Matt Alt: The United States of Japan (New Yorker)
Japan made itself rich in its industrial era by selling things like cars, TVs, and VCRs, but it made itself loved in those Lost Decades by selling fantasies. Hello Kitty, comics, anime, and Nintendo games were the first wave—“the big can-opener,” as the game designer Keiichi Yano put it. Now those childhood dreams haven given way to a more sophisticated vision of a Japanese life style, exemplified in the detached cool of Haruki Murakami novels, the defiantly girly pink feminism of kawaii culture, the stripped-down simplicity of Uniqlo, the “unbranded” products of Muji, and the Japanese “life-changing magic” of Marie Kondo. That these Japanese products are so popular, not only in America but in developed nations around the world, may indicate that we’re all groping for meaning in the same post-industrial haze.