Introduction

Up until relatively recently, individuals growing up in the United States found themselves somewhat insulated from the global influence of Japanese popular culture. If the mounting transnational reach of Japan’s 1980s bubble economy was difficult to ignore, the (omni)presence of Walkmans and Toyotas on American streets was typically interpreted in purely economic terms. Japan was deemed the ‘great imitator’ (Tatsuno 1990) whose ‘culturally odorless’ products, while cleverly engineered, had little impact on consumers’ sense of self or global consciousness (Iwabuchi 2002). After all, did it really matter that the Walkman was a Sony product if young people around the globe used it to listen to American music?