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研究ノート

Speed Tribes and Making A New Japan
Theodore Bonnah

Japan as the global future
How and when exactly did Japan become synonymous with the American
vision of the future? As Littlewood adroitly pointed out in 1996, as late as
the 20th century Japan was often portrayed as backward or barbaric, andwas evoked or explored with traditional images such as geisha and samurai.
Into this panoply has crept futuristic images of bikers in dystopian cities,
computer geeks and man-machine hybrids. As the American fiction author andcreator of the cyberpunk genre William Gibson puts it, “Japan is the global
imagination's default setting for the future” (Observer 1). This is not limited tothe speculative sphere, however, for as Allison notes, Japan’s power over the‘global imagination’ translates into the imaginative products of its video gameand anime industries that dominate world markets and demonstrate theirability to live in the modern ‘flux’ world (34).
Historically, US images of Japan in particular have been marked byauthors whose works are popular not only for their own writing ability, butalso for their adroit tappings of the zeitgeist. Lafcadio Hearn explained andexported the ancient mystery of Japan to a young country back home; Ruth
Benedict was charged to unravel the traditions that shaped the morals andminds of an enigmatic and inscrutable enemy; writers such as Edward Halland others in the 1980s tried to understand the ‘hidden differences’ of theeconomic powerhouse that threatened to buy America itself. But since thecollapse of Japan’s Bubble economy, a new vision of Japan has emerged, one
in which Japan stands for the future, both good and bad. The urge to redefineJapan is evident in both economics and culture, from Hayashi’s branding of
1990s Japan a 'lost generation' economically, to the declaration of ‘Japan’s
New Generation’ on the cover of The Face in 1993, and to books like Naff
Clayton’s exploration of a supposed social revolution in Japan.
This wave of new Japan perceptions was most concretely articulated by

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Karl Taro Greenfeld in Speed Tribes, a 1995 work of creative non-fiction that
presented a selection of underworld archetypes as Japan’s ‘next generation’,and which has gained cult status for obliterating the samurai and geisha
tropes of yesteryear. Greenfeld’s new Japan remains uniquely itself while
taking a form of pastiche globalization, is affluent and decadent while in arecession, and epitomizes both the forward-thinking embrace of technology
as well as an example of when it goes too far. Greenfeld’s picture of a ‘new’
Japan is of a lost nation that no longer matters, with the implication that, if
Americans are not careful, Japan’s next generation will be America’s, too.
Fifteen years have passed since the publication of Speed Tribes,
accompanied by a fading from Japanese society of the actual social phenomenaof bosozoku bikers that are emblems of the book, as well as most of the othersub-cultures presented in it. As Greenfeld himself replied to documentary
filmmakers doing a film on Japanese bikers in 2004, “why would someone still
be interested in filming the bosozoku?” (Moorghen). Although the popularityof bosozoku bikers and bodikon erotic dancing have fallen by the wayside,
the subculture of otaku (maniac collectors), hikikomori (shut ins), andpampered Todaisei (Tokyo University graduates) Greenfeld introduced haveincreased in importance over the passage of time, and no other receptacle ofrepresentations of supposedly modern Japan has been able to supplant thosepresented in the pages of Speed Tribes. The book’s cultural footprint has
steadily widened, and both a documentary and movie based on Greenfield’s
work have been variously in production as late as 2004 and 2011, respectively.
The book has also jumped from the cultural into the educational realm, with
Speed Tribes included in a 2004 syllabus for Japanese government policy andpolitics course at MIT, an international studies course in 1997 at universityof Oregon, a 2009 anthropology course at MIT, and a global cultures course in
2006-2007 at the university of London South Bank. Speed Tribes was first soldin digital format in 2010, and despite being a 17 year old text has remainedin the top 100 ranked Amazon e-book sales on Japan of this writing (Amazon.
com), no small feat in a list including the latest Japanese language texts,
erotic fiction, martial arts books, and tourist guide books.
It is easy to dismiss Speed Tribes as a sensationalist, non-academic workon Japan and therefore unworthy of serious study. However, it is precisely
because the people and subcultures it presents have escaped scholarlySpeed Tribes and Making A New Japan93

