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Japan's Empire of Cool
Country's Culture Becomes Its Biggest Export
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 27, 2003

TOKYO -- In the supercharged air of Shibuya, Tokyo's fiercely hip teen quarter,
music videos by Japanese pop stars topping the charts throughout Asia boom from
towering, outdoor liquid-crystal display screens. The streets below are clogged
streetwalker's makeup, sexy stockings and plaid miniskirts -- styled by
international fashion magazines as the height of child-delinquent chic.
Under a galaxy of neon, cubicle-sized stores sell trendy trinkets, including
phone mascots -- cute characters first dangled off cell phones here years ago,
now common in Seoul and Hong Kong and seen in Sydney, New York and Paris.
In the cacophony of cool, foreigners mingle with streams of Japanese descending
by a cave-like hole into the entrance of Mandarake, the world's largest Japanese
manga -- comics -- and anime department store. They buy original celluloids, or
cels, from Japanese animation, most at about $30 each, along with comic books,
action figures, posters and CDs. Hundreds of online orders come in daily to
operators speaking Japanese, English, Spanish, French and Korean.
Company President Masuzo Furukawa, whose office is entered through an anime-like
tube with round, orange electronic doors, is direct about the reason: "If it's
Japanese, the world wants it. Japan is hot."
Even as this country of 127 million has lost its status as a global economic
superpower and the national confidence has been sapped by a 13-year economic
slump, Japan is reinventing itself -- this time as the coolest nation on Earth.
Analysts are marveling at the breadth of a recent explosion in cultural exports,
and many argue that the international embrace of Japan's pop culture, film,
food, style and arts is second only to that of the United States. Business
leaders and government officials are now referring to Japan's "gross national
cool" as a new engine for economic growth and societal buoyancy.
Revenue from royalties and sales of music, video games, anime, art, films and
fashion soared to $12.5 billion in 2002, up 300 percent from 1992. During the
same period, Japanese exports overall increased by only 15 percent. Its cultural
exports are now worth three and a half times the value of all the televisions
this nation exported in 2002, according to a report by the research arm of the
trade conglomerate Marubeni.
"Japan is finding a new place in the world, and new benefits, through the
worldwide obsession with its culture -- especially pop culture," said Tsutomu
Sugiura, director of the Marubeni Research Institute. "The global embrace of
things Japanese has given us a new kind of influence, different than what Japan
once had, but influence nonetheless."
Sushi in Sao Paulo


A new crop of internationally famous architects have led Japan's emergence as a
force in international design.
Shigeru Ban recently won the competition for the new Pompidou Center in Metz,
France, and Tadao Ando, winner of both the Pritzker Prize and the American
Institute of Architects Gold Medal, designed the Modern Art Museum in Fort
Worth. Ando is currently working on the spectacular and huge Francois Pinault
Foundation for Contemporary Art on an island in the Seine in suburban Paris.
Takashi Murakami, whose "superflat" art movement has earned him the reputation
as a new Andy Warhol, inaugurated a whimsical, high-profile, anime-like
sculpture at Rockefeller Center this fall. His playful works on canvas, scooped
up mainly by foreign buyers, have fetched prices near $600,000 at New York art
auctions. Louis Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs collaborated with Murakami to
create a series of Vuitton handbags that was one of its top sellers last year.
Rei Kawakubo, who established Comme des Garcons, and the houses of Issey Miyake
and Yohji Yamamoto have for years been at the top of international fashion. But
they now hold court alongside younger Japanese designers such as Jun Takahashi
of the Undercover label, dubbed by several leading fashion editors as the
hottest breakout designer in years. Junya Watanabe, a Kawakubo protege, has also
made a big stir in fashion circles.
Japan's culture of kawaii, or cute, epitomized by playful designs in ice cream
colors such as cherry-blossom pink and tea green, is increasingly as
recognizable around the world as Americana. France's Pierre Herme, the Paris
dessert chef and retailer, picked kawaii as the theme for his fall/winter 2003
designs, with fantasy pastries in the soft, silky hues of kimonos and anime.
Sushi, once an urban trend, has become as globally ubiquitous as the Big Mac.
Brazil's Veja Magazine reported this month that there are now more sushi
restaurants than Brazilian barbeques in Sao Paulo, South America's largest city,
where residents consume an estimated 278 sushi rolls per minute. And in Paris,
on the Rue de la Gaite, the entire street has filled with sushi restaurants over
just the past two years, said Patrice Jorland, cultural attaché at the French
Embassy in Tokyo. "This is Paris, yes, Paris," he said.
Even traditional Japanese culture, which long ago influenced the French
Impressionists and furniture design in Europe, is reaching farther afield. A
school of ikebana, Japanese flower arranging, recently opened in South Africa,
and ikebana conventions have been held in Zimbabwe and Taiwan. The next one is
scheduled for Vienna next year. The drumming group Kodo has won international
acclaim, playing New York's Carnegie Hall as well as the Acropolis in Athens.
And a tea-ceremony school recently opened in Nova Scotia. "We had one nurse come
in and say she wanted to learn the way of tea and wear a kimono just because she
had read all the books coming out on geisha life," said John McGee, a 30-year
master of Japanese tea who left Kyoto in the 1990s to found the school near
Halifax. "It has gotten completely out of control."
Beyond Hello Kitty


