Sauce

JAPANESE CULTURE SCHLOCK

A BATHING APE

Never heard of A Bathing Ape? To shame!

A Bathing Ape is a label – no, not a subversive hip-hop record label or the moniker of a new rapper, but the diminutive underground clothing line often referred to as just plain “Bape”. It’s over a decade old, Japanese in origin, and based around their retail outlet in the hip shopping-mecca that is Harajuku. It’s not the easiest place to find. It’s suitably underground, and bears no shop signage other than “Nowhere Ltd.”

Indeed.

Kick-started in 1993 by Tomoaki Nagao (now better known as Nigo), Bape focuses on cool urban street wear, skater-style clothes, and self-gratuitously fashioned Bape camouflage wear – all emblazoned with a Planet of the Apes style logo, which was an intentional reference point by the label’s owner. It’s the ultimate badge-of-honor for tag-toting Japanese hipsters. Bape clothing is also exceedingly expensive, and tends to be as rare as hen’s teeth – people have been known to queue for hours outside their shop in Harajuku, in the hope of acquiring a limited edition t-shirt, often costing well over $100. There’s also a limitation on how much you can buy. Yet, in spite of some hugely forbidding price tags and quota shopping, Bape has spread and multiplied, much like the ape civilization in the original series of movies and spin-off TV series in the 1960s and ‘70s.

One reason? It’s perceived as just so darned cool.

Babe clothing has been flaunted by the Beastie Boys and James Lavelle (of Mo’Wax fame), and Time Asia dubbed Nigo “Japan’s king of cool,” in a feature story penned back in 2004. Nigo moonlights as a co-owner and chief designer for Pharrell Williams’ Billionaire Boys Club line, which shares premises (upstairs) with Bape in Harajuku, and two years ago Nigo joined Williams in opening the baptismal Bape store in New York. There are now Bape hair salons, cafes, galleries and boutiques in Japan, Hong Kong, London and Taiwan.

So much for underground.
MADMAN GOES BOATING
TALES FROM EARTHSEA

There’s a huge history behind this debut from Hayao Miyazaki’s son, Goro – he had never touched animation before this movie, and his pioneering parent was very publicly opposed to his involvement in making it.

With his debut feature, the son has followed on the coattails of the dad’s recent inclination to look outside Japan for literary inspiration. Back in 2004, Hayao tweaked Diana Wynne Jones’ novel Howl’s Moving Castle, and Goro, in turn, has opted to adapt a book by prolific American fantasy scribe Ursula K. Le Guin.

If you’re at all familiar with the Earthsea tomes, the story here concerns the character Ged in his later years as a wandering wizard. There’s also a schizophrenic boy named Arren (voiced by Junichi Okada, from the pop group V6), a scarred farm-girl called Therru (newcomer Aoi Teshima), the androgynous villain Cobb (a sinister performance by Yuko Tanaka), and the typical tools of the Western fantasy genre such as a magical sword, latent powers, soul-searching, grappling with (inner) demons, and redemption.

The problems for Goro are the comparisons with dad, in particular Hayao’s very distinctive visual and philosophical panache. On an altruistic level, Miyazaki senior, like Shakespeare, also understands that any good yarn needs its comic intervention, yet in his son’s work the lack of humor hangs heavy. Still, away from comparisons with anime’s uncontested international contemporary success story, and examined in the softer hue of what it actually is – an outstanding debut, and a rousing animation romp in its own right – Tales from Earthsea augurs well in terms of setting sail toward Goro’s very own signature style, Miyazaki moniker or not.