Uber-cool magazine Tokion has been investigating the cutting edge of creative subcultures for almost 10 years. Having started as a Japanese/English bilingual culture magazine in 1996, it now has separate editions in each language and a cult following on both sides of the Pacific.

The man behind the magazine is New York-based publisher Adam Glickman, whose latest venture is the Tokion Creativity Now conference. The ambitious project started as a two-day event in New York in 2003 and has featured big names like film director Todd Haynes and artists Matthew Barney and Richard Prince. Last year, in keeping with the Tokion's bicultural brief, Glickman brought the conference to Tokyo.

The second Creativity Now Tokyo conference saw luminaries from the creative fields assemble in Harajuku's LaForet museum for panel discussions on topics such as "Mapping the Creative Mind" and "Rebooting Tokyo Culture."

Jet-lagged and unshaven but composed and upbeat, Adam Glickman spoke to The Japan Times backstage as the event got under way.

How did this conference come about?

The conference started three years ago in New York . . . We did it basically because as a magazine you have to do a lot of events these days. You gotta keep people knowing your name, you gotta keep advertisers happy . . . I wanted to do a large annual flagship event, but didn't want to spend five months and $150,000 to get the Strokes to perform and get a bunch of hipsters drunk for free. You can do that every other night in New York or Tokyo. I wanted to do something different: a daytime event that would actually create a dialogue, bring a large cross section of people from the creative community together -- and get them thinking.

How does the conference relate to the magazine?

Tokion is different from other magazines because we take more of an anthropological approach, we're almost just like students of popular culture: we're interested in it, we like learning about it, so it made sense to do an event like this.

What we do is take the best parts from the conference, we transcribe the contents, we edit it down to the best parts and we turn that into our January issue. You can only get 500 people into this auditorium, but through the magazine we can reach a much wider audience.

You left Tokyo, first to L.A. then New York. Was that related to creativity?

We started Tokion here in Japan, and the magazine was successful right away. And I said "Yeah that's fine to be a gaijin in Japan, and become successful, but how are we going to do in the States?"

Why originally Japan?

We started the magazine because there was such an exciting pop culture scene, with fashion and music and graphic design. At that time, people in Europe and the U.S. didn't know what was happening here -- this is like 1996 -- and people in Japan were still very farsighted, they were looking over there for their inspiration. And so the idea was like to say, "Look at what you've got in your own back yard; you should pay attention because you guys have a great scene here."

Do you feel that Japanese creators are compelled to leave their home country?

They have no system set up to support art here. So if you're an artist and you're worth anything, you have to leave -- you have to go to Europe or go to America and make a name for yourself, and then you can come back once you're successful.

I'm not saying this because I'm American, but I think if you have talent that's where you go. It's the biggest market, so if you become successful there, by default you become successful in Europe and Asia. Especially for film, and I think for art and probably music, too.

What changes have you seen in Japan?

I think what's going on in Japan with regards to pop culture is the same as what's going on in America. And it's that people are playing it a lot safer than they were doing in the '90s. I don't see as much stuff that excites me as I did in the '90s, and I always thought, is it because I'm older now, so I'm not so interested in what younger people are interested in so much? Or is it that there's not as much interesting stuff as there was in the '90s? It might be a little bit of both. That goes for art or music or film. I mean look at the new MoMA. It cost like $500 million to make this building, and it' s pretty dull, it has nice clean lines, but . . .