Japan had a more radical experience of future shock than any other nation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. They were this feudal place, locked in the past, but then they bought the whole Industrial Revolution kit from England, blew their cultural brains out with it, became the first industrialized Asian nation, tried to take over their side of the world, got nuked by the United States for their trouble, and discovered Steve McQueen! Their take on iconic menswear emerges from that matrix.

When I was first writing about Japan, it was at the peak of the Bubble. Bubble popped, but they kept on going. Japanese street style feeds American iconics back into America in somewhat the way English rock once fed American blues back into America.

I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.

Twitter is the only brand of social media that I have ever taken to at all. I like the feeling of having my perception of the world expanded daily, 24/7, by being able to monitor the reactions of 100-and-some people throughout the world that I personally follow so I have some sense of who they are. There has never really been anything like that before, at least in terms of the digestible 140-character bandwidth that Twitter is based on. I am able to wake up, open Twitter, and sort of glance across the psychic state of the planet.

There's violence in my culture [from America's South].

I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'.

I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.