May | June 2002 45

On Sunday mornings, teenagerscrowd the sidewalks of Tokyo’sShibuya district until they spillover the curbs and into the streets.

They start at Hachiko Square, under a video mon-itor that takes up the entire face of a glass and steelhigh-rise, and spread out, 30 or 40 wide in thecrosswalks. They mill around displays stacked withnew sneakers—Nike and New Balance from theUnited States, Puma and Adidas from Europe viaNew York. They gather in a small music store that

specializes in the American vinyl records played inTokyo’s popular soul bars—Grandmaster Flash,Curtis Mayfield, Parliament. They spend 370 yen(roughly $3) at Starbucks for a tall iced latte, whichtastes just as it does in Washington, D.C., and is justas overpriced. Like any global metropolis, Tokyoserves up a substantial dose of American culture,particularly to its youth. Sometimes, like Starbucksor Nikes, it is authentic. Sometimes, like a “HarbardUniversity” sweatshirt or a potato salad pizza, it isnot. But cultural accuracy is not the point. Lessimportant than authentic American origin is thewhiff of American cool.

A few blocks from the Starbucks in HachikoSquare you will find Mandarake, a shop that sells

44 Foreign Policy

Douglas McGray is a contributing writer of ForeignPolicy magazine. He spent the spring of 2001 in Japan as

a media fellow of the Japan Society.

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 eco-

nomic one. But can Japan build on its mastery of medium to project an

equally powerful national message? | By Douglas McGray

JAPAN’S GROSS NATIONAL COOL[ G L O B A L I Z A T I O N A T W O R K ]

Pop culture s new Mecca: Tokyo sShibuya district at dusk

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mind. Just an economy. What madeJapan a superpower, more than just awealthy country, was the way its greatfirms staked claim to a collective intel-lectual high ground that left competi-tors, even in the United States, scram-bling to reverse-engineer Japanesesuccesses. Seeking guidance on every-thing from “quality circles” to “just-in-time” inventory management, U.S. cor-porate executives bought stacks of bookson Japanese management techniques. Thekey to Japan’s economic ascendance wasnot ideology, at least not by Cold Warstandards; but it was a method, it drovethe most dynamic economy of the era,and it was indisputably Japanese.

Fast forward to 2001. High incomes,long life expectancy, and many more of thestatistics that mean anything in terms ofquality of life still tilt in Japan’s favor. Butthe national swagger is gone, a casualty ofa decade-long recession. Gross domesticproduct is down; the yen is down; theNikkei Stock Index hit a 17-year low; andfull employment, practically a natural rightin Japan, has been replaced by near-recordrates of unemployment. Tokyo has tried tokeep the International Monetary Fundfrom investigating its banking system,which is suspected to be in even worseshape than the finance ministry hasadmitted. A recent downgrade fromMoody’s Investors Service rates Japanonly slightly more creditworthy thanBotswana. The country limps its wayinto G-8 meetings and remains lockedout of the U.N. Security Council.

Yet Japan is reinventing superpoweragain. Instead of collapsing beneath itspolitical and economic misfortunes, Japan’sglobal cultural influence has only grown.In fact, from pop music to consumer elec-tronics, architecture to fashion, and foodto art, Japan has far greater cultural influ-ence now than it did in the 1980s, when itwas an economic superpower.

Its cultural sway is not quite like thatof American culture abroad, which, evenin its basest forms, tends to reflect certaincommon values—at the very least, Ameri-can-style capitalism and individualism.

46 Foreign Policy

[ Japan s Gross National Cool ]

used manga and anime (Japanese comic books andanimation, respectively). There is no storefront fullof dog-eared comics in plastic sleeves, just a maw ofan entrance carved cavelike out of fake rock andflight after flight of stairs down to the basement-levelshop. There, comic books and videotapes are stackedto the ceiling, alongside the toys and collectiblesthey inspired. The real esoterica are under glass,rare Godzilla and Ultraman action figures selling forhundreds of dollars each.

With a network of shops across Japan and a list-ing on the Nikkei Stock Index, Mandarake Incor-

porated is positioning for global expansion. Newstores opened in Los Angeles in 1999 and inBologna in 2001. Japan accounts for the bulk ofMandarake’s revenue, said company presidentMasuzo Furukawa, “but in, say, about five to 10years, it should be the other way around. The for-eign market should be much bigger.”

