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Japan’s economic expansion continued in the 1980s, but its benefits were selective, serving those who fit the myth of homogeneity while consigning others to the margins. In the ’90s, the economic bubble burst and Japan faced a number of serious crises, including a devastating earthquake in Kobe, domestic terrorism by a religious group, and the demographic threat of a rapidly aging society. Around the same time, however, Japanese popular culture began to attract acclaim and large, new audiences around the globe. Japan’s rising influence—in arenas ranging from pop music to consumer electronics, from architecture to fashion, and from animation to cuisine—makes it look more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the ’80s, when it was an economic superpower, or the late ’30s, when it was a major military and imperialist power.
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
During the ’80s, the Japanese economy continued to expand, especially among service industries such as banking, insurance, mass media, and real estate, which collectively employed over 60 percent of the population. Manufacturing, especially the automotive and electronics industries, also continued to prosper. Among the nation’s twenty-five largest corporations, fourteen were in those two industries. Japan became the world’s top producer of automobiles in 1980; between 1974 and 1989, production nearly doubled, from seven to thirteen million vehicles. Forty percent of these were exported to U.S. and European markets, damaging the sales of their domestic auto manufacturers. With the dollar strong in the early ’80s, Americans snapped up Japanese cars and electronics, resulting in a chronic trade imbalance, which grew from $49 billion to $87 billion between 1985 and 1987. U.S. protectionists began to call for import restrictions to defend manufacturers against Japanese competition. As trade friction mounted, Japanese firms such as Toyota, Nissan, and Honda began to invest in factory construction in the United States and other countries to avoid trade barriers. Electrical equipment makers produced a large spectrum of goods, from industrial machinery to office equipment and household goods. In the late ’70s, many successfully expanded their product lines to include computers and related equipment. They, too, began to construct many of their factories abroad to avoid market restrictions and take advantage of lower labor costs.
In the retail sector, convenience stores and superstores began to appear across the country, offering consumers shopping choices midway between the small neighborhood shop and the luxurious urban department store. Convenience stores (konbini), including Seven-Eleven, Lawson, and Family Mart, are generally open 24/7 and always nearby. They offer a wide range of food and drink beyond simple snack foods and Cup Noodle, including rice balls (onigiri), sandwiches, and bento meals, replenished up to nine times per day through the use of sophisticated computer inventory systems. Most konbini also sell beer, wine, sake, and whiskey; stock an assortment of daily essentials such as batteries, shampoo, and umbrellas; and offer racks of magazines and manga for customers to peruse. Today they also offer services such as tickets for movies, concerts, and other events; bill payment; photo printing; and copier/fax service. Life without konbini is simply unimaginable in contemporary Japan. Superstores such as Seiyū, Jusco, and Don Quijote are similar to Target or Walmart in the United States, selling a wide range of economically priced groceries, clothing, household furniture and appliances, and other goods. Their rapid growth, however, did not affect the more luxurious department stores or high-end boutiques, because as consumers prospered they developed an appetite for international designer brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Gucci. Young consumers sought trendy fashions, household décor, and goods that supported their hobbies at stores that marketed a lifestyle “brand,” such as Muji, Loft, and Tōkyū Hands.
In short, the ’80s were a time of conspicuous consumption and differentiation of goods and services for niche markets. Newly affluent consumers indulged in luxury cars, expensive golf-club memberships, hundred-dollar melons, and sake flecked with real gold. Tanaka Yasuo’s 1980 novel Nantonaku kurisutaru (Somehow, Crystal) captured the consumer-centered lifestyles and materialistic values of the younger generations—called the “crystal” life by the author—by depicting two weeks in the life of a college student, celebrating her unrestrained consumption. Thin on plot, it instead provided a guide to the most desirable brands and fashions and the most chic restaurants and cafés. The narrator cherishes her “snobbery” and “affectation,” demonstrated through acts like carrying a Courrèges shopping bag or eating her afternoon cake in a café “French style, with white wine” rather than espresso. The message of the book is ambivalent. On one hand, it seems to critique consumption as a source of identity. One character comments, “I guess in the end you have to say that we have no resistance to brand names. Our generation. Maybe it’s not just our generation, maybe it’s all of Japan.”1 On the other hand, the book offers several hundred detailed notes recommending brand-name goods and restaurants. It quickly sold eight hundred thousand copies and became a sensation in the media, setting off debates over changing social values.
FIGURE 72. Typical variety of bento-style meals offered at a konbini. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Awash in capital, companies also made ostentatious purchases. In 1987, a Japanese insurance company bought Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for $39.9 million, then the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Sony and Matsushita each spent billions to acquire their own Hollywood studios, Columbia Pictures and MCA Entertainment. Other Japanese firms took control of Rockefeller Center, CBS Records, and Pebble Beach golf course, site of the U.S. Open. The U.S. media reported on these acquisitions in alarmist tones, as if they constituted a Japanese invasion, but in fact, European countries like the United Kingdom and Holland owned many more U.S. companies and real estate.
Affluence was accompanied by a new surge of nationalism—pride in a prosperous nation that had risen from the ashes of defeat to once again challenge Western nations. Some authors began to credit Japan’s accomplishments to unique racial and cultural characteristics in a genre of writing known as Nihonjinron, or reflections on Japaneseness. Many works asserted that Western customs were “hard” and “dry,” so that Westerners were unconnected, like grains of sand; whereas Japanese ways were “wet” and “soft,” so that members of society stuck together like cooked rice. During the occupation, qualities such as groupism and social indulgence were deemed negative and feudal, but they were now reevaluated positively as the very values that made Japan affluent and superior to other nations. Academic versions of Nihonjinron were popularized by psychologist Doi Takeo, who asserted that Japanese society was built on indulgence of or dependence on others (amae), rooted in mother-child relationships; and by Tokyo University economist Murakami Yasusuke, who claimed that Japan’s corporate success was rooted in the samurai family structure, a collectivist rather than individualist model that emphasized relationships and organizational skills. Pseudoscientific works of Nihonjinron sometimes made absurd claims, such as that Japanese bees are more communal than non-Japanese bees or that Japanese physiology is different from that of other humans and so Japanese cannot digest foreign beef or use birth control pills.
New national confidence was pointedly expressed by LDP politician Ishihara Shintarō, later the governor of Tokyo, in the 1989 essay “The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First among Equals.” The title referred to the widely felt sense that the Japanese government kowtowed too much to the United States and needed to take a more independent stance in both foreign affairs and business. The essay criticized America’s prejudice and predicted its decline while outlining what Japan must do in order to be the mainspring of the new world order, with claims like the following: “Americans, with their scant few centuries of history, have never experienced the transition from one major historical period to another. They emerged as the premier world power only decades ago, toward the end of the modern era. That Japan, an Oriental country, is about to supplant them in some major fields is what annoys the Americans so much.”2 This type of rhetoric was viewed by many Americans as arrogant, humiliating, and frighteningly reminiscent of Japan’s imperialist days. Offended Americans did not have to worry long, however, because Japan’s bubble economy and new confidence were soon to burst.
The death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 portended a decade of decline and disaster. The reign of the Shōwa emperor, the longest in Japan’s recorded history, had witnessed remarkable highs and lows. Hirohito ascended the throne in 1926 as Japan began to flex its military muscle, soon becoming capable of challenging the United States. Twenty years later, the nation was decimated and occupied militarily for the first time in its history; its future seemed bleak. But within a few decades Japan had recovered and become a leading economic power, one of the most advanced nations in the world. The emperor died after months of serious illness, during which the mass media reported minute details of his daily health and treatments in somber, honorific language. Following his death, TV networks suspended regular programming for three days to facilitate national mourning. The emperor’s death sparked widespread public reflection on the question of his war responsibility and on the value of the imperial institution. His son and successor, Crown Prince Akihito, chose Heisei for the title of his reign, a classical term expressing hope for peace in the world. During his first years as monarch, however, Japan experienced political and economic turmoil as it fell into recession and the LDP lost power for the first time, while the collapse of the Soviet Union altered the Cold War landscape that had supported its American-led prosperity.
The fall into recession is often described as the “bursting of the bubble.” Risky bank loans had financed much of the domestic and overseas investments of the ’80s. Speculation in land and real estate had resulted in unbelievably inflated values: the grounds of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo, occupying under three square miles, was worth more on paper than all of the real estate in California; the aggregate value of land in Japan was 50 percent greater than the value of all the land in the rest of the world. To reign in the overheated economy, the government raised interest rates in 1990, resulting in a credit crunch. When loans came due, many speculators could neither make repayments nor sell their rapidly deflating assets. The real estate market collapsed, wiping out a trillion dollars’ worth of paper assets. The Nikkei stock index plummeted by over 80 percent and has never fully recovered. Corporate bankruptcies reached record rates and domestic consumption crashed as families lost their nest eggs. To help restore financial stability, major banks received $600 billion of taxpayer bailout.
