When I was ten, the rumor around the playground was that Japanese kids were already playing something like Super Mario Brothers 10. And when I got my first portable CD player, they were sporting microscopic minidiscs. Japan seemed to always be one step ahead of the world: they invented the Walkman, had widescreen televisions in the late 90s, and all wore dark denim before mainstream brands even sold it in America. Sixteen year-old girls alone brandished enough Louis Vuitton to buy your entire family twice over. By the late 90s, you could set your clock to the exact, mechanical Japanese adoption rhythms of new styles - capri pants in Tokyo 1998 meant capri pants everywhere else in 1999. Well, then of course they all have some sort of souped-up, awe-inspiring mp3 players, right? Nope. Like some kind of karmic intervention, Japan is suddenly two-steps behind.

Sure some people in Japan have iPods and blogs and like listening to Franz Ferdinand and whatever else the social pressure of cultural elitists in the West demands, but unlike ten years ago when mainstream Japanese kid's clothing was only one heartbeat away from European and American trendsetters, the cult of hipsterism is no longer an essential part of middle class life. The feverous trend cycle of the past is over: The average Japanese kid has traded $500 Comme des Gar�ons patched plaid pants for a $9 skull cap and oversized basketball jersey. Popular musicians are no longer mimicking My Bloody Valentine or Aztec Camera, but Avril Lavigne and Linkin Park. Without even an army of Napster-bred college kids bent on trading music, record sales are down for the fifth year in a row. Indie bands that sold tens of thousands of records five years ago are now lucky push a thousand. Major label artists can no longer afford to make music videos with real film. Niche record stores are shutting down. New fashion boutiques open and close in the span of months. Magazines are so strapped for cash that they are selling editorial space in place of advertising. Everything is pointing towards cultural meltdown. In the words of Wayne Berkowitz from the formerly Japan-centric global shopping website superfuture.com, "Someone just asked me today what is especially great in Tokyo at the moment, and I really didn't have an answer."

So, who threw the wrench in the Japanese consumer juggernaut? How did a country at the cutting edge of world culture suddenly get so boring? Certainly, thirteen years of recession have not helped. Japan somehow managed to keep spending like hopped-up moviestars in the past decade, but an extremely bleak outlook for the future has finally caught up with the pocketbooks of the nation's young. In the late 80s, the country whet its taste for the best of the best when it went on a wild speculation-fueled economic ride and subsequent shopping spree, gobbling up European designer brands previously set aside for only the ultrawealthy. When the Bubble burst in '91, they ignored economic woes and kept on spending as if recovery was just around the corner. Soon, however, they started having to scrimp on underwear to save for those $400 pre-WWII loom-stitched vintage Levi's. Then anyone over 22 stopped trying to look fashionable, and a well-funded, well-educated army of teenage consumers carried the torch and made it look like Japan was still hopping in case Paul Smith dropped into town. Now in 2004, kids reaching their peak shopping age could care less about the fashion or music avant-garde - they've got $200 monthly phone bills to pay, thank you. There's no money left over to buy the new Interpol.

Ironically, the West has just now come around to the view of the Japanese as creators and not just faithful, but ultimately imitative consumers. Japan is no longer just the place where washed up bands go to cash in (see This is Spinal Tap), but a creative mecca of its own right. An influx of Japanese musicians and clothing brands in the late 1990s started to school the West on their own game. In an age that valued sampling and reference over original creativity, musicians Cornelius, Pizzicato Five, and Buffalo Daughter's pastiche and bricolage-heavy music trumped even A-list American attempts in the same vein. Streetwear brands A Bathing Ape and Goodenough took the St�ssy model of jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers and expanded it into a limited-edition empire. Where did this sudden creative burst come from? All of these creators have one thing in common: they grew up in an extremely rich late 80s Japan with everything imaginable at their fingertips. They obsessively absorbed anorak pop, bossa nova, vintage jeans trivia, Dutch Modernist design, and any other weird, obscure international trend they could get their hands on, and when they started to make their own cultural output in the early 90s, they pulled from a rich palette of high quality sources. More than anywhere else in the world, creation in Japan is an act of homage to consumption. So, when the shopping funds stop, so goes the clay for the next round of cultural pottery.

The young "artists" coming to market at the moment grew up in less bountiful times, and their work ignores their big brothers' Continental obsessions for direct imitation of current American popular culture. Japanese hip hop in the past was based on the suburban De La Soul model, but now a cadre of deeply-tanned B-boys and soulful divas belt out rhymes without the slightest idea that their swagger resembles more blackface than Blacksheep. Even the best of Japan's new huge punk/ska movement makes one re-evaluate all the mean things said about Blink 182 over the years. These middle-class kids just blew the entire hope of exporting Japanese music to the West by choosing to mimic an extremely ethnocentric, inner-city music based on the core idea of "keeping it real" and a style of rock music so formulaic in its rebelliousness that no one in the West could possibly take it seriously. Just like anywhere, there are talented and creative musicians in the young generation, but they are inaudible under the din of cheesy drum-machine beats and sub-Cobain power chords. And the new exciting trend for Japan 2004? Hip-hop/punk hybrid rock bands with an MC and a turntablist!

