Japan doesn’t give a **** about you

And that’s the real secret to global pop-cultural success

The Atlantic essay by Spencer Kornhaber asking “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” sparked a great deal of commentary in the two weeks since it dropped. Friends W. David Marx, Noah Smith, and others have weighed in as to whether we’ve really entered a “cultural dark age,” and if so, why. The argument goes that American television, film, and music are backward-looking, beset by stale franchises, prequels, reboots, “interpolations,” and derivatives. Meanwhile, online, would-be influencers grind out formless content in a losing battle against AI slop-mills. There’s almost no way for the creative class who traditionally guided our fantasies — musicians, writers, artists — to earn a living, even if they attain widespread acclaim.

Let’s put aside the counter-arguments for the moment and say that American pop culture is on the decline. So why is it that Japan is currently experiencing the opposite of the U.S.? Why is Japan in the midst of a pop-cultural boom?

Kornhaber’s piece focuses mainly on the American music scene. So it makes sense to focus on the analogous artform in Japan: manga. This isn’t as apples-to-oranges as it might seem. In the States music was long the literal beat and meter of the counter-culture, whether in the form of folk, protest rock, or hip-hop. But in Japan, illustrated entertainment, rather than music, played that role. Manga, and its binary-star twin of anime, are chief among the things that people refer to when they refer to “Japanese pop culture,” so the comparison feels apt.

Critics and commenters tick off many reasons why American creativity is on the downswing: corporate platforms with their algorithmic decision-making; consumers with punishingly short attention spans; isolation and loneliness on the part of creators and customers both; the collapse of the counterculture into mass-culture singularity; the constant need to grind out content; the conservative swing of younger generations seeking safe harbor from never-ending socio-political chaos. Hard to argue.

Virtually all of these factors apply to Japan as well. Manga is a data-driven medium too: big publishers constantly survey their readerhips and brutally cull any titles that fail to perform. Manga readers have short attention spans: studies show they spend only moments on a given panel. Many Japanese feel so adrift that the government appointed a Minister of Loneliness in 2021. Manga artists have to churn out work on a relentless schedule. Just like many American musical genres, manga transitioned from counter-culture to mainstream pop. And as I’ve written about before, young Japanese are swinging conservative too. From a broad societal perspective it would be hard to find a closer analogy to the States than Japan.

So again: why is American pop culture on the decline and Japanese pop culture so ascendant?

* * * * *

“The public does not know what is possible,” wrote Akio Morita, Chairman of Sony, in the autobiography Made in Japan. “We do. So instead of doing a lot of market research, we refine our thinking on a product and its use, and try to create a market for it.”

“Billionaire unilaterally deciding what’s best for the world” isn’t a great look at the moment. And Morita’s memory is selective; the company did indeed sometimes enlist the help of focus groups (such as when it designed and marketed the Walkman.)

But he was right: we don’t know what we want. We’ve created technologies that connect us more than ever before, only to make ourselves lonelier than ever before. We have access to ever-growing libraries of content and info on demand, yet are dissatisfied and distrustful of it. We outsource our sense of worth to companies who dole out recognition in the form of views, likes, and plays. Now we’re even starting to outsource ourselves, to AI models that make “art” without talent or effort, to the chatbots that absolve us from having to think for ourselves or interact with other living things. When we’re given a choice, as a species, we tend to take the safe way out, the easy, the known and the familiar. We are indoor cats who’ve built our own houses. I’m not singling any generation or group out here. Or even our current moment. A drive to seek comfort is built in to the human condition.

This applies to the production side, too. Whether a lowly Substacker or a faceless media empire, you’re hungry for feedback, for some sign that what you’ve made and released into the world is getting traction. You’re looking at all the data those customers generate — and if you’re one of those faceless media empires you’re probably getting a frighteningly detailed amount of it.

What if the problem is that the American content production and distribution system is paying too much attention to the customers?

This sounds counterintuitive, even subversive. Products, whether of the physical or media varieties, are made for consumption. So why wouldn’t producers consider the desires of audiences when making their products? But the question cuts to the heart of why Japanese creators seem to be hitting their global stride just as American ones seem to be losing theirs.

Take, for instance, this recent Bloomberg article about the creators of the mobile game Genshin Impact. This is a Chinese game, but the way in which it is run is pure Silicon Valley. HoYoverse made a fortune by crossing Nintendo-esque gameplay with slick, “anime-style” (scare quotes entirely intentional) imagery. In the five years since launching Genshin Impact, they’ve raked in the equivalent of more than six billion USD from in-game purchases. Then they followed it up with a pair of sequels that brought them two billion USD more. HoYoverse’s success is largely due to data, harvested in huge amounts from customers. “They have mastered player behavior to the point where they know exactly what you want when,” Bloomberg quotes an expert as saying. “They’re like economists and psychologists making video games.”

