‘Hachinosu’ and ‘Atari’ : Autonomy and Passivity in Japanese Culture

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how jeans and leather shoes age over time.

In Japan, there’s a whole culture of giving names to tiny signs of wear and tear—like the “honeycombs” (hachinosu) and “whiskers” (hige) on jeans, or the “atari” (wear marks) on leather—and carefully observing and evaluating them.

I personally enjoy that game quite a bit; I’m the type who grins to myself looking at the way my jeans fade or the creases on my leather shoes.

But one day I started wondering:

Isn’t this, in a way, a pretty Japan-specific culture?

And isn’t it something that neither Japanese people nor people in the West are very aware of?

From that sense of discomfort, I started thinking about something a bit larger: how Japan “receives” culture, and how (or whether) it maintains any kind of “autonomy” within that process.

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Japan is very good at “breaking things down and rebuilding them”

If you look at Japanese history in broad strokes, Japan has always been taking things that came from outside, breaking them down into small pieces, recombining them, and turning them into its own culture.

From ancient to medieval timesJapan took in systems (like the ritsuryō codes and bureaucratic structures), writing (Chinese characters), religion (Buddhism), and artistic styles from the Chinese mainland and the Korean peninsula. These were then “Japan-ized”—developing kana syllabaries, combining native kami worship with Buddhism, and creating uniquely Japanese institutions and religious forms.
From the modern era onwardJapan imported modern law, military and police systems, education systems, Western clothing, and Western music from European countries (and later, from the U.S.). These were then adjusted to fit Japan’s political framework and social structure, and gradually settled in as “Japanese-style” systems and ways of life.

And today, the things we play with—like denim and leather aging, gardening, whisky, rock music—follow almost the same pattern.

They were originally born in America or Europe, and we:

Break them down into fine-grained elements
Verbalize where we see value
Reassemble them into a “Japanese version”

We just keep repeating this.

You could say that “taking culture apart into details and rebuilding it” is something like a Japanese specialty.

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And yet, we still don’t quite think of it as “our own culture”

This is where things get a bit tricky.

Japan is extremely good at dissecting and reconstructing foreign cultures,

but at the same time, it seems very bad at actually accepting the result as an original culture of its own.

Take denim, for example.

In the U.S., jeans started out as workwear, and fading was treated in a rough way—like, “they’ve worn in nicely,” and that’s about it.

In Japan, though, we’ve turned those same signs of wear into objects of evaluation, giving them detailed names like:

Whiskers (hige)
Honeycombs (hachinosu)
Atari (wear marks)

In a sense, this is a level of obsessiveness that goes beyond the original.

The same thing happens with leather shoes and leather jackets:

we talk about things like chashin (so-called “tea-core” leather) or the atari on the edge of the sole, and we attach value to these tiny details.

Developing the aesthetics to that level of fine segmentation feels like a very Japanese kind of transformation.

And yet, the way we see ourselves is often stuck at:

“How faithfully can we reproduce ‘authentic’ vintage?”
“How much are we honoring American workwear culture?”

We rarely go so far as to say:

“This is something Japan has taken apart and rebuilt. At this point, it’s Japanese culture.”

To me, that hesitancy is one of the reasons Japanese culture keeps looking “passive.”

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Cultural autonomy = whether we can put our own labels on things

This is the point I care about most.

If you boil it down, cultural autonomy is really about whether we can put labels on our own culture ourselves.

Japan is very strong when it comes to making “content” and in breaking things down and reconstructing them.

But when it comes to:

What we call that culture
What story we use to talk about it
What we declare to be “important”

—this whole “meaning-making” part is often left to others.

If we stick with denim and leather as an example, the pattern looks like this:

Japan breaks down jeans and leather and develops them with a kind of obsessive devotion
People overseas see this and label it as “Japanese denim” or “Japanese leather”
Japan hears that label and realizes: “Oh, so what we’ve been doing is called ‘Japanese denim’”

This “one lap behind” structure shows up in a lot of other fields as well.

Japanese fashion and whisky are only re-recognized as “Japanese culture” after they’ve been praised abroad
In manufacturing, Japan produces some of the highest quality in the world, but the meaning, story, and brand value are often controlled by European brands or American platforms

In other words, the content itself is already original enough,

but the label and the narrative are still handed over to the “home countries” of those cultures.

That, I feel, comes very close to what I mean by Japan’s “lack of cultural autonomy.”

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A brief detour: how this shows up clearly in the art world

I think this issue is especially easy to see in the realm of art.

In contemporary Japanese art, things like:

The basic formats of artworks
The language of criticism
The institutional framework for exhibitions (galleries, biennales, art fairs, etc.)

are almost all operated as an extension of Western modern and contemporary art frameworks.

Given how far globalization has gone, creating a completely separate “playing field” outside of that is realistically very difficult.

