Why is being Japanese cool?
An older Racialicious post made me think of the attitude I’ve seen both online and in real life from some Americans, who seem to think it’s endlessly cool to be Japanese. I’m not really sure where this meme comes from. Americans are very patriotic, so what makes a subset of probably the most patriotic people on Earth think it’s cool to be from another country? And why Japan? Is it exotic and therefore cool? Does it have something to do with the near-shock that at least some American people seemed to go through when Japanese electronics and cars started to push local manufacturers in the US aside?
I heard a song on the radio here in the US called “I think I’m turning Japanese”. I don’t know who it’s by, but the name is hard to forget as it’s repeated in the refrain. First I thought it might have something to do with expatriation and the expression “going native”, and as I was busy internally frowning on people who think of the world in terms of “us” and “natives”, the American in the car with me (of course this happened in a car) said that it came out during the 80s, when Japanese cars started making significant inroads into the American market. Apparently, driving Japanese cars makes one Japanese.
In my gender and technoculture class, a discussion about the social function of the microwave got derailed into discussion of new technology in general. Someone informed me that American pentecostals (a radical Christian sect of some sort) thought that the Devil attached itself to Japanese electronics. Obviously, not everyone could have been that irrational (or funny), but that anyone came up with that idea as a religious belief at all says something about how society at large related to Japanese goods.
Based on the song and the religious belief, it seems like Americans had a pretty strong emotional reaction to imported, superior goods. Perhaps it’s cool to be Japanese not only because it’s exotic, but that it’s perceived to be exotic in a superior way.
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Interesting post. I think a lot of the “coolness” of Japanese in America has to do with the fact that we import not only goods, but also cultural productions like film, animation and music. If it were just cars and electronics, I don’t think the Japanese phenomenon would exist as it does today. Cultural productions like music always provoke a strong emotional reaction in people, and fans frequently take the object of their fandom as part of their identity.
Think about mods, rockers, hippies, punks, etc. These groups took music, literature, style, ideology and so forth, and made subcultural identities for themselves. The influence of consumer goods plays into style, but on the whole, people are more strongly affected by less tangible things. The Japanophiles have done a similar thing, but instead of crafting a subculture that includes Japanese music or film, they imported part of the culture from which those things hail.
By the way, I think your friends have the wrong idea about the song “I’m turning Japanese.” The phrase mocks Japanese facial features, comparing them to the squinting appearance one might have during sex or masturbation — in the case of the song, the latter. Since I can’t find a less crude reference for this, I give you the urban dictionary entry: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=turning+japanese
By the way, I think your friends have the wrong idea about the song “I’m turning Japanese.”
Haha! That’s kind of funny. Well, I guess we can strike that part of the analysis then
Do you know why Japanese cultural productions made it over here in the first place? I’m still trying to figure out why some culture gets “exported” and some doesn’t.
Do you know why Japanese cultural productions made it over here in the first place? I’m still trying to figure out why some culture gets “exported” and some doesn’t.
I’m sure a major part of this is that Japan markets its culture in a way that few other nations do.
One of the interesting qualities of the Japanese is the way their culture changes in time. Most cultures have periods of more change and periods of less, but on the whole they change fairly fluidly. Japanese cultural norms look like a system exhibiting punctuated equilibrium: the Japanese strongly resist change for a time, but when they do change, they change suddenly and drastically. I don’t know why this is true, but if you look at historical trends, you’ll see that it is.
The most recent example is the conclusion of WW2. The Japanese fought tooth and nail, and even prepared women and children to physically resist invading soldiers, had Allied troops made landfall in Japan. Despite all the controversy around the decision to drop the atomic bombs, it seems highly probable that the Japanese would have suffered more casualties had we resolved the war with conventional fighting on Japanese soil. You would have a hard time finding more anti-American sentiment anywhere than early 1940’s Japan. However, once the war was over, the Japanese didn’t waste a minute on bitterness or resistance. Instead they quickly embraced their new role in the world. It’s almost beyond belief how quickly they rebuilt their country and economy after such a defeat, and they immediately made the US — the nation most directly responsible for Japan’s defeat — one of their strongest allies and trading partners, if not the strongest.
Since that time, the Japanese have aggressively marketed their products toward Western markets, and the American market in particular. This includes material goods like cars, but also creative output like film, music, animation and (in particular) video games. Japanese material goods got a lot of attention in the 1970s and 1980s, when it looked like they might completely dominate the market. After the burst of the Japanese economic bubble in 1990, this attention diminished, but in response the Japanese pushed the marketing of their creative goods to the front. What we’re seeing now is, I believe, that influence.
As an interesting aside, the Japanese are as good at importing culture as they are at exporting it. This is also a dramatic departure from pre-WW2 Japan. This seems like it would be at odds with the Japanese attitude toward “gaijin,” but another peculiar quality about Japanese culture is that it survives quite well with internal inconsistencies and contradictions.