The Best Australian Humorous Writing (11 page)

Where exactly am I? It's not easy to answer. This is a place called Toyota Megaweb, situated on Odaiba, an island reclaimed from Tokyo Bay in the heady bubble days of 1988. Odaiba means “cannon emplacements”, as this was the fort from which Japan intended to defend itself against Admiral Perry 150 years ago. But the past has closed around us from behind. Odaiba is a futuristic mini-city, and it has the white elephant's obligatory assemblage of monorail, artificial beach and ambitious, forward-looking architecture. Unlike anywhere else in Tokyo, Odaiba has an abundance of empty lots.

The Toyota Megaweb, which I circle in my radio-sensor-controlled “E-com ride car”, is a place of paralysing ambiguity. It is certainly a tourist sight: the place is as shutterbug-packed as the temples of Kyoto. As well as the E-com ride, it has the Imax, with seats that convulse in violent Parkinsonian shudders, the simulators, the F1 display and, outside, the ferris wheel. Is it a theme park? There are giant video screens, cafés and a racetrack for children to pedal electric vehicles, but it might also be a science-and-technology museum: the Megaweb contains an interactive educational display on hybrid vehicles and a “Universal Design Showcase” of household items (slogan: “Universal Design: made to make you happy!”). A wall is implanted with every Toyota gearstick and dashboard ever made, each with an explanation of why its design seemed a good idea at the time. And, lest we think this is just about cars, the Universal Design Showcase has furniture, pens, crockery and a model city. Perhaps the Megaweb is a museum after all. It does have a “History Garage” of vintage cars. Incongruously—though I'm not sure if there is any congruity left to mess with—there is also an exhibition of photographs and drawings about John Lennon.

But let's cut to the chase. The hybrid vehicles are for sale. The test-driving track is for prospective Toyota buyers. The Imax and simulators feature great moments in Toyota-racing history. The History Garage is filled only with Toyotas. I can't quite work out the
John Lennon connection, as I thought he was a Rolls fan. But at the centre of the Megaweb beats a very familiar and functional heart: this is a car showroom. Many of the Japanese tourists are ordinary people buying cars. All the free entertainment—everything that has brought me here—is garnish. I am sightseeing in a car yard.

Across town, in the established shopping precinct of Ginza, is the Sony Building. Like the Megaweb, the Sony Building is featured in all of my tourist guidebooks, and it is also filled with tourists who are consumers and consumers who are tourists. The space-age interior is modelled conceptually on the New York Guggenheim, a single path spiralling through the exhibits. As at the Toyota Mega-web, there are interactive displays: you can make a film of a toy town; you can play games on next year's computers. The information desk is unmanned, instead advertising Sony technology by asking you to manipulate a touch-sensitive electronic card and view your hand on a TV monitor.

It strikes me that all high-tech consumer shops could be interactive science museums or computer-game arcades if they wanted to, but Sony has brought this ambiguity front-and-centre. When I sit down before the latest Bravia flat-screen television, which transforms the water of Japanese TV into the wine of compelling viewing, what have I become? Am I a tourist checking out the newest Japanese miracle, or am I a convert to a brand? No salesperson approaches to gauge my interest. They are happy for me to remain uncertain as to what, precisely, I am.

Things get weird when I climb to the twenty-fifth floor of the Shinjuku L Building, across the road from the Park Hyatt, where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson loved each other unrequitedly in Sofia Coppola's 2003 film
Lost in Translation
. Here at the Toto Super Space, I am taking a tour of a toilet showroom. Again, “Universal Design” is the proud boast, “applied to all plumbing environments”. Toilet-roll holders enable “one-hand, one-touch” usage. Toilets have backrests and remote-control adjustable seat
heights. Taps are automatic (in Japan, I don't think I ever turn a tap handle). And, of course, there is the famous Washlet, a Toto trademark that caused a “WC revolution” in 1980 (advertising jingle: “Our bottoms want washing as well”). The Washlet is the toilet that makes a watery sound when you sit on the seat, for ladies' modesty, and doubles as a bidet. There is not much to buy here, apart from toilets, taps and bathtubs, but I can get a souvenir ashtray shaped as a toilet bowl, complete with cistern. I take a very informative free booklet about the historical evolution of Toto's ecological virtues, customer-friendliness and usefulness to society at large, and enjoy the view from 25 storeys.

In Japan, there is every blend and recombination of what is cultural and what is corporate. The Tokyo beer museum is owned by the beer company. The tobacco museum is owned by the tobacco company. There is the corporate showroom as curio (Toto Super Space), and the corporate showroom as funhouse (Toyota Megaweb, Sony Building). There is the company headquarters self-advertising as a theme park (the NHK television and Ghibli animation studios). There are shops which blur their identity with historical exhibits (the Pentax shop has old cameras in glass cases, and the Leica shop has a photo gallery, old cameras and even, in its repairs section, a case of cameras destroyed in disaster or war—irreparable!). The Pen Pilot showroom, Pen Station, displays the evolution of fountain pens through the years. Art galleries are either name-branded (the Bridgestone Gallery is one of Japan's foremost) or they form a floor of existing shops (the cosmetics house Shiseido has one floor dedicated to art exhibitions). The media conglomerate Axis has set up a corporate/cultural centre in which it is impossible to distinguish the exhibit from the retail. In Shibuya, an Audi building is being fitted out, promising customers a place “to come in and experience our brand”. Not buy a car, but experience the brand.

Sometimes it is the building itself that makes it into the Lonely Planet or the Frommer's. Prada, Comme des Garçons and Louis
Vuitton, among many others, have commissioned structures which attract architecture students; tourists flock to the bubbled, diamondpanelled Prada building in Aoyama. As advertising, it is cost-free.

