Anime, sushi, and that TikTok song? Why this simplistic framing of Japan can be problematic today.
Illustration by Lydia Kempton (IG: @lydiak_arts)
CONTENT WARNING: discussions of discrimination, colonialism, and wars.
It’s been interesting to navigate my life in the Western sphere as a Japanese person.
I can sense that Japan has recently been a hyped country, especially in the last few years. You can find a great number of Japanese restaurants in big cities across the globe, and I can’t count how many of my non-Japanese friends are fond of anime or J-pop songs. As if to demonstrate its popularity, the number of tourists to Japan was the highest on record in 2024 (Kyodo News, 2025). A certain narrative in the West seems to have fueled this popularity: In countries like Britain, Japan seems to be celebrated for its “distinct” nature—an exotic, unique culture that stands on its own. However, through my real-life experiences and studies at university, I’ve come to realise that it can be problematic to over-emphasise Japan’s distinctiveness or mere cultural aspects. The world is interconnected, and Japan also exists within the intricate web.
I argue here that Japan occupies an in-between position in the global power dynamics shaped by colonialism and Western dominance. By stating this, I’d like to suggest a new discourse on Japan, which deserves more attention and debates from scholars and students.
Westernised Politics, Economy, and Culture
Japan is in-between because it is culturally distinct from the West while embracing a similar political and economic footing with Western countries.
Located in the Far East, Japan is not a Western country. Due to its separate development from Europeans, its culture is generally seen as exotic in the Western cultural sphere. However, Japan undeniably belongs to the global North—the privileged. Japan is a highly industrialised economic power; It embraces typical liberal democracy; It has influence in international politics like taking part in the Group of Seven (G7).
Given its history, Japan has gained this advantage primarily by imitating the West. In the modern era, Japan “caught up” with Western countries economically and politically as an empire. After overthrowing its traditional feudal regime in 1868, Imperial Japan set up Western-style political institutions and heavily invested in developing industries and infrastructure to modernise the country. It was impossible without an enormous amount of learning from the West: Under the slogan of “Civilization and Enlightenment (bummei kaika),” the Japanese government familiarised itself with Western science, technologies and cultures and promoted them to the public (Britannica, 2024).
Western nations politically influenced Japan after World War II, too. Despite seeing devastating infrastructural and economic situations, Japan quickly recovered after the war, influenced by the United States and its occupational force. It established itself as a liberal democracy in 1947 with the new constitution, eventually re-joining the global community as one of the influential states again (Beckley et al., 2018: Britannica, 2025b).
Colonial Past
Imperial Japan also mimicked the colonial practices of the West: It occupied multiple lands in Asia-Pacific, including Taiwan and Korea (Britannica, 2025a). the Imperial Army conducted atrocities around the region, such as massacre, rape, and forced labour which are confirmed by most scholars (Yoshida, 2008).
However, contemporary Japan often overlooks its colonial past, the public and media both viewing their country as a victim of the war. They discuss domestic events, like the Bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombs, neglecting their past actions as a perpetrator and coloniser. Though phrases like “brutality of wars” are often used in the peace ceremonies that occur across Japan during summertime, it appears to me as reductionist pacifism rather than a critical reflection of the wars intertwined with colonialism and its current remaining effects.
Japan has historically benefited from modernisation and Westernisation, often downplaying its negative consequences, like adopted colonialism. Why is it worth mentioning? Because it could, to an extent, explain Japan’s idealisation of the West and its traditional principles of modernity that firmly persists today.
Admiration for, and Empathy with the West
Today, most Japanese discourses contain much admiration for the West in various ways.
For example, the physical proximity to a stereotypical Westerner is celebrated. Lightly coloured hair, large eyes with prominent lids and eyelashes, and white skin are some of the most prevalent beauty standards for Japanese women.
The narrative of “Japan should learn from Western countries” also exists in Japanese domestic media. Its workaholism, Japan’s one of the most well-known social issues, is often discussed by contrasting it with the West. When Germany took over Japan’s place as the world’s third-largest economy in late 2024, a lot of books and TV shows featured German ways of working. For example, the book The Impressive German Way of Working: How They Produce Three Times More Rest and 1.5 Times More Results than Japan by Shigeki Nishimura became popular, praising the efficiency of the German work style. It seems to mirror the long-lasting framework of “learning from the West to improve Japan” by increasing rationality and productivity.
Moreover, the Japanese are said to empathise more with the Western people than their geographical neighbours. According to the Japanese political scientist Mimaki (2021), during the COVID-19 pandemic, Japanese people didn’t seem to align themselves with Asians who were discriminated against in the US. She points out that it highlights their “honorary Whites (meiyo hakujin)” sense: The Japanese believe in many shared values with Whites, differentiating themselves from other Asians.