In 1995 two national disasters, one natural and one man-made, compounded economic woes. On January 17, the Great Hanshin Earthquake razed a third of the city of Kobe, including much of its central business district. The quake, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale, claimed over 6,200 lives and caused over $100 billion in damage, the equivalent of 2.5 percent of the national gross domestic product. Highways collapsed and the port and rail links were destroyed, making access difficult for emergency responders. Over 320,000 residents were forced to live in temporary evacuation shelters, some for four or more years. Early-warning systems had failed to predict the quake, and “earthquake-proof” construction techniques came to naught. Furthermore, national government agencies were slow to respond to emergency needs and even refused offers of aid from other nations. Individuals, non-governmental organizations, and corporations—in the absence of effective relief from the state—mobilized to provide aid to local residents. To the embarrassment of the government, a yakuza syndicate headquartered in Kobe was among the first groups to offer food and water to victims. New religions sent thousands of volunteers who set up local relief centers, and right-wing political activists (uyoku dantai) sponsored soup lines. The Japanese mass media reported selectively on the quake’s aftermath, focusing on positive stories of cooperation and perseverance among victims and ignoring the looting and violence that accompanied the massive disaster. The media’s censored, wishful approach to reporting disasters would be repeated in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and nuclear disaster.
On March 20, 1995, while the nation was still reeling from the quake, a new religion called Aum Shinrikyō committed a heinous act of domestic terrorism, releasing deadly sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system. Twelve people died and over 5,500 required hospitalization. Aum’s founder and guru, Asahara Shōkō (b. 1955), initially established the group as a meditation and yoga circle. Members entering the community gave up all outside ties and engaged in harsh ascetic practices. Aum arose with a wave of other new religions in the 1980s that, like their predecessors, were centered on charismatic leaders and often stressed spiritual healing. In keeping with the mood of the bubble economy, several new groups claimed the ability to make followers wealthy. Many of them mounted spectacular events and festivals to gain mass media attention and used manga and anime as a recruitment tool to reach new followers. Earlier new religions had combined beliefs and practices from a variety of religions, including Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, and Christianity. But many of these “new age” groups went even further, incorporating folk beliefs about ghosts and wandering spirits along with UFOs and the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis. Aum mixed Hinduism and Tibetan Tantra into its teachings.
Asahara first gained public notoriety in 1985 when a magazine photograph appeared to capture him floating in midair in the lotus position. Aum developed a series of profitable businesses, including ramen shops, a telephone dating club, a babysitting service, and computer stores, financed and staffed at no cost by members. The group launched a political party in 1990, attempting to elect twenty-five candidates, including Asahara. In its bizarre campaign, followers danced and chanted while wearing masks of the guru or the Hindu elephant deity Ganesha. They were widely mocked in the media, and none of the Aum candidates prevailed. Finding the path to political power blocked, Asahara turned increasingly to messages of violence, preaching of a coming Armageddon. The group began amassing arms and developing chemical and biological weapons in preparation. Police planned a raid on Aum headquarters after investigating the death of an accountant murdered by Aum for trying to help his sister flee the cult. The sarin gas attack was likely launched to forestall the raid. In the decade following the attack, 189 Aum members were brought to trial and eleven sentenced to death, including Asahara, although executions have been held up by legal complications. At its peak, Aum had some forty thousand members, the vast majority of whom had no knowledge of its violent activities. Most attempted to return to normal life, but over a thousand continued to live and practice the religion in insular Aum compounds.
News of the Aum attack and subsequent coverage of the group’s nefarious activities dominated the mass media for months. The public was especially shocked to learn that Asahara’s top lieutenants included many graduates of top universities, who might have enjoyed successful careers elsewhere but chose to join a radical cult instead. Endless essays and TV roundtable discussions obsessed over where “Japan” had gone wrong. Coming on the heels of the recession and earthquake, the events deeply shook society, which had long regarded itself as one of the world’s safest, most stable nations, where disasters and crimes that occurred in other parts of the world never happened. Many called for stricter policing of religious groups. It is important to remember, however, that the Aum incident was an aberration, not attributable to something inherent in Japanese society or in new religious movements. Millennial cults are particularly prone to violence because they often believe that a catastrophic war will result in paradise on earth. Aum’s path to violent crime was due to a combination of Asahara’s paranoia, the weapons-making capabilities of scientists among his leading followers, and the isolation of members, reinforced by spartan communal living.
Demographic change has also created a sense of threat to Japanese society. The population is rapidly shrinking and aging; by 2025, Japan will be the world’s oldest nation, with 36 percent of the populace over the age of sixty-five. The birthrate has declined steeply and continuously since the 1970s, and the population is expected to drop to one hundred million by 2050, when only 1.5 people will be working to support every person over sixty-five. The falling birth rate is due, in part, to women’s growing refusal to marry because they resent and reject the heavy social expectations to act as nurturers and housewives. Many women are reluctant to have offspring because of a relative lack of child-care facilities and support mechanisms for mothers. Furthermore, childbirth is not covered by national health insurance, and the cost of raising children in Japan is very high. Low rates of childbirth are also related to the decline in Japan’s marriage rate, which has fallen steadily for decades and especially steeply since 2000. While 21 percent of Japanese men in their early thirties were unmarried in 2005, this had grown to nearly half of all men in the same age group by 2015. More young women are organizing their lives around the principle that they will remain single by preparing for careers and buying condos for themselves.
The sharp population decrease has dire consequences for the economy: falling production, shrinking consumer markets, soaring taxes, and plummeting savings. The anticipated reduction of the future labor force will drive small and medium-sized businesses that depend on low-wage labor into bankruptcy. To avoid these outcomes, Japan needs to add over half a million workers every year for the next fifty years. Government officials have discussed for decades how to increase the number of workers and limit future tax burdens, but changes will require adjustments to long-standing policies and attitudes in order to allow higher rates of immigration and provide equal opportunities for women and minorities who wish to pursue professional careers.
There is a willing supply of immigrant labor to meet demand, but the government has made it difficult for most foreign individuals to work legally in Japan. Many would-be immigrants arrive as tourists and simply overstay their visas, hoping they won’t be caught. Foreign workers are often employed in the lowest rungs of construction and manufacturing, in very small businesses or doing repetitive factory work. Foreign women from poorer countries often work in the sex trade or as in-home helpers for the elderly. Despite the growing need for labor, immigration is widely resisted because the general public, egged on by the media, believes that migrants are potential criminals threatening their imagined crime-free society. Furthermore, admitting foreign workers threatens to destabilize a society that views itself as racially and culturally homogeneous. With the continuing recession, people blame foreigners for taking jobs, although few Japanese would want the types of work available to immigrants.
Existing minority populations also tend to fill the “dirty, hard, and dangerous” jobs unwanted by middle-class Japanese. Minorities did not equally share in the bounty of the postwar economic miracle. Four percent of the Japanese population can be classified as members of minority groups, but their experiences are often ignored in accounts of postwar affluence. Notions of homogeneous Japaneseness ignore diverse populations such as the burakumin, Ainu, Koreans, Okinawans, and Nikkeijin (i.e., South Americans of Japanese descent who were allowed to immigrate beginning in the 1980s to fill labor needs).
The burakumin, the former outcaste group of the premodern period, are the largest minority group in Japan, numbering around three million individuals, mostly clustered in six thousand communities. Burakumin are not a racial or ethnic minority; it is only their past low-caste status that makes them the target of continued discrimination. A commission in the 1960s found that buraku communities had ghetto-like conditions, often lacking basic public services such as sewers, tap water, streetlights, and fire protection. Educational achievement in these communities was well below the national average, while unemployment rates and welfare cases were significantly above average. Legislation in the ’60s established special funds to improve housing and provide educational opportunities, but various forms of illegal discrimination persist. Major companies require that applicants submit their official household registries, and they eliminate candidates from addresses in known buraku areas. Because of public perception that they are polluted or tainted, few in the minority populations can find jobs in service industries like retail or restaurants. Marriage is also an area of persistent discrimination. Families sometimes hire private detectives to ensure that their children’s fiancés are not from buraku areas.
Koreans form one of the largest ethnic minority populations, with over seven hundred thousand in Japan. Second-, third-, and fourth-generation Korean residents, descended from colonials who resided in Japan before and during World War II, are referred to as zainichi (“stay in Japan”) to differentiate them from contemporary immigrants. With the postwar dismantling of the empire, Koreans who remained in Japan were stripped of Japanese nationality; they had no right to vote, to hold public office, or to be employed as teachers in public schools. Although the majority were born in Japan and speak Japanese as their first or only language, their rights are constrained by their status as resident aliens. Japanese law determines citizenship according to the nationality of one’s parents rather than one’s place of birth. Koreans born in Japan must take formal steps to become naturalized citizens, but many choose not to do so for political reasons. The zainichi population is divided according to loyalties to North or South Korea. North Korean groups are especially active in trying to maintain Korean language and culture, sponsoring over a hundred private schools, including a university—necessary because graduates of Korean high schools are not allowed to take entrance examinations for most Japanese universities.
