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Export Machine
While Asia's older generation is still haunted by Japan's wartime brutality, Hello Kitty culture is hot with the region's youth, who are happy to snap up all things Japanese
By TERRY McCARTHY
Amanda Yee thinks made in Japan is way cool. The 18-year-old high school student is out on a Saturday afternoon with three girlfriends, cruising the stores of Causeway Bay--shopping mecca for Hong Kong's teens. With her brown-dyed hair and platform moon-walking shoes, she could easily be a groupie in Tokyo's Harajuku fashion quarter. Her obsession with things Japanese includes her favorite TV programs: soap operas Love Generation and Long Vacation. "Japanese society is very fast-paced and always changing," she says with a giggle. "Everything is very cute and stylish, that's why we like it." Naturally, she adores Hello Kitty, the ultimate icon of Japanese cuteness. "Whenever I'm sad, like when I do badly on a test, I buy some Hello Kitty things to feel better."
Japan may not top the popularity polls in banks and boardrooms around Asia, but among the younger generation the homeland of Hello Kitty is hot. Japanese pop music, videos, comic books, clothes, accessories and cosmetics all are being snapped up across the region by a new generation of YPMs--Young People with Money. Slickly packaged and having already run the gauntlet of one of the world's most demanding fashion markets at home, Japanese youth culture is proving irresistible to teens from Taipei to Singapore, despite what local parents and grandparents remember of Japan's brutality in the last war.
Four in five comic books sold in South Korea are Japanese. In Hong Kong, people buy pirated VCDs of their favorite Japanese TV soaps within days of their being shown in Japan. Taiwanese and Singaporeans cannot get enough of Japanese pop music. When diva Noriko Sakai abruptly announced last year that she was both married and pregnant, the news was on Hong Kong radio stations just minutes after Sakai's press conference in Tokyo.
Of course, Hollywood movies are still the region's biggest box-office draw, and U.S. junk culture is omnipresent. But despite the marketing muscle of American record companies and film studios, there is an inevitable cultural shortfall--Asians may watch the American shows, but the bronzed, buffed bodies of Baywatch are not something that most Asian teens could (or even would) aspire to. Nor are the family values of U.S. rap artists entirely consonant with the Asian values of the region's high school students. Many find it easier to relate to Japanese pop acts like Puffy, the sylph-like duet consisting of Ami, 25, and Yumi, 24, who have been actively courting the Asian market with their girl-next-door looks. Puffy performed at sold-out concerts in Taiwan and Hong Kong last September. In Taiwan they even sang their hit single in Mandarin, and they have released a separate video and VCD for Chinese-speaking fans.
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THIS WEEK'S TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Young Japan Home
The Me Generation:
The country's privileged youth are struggling to define what they want. Their efforts--both frivolous and fundamental--are already beginning to transform the culture
Day in the Life:
What a 17-year-old girl does--and buys
Culture Club:
Tokyo has taken over as the source of what's hip and happening for the rest of East Asia
Sound Factory:
An Okinawa school turns out stars
Talk Talk:
What teens are chatting about online
Not Playing Ball:
A fresh generation is starting to shake up the hidebound world of Japanese baseball
Outside the Box:
Breaking the education straitjacket
Viewpoint:
Actress Youki Kudoh says respect the old ways
Viewpoint:
Parents should examine their own ethics
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