Everywhere you turn, there is Japan: in restaurants and cafes, in bookshops, in music, on Netflix, on your friend’s Instagram, and probably on a poster in your bedroom. Of all of the countries to have experienced a complete cultural turnaround in the 20th century, Japan is one of the strangest stories, and Australia has in recent years become increasingly obsessed – our food, pop culture and fashion have soaked up Japan like a sponge, even as Japan straddles a line between hyper-Westernised and culturally insulated.
Japan’s unique culture is largely thanks to the extreme shifts between its period as a closed country, its forced opening to trade with America and the outside world, its brutal imperialistic period, as well as its social and cultural upheaval in the 1950s. Today, Japanese culture is a global brand. Everything from ramen to Ghibli plushies are ubiquitous around the world. Japan itself has a strange relationship with its culture, though. Despite its rich history stretching back millennia, the still-relevant events of the 20th century have been glossed over in Japanese society and education. Namely, the atrocities committed under Imperial Japan during the Second World War.
The forced demilitarisation of Japan in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s led to an unusually pacifist society, which today still faces strict restrictions on the use of military power. American figures like General Douglas Macarthur are credited with scrubbing away the culture of Imperial Japan; to the extent, it might be argued, that Japanese people today are oblivious to the brutality that Japan inflicted on hundreds of millions of people across Asia, and to specific atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing and the comfort women of South Korea. These histories, which have led to decades-long regional grudges, have not been given nearly enough attention in Japan’s curriculum, and are not discussed freely compared to similar atrocities committed under Nazi Germany within the same time period.
This may be from a collective trauma experienced in the direct aftermath of WWII. Those Japanese civilians who survived experienced an excruciating famine that lasted for much of the 1950s, as Macarthur and American authorities scrambled to regulate the food supply despite flourishing black markets. The extent of barbarity that Japan has experienced and inflicted is enough, surely, to make it steadfastly avoid conflict.
With recent incursions by China into the South China sea, and several instances of intruding upon foreign airspaces belonging to Japan and Taiwan, Japan’s militarisation – or lack thereof – has come into question. The Australian government has had an increase in China-Australia relations within the last week, after an incident where a Chinese J-16 fighter jet released flares close to an Australian aircraft flying over the South China sea. Taiwan, meanwhile, has faced outright threats on its sovereignty. Recently the spokesperson for the department of foreign affairs, Guo Jiakun, said that Taiwan was “an inalienable part of China’s territory”. Where, then, does this leave Japan?
The Japanese constitution, enacted in 1947 and written mainly by American officials, states in Article 9 that Japan is prohibited from using military force internationally. However, in 2015 Japan reinterpreted this to legalise participation in foreign conflicts under the justification of “collective self-defence”. It straddles a perilous line as a nominally pacifist country in a region of increasing tensions, with a quarter of a million people registered as active members of the military.
However, Japanese influence is by no means limited to its military. Its soft power is prolific and ubiquitous, including business and cultural phenomena such as Kinokuniya, J-pop, Studio Ghibli. In Sydney we’re seeing the soaring trend of Inner West Japanese-style cafes cropping up on Instagram, with $30 souffle pancakes to seal the deal. Japan is developing a reputation similar to France, wherein anything Japanese is automatically chic. Australians are flocking to Tokyo at an unprecedented level, with the numbers of Australians travelling to Japan soaring by 126% between 2023 and 2024. Before COVID, Japan’s 2019 tourism levels reached nearly 32 million visits, equivalent to a quarter of its population. The Japanese National Tourism Organisation recorded a bounce from 4 million visits in 2020 to 25 million in 2023, with numbers expected to increase substantially.
With this sudden vogue status comes an increased spotlight on the less desirable parts of Japan. The country is developing a so-called ‘celibacy syndrome’, wherein a significant number of Japanese people identify as asexual, or choose not to enter relationships due to work commitments. Birth rates are falling, and Japan’s population is aging and shrinking at once. In addition, its gender equality situation is dire, as Japan ranked 113th out of 146 countries in 2024. According to Japan’s Institute for Population and Social Security, 90% of women say that being single is “preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like”. It also has the unpleasant accreditation of being the country to invent a severe social phenomenon known as hikikomori, where people submit themselves to complete social withdrawal. The number of these such people is unclear, but may well be in the hundreds of thousands.
As much as there are upbeat, quirky scenes that make Japanese culture seem exotic and desirable – such as a recent viral sensation of Japanese mascots getting stuck at train stations – there are several phenomena which Japan’s government would be less eager to claim. Its extensive period of being closed off from the world, its astonishing brutality and its cultural upheaval have created a country like no other in the world, with an outreach that rivals major Western powers, and a strength demonstrated in its business and technological capacity that is wholly muzzled when it comes to its military. Japan, at once adorable and awe-inducing, must also reckon with its past as an occupying force. It is only through this act of reckoning that it can gain regional consciousness.