Inside the anime department store, Andy, a 42-year-old from London, was buying
dozens of original anime cels -- paintings on transparent plastic sheets used to
create an animation -- for his own collection and resale at home. One cel frame
depicted a doe-eyed young man who looked like a character from "G-Force," a
Japanese cartoon popular in the United States during the 1980s. "Forget it; this
character is much newer," he said, unwilling to give his last name for fear such
resales may not be entirely legal. "If that were really 'G-Force,' it would be
vintage. We're talking eight times the price, more, back in London."
Lighter-fare manga and anime franchises such as Pokemon, translated into more
than 30 languages and available in 65 countries, are still hugely popular and
contributing to the global fascination with Japan's youth culture. But around
the world, Japan is not just about Hello Kitty anymore. Shonen Jump, a leading
Japanese comic, was launched in the United States last year and has reached a
monthly circulation of 540,000. Video games with Japanese themes, such as Tenchu
and The Way of the Samurai, rank among the hottest sellers worldwide.
"There are millions of kids around the world listening to the Japanese language,
sometimes without even realizing it, when they play a video game," said Noriyuki
Asakura, a former "J-pop" star who composes musical scores for Sony PlayStation
video games. "Our audience has never been greater."
The mania has also touched Hollywood. Spoken partly in Japanese and with a long
anime sequence, Quentin Tarantino's hit "Kill Bill" incorporates Japan's ancient
traditions and Tokyo's modern pop culture in an homage to Japanese coolness. Tom
Cruise joined a host of celebrated Japanese actors in the new epic "The Last
Samurai." And the costumes and atmosphere of the recently concluded "Matrix"
series were rooted primarily in Japanese manga.
In Japanese film, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" won the Oscar this year for
best animated feature, while Takeshi Kitano's "Zatoichi" walked away with the
coveted best director's award at this year's Venice Film Festival.
Japan's emergence today as a cultural superpower is, observers say, the product
of various factors. In the United States, Japanese anime and manga, the key
source of Japan's newfound popularity, were embraced during the 1970s and 1980s
by a fertile subculture of technology-minded Americans, some of whom went on to
spark the dot-com explosion.
"The geeks who read manga as kids went on to become the millionaires of the
1990s," said Washington-based journalist Douglas McGray, who wrote an article in
Foreign Policy magazine on Japan's gross national cool and is credited with
coining the term. "They spread their interest in things Japanese."
A record 3 million people around the world are now studying the Japanese
language, compared with only 127,000 in 1997, according to the Japan Foundation
and Tokyo's Marubeni Research Institute.
David Janes, program officer for the New York-based U.S.-Japan Foundation,
attributes the huge increase in Japanese-language students to the spread of
Japan's pop culture. He said he visited a high school in Iowa with 80 kids in a
Japanese program and "what really amazed me is that when we asked why they were
studying the language, the majority of them didn't hesitate. They said manga and
anime."
Cultural Kaleidoscope

Japan's role in the world has changed dramatically over the decades, from
expansionist military empire in the first half of the 20th century to global
economic superpower in the 1980s. Although its economy is still the
second-largest in the world, the bursting of Japan's economic bubble in 1990 and
its limping economy of the past decade have dimmed the American perception of
Japan as a global financial competitor.
Meanwhile, outside the United States, Japan is being viewed as a more neutral,
alternative source of entertainment at a time when anti-Americanism is running
high.
In Asia, where resentment of Japanese invasions before and during World War II
still runs deep and Japanese cultural imports in many countries were banned,
Japan's pop icons have easily overtaken their U.S. counterparts.
A ban in South Korea only increased the cache of Japan's pop culture among many
young South Koreans, and created a huge black market in Seoul for Japanese
magazines, comics, music and films. As the two nations have moved toward closer
ties in recent years, those restrictions have gradually loosened, with the ban
scheduled to be completely lifted in 2004.
Across East Asia, J-pop -- a cuter, softer and Japanized version of American pop
-- rules supreme. Groups such as Kinki Kids and Glay, both Japanese boy bands,
have topped the charts in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. Despite the still-frosty
relations between Japan and China, Glay played to one of their largest crowds
ever in October 2002 in Beijing, luring a sold-out audience of 35,000.
"Japan led the funk and punk culture of the young generation," said Karl Hwang,
a Seoul-based Korean entertainment-industry analyst. "For Korean kids, coming
out of the military era, Japanese culture was full of those things that Koreans
were deprived of. The Japanese successfully transformed Western culture into
their own. And for Koreans and other Asians, the similarity in appearance helped
us accept Japanized Western culture rather than directly copying Western
culture. Take blue jeans for example. Japanese made blue jeans are much more
comfortable in size, fit and design for Koreans than U.S.-made jeans."
Critics say that Japan is merely a cultural prism, absorbing influences from
abroad and reflecting them back, albeit altered to Japanese taste. But many say
that it is precisely the attraction.
"Japanese culture absorbs things, but then puts a different interpretation to
it," said Naoki Takizawa, a top designer for the fashion house of Issey Miyake.
"Some people may say that we don't correctly understand the history of what has
come from overseas. But we attach a different creativeness to things . . . our
own sense of beauty. If you take a look at Shibuya, you see an energetic
performance going on there, all the girls who want to be like dolls, like
characters [in anime]. . . . Japan is a creative culture and the world is
beginning to understand that."
Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company