treatment while becoming shorthand for modern Japan that they are worthyof a closer look. As Littlewood writes in ‘The Idea of Japan’, his exhaustive
exploration of western representations of Japan, the study of images ofculture and their manipulations is a shadow zone outside of academia thatnevertheless reflects and effects other spheres of interaction. Although many
books have come out on the darker sides of Japan since the 1990s, Speed
Tribes is different from contemporaries like Whiting’s 1999 Tokyo Underworld
and Tokyo Vice (Adelstein in 2009), both of which are case studies of one
aspect of the Japanese underworld. Only Speed Tribes articulates a view ofJapan’s ‘next generation’ and presents itself as the journalistic explorationof this phenomenon. Speed Tribes itself did not change the face of Japan,
but rather it was an adroit tapping of the zeitgeist, one that has changed
little in overall direction since its publication, and is therefore worthy of
scrutiny. Speed Tribes is a cult phenomenon, just as the otaku and other subcultures it chronicles, and its appeal is precisely the eschewal yet reliance on
the journalistic, financial, or scholarly lenses of Japan that have previously
dominated US Japan relations.
In this era of globalization and global media, the proliferation andpersistence of cultural and economic representations of a ‘lost’ or ‘new’ Japan
articulated by Greenfeld and promulgated in internet memes and odd news
stories can easily spill over into the political and business realms. In terms of
US-Japan relations, the gap between reality and image can ultimately impact
on consumer confidence between the 1st and 3rd largest economies in theworld, who are both allies in keeping Pacific security and stability, and who
have a long history of both positive and negative interaction. To not call into
question this phenomenon is folly, and as Iwata suggests, “There is a sensein which it is necessary to examine the mechanism of the so-called Japonism
and to criticize Occidental ideology” (Iwata 59). The best way to understandthe nature of this phenomenon is to study why Greenfeld’s need and timing tocreate came about, which techniques the author used to facilitate it, and who
benefits from and consumes this re-imagining of a ‘new' post-modern Japan.

A New Japan for a New Era
Of course, Greenfeld’s interpretation of underworld Japan for a Western

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audience was not the first work to redefine the idea of Japan. The 1990s markthe end of Japan’s economic dominance, and interpreters of Japan responded
to this phenomenon by presenting it in a new light. The acknowledgmentsin Speed Tribes are a list of the initial wave of interpretive precursors who
made their career writing about the dark side of Japan: Ian Buruma’s Behind
the Mask, Bornoff’s Pink Samurai, Fallow’s More Like Us, Kaplan & Dubro’s
Yakuza, Seidenticker’s Low City, High City, and Venturi’s Undergroundin Japan. Whereas Greenfeld’s inspirations each focused on one aspect ofJapanese society’s dark underbelly, only KTG offered a smorgasbord of such
images palatable to many Japanist consumers, brought to life through his
superior descriptive skills and gilded with a veneer of journalistic reliability.
Why did Greenfeld couch his iteration of Japan in terms of a new, more
personal creative journalism? As Said states,
within a text there has to take place a metamorphosis frompersonal to official statement; the record of Oriental residence andexperience by a European must shed, or at least minimize, its purely
autobiographical and indulgent descriptions in favor of descriptions
on which Orientalism in general and later Orientalists in particular
can draw, build, and base further scientific observation anddescription. (157)
KTG effectuates hia representations by presenting them as a journalistic
fiction. The change in paradigm in relations is reflected in the change of newgarde interpreters of Japan.
Speed Tribes is a book about a time, namely the immediate post-Bubble
Japan of the early 1990s, but it is equally a book about timing. Specifically,it lays bare the moment when Japan ceased to be dominated by imagesof its past, and where present Japan was overtaken by Japan-as-future.
Culturally, Greenfeld focuses on the obsessive and anti-social nature ofJapanese data-mining otaku long before the term gained the cultural currency
and representation of myriad subcultures it has now. In the financial arena,
Greenfeld’s jaded view of Japan’s Bubble and decadence presages the trendof seeing Japan’s credit crunch as an object lesson or warning about thedirection of American finances as presented by Drifte and White, and althoughSpeed Tribes and Making A New Japan

