the sign of high-tech experimentalism, inno-

vators of fabric and shape who redeploy culturally specific costume conven-

tions or as cutting-edge creators who play the feminized almost-equal to the

European Master Subject. Not quite/not white.

Given this racialized geopolitical context, the autoexoticism and reappro-

priations of Orientalism in Kyoto etrangere acquire new significance. Com-

modity fetishism here becomes a solution to Japanese anxieties over loss of

identity and its contradictory position as a racially marked capitalist nation-

state. Confident consumption becomes a way to overcome racial marking and

to resolve anxieties about loss of innocence, purity, essential Japanese-ness,

and tradition. Perhaps one could say that this confidence always and only

occludes loss. But here, race is the difference that makes a difference. In the

face of Orientalizing discourses deployed from Western sites, Kyoto etrangere

redeploys these Orientalisms for its own ends, appropriating a Western posi-

tion as it also draws upon nativist discourses of cultural uniqueness, Nihonjin-

ron. "Kyoto, snob resort" advances the proposition that Japan, too, has entered

the first ranks of advanced capitalist nationhood. Kyoto as snob resort signifies

a recovery of pride-that Kyoto, too, is worthy of our consuming attention, even

as the appellation "snob resort" enshrines upper-middle-class hegemony. So

confident is this Japan that it can ironically view itself from the gaze of the

West and redeploy Western Orientalisms, a Japan so powerful that through

93

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DORINNE KONDO

consumption it can blend the best of East and West in a figuration of the "truly

Japanese. "26

Japan's accession to the ranks of first-world consumer constructs its version

of the Orient as a site of (pre)capitalist nostalgia, whether it is a trip to Kyoto,

a vacation that ensures masculine prowess and dominance, or clothing that

blends East and West in a new Oriental synthesis. Fashion fabricates the com-

modity fetishisms that invite such consumption, while simultaneously fostering

a capitalist nostalgia for a purer, precapitalist past reigned by use value. Yohji

Yamamoto, for instance, articulates his vision of a time when function ruled

people's lives. "They [the Japanese] think they can consume everything ....

They think they can buy everything. That is very sad. So I am very happy to go

back to that time when people cannot buy anything, when people were forced

to live with very simple things around them" (Notebook on Cities and Clothes).

Yamamoto's yearning for a precapitalist past is in part the product of the very

industry that provides his own livelihood. He is thoroughly enmeshed-as we

all are-in the reproduction of such a system and longs for a history that he has

participated in destroying. Similarly, Thailand and Bali function as differenti-

ated sites of nostalgia: in the Thai case, for a time of innocence and tradition

before modernization and Westernization, as the site for staging regret for the

loss of precapitalist Japan; Bali, for an untrammeled nature before urbanization

and as consumable site of spiritual renewal. The fashion magazine suggests

that both Thailand and Bali remind the Japanese of what they have lost, but the

loss is not irrevocable. Through consumption, Japanese can (re)experience

their lost innocence without jeopardizing the comforts of advanced capitalism

that ensured its originary loss. Japan's neocolonial economic dominance

assures access to spiritual renewal.

Yet such seeming certainties are never certain. Japan is constructed

through constitutive contradiction, through the constitutive lack at its core-

for identities are always constructed in relations of difference.27 To suppress

this contradiction requires always already ambivalent peformances of national

identity that assert nationhood as unique and timeless essence. Essence fabri-

cation must therefore be continuous, repeated in multiple sites, in multiple reg-

isters. In the fashion world, as elsewhere, "Japan" assumes a form against the

West, as it both emulates and challenges Western hegemonies in the process

reinscribing and contesting Orientalist discourses. Pan-Asian solidarities are

riven with contradiction, as Southeast Asia becomes a locus for Japanese con-

sumption enabled by neocolonial relations of dominance. These complex con-

ORIENTALISMS

tradictions figure "Japan" at an historical moment of Japanese economic

strength and a concern with Asian history and Asian exoticism that accompa-

nied the appearance of a new postwar generation for whom earlier Japanese

history was indeed exotic.

A key message circulated among these sites is that race matters. Race fig-

ures the space of difference between Japanese colonial projects, Japanese cap-

italism, and those projects in the West, racially marking those interimperial

rivalries.28 Race figures the space of contradiction when Japanese expansion-

ist projects colonize other Asian nations, despite invocations of Asian solidar-

ities. Invocations of East and West and essentialized Japanese culture, the

neocolonialism and capitalist dominance of the Japanese nation-state, occur

within a field that is always already racialized. Racial tropes are in tum imbri-

cated with gender, as woman embodies essentialized national identity, vulner-

able to the masculine penetration of Westernization and urbanization. She

writes the figure of inferiority, whether it is Yohji Yamamoto in the miniaturized

viewfinder, the blushing Thai waitress at the Bangkok airport-or Madama

Butterfly. Enmeshments of gender, race, and geopolitics permeate the Orien-

talisms I have described as they circulate and recirculate in disparate and con-

tradictory ways in the discourses of fashion, writing new, historically specific

stories in all-too-familiar ways, fabricating and refabricating the contradictions

of Japanese identity.

