For many years now the public image that Japan had as a highly advanced, role model nation with a great society has diminished because many people got to see its ugly sides. I remember that learning Japanese was very popular until about the mid to late 90's until Chinese and even Korean became favorite languages for people to learn while on college. There's no more big Japanese companies like Sony that create a big splash in any type of consumer industry. What does Japan have left that they didn't already present before to the 'world'?

*cough*

it's spelled lustre.

lol. j/k. it's canada day. ^___^


maybe japan's just running out of gas? no country has stayed at the top for a long time. either way. i think the fact that when the western world started to love anime TOO much, japan started to be associated with hentai and cosplay instead of electronics. THAT, IMO, was what caused japan's decline. just my two cents.

The japan government can stop by rellying on the U.S. ignoring all outside complaints.

Er..your wishful thinking? I think Japan is still advanced in many areas. For example, Honda has created ASIMO that is world's most advanced humanoid robot. Within the next few years, a welfare robot to watch over the elderly and infirm is expected to be commercially available. You think there's no more big Japanese companies like Sony? Well, Toyota is expected to overtake GM as No. 1 auto maker by 2010, and their hybrid cars are becoming very popular.

Japan is unique nation and central to our belief is the emperor who has always leaded us through courage and valiancy.

Err..central to our belief is the emperor ?? How old are you? Young Japanese like me don't think like that

There are a lot of hightech, high-quality japanese brands to be seen around. And people see japanese cuisine as very classy and tasty.

(speaks like al pacino) Japanese gain back luster? NEVER!

What does Japan have left that they didn't already present before to the 'world'?

cheap domestic goods, so you don't have to do your shopping in HK.

Cheap? Sushi is cheap when you make it yourself and all the other japanese foodstuff. But electronica, clothing like evisu, bathing ape, games, cars like toyota are quite expensive.

delete

If it's possible for a country's "brand recognition" to over-saturate the public then this is exactly what we're seeing with japan. whether accurate or not japan has become ubiquitous with dorks, anime, samuri swords and hello kitty. it's been "wow japan" for so long that people seem to just be getting tired of it. i had even enrolled in a japanese language class and had to drop it b/c the manga dorks in there were freaking me out so much......and that's just the image japan has these days.

There is an interesting article about the current image of Japanese culture at trendwatching.com

Turning Japanese? I Think So

What could Australian pop culture lovers see in Japan? Plenty, it seems. We're leaping for its pop outpourings faster than Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, writes Steve Dow.

Once, to find the next big thing in pop culture, you could always ask the urban tribes of New York City or Los Angeles, or check out what they were wearing from their caps to their trainers. No more. In 2004, you'd be better off asking a Japanese teenage girl about fashion or must-have gadgets. She knows the big fad of tomorrow. Fancy your Louis Vuitton bag in a Murkami design? But of course, Uma-san.

Japan's Marubeni Research Institute estimates Japanese cultural exports books, music, magazines, films and collectables at $15 billion in 2002, three times their value a decade earlier. And while Japan's pop exports are snapped up in South-East Asia, the language barriers in countries such as the United States and Australia are tumbling.

Local teenagers and 20-somethings blooded on PlayStation are proving themselves a visual generation, delighting in Japanese pop forms heard about through word of mouth or on the internet. BusinessWeek recently reported the Japanese pop tsunami could profoundly affect US culture merchants. Anne Allison, cultural anthropology chair at Duke University says, "The US has for a very long time been the centre of global culture movies, music, food but now that's no longer true."

The boom began with the king of video games: PlayStation, which was launched in late 1994, gave kids a crucial feeling of being in the driver's seat, says William Armour, an academic who teaches a Japanese pop culture course at the University of NSW. And Tamagotchis, the virtual LCD display pets launched in 1996, were a defining moment. "Children are powerless, and either with PlayStation or Tamagotchi, children were basically put in powerful positions," says Armour.

Also, the Pokemon computer game phenomenon introduced many children to the world of Japanese "anime", or animation, and "manga", or comic books. Now, says Jim Papagrigoriou, manager of Kings Comics in Pitt Street, the generation has outgrown Pokemon and discovered adult anime and manga. Manga represents 35 per cent of the store's sales, compared to 5 per cent five years ago. "Manga has latched on to a new generation," he says. "When they take it home, their parents aren't going to say, 'That's something I had'."

Partly driving this manga and anime explosion is the availability of English translations over the past five years or so. TOKYOPOP, a Los Angeles-based publisher, among others, snapped up the rights to many manga titles, recognising that the colossal, visually brilliant 180-plus page weekly comic tomes rival the popularity of newspapers in Japan. In Melbourne, film distribution company Madman is doing a roaring trade as Australia's biggest importer of Japanese anime feature films and shorts.

At Melbourne's Monash University, a manga library with more than 5000 titles has been established, and now has 300 members and 30 volunteer staff. Lecturer Craig Norris of Monash's arts faculty, who did his PhD on anime, says the library runs manga drawing classes; and these are filled with Anglo-Australians.

In the parlance of today's teenagers, Japanese culture is attractive because it feels "random", says Rob Marjenberg, a director of Sydney-based Heartbeat trends. Teens are now very visually literate, he says, and the eclecticism of Japanese pop art bright backgrounds, textures, and big-eyed characters accompanied by strange, sped-up music is appealing. Younger people are travelling to Japan more, he says, while in Australia they now regularly eat the likes of sushi, "the McDonald's of the urban office worker".