Already, “there isn’t much of a time lag betweenwhat sells well in Japan and what sells in the Unit-ed States,” Furukawa said, comparing business inTokyo and Los Angeles. The buxom, gun-totingpixies, cute monsters, and transforming robots thatfill Mandarake in Shibuya show up in mtv graph-ics, street fashions, bars and dance clubs, and evenmuseums. Last year, the Getty Center in Los Ange-les debuted a blockbuster show on Japan’s “SuperFlat” movement—young Japanese art inspired by thetwo-dimensional look of commercial cartoons.

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

T H E P O K É M O N H E G E M O N

Critics often reduce the globalization of culture toeither the McDonald’s phenomenon or the “worldmusic” phenomenon. For the McDonald’s camp,globalization is the process of large American multi-nationals overwhelming foreign markets and getting

local consumers addicted to special sauce. In thiscase, culture flows from American power, andAmerican supply creates demand. For the worldmusic camp, globalization means that fresh, mar-ginal culture reaches consumers in the United Statesthrough increased contact with the rest of the world.Here, too, culture flows from American power,with demand from rich Americans expanding dis-tribution for Latin pop or Irish folk songs.

But Japanese culture has transcended U.S.demand or approval. Director and actor TakeshiKitano, arguably the Japanese film industry’s most

noteworthy recent export, was firstembraced in Europe, then in theUnited States. At this year’s BerlinFilm Festival, Hayao Miyazaki’sSpirited Away became the first ani-mation feature ever to win a topfestival prize. A major publishingshow in Frankfurt, for the first time,opened an exhibition of Japanesemanga. Namie Amuro, reigning “J-

Pop” (Japan-Pop) music diva of the 1990s, built ahuge fan base in Asia without ever going on tour inthe United States. Millions of teenagers in HongKong, Seoul, and Bangkok covet the latest fashionsfrom Tokyo, most of which never make it to NewYork. Japanese lifestyle magazines, some of the mostlavishly produced in the world, are smuggled by ille-gal distributors across Asia as soon as they are onnewsstands in Tokyo, though none has launched anAmerican edition.

At the same time, Japan has made deep inroadsinto American culture, usually written off by the restof the world as aggravatingly insular. Bestselling SonyPlaystation and Nintendo home video games drawheavily on Japanese anime and manga for inspiration.So have recent Hollywood films, such as The Matrix,and television series, including director JamesCameron’s Dark Angel. “Tokyo is the real interna-tional capital of fashion,” the style editor of the NewYork Times proposed this spring, spurning Paris,New York, and Milan as pretenders. Japanese anime-style cartoons currently fill the majority of time slotsin the after-school and Saturday morning schedules onU.S. cable television. The cartoon and video gamefranchise Pokémon—broadcast in 65 countries andtranslated into more than 30 languages—even madethe cover of Time magazine.

In the 1980s, Japan pioneered a new kind ofsuperpower. Tokyo had no army to speak of, nopuppet regimes to prop up, and no proxy wars to

Over the course of an otherwise dismal decade,

Japan has been perfecting the art of transmitting

certain kinds of mass culture.

Dressed for success:Japan s Issey Miyake

wares on displayin Paris, 1999.

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May | June 2002 49

group, dreamed up by record producers and mar-keting executives and then assembled through audi-tions. In this case, the concept was 18- to 22-year-oldgirls with 2-year-old children. A producer explainedthe band’s name to local press: “You can like them.But they’re mothers, so you can’t kiss them.”

Their debut performance took place in March2001 on a makeshift stage outside 109, a tall shinydepartment store in Shibuya that, for a few millionof Japan’s teenage girls, is the most stylish, mostimportant, and most exciting place in the world.The girls in the band, like every girl in every mag-azine that season, had light cedar tresses, denimskirts, and tight tops with vintage sports lettering(no doubt all of it was for sale inside). They wheeledtheir kids out in strollers, all in a line. Then theystarted to sing. “Pada Pada mama, PadaPada mama.”

A new dance then sweeping throughTokyo’s clubs, the Pada Pada is“uniquely Japanese,” said KatsuoShimizu, a culture columnist at the dailyAsahi Shimbun, touting it as the firstpopular dance step to originate inJapan. In fact, the Pada Pada looks likenothing if not the Macarena. The dancedidn’t seem uniquely Japanese. It didn’t seem at allJapanese. But then, what should one expect, geishasgrooving on a Shinto arch?

