ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how to make sense of the current J-wave in US youth culture and how to measure this in terms of soft power. The American youth attracted to J-cool, the allure is for a cultural coding at once different and foreign that is within their capacity to master and grasp. For more than a decade now, the global prominence of Japanese creative or fantasy goods comic books, animation, video and electronic games, youth fashion, Hello Kitty, and Pokemon collectible card games has been on the rise, making Japan world-renowned as the producer of cutting-edge 'cool'. All of this makes a play product like Pokemon not only pleasing but also compelling: an attractive commodity that sells and sells big. This differs from the relationship the American adults have to Japan in the movie Lost in Translation. Japan is forever foreign because, when traveling there, the Americans do so within the shell of their own cultural ethnocentrism.