Zainichi Koreans are rarely employed as unionized or permanent workers in large Japanese firms and are barred from holding government jobs, despite being born and raised in Japan. They are disproportionately represented in the poorly paid service and entertainment industries, in small, non-unionized subcontracting companies, and as unskilled labor for the construction industry. On average, they earn 30 percent less than Japanese working in comparable jobs. In order to avoid such discrimination, many become small-business owners and are particularly known for operating barbecue restaurants, pachinko parlors, and small construction companies. Like some burakumin, some zainichi try to “pass” in Japanese society, changing their names and obscuring their ethnic origins. Since many feel fully Japanese, with no ties to Korea, they are frustrated by continuing discrimination.
The Ainu number twenty-five thousand officially but include up to two hundred thousand persons of Ainu ancestry. They represent the indigenous inhabitants of Ezo, the former name for Hokkaido, whose subsistence as hunter-gatherers began to transform under the Tokugawa shogunate. In the seventeenth century, the Ainu began to trade animal skins and fish products for Japanese tobacco, sake, rice, tools, and other items under disadvantageous terms, leading to a loss of their autonomy and exhaustion of natural resources. By the Meiji period, the Ainu were seriously weakened and unable to resist the state’s demands for assimilation that imperiled their language and culture.
Ainu have never been formally recognized by the state as an indigenous people of Japan and have thus not received financial and social reparations that other industrialized countries have provided to displaced native populations. Like other minority populations, they also tend to work as construction laborers and have a lower educational profile than mainstream Japanese. Beginning in the 1960s, Ainu groups began international dialogues with other oppressed indigenous peoples, including Native Americans and the Eskimo. In recent decades they have begun to seek guaranteed political participation and rights pertaining to education, language, and culture.
Okinawans are the largest ethnic minority, with 1.3 million in the Okinawan islands and three hundred thousand in other parts of Japan. Their native language and culture are distinct from the mainland Japanese. In the early twentieth century, the Okinawan economy was not developed in the same way as the main islands, and many Okinawans emigrated, going to Hawaii, Brazil, the Philippines, and the Nan’yō to earn a living.
Okinawans have paid the highest price for Japan’s postwar security. The U.S. occupation of Okinawa lasted until 1972, twenty years longer than for the rest of Japan. SCAP placed the islands under military governance and neglected the reconstruction being performed on the mainland. As fears of Cold War heightened in the 1950s, the U.S. military saw that some degree of economic and social progress was necessary to gain the popular support of Okinawans, who resented the appropriation of their land to construct foreign military bases. Today, U.S. bases still occupy a fifth of the Okinawan islands and are home to nearly fifty thousand American military troops. Residents complain that the bases cause noise and environmental pollution and hinder development. The commission of crimes by U.S. military personnel has become a controversial and emotional issue. In 1995, three soldiers were convicted of raping and beating a twelve-year-old girl they had abducted off the streets. Nearly eighty-five thousand Okinawans demonstrated in protest, and the case intensified debates about expulsion of U.S. troops. In 2010, a hundred thousand Okinawans (10 percent of the population) gathered to protest the building of a new U.S. base that would damage a fragile ecosystem and likely obliterate the population of the endangered dugong, a cousin of the manatee.
Belief in Japanese racial superiority and the myth of homogeneity is demonstrated by a 1990 government program allowing the legal immigration of South Americans of Japanese ancestry, or Nikkei, in order to help solve labor shortages. Authorities acted on convictions that Nikkei, whose families had lived abroad for generations and who knew neither the Japanese language nor culture very well, could be integrated into society more easily than immigrants from other nations. They created a visa category exclusively for foreign descendants of Japanese emigrants. Many poor farmers had left Japan in the early twentieth century and migrated to South America in search of better opportunities. In fact, the city of São Paulo, Brazil, hosts the second largest population of Japanese in the world, after Tokyo. Over 280,000 Nikkei have immigrated to Japan for work since the program was instituted.
Workers are often recruited in South America through subcontractors, many with yakuza ties. Initially, many Nikkei were hired for manufacturing jobs at large auto and electronics factories. As production increasingly moved to China and other countries with lower labor costs, the jobs available for Nikkei have become less secure and pay lower wages. By 2001, a quarter of Brazilian Nikkei in Japan were unemployed. A variety of social problems arose as South American populations settled in. Immigrant children were often academically unprepared for the Japanese school system, which did not offer the multilingual education they required. Nikkei faced discrimination in obtaining housing and access to public services. In areas with high Nikkei populations some businesses, fearing theft, prohibited their entry or limited the number allowed in shops at one time, prompting lawsuits charging discrimination.
The number of available Nikkei immigrant workers plateaued at a level that could not fill anticipated labor demand. In response, the government created special trainee programs, allowing companies to legally hire Asian workers—mostly from China, the Philippines, and Indonesia—with the goal of eventually sending trained employees back to their home countries to work for Japanese companies there. Trainees are not protected by labor standards and receive “allowances” much lower than market wages. Another category of Asians permitted to immigrate are women who agree to become the brides of rural farmers. As Japanese women are increasingly unwilling to lead the difficult lives of farm wives, local governments in rural areas are sponsoring searches abroad for Asian brides among mostly Chinese, Filipina, Korean, and Thai women.
Other disadvantaged populations in Japan ignored by the notion of a middle-class majority are day laborers and the homeless. Major cities contain pockets of poverty and homelessness, with people sleeping in underground subway passages, living in community encampments and tent cities, or gathering in seedy, skid-row neighborhoods. A huge population of day or seasonal workers continues to undergird Japanese economic strength, constituting a disposable labor force controlled largely by the yakuza. Throughout the 1950s, bankrupt farmers, war veterans, and unemployed coal miners drifted into day-labor enclaves such as the San’ya district in Tokyo. Their numbers increased dramatically in the ’60s with the mammoth construction projects required by the Olympics and the Osaka Expo. The areas housing the laborers contain shabby flophouses where eight or more men share a crowded dorm room. Yakuza labor contractors operate neighborhood prostitution and gambling facilities to drain the meager finances of these men. Health problems are very common in these areas: tuberculosis rates are twice the Japanese average, advanced alcoholism afflicts over 70 percent of the residents, and many also suffer from disabilities or are mentally ill.
Gender Issues in Contemporary Japan
Around half of all women between fifteen and sixty-five engage in paid labor, constituting over 40 percent of the workforce. The Japanese labor system is structured to keep companies competitive by employing women in low-cost, dead-end jobs that receive few benefits. Much of women’s labor is concentrated in service and light industries and is considered “part-time,” a category that covers employees with limited working hours (usually thirty-five per week), those hired for fixed terms, and those who work at full-time, permanent jobs but don’t receive benefits. To cope with chronic labor shortages, Japanese companies recruit women as supplementary, low-wage labor under unstable employment conditions. Deregulation of the labor market in response to the recession has doubled the number of such part-time workers; they now make up around a third of the total workforce. In 1985, Japan passed an Equal Opportunity Law intended to improve women’s employment options. The law advocated equality between men and women in the workplace but was toothless, with no penalties for noncompliance. As a result, few companies substantially altered gendered work practices.
Full-time female employees in white-collar jobs fall into two categories. Career employees have employment paths similar to men, leading to management positions. They’re expected to work overtime without pay, to accept transfers, and to work under the same conditions as their sarariman colleagues. This is a small, elite group of women with degrees from prestigious universities. Only a quarter of Japanese firms have women in these management positions. In large corporations they represent less than 3.5 percent of career-track employees. Among government officials, only 1 percent of employees at top levels are women. The second, larger category is for “ordinary” employees, often known as “OLs” (office ladies), subordinate workers with low wages and low responsibilities who performing administrative and menial tasks for their male coworkers.
Young women receive mixed messages on ideal gender roles from contemporary media, schools, and other state agencies. On one hand, they are socialized and encouraged by official ideology to perform nurturing roles as mothers, dutiful wives, and caretakers of the elderly. Yet they are also bombarded with commercial advertisements urging them to dress in the latest fashions and buy the newest gadgets despite the economic recession. At the same time, popular culture idealizes the schoolgirl, in her uniform and white socks, as a desirable sexual object. “Lolita-complex” (roricon) is the name for the common sexual obsession with young girls encouraged by popular culture and the media. Mass media has heightened teenage girls’ awareness of their sexual desirability and how to use it for financial benefit. Teenage prostitution, known euphemistically as “compensated dating” (enjo kōsai), emerged as a social issue in the mid-1990s. In urban areas like Tokyo, some teenage girls engaged in this activity, seeking out middle-aged men as clients who paid up to $500 per hour. Transactions didn’t always involve sex: some simply consisted of companionship while strolling about town, chatting in coffee shops, and hanging out. But most required an exchange of sexual services for money or expensive gifts. Encounters were often anonymous and random, arranged through widely advertised “telephone clubs.” Teens engaged in the practice out of peer pressure to buy expensive items not covered by their allowances or part-time jobs. They were usually from middle-class homes and not considered rebellious or troubled youths; their clients were usually ordinary sararimen. Some social critics, mostly men, viewed the phenomenon as positive, a rite of passage into adulthood and mature relationships. Others saw it as an example of the shallowness and superficiality of relationships in modern Japanese society.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the mass media has often turned to gendered caricatures to explain the decline in marriage and birth rates. Young women reluctant to marry were dubbed “parasite singles,” while young men with little desire to wed were christened “herbivores” (sōshoku danshi). The majority of single women in their twenties and thirties live in their parents’ homes and are accustomed to spending their disposable income on themselves: traveling, dining out, and buying expensive cosmetics and fashions. Most receive free housekeeping, laundry services, and meals from their parents. They are in no hurry to marry, as they are reluctant to give up their enjoyable lifestyles to become domestic housewives with the responsibility of nurturing everyone but themselves. Media critics and authorities blame Japan’s population problems on the selfishness of these “parasite singles.” Meanwhile, the number of heterosexual men in their twenties and thirties who are reluctant to pursue marriage or even sexual relations are called “herbivores” because, like grass-eating animals, they are uninterested in consuming flesh. The media has characterized herbivore men as obsessed with fashion and grooming and as quiet and submissive, traits associated with femininity. Nevertheless, unmarried men began embracing the term themselves; one 2012 survey of four hundred single men around age thirty reported that a full 75 percent self-identified as herbivores.
