‘Culture’, famously wrote the Welsh literary critic and cultural theorist Raymond Williams, is ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’.1
1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Croon Helm, 1976), p. 76.
In the ensuing half-century since this declaration, the term has expanded in its polysemy. In the 21st century, ‘culture’ means at least four things: (1) the so-called ‘high’ culture of museums and symphony halls, (2) folk customs, (3) pop culture, and, most recently, (4) the workplace norms inside of large corporations. The rapid democratization of our late capitalist world has made the first meaning – ‘high culture’ – feel dated, verging on bigotry. Only an unreformed elitist would claim that one set of cultural practices should be levated over others.
Yet ‘high culture’ best approximates the original meaning of the word, which arrived from Latin as an agricultural metaphor. Just as we cultivate barren fields to bear fruit, we cultivate our minds with arts and letters. Key to this idea during the Enlightenment was the presupposition that only the Europe had real ‘culture’, in that only the West had classical music, philosophy, and oil paintings. The term only began to mean more once anthropologists applied, as a metaphor, the word ‘culture’ to the practices of people in faraway lands. They had their own ‘versions’ of culture – but not forms competitive with European culture with a capital ‘C’.
The last century saw a steady erosion of the idea that a group of educated elites have the sole claim on cultural production, especially with the success of American ‘coolness’ in promoting individualized consumerism across the globe. There are only vestigial traces of the old, formalized hierarchy of high and low cultures. The marketplace, of course, welcomed such flattening, as it is much easier to mass-produce formulaic kitsch than original art. Moreover, culture today is fundamentally consumer culture, or in the case of fine art, inexorably tied up in the question of market value.
As much as elitists complain that this shift brought a subsequent decline in the quality of culture, there is no question that a more inclusive concept of culture opened the door to a greater diversity of practices and more international hybridization. Into this opening, we have watched East Asia emerge as the next important hub for global culture in ways both obvious and subtle, decentralizing the West’s monopoly on cultural production and valorisation. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese artists and creatives stand as equals to their global peers. This is a different state of affairs from the 19th century, when Western connoisseurs derived inspiration from the ‘Orient’ for their own purposes. French Impressionists adored ukiyo-e woodblock prints, not for their place in Japanese art history, but because the art form bolstered their own mission to abandon naturalistic conventions. Exoticization, however, is ultimately ostracization. In the 19th century, no Japanese artist could bend the arc of cultural history toward themselves in the manner of Monet and Cézanne. The wealthiest people collected ‘china’ and ‘japan’ – as ceramics and lacquerware were often referred to – without having any desire to be Chinese or Japanese.
Today, the reverse is true: Western youth seek to bolster their status by imitating East Asian lifestyles, and they show little interest in the exotic orientalist crafts. The 21st century, then, offers a new paradigm for Asia’s place in culture. ‘Asia’ was always a continent, but now it has also become an interconnected network of cultural fields. This transcends the individual successes of individual Asian artists on the global stage into a broader categorical respect for entire industries and fields: Japanese fashion, architecture, design, and crafts; Korean music, drama, and beauty; and Hong Kong films. Even behind-the-scenes, the Western luxury industryis positioning its aesthetic decisions to meet the tastes of Chinese consumers.
By examining the causes of this dramatic reversal, we can understand not just the current dynamics of cultural flows in the postmodern 21st century, but also how nations build cachet at a country-wide level.
In October 1964, Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics – a momentous occasion for Japan that symbolised the country’s reintegration into the global order after its defeat in World War II. The Olympics would serve as a showcase for how the city was rebuilt after the March 1945 firebombing. A public works project aimed to create a ‘city of the future’ with the construction of new highways and a Shinkansen bullet train to Osaka, as well as the erasure of older elements, such as wooden garbage cans and trolley lines. (Andrei Tarkovsky later filmed the new Shuto Expressway as part of his 1972 science-fictional epic, Solaris.) The centrepiece of the Olympic Village – architect Kenzō Tange’s spiralling modernist Yoyogi Gymnasium – embodied this vision of Japan as a cutting-edge nation. Over the next two decades, this 1964 techno-optimism would find additional data points in the nation’s booming economy and recognized prowess for high-quality, low-price cars and electronics. Japan’s resurgence was a ‘miracle’: a phoenix of universalist peace born from the ashes of its chauvinistic death-cult imperialist past.
