Japan is cool. It has a sort of instinct for acquiring coolness. As far as I can tell, Japan has invented almost nothing; pretty much everything that we think of as quintessentially Japanese was borrowed from somewhere: tea from the Chinese, Buddhism from the Koreans, ideographic writing from the Chinese, rail transportation from the British, electronics from us. But whenever they borrow something, it’s because they think it’s cool, and when they borrow it they tend to make it even more cool. I don’t know where Japan got its martial arts culture from, but could anyone but Japan have fueled the whole ninja craze? And consider advertising: Japan’s obsession with consumer goods may well outdo our own, but there’s something charming about it. It’s as if the whole country is just a big filter to extract and concentrate all forms of cool.
I could also put a darker spin on all this. Here’s this country which was first our military enemy and then our economic rival and is now our friend, ally, and groupie, adopting our ways whenever and wherever it can… but what is it really doing? It’s taking our culture—our entertainment, our technology, our customs—toying with it, subtly altering its DNA in ways we don’t understand, and then quietly feeding it back to us. And we say “Wow, cool!“ and eat it up, finding it oddly familiar and yet refreshingly different and exotic, but never quite understanding it. We think it’s our own culture we’re getting back, but is it really? Or are they infecting us with a cultural virus by which, ultimately, they’re going to conquer us after all?
And would that be a good thing or a bad thing?