Nouveau... ou Dejavu?

“Do you want to listen to some Min’yo?” I asked my friend a while ago and just as I expected, he asked the questions “What is that?” I didn’t anticipate his acknowledgement about this specific genre of music. “What is that?” he insisted to know. “Well, it’s a genre in the Japanese traditional music culture.” So then I asked “Do you know Ayumi Hamasaki?” and he replied “Isn’t she that famous Japanese star?” and he was right. Ayumi Hamasaki is a symbol and an icon of the popular Japanese music culture, or in the correct terminology, J-Pop. We can say that J-pop is a sub-culture in Japan that is vastly popular around the world. The real question here is “how original is ‘J-Pop’?” When you hear Opera you directly think about Italy; when you hear “Frère Jacques” you immediately think of France, disregarding the name. But no one would recognize Min’yo nor Okinwan which both are Japanese traditional music.

Japanese pop, I would define, as music in the Japanese language but of the style of western music. You can’t deny the cultural diffusion and the effect of western clothing style, the over-all image and the music production on this specific genre of Japanese music. We can name a few things to blame but the first one is technology. Some companies, to promote their product, associate a song to it and produce a commercial film featuring a Japanese icon. In this case, Ayumi Hamasaki’s song “Sunset: Love is all” was used in an advertisement for Panasonic Lumix FX-60 digital camera. So therefore associating advertisement with a song leads for this product to have a “theme” song if you want to say and so when it goes international, different parts of the world that hear it. And let’s admit it that commercial songs can get addictive. This is how a product becomes appealing to other cultures because they use similar traits of music that are common in the world. So, this route through the Japanese music market associates culture to expand globally.

But the thing with Japan is that it knows how to level the cultures. Yes, Western culture is very appealing to them but when they take something they manage to twist it and make it their own. For example, as Valentine’s Day is approaching the world will be celebrating love and that is a cultural tradition. In Japan, however, the 14th of February has the name “Valentine’s Day”; however, their tradition is girls bake a chocolate cake by themselves and they offer it to a person as a confession of love and then that person has up to the 24th of March to either reject or accept the person’s love.
So, I conclude by saying that Japan does have the influence of the Western culture which might seem a bit “dejavu-ish” when you visit, however it is all absolutely new if a foreigner does visit the culture. You will definitely get a culture shock even though you’ll find similarities in the names and style. What do you think Japanese will do next? Take the Arab men’s head attire and produce a new fashion statement? Only time will tell what these creative minds will plan in the future.