In the twenty-first century, the economy is still stagnant and rural towns are being decimated by population decline. Growing numbers of individuals have withdrawn from society, including youths who refuse to leave their homes or interact with others (hikikomori). A general sense of insecurity, anxiety, and hopelessness seems to have become the new norm. On March 11, 2011, such feelings were further exacerbated by the Tohoku earthquake, which triggered powerful tsunami waves that led to the meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima power plant. The combined disasters claimed over sixteen thousand lives and resulted in an estimated $25 trillion in economic damage. The earthquake, with a magnitude of 9.0, was the most powerful tremor recorded in Japanese history. It generated tsunami waves over 130 feet in height that traveled up to six miles inland along a three-hundred-mile span of coastline, wiping out entire towns, such as Minami Sanriku. The damaged nuclear plants emitted 170 times the amount of radiation released by the Hiroshima bomb; over three hundred thousand individuals who lived nearby had to be evacuated from their homes, many with no hope of ever returning. The disaster reinvigorated the dormant antinuclear movement, launching massive protests throughout Japan. Government energy policy had relied heavily on nuclear power, but the post-3/11 public outcry resulted in the shutdown of the majority of nuclear reactors. In attempts to digest the causes and effects of the natural and man-made disasters, social critics called for the people to rouse themselves from apathy and alienation and reconsider Japan’s future. Tens of thousands of volunteers answered the call, traveling to the Tohoku region to help provide humanitarian relief. Some critics advocated simpler lifestyles, including less dependence on consumer goods and more conservation of energy and other resources. Once again, Japan faces the challenges of overcoming a cataclysmic setback. Whether the future holds another miraculous comeback or continued decline remains to be seen.
“COOL JAPAN”: A NEW CULTURAL SUPERPOWER
Despite its recent challenges, Japan has remained a dominant exporter of electronics and hardware—including audiovisual components, computers, and gaming consoles—since the 1960s. Such technologies have had a tremendous impact on the everyday lives of people around the world, giving them greater choice and mobility in their consumption of media. Nevertheless, the twenty-first-century reinvention of Japan as a cultural superpower is based more on international demand for products like media, music, fashion, and food than on manufactured hardware. Although Japanese contemporary popular culture first began infiltrating world markets in the 1980s, widespread use of the Internet since the early twenty-first century has accelerated global dissemination. As audiences abroad, especially youths, were exposed to Japanese manga and anime, J-pop music, trendy fashions, and high-quality ramen, new demand for Japanese goods helped reinvigorate the economy.
Government agencies began to realize the power of the “Cool Japan” brand in the early twenty-first century and created numerous programs to promote popular culture as a key component of Japanese “soft power,” a term coined to describe a nation’s ability to influence others noncoercively through the attractiveness of its culture and values rather than through military force or economic aid. America has long held soft power via such exports as Hollywood films, rock music, Levi’s jeans, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola, many of which encode “American” values such as individualism and capitalism. American films and TV tend to feature strong, handsome heroes and beautiful heroines and usually draw clear divisions between good and evil characters. Japanese media products, in turn, focus more on cute characters, often with ambivalent morality, who frequently work in teams. They tend to encode social values such as cooperation, animism, and attention to aesthetic detail. Kawaii—meaning cute, sweet, adorable, and vulnerable—became an important aesthetic in popular culture in the 1970s and has since been identified as the word used most often in Japan today. Cuteness may seem like a strangely trivial source of Japanese soft power, but there’s no question that a country that commands channels of communication and consumerism has more opportunities to affect preferences in other parts of the world.
Many elements of contemporary popular culture are deeply interconnected today, as they were in the Edo period. Anime, manga, and video games influence fashion and merchandise, and vice versa. Fads and fashions rise and fall rapidly, providing a steady supply of new images that inspire new media products and merchandise. While kawaii remains an aesthetic ideal, new genres of cute emerge constantly and challenge conventions of what might be considered adorable. In the late 1990s, droopy, lethargic-looking characters emerged after the commercial success of Tarepanda, an exhausted panda lying on his tummy. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the popular manga and anime Gegege no Kitarō, based on folk stories about ghosts and monsters, transformed giant eyeballs and a rat-human hybrid into cute commodities. In recent years, creepy-cute (kimokawaii) and grotesque-cute (gurokawaii) aesthetics came into vogue. Examples include Gloomy Bear, a pink bear with blood spattered on his face and paws from attacking and eating humans; and Kobitodukan, tiny creatures with the skin of plants, such as mushrooms and peaches, and disturbing human faces. Pop superstar Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (b. 1993; see below) embraces this aesthetic, claiming in an interview: “I love grotesque things. My concept is scary things that become traumatic with their cuteness. There are so many ‘just cute’ things in the world, so I add grotesque, scary and even shocking materials like eyeballs and brains to balance out the cuteness.”3
Literature
Murakami Haruki (b. 1949) and Yoshimoto Banana (b. 1964) emerged as literary sensations in the 1980s, developing mass followings in Japan and abroad. Their critically acclaimed works manage to blur distinctions between “high” and “popular” literature and share a sense of casual intimacy and accessibility that appeals to a broad range of readers.
Banana is the pen name of Yoshimoto Mahoko, daughter of an influential leftist philosopher. Kitchen (1988), her first published work, struck a chord with the public, raising questions about gender identities in modern Japan and the pressures faced by young women. The novel sold over ten million copies, and the term “Bananamania” was coined to capture her hordes of fans. It has had over sixty printings in Japan alone and has been translated into thirty-nine languages. Mikage, the novel’s protagonist, is a young woman grieving her recently lost grandmother, who raised her after her parents were killed. She seeks solace in the familiar objects and smells of her grandmother’s kitchen but is afraid to stay alone in the large apartment. Yūichi, a young male friend of her grandmother, suggests that Mikage move in with his family. There she throws herself into cooking for Yūichi and his transsexual mother, Eriko. Drawn to Yūichi, who already has a girlfriend, Mikage decides to move out, taking a job as an assistant to a cooking teacher. In the following passage, she compares herself to the types of mainstream, middle-class women taking cooking courses:
These women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by loving parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by ‘their happiness’ is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That’s not a bad thing. Dressed in their aprons, their smiling faces like flowers, learning to cook, absorbed in their little troubles and perplexities, they fall in love and marry. I think that’s great. I wouldn’t mind that kind of life. Me, when I’m utterly exhausted by it all, my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody’s home, then I despise my own life—my birth, my upbringing, everything. I feel only regret for the whole thing.4
At the end of the novel, when Mikage learns that Eriko has been murdered by a boyfriend disturbed to learn of her sex change, she returns to comfort Yūichi with her home-cooked foods.
Since Kitchen, Banana has produced eleven novels and seven collections of essays, but none have recaptured the excitement of her debut. Her works deal with heavy themes like death, violence, and loneliness but enfold these within the healing details of everyday life. She and her characters appear to be unconcerned with global issues or domestic politics, seeming to prefer manga, pop music, pulp fiction, and food as sources of diversion. Banana herself is an enigmatic figure who shuns publicity and photographs. Unlike most female celebrities in Japan, she usually appears without makeup and in simple clothing. She also maintains that marriage is unnecessary, although she is in a long-term relationship. Most of Banana’s characters similarly enjoy unconventional relationships and lead atypical Japanese lives. Some critics suggest that the key to her popularity is wishful thinking among young Japanese women who dream of leading different lives but face pressures from family and peers to conform to social expectations.
Murakami’s remarkable output—over a dozen best-selling novels, four collections of short stories, and numerous nonfiction works—has been translated into fifty languages and won scores of prizes, and he ranks among the greatest and best-known writers living in the world today. He is sometimes labeled postmodern for his experimentation in the structure and style of his novels, which frequently contain elements of magical realism, surrealism, and dystopia. Loss, alienation, loneliness, and memory are frequent themes, and his protagonists are often indecisive young men suffering from ennui, surrounded by strong, energetic wives or female friends. The rich and convoluted plots of Murakami’s novels defy easy synopsis. Norwegian Wood (1987), a spare coming-of-age story about a young college student’s relationships with two very different women, propelled Murakami to celebrity status. Another major work, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), published in three volumes in Japan, established his reputation as a dominant literary figure. This complex novel follows Toru, an unemployed thirty-something man, on his quest for a missing cat and then his missing wife. It uses a variety of forms—such as dream sequences, letters, and transcripts from Internet chats—to weave together story lines that address romantic disappointment, the emptiness of contemporary politics, and the legacy of Japan’s wartime aggression, related in two harrowing stories about Japanese soldiers’ actions in Mongolia and Manchukuo.