Kathy Baylor, a New York-based researcher for Trendwatching.com, says Japan's influence as the "leading exporter of pop culture cool" can be seen in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films, the adaptation of the Japanese horror hit The Ring and the burgeoning popularity of Japanese director Beat Takeshi's movies. US director Sofia Coppola made the hit film Lost In Translation to convey how much she loved Tokyo.

The Japanese culture of kawaii or "cuteness" is increasingly pervasive in the West, too. Think of the Hello Kitty cat design, which has been around for 30 years now. Japanese teenage girls and women in their 20s are now such an important yardstick for pop culture marketeers because they're in the right place with cash to spare, says Baylor. Japanese tradition holds that a girl live rent-free with her parents until she marries. As a result, says Baylor, you get a human "demo with lots of expendable income".

If Generation Xers and baby-boomers fear they're missing the tsunami, consider what you might not have recognised as vintage anime and manga that has influenced the current wave. The late Osamu Tezuka, dubbed the God of Japanese comics, created Astroboy and Kimba The White Lion, seen on Australian screens at various times since the 1960s.

While Japanese academic studies in Australia boomed in the 1980s and early 1990s, fewer Australians have been learning the language since 1996. Armor says while the popularity of Japanese pop culture is rising here via English translations, learning the language helps students better understand the ideas and ideology behind manga and anime.

Worldwide, however, the Marubeni Institute estimates there are 3 million people outside Japan learning Japanese. Kinokuniya, the Japanese multinational book store, has seen manga sales rise 400 per cent in the two years its branch has been open in George Street, says the store's comics consultant Wai Chew Chan.

The most popular titles are anime tie-ins: Naruto, the ninja student; Rurouni Kenshin, a samurai epic, and Love Hina, a 14-volume epic about a man who inherits his grandmother's bathhouse, of all things. Chan says teenagers half of whom are Caucasian are the biggest buyers.

Whether the trend in Australia could ever mimic Tokyo, where commuters buy manga as often as newspapers, is unlikely, given manga is mass produced and thus cheaper in Japan. But the boom is undeniably here. The manga stories are prized for being long, engaging and often slowly paced. "I don't think it's a fad," says Chan. "People are learning to see comics as a way of reading."

korean and chinese more popular to learn in colleges? i think there are more colleges offering it, especially chinese (but korean not so much that i know of), but on the whole in American colleges and highschools, Japanese is still big. now i said American.

Japanese is still the favoured language course in Australia.

I could've sworn LIT was a not-too-subtle dig at Japanese culture, not portraying a love of it

Also honda developed the best f-1 engine wich won many races

Japan has dished out many material goods but it hasn't gained any real respect in the international community. Now that there are North Korean, Chinese, and American products challenging Japanese, competition is just going to get worst.

For example, Microsoft XBOX vs. PS2. XBOX owns PS2 in the United States.

You mean South-Korean, like Samsung. Chinese like Haier.
I think Japan will be ahead of things, technologies for a very long time.

Samsung is just as big as Sony. Looked at their computer chips. Their electronics isn't so bad either. IMO Sony is overrated. Half their stuff is crap.

I wouldn't call it crap, I've never saw Sony as the big one but one of the big ones. Samsung is doing a great job. Toyota too.

Wrong. PS2 had 43 percent of the U.S. market, followed by Xbox with 19 percent and GameCube at 14 percent last year. PS is still the most popular game console among video game players.


Sony isn't the only electronic company in Japan. There are many other good companies like Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp, Canon, Casio, JVC, Epson etc.

Since when?

Since 1963 during the Grand Prix races
Click Here for info
Their team drove the RA271, RA272, Honda RA273, and the Honda RA300 in the European and Mexican Grand Prix races in the 1960’s. I use to play Papyrus’s Grand Prix Legends on the PC a lot.

*edit*BTW, the guy who started Honda company was from the same family clan as this famous Samurai Taisho (General) who was a retainer of Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Honda Tadakatsu

This is his army’s battle flag.click here You can find more info on him on this site: click here. I thought I might put that in because his helmet was pretty cool looking. He’s one of my favorite generals of the Sengoku Jidai era along with Daimyo Takeda Shingen, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Date Masamune.

I think the reason why Chinese and Korean langauges/hangul writing have become “favorite languages” or have become more “popular” than Japanese is because the people learning these languages in school are probably mostly Chinese and Korean Americans who were raised here and want to learn their ancestor’s language. Check the classes out at those colleges. They’re probably mostly Korean and Chinese American students as with Japanese langauge classes with Japanese Americans. The majority of Asians are Chinese Americans with Filipino Americans at a tie or close second with Koreans at a third, and Japanese Americans at fourth place in Asian American population. You can check the US Census Bureau on this: http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/censr-17.pdf
Heck the majority of Asians living here in my home city and the suburbs are Koreans and Filipinos. They outnumber Chinese but they have a ton of Chinese Americans living in Hawaii, California, and Washington state. I don't see a lot of Japanese in my city except for some of my friends who are half Japanese/Okinawan half white. (I don’t know if they count).
No offense, but I don’t think a lot westerners or the westerners I know are really interested in learning any Asian languages. Unless if they plan on going to those countries to be either missionaries in Korea (half of the Korean population is Baptist/Evangelical Christians) or they plan on doing business there or become english teachers.