Arts & Culture on the Pacific Rim : A SPECIAL REPORT : A Look Into the Future : The Futurists

Los Angeles, dubbed the cultural capital of the Pacific Rim, is in a unique position. But what kind of arts and culture will this city produce in the next decade and beyond?

Calendar posed this and other questions to four writers and one researcher in the business of soothsaying:

James Fallows, an Oxford and Harvard graduate who, for three years, has reported from Yokohama for The Atlantic. He is the author of “More Like Us: Making America Great Again,” to be published this month by Houghton Mifflin.

Joel Kotkin, West Coast editor of INC magazine, who co-wrote “The Third Century: America’s Resurgence in the Asian Century” with Yoriko Kishimoto.

Joel Garreau, author of “Nine Nations of North America” and a senior writer with the Washington Post. He is writing “Edge City,” a book about Los Angeles as the Pacific Rim capital in the next century.

Ernest Callenbach, editor of the prestigious Film Quarterly and the author of several books, including thre ecological novel--”Ecotopia,” a best seller noted for its technologically driven predictions.

Leobardo Estrada, a UCLA associate professor at the School of Urban Planning and Architecture and consultant to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Question: When the Pacific Rim is discussed these days, it’s usually defined economically: the emergence of Japan, Korea, Singapore and China as industrial and financial powerhouses and their effect on the U.S. economy. But does the term have a special cultural meaning as well?

Fallows: I think yes, but in the following way. They (the citizens of Los Angeles) are in a position of really having a mixture of the different Pacific Rim cultures. For example, I think that Japan and other Asian countries have zero interest in cultural exchange with Latin America. Within the Asian countries there has been, of course, a huge intermixture over the centuries, especially throughout the Chinese culture. But there is not that much exchange among those countries right now. So Los Angeles is really the one place that is both in a geographical, economic and, especially, in the emotional or social position, to draw upon . . . Japanese, Chinese, Latin American, Southeast Asian and American (influences). So I think it makes it more likely to be a richer cultural melange, melting pot, whatever you want to call it.

Estrada: The Pacific Rim is an economic concept. It exists because we are concerned with the influence of the Asian economies on the U.S. The problem, therefore, because it is defined economically, is that it means something else culturally. Because the economic forces are the driving arts, the Latin influences on all of this is not going to take place unless of we open up our concept of the Rim. Since it’s unlikely that these countries can compete economically with Asia, perhaps the arts is the only area we (as Latinos) can compete. So it’s probably more important to consider the Rim in the area of the arts, because we have the possibility of broadening the meaning of the Pacific Rim by looking at artistic talent from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.

Question: Are the cultural hybrids emerging from Los Angeles really so different from the experiences of other U.S. cities? If so, do we need new a radically different set of aesthetic concepts, metaphors to describe this city’s cultural life?

Kotkin: Yes. I think it’s important to understand that the real issue is fundamentally an old American issue. Is America a separate culture from Europe? This is the crucial issue. What the Pacific Rim allows us to do--and I would include Hispanics in this--is that it gives an economic and demographic justification for saying America is not a European country. In other words, you are seeing the makings of a post-european culture, which is part black, part Hispanic, part Asian, part Euro-American, but it is distinctly different.

Look, the first great American popular art form that really showed superiority over European forms, that was really new and different, was jazz, a black hybrid form. I think, that as we go into the late 20th Century, America’s cultural predominance will continue to grow and be more expressive of a multiracial culture. The Pacific Rim is the key thing in making that happen. And Los Angeles will be the capital of this new culture.

Question: Do you anticipate a crisis of American cultural identity or a backlash from Euro-Americans who feel they no longer see their self-images, both literally and figuratively, in the cultural landscape of Los Angeles?

Garreau: I think just the opposite. I think we are being amazingly tolerant. I am just astonished at how good were being compared to the last century. Given the level of immigration that we’ve got, the biggest in a hundred years, at this stage of the game we should have daily lynchings. It should really be old news, back with the bed-wetting ads. The worst that we can seem to do right now is come up with pious referendums about tentatively thinking that may be we ought to have English as the official language. If that’s the worst we can do we have no business calling ourselves Americans.

Question: What kind of Pacific Rim culture will Los Angeles develop by the end of the century? And what role will technology, especially the continuing communications revolution, play in all of this?

Callenbach: You are getting videotape outlets for Asian cultures of one kind or another. We have them (here in San Francisco) in Indian grocery stores, Thai grocery stores. There are also theaters where Caucasians are seen going to mainland and Cantonese, Hong Kong-made films too. Some Anglo friends of mine watch Japanese soap operas on the UHF stations here. That’s a relatively new development.

So what’s probably going to happen, to get back to your Pacific Rim emphasis, is the same thing that happened to American culture in the East.

It’ll be interesting to see if there is a unification of Latin American higher culture with the children of the Latin American immigrants. I think there will be. As their children born here legally go to college, and then their children got to university and they read a lot of stuff, and if there is any preserving of their heritage at all, they may start reading authors like (Gabriel) Garcia Marquez. And there will probably be more people like that who will prize their connections to Latin American culture and perhaps European culture. I think there’s hemispheric awareness too, not just Pacific Rim awareness.

As the world becomes more homogenized economically, people will continue to struggle to maintain or retain their cultural roots. We see this in all the separatist movements scattered throughout the world. It was a major 20th-Century theme, and I think it will be a major 21st-Century theme too. We may be eating Wheaties in Bejing or Los Angeles, but we will want to maintain our particular local cultures.

This special report was edited by David Kishiyama, an assistant Calendar editor