Japan has become increasingly ubiquitous in Western mediascapes over the past decade, partly as a result of the efforts of the Japanese media industries themselves, partly due to the “pop cosmopolitanism” of Euro-American audiences.2 Much has been written on the “Cool Japan” phenomenon, a co-production of Japanese cultural foundations and Western cultural critics who have repositioned “Japan” as one of the most desirable brands of the Western subculture industry.3 In contrast to the modernist Western imaginary of traditional Japan, with its zen gardens and tea ceremonies, this rebranded, postmodern Japan is imagined primarily as a subcultural space (even though many of its referents may be considered as belonging to the cultural mainstream within Japan itself) with manga, anime, popular music, street style, media crazes, and contemporary art all having been successfully marketed as alternatives to the Western cultural mainstream, generating numerous subcultural networks among Euro-American youth organized around anime, J-horror movies, or J-pop. Exactly why Japan has acquired cult status among Euro-American youth is a much larger question, but arguably relates in large part to the perception of Japanese culture as transgressive and hence emancipatory in relation to the strictures of Western “political correctness,” making it an ideal vehicle for the “oppositional taste” beloved of cult move fans.4

In the domain of television, Japan’s heightened visibility is most evident in anime, but also live-action Japanese shows repackaged for Anglo-American consumption such as Iron Chef, Takeshi’s Castle/Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, Ninja Warrior, or Unbeatable Banzuke, along with Western spoofs and spin-offs (Banzaï, or Iron Chef America). On British TV, meanwhile, a new generation of ostensibly “factual” programming focused on Japanese culture has emerged, including the Japan TV series (2000), Adam and Joe Go to Tokyo (2003), I, Samurai (2006), Dawn Porter… Geisha Girl, and Kelly Osbourne’s Turning Japanese (2009). The most prominent of these shows is undoubtedly the BBC series Japanorama (2002-2007), a half-hour show hosted by the nation’s favorite enfant terrible, Jonathan Ross, and produced by his company Hot Sauce Productions. Not broadcast in the US and not yet released on DVD, the show has acquired its own modest cult status among British fans: episodes are widely available on YouTube and a Facebook group recently launched to campaign for a fourth season.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Although Ross presents the show as the result of his personal predilection for “all things Japanese,” Japanorama can be seen as a rather transparent attempt to tap into the popularity of the “Cool Japan” phenomenon, and who better to do so than Ross? Prior to Japanorama, he produced several seasons of The Incredibly Strange Film Show (1988-89), a series on cult movie directors, while his three-part series Asian Invasion (2006) focused on the Japanese, Hong Kong, and Korean film industries. As the host of the highly rated chat show Friday Night With Jonathan Ross (2001-present), Ross has made his career as a provocateur, most recently in the scandal involving fellow celebrity Russell Brand which resulted in a three-month suspension. Japanorama gives free rein to this penchant for provocation via breezy discussions of anime porn, maid cafes, and the sex industry. In an episode from the second season of which Russ Meyer would be proud, Ross and a male companion recline their heads on vinyl pillows shaped as a female lap and a pair of breasts, crooning the otaku mantra, moe (a sigh of contentment). Cult-movie fans are likely to find themselves doing the same.

The problem is that Ross tends to treat Japan in general (or more precisely Tokyo, where most of the show take place and which it largely conflates with “Japan” as a whole) as a kind of walk-through cult movie. Much of the show focuses on movie genres, filmmakers, actors, or films themselves which have long enjoyed cult status among Western audiences, while the BBC cachet enables him to score interviews with Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, Nagisa Oshima, Takeshi Kitano, Hideo Nakata, and Takashi Miike. As I have suggested, however, not only movies but Japanese pop culture in general now enjoys cult status in the West, and like a live-action Pacman zipping around Tokyo, Ross wants to cover it all, interviewing Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara on contemporary art, Pizzicato Five’s Yasunaru Konishi on J-pop, or quizzing hip-hop entrepreneur Nigo (founder of the trendy Bathing Ape label) about his collection of vinyl action figures. Biker tribes, Harajuku girls, humanoid robots–no cult stone is left unturned. While many of these subjects will already be familiar to any fan of Japanese pop culture, Japanorama’s three seasons comprise a remarkably comprehensive catalog of aspects of Japanese popular culture which have acquired cult status in the West.