The first printing of Murakami’s 1Q84 (2009–10), a dystopian novel about parallel worlds and an abusive religious cult, sold out the day of release, and sales reached one million within a month. The following passage—which discusses the meaning of literature for one of the main characters, Tengo, an unpublished novelist who works as a math tutor—provides insights into Murakami’s own feelings toward his craft:
While math was like a magnificent imaginary building for Tengo, literature was a vast magical forest. Math stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, but stories spread out before him, their sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In this forest there were no maps, no doorways. As Tengo got older, the forest of story began to exert an even stronger pull on his heart than the world of math. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape—as soon as he closed the book, he had to come back to the real world. But at some point he noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of math. Why was that? After much thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility.5
Anime
Anime are often considered Japan’s chief contemporary cultural export. The value of Japanese animation and manga abroad has grown rapidly in the twenty-first century, from $75 million for both categories in 1996 to $200 million for manga alone in 2006 and $2.7 billion for anime in 2009. The advent of the Cartoon Network cable channel in the United States in the early 1990s helped many American viewers discover Japan’s most popular anime series. These series are now carried by major on-demand streaming-video services, such as Netflix and Hulu, rather than just by niche specialists like Crunchyroll and Funimation. Anime conventions around the world attract mass followings; 2014’s Anime Expo Convention in Los Angeles drew eighty thousand fans, making it the eleventh largest convention in the world that year.
The world of anime is so vast that our discussion must be limited to a few iconic films and TV series. The anime feature film Akira (1988), directed by Ōtomo Katsuhiro and based on his manga of the same name, was pioneering in its use of cutting-edge techniques and targeting of adult audiences. The dystopian film is set in 2019 in Neo-Tokyo, rebuilt after the government dropped an atomic bomb on the city in 1988 after psychic experiments on children spun out of control. Akira, the most powerful psychic child, was cryogenically sealed in the Olympic Stadium. Neo-Tokyo is now rife with gang violence and domestic terrorism. Kaneda, the leader of a biker gang, attempts to save his friend Tetsuo, who has been subjected to military experiments that gave him psychic powers. Kaneda and members of his gang must battle various groups and prevent Tetsuo from freeing Akira and unleashing uncontrollable psychic abilities that will result in Neo-Tokyo’s destruction. The high quality of Akira’s art and animation, including super-fluid motion and detailed, realistic backgrounds of a futuristic Tokyo, earned critical acclaim. The film gained a worldwide cult following and is considered by many to be one of the best animated films of all time. It was seminal in prompting wider demand for sophisticated anime outside of Japan.
Two other important anime in the science fiction genre are the 1995 film Ghost in the Shell, directed by Oshii Mamoru and based on a popular manga, and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–96). Ghost in the Shell follows the members of a counter cyber-terrorism group called Section 9, led by the cyborg Kusanagi. The action takes place at a time when people are at least partially cyborg, with brains that can interface with computer networks or prosthetic body parts. Section 9 battles hackers, especially the Puppet Master, who takes control of cyberbrains in order to turn their owners into slaves. The well-received film was followed by a TV series and by film sequels released in 2004 and 2015. Hollywood’s remake in 2017 received mixed reviews; many fans criticized the casting of Scarlett Johansson in the lead as “whitewashing.”
Like Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion is set in a futuristic Tokyo several years after an apocalyptic event. Specially selected teenage pilots operate giant robotic machines, synchronized to their nervous systems, to fight against a race of beings known as Angels that can wipe out humanity. The main character is a teenage pilot named Shinji who is tormented by self-doubt. The series explores his emotions and relationships with other pilots, delving deep into psychoanalytic concepts. It employs imagery and mythology from a number of religious traditions, from the Jewish Kabbalah to Shinto mythology and the biblical story of creation. Evangelion gained critical acclaim at home and abroad. In Japan it became the topic of widespread media discussion, especially after the airing of the finale, a confusing mélange of imagery meant to represent Shinji’s inner psychological states as he contemplates the fate of mankind. Public outcry against the finale was so strong that the film End of Evangelion (1997) was released a year later to explain the events in it. Nevertheless, the series overwhelmingly won first place in the “Best Loved Series” category of the Anime Grand Prix awards in 1996 and 1997 and was ranked the most popular anime of all time in a 2006 survey. Subsequent Evangelion films, manga, and merchandise, including products like cell phones and laptops targeted at adult consumers, have earned over $1.3 billion in domestic and overseas sales.
Among anime targeted toward children, several have become major hits in international markets. Space limitations permit mentioning only a few iconic examples. Doraemon was one of the first overseas smash hits. It follows the adventures of a blue robot cat from the future that uses high-tech gadgets, such as “memory bread” and a (prescient) 3-D printer, to help his ten-year-old friend Nobita. The series first aired in Japan in 1979 and can now be seen in over thirty countries. Dragon Ball Z premiered in the United States in a dubbed version in 1996 and attracted an entire generation of young boys. Its protagonist, an extraterrestrial named Goku sent to conquer Earth as a child, forgets his mission after a head injury. As an adult, Goku protects Earth, fighting intergalactic aliens and androids. Sailor Moon, a ’90s series about ordinary teenage girls who morph into sexy warriors to battle evil, is an example of the “magical girl” genre. The manga underpinning the series is one of the most popular of all time, selling thirty-five million copies in over fifty countries. Naruto (2002–7), named for its title character, centers on a teenage ninja possessed by the spirit of a powerful fox kami. Dubbed versions began export to the United States and other markets in 2005. Finally, One Piece, a humorous pirate anime based on the best-selling manga series in history, began airing in Japan in 1998, reaching American markets in 2007. It recounts the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew on his quest to become King of the Pirates. In addition to the TV series, thirteen One Piece animated feature films have been released since 2000. These and many other anime series have spurred tens of billions of dollars in sales of video games, trading cards, figurines, and other merchandise.
Any discussion of Japanese anime must include the work of director Miyazaki Hayao (b. 1941), founder of Studio Ghibli and creator of beloved feature films such as My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), and his masterpiece Spirited Away (2001), which won Best Picture at Japan’s Academy Awards and Best Animated Feature at the U.S. Academy Awards. Miyazaki’s films span a wide variety of genres in a multitude of geographic and historical settings, from apocalyptic futures to European fantasies to family dramas in modern Japan. Recurring themes within most of his works include animism, the power of nature, and the need for humankind to protect the environment; the depiction of flight and various means of aircraft as a source of agency; and strong, plucky girls as heroines. Miyazaki’s remarkable girl heroes are one reason for his popularity. In contrast to gender norms that encourage girls to be cute and act submissively, Miyazaki’s heroines are bold, courageous, and independent; they are often orphaned or neglected by parents. Unlike the voluptuous warriors of magical girl genres like Sailor Moon or Cutey Honey, they do not need to morph into sexualized bodies to feel empowered.
FIGURE 73. A cosplayer portraying Sailor Moon at FanimeCon 2010 in San Jose, California. © 2010 BrokenSphere/Wikimedia Commons.
In his early career, Miyazaki worked for several different TV and film animation studios and earned acclaim for works in European settings such as Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974) and The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). The first feature that he both wrote and directed was Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The film takes place in a postapocalyptic world where bioweapons called Giant Warriors have destroyed civilization and created a Toxic Jungle, inhabited by dangerous mutant insects and large armored creatures called Ohm. The heroine, Nausicaä, is a princess of the Valley of the Wind who defies warnings about the dangers of the Jungle, using her jet glider to explore the forests in search of a way for her people to reinhabit the land. She learns to communicate with the creatures of the forest and discovers possibilities for producing clean water and soil. The militaristic Tolmekians, however, want to destroy the Jungle by using a Giant Warrior embryo. They kill Nausicaä’s father, the king, and manipulate the Ohm into stampeding into the Valley. Nausicaä calms the herd but is injured in the process. The Ohm surround her with healing golden tentacles, revealing that she is the savior of Earth, as foretold in a prophecy. Nausicaä thus first expressed many of Miyazaki’s major thematic concerns.
Following Nausicaä’s success, Miyazaki established Studio Ghibli in 1985. Its first release was Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), about two orphans seeking a magical kingdom that floats in the sky. In 1988 he made the beloved Totoro, which told the story of Mei, a headstrong girl who moves to a large house in the country with her father and older sister while her mother is hospitalized in a nearby sanitorium. She befriends Totoro, a giant nature spirit that appears to be a cross between a bear and a cat, who lives in a large tree adjacent to her home. Like Shinto kami and Nausicaä’s Ohm, Totoro is an ambiguous character of nature, sometimes gentle and kind but capable of ferocity and great power. In Princess Mononoke, a historical fantasy about a young woman raised by wolves who fights against human destruction of the forest with the help of a young warrior from an indigenous tribe, a giant magical stag represents another such kami, the god of the forest.
