Why Japan? Why Hipsters? Why Now?

Some will tell you it

started with a handbag...

When Lady Gaga: singer, celebrity and unnatural-fiber-enthusiast touched down in Japan on her Monster's Ball Tour this April she brought with her a message scrawled on her Hermes Birkin Bag.

"I love little monster, tokyo love"

Regardless of the poor translation and use of the Katakana alphabet the transmission was clear: Japan is hip.

However the Western world's love affair with Japanese Pop Culture isn't a recent one, just a resurfacing of an ongoing obsession with the inexplicable cool-factor Japanese Pop Culture holds.

Do you recall Gwen Stefani's strange obsession with the fashions of Harajuku and her entourage of small Japanese girls she dubbed her Harajuku girls in 2004?

Then how about the abundance of Memoirs of A Geisha novels being leafed through by the mid-30's soy-latte-devotees of every inner-city Suburb in the wake of its glowing review in the New York Times in 1997?

Surely you must at least recall the scene in 1985's homage to teen-angst The Breakfast Club where the ever pink-cheeked Molly Ringwald decrees "It's Sushi! Rice, raw fish and seaweed...It's very popular!"

Tamagotchis? Anime? Pokemon? Hello Kitty? Kimono dresses by Akira?

Nothing?

I must say I don't believe you...

Renderings of Japanese pop-culture are everywhere. Take a look around. Is that green tea in your mug?!

Don't laugh at me! I see your grey Kenji Urban jumper and your Nudie jeans(that use salvaged vintage Japanese denim of course)and I raise you a Hello Kitty umbrella, a hilariously kitsch Gamera dvd and an Astro Boy poster. And that's just what sits immediately to my right in this study.

But what's the ubiquity all about? What is it about Japanese pop-culture that has us dressing like anime characters, slathering our lunches in wasabe and loading our new Sony gadgets up with Japanese hip-hop and video games in the hopes of seeming edgy and globalized?

It's not just an idle question. Academics want answers just as much as you or I (more I than you, but I hope this changes as this blog progresses...)

In 2002 Douglas McGray wrote an article titled "Japan's Gross National Cool" for Foreign Policy Magazine that first discussed the notion that Japanese Pop Culture had something other globalized customs did not: it worked outside the Centre-Periphery concept of Western money/ideals/modernity driving the Eastern market.

"Japanese Culture has transcended US demand or approval" (McGray, 2002). It was post-modern before post-modernism was considered in the West as it had to recover and adapt from its great fall from being an international superpower post-WW1 and WW2. Modernity simply could not be met in the same way as the West was doing it with an almost non-existent military, recession and falling Gross Domestic Product rates. So Japan cleverly began rebuilding its culture by blending tradition and "fusing elements of other national cultures into one coherent whole"(McGray, 2002).

McGray's work got the world talking and in 2007 (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) MIT and Harvard launched the Cool Japan Project to try and further understand what makes Japanese Pop Culture so adoptable and the potential of it to be distorted by its consuming audiences.

Ian Condry, founder of the Project had this to say about his own personal interest in Japanese Culture in an interview with Henry Jenkins:

"The idea of "cool Japan" really took off with the publication of journalist Douglas McGray's 2002 article ... He argued that Japan had become a "cultural superpower," despite a decade-long recession that began in the early nineties. It has also changed the attitudes of American's interested in Japan... "

"The real power of popular culture is making stereotypes seems less compelling, and to force us to ask more complex questions about cultural differences."

Could a key question then be asked: If we acknowledge Japanese Pop Culture is setting trends in the West...What then is inspiring these trends in Japan?

That is the purpose of this blog. Rather than recycling someone else's rhetoric that ultimately concludes Japan to be a major player in the globalization or homogenization (depending on which side of the fence you sit) of Pop Culture trends; let us examine what is "hip" in Japan NOW and why so that we may further understand where the "gross national cool" of Japan is borne from and perhaps predict where it may lead.

So, here my friends, feast on what is to come:

A guide on "How to be a hipster in Japan".

Live it. Love it. Be it. So that one day you may understand it.

ではまた後で。

Dewa Mata Atode!

See you later!