Why is GEN X Obsessed With Japan?

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Why is Generation X obsessed with Japan?

[00:00:02]Well, this goes way back before Tik Tok and Instagram. This goes you have to reach into the thinking and the zeitgeist, the culture that surrounded them as they were growing up.

[00:00:10]Let's break it down. So, many curious onlookers are watching this phenomenon, especially Japanese, and wondering why is everybody so obsessed with Japan? Why does everybody want to come to Japan?

[00:00:21]Why is Japanese culture soft power so powerful around the world? One of the first thing that comes to mind is the economic miracle. So, young people saw Japan in the '80s and '90s and thought, "Look at these sleek neon cities, this Japanese design and aesthetic. They're living in the future." And slowly but surely Japan turned from exporting cars and electronics to exporting culture. We can't ignore the influence of Hollywood.

[00:00:43]Look at movies like Die Hard with Nakatomi Plaza, Black Rain, and that masterpiece Blade Runner. They saw this future where Japanese mega corporations dominated the world. But, it goes deeper into the personal lives of young people during that time. The first personal music system, the Sony Walkman, came out.

[00:01:01]Now, you could go on a road trip with your parents and listen to your own music. You weren't subjected to whatever they had on the stereo, and you could just be in your own space. Now, this came out of the culture of riding subways in Japan, where people want a personal space. But, to American teenagers, this was just a paradise.

[00:01:17]Then there came the home arcade culture.

[00:01:19]When I was really small, the Pong game first came out, and then the Atari 2600 and all these different game systems.

[00:01:25]So, Sony, Sega, Nintendo, these defined the lives of the childhood and teenage years of a lot of Western teenagers. It turned your living room into a game center. You could have your friends over and play games, you could network and play games, meet a lot of new friends, and it just really revolutionized the way teens played. Then there was anime with tape trading networks. People would get bootleg or gray market tapes of anime and do their own translations.

[00:01:50]That's how a lot of people learn Japanese, by the way. They do their own translations and kind of form underground groups where they could trade tapes of anime. And anime is not to be confused with cartoons.

[00:02:01]Cartoons are what I grew up with on Saturday mornings where you would sit there and eat cold cereal and watch Bugs Bunny, but anime covered more mature themes. The scenes were quite different.

[00:02:10]Some parents were shocked. They thought their kids were watching cartoons and all of a sudden they see scanty outfits, adult themes, and mature themes. Sure, there was a little backlash against anime, but all that's kind of blown over and now all the people whose parents used to tell them not watch anime are showing their kids anime. Then there was the Akira effect with its high-tech scenes that could rival a Hollywood live-action movie. People were blown away. How could somebody with a hand-drawn anime feature film rival a Hollywood full feature film?

[00:02:44]Really blew people away.

[00:02:46]And that really stuck in the minds of young people. Now, we can't forget the psychological resonance of Evangelion.

[00:02:51]Neon Genesis Evangelion struck a deep chord with young people. They explored themes of psychological pain, isolation, and mental struggles that mirrored their own struggles. It really humanized those characters and people could identify with them. Now, we cannot minimalize the effect of martial arts movies. I mean, look at Karate Kid. How many of you now you admit it, you walked out of the theater and you tried this kick, right?

[00:03:11]You my good friend Nick came to Japan to seek out his own Mr. Miyagi. You can watch our episode of the podcast in the link in the description below. But they brought themes of discipline, focus, balance to the young minds of American kids.

[00:03:24]Things that they hadn't seen in movies before or at least portrayed that way.

[00:03:28]So, I was just leaving the gym and I asked a buddy to film me doing that really embarrassing crane kick and he asked me what this is for and I told him about the subject of this video. He said, "Well, of course we love Japan. Isn't it obvious? We were brainwashed by Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

[00:03:42]Then there was the 1980s dojo craze.

[00:03:44]Now, my parents put me in a dojo cuz I wanted to learn karate after watching Karate Kid. That lasted about a year. Parents were putting their kids into dojos to help them learn focus, discipline, humility, balance. You can't forget Akira Kurosawa and his movies. He really influenced directors like George Lucas and his films are still cited as the inspiration to a lot of modern directors. The themes that he put in his movies like Rashomon and Ikiru and the Seven Samurai, all these themes are still redone over and over again in Hollywood films. And then we can't forget the integration into mainstream culture with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bringing to life these ideas of discipline and honor to make it more accessible to a younger audience blending comedy and martial arts.

[00:04:30]And what video about Japanese influence on culture would be complete without talking about Japanese cars? So, I remember when I first sat in a Toyota Corolla as a kid, it was the first time my feet had touched the floor in a car and I'll never forget that moment the rest of my life. But, most Americans bought them because the oil crisis of 1973 and 1979 when gas prices went through the roof and people traded in their gas guzzling boats for cheaper, smaller, reliable Japanese cars.

[00:04:59]These Japanese cars brought a lot of cultural horsepower to the rest of the world and they were extremely reliable.

[00:05:04]They're made for start and stop traffic of Tokyo streets and they're made for harsh weather conditions like typhoons and the salt water by the ocean because almost everywhere in Japan is by the ocean. So, they had to be extremely well-built. That made them more than capable of handling American roads. You remember the Honda Accord, the Toyota Corolla, and Datsun. Remember those commercials? We are driven, right? You can't get that out of your head now. And it didn't stop there, see? As consumers got older and had more money to spend, Toyota created Lexus, Nissan created Infiniti, and Honda created Acura. They kept people buying Japanese cars. There are entire subcultures of young people who talk about cars in terms of letters like JDM R43. I I even know what that means, but it means a lot to a car enthusiast.

[00:05:48]But we got to mention games like Gran Turismo, where you could sit in your living room in Ohio and drive through the Japanese freeway, the Shuto, and drive a JDM car. What's your favorite?

[00:05:57]The NSX, the GTR, the WRX, the Evo, the Supra? I probably missed a few. Now, as Generation X gets older and they've started to realize the failings of commercialism and the housing bubble that we all experienced in 2007-2008, we realized there must be something more to life. Started looking overseas to our favorite place to look, Japan, and started learning words like wabi-sabi and ikigai, and thought, you know what, if I could just read one more book on Japanese aesthetics, my life would totally change. So, people who were kind of disillusioned with consumerism would look towards Japan for something a little bit deeper, an older culture that thinking maybe these guys have figured it out. They started to find meaning in words like wabi-sabi. It's much deeper than loud, boisterous Western consumerism. Terms like ikigai and wabi-sabi became part of everyday life. Wabi-sabi meaning finding comfort in imperfection, the rough textures and tools that show that they've been used over time. Westerners love the thrift shops of Shimokitazawa. They love the handcrafted. They love the well-crafted, human-made. They love high-level craftsmanship and they love analog vinyl records. And of course, we can't forget the reality for expats, people like me who come over and fall in love with Japan. Long-term residents like me find a home in Japan because we really love the clean streets, the safety, and the absence of political divisiveness.

[00:07:21]This dramatically reduces the stress of daily life.

[00:07:26]So, when you look at all the cultural influence that Gen X grew up with, the cars, the games, the culture, anime, Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Akira Kurosawa, the only obvious conclusion you can come to is that they would be obsessed with Japan. But there's a completely different reason why Gen Z is obsessed with Japan. We're going to explore that in the next video. Now, we can't forget the cycle of Now, we can't forget the psychological Now, we can't forget the psychological resonance of Evangelion.

[00:07:59]Long-term residents like me really love living in Japan.