The Production and Consumption of ‘Japanese Culture’ in the Global Cultural Market

Abstract

This article presents an unusual angle for the study of consumer culture in a case study of an explicit process of the production and consumption of ‘culture’, or more specifically, of a product, which carries the label: ‘Japanese culture’, and which crosses national borders. The general context is that of cross-cultural consumption and cultural globalization. Globalization cannot be easily described anymore as having ‘a distinctly American face’. There is more and more evidence for competing centers or multiple globalizations. Japan has no doubt become one of these centers. The case at hand is that of the re-production and consumption of ‘Japanese culture’ in Israel. The article emphasizes the significance of looking at local cultural discourses or discourses about culture both at the ‘exporting’ and ‘importing’ destinations in trying to have a deeper understating of the processes of cultural globalization. I show how the Japanese cultural discourse - largely through the extremely popular genre of writing detailing the essential qualities of what it means to be Japanese known as Nihonjinron!- yielded a global cultural product known as ‘Japanese culture’, which is delivered to the world through contemporary ‘global cosmopolitans’.