Japan Echo Web

Japanese Culture Takes on the World

Japanese culture has a much more prominent position in the world today than most people in Japan realize. The “Cool Japan” phenomenon has really started to take off around the globe.

Personally, I think of the current interest in Japan as the third “Japan boom.” The first boom, which started back in the nineteenth century, focused on things like geisha, “Fujiyama,” and ukiyoe woodblock prints. In those days, people had a taste for the exotic, and the interest was driven chiefly by curiosity about the Other. The second boom came during the 1980s, when animated cartoon versions of Japanese manga like Candy Candy and Captain Tsubasa were shown around the world and Japan started to attract attention for the high quality and entertainment value of its popular culture. Even so, the image of Japan as somehow “exotic” remained strong through the late 1990s.

The current boom, which began around the start of this century, is different. This time, Japanese culture is simply regarded as something interesting and fun, and it is able to find a niche for itself overseas much more naturally. Artists were the first to become aware of Japanese culture as “cool.” Next came a relatively small number of hardcore fans. Now, finally, this awareness is starting to become widespread in mainstream society, so that anyone who is even slightly knowledgeable about film or interested in culture in general will naturally be exposed to the pleasures offered by Japanese culture as a matter of course.

Recently, though, the trend has gone too far. The positive view of Japanese anime and pop culture as something “amazing” has reached such an extent that even manga and anime that weren’t big hits in Japan circulate in shoddy translations, and even some fairly unimpressive examples of pop art have had considerable impact overseas. As a result, the myth of Japanese culture as something unconditionally wonderful is beginning to fade. This in itself, of course, is only to be expected. If the things that Japanese people find interesting or worthwhile when they are shown in this country achieve recognition overseas, that is enough.

In the old days, lots of Japanese people were convinced that Hollywood produced nothing but masterpieces. “What genius,” they thought. But the reason is that Hollywood has always differentiated between movies that are worth exporting and lightweight stuff that stays at home.

It was manga that blazed the trail for the breakthrough of Cool Japan into the international mainstream. The reason for their success was straightforward: They were unambiguously entertaining. All of the genres of entertainment in the world, none is more completely attuned to capitalism than manga. Serialized stories rise and fall rapidly in the prominence they get in the weekly magazines according to votes cast by readers, with no relation to the development of the plot. Sometimes the story is altered dramatically halfway through, and in extreme cases serialization might be stopped altogether. There is nothing like this anywhere else. The severity of these conditions makes manga unique as a product of mass culture. Recently people overseas have started to discover for themselves how entertaining the products of this unique environment can be.

But today the phenomenon of Cool Japan is no longer limited to manga and anime. I help to present a TV show called Cool Japan Hakkutsu! Kakkoii Nippon (Discovering Cool Japan), which introduces popular aspects of Japanese culture from the perspective of foreigners. One young woman who appeared on the show said she was initially inspired to come to Japan when she was knocked out by a CD by a Japanese rock group called the Blue Hearts. A lot of people tell us that they were prompted to come to Japan by the films of Kitano Takeshi or Mitani Kōki. They see the movies and are inspired to come and see for themselves the country and culture that has produced such cool stuff.

Even more interesting was the woman who was lured to Japan by the attractions of “straight perms.” I once asked a bunch of Japanophile New Yorkers what it was that first got them interested in Japan. One woman replied “straight perms.” She had fairly unruly hair, and was determined to have it straightened out. She tried all kinds of salons and stylists in New York, but no one could do anything for her. One day someone suggested she should try a Japanese-run place in the city. They gave her a straight perm and she was finally able to have the hairstyle she had always wanted! She has been in love with Japan ever since.

To celebrate the hundredth edition of the show, we ran a survey in which our foreign participants voted for the “Top 20” of Cool Japan. At the very top of the list were Japan’s high-tech lavatories: toilets fitted with a shower attachment for washing the backside. In Europe and America, such things are not a part of mainstream culture.  Apparently part of the reason is an idea that there is something “gay” about the idea of washing your backside. But affluent foreigners who have experienced the convenience of these units for themselves in Japan are buying them to take home.

Japanese culture and Japanese products that satisfy the customer’s every need are spreading around the world. This means that promoting Japanese culture abroad is no longer like firing off flares into the darkness, as it was the days of Kurosawa Akira. The same thing used to be true in music. For many years, the only Japanese song anyone knew overseas was the “Sukiyaki Song,” but today artists like Amuro Namie, Blue Hearts, X-Japan, and others are attracting growing numbers of fans around the world.

The gulf between Japan and the West is shrinking. Trends and developments in Japan used to be looked on as strange events taking place in a faraway land, but now Japan respected as though it were just another European country. The relationship is not as close as that between Germany and France, of course—but I think we may be getting close to the distance between Britain and the Scandinavian countries, for example.