Japanese artists began to work in Western artistic mediums during the Meiji period, and as the country opened up in the late 1950s, the most talented youth rushed overseas to compete on the global stage. Borrowing money from a family friend, the aspiring young conductor Seiji Ozawa travelled to Europe and won the 1959 Besançon competition. This opened up opportunities for him to study directly under Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono escaped the stifling misogyny of Japanese society and buried themselves in the New York avant-garde. In the mid-1960s, Kenzō Takada and Issey Miyake moved to Paris to make their names in fashion design. At first, their Western peers viewed their presence with curiosity – and often in an exoticist framing. Ono’s association with John Lennon was a double-edged sword: everyone knew that she had baptized Lennon in avant-garde techniques, yet she also served as the master villain in the Beatles’ denouement.
This early generation of Japanese artists attempted to compete as universalists rather than as representatives of ‘Japan’, but by the 1970s, musicians had found a foothold in Western culture by tapping into the idea of a techno-utopian Japan. The musical trio Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) began as folk and exotica musician Haruomi Hosono’s side project; he wanted to use the latest instruments from domestic electronics companies Korg and Roland to create disco floor-ready versions of fauxoriental melodies à la Martin Denny. YMO’s first album would be released in the United States as part of the disco boom, and their successful overseas tour won them accolades back home. Their second album, Solid State Survivor, offered young Japanese boys a sonic parallel to their obsession with electronic gadgets and video games, and the group’s Maoist automaton aesthetics gave Japan a guiding look for its posthippie moment. (Their short haircuts, styled after frumpy Chinese traditional musicians, became known in Japan as ‘techno-cuts’.) Keyboardist Ryūichi Sakamoto broke out as a star composer and model in his own right, especially after a glammy performance in 1983’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence alongside David Bowie. (Bowie was an important vehicle for the export of Japanese culture; unbeknownst to the majority of his fans, his most sensational looks often came from designer Kansai Yamamoto.)
YMO’s use of electronics inspired a generation of younger Japanese bands, and one act, the Plastics, won over New York and London with an odd combination of New Wave guitars, primitive drum machines, and robotic lyrics. They would be filmed as part of the footage for Glenn O’Brien and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s unreleased movie that was recut in 2000 as Downtown 81. In cases of both YMO and the Plastics, however, Japanese bands had to break into global cool through an immediate admission that Japanese society was inherently uncool. Like Kraftwerk’s critique of German industrialism, techno-pop offered a dystopian artistic vision, and it basked in the irony that rigid bureaucratic organizations could operate machines with computer precision to create futuristic versions of ‘culture’. While this certainly internalized too much of the Western critique of Japan, it opened the door for cool to come from Asia.
Music was an easier field for Japanese artists in which to compete, as listeners aggressively desired novelty and transgression. Fashion was harder to break into, since the industry must sell status symbols anchored in the Western aristocratic ideas of elegance and grace. Music could come from Liverpool or Mississippi; real fashion only came from Paris. Kenzō Takada was the first to succeed in France, opening a curious store called Jungle Jap in the early 1970s. The major turning point, however, was the 1981 Parisian joint fashion show from Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons. Their use of tattered industrial fabrics in various shades of black was a radical avant-garde break from Western clothing traditions – in fact, the supportive critics understood the looks as a step beyond contemporary trends. Yamamoto and Kawakubo suffered an ignoble and merciless backlash (Women’s Wear Daily labelled the clothes in the autumn-winter 1982 collection as a ‘Hiroshima bag-lady look’), but the world’s top fine artists became loyal customers. Famed film director Wim Wenders made a documentary on Yamamoto as a traditional genius artist, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), while Comme des Garçons moved forward year after year to become one of the world’s most respected fashion brands.