The Pada Pada doesn’t require a great culturalleap for foreigners. The band has an English name,not that it makes much sense to a native speaker,but English words travel well. If the Pada Padaspreads across Asia, however, it will be on thestrength of Japanese pop songs, Japanese musicvideos starring Japanese girls with light cedar hair,and Japanese cool. Maybe there is not much tra-ditionally Japanese about any of it. But if that is arequirement for national branding, American popculture is hardly more respectful of traditionalAmericana—unless you count when Madonnawears a cowboy hat.

M E E T H E L L O K I T T Y, D AV O S C AT

Japan’s most visible pop icon, Sanrio’s cartoon catHello Kitty, takes the national ambiguity of thePada Pada further. Kitty is not actually supposed tobe Japanese. In fact, Kitty’s last name, announced forthe first time in spring 2001 in Sanrio’s official fanmagazine, is White.

Kitty White? Kitty is a wasp!

Hello Kitty drives an empire worth almost $1billion in global sales per year. “From Target toMcDonald’s, she went big time,” wrote Asian-American pop culture magazine Giant Robot, pro-claiming her the best “Corporate Whore” of 2001.Sanrio licenses so many products with Hello Kitty’slikeness that a company spokesman could not con-firm the current count. Put it between 12,000, theestimate he gave, and 15,000, a number that iswidely reported. You can buy individually wrappedHello Kitty prunes. You can buy a toaster thatburns Hello Kitty’s face into a piece of bread. Youcan buy a Hello Kitty vibrator. “We don’t havesuch strict regulations,” the spokesman said. “Hardalcohol, maybe that would not be appropriate.”

Hello Kitty’s longtime designer, Yuko Yama-

guchi, met me in a small Sanrio conference room,dressed in dark jeans and a baggy shirt. A cell phoneand a dozen Hello Kitty dangles hung from a chainaround her neck. So which is Kitty, foreign or Japan-ese? “When Kitty-chan was born, in those days itwas very rare for Japanese people to go abroad,” shesaid. “So people yearned for products with Englishassociations. There was an idea that if Kitty-chanspoke English, she would be very fashionable.”

Today, teenagers and 20-somethings in the Unit-ed States and elsewhere buy Hello Kitty purses andcell phone cases as icons of Tokyo pop chic. In the1980s, however, Sanrio’s American-based marketingteam had to customize Hello Kitty for Americanaudiences, which they considered a tough sell. Often,that meant designing two Kitties, one for Japaneseand one for Americans. “Purple and pink were verystrong,” Yamaguchi said, recalling Sanrio’s Ameri-can market research. “Blue, yellow, and red werebelieved to be taboo.”

“There were also motifs that were taboo in theUnited States. There was a snail, one of Kitty-chan’sfriends. When there is a rainstorm, Kitty-chan hasan umbrella and a flower, and beside Kitty-chan isa snail. In the United States, that was not accepted,and there was a request to eliminate the snail,” she

48 Foreign Policy

Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan canseem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect thecontradictory values of a nation in flux, a superfi-ciality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BTto equate contemporary Japanese culture with“Super Flat” art, “devoid of perspective and devoidof hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneous-ly.” “We don’t have any religion,” painter TakashiMurakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically.“We just need the big power of entertainment.”

But gradually, over the course of an otherwise dis-mal decade, Japan has been perfecting the art oftransmitting certain kinds of mass culture—a tech-nique that has contributed mightily to U.S. hegemo-ny around the world. If Japan sorts out its econom-ic mess and military angst, and if younger Japanesebecome secure in asserting their own values and tra-ditions, Tokyo can regain the role it briefly assumedat the turn of the 19th century, when it simultane-ously sought to engage the West and to become a mil-itary and cultural power on its own terms.

J A PA N ’ S P O S T M O D E R N P O P

I spent three months last year traveling aroundJapan, interviewing artists, directors, scientists,designers, and culture mavens. Many of them seemed

surprised at the idea of Japanese cultural mightabroad. They tended to think very little about for-eign audiences. What they talked about instead wasforeign inspiration. At times, it seems almost astrange point of pride, a kind of one-downsmanship,to argue just how little Japan there is in modernJapan. Ironically, that may be a key to the spread ofJapanese cool.

“I can’t always distinguish elements of tradition-al Japanese culture from Japanese culture invented fortourists,” confessed Toshiya Ueno, a sociology pro-fessor at Chubu University and, in his spare time, atechno deejay with gigs in Tokyo and Amsterdam.