On the one hand, HoYoverse’s approach seems incredibly customer-forward. They have more information on their users -- real, actionable information -- than Morita or any producer of anything in history could have ever dreamed. And they’re giving those customers exactly what they want. But there’s a catch: they’ve hit a wall. Their new games don’t expand their market share; they cannibalize customers from existing ones. Their reliance on exactly what customers want is holding them back. If they want to continue to grow, they will need to “expand beyond their comfort zone.” And really, who can blame them for staying in it? Even with plunging revenues they still made more than four billion USD last year. Please take me along as you slide on down.

This paradox helps explain why Japan’s pop culture feels ascendant. Japanese creatives typically don’t pay a lot of attention to foreign markets. Nintendo’s traditional take-it-or-leave-it style takes a page from Morita’s top-down approach, shunning focus groups and player feedback. For a long time, as companies like Nintendo and Sony ceded market dominance abroad to competitors, observers derided this mindset as “Galapagos syndrome.” Japan was blessed and cursed with a domestic market large enough to profit handsomely from, the argument begins. And when the bubble economy popped in 1990, Japan’s global ambitions retracted within the boundaries of its national borders, and it fell out of step with the world. The term was first used to explain why Sony failed to invent anything like an iPhone, but it might also be applied to the way Japanese game companies ceded so much ground to foreign competitors like Microsoft or Electronic Arts (or HoYoverse), or why none of Japan’s anime studios have ever grown to the size of a Pixar.

However – and if this sounds familiar, it’s because I argued the same point in an NHK show earlier this year, which you can watch here – the critics missed the point. Japan has always been a cultural Galapagos, from the first moments of contact between East and West in the 19^th century. And even in modern times, the Japanese products that became global hits, whether the Walkman or Game Boy or kawaii fashion or what have you, were made by and for Japanese people. We outside consumers have always been an afterthought. A welcome one! But secondary. Japanese creatives are notoriously bad at promoting themselves, domestically and abroad – witness how most manga-artists retreat behind pen-names and doodles rather than revealing their identities. Companies fare little better internationally. And the government fares perhaps worst of all.

Charitably you could call it a Japan-first mindset; less charitably, an unwillingness or inability to go toe to toe with rivals in foreign markets. I’ve had many discussions about foreign audiences with Japanese creatives ranging from game directors to toymakers to manga artists, and I almost always hear variations on the same theme: we make this stuff for ourselves, not only because we want to, but because we have to. We don’t know what foreign people are thinking.

This seeming Achilles heel is proving an unexpected asset in the modern era. It is in fact why the world loves things from Japan. Japanese cultural producers may not pay much mind to foreign customers, but this isn’t out of antipathy or close-mindendess; rather, it’s the natural outcome of a kind of culture-wide introversion. As a result Japanese products don’t make us feel targeted; they make us feel seen. We often have to put some work into discovering them, which makes them feel all the more authentic.

There are, of course, plenty of American creatives making intensely personal things. But their brainchildren are all too often strangled by the algorithms of online curation. As a result, American creators small and large are encouraged, even compelled, to “go big or go home.” But when you try to make something for everyone, it inevitably feels like it’s made for no one.

Contrast this to Japanese media platforms, manga in particular. The major magazines are run by giant corporations, and use survey to drive decisions… And yet still manage to discover new talents, to create new franchises. The magazines fiercely cull anything that fails to find an audience. But when one does, the manga artist — tellingly called a “sensei,” in a show of respect for those who create — is given free reign to fly their freak flag. And that freedom results in unexpected new things. They’re data-driven, but the info comes from readers and is “crunched” by editors, who are given wide latitude to use the data or downplay it. It is an algorithm of a sort, but a human-centric one. And it creates human-centric art. (There’s a much bigger article in this — stay tuned.)

This is why Japanese creators, and manga creators in particular, putting themselves first has worked so well for Japan from a pop-cultural standpoint. Even the stuff that isn’t particularly visionary feels like it has a vision. In other words, the “economists and psychologists” aren’t driving, the creators are. Consuming products from Japan, whether manga or games or whatever, feels more like a conversation, whereas consuming content in the States, particularly online, feels like being trapped in some psychology lab’s Skinner box. And that’s the reason why you won’t see articles with titles like “Is this the Worst-Ever Era for Japanese Pop Culture?” anytime soon.