NGG note: Douglas McGray is getting a lot, perhaps way too much, print for his thesis about GNC (that's Gross National Cool) and today at a symposium in Tokyo he delivered a speech titled, "Cool Japan: Japan's Cultural Power." We have not seen any links to stories about his speech yet, but, even better, we present to you a transcript what he said:
As the introduction said, I wrote an article called Japan's Gross National Cool for Foreign Policy. (NGG note: also translated into Japanese by Chuo Koron).
One of the first questions that most people ask me is what made me write the article. It came down to reading a newspaper, interestingly enough. When I read the business section of the newspaper, I would read all of these very serious, pessimistic articles about politics and the economy, about the need for reform. They also write all sorts of economic indicators that suggested that things were difficult. There was nothing good to write about, overly pessimistic.
But then when you would read the sections of the newspaper that were supposed to be lighter, the style sections, the culture sections, it would seem like every couple of weeks there would be another article about some new trend coming out of Japan, whether it was something in technology, or something in the arts, something in high culture, something in pop culture, they didn't necessarily relate to each other and the stories didn't to try to relate them to each other but they happened so often and they posed such a contrast to the stories that I would see in the sections of the paper that were supposed to cover serious international issues that I set out to try and look at this paradox.
When I got here, and I should say I didn't set out to write an article about Japanese culture in Japan because as a journalist and a generalist, I wouldn't be in any position to do that. What I tried to do was take the Japan that I saw outside Japan and then follow it back to meet with some of the producers of this culture.
When I talked to them, a number of them were really skeptical about my approach. They wondered why I wanted to write about Japanese culture abroad. Most of the interviews that I had particularly in the first month, they all recommended that I talk about foreign culture in Japan. They thought that would be a much more interesting article.
But then there are so many examples of this boom in Japanese culture that I have seen abroad in the last 10 years, particularly recently. One of the first things that I did when I came to Japan was to go see Kill Bill at Roppongi Hills after a journalist asked me about it when I first got here and I admitted I hadn't seen it yet. And I was glad that it was one of the first things I saw here because what I saw was two blockbuster American actresses who were struggling to speak Japanese for about 30 minutes of the movie, which is definitely something new. I think American audiences are used to seeing foreign stars come and to learn English to be in American movies. But seeing American actors forced to learn Japanese for this film, I thought was something interesting.
Then also 20 minutes in the movie is anime produced by the great anime production house "Production IG." Talking with them, I found out something that you may know from reading the papers about it. But it's Quentin Tarantino, the director, asked over and over again for Production IG's assistance on the movie and it was only after many requests that they agreed to do the segment.
You can see influences of anime on countless other films. The French music group Daft Punk recently commissioned an album-linked anime to go with their new album. Miyazaki-san won the Oscar for best anime. Kids' cartoons on TV are the top-rated programs on prime time for kids' viewing. Production IG is even making its first Japanese anime directly for the U.S. audience, which they are going to do entirely in Japan, and write the script in Japanese. Only it will go to the U.S. first and it will be translated into English and dubbed into English straight away.
But it goes far beyond animation. The New York Times called Tokyo the real international capital of fashion. A major foundation study on the boom in Japanese art in the 1990s found a number of galleries representing Japanese artists in New York. The auction prices that works were selling for were both going straight up the chart. Takashi Murakami may be the most famous example, but he is only one of many. You see it also in architecture and design.
Sushi is a pretty funny example. Not too long ago, it was assumed in Japan that foreigners would never like sushi. Now in the grocery store down the street from me, which has very little foreign food at all aside from the stuff that has been standard for a long time. It's a pretty bad grocery store but they still manage to have a sushi counter. You can buy sushi in baseball stadiums and airports.
Of course, I could talk for a long time about Sony PlayStation as anybody with kids anywhere in big cities knows.
What's particularly interesting about this is that it's not simply a case of marketing, which is what sometimes is assumed when you have a wealthy country that is sending its culture abroad. When I was here, I tried to schedule an interview with the record label Avex because I was interested in the number of pop groups they represented and their representation on the charts across Asia. And they didn't want to schedule an interview because they felt that their international presence, their international marketing strategy wasn't fully developed yet to the point that they wanted to talk about it, which I thought was incredible given the fact that they were dominating foreign radio in many countries.
It's the same with publishers of style magazines. They put out Cutie, Spring, Sweet and some others. He said they don't have any foreign editions and they don't really have any concrete foreign distribution plans. But at the same time, a few days after his magazines hit the newsstands here, he doesn't know quite how it happens but they show up on newsstands in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea and all across Asia.