“During the First World War, in Japan, alreadythere was a strong argument about overcomingmodernity,” Ueno said, sitting in his cluttered uni-versity office behind two turntables and a mixingboard. “Already, postmodern eclecticism was sur-facing.” In other words, Japan was postmodernbefore postmodernism was trendy, fusing elementsof other national cultures into one almost-coherentwhole. It makes sense: Japan’s history is filled withexamples of foreign inspiration and cultural fusion,from its kanji character system to its ramen noodles.

Consider the case of a new band, Lipless X Sis-ter, and a new dance, the Pada Pada. Like mostJapanese pop music acts, Lipless X Sister is a concept

Japan was postmodern before postmodernism

was trendy, fusing elements of other national

cultures into one almost-coherent whole.

Global kitty litter: Hello Kittymerchandises more than 10,000products worldwide.

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said. “Differences in color were easy, but I had dif-ficulty accommodating all the little requests—therewere so many.”

“Now, there is no difference in design. Now, wehave the same Kitty-chan in both markets,” she said.They have to. Sanrio’s head of marketing for Asia,Shunji Onishi, described the company’s disastrousattempt in the 1990s to customize Hello Kitty for Tai-wan and Hong Kong, two of Sanrio’s strongest mar-kets. They put Kitty in local clothes and surround-ings, and the products sat on the shelves. “Theyknow Kitty is from Japan. That’s why they like it,”

he said. “Especially the younger generation.” Even ifshe is actually English? “Kitty has a sort of inde-pendent existence,” Yamaguchi answered, hedging onnationality a bit. “I let her transcend the borders ofLondon.” A regular Davos cat.

WHY 600 LB. WRESTLERS DON’T TRAVEL

Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She isJapanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketingboomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony, and Ninten-do manage effortlessly. And it is part of the geniusbehind Japanese cultural strength in a global era thathas many countries nervous about cultural erosion.

Imagine for a moment if modern Japan weremore like France, less culturally plastic and moreanxious that globalization might erode its uniquenational character. Its cultural reach might looksomething like that of Japanese sumo—popular athome but stubbornly closed to foreign influence,and as a result, largely invisible outside Japan.

Tokyo’s official sumo museum, maintained bythe Japanese Sumo Association, ought to be one ofthe city’s big foreign tourist attractions; instead, it isa dreary, one-room obscurity. The sumo associa-tion sells no official merchandise, at home or abroad.Occasionally, the association will hold an exhibitionmatch outside Japan but only when a foreign citycampaigns for a visit, and then never more thanonce or twice in a year. It is a marked contrast to the

May | June 2002 51

leaned stiff-legged on a smaller one, and the small-er one pushed him from one side of the dirt ring tothe other, and back, and again, and back. Sisyphuswith a fleshy boulder. The smaller man gasped andcollapsed to the dirt, his sweat turning it to reddishmud. “What’s wrong with your legs?” Akebonotaunted in Japanese, grinning. “You can go for 30minutes, can’t you? It’s only five or six minutes andyou look exhausted!” Akebono speaks only Japan-ese at the heya, even with Azumazeki (the name

Takamiyama took when he retired from competition,instead of his given name, Jesse Kuhaulua).

Wrestlers live at their heya, train at their heya,and eat at their heya. For a foreigner like Akebono,the instant immersion is twofold: immersion in sumoand immersion in Japan. Not everyone would facethat kind of cultural rebirth for a chance at successin the most foreign of sports, and that is part of thepoint. “It’s not easy, man. It’s not easy,” said Azu-mazeki, in a Louis Armstrong rasp that has made hisvoice one of the most recognizable in Japan.Although he also discovered Konishiki abroad, hedoes the vast majority of his recruiting in Japan.“Back in Hawaii, my relatives and friends intro-duce us to kids,” he said. “I don’t encourage them.I prepare them for the hardship.” He explained that

he is looking for more than just athleticism and aframe six meals a day can bulk up. “We try to findsomeone who would get along with Japan, whowants to be a Japanese kind of person.”

Heya masters like Azumazeki, like coaches in anysport, are under pressure to produce bigger andstronger athletes. At the same time, there is a strongstigma against traveling the world in search of for-eign giants. If all else fails, the sumo associationwill enforce a seldom-mentioned quota of 40 foreign

wrestlers in sumo at one time—or about 15 percentof the total. But all else has yet to fail.