95

Ledbetter attempts to debunk this belief, the subprime loan problem belies theaccuracy. Although the exact manifestations may change, Speed Tribes heralds
the birth of Japan’s soft power, a hybrid of culture and finances. Greenfeld ismerely shuffling the deck of images representing Japan in response to the new
hand its economic stagnation and the rise of China have dealt it.
It is important to note that the Japanese do not see their country in the
1990s in as wholly bleak terms as America does. Japanese see the Bubble asa transient phenomenon, and refer to it a 'jidai', an era, or more literally, a'time that will change'. They have the understanding that a boom cannot be
expected to last indefinitely, nor will its effects. Likewise, in Japan the odd orantisocial bodicon and bosozoku subcultures Greenfeld chose to depict wereyouth phenomenon of the Bubble era whose time has come and gone. The
1990s instead mark Japan’s shift away from purely economic and industrial
power to cultural or ‘soft power’. In 1995, the first Japanese player in the
MBA was a success and source of national pride, opening the floodgates for
the Japanese invasion of US baseball by great players such as Ichiro andMatsui, and the start of the global pervasion of manga and anime. These are
all normal changes of the tides in a country that is its own world and center ofcultural production, unlike the increasingly de-centralized production of the
English speaking world.
Besides re-branding to suit the times, another constant of Western
representations of Japanese is their depiction as inscrutable, whether as
indomitable samurai, banzai-charging WWII soldiers, or faceless salarymen.
In the 1990s a new image of Japan was needed to explain to Americans theincomprehensible nation that could be on top of the world financially one
moment, and then lose it the next. As Chrysler CEO Lee Iacoca mused in
1990, "Japan today is wrapped in a Teflon kimono," and this frustration on thepart of Americans towards perceived perfection of Japanese caused by their
domination of the auto market, then slide into economic stagnation withouta credit crunch, called for a response. Digging into the dirty side of Japanesesociety à la Greenfeld or Whiting became de rigeur in the 90s when thecollapse of the Bubble economy revealed Japanese imperfection and humanity.
Just as Iwata notes that many Japanese felt estranged from thetraditional images of samurai and geisha that bound them, foreigners inJapan too could see little connection between these ancient stereotypes, the96

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robots of the Bubble and Japan Inc., and the bikers and social misfits aroundthem. The need was thus for a post-modern Japan that could de-construct
its old images and peer past its façade of a polite and orderly society. Enter
Greenfeld to give shape to these changes in both Japan’s political reality andrepresentation, ones that would appeal to a new foreign audience for imagesof Japan. The 21st century is seeing a change from consumers of research on
Japan as Japanologists interested in finances, history, traditional culture, andpolitics, to a new global generation of otaku and fetishists whose needs were
not met by academic or journalistic texts. This new form of Japanism needed
articulation and found it in Speed Tribes.
Finally. this trend to re-imagine Japan is not limited to the cultural
sphere, however. The title of Hayashi's economic analysis of the bursting ofJapan's bubble, 'The 1990s in Japan: A Lost Decade' exhibits rather suggestive
language for a rigorous work in the 'dismal science' and indicates the needto define Japan as lost, entering a new phase after its post-war economic
explosion. In both Speed Tribes' 'next generation' and Hayashi's analysis of the'lost generation', Japan is measured by the yardstick of the US. To compare
Japan with a nation that far outstrips it in the natural resources required
for economic supremacy, military might to back its political agendas, and thedemocratic tradition that supports its culture is obviously quite unbalanced.
Tèlingly, Hayashi finds Japan's increase in holidays for workers a major
factor in its economic slowdown. This is a reversal for the Japanese who weredamned in the 1980s as robots working to put Japan Inc. at the top, and who
now become criticized for tumbling down the economic ladder after taking
a well-deserved rest following their rebuilding of the country and its postwar ascension. Hayashi also admits robust investment in this period, as
opposed to the freezing and 'credit crunch' that followed the 1990 and 2008 US
meltdowns. With Japan no longer poised to buy America as it had feared, arecalibration in the image of Japan was thus needed. This unequal comparison
allows for America to exercise its supposed moral superiority, as well as a way
for the American consumer of Japanism to understand what is being relayed
to them.