In that sense, the situation is partly irreversible.

But given that premise, what bothers me is this:

We’re conflating:

“Using the framework”

with

“Letting others completely decide what that framework means”

Using the formats of global markets and institutions is probably unavoidable now.

But within that, questions like:

What do we treat as our “primary experiences”?
What do we position as the “core problems”?
On what basis do we declare “this is important”?

—these are things we should, in principle, be able to decide ourselves.

In reality, though, it feels like:

“Being valued in Europe or the U.S.”
“Being easy to describe in Western critical language”

has become the unspoken correct answer.

As a result, not just the content of the works, but the very act of deciding what counts as value has become passive.

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Zooming back in: aging denim and leather as a microcosm

If we bring the discussion back to jeans and leather, the culture around aging might be a kind of miniature version of this dynamic.

What I find interesting is that this structure of “receiving a culture and then having someone else label it” seems to be embedded in denim fading and leather aging culture itself, in miniature:

Workwear culture originating in the U.S.
Japan breaks it down and reconstructs it as an aesthetic of “aging”
Yet Japanese self-awareness remains framed as “respecting the original” and “faithful reproduction”
In the end, it’s people overseas who label it “Japanese denim”

To me, this captures a very Japanese habit:

We reshape the substance of a culture ourselves,

but we hand over the right to name that culture to someone else.

That’s why, for me, looking at the honeycombs on jeans or the atari on leather isn’t just a matter of “hobby” or “fashion.”

It’s a small lens through which I can think about how Japanese culture takes in the culture of others—and how it fails to fully make it its own.

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Even so, I want to believe there’s room for autonomy within the framework

Taken as a whole, this might sound pessimistic:

We can’t get away from Western frameworks
We’re embedded in global systems
We can’t label things ourselves

But I don’t think that means we should just give up on everything.

To me, what really matters is this:

If we accept that we can’t entirely escape these frameworks,

then can we at least decide, from our own side,

what we will treat as the “core questions” within them?

The formats or markets can be imported—fine.

But I want us, at the very least, to decide for ourselves:

What we consider “primary data”
Which sensations, histories, and discomforts we put at the center
And what kinds of labels we place on things on top of that

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As a core piece of my own aesthetic sense

This problem of “breaking things down and reconstructing them” and “having autonomy over labels” is one of the core elements deep inside my own sense of aesthetics.

When I look at honeycombs on jeans or enjoy the creases and atari on leather shoes,

I don’t want it to end as just “gear geekery” or “nerdy preferences.”

I want to enjoy those things together with the question:

What are we breaking down?

How are we reconstructing it?

And whose words are we using to evaluate the result?

And if possible, even little by little, I’d like us to move from being:

“A country that imitates ‘the original’ really well”

to being:

“A country that breaks down and reconstructs the cultures of others,

and has the ability to label them in its own language.”

For me, aging denim and leather are a small entry point to that.

If you see honeycombs and atari that way,

the time you spend looking at them might start to feel just a little different.

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Standards and methods for really “owning” imported culture

Up to this point, I’ve been talking about how Japan constantly breaks down and reconstructs foreign cultures, yet rarely fully accepts them as “our own culture.”

So what would it actually look like to have accepted them?

Let me try to整理 this a bit more practically, in terms of standards and methods.

1. What does it mean to have “taken ownership”?

First, here are three minimum conditions that, to me, would mean we’re genuinely accepting an imported culture as part of our own:

We’ve written it into our own historyWe don’t stop at “This originated in America.”We can tell a story, in our own words, about how we broke it down and how we rebuilt it in Japan.
Our criteria of evaluation have shifted from “authenticity” to “our own lived reality”Instead of “How close is it to the original?”,we judge it by “Does this feel real and meaningful in our own bodies and everyday lives in Japan?”
We have our own labels and concepts for itNot just “the Japanese version of X,”but “X that emerged in this particular way, under these particular conditions, in Japan.”Labels aren’t just names—they signal who holds the power to define what something means.

Once these three are in place, imported culture stops being a permanent sidecar to the “original” and starts becoming something that’s genuinely living here.

2. Stepping off the “100% original or nothing” mindset

Because of our painfully earnest seriousness, Japanese people tend to slide into a kind of “100% originality or you don’t get to claim anything” mindset.

“If there was an original somewhere else, isn’t it rude to call what we do ‘original’?”
“If we didn’t create it 100% from nothing, isn’t it arrogant to call it ‘our culture’?”

And while we’re holding ourselves back like that, the reality is that we often have already transformed things in quite unique ways—yet we keep treating ourselves as if we’re “just copying.”

In reality, almost all culture is hybrid and a kind of spin-off.

So I think we should allow ourselves a kind of partial claim, like:

“The framework or technique came from somewhere else,

but the way we edited it and the way we play with it—that part is ours now.”

