Pop Culture

My main thoughts / impressions (etc.) about Japanese pop culture since coming to Japan are mostly about how much less I interact with it while I've been here. That's a badly phrased sentence but whatever. Here in Japan I rarely watch tv (I watch a lot of Japanese tv on the internet in the US), I only really listen to the music my host mother plays or the music on my iPod (which is mostly J-pop anyway), I cannot read the magazines or books (yet), and so on.

My main interaction with Japanese people's thoughts about pop culture are in the things they ask me if I know. These things usually end up being singers/music groups, sports players, or actors with the occasional げんいんさん thrown in there. Unfortunately I usually get asked about food or places or festivals and holidays and customs rather than what celebrities I know so the interaction is rather minimal in my opinion. Besides tv (which I don't watch) the most obvious visual aspects of what I think of as pop culture are all the adds. Featured people are apparently popular celebrities etc. most of the time.

The “American influenced” (I guess) impressions I had of Japanese pop culture that I've altered a little since I've been here are mostly about the prevalence of manga and anime as the main export of Japan to the world. They certainly have a large export value but (at least the people I've been spending time with) they seem to be less frequently consumed by the Japanese public than we have been led to believe by the way people talk about Japanese anime and manga in the US. They're just kind of there and the big stories everyone knows but they might not have read them. And I think that Japanese people talk about manga and anime to foreigners because they know how much export value it has and are curious about how we (foreigners) perceive it.

Also, sports are a larger part of Japan that I had previously experienced. I think sports usually forms a large part of pop culture around the world because it is a constant presence but mercurial. I hadn't experienced that prevalence so much in reference to Japan before coming here because I don't much care for most sports and so ignore them most of the time.

Being here has also cemented my impression of the importance of clothing and appearance in interactions between Japanese people. (I don't know what category other than pop culture to put that aspect into besides 'daily life in Japan')

And I know that pop culture is more than who's on tv and what music the young people are listening to these days and which is the next bestselling book but those things are the only way I know of to think about articulating how I look at pop culture.