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Manufacturing Authority in Speed Tribes
How did Greenfeld construct his new Japan? To achieve any change ofimage, the interpreter of Japan first has to define the place he is examining.
Lafcadio Hearn focused on the aesthetic and mysterious Japan while
Ruth Benedict chose to see the spiritual and social facets beyond wartime
propaganda. Greenfeld articulates his choice at the beginning of Speed
Tribes when he writes, “I decided my Japan would be life in the bars, at thenightclubs, and on the streets. I had never read about this in Time, Fortune,or the Wall Street Journal. I would hang out with these kids and write theirstories.” (xiv). This declaration shows that his seemingly objective presentation
is a quite subjective mimetic choice. But the main question is why he felt
the need to drag Japanese social skeletons out of the closet, to use obscuresubcultures and underworld figures to create the ‘New Japan’. For Greenfeld,
it is not the political news and business magazines which are no longer
relevant, it is this lost Japan itself which has ceased to be relevant and must
thus be depicted as negative.
However, to understand how Speed Tribes gained authority as thevision of modern ‘real’ Japan, it is first necessary to observe how the author
actively assembled the authorial persona that would lend credence to his
representations and insert him in the pantheon of American interpreters on
Japan. Greenfeld establishes this persona in the foreword, where he makes
himself the main character and recounts the experiences in Tokyo that became
the inspiration for Speed Tribes. He identifies himself as a half-Japanese, halfAmerican born in Kobe, raised in Los Angeles, and educated in New York, who
returns to Japan as a journalist in 1988 covering trade and diplomacy. Thisdefines the author as an insider to both Japanese and Americans, an objective
journalist, and finally, as knowledgeable about economics, the main field inwhich Japan had been judged up to that time. Greenfeld establishes the power
this dual identity gives him in the prologue when he writes, “Only idiots andforeigners didn’t get rich during the bubble,” an equity warrants salesman forJapan’s largest securities house once confided in me.” (x) He is at the sametime confidant to the Japanese, learning about Japan Inc. from its insideplayers, while confiding to American consumers about the ‘real’ Japan he sees.

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Through this duality Greenfeld resolves the fundamental criticism that theobserver changes his object merely by observing. Furthermore, Greenfeld also
tackles the opposite criticism that the native insider is too close too his subject
when he disingenuously remarks that his British girlfriend’s skin is the huethat “Japanese men were supposed to be very fond of.” (xi) This disavowal of
any connection to Japanese values reinforces both KTG’s supposed objectivity
and status as American and effectively makes his authority absolute with his
American audience.
Greenfeld has thus created the illusion that his persona is boththe outsider American journalist telling us the objective truth, while
simultaneously being the Japanese insider that can get to places no outsider
could go. However, Greenfeld tellingly omits his tenure as a Japan Exchange
Teaching Programme English teacher in Kanagawa in 1988-89, the lessglamorous route by which many foreigners come to Japan. Since JET
Programme tenure would mark Greenfeld as inimically foreign, it would breakthis illusion of authority, so is naturally not included.
Greenfeld further strengthens his persona in the acknowledgments,
stating that Tribes “would have been difficult to write had not other foreign
journalists and scholars written about Japan and shown the way”. Here heis foreign again, and heir to both the journalistic and scholarly Japanist
traditions. The names cited by Greenfeld show that the system of Orientalism
citations identified by Said is equally alive and well in Japanology. Greenfeld
notes Ian Buruma’s Behind the Mask as one of his inspirations, while Ruth
Benedict is not mentioned. This gap in the system of citations is bridged
by Buruma himself, who wrote the foreword to the latest edition of Ruth
Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. In fact, the cover for theHarper Perennial edition of Speed Tribes is a hyperlink of reviews andcitations, with blurbs from Pico Iyer, and William Gibson, further linking
Speed Tribes and Greenfeld to an interpetor of Japan system outside of
the purely scholarly world. This reinforcement of the system of citations ismerchandizing in its most populist form, appealing to the hip or in the know.
Although KTG may seem to repudiate the Japanist tradition by inventing a‘new’ Japan, since every author on Japan fashions their own image of Japanby focusing on certain elements, his choice in fact renews and reinforces it.
Although KTG’s authorial persona gives him a fiction of access to twoSpeed Tribes and Making A New Japan99