Spirited Away is Studio Ghibli’s largest critical and financial success to date and is frequently named one of the greatest animated films of all time. The ten-year-old heroine, Chihiro, is forced to take a job at a magical bathhouse for kami and spirits run by the witch Yubaba. She must do so to free her parents, who were turned into pigs when they gorged on food after unknowingly entering the spirit world. The film presents a colorful world of unforgettable characters, drawing deeply on Japanese myths and legends. Among its many messages are the redemptive powers of hard work and love and the hazards of overconsumption—clearly a critique of Japan’s consumer-oriented society.
FIGURE 74. Image from Miyazaki Hayao’s My Neighbor Totoro, produced and distributed by Studio Ghibli. Source: Alamy stock photo.
Miyazaki’s genius has opened doors for Japan’s feature-length animated films abroad. In recent years many anime features by other directors have achieved worldwide success, including The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) and Miss Hokusai (2015). Your Name (2017) by director Shinkai Makoto became the highest-grossing anime film worldwide and the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time in Japan. Based on a novel of the same name, it is the story of Mitsuha, a teenage girl living in a rural mountain town, who begins to swap bodies with Taki, a high school boy in Tokyo living three years in Mitsuha’s future. Through their growing relationship, they are able to save Mitsuha’s town from destruction by a comet.
Cute Commodities
Children’s culture has become a globalized market, and Japan is a new center for the production of commodities targeted toward children, thus challenging the U.S. hegemony over this market, as best represented by Disney. Japanese toys and games are first conceived, produced, and marketed domestically and then “glocalized” (i.e., adapted for specific overseas markets). Cute characters (kyara) are an important component of this market, with an appeal that is not limited to children. Even serious businesses such as banks feature cartoon mascots like Miffy the Bunny or Disney characters; many sararimen adorn their cell phones or other possessions with their favorite characters. Some observers believe that the appeal of cute characters for the Japanese is due, in large part, to the attraction of childhood and the feeling of never wanting to grow up, perhaps because Japanese adulthood means heavy responsibilities and pressures to conform. Cute characters often display elements of helplessness and vulnerability. They frequently lack a mouth and have undersized or rounded stumps as limbs.
FIGURE 75. Ribbon-cutting ceremony for Hello Kitty’s Kawaii Paradise. Source: Alamy stock photo.
Japan’s most visible symbol of cute is Hello Kitty, introduced by Sanrio in 1974 and imported to the United States in 1976. Kitty is a white cat with a giant head and red bow. Products bearing her image sell briskly in more than thirty countries and were worth about $7 billion in sales in 2014. Unlike other characters that originated in manga or anime, Kitty was designed specifically to sell merchandise. Although she was originally aimed at preteen girls, Hello Kitty’s fans now include many adult consumers. Her image is found on products ranging from school supplies to diamond jewelry. Diehard enthusiasts can buy Hello Kitty–themed cars and condos or hold Hello Kitty weddings. Sanrio licenses her image to makers of twelve to fifteen thousand products and will grant licensing rights for almost anything except weapons or hard liquor.
Sanrio has an entire stable of cute characters designed to suit different tastes and personalities, whose images are also emblazoned across a wide range of merchandise, available at dedicated Sanrio stores located in shopping malls around the world and from many other retail outlets. Sanrio’s large staff of graphic artists design hundreds of potential characters each year, but the normal life span of a new character adopted by the firm is only a few years. Fifteen or so core characters have remained in circulation much longer than average, like Kitty. For instance, Kero Kero Keroppi is a big-eyed frog created in 1987; Bad Batz Maru, released in 1993, is a naughty penguin with spiky hair; and Pompompurin, a roly-poly golden retriever in a brown beret, was introduced in 1996. Favorite characters can be visited at Sanrio’s theme park, Puroland, in the Tokyo suburbs. Built in 1990, it is one of Japan’s most popular attractions, visited by twenty thousand every weekend.
In addition, there are hundreds of non-Sanrio characters, usually from domestic or foreign anime, that have generated their own lines of merchandise. Favorites include Totoro, Doraemon, and foreign characters like Miffy, Snoopy, and Moomin. Underneath Tokyo’s main railroad station, amid a warren of shops and restaurants, one can visit the recently opened Character Street, with over twenty stores dedicated to these beloved—and enormously profitable—characters.
Unique characters are also designed to act as mascots, primarily for towns and cities, but also for festivals, businesses, and governmental or non-governmental agencies. Local mascots try to embody some aspect of the area they represent, whether a famous product, historical figure, or geographical feature. Since 2007, the number of such characters has boomed; an online database lists three thousand local mascots. Many have their own signature song and dance and compete in an annual Grand Prix to select the most popular. The 2011 winner, Kumamon, a lumpy black bear with red cheeks created by Kumamoto prefecture to commemorate the opening of a new high-speed rail line, has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of merchandise ranging from snack foods to fake nails to actual teddy bears created by the famous German toymaker Steiff. Other, more idiosyncratic characters also attract a large fan base. Funassyi, the unofficial mascot of Funabashi city, is a freckled pear. Unlike most mascots that remain silent and make cute, awkward movements, Funassyi speaks and jumps around hyperactively. He appears frequently on TV, and four stores have been launched to sell Funassyi-related merchandise.
FIGURE 76. ANA Pokemon 747 jet at Haneda Airport, 2007. Photo by Kouhei 14915, via Japanese Wikimedia.
Pokemon represents a globally significant export of Japanese children’s culture. The massive franchise began as a game for Nintendo’s Game Boy in the early 1990s and has grown to an empire that includes hundreds of toys, billions of trading cards, animated TV series broadcast in sixty-five countries, and nineteen animated feature films. In the virtual world of the game, players must acquire and train fantastic creatures, called Pokemon (“pocket monsters”), which they place into battle with other creatures to gain new powers. The number of Pokemon has grown from around a hundred and fifty to over eight hundred species. Among the most popular are Mew, a pink cat with psychic powers; Charizard, a flame-breathing dragon; and Pikachu, the iconic yellow mouse-like creature with a lightning-bolt tail. Pikachu has its own Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon and is painted on airplanes in the fleet of the Japanese airline ANA. Anthropologist Anne Allison has analyzed how Pokemon targets children for endless consumerist acquisition and teaches that commodities can act as companions.
Other Japanese video games, such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders, first became global hits as arcade games in the early 1980s. In the ’90s, game companies Sega, Nintendo, and Sony competed fiercely for market share in home consoles and handheld games. Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers is one of the top games of all time, popular since its release in the mid-1980s. According to one survey, Mario is better known among American children than Mickey Mouse. Other games that earned large followings abroad include Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda, Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, and Capcom’s Street Fighter. The Japanese video game industry earned $9.6 billion in 2014. Over the past five years, mobile games for smartphones have accounted for a growing portion of that market.
Fashion
Japanese fashion designers began to attract international reputations for innovative haute couture in the 1980s. Avant-garde designers Issey Miyake (b. 1938), Yohji Yamamoto (b. 1943), and Rei Kawakubo (b. 1942) of Comme des Garcons, known for monochromatic, asymmetrical looks, opened studios and premiered collections in Paris, as did Hanae Mori (1948–96), who created more conventional looks that incorporated Japanese motifs like kanji characters and cherry blossoms. In the 1990s, at the opposite end of the couture scale, youth street fashion became a source of media obsession with the emergence of the kogyaru (high school gal). The look began simply as modifications to standard schoolgirl uniforms—hiking up plaid skirts to micromini levels and sporting baggy white knee socks and Burberry scarves. The term gyaru was then applied to super-trendy teenagers who wore platform boots up to ten inches high along with a very distinctive look, including dyed blonde hair, dark tan makeup, white rings around the eyes, and heavy black eyeliner. Several fashion magazines, such as Egg and Cawaii!, were dedicated to the latest in gyaru makeup, accessories, and clothing. Most gyaru were simply indulging in trendy fashions, but some took the look to extremes, resulting in variations such as blackface (ganguro) and yamamba (mountain hag—with witchy, messy hair). Some girls and social analysts claimed that such new variations were a parody of the social pressure to be cute, representing rejection of male-dominated society’s ability to dictate girls’ looks and their lives.
Gyaru fashion declined in the late ’90s as street fashion associated with Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku district gained popularity. New looks captured international attention through FRUiTS magazine, established by photographer Aoki Shōichi, who published photos of fashion-forward youths with detailed captions describing their ensembles. Aoki had noticed how trendy youths were crafting unique, fun outfits that disregarded fashion conventions. Many fashionistas mixed different styles—incorporating elements of traditional dress like kimono or obi sashes with modern wear—or refashioned secondhand clothing into handmade designs. Others adopted a head-to-toe “Lolita” style that came in variations like Sweet Lolita (ama rōri), characterized by pastel colors, lace, and ribbons; or Gothic Lolita (gosu rōri), all-black looks with lace and ruffles modeled on Victorian clothing. The Lolita look became even more prevalent through frequent representation in manga and anime, video games, and feature films. Other fashion genres captured in the magazine’s pages included Cyber, Punk, and Decora, a style achieved by copious accessorizing with cheap plastic jewelry and barrettes.