Whether otaku-spotting in Akihabara, explaining the anti-kawaii character Gloomy Bear, or riding a giant mechanical panda in an arcade, Ross exemplifies a figure I have come to call the hipster cosmopolitan, who of late has become ubiquitous in Western media culture. The hipster cosmopolitan is a far cry from the old-fashioned BBC travel-show host, embodied by the shambling and nostalgic Michael Palin: his natural habitat is the city rather than the village, the subcultural rather than the mainstream; he knows the cool global scenes; he is a night owl, spending the night partying and chowing down on street food, before stumbling, hung over, into the light of day. He is probably a DJ: Gilles Peterson, who hosts the BBC radio show “Worldwide” which favors Brazilian tropicália, Ghanaian high-life, or Nigerian juju, is a good example. He may have tattoos. On American TV, his most notable incarnation is the globe-trotting celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain. Most hipster cosmopolitans are white and speak English, and like the hipster brilliantly satirized in Blossom Dearie’s song “I’m Hip” (”I even call my girlfriend man”) they are usually male.

Hipsterism, as Norman Mailer observed decades ago, has always had a racial dimension, involving a white bourgeois appropriation of black cultural capital.5 More recently, John Leland’s book Hip: The History (2004) elaborates Mailer’s point, from white slumming in Harlem to contemporary suburban Americans who mimic African-American working-class identity and prefer hip-hop to rock music.6 As both jazz and hip-hop have lost their oppositional status and moved increasingly into the cultural mainstream, the value of their subcultural capital has correspondingly declined, requiring today’s white hipsters to look further afield. In a world of accelerating global cultural flows, this leads to hipster cosmopolitanism. It is perhaps unsurprising that Asian popular culture, and Japanese popular culture in particular, should have become one of its privileged objects, given the longstanding admiration of Black Americans themselves for Asian popular culture and vice versa, from the movies of Bruce Lee to Kanye West’s collaboration with Takashi Murakami.7 From this perspective, Jonathan Ross’s interview with Nigo, a Japanese hip-hop designer who has collaborated with African American hip-hop celebrities, becomes the quintessence of hipster cosmopolitanism.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Whether the value of Japanese subcultural capital will in its turn decline as Japanese popular culture moves increasingly into Western mainstream media remains to be seen; but it is likely that the subcultural frontier will shift again, perhaps to Africa, where Nigerian popular music has long been a pole of hipster attraction and its digital video industry has also been attracting the BBC’s attention. Meanwhile on American cable TV, a pair of Brooklyn-based hipster cosmopolitans have proposed an even more remote destination in the continuing mission to boldly go where no fan has gone before. While New Zealand might seem an unlikely hipster destination, in the logic of hipsterism its very squareness makes it paradoxically cool. Wellington as the new Tokyo? Brett and Jemaine’s number one hipster-groupie Mel would certainly think so.

Image Credits:
1. Jonathan Ross in Japanorama
2. Japan as Cult Movie?
3. The Next Hip Thing?

Please feel free to comment.

1. Quoted in Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” In Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959: 337-358.
2. See Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002; Jenkins, Henry. “Pop Cosmopolitanism.” In Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Desirée Qin-Hilliard, eds., Globalization: Culture and Education for a New Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004: 114-40; Napier, Susan J. From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; I use the term subculture industry – modeled on Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential concept of the culture industry – to refer to the commercialization of subcultural identities, practices, and production by the Western media industries.
3. McGray, Douglas. 2002. “Japan’s Gross National Cool.” Foreign Policy. May/June 2002: 44-54; Allison, Anne. “The Japan Fad in Global Youth Culture and Millennial Capitalism.” In Frenchy Luning, ed., Mechademia 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006
4. Jancovich, Mark, Antonio Lázaro Reboli, Julian Stringer, and Andrew Willis, eds. Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003.
5. Mailer. “The White Negro,” 337-358.
6. Leland, John. Hip: The History. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
7. Wood, Joe. “The Yellow Negro.” Transition 73, 1997: 40-66

I don’t watch much British television these days, if by that you mean programming available—officially, at least—exclusively within the territorial UK. Having lived in the US for several decades, I’ve long since tired of BBC America’s incongruous diet of Cash in the Attic re-runs, freak-show documentaries (“My Fake Baby,” “My Mums Used To Be Men,” “Britain’s Worst Teeth”), soft porn soaps (Footballer$ Wives, Mistresses), Top Gear marathons, theme nights (“Supernatural Saturday”), and Gordon f***ing Ramsay. British television networks restrict online access to domestic programming to license-paying UK residents, and while there are workarounds, expatriates wishing to access it have limited options compared to, say, their Japanese or Korean counterparts. Most of the British television I’ve watched in recent years has been either on DVD or obtained from online torrent communities, whose expanding archives still offer only a sampling of the rich national mediascape available to domestic viewers.

