JAPAN - New culture Power
Japan is in the way to become new cultural hot spot in asia. Japan's economy is no more hot as it was a decade back and rising economy like china and india had stalled the japan's march. On other side japan is fast becoming the trendsetter in culture, art, music and fashion.
A disastrous thing happened on the way to the 21st century. Once the producer of 59% of the world's computer chips, Japan currently makes only 24%, according to research firm Gartner Dataquest. Just about any country, it turns out, can make a great stereo if it sets its mind to it, and even Japan's blue-chip manufacturers are now under unprecedented pressure. Today, Samsung television sets from South Korea are every bit as good as Sony's; Haier refrigerators from China match up well with Toshiba's; and even America's GM and Ford have proved that they can, when pushed, produce cars that meet Toyota's and Honda's in quality, price, gas mileage and durability.

In the wreckage of Japan's increasing inability to compete against the lower labor costs and rekindled ambitions of its rivals, however, a number of observers both inside the country and out are turning to the nation's creative and cultural enterprises as a source of potential salvation. For this has been one of the greatest Japanese ironies: even as Japan's economic leadership has been slipping for more than a decade, its cultural hegemony has only swelled. "Japan has changed from being a corporate manufacturing and industrial society to a pop-culture society," says Ichiya Nakamura, a visiting scholar at Stanford Japan Center and M.I.T. Media Lab. Pokémon has supplanted Astroboy in the hearts of schoolkids in more than 65 countries, and 60% of the world's animated-cartoon series are made in Japan. Games running on PlayStation 2 and (to a lesser degree) Nintendo's Game Cube rule the video-game universe just as tightly as before, despite a frontal attack from none other than Microsoft and its sinister-looking black Xbox. And high-end Japanese fashion designers such as Hanae Mori, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake are not only as vital as they once were; they have also been joined by a generation of young turks such as A Bathing Ape, Jun Takahashi and Naoki Takizawa who set the style for hipsters from Berlin to Bangkok and beyond. Japanese films, TV series, music acts and lifestyle magazines, meanwhile, routinely spark fads all over Asia. (Turn on MTV in Singapore or Hong Kong and you are just as likely to see Ayumi Hamasaki as J. Lo.)
Says Stanford's Nakamura: "This is the period of change from the postwar generation who supported the manufacturing Japan to the younger generation who will be building the cultural Japan."Indeed, this period of change reflects a sentiment only recently hatched, yet quickly gaining currency: that Japan's future identity no longer rests in being the leading manufacturer of goods—whether cars, cameras or stereos—but as the world's foremost creator of cool.
courtesy TIME asia