Japanese Consumer Culture   Japanese consumer culture is in constant overdrive, a self-amplifying machine that does not run on empty but instead is always growing new limbs and forms. Signals from the street and from abroad are rapidly taken in, absorbed, and modified. Foreigners sometimes sneer at Japanese consumers, saying that they simply buy all the clothes they see in some particular picture in a British fashion magazine, and that they have no style of their own. This is to fall into a well-known trap, assuming that "authenticity" should somehow be the guiding star of our lives. The Japanese consumers are not in the authenticity business. They have no time to, because they have to keep up with the market, which changes at lightning speed. Next week, another obscure clothes shop in Shinjuku will be the rage. This rapid cultural scene makes for a fast evolution of trends, where symbols and catchphrases scroll by at one thousand miles per hour. It's no wonder that the hippest trendsetters in Europe (James Lavelle of Mo' Wax for example) would be helpless without their regular dose of Japanese pop culture. So what is it exactly that the Japanese know and we don't? It all comes down to hacking. Since the 1970's, guide magazines to entertainment and leisure activities have been extremely popular in Japan. These magazines (one of which is 'Pia') quickly became so powerful that people didn't care for shows not listed in them anymore. Tetsuo Kogawa said (in the late 80's!): "This type of magazine transforms the total reality of city culture into fragments of information that one can assemble according to one's preferences ('konomti'). And it goes to an extreme in which informational reality is substituted for the substantial reality that everybody used to experince." Thus, many readers began to the magazines just for "information play", reassembling the data in them into various configurations. Many of them have never even seen the listed shows; they are manipulating pure information. This dissociation of information from concrete experiences makes possible many new forms of creativity, and especially the ability to hack anything. The'otaku' are well-known: (mostly) teenage boys who devote their spare time to digging up obscure snippets of information about movie stars, singers, or whatever; the less well-known, the better. In the same way, clothes or other fashion accessories are certainly nothing else than symbols; something you can hack - try for a while and then discard. The Japanese penchant for simulations also explain the wonderful inventions they come up with - Tamagotchi and the handheld consoles where you do battle with creatures who get their combat characteristics from scanned barcodes are just two examples.  Japanese noise music also reflects this tendency: while European noise bands tend to have heavy and "important" agendas, Japanese artists like Merzbow admit that their music has no message - it's just noise, and in Merzbow's case, it's intended to be so violent that the listener's thought processes stop completely. Since the Japanese economy has been so strong, at least up until now, capital has been abundant and available for young people through their parents. Information in the form of capital has been massively invested in information in the form of cultural artifacts, and as a result, street culture has been flowering. What better use is there for money than converting it to shiny, glistening cultural capital? by Mikael Huss