Japan's Gross National Cool

Japan is reinventing superpower -- again. Instead of collapsing beneath its widely reported political and economic misfortunes, Japan's global cultural influence has quietly grown. From pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and animation to cuisine, Japan looks more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic one. But can Japan build on its mastery of medium to project an equally powerful national message?

BY DOUGLAS MCGRAY | MAY 1, 2002

On Sunday mornings, teenagers crowd the sidewalks of Tokyo's Shibuya district until they spill over the curbs and into the streets. They start at Hachiko Square, under a video monitor that takes up the entire face of a glass and steel high-rise, and spread out, 30 or 40 wide in the crosswalks. They mill around displays stacked with new sneakers -- Nike and New Balance from the United States, Puma and Adidas from Europe via New York. They gather in a small music store that specializes in the American vinyl records played in Tokyo's popular soul bars -- Grandmaster Flash, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament. They spend 370 yen (roughly $3) at Starbucks for a tall iced latte, which tastes just as it does in Washington, D.C., and is just as overpriced. Like any global metropolis, Tokyo serves up a substantial dose of American culture, particularly to its youth. Sometimes, like Starbucks or Nikes, it is authentic. Sometimes, like a "Harbard University" sweatshirt or a potato salad pizza, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. Less important than authentic American origin is the whiff of American cool.

A few blocks from the Starbucks in Hachiko Square you will find Mandarake, a shop that sells used manga and anime (Japanese comic books and animation, respectively). There is no storefront full of dog-eared comics in plastic sleeves, just a maw of an entrance carved cavelike out of fake rock and flight after flight of stairs down to the basement-level shop. There, comic books and videotapes are stacked to the ceiling, alongside the toys and collectibles they inspired. The real esoterica are under glass, rare Godzilla and Ultraman action figures selling for hundreds of dollars each.

With a network of shops across Japan and a listing on the Nikkei Stock Index, Mandarake Incorporated is positioning for global expansion. New stores opened in Los Angeles in 1999 and in Bologna in 2001. Japan accounts for the bulk of Mandarake's revenue, said company president Masuzo Furukawa, "but in, say, about five to 10 years, it should be the other way around. The foreign market should be much bigger."

Already, "there isn't much of a time lag between what sells well in Japan and what sells in the United States," Furukawa said, comparing business in Tokyo and Los Angeles. The buxom, gun-toting pixies, cute monsters, and transforming robots that fill Mandarake in Shibuya show up in MTV graphics, street fashions, bars and dance clubs, and even museums. Last year, the Getty Center in Los Angeles debuted a blockbuster show on Japan's "Super Flat" movement -- young Japanese art inspired by the two-dimensional look of commercial cartoons.

Sometimes, like an Issey Miyake gown, the Japan that travels is authentic. Sometimes, like cream cheese-and-salmon sushi, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. What matters is the whiff of Japanese cool.

THE POKÉMON HEGEMON

Critics often reduce the globalization of culture to either the McDonald's phenomenon or the "world music" phenomenon. For the McDonald's camp, globalization is the process of large American multinationals overwhelming foreign markets and getting local consumers addicted to special sauce. In this case, culture flows from American power, and American supply creates demand. For the world music camp, globalization means that fresh, marginal culture reaches consumers in the United States through increased contact with the rest of the world. Here, too, culture flows from American power, with demand from rich Americans expanding distribution for Latin pop or Irish folk songs.

But Japanese culture has transcended U.S. demand or approval. Director and actor Takeshi Kitano, arguably the Japanese film industry's most noteworthy recent export, was first embraced in Europe, then in the United States. At this year's Berlin Film Festival, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away became the first animation feature ever to win a top festival prize. A major publishing show in Frankfurt, for the first time, opened an exhibition of Japanese manga. Namie Amuro, reigning "J-Pop" (Japan-Pop) music diva of the 1990s, built a huge fan base in Asia without ever going on tour in the United States. Millions of teenagers in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Bangkok covet the latest fashions from Tokyo, most of which never make it to New York. Japanese lifestyle magazines, some of the most lavishly produced in the world, are smuggled by illegal distributors across Asia as soon as they are on newsstands in Tokyo, though none has launched an American edition.

At the same time, Japan has made deep inroads into American culture, usually written off by the rest of the world as aggravatingly insular. Bestselling Sony Playstation and Nintendo home video games draw heavily on Japanese anime and manga for inspiration. So have recent Hollywood films, such as The Matrix, and television series, including director James Cameron's Dark Angel. "Tokyo is the real international capital of fashion," the style editor of the New York Times proposed this spring, spurning Paris, New York, and Milan as pretenders. Japanese anime-style cartoons currently fill the majority of time slots in the after-school and Saturday morning schedules on U.S. cable television. The cartoon and video game franchise Pokémon -- broadcast in 65 countries and translated into more than 30 languages -- even made the cover of Time magazine.

 SUBJECTS: CULTURE, JAPAN, EAST ASIA
 

Douglas McGray is a contributing writer of FOREIGN POLICY magazine. He spent the spring of 2001 in Japan as a media fellow of the Japan Society.