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It may be off the boil, but suddenly Japan is the coolest of the cool

December 30, 2003

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Japanese culture as cool, clockwise from bottom left, Hello Kitty, Astro Boy, Tom Cruise, Manga Animation, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, and the bright lights of Tokyo.

Those trend-setting Japanese have found a new and profitable way to make their mark on the world, Shane Green reports from Tokyo.

Since Japan hit the economic wall just over a decade ago, there has been an unseemly rush to write it off. For many, uneasy with the country's remarkable rise from the ashes of World War II, the put-down came easily.

But those quick to dismiss Japan have missed a couple of salient points. First, in economic terms, Japan's economy remains the world's second-largest, still dwarfing China's. What's more, the economy is looking stronger than it has in years. But forget the economy - the real Japan story today is not gross national product, but gross national cool.

In a development some say could rival the emergence of Japan Inc in the 1980s, Japanese culture - displayed in what the world watches and listens to, eats and wears - is sweeping the globe. Japan, no longer hot, is very cool.

"Japan's pop culture, gradually cultivated since the end of the war, is being recognised by the global community," said Ichiya Nakamura, executive director of research at the Stanford Japan Research Centre. "In other words," said Mr Nakamura, who has charted the trend, "people overseas have come to acknowledge that Japan is an originally cool country."

Last year, this concept was expounded by Douglas McGray in the article "Japan's gross national cool" published in Foreign Policy. "Japan is reinventing superpower again," he said. "Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan's global cultural influence has grown.

"In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower."

Look no further than your local cinema for evidence. Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai, the story of an American Civil War hero who embraces the samurai and their way of bushido, is a clue. "The samurai swords, the costumes, the amazing landscapes," Cruise said in a recent interview. "There's just something about it all that's eternally cool."

Walk around the streets of Shibuya and you realise just how seriously cool Japan has become.

The Japan connection continues with Lost in Translation, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, and the Australian Japanese Story, about an Australian geologist and a Japanese businessman finding each other in the outback. Then there is the pervasive influence of Japanese animation, which some estimates suggest has 60 per cent of the world market.

"You can ask children in the US, Europe and many other places, 'What is the image of Japan?' Their answer would be Pikachu, DragonBall Z, Sailor Moon and Super Mario Brothers," writes Mr Nakamura in his recent paper on Japan's pop culture.

Last year, Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, a first for animation films.

Running in tandem with the animation industry has been the entertainment technology of Japan, seen in Sony and Nintendo game consoles, and the development of video games. Even old-technology manga - Japanese comic art that transcends age barriers and inspired the Astro Boy-Pokemon genre - is making inroads abroad. Raijin Comics Weekly is finding a big market in the US and Europe with an English manga, complete with authentic Japanese-style pages turning right to left.

Beyond Pokemon, the enduring Japanese icon of Hello Kitty, created by Japanese company Sanrio in 1974, continues to make new friends across the world, extending her reach to the US and Europe.

"Kitty's success is part of the rise of what we call the 'culture of cute', a unique blend of post-modern desire and infantile affectation," write Ken Belson and Brian Bremmer in their new book, Hello Kitty - the Remarkable story of Sanrio and the Billion-Dollar Feline Phenomenon. "This grew up first in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s and is now spreading overseas."

While Japanese pop culture is now making significant inroads into the West, it is already huge in Asia. In August the Asian edition of Time magazine ran a cover story Japan Rules OK!, a "special report on Asia's pop culture superpower".

The magazine listed the pervasive areas of cool: music, art, fashion and design, and their potential to generate a new kind of prosperity for the country.

Just where this has all stemmed from makes an interesting study of the evolution of a modern society. The dominant, and often accurate, view of postwar Japan was that it was a tightly controlled and uptight society: the loyal salarymen toiling through stress-filled lives; obedient youngsters heading off to cram-schools.

So what happened? One theory is that, in part, the 1990s - the lost decade in Japan's economy - helped drive this revolution. The downturn meant that younger people began questioning the values of Japan's economic machine. A new breed of youth emerged, shunning the corporate world for life as part-time workers.

Walk around the streets of Shibuya, Japan's youth mecca near the heart of Tokyo, and you realise just how seriously cool Japan has become. The fashions are edgy and eclectic, worn by self-assured youngsters at ease with their distinctive place in the world. There are plenty of US influences, but they are modified and supplanted by the home-grown.

Not surprisingly, the business potential of the cool industry has not been missed; recently, the Nikkei newspaper, Japan's top financial journal, ran a Cool Japan symposium.

Such a conference run by a financial newspaper made sense, for there is big money for Japan in the pop culture business. As Kitty authors Belson and Bremmer point out, the entertainment industry is worth between 43,000 billion and 53,500 billion yen ($A540 billion to $A674 billion) a year, about 10 per cent of the country's GNP.

In the context of an economy only second in size to America's, Japanese cool is big business. Just how far Japan's Gross National Cool can go is uncertain. While Pokemon, sushi and Japanese themed movies transplant well, it is difficult to see how something like Japanese pop music can follow suit.

Yet who would have thought a too-cute cat without a mouth would have been so enthusiastically embraced as a global figure?

But there are dangers ahead in the line between fad and long-term trend. Mr Nakamura believes it can be the latter. He wants to maximise digital technology, develop professionals for the pop culture industry, and introduce pop culture education in schools.

And he is thinking long term: "Japan should have a strategy for its pop culture to be popular around the world for five decades - or even 10."


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