Daring Experiment by a Waterworks Forman and a Renegade Journalist
Truly avant-garde magazine featuring constructing worker’s lifestyle, fashion, art, and philosophy
Browsing magazine racks for too long can start to feel like drowning in an engorged river of celebrities, elite businessmen, and famous artists. As you flip through the lifestyles and philosophies of people clamoring for media attention, it can get harder and harder to hold the daydreams at bay.
“I can be like these people!” “Someday, somehow, I want to live like that.” “I want to make an ‘impact’ on the world too!”
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Founded in Tokyo this spring, BLUE’S MAGAZINE is a Japanese free paper that dares to turn the media spotlight back on the people who built it. Self-billed as a “construction culture magazine,” its covers highlight topics, from features on “today’s” construction market to profiles of the personal dramas and aesthetic sensibilities shaped by life in the construction world. At a glance, the concept might seem to raise the eternal media question “is there any demand for this,” but while we scratch our heads about market research, more and more bookstores and magazine sellers are reporting selling out of the magazine. With barely half a year in circulation, BLUE’S itself is on the verge of becoming part of the story.
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“Their day begins with exhausting physical work and ends with sake and early sleep,” say enough songs, poems, and novels to fill a library. But Yanagi, who has lived the punk lifestyle while working construction, understands the cultural life concealed under the hardhats, and he recognizes that cultural sensibility as part of the fierce energy that drives his employees in their work. These men, he says, live within and help build the emotional and cultural life of Japan’s cities – in the end, they’re really no different from the rest of us living in the cities.
Driven by this awareness, BLUE’S MAGAZINE opens a door onto the intellectual and creative life hidden beneath Yanagi’s taciturn construction crews. As the stories flood off the pages, it’s hard not to be warmed by the pride and loyalty that has driven Yanagi for his thirty years as a waterworks construction manager. As they work laying pipes around the city, most of Yanagi’s men are full of secret, lively ambitions to become rappers and punk musicians.
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Another important but little-publicized issue in the last few years has been the growing number of foreign guest workers who have come to Japan to fill the gap created by the shrinking supply of Japanese workers. Ever since its prelaunch issue, BLUE’S has featured a monthly column titled “From Far Away – Japan’s Foreign Workers,”* which collects stories from these workers and shines a light on the life of a foreign laborer in Japan.
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