'If it's Japanese, the world wants it'

Sushi restaurants, ikebana and tea-ceremony schools are becoming popular all over... Japan is finding a new place in the world as its culture becomes its biggest export


In the supercharged air of Shibuya, Tokyo's fiercely hip teen quarter, music videos by Japanese pop stars topping the charts throughout Asia boom from towering, outdoor liquid-crystal display screens. The streets below are clogged with hordes of young women wearing the Japanese schoolgirl look — makeup, stockings and plaid miniskirts — styled by international fashion magazines.

Under a galaxy of neon, cubicle-sized stores sell trendy trinkets, including phone mascots — cute characters first dangled off cell phones here years ago, now common in Seoul and Hong Kong and seen in Sydney, New York and Paris.

In the cacophony of cool, foreigners mingle with streams of Japanese descending by a cave-like hole into the entrance of Mandarake, the world's largest Japanese manga — comics — and anime department store. They buy original celluloids, or cels, from Japanese animation, most at about $30 each, along with comic books, action figures, posters and CDs.

Company President Masuzo Furukawa, whose office is entered through an anime-like tube with round, orange electronic doors, is direct about the reason: "If it's Japanese, the world wants it. Japan is hot.''

Even as this country of 127 million has lost its status as a global economic superpower and the national confidence has been sapped by a 13-year economic slump, Japan is reinventing itself — this time as the coolest nation on Earth.

Worldwide obsession

"Japan is finding a new place in the world, and new benefits, through the worldwide obsession with its culture — especially pop culture,'' said Tsutomu Sugiura, director of the Marubeni Research Institute. "The global embrace of things Japanese has given us a new kind of influence, different than what Japan once had, but influence nonetheless.''

A new crop of internationally famous architects have led Japan's emergence as a force in international design. Takashi Murakami, whose "superflat'' art movement has earned him the reputation as a new Andy Warhol, inaugurated a whimsical, high-profile, anime-like sculpture at Rockefeller Center this autumn. His playful works on canvas, scooped up mainly by foreign buyers, have fetched prices near $600,000 at New York art auctions. Louis Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs collaborated with Murakami to create a series of Vuitton handbags.

Rei Kawakubo, who established Comme des Garcons, and the houses of Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto have for years been at the top of international fashion. But they now hold court alongside younger Japanese designers such as Jun Takahashi of the Undercover label, dubbed by several leading fashion editors as the hottest breakout designer in years.

Japan's culture of kawaii, or cute, epitomised by playful designs in ice cream colours such as cherry-blossom pink and tea green, is increasingly as recognisable around the world as Americana. France's Pierre Herme, the Paris dessert chef and retailer, picked kawaii as the theme for his autumn/winter 2003 designs.

Sushi, once an urban trend, has become as globally ubiquitous as the Big Mac. Brazil's Veja magazine reported recently that there are now more sushi restaurants than Brazilian barbeques in Sao Paulo, South America's largest city. And in Paris, on the Rue de la Gaite, the entire street has filled with sushi restaurants over just the past two years, said Patrice Jorland, cultural attache at the French Embassy in Tokyo.

Even traditional Japanese culture, which long ago influenced the French Impressionists and furniture design in Europe, is reaching farther afield. A school of ikebana, Japanese flower arranging, recently opened in South Africa, and ikebana conventions have been held in Zimbabwe and Taiwan. And a tea-ceremony school recently opened in Nova Scotia.

Original anime cels

Inside the anime department store, Andy, a 42-year-old from London, was buying dozens of original anime cels — paintings on transparent plastic sheets used to create an animation — for his own collection and resale at home. One cel frame depicted a doe-eyed young man who looked like a character from "G-Force,'' a Japanese cartoon popular in the United States during the 1980s. "Forget it; this character is much newer,'' he said. "If that were really 'G-Force,' it would be vintage. We're talking eight times the price, more, back in London.''

Lighter-fare manga and anime franchises such as Pokemon, translated into more than 30 languages and available in 65 countries, are still hugely popular and contributing to the global fascination with Japan's youth culture. But around the world, Japan is not just about Hello Kitty anymore. Shonen Jump, a leading Japanese comic, was launched in the US last year and has reached a monthly circulation of 540,000. Video games with Japanese themes, such as Tenchu and The Way of the Samurai, rank among the hottest sellers worldwide.

"There are millions of kids around the world listening to the Japanese language, when they play a video game,'' said Noriyuki Asakura, a former "J-pop'' star who composes musical scores for Sony PlayStation video games.

The mania has also touched Hollywood. Spoken partly in Japanese and with a long anime sequence, Quentin Tarantino's hit Kill Bill incorporates Japan's ancient traditions and Tokyo's modern pop culture in an homage to Japanese coolness. Tom Cruise joined a host of celebrated Japanese actors in the new epic The Last Samurai. And the costumes and atmosphere of the recently concluded Matrix series were rooted primarily in Japanese manga.

A record three million people around the world are now studying the Japanese language, compared with only 127,000 in 1997, according to the Japan Foundation and Marubeni Research Institute.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service