cultures, Speed Tribes has been criticized as not being entirely fact. Thisis a response to Greenfeld’s conscious use of ‘creative non-fiction’, a style ofwriting for which he has been anthologized in ‘best of’ collections. Greenfeld
has admitted to using ‘composites’ of people to create characters, and although
he includes journalistic facts and figures, his eye for detail, characterization,and narrative voice are those of the fiction writer. It is precisely this blendingof the real and the creative that lends his writing appeal, and Greenfeld
deftly sprinkles dry facts acts amid the narrative to lend his words power. In
defending his creative reporting techniques Greenfeld states,
For me, especially with my earlier books, they were fictionalized
nonfiction. I was taking a lot of liberties with characters, I openly said
that I was using composite characters. I was using fiction techniques
to tell what I believed were real stories. Basically, Speed Tribes camefrom me knowing a lot of people in Tokyo who would tell me thesestories about what they’d done, and I didn’t go out and check thesestories. I wrote them the way they were told to me because I thought
they were great stories. You can’t do that anymore. If you do, it’s seen
as a violation. (Wolley)
KTG’s authoritative fiction is thus a boon to the new consumers of Japaneseimages which don’t meet the strictures of academic or rigorous journalistic
inquiry, but which appeal to modern otaku devourers of fictional Japan.
Besides presenting himself as a journalist and scholar, KTG also presents
himself as a translator, another role expected to have some objectivity andauthority. Greenfeld’s proffered English translations of Japanese terms
exhibit various manipulations, while his status as a journalist validates them.
His first significant act of creative interpretation is redefining his title term,bosozoku, to suit his agenda. Once again this manipulation occurs in theforeword, where Greenfeld explains that “Speed Tribes’, a literal translationof bosozoku, is the term I have come to use in referring to all these new
subcultures” (2).
Greenfeld himself later admitted that his translation was not literal when
he defended it against criticism in a New York Times book review. Greenfeld
replied to the reviewer’s objection to his translation, “Would he have preferred

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the more literal ‘Out-of-Control Running Tribes’ as a title? If so, he is free
to use that title when he writes a book.” Greenfeld’s reply demonstrates hisneed to defend both his authorship and knowledge, and clearly shows thathe subverted literal translation to further his agenda. In truth Greenfeld’s
rendition is far from literal, but has an aesthetic appeal to it, proving that
KTG has a knack of stringing together information in a way relatable andenticing to American consumers of Japan images. The combination Speed
Tribes is a very post-modern rendering, echoing both the high-pace of Tokyo
life and the group facet of Japanese society, a type of contradiction in terms
that Littlewood identifies as common in representations of Japan. Greenfeld
has at the same time made a creative choice of English cognates, put the term
to a metonymous use to subsume Japan into its subcultures, and reinforced
the contradictory definition at the heart of Japanology.
Greenfeld follows this first major act of definition with minor manipulativetranslations throughout Speed Tribes. There are few ‘straight’ translationsin the book common to a guide on a foreign culture. Many of Greenfeld’sinterpretations are laden with value judgments and trivia; the definition of
Chinpira as little pricks is mere titillation, where the word punk would serve
equally well. Then there is the translation of Romanized English words fromwaseeigo (Japanized English) back to native English, such as turendo to trends
and Live houses (183) for music venues. These inverted translations let thereader see through Japanese eyes and amplifies the strangeness of Japan.
But more important than the translation of words is the translation
and relation of ideas. When Greenfeld describes Keiko as “looking like 100
yen, which is less than a dollar” (118), he is laying bare the discrepancy inAmerican and Japanese values, and the insignificance of the latter. This isreinforced in the description of Todai university as ichiban (149), and of theGeisha roots of hostessing, (231). KTG makes Japan intelligible by describing
prison rehabilitators as Cool Hand Luke and Stand and Deliver types, while
showing Japanese inability to grasp American icons like. Patu-rikku Shwazhee (135). Greenfeld's mishmash of Japanese and American icons andperspectives reveals Japanese hybridity as an impure otherness that seeks tocopy the US but does so imperfectly, a viewpoint Littlewood asserts as common
to the wests idea of Japan (1994).
The depiction of Japan as impure, mixed with foreignness it detests

