Paran Balakrishnan: Cool customers of the east

MY WORD!

It's a cultural revolution that has finally reached the Indian shores. One month ago, amidst a blitzkrieg of publicity, Sony Entertainment Television began airing a cartoon channel called Animax that's radically different from its rivals. What's Animax's USP? Its fast-moving programmes have mostly been conceived and visualised in giant "anime" studios around Tokyo and all carry the Made in Japan stamp.

What does that imply? Well, for a start, out goes Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone, and Scooby Doo""the Middle American characters whose zany antics have hardly changed in the last 30 years. In their place come heroes for the 21st century like the dizzying Astroboy and the flash and slash Samurai X. That's a giant cultural shift for a world that has long depended on western imports.

Perhaps this isn't as new as we might think. It's an acknowledged fact that Japan has turned itself into a cultural leader for large swathes of Asia. Mimicking their Japanese counterparts, Chinese, Korean and South-east Asian teenagers have been tinting their hair every shade from pink to blonde. Japanese street fashion is now being copied in every part of the globe from San Francisco to the boulevards of Paris.

Even Time, that one-time arbiter of global news and trends, has given Japanomania its stamp of approval. A year ago under the cheery headline "Japan Rules OK!" the magazine pronounced that Japan had reinvented itself as the coolest place on Earth. Japan's manufacturing industry, it said, may have declined during the 1990s but the country's "role as a global trendsetter""in cutting-edge music, art, fashion, design and other pop-culture categories of every stripe""is only now just getting started. In Japan, they say "the future is cool."

In reality, Time was late to the street party that has been transforming cities like Tokyo for several years. And it has been slow to catch up with the popularity of anime (animation) and manga (comic book) literature, which has caught the attention of the youth around the globe. After all, who hasn't heard of the Pokeman cult, which baffles most parents with its incomprehensible cast of unusual-looking characters?

How big is anime? At the last count, Tokyo's Suginami district, for instance, had 70 anime studios. Japan's ministry of economy, trade and industry, which once spent its time worrying about the health of sprawling keiretsu like Mitsubishi, now also turns out figures to show that 60 per cent of the animation shows on television around the world are produced in the island nation.

Inevitably, Japan has become a cultural beacon for a swathe of up-and-coming nations across Asia. And perhaps that's the subtle change that's sweeping the world. Suddenly, youngsters aren't mindlessly following trends established in the cultural capitals of the world like New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris. As economic power shifts, the youth of today are getting ready to follow""probably in an equally mindless fashion""trends being established in Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing.

How important is Asia's willingness to forge ahead without taking its cultural cues from the United States and Europe? It can have an effect in all kinds of ways. Take a look at the mobile telephony industry, where nations like Korea and Japan were the first to embrace new technologies like MMS in a big way. And, of course, Japanese teenagers have established themselves as the world champions of SMSing. "The global embrace of things Japanese has given us a new kind of influence different from what Japan once had, but influence nonetheless," says one Japanese academic.

Are there any lessons we should draw from the explosion of Japanese cool? Murli Manohar Joshi wanted to reach deep into India's past to ensure that this country didn't lose touch with its roots. But his insular approach to a shrinking globe was a defensive and unsustainable one.

The Japanese, by contrast, have taken the modern world, synthesised it, and tossed out something that is unmistakably their own. Surely, there's a lesson in that?