Exoticism for Japan
Honorary Whites. This term refers to the non-Whites who are given the same privileges as Westerners because of the political, economic and cultural standing of their country (Yamamoto, 2012). Despite the obvious coloniality of this concept, I can’t deny I have internalised honorary Whiteness as a Japanese person. When I lived in Canada as an exchange student, I got to know local Canadians and other international students from Western Europe. I enjoyed making many international friends, but they often shocked me by some of their comments on Japan.
“Why do you have such a crazy writing system?”
“Japan has so much weird stuff Europeans wouldn’t think of, right?”
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to live there.”
I will never forget how stunned I was back then. I’m still unsure if their comments were meant to be offensive or if they stemmed from pure curiosity. One thing was clear, though, to North Americans and Europeans, Japan is entirely foreign to them. This notion clashed sharply with my own perceptions. I saw Japan as a peer of European countries and didn’t think it was so different from them.
As time went by, I began to see cultural differences between myself and my Western friends. I hated my own Japanese-ness. I hated having a Japanese accent, wearing a “kawaii” outfit, and being non-assertive or illogical. I wished my mother tongue was one of the Europeans, which are more influential and useful in today’s world, as well as more linguistically rational and direct. I was desperate to blend in with Western society and wanted people to acknowledge I belonged to them reflecting my toxic desire to appear Western.
Fanon’s “White Masks” and the Japanese
When I learned about Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) at university, I was surprised how his experience strongly resonated with mine, even though we were from historically and geographically different countries.
Fanon is a French Afro-Caribbean political philosopher whose work is considered significant in post-colonialism. He was born in the French colony (now department) Martinique in the eastern Caribbean Sea after the abolishment of slavery (Hudis, 2015). In his book Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon (2008) vividly depicts how he developed a self-perception as an honorary White throughout his life. He grew up exposed to French learning materials and entertainment, regarding himself as “civilised” and different from Black people in Africa. When he studied in mainland France, however, he was shocked to be treated inevitably as a Black person, associated with negative stereotypes and fear, rather than French. Fanon’s account remains crucial in post-colonial theories, highlighting the psychological effects on the colonised. Surprisingly, though, this concept of “White masks” neatly fits my experience in Canada—when I was othered by my Western friends as a Japanese person. Through this unexpected parallel, I’ve realised that Japan is also incorporated into the colonial dynamics, even if it is out of the mainstream discourse.
Why Japan Struggles in Addressing Global Challenges
I argue that Japan’s in-between status in the colonial dynamics has a detrimental impact on how Japan engages with current global challenges. Western academia, at least the British academia of social sciences I belong to, seems to incorporate the approach of reflexive modernisation into many disciplines today if I borrow words from the sociologist Beck (1992). Reflexive modernisation is a critical examination of modern institutions and supporting Western ideas—industrialisation, scientific rationality and the dominant stance on nature, to name a few. Though the West-originated modernity was once celebrated as “progressive,” many scholars and members of the public are now aware that such a modern social organisation has been causing numerous problems in the world like inequality and environmental degradation.
However, Japan’s position—being politically and economically privileged yet not in the cultural sphere that produced colonialism—makes it challenging to engage in this discussion like Western countries can. I recognise that various topics on global challenges, such as gender, climate change and economic inequality, feel quite “off” in Japanese discourses. Indeed, Japan’s gender equality score remains the worst among the global North countries (Kyodo News, 2024); Its insufficient commitment to tackling the climate crisis is shown by its regular acquisition of the Fossil of the Day award (Jiji Press, 2023). Despite looking irrelevant to each other, these issues share one thing: They are all rooted in the power disparity aggravated by modernisation and colonial practices (see: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023).
Japan seems to have been facing difficulties in grasping this context, as it is out of the traditional colonial relations. One example of the misaligned arguments comes from Mimaki (2021): “Today, a determined fight against all forms of discrimination is the standard for a ‘civilised’ country” (translated by me). This statement represents how the Japanese ignore the colonial context of the global anti-racism movement and follow the pattern of “We should imitate things happening in the West in order to ‘civilise,” reinforcing coloniality and West supremacy.
Liberation of the Colonised, Colonisers, and the In-Between
I’m not here to blame Japan or the West. Instead, I want to emphasise the importance of critically examining common narratives in a particular culture, such as Japan’s simplistic pacifism and praise for the West. It should also be noted that Western academic and public discourses often ignore countries like Japan that occupy a liminal space within global power systems, failing to incorporate them meaningfully into contemporary global challenges.
Prominent postcolonial thinkers like Fanon emphasised the physical and psychological liberation of both colonisers and the colonised. I’d like to argue here that the recognition and liberation of the in-between is also essential. This under-investigated perspective could foster a deeper understanding of the political and historical standing of Japan and other liminal nations, leading to fundamental liberation from the traditional power structure.
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