Return to Asia?

Japan’s ‘New Asianism’ is principally economy-oriented, its impact is much wider. This chapter looks at this phenomenon by exploring what might be called ‘Japan’s postmodern return to Asia’. Japan’s modern history can be described in a simplifying manner as a dynamic cultural hybridization through ‘westernization’, ‘Japanization’ and ‘de-Asianization’. The Japanese population of more than 120 million and its economic wealth make the Japanese audiovisual market, along with those of the United States, one of the two self-sufficient markets in the world. Behind the confidence of Japanese music industries in terms of the know-how of indigenizing the ‘West’, there is a fear that Japan is being left behind in the expanding Asian audiovisual markets. People’s freedom of negotiation at the receiving end of the global cultural flow coexists with an unambiguously centralized control of the system of distribution.