I Blame Kill Bill

It's funny. In the time since I first arrived in Japan (March 2003), Japanese culture has really undergone something of a transformation. Before I left there were some upper-middle-class types in London who ate sushi for lunch, and there were some teenagers who read manga - mostly boys who liked looking at demons having sex with nubile high-school students - and of course, Pikachu was always lurking in the backwaters of our cultural byways like a sinister rumour. But Japanese fiction, art, cinema, comics and music remained very much a fringe interest.

Now it's no exaggeration to say Japaneseness is so popular that literally anything Japanese has become the watchword for coolness. Men - ordinary men, who shop at Top Man and drink lots of beer - strut around in old baseball shirts with Hanshin Tigers and Seibu Lions logos. Teenagers - and not just the geeky ones - read manga and think it's actually good. J-pop starlets like Hamasaki Ayumi and Koda Kumi are listened to. Miyazaki Hayao's films are hailed as masterpieces. Hollywood remakes Japanese horror films and considers it de rigeur to write Japanese characters into scripts. Films about Westerners struggling to make sense of how "baffling" Tokyo supposedly is win Academy Awards for Best Screenplay, even though they're really boring. Watanabe Ken is now an A-lister. Mamiko works in "The Japanese shop" and sells origami cranes for 60p a pop even though it takes her about three seconds to make one. The world has gone Japanese-mad.

Thinking back, the thing which either lit the touchpaper, or perhaps was just the first thing to signify the trend, was Kill Bill vol. 1. I remember coming back to the UK in around October 2003 for a visit and that film was everywhere, and the vast majority of the comment on it was of the nature of "I don't know about the story, but boy is Japan a cool place!" I think it rather skewed perceptions of what Japan is really like, with the way it seemlessly interwove bloodthirsty anime, female rock 'n' roll three-pieces, mafioso-style yakuza and Okinawan swordmakers into its plot. Even I, who knew that none of those things are remotely indicative of what life in Japan is like, watched that film and thought to myself "Japan is really damn cool."

The most interesting thing for me is that ordinary Japanese people are usually bemused when they hear about their country's newfound popularity. See, most Japanese people don't read much manga now but did when they were in junior high school, dislike Beat Takeshi films, think novels by Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana are generally kind of silly and depressing, don't know anything about origami and tea ceremonies, and vaguely recall Pikachu as some character who was popular ages ago and now think of in the same way that British people look back on Bananaman or Thundercats. If you tell them that now, for example, it wouldn't be considered unusual if an average British teenager plucked off the street could tell you what Cowboy BeBop is, they'd probably look at you askance and say "What's Cowboy BeBop?"

Anyway, over the next few days, I thought I'd post a few Top-5 lists of Japanese things which I think are worth investigating if, like me, you aren't particularly into samurai, ninja, manga, androgyny, slasher pics, suicidal novelists, pop stars who sing gibberish, pink things, girls who make 'peace' signs all the time in photographs, and cartoon characters with grotesquely large eyes.

First up tomorrow: music.