Speed Tribes and Making A New Japan101

but cannot do without, runs throughout Speed Tribes. Even Japanese ultranationalists smoke Russian cigarettes and go surfing when not practicing
kendo or holding meetings to expound their ideology. The culmination isGreenfeld’s comparison of Japanese social phenomenon with Americancounterparts. This is a form of translation laden with value judgments.
This last type of linguistic translation manipulation is indicative of a larger
thematic translation or relation of Japan to America. By linking or putting
Japanese things in an American context, KTG makes them understood, but
not without adding a moral value. The comparison is largely to the detrimentof Japan.
Equally telling are the times when KTG doesn't compare Japan with the
US. Greenfeld asserts that Japanese prison will "knock the life out of any
exuberant youth" (81), but is US prison any different, especially considering
the convicted bike thief like Dai?
Another aspect reinforcing the concept of decadence is the unreliability ofcharacters in Speed Tribes. Just as Greenfeld’s translation choices serve his
purpose, so do the characters he chooses as titular in all 12 chapters of thebook. Every character spotlighted in a chapter somehow shirks responsibility
or opposes authority. Whereas traditional images of Japanese were
circumscribed by their loyalties to their country, family, and the emperor,
Greenfeld’s ‘new generation’ are notable for their resistance to one or manyof these loyalties Biker gang leader Tats ignores the order of his superior
and his mother; office worker, Keiko disobeys her parents’ wishes to run off
to Australia; and even uber-nationalist Ozaki turns down the overtures of an
uyoku oyabun, or fascist party chairman.
Besides these lexical and narrative manipulations, throughout Speed
Tribes KTG advances the theme of decadence to create his vision of the 'next'
Japan. His first act is to link money with sex, which has the effect of depicting
Japan as a decadent place, exactly the type that could hold the greatest wealthin the world and lose its way to materialism. Once again it is the foreword
where he introduces this concept, when he describes the bubble economy as“asset appreciation spreading like crabs in whorehouse (x).” He then launches
into an anecdote of his British hostess girlfriend, the embodiment of selling
sex for money to Japanese customers, who are in turn the rapacious Japanesebusinessmen buying up American real estate at the time. KTGs characters102

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are defined by this immorality throughout the novel; his first character Izumi
has enough money for three girlfriends, the porn stars also embody sex for
morey, and the hostess girls debate whether to do it. Those who refuse theassociation are pushed around by it, like Keiko, who employs her erotic capitalto trade power over men instead of sex, but is left strapped for cash. This
theme continues and gives Japan a decadent, immoral air. Tats’ lover Chiharu
also has “exaggerated femininity” which contrasts with “a lack of interest inanything that wasn’t of immediate benefit to her” (35). In Greenfeld’s 'new'
Japan, love and sex are commodities, and feminining is just a strategy for
selling them.
Next, KTG points to drugs as the glue holding together the worker bees ofJapan, the escape for its disenfranchised members, and the status symbol of
its clueless elite, and ultimately another explanation for both decadent Japan’s
rise and recent fall. The various scenes of drug use imply its inescapablepresence in this 'new' Japan, as does its pairing with foreign corruption.
Nineteen year old bike gangleader Tats goes from sniffing glue (24) to his
first shot of metamphetamine (26) at the Shonan Run. Choco Bob Bon smokesshabu (87) to escape the drudgery of Japan, Iranians work construction & selldrugs, while valium is legally available (103-104). Keiko does E for the firsttime with an Australian (139), foreign hostess Rachel wants drugs to make her
man happy (167), while Tokyo rich kids see it as status thing (170). The overall
message is of Japan as wide open for drugs (172), and ever the drug language
barrier necessitates gaijin (174) for the Yakuza. In reality, Japan is a humansociety, and drug use is an understandable evil. Although Greenfeld focuses on
drug use to a large extent, in reality illegal substance abuse has been a facetof the worker society of Japan for much of the 20th century. The protagonist of
Ningen Shikkaku by Osamu Dazai, a classic of modern Japanese literature,loosely based on the author himself, does drugs. For America mired in its War
on Drugs to criticize Japan’s could be seen as the height of hypocrisy.
Finally, the overall impression of Japanese society Greenfeld transmits
through his character’s voices is one of the opposite of the United States’
meritocracy and the grandiose ‘American Dream’ it offers, which Greenfeld
demonstrates through the various small ‘Japanese dreams’ of his protagonists.
Porn actor Choco Bon-Bon, whose dream consists entirely of obtaining a newly
hip in Japan Kharman Ghia (88), articulates this paucity of Japanese visionSpeed Tribes and Making A New Japan103

when he insists, “You have to think small”. His reasons for this desire are alitany of the mundane aspects of his life such an acquisition will liberate him
from: “No traffic. No trains. No crowds. No videos. No cum shots” (114). Bicycle
thief Dai accepts his petty dream: “We steal motorcycles. It was a future, arole, a niche in society” (71). Office worker Keiko dreams of an Australian
Statue of Liberty, as opposed to her image of the Japanese, a guy in a grey
suit with ‘Work Hard’ over his head (142). To Greenfeld’s protagonists, Japanis a rigged game, and one that only people with the right birth can win. This
society is as rigged as the socialist mechanisms of subsidizing underperforming
companies noted by Hayashi, further strengthening the gulf between Japanand the US yardstick by which it is measured.