What's interesting about this is that sometimes the Japanese culture that travels is authentic. It's the real thing, the original. And sometimes maybe you'd call it a corrupted version, maybe you'd call it a changed version. But what's interesting about that is it actually makes it a lot like American culture abroad, which people around the world have gotten used to in the last decades.
Authenticity is not so important. What's important in both cases is this idea of national cool. Even if the individual elements get lost a bit in translation, that idea carries through.
So I coined the term gross national cool for this article. There are a couple of meanings of cool. You can look at it as an insider thing, something only a few people know about, its elite producers influencing other elite producers. You can define it as mass culture. You have millions of people consuming something that's very popular. I didn't see the need to distinguish between the two because it struck me that Japan had both. They both add up to a power to fascinate. And that's the reason that I chose the title, this power to fascinate has the effect of turning the world's head, has the effect of calling attention. That has not just value, but I think it does have power.
If you look at the reasons why there were some factors that I found that seemed to account for it, one is the overall ups and downs of the economy. It didn't seem to have that much to do with whether culture spread or not. Strength in those few particular areas seemed more important. One was the marketing focus. Sony Vaio's offices in San Diego, California, told me that even though they could do simultaneous launches of their new technology here and there, they tend to roll things out in Japan first because the Japanese consumers, they find, are willing to try things quicker and it lets it be kind of like a lab. The result of that is that a lot of American consumers tend to have the idea, just this vague sense, that when it comes to new electronics, Japan probably has them a few months earlier.
Another one is that demand for luxury goods remained fairly steady through the recession. This is a point that a number of sociologists here have pointed out to me. Louis Vuitton in the 1990s made more money in Japan than anywhere else in the world, which isn't something you'd think of as happening during a recession.
The strength of youth consumption is also strong. For whatever reason, youth consumption has not been extraordinarily affected by the recession. Youth are globally networked and youth culture tends to spread, which means that has a tremendous impact outside Japan.
And when you start looking at these things together, this idea of early adoption, youth culture, luxury goods, you start to be able to string together something that while not totally coherent, adds up to something powerful that is capable of spreading.
There is even some benefit in a recession. It's interesting to compare it to the punk movement in the late 1970s in England. A time of recession there, where they had an enormous cultural impact on fashion, art and music. It lasted for 20 years.
People I talked to here in the arts pointed out that a number of designers that were setting up small design firms, a number of people that were breaking off the career track and starting independent record labels, deejays, artists, things that bigger companies are beginning to pick up on and something which might have been enabled by the fact that the traditional career track had been a little bit discredited, a little bit weakened.
The most important is that "open culture" tends to spread. And what I mean by open culture is that if you look at the global age, the culture that tends to spread often is culture that pulls elements from other cultures and mixes them together. It's very true of American culture. It's been that way for ages because of immigration. It's true of a lot of other culture. It's something that you find Japan was at a little bit earlier than possibly the rest of the world.
If you take a look at the show Iron Chef, which has been very popular outside Japan, the creator told me he was combining the esthetics of a fighting video game with the visuals of an American kitchen from the sitcoms, the comedies he watched growing up. I think it's particularly important that the food isn't strictly traditionally Japanese, although it does tend to circle back to traditional Japanese themes.
The question comes up then if the culture is fused is it still Japanese. One of the more interesting discussions I had on this point was with the folks at Sanrio, the creators of Kitty-chan. They said that Kitty-chan was originally created to be from London, and that her last name was actually White. She was made to be foreign because they thought that would help her sell in Japan. In the early days of bringing her to the U.S., they customized it for the U.S. market. They made lots of tiny changes, colors, things like that that they felt would make it appeal more to Americans.
Over time though they stopped doing that and they stopped doing that because they had to. They tried to customize for the Taiwan market, which is one of their strongest. They put Kitty-chan in local surroundings, clothes and settings that Taiwanese buyers would recognize. And they sat on the shelves because this British cat was not authentically Japanese any more. Even in the U.S., they stopped making the separate demands. It became one design that they would send everywhere.
Whole Spectrum
If you look at the flip side, you get something like sumo. Sumo, which has been culturally set up in such a way, between the way that wrestlers come and train and the fact that there is a small sumo museum, that there is only very small promotion, that the sumo association only hold matches abroad when they are invited. It's a stark contrast to what you see from the approach of say, something like the National Basketball Association or baseball.