All of which is why, whenever I visit the UK every year or so, as I did during the recent holiday, I’m always struck by how different the British television that people in Britain itself are watching is from the rarefied version of it available to expatriate viewers like me. What struck me in particular this time was its pervasive nostalgia, a longing for the nation itself as it once was or is imagined to have been. This was no doubt in part seasonal—Christmas is, after all, a festival predicated on nostalgia—yet still seemed excessive even by usual standards. Nostalgia is hardly new to British television, of course: sitcoms such as Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and ’Allo ’Allo have been poking fun at the nation’s wartime and imperial past for decades, while satellite networks maintain a steady stream of “classic” programming. But nostalgia has today become one of the dominant modes of what the British sociologist Michael Billig (2005) calls “banal nationalism,” the everyday social rituals and discursive practices by which national identity is routinely reaffirmed, and British television plays a key role in this process.1 Consider its fascination with the national rail system: in the space of several weeks, I watched three documentaries about the Age of Steam and the “romance” of train travel in fiction and film (in stark contrast, it may be added, to the calamitous state of the contemporary rail network). The BBC’s holiday schedule included a re-run of one of its (four) adaptations of Edith Nesbit’s book The Railway Children (1968) and of Charles Dickens’ ghost story The Signalman (1976).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yorkshire Television’s educational drama series How We Used To Live has been broadcast since the 70s, and its shows have themselves become a site of nostalgia, posted on YouTube and torrent sites by fans reminiscing about their childhood experiences watching it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recent years have seen a growing number of similar series with titles like The Way We Were (ITV), Nation on Film (BBC) and Those Were The Days (ITV) which draw heavily on home movies and footage from local film archives.

British television’s most intense nostalgia, however, is reserved for itself: much of the BBC’s schedule consisted of “classic” Christmas specials I had watched in the 1970s: Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, Top of the Pops. An hour-long documentary was devoted to the long-running children’s show Blue Peter. This self-reflexivity reaches its height in one of the nation’s best-loved institutions, Doctor Who, which functions almost as a compendium of its own forty-five year history, reincorporating Daleks and Cybermen with contemporary cultural references and celebrity cameos. Watching domestic television today, one can easily feel like the time-travelling doctor himself, stuck in a televisual time-warp continuously looping between the 60s and the 80s.

In her book The Future of Nostalgia, the Russian cultural theorist Svetlana Boym observes that although at first glance nostalgia is a longing for a place, “it is actually a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. . . . The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”2 British television offers a compelling case study in nostalgia and the medium’s role in converting private memories into a shared cultural mythology. It is no coincidence that so much of the historical programming it offers takes the form of children’s shows: like an electronic toy-box filled with a hodge-podge of half-forgotten artifacts, it invites viewers to relive their own childhood vicariously through it. Much of the nostalgia of contemporary shows is what Boym calls “restorative,” explicitly aimed at turning back the clock to a historical time-zone in some cases predating modernity itself, most clearly on view in the self-conscious pastoralism of celebrity chef-turned-gentleman farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.3

Click here to view the embedded video.

The concept of “heritage” is often associated with the costume dramas of 1980s British cinema, but cinema itself is only part of the larger heritage industry in which television is also a major participant.4 From its inception, the BBC has positioned itself as the custodian of the nation’s collective memory, a role it continues to play through documentary series on the national landscape (Coast, Wainwright’s Walks) or social history (the Britannia series on popular music). Yet both the BBC and the ITV franchises today clearly see themselves as an indispensable part of that heritage, and have for some time been engaged in the painstaking project of reconstructing their own past, not just via re-runs and DVD releases, but also documentary “tribute” shows (All About Thunderbirds, The Old Grey Whistle Test Story), or behind-the-scenes biographies of “classic” TV personalities (Hughie Green, Ronnie Corbett). British television today is primarily a commemorative medium, looking wistfully back on its own childhood as well as that of its audience, conjuring up a national community which may have little common ground anymore other than having grown up watching the same shows.