YOUTH WITH A YEN FOR TECHNOLOGY

A cultural superpower needs a healthy economic basebut not necessarily a healthy economy. Perversely,recession may have boosted Japan’s national cool,discrediting Japan’s rigid social hierarchy and empow-ering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosenedthe grip a big-business career track had over so muchof Japan’s workforce, who now face fewer social stig-mas for experimenting with art, music, or any num-ber of similar, risky endeavors. “There’s a new cre-ativeness here because there’s less money,” saidTokyo-based architect Mark Dytham, a London trans-

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[ Japan s Gross National Cool ]

U.S. National Basketball Association (nba), forinstance, which in recent years has aggressively pro-moted its sport around the world and hinted that itmight place a new team in Mexico City, or even awhole division of teams in Europe.

It is no wonder why the nba—and the U.S. foot-ball and baseball leagues—takes a global approach.Foreign fans mean extra licensing and broadcastingrevenue. And if a foreign star emerges, you have thepossibility for another Ichiro. The day Japanesebaseball star Ichiro Suzuki left Japan to bat leadofffor the Seattle Mariners, Japanese sports shops were

already filled with official Marinersjerseys and baseball caps in antic-ipation. During the season, Japan-ese television covered everyMariners game live, despite a 12-hour time difference.

By that logic, the fact that 25percent of the wrestlers in sumo’stop two divisions are foreign-bornshould be great for the sport—it

raises the level of competition and offers up home-town heroes to potentially lucrative foreign broad-casting markets. But instead, it is a source of greatanxiety. Sumo is a rare thing, a part of Japan’s com-mercial pop culture that looks much as it did hun-dreds of years ago.

Sumo is seldom broadcast outside Japan, butHawaiian television carries all the tournaments. So atall, skinny kid named Chad Rowan grew up watch-ing Konishiki (whose given name is Salevaa Atisanoe),a fellow American from Hawaii who left the UnitedStates to become sumo’s first 600-pound wrestler.He also knew Takamiyama, another Hawaiian, theJackie Robinson of foreign sumo wrestlers, whoendured hate mail and death threats as he rose thoughthe sumo ranks in the 1960s. Rowan never consideredwrestling, himself. But he knew it was a big dealwhen Takamiyama, now a powerful coach, offeredRowan a chance to go to Japan with him and train.Rowan took the name Akebono and became the firstforeigner the sumo association would declare aYokuzuna, a grand champion.

When I arrived at Azumazeki Heya, the trainingclub on the eastern edge of Tokyo where Akebononow coaches alongside his former mentor, a dozenwrestlers were waiting for their turns in the ring.Even so, you could not miss Akebono, not at 6 feet8 inches and 512 pounds. “Osu osu osu!!” he yelled,crossing his arms and resting them on the bulge ofhis stomach. “Push push push!!” A larger wrestler

Perversely, recession may have boosted Japan s

national cool, discrediting Japan s rigid social

hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs.

We re huge in Japan: Sumoofficials have done little to sell

their sport overseas.

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and products, and a country’s knack for spawningthem, can serve political and economic ends. AsNye argued in this magazine more than a decadeago, “There is an element of triviality and fad inpopular behavior, but it is also true that a countrythat stands astride popular channels of communi-cation has more opportunities to get its messagesacross and to affect the preferences of others.”

However, while Japan sits on that formidablereserve of soft power, it has few means to tap it.National cool ought to help Japan infuse its universi-ties, research labs, companies, and arts with foreign tal-ent. But in a vast public opinion study conductedthroughout Asia in the late 1990s, respondents whoadmired Japanese culture and Japanese consumerproducts thought little of the idea of studying or work-ing in Japan, even less of moving there for good. Andas open as Japanese culture is to foreign influences,there is neither political nor public support in Japanfor immigration, or for immigrants.

When Nye first wrote about soft power, he right-ly believed that Japan’s insularity kept it from takingadvantage of its formidable economic soft power.Today, a decade of globalization has made Japansomewhat less inward looking, but a decade of reces-sion and political turmoil has made many Japaneseseem less secure in some of their fundamental values,undermining traditional ideas in everything from busi-ness culture to family life. Those values may rebound

ing an intact cultural core. Yet for Singer writing inthe 1930s, the question was “why this gifted andactive nation has produced so little that has beenfound acceptable by other countries in an age opento all foreign influences.”