The cynical observer, however, would argue that whether it be No Wave or No Doubt, the Japanese consumer processes music, fashion, art, and culture in the same cold, unemotional way. Daisuke Kawasaki, editor-in-chief of veteran indie music magazine Beikoku Ongaku, explains, "Cultural booms are just about shopping. Even with sophisticated trends, the material never makes an impression on the listener, and no matter what the trend, it never changes society." Leading credence to that idea is the fact that there is no expressed criticism in the Japanese media. Imagine a world where you cannot print that the new Madonna album is garbage or that James Murphy is a dickhead, and there you have Japan. Nothing is ranked with stars or thumbs-up for fear of upsetting advertisers or occasionally the mob-boss running the pop idol management company. There are no "Greatest 50 Japanese Albums of All Time!" lists in Japan, because no one is allowed to wax critically (and thus, comparatively) on the value of Japanese music. So, consumers don't either. To them, everything is great! Sometimes this works out well, sometimes not. (Geoff McFetridge? Great! Mr. Big? Great!)

Without any way to assign a value to culture, music and fashion becomes mere shopping fodder. But why has the quality of that fodder decreased? Culture in Japan has a semi-authoritarian structure (for example, everyone at clubs faces the DJ), and in the past, charismatic cultural leaders like Fujiwara Hiroshi and Cornelius appeared in magazines and suggested extremely sophisticated items for purchase. Young shoppers then went out and dutifully bought Barbara Kruger t-shirts or whatever else was dictated to them. Now, however, there are no new cultural icons with the same kind of cachet, and thus, no more enlightened dictatorship of culture. It's a democratic free-for-all, and as we all know, egalitarianism breeds terrible taste.

Coupled with this new freedom from social pressures to buy fancy things is a new independence from their parents' inferiority complex to the West. This surely started with the rise of Japan-centered egotism from the "Japan as #1" period of the late 80s/early 90s when the Japanese started to consider that they didn't need to judge themselves on an international standard. Beikoku Ongaku's Kawasaki notes how the Japanese used to work hard to eat spaghetti in the proper Italian way, but now even commercials show people slurping it up like noodles. In this kind of cultural relativism, maybe it's okay for the rapper Zeebra to thank "Jah" for his hip-hop talents in all seriousness.

Champions of Japan may bark: hey, Japan's cellphones are among the most advanced in the world! This may be true, but the choice to bring Japanese customers to the internet through their phones (where viewing content can be properly charged) instead of the personal computer will ultimately alienate the nation from the global community where most innovations are occurring. The Japanese missed the mp3 revolution because they weren't online. What else will they miss because their corporately mediated "web" is not the same Net as the rest of the world uses?

This is all a relative pessimism, admittedly. The fashion districts of Harajuku are still densely occupied with shoppers and boutiques, and the Japanese contribute greatly to the coffers of the world's fashion industry. On closer inspection though, there has been an increasing trend towards "superbrands" like Louis Vuitton and Gucci in the last decade as consumers want products that will not suddenly go out of style. The market for luxury goods has dropped more than one-third since 1996, but LV posts greater and greater profits. Meaning: a smaller market with more big players. What made Japan so fun in the late 80s/early 90s was their embrace of small, interesting and often revolutionary brands, bands, and filmmakers. Whether the economy was good or bad, there was a bright future ahead - Japan as number one - and kids spent with an invigoratingly reckless abandon. The whole idea of "trends" is that they change - they are adopted and eventually disposed. The main appeal of those previously-mentioned overpriced leather bags is that they will never go out of style. There may always be "fashion" in Japan, but the willingness to support interesting and risky cultural products took a kind of wastrel mentality that the current economy cannot sustain.

Some competitive types may gloat about Japan's dwindling economic prosperity, sophistication, technological-savvy, international-orientation, and good taste (serves you right for eating more hot dogs than us at Coney Island every Fourth of July!), but lest we forget that the Japanese are probably the sole reason that Soho exists and that brands like APC can stay in business. Tokyo is the lynchpin in the whole global hipster culture network because they actually buy all the stuff that we just like to talk about. If the Japanese economic support of interesting brands and bands goes away, no one is going to pick up their slack. If you think our dark, corporate age of Britney Spears is an impoverished cultural era, just wait until the Japanese stop spending.