prep-school then going to MIT or Princeton, but one who dyes that blonde-hair jet-black, wears Doc Martens or safety shoes, and affects large-plastic frame glasses. Then you would have the exact correspondence of BARBIEDOLL to Japanese society, commanding as she does that weird position between being the bluest-blood at the programme but still the ironic 'artiste,' one whose tastes runs towards anarchy and bloodshed rather than conventionality; familiar with German and Japanese artists TUSK brought up and capable of explicating on same in complex and rapidfire Japanese (but alas, not English).
Of the girls in the programme she is the only one who definitely would have been accepted to Keiwha; she was quite fluid and supple in her language ability; her one personality tweak (aversion to cameras) understandable in light of the thickly mascared false eye-lashes, dyed-blonde hair 1950s French actress look she affected that Americans sometimes read as "a parody of a white woman." BARBIEDOLL would pass unblinked at in a Tokyo street; in Seoul she was quite the object of fascination.
But not for TUSK. In reflection of the sentiment that 'opposites attract,' TUSK couldn't experience any frisson of desire for BARBIEDOLL. It's not just that he wasn't attracted to the Doc Marten set in the US, it's just that his tastes have turned ever more conservative, perhaps to the point of being middle-class. TUSK is beginning to feel something for ICEPRINCESS.
BARBIEDOLL was the most fascinating personality on the program. As stated in certain long-forgotten conversations, when two artistic people meet, what they talk about, of course is aesthetics. Liking ‘One Piece’ isn’t just hipster-irony; BARBIEDOLL is a fanatic, her favorite character is (appropriately) Brooke, she may not quite read the anational gang of dynamic personalities against the world state as a metaphor for Japan’s future itself, but she believed in the power of the personality. And herein lay tragedy of such personality types, for whereas a Keio Economics major had a 60% chance or so of a decent career and a Keio Engineering major had a 70-80% chance of a steady salary good job, becoming an arts major was a highly dubious prospect. BARBIEDOLL was more intelligent than most (although she did make one highly moronic expression that first week), she had supreme willpower to sit down and burn through any paper test in existence, and her easy-going chattiness with the ‘regular’ girls established her as a leader-type. It may not be going too far to claim that even here, in the first week, she was ‘winning the programme.’ Like ‘winning the party’ the phrase has the connotation of competition where none genuinely exists, but vocabulary must serve things as they are sometimes and not always the reverse.
In the 1990s Japan had been abuzz with the story of costumed sailor girls fighting a dark and supernatural evil. Such a story caught the imagination of middle-school aged girls and then spread to a larger public, although it was always a weird thing to behold the male ‘Scout Fighting Crescent’ fan. SFC captured something about the zeitgeist of the times, though: a new innocent Japan now free of the Cold War false dichotomy was represented by its young and feminine who then battled some otherworldly force governed by magic and fear. Now in the third millennium, the war would be about the oppressive world government, which tried to enforce conformity on others and put bounties on outlaw heads. Yet this too was artifactual; this too was a constructed reality. The students simply drank; they were stared at by other restaurant guests.
If SEATTLE had been a lone-wolf, a histrionic; BARBIEDOLL is team-leader, a Byronic hero whose interaction with others is to find the point of control and subvert it. She liked TUSK; she wished he would have paid his fair share of the tab. But TUSK was reeling in probability odds; he had a 10000 won bill and didn’t want to break a 50000; he decided to be a cheapskate. There was perfume in his boots, and the girls had CDs given out by a possibly Christian group at the subway station. Myung-deung was abuzz.
"What do you think of the programme?”
"It’s pretty good. I think my main problem is that I keep comparing things to last year.”
"Oh, so you were here last year?”
"Yeah it was Germans and Canadians and Japanese and Korean-friends of people. Kinda more chaotic.”
"More fun last year?”
"Maybe so.”
"Well, every moment is unusual, so seize the day!”
An engineer has a 60-70% chance of getting what they want; the artist, even with all things going for him, has perhaps a 5% chance or less. But fortunately, when the engineer fails, they are wrecked; whereas the artist is already committed to poverty, so living amidst hipsters and punk musicians is no terrible loss. BARBIEDOLL has maybe a 3-5% chance of becoming a moderately successful artist; but at the very least, she is part of the magic of Keio at the time; she will be remembered by everybody there for those four years.