Tokyo’s fashionable district of Harajuku in 2018. Photo by Dick Thomas Johnson. Creative Commons License 2.0 via Flickr.
The vanguard spirit of these brands in the mid-1980s dovetailed with an emerging national narrative: ‘Japan as number one’, from the title of a book by Harvard professor Ezra Vogel. With the financial growth during the years of the Japanese bubble economy, the country seemed poised to leapfrog the West. To critics and philosophers, Japan also appeared to embody ‘postmodernism’ like no other place on earth. Japanese consumers mixed and matched Western references with no constraints of ‘authenticity’. Everything was ‘flat’ and available for ‘play’.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s idea that late capitalist culture was a ‘simulation’ of reality appeared to have come true first in Japan. French mesdames bought Louis Vuitton bags as part of a class uniform; in the late 1980s, Japanese consumers, with no connection at all to this class milieu, made up 90 percent of the brand’s sales.
Japan’s economic success would trigger much anxiety in the US, which pounced on the country for its success despite a fundamental and inhuman rigidity. Culture was supposed to appear from humans longing to express their individuality; in other words, the Japanese could never compete. In his 1992 book, Dave Barry Does Japan, the American humourist Dave Barry complained that Japanese teens in rock bands seemed to miss the entire point of rock ‘n’ roll:
‘What was really pathetic about them was their desperately misguided effort to be different. For example, you don’t see a lot of tie-dyed T-shirts in Japan, and there was one band whose members all wore tie-dyed T-shirts, which I guess made them different by Japanese standards, but they all wore virtually the same T-shirt. And dancing in front of them was a crowd of groupies – all teenage girls, and they all wore the same shirt, on top of which they were all doing the same dance step, which I assume they thought was cool, but which I swear looked exactly like the Hokey Pokey’.2
2 Dave Barry, Dave Barry Does Japan (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 119.
Coolness required a rebellious detachment from social convention, and therefore, Japan could not possibly be ‘cool’.
Americans of this era could only see the surface culture of the bubble period: mass-market tastes that reflected conservative values of the previous decades. The global future was being invented in the underground. Higher incomes created a more robust consumer market, which in turn increased the Japanese individuals at the margins attempting to outdo each other in global knowledge. The isolation of Japan created amazing opportunities for cultural arbitrage – just knowing about a new trend in the US or the UK before one’s peers would be valuable in elite social circles and lead to respect and career success.
There is no better example of this than Hiroshi Fujiwara. In 1982, he arrived in Tokyo from Mie prefecture as a fashion design student obsessed with London counterculture icons Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. He had enough pocket money from his parents to buy up the few secondhand Seditionaries garments that existed in Japan. Fujiwara soon flew to England, where he befriended his heroes, and while there, McLaren encouraged him to abandon his interest in punk rock for a new sound emerging from New York’s South Bronx: hip-hop. Back in New York, Fujiwara bought up the few 12-inch rap records in existence, and returned to Japan to become the country’s first hip-hop DJ. He would later become the Japanese ambassador for the American skate-surf label Stüssy – the first brand in a new genre of urban clothing called ‘streetwear’. In 1991, Fujiwara founded Japan’s first streetwear brand, GOODENOUGH.
The bubble economy burst that same year, and yet, Japanese youth consumption continued to increase until 1996. What changed, however, were its core aesthetics; Fujiwara’s brand of street culture outmoded the gaudy tastes of the nouveau riche. GOODENOUGH became a cult hit, and with it, Fujiwara encouraged his protégés to start their own brands: UNDERCOVER, A BATHING APE®, NEIGHBORHOOD, and Real Mad Hectic. These would coalesce into a casual clothing movement called Ura-Harajuku-kei that dominated late-1990s Japanese fashion and began to be sold at the hippest boutiques in London. There was an allied movement in music as well. Postmodern collage artists, such as Cornelius and Pizzicato Five – known under the loose genre name Shibuya-kei – impressed Western cognoscenti with their encyclopedic knowledge of rare grooves and independent acts. (Ultra-hip New York label Matador Records released both of their key work in the late 1990s.) Keigō Oyamada of Cornelius equally referenced Michael Jackson and J.S. Bach with obscure bands Orange Juice, Microdisney, and Count Five.