FIGURE 77. Harajuku street fashions, including Decora, Sweet Lolita, and Gothic Lolita. Photo by Peter Van den Bossche, via Wikimedia Commons.
Cosplay (“costume play”) is a form of fashion performance originating in Japan that demonstrates the interconnections between different forms of popular culture. Cosplayers wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent a specific character from a movie, TV series, book, manga, video game, or musical band (see fig. 73). Some cosplayers also try to mimic the mannerisms, body language, and speech patterns of the characters they portray. The practice has been growing rapidly since the 1990s in Japan and more recently in other parts of the world. Cosplayers congregate at sci-fi, anime, and manga conventions as well as at their own dedicated conventions and competitions.
J-Pop Music
While contemporary popular music spans a wide number of genres, from glam-rock (bijuaru kei) to hip-hop to nostalgic ballads (enka), the varieties most often associated with “Cool Japan” are pop idols, who first emerged in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Girl idols are “manufactured” and heavily managed by talent and promotion agencies that often identify and recruit them through talent shows and mass auditions. In contrast to European and American singers, who become stars on the basis of their talents or looks, Japanese idols are deliberately selected for girl-next-door qualities, with average voices and slightly above-average looks. Above all, they should be cute—speaking and acting in an innocent, adorable manner. Their photos capture coy expressions, with eyes opened widely and crooked-toothed smiles, considered kawaii.
Matsuda Seiko (b. 1962) debuted in the 1980s and earned the nickname “eternal idol” for her string of twenty-four consecutive number-one hits stretching into the first decade of the twenty-first century. She has often been compared to Madonna for her ability to continuously reinvent her look and capture media attention. Matsuda epitomizes the typical girl idol who acts cute and innocent, even well into adulthood. Such idols intentionally project vulnerability in order to promote feelings of protectiveness among fans who will want to support their efforts in fan clubs. This ploy is illustrated through one of Matsuda’s statements: “Seiko is so happy to meet you!! As a singer and an 18-year-old girl, I feel for the first time that I can become independent. Please watch over me warmly forever!!”6
Japanese idols became very popular across East Asia, selling millions of records and appearing frequently in the foreign media. Nations like Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam adopted Japanese business models for producing and promoting their own national idols, often collaborating with Japanese companies. By the mid-1990s, taste for cute but mediocre performers began to wane and better performers with more mature, confident images began to emerge. Okinawan singer Amuro Namie (b. 1977) has been compared to Madonna and to Janet Jackson for her “hip-pop” musical style, blending hip-hop and pop. The sexy, funky, tattooed Namie is nothing like the sweet teenagers of earlier decades. She has sold over thirty-five million records in Japan and has a major fan base throughout Asia. But, like Seiko Matsuda, she was unable to successfully break into the mainstream American music market.
Among the first to do that was Puffy AmiYumi (known as PUFFY in Japan), a girl duo paired by Sony talent scouts in the mid-1990s. Their debut single, “Asian Purity” (“Ajia no junshin”), became a phenomenon. Its lyrics suggest the importance of Asian markets for J-pop idols:
Open the door, flow out now and there’s Asia
Lining up any and every white panda
Pure hearts twinkle in the night sky as if it’s about to burst
Like a spark.7
Japanese fans were swept up in “Puffymania,” and the duo soon had their own weekly TV series that featured foreign guests such as Lenny Kravitz, Sylvester Stallone, and Harrison Ford. They next landed an American-Japanese animated series on the Cartoon Network, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi (2004–6). Although their characters were voiced by American actresses, the show contained live-action segments featuring the original singers and their music.
One format for girl idols that has remained popular is large groups of high-school-age girls, pioneered by Onyanko Club (Kitty Club), which had fifty-two members and disbanded in 1987. Morning Musume, with thirteen members, emerged in 1997 and is still performing today. These groups maintain a teenage lineup by recruiting new members through nationwide auditions and “graduating” members in their twenties. The most famous girl group is AKB48, formed in 2005 and named after the Akihabara area in Tokyo, where the group performs daily in its own theater, plus the number of members originally planned. Akihabara is strongly associated with the geeky subculture of otaku—individuals obsessed with computers or particular aspects of popular culture, often possessing limited social skills. AKB48 are among the highest-earning musical performers in Japan; their thirty-two latest singles have topped the charts. They are a media marvel, with spin-off manga, an anime series, and a video game that allows fans to simulate dating favorite members. In 2012, the national post office even issued an AKB48 commemorative stamp.
There are currently 130 members of AKB48, split into several teams that allow the group to perform in several venues simultaneously. Sister groups have been established in China and Indonesia and are planned for the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand. AKB48 perform daily at their Akihabara home theater so that fans always have the opportunity to see them live. There they stage simple, synchronized dances to fast-paced pop songs while audience members cheer in tandem and sing along with the choruses. The audience is roughly 95 percent male but also includes many prepubescent girls. After performances, fans can interact with the members, taking pictures or shaking their hands. Members are not allowed to date, however, and have strict behavior guidelines that, if violated, can result in expulsion.
Singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, known as the “Harajuku Pop Princess,” is the latest J-pop phenomenon. She cites Gwen Stefani, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga as her inspirations in both music and fashion. Like Gaga, Kyary uses unusual fashions to attract media attention. The video for her 2011 debut single, “Pon Pon Pon,” went viral on YouTube, with over a hundred million views, becoming an international smash hit. The colorful, imaginative video included graphics of eyeballs, skeletons, donuts, and psychedelic animals flying around a pink room piled with toys while a beribboned Kyary dances and sings and a large-bodied dancer in blackface, pink tutu, and platinum blonde wig mirrors her moves in the background. Follow-up songs and videos, including “Candy, Candy,” “Ninja Re Bang Bang,” and “Fashion Monster,” similarly feature Kyary in adorable outfits surrounded by unsettling graphic elements. The faces of backup dancers are often eerily obscured with numbers, letters, or blank masks. Such weird and wacky features inevitably appealed to foreign markets long infatuated with Japan’s exotic Otherness, and Kyary was soon profiled in Western fashion and art magazines and even in the Wall Street Journal. In 2013, MTV called her “the coolest girl on the planet.” Tokyo’s posh Roppongi Hills complex held a month-long exhibition in March of that year showcasing all the costumes from her music videos and live performances. In early 2017, Kyary had over 4.4 million followers on Twitter, making her the most followed female celebrity in Japan.
FIGURE 78. AKB48 performing in Beijing in December 2016. Photo by Imaginechina, via AP Images.
In 2007, Crypton Future Media introduced a virtual pop idol, Hatsune Miku, a sixteen-year-old android girl with long, turquoise pigtails. She performs in concert tours as an animated projection with a voice provided by a singing synthesizer application. An English-language version of Hatsune was released in 2013, and she completed a ten-city tour of the United States in 2016. A more recent trend in J-pop is “kawaii metal” by groups like Babymetal and Ladybaby, in which girl idols are backed by heavy metal instrumentation. The latter was established by an Australian pro wrestler known as Ladybeard, who wore outfits matching those of his two teenage, kawaii bandmates and added guttural screams to their pop numbers.
Japanese Cuisine
Japanese cuisine has been rising in international esteem since the 1980s, when sushi first became prominent in the West. Until the ’70s, most Westerners were repulsed by the idea of eating raw fish. The first U.S. sushi bar opened in 1972, when Americans were beginning to look for alternatives to a heavy, meat-and-potatoes diet. High-quality fresh fish with rice and vegetables became an attractive and exotic dining alternative in many major cities. From the ’70s to the ’80s, the idea of sushi moved from an icky ethnic specialty to a cool, popular staple. Today sushi is globally embraced as a healthy, sophisticated food widely available in restaurants, supermarkets, and even convenience stores and stadiums. During the bubble years, the sushi business boomed in Japan; imports of fresh bluefin tuna, the most popular fish for sushi, quintupled between 1984 and 1993. The average wholesale price of a bluefin peaked in 1990 at $33 per pound, making a 500-pound tuna worth around $17,000. When the economic bubble burst, demand for tuna managed to survive because of sushi’s growing global popularity.
Increasing international familiarity with sushi added to Japan’s reputation for “cool” and opened people’s minds to trying its other characteristic foods. In recent years, Japanese cuisine has reached new heights of global gourmet popularity, with the number of Japanese restaurants outside of Japan doubling between 2003 and 2013, when UNESCO recognized washoku (Japanese dietary culture) as an intangible cultural treasure of the world. The elite Michelin guide to the world’s best restaurants began rating Tokyo restaurants in 2008 and gave more stars to its establishments than to those in Paris and New York combined. At the other end of the culinary scale, professionally prepared ramen has now achieved cult status across America and in many cities around the world, with long lines outside popular establishments. In the 1970s, as domestic tourism boomed among the Japanese, so did ramen. Local variations—such as Sapporo’s miso-based broth, Kumamoto’s thick, pork-based tonkotsu style, and Iwate’s light chicken broth—became available nationwide. Ramen quickly emerged as Japan’s most popular object of lowbrow culinary connoisseurship, a trend that expanded even further with the advent of the Internet and social media. In the United States today, high-quality ramen represents an affordable, yet exotic and “authentic,” gourmet experience, just as sushi did in the ’80s and ’90s.
