Washington Post Japan's Empire of Cool

"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.""

""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.""

redux [05.04.02]
Foreign Policy 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?"

redux [03.31.01]
Guardian Unlimited Observer Modern boys and mobile girls

"Why Japan?' I've been asked for the past 20 years or so. Meaning: why has Japan been the setting for so much of my fiction? When I started writing about Japan, I'd answer by suggesting that Japan was about to become a very central, very important place in terms of the global economy. And it did. (Or rather, it already had, but most people hadn't noticed yet.) A little later, asked the same question, I'd say that it was Japan's turn to be the centre of the world, the place to which all roads lead; Japan was where the money was and the deal was done. Today, with the glory years of the bubble long gone, I'm still asked the same question, in exactly the same quizzical tone: 'Why Japan?'

Because Japan is the global imagination's default setting for the future."

redux [04.20.01]
Kyoto Journal Digital Dream or Digital Dystopia?

"How are we Asians, in this new global realm of the phosphor and the pixel, going to deal with the reality that 95 percent of the Asian populace has never used a computer and 98 percent has never been on the Internet? A populace for whom 1) family and wealth, or class and caste, define almost all relationships; 2) magic and myths born in the fears of the Stone Age are the roots of almost all the laws; 3) legend, not fact, is the wellspring of the public imagination; and 4) the future is something most people go to an astrologer for.

What have we to offer to 2 billion people who can't read? How will we reconcile the Asia around us with the fact that we represent a medium that is an imported sociology founded on the assumption that efficient commerce is the pinnacle of human achievement? How do we propose to guide the abyssal undercurrent of Asian tradition into a media-shaped future without losing what to most people is a precious mythical identity? How will the underclasses of Asia respond to a medium that does not reinforce the courtyard culture of old Asia but appears all too ready to cast it aside for something defined almost entirely in terms of a marketplace culture? And how, with an unclear new identity facing them, can Asians avoid the two calamities that have historically gone into defining who they are: reactionary nostalgia and the bloodshed of change?"

redux [05.14.00]
The New York Times Rising Internet Use Quietly Transforms Way Japanese Live
[requires 'free' registration]

""The use of the Internet here has started more as a social thing that in the end is going to have enormous implications," said Jiro Kokuryo, a professor at Keio University's business school, who specializes in e-commerce and information systems. "It is changing people's point of view and empowering them to challenge traditional ways of doing things."

Groups that have traditionally had little influence here are finding their voices and taking action on the Internet. Farmers like the Kimuras escape the huge, bureaucratic distribution system that has been sucking up their profits. Working mothers are banding together to form business ventures. Small companies are using the Internet to expand business and decrease reliance on a primary corporate customer. These are all revolutionary developments by Japanese standards, and not limited to marginal players."