While Rei Kawakubo and Ryūichi Sakamoto were seen as inscrutable gods, the 1990s generation of Japanese creatives were connecting with their global peers at an authentic community level. Neither high culture nor pop culture, this was street culture – a reflection of what was authentically happening among cutting-edge youth. This found an expression among both genders as well; Japanese female teenage photographers Hiromix, Yurie Nagashima, and Mika Ninagawa gave the culture its own unique visual quality. The self-published magazine FRUiTS offered street snaps of the most creatively dressed Japanese youth, and its foreign distribution turned from the West to Japan as a fashion centre.
Portrait of Ryūichi Sakamoto. Photo by Joi Ito. CC 2.0 via Flickr.
This ’90s reverence for Japanese alternative culture would spearhead a broader cultural movement that was later coopted by the government as ‘Cool Japan’. By the early 2000s, Western appreciation for Japanese creators spanned from the highest museum art to the lowest kitsch. The older millennial generation had grown up on Nintendo, Sega, and other Japanese video games, and by the early 2000s, Barnes & Noble bookstores across the US were stocking their shelves with translated mangas. Interest in this otaku nerd culture made the Japanese Neo-Pop artistic movement from Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara easy to understand.
By this point, the sheer scale and scope of the Japanese culture industry had given Japan a privileged position over other countries in East Asia. At the end of the 20th century, South Korea and Taiwan were completely off the cultural map, still recovering from their years under repressive dictatorship. The American understanding of Korea is well represented by a 1992 episode of The Simpsons featuring a scene of the show’s own South Korean animators toiling in a dungeonlike environment with soldiers bayonetting them in the back to prod them into labour. (The actual South Korean animators, who took pride in working on a popular American TV show in comfortable middleclass jobs, protested the inclusion of this scene.) Hong Kong and Chinese filmmakers began to win over Hollywood in the 1990s, and with Quentin Tarantino’s endorsement, Wong Kar-wai became a darling of independent cinema. Between Hong Kong, Japan, Asian-American cultural icons such as Gregg Araki, and Asian-American media including Giant Robot, there seemed to be an emerging ‘Asian pop culture’.
Hong Kong would end up being important for far more than its cinema. In the 1990s, Japanese streetwear reached its peak of vibrancy, yet it was more or less stuck inside Japan. Sitting between the East and the West, the city would be critical for bridging Asian culture with the rest of the planet. In 1999, the Japanese label A BATHING APE (BAPE) worked with two local Hong Kong rappers, Eric Kot and Jan Lamb of Softhard, to open its first VIP-only boutique in a Hong Kong office building. The media attention for its exclusive T-shirts spurred counterfeiters into action, and soon the world was flooded with fake BAPE. This, ironically, helped to promote the brand across Asia, and over the next five years, Hong Kong became one of the world’s most devoted consumer groups for BAPE, Supreme, and other core streetwear brands.
Young men who took too much interest in limited-edition sneakers and apparel became pejoratively known as ‘hypebeasts’, and in 2005, former Hong Kong banker Kevin Ma launched a website dedicated to this culture called Hypebeast. Meanwhile, Japanese fashion brands spent little time considering their export businesses, and the existing info-rich Japanese magazines published nothing in English. Hypebeast played a crucial role here: it was an English-language site based in Asia with an eye on Japan whose editors and writers provided the world with realtime updates on Japanese fashion. As Hypebeast and its imitators gained readers in the millions, Hong Kong became an important silent broadcaster and translator for the latest in Asia.
Pharrell Williams performing at Coachella on April 19, 2014. Photo by Thomas Hawk. CC 2.0 via Flickr.
