When
seeking an explanation for the global popularity of forms such as
Japanese animation and Nintendo video games, most observers, whether
fans or academic researchers, have tended to start with the pop
products themselves. There does seem to be something intrinsic to
Japanese mass entertainments — their style, their content, their
message — that is distinctive and broadly appealing, especially in
contrast to the familiar fare of Hollywood blockbusters, American
prime-time television, and the Billboard
Top 40 music charts. Japanese pop has become a global success story not
just because it is as polished and sophisticated as the best of what
America and Europe have to offer but also because it is insistently and
unapologetically different from the familiar and often predictable
products of the Magic Kingdom, Marvel Comics, and the top Paris fashion
houses. (Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization, 35-6)
To the extent
that elements that are abundant in Japanese pop culture — complex
story and character development; frank portrayals of human nature;
dreams and romantic optimism; kids’ perspectives; a focus on human
relations, work, and mental strength — are scarcer in Western pop
culture, Western consumers find that Japan pop enriches their pop
culture diet, giving them a fuller range of forms, themes, and
viewpoints to enjoy, and perhaps to be influenced by. (JPCG, 37)
The medium is both different in a way that is
appealing to a Western audience satiated on the predictabilities of
American pop culture and also remarkably approachable in its universal
themes and images. ... Indeed, anime may be the perfect medium to
capture what is perhaps the overriding issue of our day, the shifting
nature of identity in a constantly changing society. With its rapid
shifts of narrative pace and its constantly transforming imagery, the
animated medium is superbly positioned to illustrate the atmosphere of
change permeating not only Japanese society but also all industrialized
or industrializing societies. Moving at rapid — sometimes breakneck —
pace and predicated upon the instability of form, animation is both a
symptom and a metaphor for a society obsessed with change and
spectacle. In particular, animation’s emphasis on metamorphosis can be
seen as the ideal artistic vehicle for expressing the postmodern
obsession with fluctuating identity. (JPCG, 37-8)
Napier also
concludes that a substantial part of anime’s appeal is its subversive
edge, its tenacious unwillingness to embrace the Hollywood happy ending
that reassures audiences that all is well with the world. Indeed, anime
— as well as manga, sci-fi cinema, and much popular fiction -- often
leaves viewers with the abiding impression that the world is
profoundly, perhaps even irreparably, corrupt and dysfunctional.
Countless Japanese pop narratives end with the hero dead, Tokyo in
smoldering ruins, and fears of apocalypse only briefly alleviated. (JPCG, 38)
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Familiarity and the Media Marketplace
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| The reasons for
the worldwide embrace of Japan’s “Gross National Cool” are, perhaps not
surprisingly, as diverse as the forms of Japanese popular culture and
the sources of Japan’s pop creativity. The intrinsic characteristics of
Japanese animation, cinema, and character goods — obvious quality,
stylistic and thematic complexity, insistent difference from Western
pop conventions — have undoubtedly proven attractive to global
consumers. At the same time, external factors — the market forces that
consistently brought Japanese entertainment products to American
audiences, international stereotypes of Japan’s cultural odor, the long
shadows of September 11, and even the activities of devoted fans — also
created conditions favorable to the diffusion of Japanese pop culture.
Through a complicated interplay of content and context, Japanese pop
forms have become familiar icons and welcome diversions, mass-marketed
commodities and cherished artifacts, as well as meaningful sites of
identification, aspiration, and resistance in the contemporary global
imagination. (JPCG, 46) |
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Lost in Translation
Today,
as has been the case since World War II, the Japanese pop culture
products that reach consumers abroad are usually not identical to the
ones that Japan’s domestic audiences enjoy. Pikachu may look the same
in New York as in Tokyo, but his fellow “pocket monsters” have
different names in different countries and their animated adventures
are not precisely the same worldwide. Linguistic intermediation is
inevitable in the global circulation of Japanese entertainment goods;
anime and Japanese movies are translated and subtitled or dubbed in
English, Korean, or French to make them accessible to audiences
overseas. But editing also takes place to make Japanese pop forms seem
more familiar and appealing to international consumers. This process of
“localization” — the adaptation of pop culture commodities to the
cultural, social, and political realities of the regions and nations
where they will be bought and sold — is now regarded as a fundamental
part of the negotiations and transformations of globalization. (JPCG, 47)
 The remaking of Japanese pop products abroad may be the
ultimate form of localization, a wholesale appropriation of Japanese
styles, stories, and innovations that removes any apparent
“Japaneseness” from a pop culture artifact, be it a samurai movie or an
animated series, even more thoroughly than editing, censoring, and
dubbing. But imitation is more than just a passive act; the recasting
of Japanese forms in new American or European or Chinese guises
requires intricate adjustments, negotiations, and acts of creation and
produces imaginative new fusions not wholly “Japanese” or “Western” or
“Asian.” Out of this constant, dynamic process — of pop products moving
across borders and cultures, being localized and remade, inspiring new
creative energies, hybridizing into novel forms, and then circulating
once again to audiences worldwide — comes much of the imaginative
energy and seemingly endless diversity of global popular culture. (JPCG, 56-7) |
Japan as Soft Superpower
In a 2002 article in the journal Foreign Policy,
the journalist Douglas McGray described a fundamental shift in the
international profile of Japan in the closing years of the twentieth
century. McGray notes that in the 1980s Japan grew into one of the
world’s premier industrial nations, earning global attention (and
sometimes respect) for the Toyota sedans, Panasonic appliances, and
Mizuno sporting goods flooding international markets. In the long
recession of the 1990s, however, when the shine came off the Japanese
economy, Japan began to gradually but dramatically redefine itself in
the eyes of the world. “Japan is reinventing superpower,” McGray wrote.
“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?” In other words, can Japan leverage its success in
exporting popular culture — what McGray memorably called “a might
engine of national cool” — to achieve broader political, strategic, or
economic goals on the international stage? (JPCG, 59)
As scholars continue to debate the sources of Japanese
pop culture’s creativity and the reasons for its global appeal,
policymakers will no doubt continue to work to find ways to convert
Japan’s substantial “Gross National Cool” into tangible political,
economic, or diplomatic benefits. Whether anime will ever be able to
compensate for the relative weakness of the Japanese military
establishment or the appeal of Japanese fashion among Asian youth will
somehow counteract the decline of Japanese manufacturing is dubious at
best. In the end, only time will tell if the early-twenty-first-century
globalization of Japaneses popular culture will prove an important
turning point, an opportunity lost, or perhaps even the historic dawn
of Japan as the world’s first soft superpower. (JPCG, 67)
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