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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