World Order - "Last Dance"

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The work of electronica dance group World Order is intensely political. The group's very name is a blackly ironic take on George H. W. Bush's New World Order, as was made crystal clear in their June video, "Imperialism."

"Imperialism" is an outlier in terms of its sledgehammer message. Much of the time the group is infuriatingly and charmingly oblique in its judgments, inscrutable as their blank facial expressions.

World Order's latest video "Last Dance" is clearly a commentary on where the country is under the Abe Administration and more broadly in the aftermath of the triple disaster of 3/11 -- but seems unfinished, probably intentionally so. The Ministry of Finance, METI, the anti-nuclear protestors outside METI, the Supreme Court all make cameo appearances. Mt. Fuji is one prominent backdrop, playing on the mountain's UNESCO World Heritage Site listing this year. Sequences shot in front of nuclear power plants and the archival footage of one of the Fukushima Daiichi plant buildings exploding are juxtaposed with footage shot in front of a hydroelectric dam, a solar farm and a wind farm fronting an oil tank farm. The group is saying something about Japan's energy policy but what, exactly? Are the members offering an idealized anti-high velocity, anti-mass production Arcadian vision a la Godfrey Reggio -- which may be the only place one can end up when one starts using cameras and slow motion to reveal the pace and patterns of contemporary human life?

The inclusion of seasonal references -- the famous drive of gingko trees in Jingu in their full golden exuberance, the susuki in the Mt. Fuji sequence -- seem to hammer two messages. First, that this is a Japanese video for designed for Japanese to interpret (which begs the question what the heck I think I am doing here). Second, that even though the video of this performance has been archived in the vast global library of the Internet, it remains no more than a bit of emphemera, with a hard chronological locus ("This is the autumn of 2013 - and no other time"). The nature scenes also offer a sharp alternative to the unnatural but not unpleasantly angular and clean human-crafted environments of Shiodome and Shinjuku Station.

And oh yes, the suits. They are not, as the Huffington Post has it, "classy." They are off-the-rack from low-cost mass formal wear retailer Yofuku no Aoyama (more irony here) which features the group in its ads. This is sarariman uncool and conformist ideology, stretched to the point where they become their opposites.

There is a sincere, unquiet core to the work...but with all the style and ambiguity, the conclusion is left up to viewer to draw. For whom is this a "Last Dance" -- the country, the iron triangle of Big Business-Bureacracy-Politicians, humanity? The identification of a last dance dovetails with the rhetoric of those portraying Abenomics being a "last chance" for economic and socio-political revival (just search "Japan" "last" "chance" to see what I mean). As with World Order's last work -- the Olympics-inspired paen to the TMD "Welcome to Tokyo" -- the above video is best viewed in Full Screen mode. Later - From the standpoint of a business model, World Order is in a class by itself. Not only only does the group produce highly political work -- it gets corporations to pay for it. Aoyama has funded their work; so has Sumitomo Corporation. Asiana Airlines probably asked for a gawky and sweet "All of Asia is One" message in the video it bankrolled. What Asiana Airlines got was "Permanent Revolution" -- with its extraordinary postscript questioning the role of the United States in East Asian affairs (with the secret message written in English).

What To Call The New Order

aI was asked a few months back what we should be calling the Japanese political order in the aftermath of the July House of Councillors election, whether it is indeed the return of the "1.5 Party System" of old. The phrase "1.5 Party System" is a demeaning* and easily apprehended international version of what was domestically called "the 1955 System," after the year the two factions of the Socialists on the left and the Liberal Party and the Japan Democratic Party on the right merged to form two large left/right divide parties, with the right dominant due to the left's division into Socialist and Communist camps. I responded that a better term for the current situation would be a 1.0 Party System. Under the 1955 system, the Socialists could tie up Diet business in a serious way and had to be paid off to an extent the term "1.5 Party System" leaves unclear. "1.5 Party System" indeed undersells the political threat that the Socialists posed (which the LDP neutralized in a whole host of shoddy ways, including absurd levels of disproportion in between rural and urban voting districts). However, the "0.5" in the "1.5" does give the Socialists at least some heft -- which they had. After last year's House of Representatives election and the July election the rump opposition parties in the Diet are little more than confused noise machines without any power to foment change. Hence my suggestion of a "1.0 System" moniker.The image of an utterly powerless opposition (the 0 in the 1.0 expression) is obviously an exaggeration. The general concept is not, however, entirely without merit. Leadership of Japan's small but dogged anti-nuclear power and anti-secrecy bill forces, the current most prominent movements challenging the government's attempts to sweep problems under the rug and move on, comes almost entirely from outside the Diet.I have been and will continue using the 1.0 System expression, having possibly coined it. However, one sees in the news media the indigenous expression ikkyo tajaku (???? - "one strong, many weak"), an expansion of the standard expression ikkyo meaning "dominant." I have seen the four character compound used on NHK and I think TBS network broadcasts. Here is a letter to editor of The Asahi Shimbun that uses the phrase, though the first character is replaced by the Arabic numeral 1.When written in kanji the expression ikkyo tajaku is both visually arresting and easily understood. However, what is/would be the elegant and succint English translation? ------------------------* Speaking of demeaning, why did the author insert a denigration of Japanese tech praxis in this article on South Korean reverse engineering of U.S. military technology?