Visual Arts
The Superflat art movement arose in the late 1990s in response to the pervasiveness of cute consumerism. Its founder, Murakami Takashi (b. 1962), formulated an aesthetics and theory of contemporary art that he labeled Superflat, referring simultaneously to the two-dimensional, cartoonish forms that dominated pop culture; the flat composition of traditional Japanese paintings, which are devoid of the illusion of depth and perspective; and the two-dimensionality of Japanese modern life—the shallow emptiness of its consumer culture. Superflat represented a challenge to the Western hegemony of fine art by reasserting Japanese-centric standards for creating and appreciating art and by collapsing false hierarchies between “high” art and “low” mass media and between art and commerce.
Murakami initially studied traditional Japanese painting, earning a doctorate in 1993. On a trip to New York, he first saw the pop, erotic sculptures of Jeff Koons and met many artists’ collectives engaging in “fun” forms of artistic activity that were quite unlike those of the staid Japanese art establishment. He subsequently developed a new style depicting playful, childlike, and humorous images using traditional painting and printmaking techniques. Murakami asserts that this kind of contemporary art is rooted not in Western pop art but in the stylized, colorful works of Edo-period ukiyo-e and Meiji-period nihonga artists. The subject matter is drawn from the contemporary native otaku culture of anime, manga, and collectible figurines, frequently including young girls, monsters, and apocalyptic imagery.
Murakami’s view of the U.S.-Japan relationship echoes that of postwar avant-garde artists. He asserts that the atomic bombings, the humiliating defeat, and postwar dependence on the U.S. security arrangement left Japan infantilized, impotent, deformed, and apolitical. Its hybrid postcolonial culture was thus distressingly shallow, childish, and consumeristic. But following the bursting of the economic bubble, Superflat artists, facing national instability and uncertainty, engaged in social critique by depicting the sexual fetishism and consumerism that dominated popular culture. In a long 2005 essay on the state of popular culture in Japan, Murakami wrote:
Japan may be the future of the world. And now, Japan is Superflat. From social mores to art and culture, everything is super two-dimensional. Kawaii culture has become a living entity that pervades everything. With a population heedless of the cost of embracing immaturity, the nation is in the throes of a dilemma. . . .
These monotonous ruins of a nation-state, which arrived on the heels of an American puppet government, have been perfectly realized in the name of capitalism. Those who inhabit this vacant crucible spin in endless, inarticulate circles. . . . We Japanese still embody “Little Boy,” nicknamed, like the atomic bomb itself, after a nasty childhood taunt.8
FIGURE 79. Murakami Takashi, three-panel painting of Mr. DOB, 1996. Source: Alamy stock photo.
Some of Murakami’s most recognizable characters include Mr. DOB, a circular head with Mickey Mouse–like ears, huge, lashed eyes, and a disturbing grimace; Mr. Pointy (Tongari-kun), a rounded white creature with a rainbow horn; and Miss Ko2 (pronounced “ko ko”), a voluptuous, long-legged waitress. These and other images are produced in mass quantities on watches, t-shirts, purses, and other consumer goods at Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki factory. Like the Factory, established by Andy Warhol, Kaikai Kiki employs teams of young artists to help Murakami realize his visions. They make extensive use of computer technology, utilizing clip art for his recurring motifs like anthropomorphic flowers and mushrooms. Murakami does not distinguish between art and commerce and has collaborated with fashion houses such as Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton, which sold his limited-edition handbags for $5,000.
Another Superflat artist who achieved international stardom is painter and sculptor Nara Yoshitomo (b. 1959), known for works depicting children, many of whom bear surprisingly threatening, angry, or cruel facial expressions. They sometimes hold weapons such as knives or chainsaws. The images are simple but psychologically complex, conveying vulnerability, loneliness, and aggression. Yoshitomo’s work, like that of author Yoshimoto Banana, garnered a massive fan base among young women aged eighteen to twenty-five who seemed otherwise uninterested in art or literature. The pair have subsequently collaborated on illustrated books.
FIGURE 80. Nara Yoshitomo, Punch Me Harder, exhibited at London Art Fair Preview, 2016. Source: AP Images.
Other artists associated with Superflat include Aoshima Chihō (b. 1974), who uses computer-generated imagery in large, all-digital murals featuring waifish girls who seem both innocent and sexually knowing amid apocalyptic or sublime dreamscapes. The plastic figurines of Ōshima Yūki (b. 1974) similarly explore the tensions between innocence and eroticism, with posed, prepubescent girls that female consumers find cute and adult male otaku find arousing.
In summary and conclusion, throughout its long history Japan has engaged in interactions with other nations that have deeply influenced its society, culture, and economy. In ancient and premodern times, contacts with Korean and Chinese civilizations brought profound changes in religion, philosophy, and theories of governance; imported technologies of agriculture, craft, medicine, and written and artistic expression enriched the lives of commoners and elites alike. These borrowings were inevitably tempered by indigenous tastes and values, resulting in a rich mélange of cultural forms and social practices that were unquestionably Japanese. Beginning in the sixteenth century, European nations became a new source of information on developments in science, art, and geopolitics. With the Meiji Restoration, Japan turned definitively toward Western imperialist models to guide its path to modern wealth and power, but borrowings from the West were markedly transformed to suit Japanese circumstances and preferences. Japanese identity remained hybrid; its modernity was not a simple copy of a universal “modern” patterned on Western norms.
As Japan developed and gained confidence in the early twentieth century, many grew to resent Western hegemony, leading the nation to a disastrous war, the legacy of which continues to haunt its relationship with its East Asian neighbors, Korea and China. Defeat and occupation by the United States meant that American lifestyles and democratic values would take center stage as the main sources of international influence in postwar society and culture. Today Japan continues to rely on its strong relationship with the United States for assistance with regional defense and diplomacy, but with the end of the Cold War, as accelerating forces of globalization have shifted economic and cultural relationships with other nations, America has become somewhat less of a role model. The Chinese economy surpassed Japan’s in the early twenty-first century, making China the leading economic and military power in Asia and Japan’s largest trading partner. Nevertheless, new technologies such as the Internet and the growth of global mass media have allowed Japan to emerge as East Asia’s leading cultural power, admired and emulated around the world. Foreign audiences idolize both Japan’s new pop culture and more traditional forms, epitomized by samurai, geisha, and tea ceremony. Manga, films, art, and other current cultural products often feature or reference these older traditions, keeping them alive in the imaginations of younger generations.
In the twenty-first century, Japan faces numerous challenges, brought into sharp focus by the 2011 nuclear disaster. Its scarcity of natural and energy resources has dictated reliance on trade and nuclear energy to meet the needs of the citizenry. But overwhelming public opposition to nuclear power following the disaster raises questions about how Japan can safely meet its long-term economic needs, which are further jeopardized by the rapid graying of its population. Public suspicion of officials—and of their collusion with scientific communities and mainstream media—has recently deepened, and an air of hopelessness and anxiety over national decline seems to prevail. Yet is this sense of despair truly warranted? Japan can boast that it has one of the cleanest environments and one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Its residents have the world’s longest life expectancies, thanks in part to strong safety nets in health care and elder support.
Japan’s cultural and consumer-goods industries create innovative, vibrant products at every price level that are considered fashionable and desirable around the globe. Japan may not be the most powerful or the wealthiest nation in the world, but there is no doubt that it is one of the coolest.
FURTHER READING
Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
———. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Condry, Ian. Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Field, Norma. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Lie, John. Multiethnic Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures: Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Napier, Susan J. Anime: From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.
Reader, Ian. Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyō. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.
Yano, Christine R. Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
RECOMMENDED FILMS
A and A2. 1998, 2011. Documentary films directed by Mori Tatsuya. An inside look at Aum Shinrikyo’s response following the 1995 sarin attack and its sequel, filmed several years later as the sect was dissolving.
After Life. 1998. Feature film directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu. Quirky story of how the recently deceased must make a film about the happiest moment in their life before moving on to Heaven.
Kamikaze Girls. 2004. Feature film directed by Nakashima Tetsuya. Tale of friendship between two teenagers, a girl biker and a Lolita.
Kids Return. 1996. Feature film directed by Kitano Takeshi. Two high school dropouts seek direction in life; one becomes a boxer, the other a yakuza.
Tampopo. 1985. Feature film directed by Itami Jūzō. This “foodie” comedy about a ramen restaurant includes many food-related subplots.
The Great Happiness Space. 2006. Documentary film directed by Jake Clennell. Life in an Osaka host club.
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. 2013. Documentary film directed by Sunada Mami. Follows the daily lives of Miyazaki Hayao and other directors at Studio Ghibli.