But what does it all mean, and why is this intermarriage of the corporate and the cultural so arresting? I find myself pressed by the same question that has been pressing for the half-century of the Japanese economic miracle. Am I seeing a harbinger of the next century or a new permutation of the past one? Which of this will travel: which is just weird Japanese stuff, and which of it is our future? And why does it all make me so uneasy?

When I was young, no school trip or holiday with friends through the Hunter region, north of Sydney, was complete without a visit to the Oak Factory. Oak milk was then a regional phenomenon: you didn't get it a hundred miles south. Being regional, it was exotic. At the factory, we took the tour. Not quite Willie Wonka, but pretty good: a factory that turned the disgusting stuff that squirted out of cows into cold chocolate milk. After the tour, when we were taken into the Oak shop, we discovered that Oak milk tasted fresher, better, sweeter than ordinary milk. No milkshake could ever match (nor has it ever matched) those bought at the Oak Factory milk bar. Now that the Oak Factory is a wing of Dairy Farmers and Hungry Jack's, Oak milk is everywhere and it doesn't taste like anything.

All this is to say that the commingling of factory, shopfront and advertising is neither new nor oddly Japanese. What are our beautiful wineries but Oak Factories for grown-ups? The invasions and deceptions of advertising were much more blatant in the industry's early years—the medicinal qualities of Coca-Cola, or the way Don Bradman turned himself into a human billboard for his endorsements—than they are now. Like fast-adapting bacteria, corporations are sneakier and more potent. The sandwich-board
guy has turned himself into the guy paid to drive a Nando's Chicken car around town. Advertising has colonised names—remember Garry Hocking, the Geelong footballer rechristened, for a handsome commission, Whiskas?—and the 3 corporation can patent a number. Even time itself can be sold off to an advertiser. In an eerie life-imitating-art moment, an American football team started its first match this season at 7.11 pm, the publicity an ample payoff for the cheque written by its sponsor, 7-Eleven. It made me think of David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel
Infinite Jest
, set in, respectively, The Year of Glad, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, The Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and The Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar. A decade ago, Wallace thought he was joking.

Australian corporations have for years been colonising tourism and leisure spaces, from AMP's purchase of naming rights over the highest observation tower in Sydney to Telstra's brand-takeover of the Olympic Stadium, nee Stadium Australia. Art galleries, opera companies and museums are used to singing for their supper. The money for blockbuster exhibitions has to come from somewhere, and for every quid there is the pro quo of naming-rights sponsorship. Culture morphs into retail: the museum shop is now a necessary little earner, and it's not simply for museum and gallery visitors but for locals wanting to drop in for a funky or arty gift.

So much for the shop attached to the museum. What of the museum attached to the shop?

Our companies have tended to be more modest than Japan's. They keep their art collections securely in the boardroom, for the edification of staff and important clients. No Australian corporation worth its salt
doesn't
produce a handsome coffee-table book on the company's history, but these are produced to enhance the company's prestige among insiders and clients. Seldom are these vanity items projected to the public, and seldom does the public show any interest. If Channel Nine turned its studio into an interactive theme park, like Tokyo's NHK network, would anyone come?

Although Australian companies will try to get their names on sporting gear, zoos and theatres, the sponsor is still understood as parasitical on the cultural exhibit. It's not like Japan, where a Toshiba rugby team, playing in the top division, was traditionally made up of Toshiba employees. (Or it hasn't been like that, in Australia, since our cricketers earned enough not to have to work as salesmen for Benson & Hedges when they weren't on the field.) If we were like Japan, all those Friday-lunchtime office soccer teams would be the A-League.

The seamless knit of corporation and culture plays up to our preconceived ideas of the Japanese as a nation of salarymen, company drones.
Lost in Translation
could scarcely squeeze in character and story amid the product placement. I don't know if Suntory paid the real Bill Murray to go to Tokyo and advertise its whiskey, but the fictional beverage company which paid Murray's fictional character is actually a real company that sells real whiskey. Coppola has said that this is just the point: it's impossible to depict Japan realistically without stuffing it with product names.

Let's follow our intuition, then, that in Japan, culture and corporation, leisure time and sponsored time, privacy and advertising, have undergone a complete merger. Let's also assume that this is not a Japanese invention but rather a typical example of the Japanese way of sampling, absorbing and naturalising what it has learnt from the West. (This explanation, by the way, carries a particular conviction for me: I am in Japan for a symposium on jury systems; Japan is adopting a jury system for its criminal courts in 2009; my attendance stems from the thorough-going Japanese effort to study and cherry-pick the best features from every other jury system around the globe.)

Let's also say, out of an instinct for the way our society is headed, that the merger of corporate and cultural is so profitable and productive that it cannot help but spread around the world. And let's ask, is there anything wrong with that? Are our feelings of
unease going to be outmoded, slipping into Australia's memory like communism and religious sectarianism?

My reflex is to say, with the automatism of anyone born before 1970, that of course it matters. The Not-For-Sale sign on our culture, our families, our personalities, our time, must stay up. But the argument needs constant restatement and rethinking. Does it
really
matter if the National Gallery becomes the Telstra Gallery or if BHP's collection becomes Melbourne's most-visited Australian-art gallery? Does it
really
matter if my infant children can't say “3” on its own, but instead say “3 mobile”?

I feel vigorously that it does matter, yet I also feel myself resembling Chip in Jonathan Franzen's
The Corrections
, who teaches college students how to critique their popular culture but is floored by the student who retorts, “Nobody can ever quite say what's wrong exactly. But they all know it's evil. They all know ‘corporate' is a dirty word. And if somebody's having fun or getting rich—disgusting!” This precipitates a crisis in the liberal-arts teacher: