Two new articles in Business Week look at the "Cool Japan" trend that Douglas McGray outlined famously in Foreign Policy: Japan's Gross National Cool.
Anime, manga, Iron Chef, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Tokion, TokyoPop, drifting, fan subbing, Toyota (Scion in the US), Giant Robot, Hello Kitty, etc.
There is definitely a trend towards more cultural export, which is critically important as manufacturing moves quickly to China. That said, the cultural export goods in Japan are not respected for what they are worth world-wide. There's arbitrage opportunities galore here.
I think a key question is: at what point does cultural creation in Japan become cost-non-competitive? That point may be sooner than we might imagine.
A few tidbits:
- 3M non-Japanese studying Japanese vs 1M in 1990 (driven by anime)
- Japan's cultural exports = $15 billion in 2002, up from $5 billion in 1992
- Murakami-designed LVMH bags are $300M/year (HOLY SH!T)
- Pontiac GTO drift car (good idea!)
- Americans practicing martial arts: 8% increase, to 6.9 million in 5 years (not so relevant a statistic, imo)
Is Japanese Style Taking Over The World? [businessweek.com]
Tidbits from this article:
- Jlist.com is a $4M/year business (could easily be 10X that with more marketing)
- PopCultureShock
- MangaBits.com
- est. "500 established fansubbing groups have 2,500 members" (This is terrifically interesting stuff: how the Internet has enabled fansubbing. Someone's gotta do an in-depth look at how this works. The teamwork and competitiveness of the fansubbers are not to be discounted.)
- "anime fan base itself has exploded to somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 active enthusiasts" (and many more who are not "active" per se but would pay to see/read good manga/anime content)
BW Online Extra: A Tsunami of Japanese Pop Culture [businessweek.com]
Backlinks from my archives include:
Gen Kanai weblog: Cool Japan symposium
Gen Kanai weblog: Is Japan Cool?
Gen Kanai weblog: Japan's Empire of Cool
Remember William Gibson's Neuromancer, peppered with Japanese references like the Ono-Sendai consoles? Or Marty McFly in "Back to the Future" informing a 1955 vintage Doc that "all the best stuff comes from Japan"? Nothing new here. In the late 19th century, there was a big craze in Europe for all things Japanese, and expatriate artists like Foujita in France were lionized.
A better question would be, since Japan has a rich and ancient history, is the world's second largest economy, and has the second largest population in the OECD, how come the Japanese don't have a proportionate cultural influence on other countries, as opposed to, say, France, England or Italy, which each have less than half the population or GDP?