ENDNOTES

1. In a reversal of the usual accusations of Japanese copying, boutique owner Alan Bilz-

erian (quoted in Cocks 1986: 93) commented, "Every single fashion designer has copied

their skirts, shapes, wraps." In his words, Japanese designers "have inspired the entire

world ... " Jean Drusedow, then curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume

Institute, noted in an interview with me the "enormous" impact of Japanese fashion in

the 1980s, seen industry-wide in the looser cuts of clothing in fashion of all prices and

all ranges of exclusivity. Barbara Weiser summarized for me the the influence of Japan-

ese design on mainstream American fashion:

The odd thing is that ... outside urban places they don't know the influence

the Japanese designers have had on the clothing that they all wear. That is,

there are certain kinds of cuts and certain fits that have now become-

whether it's oversized clothing or ... elastic-waist pants, or square tops-

these forms have been swept up by American manufacturers and trickle

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down to everything including, let's say, sweat clothes. But the people don't

know that's where it comes from (1989).

2. Production, on the other hand, is often the province of Third-World women. For the

avant-garde Japanese designers who have "made it" internationally, however, this tends

to be slightly less true, as most of their clothing is sewn in Japan (the high-fashion lines),

or in France and Italy (the "bridge" lines). In the latter cases, one wonders who, pre-

cisely, those garment workers might be-whether they are from formerly colonized

countries, for example. Textiles are often made in Japan or by specially commissioned

artisanal producers abroad. Miyake has used fabrics from Indian artisans, for instance;

Yamamoto has worked with Thai producers.

3. The importance of fashion, garments, and textiles can be seen in the fact that, in the

manufacturing sector alone, the garment/ textile industry is a major employer world-

wide, even more extensive if one includes the world of fashion as such: journalists, mod-

els, advertisers, retailers, wholesalers, distributors, shippers. But in addition to keen

economic competition, there is also the matter of cultural authority. Here, Japan is

assuming a place at the forefront of the discursive field called design, meeting point of

high technology and aesthetics. Fashion, graphic design, photography, industrial design,

furniture, and architecture, among other forms, index Japanese participation in a world

culture of functional objects provoking aesthetic pleasure, thus readily exemplifying the

workings of commodity aesthetics.

4. See, for example, Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths; Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Van-

ishing; Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient; Naoki Sakai, "Modernity and Its Critique: The

Problem of Universalism and Particularism."

5. In a move common among Japanese designers, Tayama inverts the usual Japanese word

order for person's names, and puts his given name first, Western-style, rendered in the

Roman alphabet.

6. Of Margiela, a French employee of a Japanese design firm wryly said to me, "It's like

being a Korean in Japan."

7. Onward Kashiyama is a considerable force in the fashion industry. They also own Dolce

e Gabbana and Luciano Soprani boutiques in Italy, J. Press in the U.S., Paul Smith

boutiques in France and Hong Kong, and U.S. distribution for Helmut Lang, Marcel

Marongiu, and Todd Oldham's bridge line, Times Seven. In 1995 they signed American

designer Michael Kors to des ign an international bridge-sportswear collection, ICB

(Women's Wear Daily, February 7, 1995).

8. This strategy of claiming the universal is always problematic in its denial of positional-

ity. For example, Asian American actors are never, al least al this historical moment, not

"Asian American." This need not be read as limitation or ghettoization; rather, the prob-

lem lies in whiteness passing as the unmarked. For marked categories of persons, deny-

ing the marking can sometimes be a denial of the strategic necessity for deploying those

marked identities in particular political struggles.

ORIENTALISMS

9. Haute couture, luxury made-to-order clothing, is contrasted to ready-to-wear, clothing

in standard sizes. Haute couture is shown in a special series of collections in Paris.

Though it loses money for all the design houses, it is considered a playground and a lab-

oratory for the designers, who can indulge their fantasies with the most luxurious fabric

and trimmings, with handmade, top-of-the-line workmanship. Women who buy these

garments go to Paris for special fittings, rather than buying the clothing in a store.

10. Here, Miyake has been an innovator; he speaks of the collaborative effort required to

create a collection, and has given much credit to fabric designer Makiko Minagawa and

to younger members of his Miyake Design Studio, occasionally helping them to launch

their own lines.

11. Harold Koda links this aesthetic to the Zen notions of sabi and wabi.

12. He was instrumental in helping to mount an exhibition of Indian textile design at the

Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris in 1985 and also created garments from some of

these Indian textiles.

13. Fortuny was a Venetian designer who worked from the turn of the century until the

1950s. He is known for his Grecian-inspired pleated gowns, particularly a style entitled

Delphos. "This is a simple column of many narrow, irregular, vertical pleats perma-

nently set in the silk by a secret process" (Stegemeyer 68). These garments are now

museum pieces and collector's items.