The other important ambassador for Japanese fashion would be music producer Pharrell Williams. In April 2003, Williams and his rock unit, N.E.R.D., visited Tokyo, where he met Nigo of BAPE. ‘When I went to his showroom’, Williams recalled, ‘it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, ever. I just went crazy’.3 BAPE agreed to manufacture the clothing for Williams’s new clothing line, Billionaire Boys Club. In return, Williams helped BAPE open its first American store in New York at the end of 2004. This put Japanese streetwear at the centre of American Hypebeast culture, and more critically, deep into the heart of the hip-hop world. Rapper-producer Kanye West was an early fan of BAPE, and in 2007, he asked Takashi Murakami to illustrate the cover of his third album, Graduation. Here, Japanese pop culture broke out of its popularity with nerds and cultural elites, and it exploded into mainstream America.
3 Pharrell Williams in Kadia Blagrove, Joe La Puma, Jian DeLeon, ‘The Oral History of Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream’, Complex, December 3, 2013. https://www.complex.com/style/a/kadia-blagrove/oral-history-bbc-icecream.
During these years, the Japanese content industry did not globalise – it was globalised. In the spirit of crowdsourcing, young fans and websites stepped in to facilitate the export of culture out of Japan, often without formal permission. Whether out of a lack of ambition, snobbery, self-doubt, or short-sightedness, most Japanese brands and creators took little interest in the export of their brands. Moreover, the Japanese domestic market, in a country of more than 125 million, was so big that there was not much need to go abroad.
South Korea had the opposite problem: its relatively smaller population of 50 million resulted in a crowded domestic market, and with an explosion of Korean pop music, films, and TV, this market quickly became saturated. In search of further growth, South Korean entertainment companies adopted explicit global strategies. They trained their talent to speak multiple languages, hired foreign producers, and tapped the knowledge of the Korean diaspora that had grown up overseas. K-pop management groups first launched their stars in Asia, getting early traction with the girl group S.E.S. and singer BoA. With the birth of YouTube in the late 2000s, these musicians now had the perfect platform for reaching everywhere in the world with a few clicks of a mouse. While Japanese record labels refused to upload their full videos to YouTube to preserve lucrative DVD sales, Korean entertainment companies SM, YG, and JYP offered all of their videos for free viewing, often with foreign subtitles. This maximized their surface area for potentially creating global hits. The industry assumed that entertainment company JYP would be the first to create a global K-pop star in its push of girl group Wonder Girls into the US market.
Global K-pop domination happened much faster than anyone would have anticipated – but not in the way anyone expected. On July 15, 2012, the middling 34-year-old rapper Psy (Jae-sang Park) uploaded his latest video Gangnam Style to YouTube. American rapper T-Pain tweeted two weeks later, ‘Words cannot even describe how amazing this video is ... ’ It went viral and became a sprawling pop culture moment. Just as Japan felt fresh in the 1980s, Korea offered new visual novelties for the 2010s; few were familiar with K-pop’s high-production values, Day-Glo aesthetics, and machine-precise dance sequences. In September 2012, Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun signed Psy to his label, explaining: ‘There is one reason... to be a part of history, to do something no one has ever done before. Psy is a guy you want to root for’.4 At the end of 2012, Korea’s Ministry of Culture bestowed Google with a formal award recognizing its role in assisting the global spread of K-pop. Gangnam Style – not Justin Bieber’s Baby, or any other American production – would be the first video on YouTube to hit two billion views.
4 Scooter Braun in Alex Marin, ‘Justin Bieber Manager Boards the Gangman Style Bandwagon, Signs Korean Pop Viral Sensation’, MIC, September 6, 2012. https://www.mic.com/articles/14269/justin-bieber-manager-boards-the-gangmanstyle-bandwagon-signs-korean-pop-viral-sensation.
Alongside K-pop and Samsung smartphones, Korean cosmetics (‘K-beauty’) and TV programs (‘K-drama’) also won over global consumers of the 2010s beyond the US. Across Southeast Asia, Korea replaced Japan as a model of emulation – mostly as Korean clothing and beauty trends were inexpensive to buy (or copy) and mapped well to the flashy goods preferred in societies with high income inequality. Korean ‘influencers’ found a global broadcasting platform in Instagram, and Southeast Asian women could tune in to mimic their style choices in real time.
