Japan's Empire of Cool

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 10:52:03 -0800
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>


Japan's Empire of Cool
Country's Culture Becomes Its Biggest Export

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 27, 2003
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33261-2003Dec26.html>

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 with hordes of young women wearing the Japanese 
schoolgirl look -- 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."

<snip>

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