What really matters is that we map out, in words:

“Where does the imported part end,

and where does our own editing begin?”

If we don’t do that, it’s understandable that others might see it as cultural theft or simple appropriation.

3. Turning our editing into explicit labels

Japan’s specialty is “breaking things down” and “reassembling them.”

If that’s the case, then it’s the edited part that should come to the foreground as the subject.

Take denim again.

Workwear denim itself originated in the U.S.

But the culture of giving names like “whiskers,” “honeycombs,” and “atari” to fading patterns,

and making the aging process itself into an object of appreciation—that grew in Japan.

Our culture doesn’t lie in the raw material.

It lies in the way we play with it.

If we can clearly distinguish:

“Up to this point is respect for the original,

and from here on is our own editing,”

then we can upgrade ourselves from “mere imitators” to something closer to “conscious second creators.”

4. A practical checklist

To make this more workable, here’s a kind of checklist you can throw at yourself:

Can you explain, in your own words, what you imported from where, and how you edited it?
Are you re-evaluating things not by “How close is this to the original?”, but by “How well does this fit Japanese daily life and bodily experience?”
Are you at least trying out your own labels and names, instead of just hanging everything under the imported name?
Have you ever seriously thought about whether this culture could still matter, even if it never received any recognition from abroad?
Instead of backing off with “Well, it’s just imitation,” can you say—even a little—“This edited part is ours now”?

If you go through these questions one by one for the things and situations you care about,

it gradually becomes clearer where you’re leaving things up to others,

and where you actually want to live under your own labels.

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Using travel and language as tools for “relativizing” yourself

Everything I’ve written so far is hard to settle just sitting at a desk.

At some point, you really do have to physically leave your own environment,

or the outline of your own culture never comes into focus.

That’s where travel and language learning come in—for me, at least.

1. Travel as a mirror that reveals your own quirks

When people talk about travel, they often focus on “seeing the sights” or “enjoying the extraordinary.”

For me, those aren’t the main point.

What’s more important is walking through everyday spaces:

Supermarkets
Shoe shops, thrift stores
Cafés, bars, restaurants
Residential neighborhoods and station fronts

and noticing:

“This feeling I took for granted in Japan?

It doesn’t exist here at all.”

Even just looking at denim and leather in different countries, you can sense differences in:

How much people care about aging and patina
Where they draw the line between “charming wear” and “just dirt or damage”
What gets named and what gets lumped together

Once you feel those differences in your body, you realize that you are, in fact,

a “Japanese person who’s into hyper-segmentation and obsessed with labeling aging details”—not just in theory, but in your senses.

In that sense, travel is a way to use movement to relativize your own culture.

2. Having another language is like having a second camera

The other important thing, I think, is having at least one other language—even if you never become fluent.

This isn’t about “English is useful” or “It’s good for your career.”

What matters to me is that another language lets you relativize the very way your world is divided up.

For example, what gets lumped together in English as “Japanese culture” is, inside Japanese, sometimes divided into finer terms like bunka (culture), dentō (tradition), fūdo (climate/landscape), kuuki (the atmosphere of a situation), nori (vibe, mood).

Conversely, there are fields where English has clear distinctions that Japanese often blurs together.

The moment you notice that, you finally feel—almost physically:

“The way the world appears isn’t fixed by Japanese alone.”

That’s why, for me, foreign languages are less about chatting fluently with foreigners, and more like tools for reading:

How “Japan” or “Japanese ○○” are talked about in other languages
What labels and value judgments are being attached there

If travel is a physical device for relativization,

then language is a conceptual device for relativization.

Once you have those two, you can start looking at your own culture from the outside:

“So where exactly do I want to draw the line

between what I accept as ‘my culture’ and what I don’t?”

You can start to face that question a little more concretely.

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⭐️ Finally, here’s a list of familiar things that are currently being labeled—or that I think will likely be labeled in the near future.

If you have other good examples, I’d love to see them in the comments.

Mont-bell jackets (By the time I’m writing this, the trend has already kind of started.)
Naturalistic gardening
The standard Japanese job-hunting suit
Fashion Center Shimamura
“Yarirafi” kids (flashy, party-oriented youth subculture)
Those little street-corner shops that only sell “auntie clothes”

※ Note

Japan is not the only place where people appreciate whiskers, honeycombs, and atari on denim.

There are raw denim / selvedge denim communities in the U.S. and Europe too, and terms like whiskers, honeycombs, and stacks (creases at the hem) are in proper use.

But even there, this is a pretty niche subculture.

It hasn’t permeated to the level of mainstream magazines in the way it has in Japan, where “talking about the fine details of fading in such a systematic way” has almost become a culture in itself.

To me, that “over-the-top level of fine-grained segmentation” is a clear, everyday example of Japan’s tendency to break things down too far and rebuild them in its own way.