With the fully globalised, internet-based culture of the 2010s, Asian culture enjoyed a new conspicuous dominance in setting the directions of cutting-edge culture – not just as the hub for new worldwide trends, but a respected influencer in the most Western areas of Western culture. Kanye West’s design protégé, Virgil Abloh, took the helm of Louis Vuitton Men’s in 2018, and he quickly brought on his personal hero, Nigo (who had sold BAPE to a Hong Kong company), to make a capsule collection. LVMH then tapped Nigo to be the head designer of KENZO, the namesake brand of Kenzō Takada. After Abloh’s sudden death in 2021, Louis Vuitton gave the creative director role to Nigo’s other close confidant, Pharrell Williams.
European luxury brands once commercialised the very idea of culture with a capital ‘C’ – the apparel and accessories key to imaginary aristocratic lifestyles of horseback riding and safaris. In the 21st century, these brands offered clothing in their stores best characterized as ‘elevated streetwear’. This would be a rational strategy – and yet another effect of Asia. Mainland Chinese customers comprise at least one-third of the market for luxury goods, and their fundamental instincts for fashion came from the influence of Hong Kong, which had long taken direction from 1990s Japan. For European brands to create additional value for shareholders, they would need to create products that spoke to their growth market of wealthy Chinese youth. Yet this group had no need for ball gowns; they wanted chunky sneakers and logo T-shirts. High-end apparel lines also began to sell their clothing through marketing techniques pioneered in Ura-Harajuku: namely, ‘drops’ of limited-edition items, often collaborations between two brands. They continued to sell clothes through celebrity associations, but in the 21st century, this meant K-pop stars, such as BTS and BLACKPINK, alongside Hollywood actors.
These concrete moments demonstrate the rolling momentum that allowed Asian creators to penetrate the Western cultural fortress and change the world’s aspirations and desires. This required an interconnected Asia: Western fashion conglomerates relied on Chinese consumers for their customer base, which necessitated borrowing design and marketing ideas from Japanese streetwear and partnering with K-pop stars for promotion. Japanese companies embraced their position in Asia; with the decline in youth consumption, their streetwear brands now rely on Korean, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese shoppers to stay afloat. This is quite easy, as the Japanese cultural explosion has snowballed into record tourist numbers. Travellers in Tokyo don’t just go to kabuki and eat sushi: they visit Akihabara for its otaku culture, Harajuku for its youth fashion, and Ginza for its cocktail bars. Even Japan’s derided pre- 1990s culture is aspirational – the cheesy ‘city pop’ fusion music of the bubble period is having a moment on mobile video sites.
We should expect further intra-Asian cross-pollination. Japan’s early-20th-century colonisation of Korea made the two countries rivals after the war, but the political reconciliation of recent years has seen a parallel phenomenon in pop culture. In 2023, hip Japanese men’s magazine Popeye published its first-ever issue on Seoul travel, offering a guide to trendy stores and restaurants without any exoticism or condescension. Meanwhile, Tokyo’s Shin-Ōkubo neighbourhood – once racistly derided as a ‘dangerous’ area because of its ethnic Korean community – is now popular with young Japanese women thanks to its confectionery and beauty shops.
Cultural creations from the East will further penetrate into the West to the degree that these geographical terms are beginning to lose their meaning. Ultimately, Western consumer culture requires Asian influences for its novelty. The looming question is whether or not mainland China can translate its vast consumer power into creative influence. Japan needed decades, if not a full century, to make this jump. Perhaps it will happen faster for China. TikTok has demonstrated that Chinese mobile technology has the potential to shape global culture, but the split between the global and Chinese versions of the app – often with very different worldviews – prevented clear crossovers or the creation of universally beloved content. The word ‘culture’ is even more complicated in this era, but Asia’s dominance in the commercial market marches forward year after year, and there is no reason to expect a reversal.