The concept of mukokuseki is one used by many recent popular culture products emerging from Japan.  The term, literally the quality of “statelessness” or “nationlessness”, is used by Japanese producers of popular culture items to make these items relatable and marketable all over the world.  Interestingly enough, one of the products of Japanese popular culture to really send the foreign popularity of Japanese pop culture into the stratosphere was one that, in Japan, was littered with references and locales that only the Japanese would understand and appreciate, a “cultural odor” seen as foreign and exotic to those consumers outside of Japan.  (Iwabuchi, 27)  This product is one that most in the United States knows as “Pokémon” or, in Japan, “Pocket Monsters.” [Read more...]

The Pokémania that gripped the United States at the end of the twentieth century can best be described as a series of contrasts.  This duality encompassed clueless parents and their captivated children, the American businesses who reaped the profits and the public who clamored for its consumption, and the product’s inherent sense of both capitalism and communalism.  Pokémon’s success in the United States can be attributed to a combination of these factors.  American corporations saw the unprecedented success of the franchise in Japan, recognized the potential for endless revenue streams, and marketed it towards children after repackaging it as a culturally neutered product. Children latched onto the games, cards, and cartoons because they could exercise control over the way they played and could communicate within their own peer groups. The majority of parents saw it as a benign yet totally incomprehensible foreign good when they were not transfixed on the sensational stories of violence reported by fear mongering media outlets. [Read more...]