Introduction

Japan's homogeneities have been emerging out of, and have come to exist from, the complex long histories of their makings. Such makings are moving into the future while simultaneously being challenged by Japan's rapidly shifting demographics and political/global landscapings. The historically limited and selective exposure to international trade allowed Japanese people to control the comfortable interpolation of 'foreign' objects into existing Japanese culture and the culturally specific adaptation of 'foreign' concepts and languages into their lives. The Western world had become reimagined during the period 1945-1980 through Japan's informal and governmental initiatives known as kokusaika, which Graburn and Ertl refer to as Japan's 'second great encounter with the Western world'. Japan and its media, in relation to other nations and their media, has been a focus in media studies of the East Asian region. Japanese people or college students have been used as samples for statistical analyses in various social scientific intercultural communication research projects.