Harajuku, USAHarajuku is Japanese, but in a sense, it’s also American.
Jason Morgan
Jan 17, 2023
An American pop singer named Gwen Stefani has called down the liberal harpies on her head. In a recent interview with Allure magazine, Stefani said that she was “Japanese and didn’t know it” as she gushed about her fondness for the Tokyo neighborhood of Harajuku.
The standard “kyudan”—Maoist denunciation and shakedown perfected by a certain professional underclass in Japan—ensued. Stefani was guilty of cultural appropriation, American liberals shrieked. She has no right to call herself “Japanese,” because that’s racist and, frankly, so is she.
How sad. I wrote in these pages back in 2021 about the failure of imagination, and failure to understand human nature, that American liberals display when they try to police cultural quarantines. Those quarantines don’t exist. Culture is up for grabs. If Stefani wants to rock Harajuku fashion, then may she live long and prosper. Because that is exactly what Harajuku is there for.
To borrow some liberal platitudes, culture is “fluid,” a “spectrum.” Nobody owns it, it is always changing, and everybody borrows it from everybody else. In fact, Stefani might have been somewhat to blame in the “I’m Japanese” dust-up, after all. She put too much emphasis on Harajuku’s Japaneseness. Harajuku is definitely a product of Japan’s cultural backpages, a re-emergence of the same kind of delightfully irreverent nose-tweaking and defiance of authority that brought us kabuki, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and Baba Bunko.
But, for all that, Harajuku is not strictly speaking Japanese. It is a hodgepodge, a wild and carnivalesque bricolage of every cultural knick-knack and bit of civilizational flotsam that the fashion rebels in the Tokyo alleyways can get their hands on. Imagine if Mardi Gras, a mascara factory, and a thousand pounds of plasmatic neon were all smashed together in a cultural supercollider. No, that doesn’t even come close to the Harajuku style, which takes over the top of over-the-top as a mere starting point for street-level phantasmagoria.
* * *
So, is Harajuku Japanese? Well, Harajuku is in Japan. But Harajuku is also a magnet for cultural cut-up, a Mecca for misfits from around the world. It is both a location and an aesthetic. And it is more the latter, an idiom of dress-up and make-believe. Very many of Harajuku’s homage-payers are not from around there anyway. Harajuku is an open-air fondue dish of cultural send-ups and outré inside jokes, a place where all are welcome to join the ongoing theater of the absurd.
In that sense, though, isn’t Harajuku American?
Harajuku is, in a sense, the best of the USA, I think. It is a melting pot that really melts, a crucible of culture that really does mix everything together into one odd and sometimes beautiful stew.
* * *
Maybe, just maybe, Americans don’t really believe the melting pot stuff anymore, though. Maybe some Americans think culture is a prison and not a kind of eros, a form of play among the strangeness of the world. Maybe that is why liberal harpies get to squawking whenever someone outs herself as a line-jumper in the Multi-Culti Museum halls. Multiculturalism is about cultures keeping separate, about cultural ghettoes assembled somehow into a city, a nation-state. Stay in your cultural lane. Don’t go all Vanilla Ice and try to be the white boy who can dance. White boys can’t dance. (Sorry, Nureyev.) The corollary, of course, is that black boys must dance. That is pretty racist. But, as I said, we’re dealing with American liberals, so, what did you expect?
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/harajuku-usa/
