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Forty years ago, four Japanese writers and photographers came to town and invented Los Angeles. Or rather, they invented an image of Los Angeles they could distill, package, and sell \u2014 first to Japan, then to the rest of the world \u2014 with the debut issue of Popeye<\/em>, published July 1976. Described in its own subtitle as the \u201cMagazine for City Boys,\u201d Popeye<\/em> would go on to stake out and ultimately dominate its territory in the world of Japanese men\u2019s style print media, one of the most internationally visible branches of that country\u2019s still shockingly robust print media ecosystem.<\/p>\n
Popeye <\/em>celebrated its 40th anniversary this year with a special 831st issue that contained a complete reprint of the first, with its extensive report on the lifestyles of the young and Californian, including instructions on how to jog, surf, skateboard, and hang-glide; seven pages of nothing but sneakers; and, most in-depth of all, a 27-page feature on the campus of a distant school called the University of California, Los Angeles. \u201cIt was all totally new,\u201d the magazine\u2019s first editor Yoshihisa Kinameri recalled to the Los Angeles Times<\/em><\/a>. \u201cIn Japan at the time, students had maybe two kinds of sneakers, and they were cheap and not stylish at all. [\u2026] In Los Angeles, people looked happy and cheerful. It was magical; it was like heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n
The issue raised Japanese interest in UCLA to such a pitch that the bookstore in Ackerman Union, the subject of its own two-page spread, had to put up Japanese-language signage in order to handle the flow of tourists desperate for letterman jackets and gym shorts in blue and gold. This localized craze foreshadowed corporate Japan\u2019s buying spree across the United States in the late 1980s, which was to be fueled by the asset bubble that briefly enriched the Japanese beyond even their own wildest dreams. It also came as a colorful moment in the story of Japan\u2019s interest in American clothing, and specifically menswear, which W. David Marx tells in Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n