What's Right with Japan — page 2

Pop-culture production—the cultivation of hip—as the nation's saving grace? It's a concept you could call "Gross National Cool." In an influential essay by that name in Foreign Policy magazine last year, American writer Douglas McGray argued that Japan's unique ability to accept, synthesize and spin a host of foreign influences into something both global and local made it the odds-on favorite to become the world's next cultural superpower. With a 20- to 30-year head start on many of its Asian neighbors (pop culture is, after all, a luxury), Japan's cultural output is broad and deep, self-aware and ironic. But it is also devilishly approachable. Discussing the fact that the Sanrio corporation's ubiquitous Hello Kitty character is supposed to be from London, McGray wrote, "Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketing boomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony and Nintendo manage effortlessly. And it is part of the genius behind Japanese cultural strength in the global era."

Over the past year, Gross National Cool has developed into a kind of all-purpose buzzword in Tokyo among young, reform-minded government officials, entrepreneurs, journalists and others looking to shake up Japan's moribund political and economic system. It pops up frequently in newspaper headlines and wonky policy discussions. "Much of Japanese cool is about being underground or part of something exclusive," says Hiro Kishi, a 40-year-old senior adviser to Japan's Financial Services Minister and an outspoken proponent of pop culture. But cool doesn't always convert into cash. Even the influence of the supposedly massive U.S. culture industries far outstrips their economic importance. Consider: the U.S. media titans AOL Time Warner, Viacom and Walt Disney combined brought in only half the revenue in 2002 that oil giant Exxon Mobil did by itself. Instead, Kishi and others maintain that the significance of Gross National Cool—its spirit of iconoclasm and innovation—may be more pervasive, if harder to quantify.

Take the international status that being cool brings to Japan. Over the past decade, the country's cultural boomerang has been flying ever more confidently beyond the well-known strongholds of kiddie cartoons and video games. Painter Takashi Murakami, for example, has mounted one-man shows at London's Serpentine Gallery and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in just the past two years. The Superflat movement of Japanese fine artists he helped organize has been similarly well received in traveling exhibitions worldwide. Spirited Away, director Hayao Miyazaki's adult-themed, animé masterpiece, won an Academy Award and the Berlin Film Festival's top prize. Even baseball players Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki are themselves successful cultural exports, being among the most popular players in the U.S. Major Leagues. Though the economic impact of all these achievements is hard to measure, the message they send about Japan's ability to compete culturally at a world-class level is undeniable.

Far more important than international status, say proponents, are the broader changes that Gross National Cool is already sparking in Japan's still regimented society. Japan's economic nightmare, they claim, has produced unexpected though beneficial social changes, thanks to the rising stock of entrepreneurs and others bringing about the birth of the cool. With on-again, off-again recession discrediting the traditional Big Business career path, never has individualism and risk taking looked more attractive.

Historically, Japan's best and brightest university graduates headed straight for government bureaucracies, big banks or export manufacturers. There, they were guaranteed lifetime employment, annual raises and the prestige of being a member of Japan Inc. Now, as the very foundations of Japan Inc. start to wobble, that bargain looks increasingly like a bum deal, and more potential employees are simply saying no. A London School of Economics-sponsored study last year, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, found that "young (Japanese) people have been more motivated to start new businesses rather than opting to work in large established companies or in the public sector." And more of those corporate refugees, fueled by both desire and necessity, are founding their own movie-production companies, boutique advertising firms, DJ collectives, fashion-design studios, art galleries or any number of risky ventures that fuel, and eventually monetize, the cool. Says Stanford's Nakamura: "This is the period of change from the postwar generation who supported the manufacturing Japan to the younger generation who will be building the cultural Japan."

Indeed, this period of change reflects a sentiment only recently hatched, yet quickly gaining currency: that Japan's future identity no longer rests in being the leading manufacturer of goods—whether cars, cameras or stereos—but as the world's foremost creator of cool.

—With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo