Japanization of Global Entertaintment

The United States has been a major player in the global game; the US has been a major influence on the world for many decades, there are traces of the US to be found in many countries in terms of values, mind-set, products and management systems. In recent decades, there is a new player on the field, a new country rising up to the game of globalisation, and it is a player from the Far East, Japan.

In today’s world, the Japanese has invaded into many countries, almost everywhere we look, and there are something Japanese, it may be their product, culture or practices.  As a person growing up in the 1990s and 21^st century, one of the few prominent influences in my life are games, comic books and cartoon or animations, there are two major countries who produces these things are the United States and Japan and both of these countries have penetrated deep into many countries.

Japan has many influences in the world, that includes the US movie industry and it even has influence in some of the classic Hollywood movies. I’m sure many of us have seen and loved the classic Disney movie The Lion King, apparently some says that the movie copied an old Japanese animation called Kimba the While Lion (Robwrite, 2011).

Many movies from Hollywood has Japanese influence too, one of the prominent one is the movie Kill Bill, the main character uses a Japanese Katana and many of the fights occur in the Japanese Dojo type setting. This shows that the Japanese influence is slowly creeping into many countries, the Japanese image has an exotic appeal to many people from the West (Iwabuchi, 2002; pg. 27).

Not only the Japanese has influenced films back then, it has even influences in films today, like the recent Hollywood film Pacific Rim, which is about giant robots fighting giant monsters, the director Guillermo Del Toro publicly said that this film pays homage to the classical Japanese film genre of mecha, which is movies with giant robots like Gundam and kaiju movies, which is movies with giant monsters like Godzilla (The China Post, 2013).

Looking in today’s sales of Japanese games, the Sony PlayStation 3 has sold 77,313,427 units worldwide (D’Angelo 2013), this game console along with many games has penetrated into many countries. One of the reason why Japanese goods were so easily accepted by the global market was because it was as Iwabuchi put it, ‘culturally odorless’, many of the character in the Japanese games or animation does not show much of the Japanese characteristics (Iwabuchi, 2002; pg. 28).

Looking at many of the classic Japanese game characters like the famous Mario from the Nintendo game Super Mario, he is an Italian plumber fighting his way through Mushroom Kingdom to find a princess, there are close to none “Japaneseness” in the game. Another classic game is also by Nintendo and it is the game Legend of Zelda, which is about hero called Link fighting his way through many monsters to save the princess Zelda, once again the game is situated in a fantasy world and not much of the Japanese culture is presented in the game.

Unlike Americanisation which the influence from the US is not only material, but also the values, ideologies and way of life like democracy and the value of freedom, the influence of Japan is more material (Iwabuchi, 2002; pg.35). Although many of the children like me grew up with Japanese influences in terms of animation and games, not much of the Japanese values and ideology was transmitted to the children. With culturally odourless games like Super Mario and Legend of Zelda, many would not even realise that the game was Japanese.

Looking at this, the influence of Japanese is definitely around the world, just with games alone, the numbers are staggering and almost every household will have some present, but the values and ideology of the country does not seem to be affecting the world as much or not as obvious as the US.

References

Iwabuchi Koichi (2002). Taking “Japanization” seriously: Cultural globalization reconsidered. In Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. Durham and London, Duke University

D’Angelo William (28 May 2013). PlayStation 3 Lifetime Sales Overtakes the Xbox 360. VGCharts. Visited on: 26 August 2013. Available at: http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250980/playstation-3-lifetime-sales-overtakes-the-xbox-360/

Robwrite (November 2011). THE LION KING Controversy: Did Disney Rip-off Kimba the White Lion?. Hub Pages. Seen on: 26 August 2013. Available at: http://robwrite.hubpages.com/hub/THE-LION-KING-Controversy-Did-Disney-Rip-off-Kimba-the-White-Lion

The China Post (4 July 2013). The Japanization of the film world: A culture of 'I'?. The China Post. Seen on: 27 August 2013. Available at: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/editorial/world-issues/2013/07/04/382756/p2/The-Japanization.htm