Japan as a warning sign
Who then, are the intended consumers of the images of Japan presentedin Speed Tribes? Greenfeld gives us an indication in the final chapter, Snix:
The Otaku. Just as the author establishes his authority in the prologue byinserting himself as a character before introducing the 3rd and 1st person
narrative voices of individual Japanese protagonists, he mirrors his opening
act of narration in the final chapter by reintroducing his own voice. In thisfinal chapter Japanese peaple are now relegated to a mass of ‘they’ directlyin opposition to the ‘we’ of Greenfeld’s intended audience, a mass upon which
the author now renders judgment. Coming at the end of Greenfeld’s choiceof criminal and marginalized elements to represent Japan, this final chapter
sends a clear message: Speed Tribes’ hybrid Japan is corrupt, and so is theglobalization it embraces.
Globalized Japan is thus the antithesis of America, what America mustnever become. America, in return, is identified by the protagonist in thechapter ‘Homestay’ as the place to escape to, where freedom reigns and you
can get a glock. It is the best homestay place, and is contrasted with theworst, China, here making its appearance in Greenfeld’s prescient cosmology
as the yin to America’s yang. The warning is both a financial and moral
caution against an inscrutable and impure Japanese culture. The ‘rigged
game’ of Japanese society Greenfeld’s protagonists decry is as social as it issexual, and sexual as it is financial and moral. There can be no distinction.

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The disenfranchised bosozoku are in turn just as immoral as those landed
interests that prey on them. Japan is as morally lost as it is financially, andif Japan is the default for what the future will look like, Americans should
fear it. Levi-Strauss identifies loss of identity as the fearful aspect of culturalinteraction (1987), of becoming the same as the Other. This fear is precisely
what Greenfeld plays on in the final chapter of Speed Tribes.
However, when looked at without fear, the hybrid Japan that Greenfeld
warns of is the first truly globalized society in Asia. If that sounds strange,
consider this: after closing its doors, Japan had America batter them down,then after waging war with the outside world, America again came to its
doorstep. This engendered the passive Japan of geisha tropes and idyllic
temples identified by Littlewood as the successor to the Kamikaze andSamurai images of wartime propaganda (61). The active Japan of the Bubble
is the result of the accumulation of contacts and contracts and pipelines
Japan assembled during its rise as an economic superpower, the threat ofwhich recalled the suited samurai image to duty. For Greenfeld’s Japanis a hybrid, keeping its own identity while grafting on foreign influencesand elements, which necessitates the calling into service of its underworld
and fringe subcultures to represent the new hybrid entity it has become.
Japan is international while guarding its cultural core à la Levi-Strauss,
making it more inscrutable and scarier to Greenfeld’s audience. In this light,
it is no surprise that Speed Tribes made it onto the syllabus for a course
on globalization and global cultures at London South Bank University in
2006-7, an institution from an island country subject to many of the sameinternational pressures and relations as Japan itself.
Balancing out Greenfeld’s intended readers is another audience of Speed
Tribes that Greenfeld did not intend: the modern otaku themselves. Modern
otaku are no longer Japanese, nor only interested in computers or datacollection like those presented in the book. Speed Tribes is an admittedlyprescient book in its representation of the otaku and hikikomori (shut ins)
phenomena long before their popularization, but it is also extremely dated byits small mention of technology, anachronistic cellphones are big deals, andomission of Akihabara, otaku meccas. Just as the author could not foresee
the global explosion of otaku culture, he did not realize that foreign otaku
and Sinophiles are now major consumers of ideas of Japan in addition toSpeed Tribes and Making A New Japan105

