J-brand: What image of youth is getting sold in Japan’s “gross national cool”?

The story of J-cool—the global trade and popularity of Japanese youth goods— has been much heralded by the press and government officials in this first decade of the new millennium. Spurred by an article written in 2002 by the American journalist Douglas McGray who coined the term “Japan’s GNC” (gross national cool), the lexicon of “cool,” “Japanese cool,” “J-cool,” or “GNC,” has caught on in reference to how successfully Japanese youth properties are selling all over the world today. Signaled here is a recognition that youth sells; that it sells to sell to youth; and that selling a particular iteration of youth sells something for Japan and something of Japan in all those global markets currently flooded with Japanese kids’ goods. That is, in the new buzz around Japanese cool, interest is paid both to the capital generated by the youth market and to capitalizing on that market to extend the attraction Japanese youth goods have for global kids. An iconic example of GNC and the press it’s garnered in Japan is Pokemon— what one American journalist called the global kids’ trend of the 1990s. A property that started out small in 1996—a Game Boy game targeted only for Japanese boys—Pokemon was soon expanded by its marketers into a media-mix conglomeration: a comic in Korokoro Komikku, trading cards, television anime, movies, tie-in merchandise, manga series, video game, toy lines, guidebooks, and both JR and ANA campaigns. As the property expanded in scale, the scope of its market shifted from domestic sales geared to boys to global sales targeted to kids of both genders and a much wider spectrum of age. Getting exported to East Asian markets in 1997, it soon spread to other global markets including the United States in 1998 where it generated a huge craze that the American press labeled “pokemania.” Observing all this back home, Japanese commentators called the Pokemon fad a sign of Japan’s new bunka pawā (cultural power). As a reporter for the Asahi Shinbun wrote in his account of the splash the first pokemon movie made in the States (it was the top-ranking movie of the week, yielding revenues in excess of even the Lion King) in 1999: This is amazing. And it’s possible that, if we maintain these spectacular results, we’ll outrun Disney in a country where Disney is a pronoun for the United States itself.” (Hamano 1999:4). Similarly, in another article in Asahi Shinbun, the reporter described how he was filled with tremendous pride when he saw Pokemon trading cards being sold in even grocery stores in the States. Noting how, after the war, Japan could only “hold out its stomach in pride” again when Japanese companies like Sony and Toyota became common names in the States, he added that “Japanese culture has at last produced products that circulate well in the US marketplace.” In summing up his viewpoint, he wrote “Products are the currency by which Japanese culture enters the United States” (Kondō 1999:4). This is the formula of soft power, a concept put forth by Harvard professor Joseph Nye. As he has formulated it, soft power is the “ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments” which “arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies” (Nye 2004:x). Power of this nature comes