Excerpts from Iwabuchi,
Koichi. “Taking ‘Japanization’ Seriously: Cultural Globalization Reconsidered.”
In International Communication: A Reader.  Ed. Daya Kishan Thussu. London: Routledge,
2010.  410-433.

The influence of cultural products on everyday life, as we have seen, cannot be culturally neutral.  Any product has the cultural imprint of the producing country, even if it is not recognized as such.  I would suggest that the major audiovisual products Japan exports could be better characterized as the “culturally odorless” three C’s: consumer technologies (such as VCRs, karaoke, and the Walkman); comics and cartoons (animation); and computers / video games. I use the term cultural odor to focus on the way in which cultural features of a country of origin and images or ideas of its national, in most cases stereotyped, way of life are associated positively with a particular product in the consumption process. Any product may have various kinds of cultural association with the country of its invention. Such images are often related to exoticism, such as the image of the Japanese samurai or the geisha girl. Here, however, I am interested in the moment when the image of the contemporary lifestyle of the country of origin is strongly and affirmatively called to mind as the very appeal of the product, when the ‘cultural odor’ of cultural commodities is evolved. The way in which the cultural odor of a particular product becomes a ‘fragrance’—a socially and culturally acceptable smell—is not determined simply by the consumer’s perception that something is
‘made in Japan.’ Neither is it necessarily related to the material influence or the quality of the product.  It has more to do with the widely disseminated symbolic images of the country of origin (413).

The cultural odor of a product is also closely associated with racial and bodily images of a country of origin.  The three C’s I mentioned earlier are cultural artifacts in which a country’s bodily, racial, and ethnic characteristics are erased or
softened.  The characters of Japanese animation and computer games for the most part do not look “Japanese.”  Such non-Japaneseness is called mukokuseki, literally meaning ‘something or someone one lacking any nationality,’ but also
implying the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics or a context, which does not imprint a particular culture or country with these features.  Internationally acclaimed Japanese animation director Oshii Mamoru suggests that Japanese animators and cartoonists unconsciously choose not to draw ‘realistic’ Japanese characters if they wish to draw attractive characters. In Oshii’s case, the characters tend to be modeled on Caucasian types.  Consumers of and audiences for Japanese animation and games, it can be argued, may be aware of the Japanese origins of these commodities, but those texts barely feature ‘Japanese bodily odor’ identified as such )413).

Euphoria concerning the global dissemination of animation and computer games prompted Japanese commentators to confer a specific Japanese ‘fragrance’ on these cultural products. The emergence of obsessively devoted fans in both Europe and the
United States whose craze for Japanese animation makes them wish they had been born in Japan has been often covered by the Japanese media.  Many images of Western fans playing at being would-be Japanese animation characters, wearing the same costumes and make-up, have been presented in popular Japanese magazines as evidence of the ‘Japanization’ of the West.  Okada Toshio, the most eloquent spokesperson for the global popularity of Japanese animation and computer games, further argues that Japanese animated culture and imagery has come to evoke, to a certain degree, a sense of Western yearning for ‘Japan’.  Comparing the passionate Western consumption of Japanese animation to Japan’s and his own yearning, via the consumption of American popular culture, for “America,’—the nation of freedom, science, and
democracy—Okada proudly argues that to those Western fans, Japan ‘looks like a more cool country’ than the United States (415-16). 

Looking beneath the surface of these celebratory views of Western perceptions of the coolness of Japanese culture, we find a basic contradiction:  the international spread of mukokuseki popular culture from Japan simultaneously articulates the universal appeal of Japanese cultural products and the disappearance of any perceptible ‘Japaneseness,’ which, as will be discussed later, is subtly incorporated into the ‘localization’ strategies of the media industries (416).

One cultural critic, Ōtsuka Eiji, thus warns against any euphoria concerning the global popularity of Japanese animation, arguing that it is simply the mukokuseki (the embedded expression of race, ethnicity, and culture), the ‘odorless’ nature of animation, that is responsible for its popularity in the world.  Likewise, Ueno argues that ‘the “Japaneseness” of Japanimation can only be recognized in its being actively a mukokeseki visual culture.’ If it is indeed the case that the Japaneseness of Japanese animation derives, consciously or unconsciously from its erasure of physical signs of Japaneseness, is not the Japan that Western audiences are at long last coming to appreciate, and even yearn for, an animated, race-less and culture-less, virtual version of ‘Japan?’ (417)