Today, Japan has outgrown that question, thankslargely to the qualities of Japanese culture that Singerhimself identified. In fact, in cultural terms at least,Japan has become one of a handful of perfect glob-alization nations (along with the United States). Ithas succeeded not only in balancing a flexible,absorptive, crowd-pleasing, shared culture with amore private, domestic one but also in taking advan-tage of that balance to build an increasingly powerfulglobal commercial force. In other words, Japan’sgrowing cultural presence has created a mightyengine of national cool.

It is impossible to measure national cool. Nation-al cool is a kind of “soft power”—a term Harvarddean Joseph S. Nye Jr. coined more than a decadeago to explain the nontraditional ways a country caninfluence another country’s wants, or its public’svalues. And soft power doesn’t quantify neatly. Howmuch of modern American hegemony is due to theideological high ground of its democracy, forinstance, how much to its big corporate franchises,to Hollywood, to rock music and blue jeans, or toits ability to fascinate as well as intimidate? Nationalcool is an idea, a reminder that commercial trends

52 Foreign Policy

[ Japan s Gross National Cool ]

plant. “Good art is appearing, young strong art. Youngfashion is appearing.” Graphic designer Michael Frank,who shares a flourishing downtown studio withDytham, agreed: “A lot of interesting smaller maga-zines appeared in the last four or five years. A lot ofsmall little businesses, people running their own shops,people running their own music labels, people runningtheir own clubs. Bigger companies are starting to pickup on those little things and support them.”

Meanwhile, a constellation of factors distinctfrom the economy and its woes has kept yen flow-ing to the pop industries and other cultural mediathat Japan projects around the world so effectively:demographics that favor youth and their whims, areliable demand for luxury goods, and a reputationfor cutting-edge technology.

A generation of declining birthrates has filledTokyo with one-child families. In scarcity, there ispower. Not political power, not yet anyway, but con-sumer power, lots of it. “[Children] sense that they arerare,” said Mariko Kuno Fujiwara, of the Hakuhodo

Institute of Life and Living, a sociological think tankattached to one of Japan’s major advertising agen-cies. And so they tend to be spoiled. Fujiwara recalledone newspaper headline—“Our Children Kings”—with a laugh. Tokyo’s youth spend an average of $150a month on cell phone bills alone. They propel adizzying turnover in street fashion. They drive thesecond largest music industry in the world, by far thelargest in Asia and one that is second only to that ofthe United States. At an hmv music store in Ginza oneafternoon, I counted more than 100 people in line, andnot one of them looked to be over 30. Japanese firmshave strong financial incentives to hew to the demandsof a generation with high disposable income, regard-less of economic ups and downs.

Luxury goods have also fared well in Japan’sslack economy. Japanese consumers haven’t stoppedbuying high-end products, as a number of sociologistsI spoke with stressed. They simply save up longer forthem. So even as the economy languishes, rush hourin Tokyo is like a luxury car show. Louis Vuitton,

which opened its Tokyo boutique in the midst of thecurrent recession and marked up prices 50 percentover Paris shops, makes more money in Japan thananywhere else in the world. Sony electronics are alsofrequently more expensive in Japan than abroad, oneSony industrial designer explained, because Japaneseconsumers strongly prefer lighter materials and sleek-er designs, even if they cost more. A sliver of a mini-disc player in pumpkin orange and lime green, a nar-row cell phone with a big color screen for Webbrowsing, a tiny mp3 personal stereo that clips direct-ly in your ear—these are goods that inspire techno-lust in the levelest of heads, Japanese or foreign.

A L L M E D I U M , N O M E S S A G E ?

Last summer, the prestigious New York art galleryP.S.1 announced an exhibition called Buzz Club.“Animation, cell phone art, fashion, sculpture,anime, films, elaborate graphics, popular action fig-urines and models, electronic music, and sound and

light installations,” the gallerypromised, billing it as “thelargest exhibition of Japanesepop culture creators everassembled outside of Japan.”Exhibitors included Groovi-sions, a design group mostfamous for dreaming up anationally ambiguous cartoongirl named Chappie, and an

electronic music and design collective calledDelaware. Global Japan had achieved the New Yorkscene’s seal of approval.

There is much more to Japan than the nationalcool of Buzz Club. Most foreigners will never pen-etrate the barriers of language and culture wellenough to see Japan as the average Japanese sees it.But that is part of Japan’s secret to thriving amidstglobalization. There exists a Japan for Japanese anda Japan for the rest of the world. Often, in the caseof youth fads, for instance, there is a good deal ofoverlap. Sometimes, in the case of sumo or the lay-out of a typical suburban house or the variety showsthat proliferate across Japanese television networks,there is none.