What happens though is that even though there is a quota of 40 foreign wrestlers maximum in Japan, they've never had had to impose the quota because it has never gone that high despite all the pressures to come up with bigger and stronger athletes. Certainly, there has been an influx from Mongolia but it has never gotten to the point where they've had to actually be protectionist.
Japanese cool is really the result of globalization and you look around and you can find similar cases with Hong Kong cinema, Latin American soap operas, which are some of the more popular programs in Africa and Asia.
But what's different about Japan, what makes it a particularly interesting case in this is that you see the whole spectrum of culture represented, not the whole spectrum of Japanese culture, but you see things like art, design, architecture, pop culture, music, fashion, technology. You see elements of this represented abroad and it adds up to something powerful.
So what does that all mean? There was a Harvard professor who a few years ago wrote about clusters. The idea was that a region gets known for producing a particular product. This is clearly something more than that. I wouldn't say that somebody plays video games and then wants to eat sushi as a result. But there is this idea that new interesting things are coming from Japan and that speeds the transmission of other new, interesting things in the broadest sense.
And there is a value in this. A Harvard dean, Joseph Nye, coined the term "soft power." He wrote there is an element of triviality in fad and popular behavior but it is also true that a country that stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its messages across and affect the preferences of others.
To look at a couple things really quickly, which we'll get to more in some of the discussion. What's the economic value of cultural influence? This is something I get asked a lot.
Rise of 'Creative Class'
One institute suggested that cultural exports grew 300% in the 1990s, but it becomes difficult to quantify because what really counts as a cultural product? Technology wouldn't count as a cultural product but then technology in recent years has become less about manufacturing. It's as much about cool as it is about innovation especially with the spread of design into the everyday. Time and Newsweek in the U.S. have both done cover stories about how Americans now expect a good design. That is something that Japanese have expected for a long time.
What about fine art or architecture? They are cultural output, cultural products but it's not big business. But there was an economist who wrote this book recently, The Rise of the Creative Class, a guy named Richard Florida. He found that people in innovative fields tend to be drawn to cities in the U.S. that produced culture, that've got a reputation for that. I think as you see more and more of mobility in labor, particularly culture-producing elites and skilled labor. Something like that you begin to see globally, that culture innovators and innovators in general are drawn to places that are dynamic in culture.
One concrete area that might seem to benefit is tourism. The national tourism promotion agency, their literature in English talks exclusively about traditional culture, which is nice but it is an incomplete picture. I don't totally recognize it from the Japan that I see when I travel here because it's only half of the story.
You can see examples of political power, too, but what I really want to focus on is some of the social and cultural value. I came to Japan expecting to find one paradox. And that was why was culture was so strong when the economy and politics were more in flux? Instead I found another, that Japan's openness to foreign influences in contemporary culture may actually help to keep its cultural identity strong, even traditional identity.
You compare it to France where they impose strict quotas on national broadcasting on TV and subsidize the cinema. It's hard to find that programming outside of France. And France still feels like it is fighting a losing battle. All that protectionism doesn't make them feel secure.
When you look, for instance, at Korea, when South Korea lifted its official ban on Japanese culture, the first thing that happened was not that Japanese culture flooded South Korea but you began to see a huge influx of Korean culture in Japan.
I had an interview with a playwright, Tadashi Suzuki. He said that insisting on this pure traditional culture becomes kind of like mummifying it. It's something you can unwrap every once in a while and look at but it's not alive any more. It's not growing. Japan I think maintains a healthy balance between a vibrant, contemporary culture and a more private, traditional culture and that contemporary culture can even serve to promote traditional culture. In Iowa recently in the middle of the U.S., a foundation head went to meet with a group of 150 high school students, 16-, 17-year-olds studying the Japanese language and asked them, just out of curiosity, how many of them started studying Japanese because of anime or manga. Three-quarters of the class raised their hands.
A filmmaker friend of mine, who plays in an indie rock band, who has never been to Japan and doesn't study Japanese, last year covered his living room in tatami and when he bought his first house a few weeks ago, the first thing he did was check out books at the library on Japanese gardens. I think this is only just beginning. The big question for me is what does it mean for Japan when you look particularly at youth who are growing up with Japanese culture in a way no generations before in the U.S. and many other countries has. What does that mean for Japan 20 years from now when these kids grow up? I think that is an open question and an interesting one. If I have given more questions than answers, that's because I'm a journalist. I hope the rest of the discussions will provide more answers and I'm interested to hear them. Thank you.
2003.11.19
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