Japanese youth culture as a hot export product
Jun 19th, 2009 by Ad Blankestijn
As the Japan Times informs us, three female “ambassadors of cute” appointed by the Foreign Ministry have started traveling abroad to introduce Japanese pop culture to young people overseas.
Is this a good thing? Will people still take Japan serious when they are flooded with manga, cosplay and “kawaii” characters? Isn’t this degrading the whole of Japanese culture?
[Photo from Flickr Photostream of chanchan222]
No, I don’t think so. In the first place, there is not one monolithic thing called “Japanese culture,” but rather nowadays there are various cultures in diversifying Japan. Anime, manga and cosplay are part of “Japanese youth culture” and have proven surprisingly popular with young people around the world. In the 1960s youth culture came from the U.K. (Beatles etc), now it comes for a large part from Japan.
Different from whether we like the contents of that culture, I think in itself that is good: economically (Japan needs to shift more to exporting services and “soft” products rather than only “hard” industrial products), but also for Japan’s image. It is better to have an “anime” or even “kawaii” image than no image at all. So it is a good idea of the Japanese government to sponsor this.
Moreover, the young persons who now enjoy manga, will often continue later as serious students of other “Japanese cultures” – I know someone from The Netherlands who studied Japanese because of an initial interest in manga and now is at a Japanese university doing research in serious modern literature… In other words, thanks to the manga/anime boom there is more favorable interest in Japan, which is “capital” for the future and does not hurt Japanese credibility.
[Photo from Flickr Photostream of marimoon]
A final point: also with my work of exporting sake, I notice that the “cool” image that anime etc are giving to Japan helps “sell” other Japanese cultures, such as Japanese food culture / haute cuisine. Or in other words, thanks to manga etc. sake in the U.S. and Europe has a “cool” image (the manga image transferred to other Japanese cultures), very different from in Japan itself where due to the flooding of the market with cheap stuff to which alcohol has been added by the big breweries, sake is often (wrongly!) seen as “non-cool” and something only for older men.
P.S. The easy acceptance abroad of anime and manga with their different characters and story lines is by the way an interesting intercultural phenomenon…
I’m writing to you let you know about our current exhibition:
The power of dogu: ceramic figures from ancient Japan, held in Room 91, at the British Museum from 10 September – 22 November 2009.
It’s a free exhibition of the most important dogu figurines from all over Japan, and the first time that they have been seen outside of Japan. This exhibition highlights the beauty and power of remarkable ceramic figures known as dogu, mysterious masterpieces that were produced in great numbers in prehistoric Japan.
To accompany this show there will be a contemporary exhibition in Room 3 of the BM 5 November – 3 January 2010 entitled Manga: Professor Munakata’s British Museum adventure. Leading Japanese manga artist Hoshino Yukinobu (b. 1954) will use the British Museum and its collections to create a new manga in which his popular character Prof. Munakata has adventures at the Museum. He has featured many dogu in his popular manga series, so this exhibition, which is timed to coincide with the Comica festival organized by Paul Gravett, shows the link between dogu and contemporary culture.
Thank you for informing us about these interesting exhibitions!