Paul Gilroy (2004) has diagnosed the current condition of British society as one of “post-imperial melancholia,” a morbid attachment to the nation’s imperial past and a grudging conviviality with the generation of immigrants whose arrival since the 1950s has transformed traditional understandings of national identity.5 Rather than melancholia, however, it is arguably nostalgia which is the current British affliction, “a longing for a home which no longer exists or never existed”6, a home of steam trains puffing through the English countryside, of seaside amusement parks and cockles on the pier, of country pubs and clotted-cream fudge, of Kenneth Williams and Steptoe and Son—a home before the Notting Hill carnival, before Stephen Lawrence and Satpal Ram, 9/11 and 7/7, Ali G and The Kumars at No. 42. It is a world which today survives largely in the memories of our grandparents, yet still maintains a surprising visibility in British popular culture thanks to the memory-machine of television. Heritage television offers a reassuring shelter to an older generation from the less pleasant realities of the contemporary nation documented in other media, such as Shane Meadows’s depiction of British skinheads in This Is England (2006), or the paranoia over Muslim fundamentalism dramatized in Channel 4’s docudrama Britz (2007).

Ultimately, British television’s nostalgia for itself may be seen as a reaction to its own inexorable demise, as digital and broadband technologies threaten to render obsolete the very concept of “television” itself and the medium is increasingly overtaken by gaming as the dominant form of popular entertainment. In the face of such challenges, Britain’s heritage television is in every sense, as Marilyn Ivy (1995) has put it in a different context, a discourse of the vanishing. 7

Image Credits:

1. How We Used to Live?
2. Commemorating the Styles of Yesteryear

Please feel free to comment.

1. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. (London: Sage Books), 1995
2. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. (New York: Basic Books), 2001, xv
3. Ibid., xvii
4. Vincendau, Ginette. Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader. (London: BFI), 2001.
5. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (New York: Routledge), 2004.
6. Boym, xiii
7. Ivy, Marilyn. of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1995.

When it comes to saving the planet, there’s more than one kind of green.
—Annabelle Gurwitch, Wa$ted

The past two years has seen the explosive growth of green lifestyle media across the spectrum of the media industries: an entire literature has appeared almost overnight explaining how to “go green,” requiring bookstores to expand or create new “Environmental” sections to accommodate the plethora of new publications; the torrent of advice continues on newsstands, with magazines such as Vanity Fair or Elle producing  their own “Green Issue;” on the internet, portal sites such as Treehugger.com and innumerable blogs promote energy efficiency and the new environmental citizenship. Small wonder that the past year has seen growing concerns about “green fatigue,” a potential or actual backlash against sustainable living practices paradoxically produced by the media tsunami promoting them.

The reasons for the greening of lifestyle media are complex, but undoubtedly one of its key underlying causes is the emergence of sustainability as a new form of competitive advantage, triggering new forms of entrepreneurism seeking to capitalize upon it and the rapid emergence in recent years of a new green economy.1 The media industries have played a key role both in popularizing the discourse of sustainability and in turning it to their own economic advantage, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of television. The BBC series It’s Not Easy Being Green (2006) documented a family’s efforts to adopt an ecologically-friendly lifestyle on a newly-acquired farm; the New Zealand show Wa$ted offered a new kind of makeover show by instructing its participants in how to reduce their carbon footprint; The Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for A Small Planet showcased environmentally-friendly design products and technological initiatives; the BBC’s reality mini-series Dumped outdid Survivor by depositing a team of unsuspecting non-environmentalists on a landfill site for three weeks and forcing them to survive by building a shelter from recycled refuse and scavenging waste food. Television’s green makeover culminated in June of this year with the re-branding of the Discovery Home channel as Planet Green, billed as “the first all-green TV network”. Ostensibly the first cable network devoted exclusively to sustainability issues, it features an American clone of Wa$ted and green versions of formats familiar from HGTV or E! Entertainment, while its recruitment of the Food Network’s top celebrity chef, Emeril Lagasse, has consolidated the network’s brand identity. Neighboring lifestyle channels such as the Food Network or Travel Network have been quick to incorporate green programming into their schedules.

Rather than television’s latest exercise in mind control, I’m inclined to see its recent environmental turn as a typically opportunistic move by media executives who know a new market niche when they see one. The rise of green entrepreneurism and the rapid expansion of the new green economy have not been lost on television, as network executives continue to seek new ways to ensure the relevance of their brand in an increasingly crowded marketplace. From this perspective, lifestyle television’s green makeover can be seen as a savvy attempt to tap into the emerging green economy and its affluent, cosmopolitan consumers. For all its rhetoric of “saving the planet,” however, green lifestyle TV remains committed to reshaping individual conduct in accordance with the agendas of green business, and to delivering its target market: the new green citizen-consumer.

