"Konichiwa, bitches!"
It doesn't matter whether you know the headline from Method Man, Dave Chapelle, or Robyn, or if you know it at all.
Japan is the original example of Reverse Cultural Globalization driven by economic momentum, even more so than the U.S.. In a little over 20 years, Brand Japan has gone from being about cheap cars and miniature electronics to a mix of cultural touchstones well integrated into the rest of the world:
- Food: Sushi, Ramen, Cup A Noodles, Tempura, Yakitori, Edamame, Teppanyaki, Shabu-Shabu, Sake, Asahi
- Toys and Games: Manga, Anime, Karaoke, Pokemon, Transformers, TMNT, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Super Mario, Dance Dance Revolution, Sanrio
- Fashion and Design: Kenzo, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakabo/Commes des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Hanae Mori, Nigo/A Bathing Ape, Muji, Tokyu Hands
- Film: Akira Kurosawa, anime director Hayao Miyazaki (your kids know who he is), J-Horror directors Takashi Miike and Hideo Nakata (your teenagers know who they are)
- Television: dubbed versions of Takeshi’s Castle (aka MXC), Iron Chef, Viking, Yu-Gi-Oh, Sailor Moon, Speed Racer, Endurance (Za Gaman)
- Literature: Haruki Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, and you could include Kazuo Ishiguro, although I would consider him more British
- Art: Takashi Murakami (of Louis Vuitton bags and Kanye West covers), Isamu Noguchi (of the coffee table), Yoshitomo Nara (of pop art), Tadao Ando (of reinforced concrete), Yoko Ono (of the Beatles, but surprisingly interesting as an artist).
For those of you old enough to remember when Japan was just a manufacturing and economic competitor to the US and Europe, a funny thing happened on the way from the Toyota plant. Japan has developed probably the coolest and most creative pop culture on the planet, with market success to rival the West alongside a mix of cult following and street cred. As the Washington Post reported in 2003:
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.
They were once total dweebs, and now they’re so cool that Sofia Coppola made Lost in Translation there with Bill Murray and won a screenplay Oscar, which is about as hipster-cred as you can get. How did that happen?
Remember, Japan was pretty much destroyed after World War II. It took ten years to reach pre-war GDP, and another ten rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, much like what is going on now in China, and to different extents in the other BRICs. From 1965 to 1980, Japan transformed from an emerging industrial power to the #2 economy in the world, famed for manufacturing innovation and excellence. A few TV series of Astro Boy and Speed Racer aside, it was only around the mid-80s that we started seeing the first of vertically-integrated cartoon/toy/videogame brands, sushi bars in North America and Europe, fashion designers in our stores. and a few arty films in festivals.
Then Japan hit the wall economically. All the hysterical press about Japan taking over the US died down and everyone assumed that it was all over and Japan wasn’t a threat anymore. Yet, even as the financial bubble burst in the 1990s, Japan remained the second largest economy in the world, still larger than Germany, the UK, and China (for now). The original economic momentum shifted lanes and picked up on creative and cultural exports. One might even conclude the ‘Lost Decade’ helped accelerate the push into creative and cultural exports for two reasons:
- Business at home was drying up, so people in Japanese creative industries had to look outside to develop business, less out of cultural curiosity than economic necessity. Pokemon would need to come to America if they wanted to make any money.
- Young people couldn’t exactly follow in their parent’s salaryman/officelady footsteps, which lead to a generational rupture with the past. Suddenly, it wasn’t so bad to, as Jimi Hendrix might put it, ‘let your freak flag fly’, bringing the quirky, obsessive otaku subcultures from the private into the public, and from Japan to the world. And the rest of us went from being fearful to fascinated to fanatic.
You might think Japan is an unusual case, an isolated, idiosyncratic island with unique credentials in a few key creative industries. Go back in history, however, and you see a lot of similar places with that went on to shape their own ‘world’ creative culture: the US, Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, the Ottomans, Umayyads, Ming, Incas, Mongols, Byzantines, Romans, Mauryans, Greeks, Egyptians, and so on. The difference now is the instantaneous exposure we all have and the ability to pick up and remix what we think is the most attractive or more useful.
If Japan could add pop cultural topspin to its economic rise in less that forty years, what might the BRICs do in the next forty, or even less in a world of faster everything?