Radioactive Rain And The American Umbrella Analysis

Postwar Japan is characterized as much by its successes and booms as by its disasters and busts. Yoshimi Shunya’s article “Radioactive Rain and the American Umbrella” begins by boldly claiming that, with the triple disaster of 3/11, Japan’s “’affluent postwar’ has finally reached a decisive end…[a] closure [that] had been clearly augured since the 1990s.” Yet, a decade earlier, Douglas McGray argued that Japan is “more like a cultural superpower today than it did in the 1980s,” having become a nation on par with the United States in terms of cultural influence. Though these two drastically different characterizations may seem contradictory at first glance, they are in fact entirely compatible. Furthermore, the forces that led Japan to this

Yet, looking closer, one finds that under this colorful exterior, evidence of social malaise lingers in subtle ways. McGray notes that Japan is in horrible economic shape, proceeding to list a myriad of woes: “gross domestic product is down; the yen is down; the Nikkei Stock Index hit a 17-year low; and full employment…has been replaced by near-record rates of unemployment.” However, it is even within the supposed success of modern Japanese culture that one discovers a sense of dissatisfaction; for example, the “Super Flat” art movement is “devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy,” with its proponents claiming, “we don’t have any religion…we just need the big power of entertainment,”—in essence, a movement characterized by shallowness. In this way, one could view Japan’s mass-produced culture as precisely a symptom of postwar affluence—that Hello Kitty’s image is plastered across even vibrators is not only evidence of Japan’s soft power, but also of the same unhealthy obsession with the “affluent lifestyle” (Yoshim) pushed by the United States after the government would then lead to both the postwar “’sunshine’ of nuclear energy” and the “rain of radiation” that followed—that “even the umbrella [Japan is] holding up…is of American manufacture” shows the depths of American involvement in shaping postwar Japan. This degree of influence is no less true with regards to nuclear policy, as it is to Japanese popular culture. “Cool” within Japan is synonymous with “Western”; McGray describes the proliferation of American brands such as Nike, Starbucks, or even “Harbard University.” He attributes the universal success of Hello Kitty to the fact that Hello Kitty is simultaneously Western to appeal to the Japanese, and Japanese to appeal to the West, and it is precisely this sort of contradictory existence that reveals the unique un-Japaneseness of the pop culture that defines “cool Japan,” an existence with fundamentally Western and American roots.

In some ways, Japan seems to exist in quantum turmoil, simultaneously successful and struggling. Its soft power cannot be denied, yet that same pop culture remains a shallow and superficial veil