The Positive Side of the Hatoyama Shirt
By Dyske May 28th, 2010
The Hatoyama shirt
Is it hideous? Maybe. I really don’t care much about fashion, but given his track record of bad shirts, it probably is. To me, it’s so far out that it goes beyond “bad”; it turns into a political statement about personal taste.
What is interesting to me isn’t how bad the shirt is, but the fact that someone who would wear this could actually become a prime minister in Japan, the land known for, and often criticized for, conformity. How could this be? Did he just let it loose after he became the prime minister, or has he always been this way?
In the country where “the nail that sticks out is hammered down”, it’s hard to imagine why this particular nail was not hammered down. Does this reflect a fundamental shift in how personal expression is accepted in Japan?
You can buy this shirt from shirtsmyway.com. If it were cheaper, I would consider buying it. It would be so much fun to walk around wearing it in New York.
I’ve been trying to figure out who the original designer was. (The one on ShirtsMyWay.com is a replica.) Oddly, nobody seems to know the answer. Some people are speculating that it was by G. Inglese, an Italian company. But the owner of the company denied it.
S. Onosson says:
May 28th, 2010 at 11:43 amI would wear this! But, I wouldn’t pay $500…
snen says:
June 2nd, 2010 at 11:32 pmI think it is commes des garcon, or however you spell it.
M. Seago says:
June 13th, 2010 at 10:15 pmI believe it is Rubix Cube inspired.
biquiba says:
June 17th, 2010 at 9:35 pmI think that it is only about personal expression, not about fashion. For example, the Brazil is a hot place, but my specific region ia a semi-arid one. It means few rains and a really dry air(nothing like Rio). But here, no matter how hot is, I can see the death metal fans going around, always in black. I have sure that they are melting, but they feel the need to express themselves.
So I strongly think that Hatoyama is trying to mean: “Hey I am not like all, and I do not need to be like all, I go on my own way”
biquiba says:
June 17th, 2010 at 11:10 pm愛車★ﾄﾞﾝﾁｬﾗbＢ
趣味悪ぃ?
派手派手しい?
ほかっとけ
我が道をいくんだ <— I wrote "… go on my own way" because when I were posting the previous comment, I remembered about my Japanese friend, who said these words. She was talking about her car, wich was tunned to be girly.
Later, after I commented positively about her car…she said that Japanese(her friends) do not like her car. So I understood that she was trying to mean "I go on my way, I have my own style, I do not need to be like others"
biquiba says:
June 17th, 2010 at 11:24 pm“Does this reflect a fundamental shift in how personal expression is accepted in Japan?”
awww guy, it is happening since a long time ago. I have many friends really interested in Japanese pop culture. And they show me this “J-stuff”. I can to see and I even read that they want to be different. Like, the “odd fashion style/ strange wardrobe” of many Japanese pop stars, they are purposely different, despite they are clearly very influenced by American pop culture.
Almost all my Japanese friends take many of those particular type of picture, wich they tag along with their friends, take many photos showing cute expressions and doing the hippie signal of “peace and love”. Later they edit that pictures, placing many colors and cute drawings on it. It could be much girly, but there…even the boys do it.
I have to spen hours trying to explain how they want to be unique.
Frank Luo says:
July 13th, 2010 at 1:45 pmI also find it interesting that a person with such tastes can become prime minister of Japan. However, I have a theory, and it relates to the nature of goveernment as a whole: that people mostly don’t give a crap what their poltiicians do as long as they are rich and happy. They can violate all kinds of social taboos, do things that are contrary to the principles on which the nation is founded, violate every tenet of good taste, good faith, even morality, but if the people are generally rich and happy, they won’t go through the effort to get rid of him.
Inversely, when the people feel poor or deprived, they are likely to rise up against whoever happens to be in power at the time, regardless of the origins of their miseries.
Hatoyama is the prime minister only because the Japanese people got so sick of the Japanese economy heading not just horizontally but downwards, not just not growing but suffering from deflation. After more than a decade of financial suffering, where each graduating class of college graduates has faced worse employment prospects and rewards, people are finally angry enough at the LDP to kick them out, and the only viable replacement was Hatoyama’s party. Right place, right time.
Clinton slept around a LOT during his time as leader of a nation founded by Puritans but people reelected him and did not impeach him. Al Gore would have won if only 1) he had shown a little more humility or passion, and/or 2) Jeb did not cheat for his brother by messing with the ballots, and/or 3) the Supreme Court that Reagan packed with conservatives did not rule against Gore. Bush himself was a cokehead and a draft dodger who was AWOL even from his National Guard post on top of pulling strings to get out of going to Vietnam, stole the election, lied to start the Iraq War, and then his administration committed treason by outing a CIA operative, Yet as long as they managed to keep interest rates low and so keep the pedal to the floor on the economy, creating the largest bubble since the one tht led up to the Great Depression, people were happy enough to let them keep doing their thing. Mccain won many more states than Obama, and if the bubble hadn’t burst before Bush left office, most likely would have won despite all the evil things Bush’s camp perpetrated against him during the 1999 primaries.
It comes down to simple self interest. Prosperity trumps good taste, aesthetics, ethics, social norms, even legality and morality for most of the human race. If the Japanese thought that a guy with an ugly-ass shirt can make them more prosperous than their parents’ generation had been, they wouldn’t think twice about voting for him. They ahd simply lost faith in the LDP’s ability to deliver that. When the Bush administration drove the economy off the cliff, people stopped ignoring the gop’s ineptitude and criminal behavior in other aspects of life, that they were happily able to tolerate during years of double digit economic growth and near zero inflation, all built on Pollyanna Creep lies, going into hock to China, and destroying American industry by outsourcing manufacturing and virtually all other non-service industries.
It’s just human nature.
Deanna says:
August 25th, 2010 at 8:00 pmMaybe he’s just being retro, feminist and intercultural all at the same time. I think I had a shirt like this in 7th grade, in the US. Very sensitive of him, and very hip of you to notice (fun post)
Moet Chandon says:
September 5th, 2010 at 3:13 pmI applaud him for not being a bland conformist like every other politician out there. I love the colors, it’s a great shirt that confounds expectations and rewrites the rules.
Sue says:
March 16th, 2013 at 6:57 amIt’s a Gordon Gartrelle.