My new book Status and Culture (on sale 8/30) synthesizes what we know about status and social behavior to explain taste, fashion, art, and other common cultural phenomenon.

I thought it would be helpful to list out the classic books for understanding how culture works (1/n): 1. Thorstein Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class

Foundational text for understanding taste as an economic process: namely, the inevitability of New Money engaging in conspicuous consumption. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, but his arguments are more nuanced than often portrayed.

To describe Japanese newspapers and TV as a cartel sounds like conspiracy-thinking, but obviously they're all aware that the "specific group" Abe's assassin felt animosity toward was the Unification Church. They're just coordinating to withhold that information: i.e. a cartel So what you get in Japan is a "gray market" of information, where the truth goes out to tabloids for informed readers but there's still plausible deniability because they're only "tabloids."

"Tabloid" Shukan Gendai reported the Unification Church angle

news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/6b0e3…

In yesterday's tweet thread about YMO's exotica origins, I skimmed over the electronic sound experimentation that was already brewing in Japan before 1978.

Here is a summary of pre-YMO Japanese electronic sounds. 🧵 In Feb 1974 (months before Kraftwerk's "Autobahn"), Isao Tomita released the Debussy Moog album "Snowflakes Are Dancing," which was a huge hit in the United States.

How A Single Bad Drug Trip Led to Japanese Technopop 🧵

In the early 1970s, bassist Haruomi Hosono of the band Happy End was jamming with his friends at a Tokyo studio, when someone passed around a joint. Hosono thought it would be very cool to take a double-sized hit. The joint was laced or tainted, and Hosono went into a serious panic attack. He thought he was going to die and begged his friends to call an ambulance. They told him to chill out.

Hosono managed to get home the next day, but the panic attacks started again and wouldn't go away.

AMETORA MINI-STORIES #3 🧵
Why Japanese Teenage Delinquents are Called Yankii

In Japanese, the word used for working-class teenage delinquents is "yankii" (ヤンキー), which seems to derive from Yankee.

But stereotypical yankii style doesn't look very American... so why yankii? The yankii fit the common pattern of working-class subcultures (like Japanese Teddy Boys). They're a major part of post-war youth culture, especially as part of bōsōzoku biker gangs, and show up a lot in manga, films, and TV, such as Be-Bop High-School or baseball film Rookies.

AMETORA MINI-STORIES #2
Why Japanese Fashion Magazines Look Like Catalogs

One of the most distinctive features of Japanese magazines is their similarity to catalogs: lots and lots of products laid out along with prices and retailers.

The origin is, oddly, the US counterculture. This Japanese design style began in the mid-1970s, directly inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog — @stewartbrand's hyper-saturated guide to the tools necessary for self-sustainable communities, published from 1968-1972. (Steve Jobs called WEC “Google in paperback form.")

Japanese rock-and-roller Yuya Uchida 内田裕也 (1939-2019) has died. He was arguably more famous for his album cover art and bombastic personality than for any of his actual music. Yuya's legacy is interesting as a sort of alternative history. In the late 1960s, there was a big debate between Yuya and the band Happy End about the proper direction of Japanese rock.

I don't think it's just Uniqlo-ization. That FRUiTS style has become codified as a FRUiTS style that is now literally 20+ years old.

https://twitter.com/HirokoTabuchi/status/827877852762738688

And the people who dress in it don't do it for the same reasons: they dress that way to be social media stars or be on variety TV.