“How to be a Japanese Hipster” is a blog I created for my final Play Assessment in Asian Cybercultures. In this exegesis I will discuss the origins and purpose of the idea and how I feel I achieved this purpose.
Initially I planned to do a simple travel-guide to Japan but I felt that this did not sit well in terms of the inventiveness and creative possibilities of the assignment. I also felt that it was too simple away to investigate Japanese culture and was a method that had quite simply been done to death.
In order to find a unique way of writing what is essentially a brief cultural study I came up with the idea to investigate Japanese life as experienced by one of its many subcultures. The next difficult question was which subculture to choose? After researching the (wide) variety of subcultures existing in Japanese young adults and teens I discovered a few photo-blogs depicting “Japanese Hipsters”, further research showed that there was little to no sociological/cultural works written about them. “Hipsters” as a group are also a relatively new phenomenon in the West with a wealth of information having sprung up in the last 5 years pertaining to their lifestyles.
Having read Douglas McGray’s “Japan’s Gross National Cool” as part of my research and acknowledging the Western obsession with the inherent cool-factor of Japanese Pop Culture, I decided that investigating the notion that the world’s trends are set in Japanese streets would be a fun spin on the typical colonial imperialism of Centre (West)/ Periphery (East) flows of modernity and Pop culture.
By focusing on the idea of “the hipster” and claiming its origins in Japan I was able to create a tongue-in-cheek how-to-guide that implies to be the hippest of all global hipsters is to be a Japanese one.
I divided the “life” of a hipster into sub-categories such as Fashion, Music, Language, (etc.) and undertook extensive research in order to try and find a semblance of an answer/suggestion in each. This proved extremely difficult as the “hipster” movement is about subverting mainstream notions of culture and identity, and with myself having no prior knowledge of Japanese culture my research time was doubled by checking and rechecking any information I found to make sure my suggestions weren’t too mainstream. Also many Internet searches came back with only “mainstream” Japanese Pop Culture items translated into English with much of the underground info in Japanese (if it could be found via the internet at all).
Another interesting challenge I faced in completing the project was balancing my blog posts so that they included at least some Academic basis. There is a plethora of “unofficial” blogs and webzine articles about hipster culture but nearly no Academic research on the subject so I had to find ways to relate studies on other subcultures in Japan, or general culture and identity works to my specific subject.
The blog is clearly for a niche market. The “hipster” genre required me to go deeper than a general analysis of Japanese Pop Culture. It is a brief insight into subculture in Japan framed by the imagined “needs” of a budding (or established) “hipster” in Japan.
In order to maintain authenticity I have tried to ensure that the places, brands, language etc that it features are not just generally “cool” in Japan (if I had done that the blog would be ten times lengthier) bu tare specifically tailored to the ideals, eccentricities etc of the notion of “the hipster”.
I like that it sort of adheres to the remix components we learnt about in Cybercultures this semester. A study on how to be a hipster in Melbourne or New York etc would seem to be an accepted/expected subject, but by turning the tables and investigating “hipsterdom” in Japan the reader is forced to acknowledge both the similarities and differences of Japanese Pop Culture and the West.
Hopefully this makes the blog effective in pointing out that although the notion of “hipster” is discussed mainly as a Western term, elements of Pop Culture are transient and are part of the constant globalization of our world, and it is not ridiculous to suggest that “hipsters” in Japan could have been the starting point of hipster culture in the West (or vice versa). Just in Pop Culture terms alone we as a globe are constantly borrowing, remixing and transforming cultural traits to form our own cohesive identities.
“How to be a Hipster in Japan” is simply a cheeky way of pointing out this nature of adaptation and improvement/tailoring of culture is global.