14. Thanks to Sharon Traweek for this insight.

15. Qualities associated with Zen aesthetics: imperfection, understatedness, loneliness,

quietness.

16. Partially because of her more conservative and tailored designs (designated for a mar-

ket similar to, in the U.S., the classicism of a Bill Blass or Oscar de la Renta), and par-

tially, one suspects, due to joint financial ventures with Fairchild (a Mori son publishes

W Japan, the Japanese branch of the Fairchild publication), Hanae Mori tends to fare

better in WWD, and her designs are featured with relative frequency.

17. That same year, an inquiry at the flagship Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan as to whether

they carried the work of Japanese designers merited a sniff of condescension and an

emphatic "No!" Perhaps it is a measure of increasing recognition that in 1994 this same

store proudly advertised their exclusive on Issey Miyake's perfume and his new diffu-

sion line, Pleats Please.

18. Oddly, in the fashion world, this emerges time and again as the highest compliment a

designer can be accorded. It appears to mean that the garments are timeless: either so

classic that they are not subject to the vicissitudes of this year's "in" look, or so avant-

garde that they never go out of style because they are never quite in style; i.e., they will

always look unusual and cutting-edge. Since the fashion industry is based on incessant

and ceaseless seasonal change, enforced among the top designers and among retailers

through the seasonal collections (for the designers who show both men's and women's

lines, this means at least four yearly collections of ready-to-wear, with haute couture

representing another additional round), this may reflect a barely submerged desire to be

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DORINNE KONDO

out of the hectic business of preparing collections. Clearly, it also expresses the desire

to be recognized as a kind of craftsperson/ artist.

Miyake is one of the designers who is rethinking the incessant changes of fashion.

His Permanente collection is based on styles from years past, and he claims his goal to

be the kind of Clothing in which new items can be mixed and matched with items from

past collections.

19. lchiofasshon to iu sekai de shigoto o shite imasu ga, seijiteki na nagare nado ni taishite

mo ko atte hoshl to iu negai wa arimasu. Ni ju seiki kohan to iu gendai, samazama na

kangaekata, ikikata ga aru wake desu ga, sono naka no ichibubun no hitotachi ga tsuyoi

to iu koto dake de keizaiteki na shisutemu ya seijiteki pawa ni yotte, ta no bunka nari

shis0 nari seikatsu, tsumari ikikata o hitei shitari okashitari sum koto wa ikenai n ja nai

ka to omou. Samazama na bunka ga k}fison shite ikeru sekai o tsukutte ikanakereba ike-

nai to omoimasu. Nihon no fasshon ni shite mo hakujin shiko ga hijo ni tsuyokute, ju kyii

seiki no matsu ni dekita hakujin bunka ga nani yori mo utsukushiku pawafuru de aru to

iu kangaekata wa okashL Utsukushisa to iu mono wa nihonjin no naka ni mo, chiigoku-

jin no naka ni mo, kuroi hada no hitotachi no naka ni mo sorezore ni aru mono de, kimer-

areta puroposhon ga utsukushi to iu no wa, henken ni suginai koto desu. Utsukushisa to

iu mono wa, keni zukerarerubeki mono de wa arimasen kara (1986).

20. See, e.g., the article on M. Butter:fiy in this volume.

21. Ivy (1995) deals insightfully with two remarkably similar ad campaigns for the Japanese

National Railway, entitled "Discover Japan" and "Exotic Japan." Drawing upon the dis-

courses of psychoanalysis and the postmodern, among others, her compelling analysis

provokes meditations on nostalgia, modernity, and (re)figurations of national-cultural

identity. Though the themes of the Ryu.kii Tsu.shin article in many ways echo the "Exotic

Japan" campaign in particular, my interest is in highlighting the workings of Oriental-

ism and the difference that race makes.

22. Laura Brousseau was instrumental in helping me think through the narrative trajectory

and the material techniques deployed in this article.

23. See, e.g., Mani 1987; Parker, et al. , eds. 1992, Silverberg 1993, Kondo, this volume.

24. For example, her narratives are privileged, and at points the author invokes the guide as

his audience, explicitly commenting that she had become more of a partner than a guide.

Their farewell is laced with nostalgic desire; the author mentions her distinctive

phrases, her characteristic gestures in passages reminiscent of "bittersweet" partings

from summer lovers.

25. Two sections explicitly thematize this relationship: the vignette concerning the Japan-

ese student in the strip club, and the guide's tales of sexual harassment from tourists

from around the world-especially Italians and Japanese.

26. Such a stance redeploys nativist discourses of Japanese uniqueness as it accedes to the

discourse of the nation-state, in the dialectic of universali sm/particularism

Sakai cogently critiques. Transnationalism represented by the cosmopolitanism of the

ORIENTALISMS

consumer-subject of Kyoto etrangere only magnifies these concerns with the essentially

national.

27. See, e.g., Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration, and Andrew Parker, et al., eds. Nation-

alisms and Sexualities.

28. The classic work here is John Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific

War.

99