At first sight, today’s green lifestyle programming has much in common with existing forms of lifestyle television and employs similar strategies: lifestyle TV’s tongue-in-cheek cop-show format, for example, familiar to viewers of What Not To Wear or Garden Police, is reproduced in Planet Green’s Wa$ted, where hardened “eco-criminals” are placed under surveillance and branded as “guilty” of environmental abuse before being taught how to reduce their ecological footprint. Whereas earlier forms of lifestyle television worked on remodeling the self in discrete areas of everyday life (home decorating, fashion, diet, cleaning, the garden), however, the new environmental citizenship significantly extends this project, encompassing the totality of everyday conduct and monitoring previously unregulated micro-practices, from taking a shower in the morning (4 minutes is enough) to turning off the (CFL) lights at night. Green lifestyle programming accordingly extends across the spectrum of existing formats, including green news, green renovation and real-estate shows, green fashion, green food, green travel, and green celebrities.

Lifestyle television is typically seen as an instrument of economic neoliberalism in its promotion of models of citizenship predicated upon consumption and its insistence on participation in markets, whether as buyer or seller. At first sight, green lifestyle TV appears to mark a departure from this model in its critique of unregulated consumption and promotion of sustainability and efficiency. Finally, it might seem, the toaster-with-pictures is making itself useful, teaching a progressive social agenda rather than the finer points of wine pairing. It is only when we consider the green entrepreneurs, designers, and their products who monopolize green airtime, and the boosterish treatment they receive, that a nagging anxiety sets in. Far from entailing a break with the neoliberal consumer culture championed by earlier forms of lifestyle television, green lifestyle programming arguably represents its latest frontier: green consumption. As one entrepreneur smugly explains in an episode of Big Ideas for a Small Planet, the promise of the new eco-capitalism is guilt-free consumption, the fantasy of consumption without waste—everything is recycled! Waste in all its forms—energy, water, garbage, and most important of all, money—is the central fixation of green lifestyle television, but its elimination only initiates a further cycle of consumption in the form of energy-efficient appliances, blown-in wall insulation, solar panels, smart lighting systems, recycled building materials, fuel-efficient vehicles, composting systems, and eco-furniture, not to mention the expert services of those who design and install them. These products and services do not come cheap, and often seem available only to affluent green entrepreneurs themselves. Green lifestyle TV presents us, in fact, with what Jean Baudrillard might have called a new system of green objects—not a critique of neoliberal political economy and its culture of consumption, but a recycled, eco-friendly version of it.

Green lifestyle television’s championing of an environmentally responsible citizenship ostensibly departs from conventional forms of lifestyle television in privileging cosmopolitanism over narcissism, altruism over individualism, as principles of social action. While “saving the planet” is invoked with mantra-like insistence, however, the focus of attention remains the individual self: “carbon-neutral,” “no-impact” or “off-grid” lifestyles offer new forms of social distinction (for those able to afford them), while the real reason why we should go green is signaled by the ubiquitous dollar sign in the title of Wa$ted itself and the trashcan of dollar bills dispensed to happy families at the end of every show of the projected annual savings generated by their new green lifestyle. “The planet” remains almost incidental to the real business of generating income by saving on energy costs, an ideological screen for the projection of an imaginary cosmopolitan citizenship.

Media studies’ attention to environmental issues has to date focused almost entirely on the problem of electronic waste, the mass dumping of television receivers and computer hardware in landfills in Asia or Africa.2 While this is clearly a serious issue, the developments I have described suggest that the question of how media studies relates to environmental issues is no longer—if it ever was—just a question of waste management. Green lifestyle programming also problematizes existing approaches to lifestyle television, which until now have focused primarily on sociological questions of connoisseurship and the naturalization of bourgeois taste. Aside from the conceptual emptiness of the “green” signifier itself, something has clearly been going on in lifestyle television. What that is, and whether green programming represents a progressive new direction for television, or simply business as usual, is a discussion we urgently need to begin.

Image Credits:
1. Vanity Fair, The Green Issue
2. Saving the Planet on a Budget
3. A Green Bank Account

Please feel free to comment.

1. For a clear statement of this position, see Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), especially the chapter on “Eco-advantage” (7-29). Today’s green economy originates in the environmental business movement which emerged in American business culture in the 1990s, the manifesto for which was Paul Hawken’s, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). See also Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (New York: Back Bay Books, 2000).
2. The Basel Action Network’s films Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia (2003) and The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa (2006) document the environmental consequences of dumping electronic waste in China and Nigeria respectively. On electronic waste, see Elizabeth Grossman, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health (Washington, DC: Shearwater Books, 2007), and David Naguib Pellow, “”Electronic Waste: The ‘Clean Industry’ Exports Its Trash,” in Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007): 185-224.