the economics, politics, and ‘high’ cultural specialists on Japan, motivating
Greenfeld’s use of the bosozoku as alternatives to the diplomats andbusinessmen as images of a 'new' Japan.
The otaku of Allison’s global imagination marketplace form a wider
spectrum than Greenfeld’s bosozoku, encompassing law abiding folks andgroup-oriented cosplayers that are the antithesis of Greenfeld’s antisocial
hackers. The scant mention of anime or manga in Speed Tribes except asboring old Be-Bop High School manga instead mark 1990s Japan as the
crucible in which Japanese technologies of imagination would be formed
and perfected to satisfy the lost generation of consumers who would needthem to complete their lives. In this way, it is precisely otaku culture thathas profited from Speed Tribes’ revealing of Japanese sub-cultures and theirsubsequent popularity as internet memes and media tropes. The stories of
Speed Tribes coincide with the birth of the modern otaku culture, and foreignotaku can be seen as the post modern form of the Japanist, as opposed to thepost-Meiji restoration western representation addressed by Ikeda, wartime
anthropologists like Benedict, or the seekers of Japanese business secrets
such as Hall. Allison’s cultural essay also outlines interactive Japanese media,
which were in nascent form at this point, like the video games hacked by theotaku. The lost generation of Speed Tribes is thus the catalyst for Japan’s
development of these sales techniques and their technologies of imagination,and ultimately the rise of Japan’s ‘soft power’.
Finally, Speed Tribes also offers something for the traditional repositoryof Japanist thought, the university. Although the book’s penetration into
university curricula has not been large, it has been diverse. The very factthat MIT, SLC and USC have used it in courses as disparate as Japanesepolicy and politics, anthropology, and global culture shows the flexibility
the book has and its value in providing what academia lacks. It is useful forstarting debate as Rietveld shows, while Samuels’ inclusion of it for his ‘otaku’students (2011) shows its resonance with popular culture. The rise of China
as an economic and powerhouse makes it a political reality as well, one thatstepping out of the shadow of academia as Littlewood suggests would seem tobe an increasingly important development.

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Conclusions
The idea of Japan as future is, of course, simply a metaphor for explaining
how it has coped with the modern world of economic, political, technologicaland cultural flux by forming its own unique hybrid modernity. Although
America’s image of Japan has traditionally been formed between the lensesof finances, diplomacy, and culture as dictated by the era, each of these alone
fails to explain why this Japan can be held in both fear and attraction for theAmerican mind. The relation between America and Japan is one where thewhole picture is greater than the sum of its parts, and a hybrid or globalized
view is necessary to take these interactions into account and balance any
subjective reactions.
Claude Levi-Strauss posits that cultures grow and advance the most havemore interaction with other cultures (79-80). Japan has a culture that America
sees as worth interacting with, and translators of Japan such as Greenfeld
provide the medium of that translation. The recalibration of representative
images by these interpreters to suit the times is as natural a part of USJapan relations as of all international relations, but one that should not go
unquestioned. The images of Japan, though loosely based on real phenomena
in Japanese society, can easily become exaggerated representations of thewhole carrying an alarmist message that can distort perceptions. Perceiving
Japan clearly can let other countries see how it keeps the core of its identity
while incorporating others, and how it transitions in flux times such as the
economic cycle of boom and bust that seems to be de rigeur in the post-modern
world. This phenomenon should be studied in the case of other international
relations as globalization accelerates even further. However, if Americans
allow themselves to be blinded with fear of future and globalization, America’s
credit crisis and right wing agenda may pull it into a similar depressionthat pops the bubble of American exceptionalism as surely as the Japanesefinancial bubble was popped.

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Abstract
Since the collapse of Japan’s Bubble economy, portrayals of a ‘new’ Japan
have increasingly appeared in books and other media, and modern Japan
has even been called the ‘default setting for the global future’. This trend at
redefining the image of Japan is epitomized by Karl Taro Greenfeld’s 1995
novel Speed Tribes, which introduced a pantheon of underworld and subcultural images as representations of Japan’s ‘next generation’. Examining
the popularity of Speed Tribes offers a method for understanding the motives
and methods behind the recurrent phenomenon of cultural interpreters like
Greenfeld at crucial turning points in Sino-American relations.
Greenfeld’s powerful representations have not dissipated with time, buthave instead migrated from the cultural to the political, appearing in thesyllabus for an MIT political science and policy course in 2004, and undergoingrecent attempts to turn the book into a documentary and dramatic film. Japanremains the 3rd largest economy in the world and an important counterweightin Asia to the rise of China, thus an exploration of the author’s techniques ofdisseminating representations about Japan is in order.
I trace how Greenfeld creates an authoritative persona in Speed Tribes
to cement his authority, then uses journalistic, narrative and interpretive
manipulations to depict his ‘new Japan’ as a place of decadence that nolonger matters economically or politically. Next, I examine the author’s
message of warning to Americans against becoming a globalized hybrid likethe post-modern Japan he articulates. Finally, I examine the consumers ofthese images of a ‘new Japan’, and how they have extended from traditional
academic, economic, and political experts to popular otaku culture fetishists
and consumers of the products of imagination at the heart of Japan’s ‘soft’
power.