"What movie do you watch?”
"Wasn’t there something recently about a girl from a Hokkaido fishing village who goes to Waseda, studies literature?”
"Something like that.”
"I thought it was fun.”
"It was okay.”
"I listen to Love Psychedelico. Been listening to Perfume lately.”
"I know both of them!”
We will break convention here and buzz into the future, as this year’s draft can’t merely mimic the first; information has to be organized differently so as to capture the essence of things and reflect psychic states and much more subtle positional matters which are the steak and potatoes of the year rather than the mad clash of seemingly random events that marked Year 1. TUSK spent much of this programme thinking about the previous year; he spent much of it mooning over SEATTLE. So, therefore, text that delves into the past and text that relates ongoing events to histories and prior occurrences. The ghost of SEATTLE hovers over these pages, dictating things to turn this way or that and forcing comparison of each girl, in turn (and there 180 of them, 30 of whom at least get registered on some level by TUSK’s consciousness) to her and each, in turn, is found lacking. Yet TUSK is also found lacking; nobody or almost nobody feels a genuine frisson for him. The next week BARBIEDOLL is to snub TUSK—but just gently, just enough to keep things friendly—or even possibly to become friends. BARBIEDOLL is to snub AJ-4, who was unaware of her own limitations and whose even comment that she ‘liked all equally’ was a sign of weakness rather than all encompassing insight into who each girl was. But in the Week 6, boys (and aha, the mask has fallen, there were indeed a few Japanese boys present, although none were meaningful in any way) will come up to BARBIEDOLL, she has established a sort of student council leader position that is excellent and plays off well against artistic temperaments. Screw ministries or safe corporate jobs, BARBIEDOLL is on the war-path, rising through Keio, most distinct if not quite absolute top-dog of her school. She has a knife in both hands and a firm eye for analyzing other human beings, so represents the hope of an ascendant Japan, leaned and scarred by past wars, but impossible to write-off as irrelevant. She is Tokyo.
"The thing about Japanese society is that by definition you have no hope. If you bow your head and conform and get the lifetime job, by the time you reach what you are supposed to get, the Chinese have already invented a company that is stronger than yours or your company has already cut corners and began dumping industrial waste in some concrete casement somewhere such that you pick up the bag. This is why you have to be at war constantly; it’s a lose-lose situation.”
"Well, I don’t know. Surely you could get a Biology PhD for example and do research…”
"Even there you are trapped. After you have your Biology PhD, a scrap of paper, the drug company comes up to you and gives you 5 million yen a year for the rest of your life if you work for them. But if you make your company a 500 million yen drug, you still only get your 5 million yen.”
"5 million yen is a decent amount of money.”
"Hardly for ten years of apprenticeship at a university, and then thirty years committed to one workplace, three weeks off a year.”
"This program is three weeks, and I love every moment of it.”
"If it were all you had, it would be like getting out of a jail, to enjoy for just a few days the spring flowers.”
"There is literary precedent for comment you’ve made.”
On the very last day, BARBIEDOLL will be chosen to make the class speech, just as KANYE was the year previous. Hers will be about aesthetics, the bright happy tones of Korea versus the discredited subdued Japanese. Both have written aesthetic essays for their placement tests, but BARBIEDOLL’s is positive about Korea whereas TUSK openly claimed there was no Korean literature (nobody trusts you if you’re relentlessly positive). Had he been more fluent in the language, he would have written about intertextuality, how references to other works can be both explicit or implicit, and Rezeption theory, that the author is dead and the reader creates the work. Both apply as well to sociology and situation. The girls are defined by TUSK’s presence; he is defined by theirs. But intertextuality and interdisciplinary fall shy in the TUSK-BARBIEDOLL relationship.
"You don’t speak English, how can we talk aesthetics?”
"Well you have ‘kimokawa’ written all over your Facebook.”
"A modern concept; an aesthetic word taught to me only last year.”
"Yet I don’t know if it’s fully you.”
"I think trying to get one thing, I
The Flowers of Keiwha Page 25