More than 60 years ago, in a classic study calledMirror, Sword, and Jewel, a German economist atTokyo Imperial University named Kurt Singer dis-cussed the contrast between the “plasticity” and“endurance” of Japanese culture, the ability toabsorb and adapt foreign influences while still retain-

Japanese firms have strong financial incentives to

hew to the demands of a generation with high dispos-

able income, regardless of economic ups and downs.

Cool phone, but does hehave anything meaningful

to say to the world?

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For intelligence on new trends in art, music, entertainment, and fashion from Japan, check out funand brainy Asian-American pop culture magazine Giant Robot; slicker, bilingual Tokion; or Shift,a Tokyo-based online magazine. Linger over Takashi Murakami’s Super Flat (Tokyo: madra Pub-lishing Co., 2000), an eclectic collection of works from young Japanese artists mixed with mass mediaand Edo-era prints. Also see the Web site of the NTT Intercommunication Center, a Tokyo galleryof high-tech, interactive art sponsored by telecom giant ntt.

Those curious about sumo should read Sumo World, the only English-language magazine on thesport. Sushi has far more fans outside Japan, a phenomenon Theodore Bestor explains in “How SushiWent Global” (Foreign Policy, November/December 2000). For more on Japan’s billion dollarKitty, see Mary Roach’s “Cute Inc.” (Wired, December 1999) and visit Sanrio’s Web site. Two otherrecent issues of Wired are also useful: August 2001 packages 10 reasons why “Japan Rocks,” from“demand creation” to “game shows,” and May 2001 documents in epic, illustrated form, how Japan-ese firms came to dominate the world’s video game industry.

For an inside look at the world’s consumer electronics hegemon, see John Nathan’s Sony: ThePrivate Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2000). On the potential economic power of regional andnational reputation, see Michael Porter’s “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition” (Har-vard Business Review, November/December 1998). For an argument that nations are like brands,see Mark Leonard’s BritainTM: Renewing Our Identity (London: Demos, 1997). Also see BruceMau’s thoughts on medium and message in a global context in Lifestyle (New York: Phaidon, 2000).

A useful long view of Japanese might is Frank Gibney’s Japan: The Fragile Superpower (Rutland:Tuttle, 1996). Also see Manuel Castells’s trilogy The Information Age (Oxford: Blackwell Publish-ers, 1998), particularly his comments in volume three on johoka shakai (information society)—“aJapanese invention,” he argues. Joseph S. Nye Jr. makes a case for the changing nature of power inhis influential article “Soft Power” (Foreign Policy, Fall 1990). Nye returns to the topic in TheParadox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002), where he argues that American dominance does not preclude the rise of new“hubs” and that national cultures can fuse and diffuse without diluting national essence. Mario Var-gas Llosa attacks the notion that national cultures have ever been pure in “The Culture of Liberty”(Foreign Policy, January/February 2001). For a bullish view of American cultural dominance, seeDavid Rothkopf’s “In Praise of Cultural Imperialism” (Foreign Policy, Summer 1997).

The Economist provides a grim survey of Japan’s economic woes in “The Sadness of Japan” (Feb-ruary 16–22, 2002). For an exhaustive collection of public opinion polls that chronicle shifting val-ues in Japan and Asia throughout Japan’s recession, see the research reports of the Dentsu Instituteof Human Studies.

¨For links to relevant Web sites, access to the FP Archive, and a comprehensive index of relatedForeign Policy articles, go to www.foreignpolicy.com.

[ Want to Know More? ]

54 Foreign Policy

[ Japan s Gross National Cool ]

with the economy, or they may transform into some-thing new—a national uncertainty infused with evenmore anxiety by the demographic changes that willaccompany the graying of Japan’s population.

Japan’s history of remarkable revivals suggeststhat the outcome of that transformation is more like-

ly to be rebirth than ruin. Standing astride channels ofcommunication, Japan already possesses a vast reserveof potential soft power. And with the cultural reach ofa superpower already in place, it’s hard to imagine thatJapan will be content to remain so much medium andso little message.

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Martha Brill Olcott

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To read an excerpt go towww.ceip.org/Kazak

2002 322 pp. $24.95paper: 0-87003-188-0 / $44.00 cloth: 0-87003-189-9

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