2026 SEP | A Japanese View from America by Tato Takahama | Pacific Research Institute | When Did Americans Begin to Look to Japan? — Vietnam, Hollywood, and an Alternative Set of Values
By Tato Takahama
Pacific Research Institute
September 28, 2026
Why has Japanese culture acquired such a distinctive appeal in the United States today? The answer may lie less in Japan’s ability to “export” its culture than in a long transformation within American society itself.
Strategist and BIOTOPE founder Kunitake Saso argues that Americans and Europeans increasingly see Japan as a source of an “alternative” way of thinking: an acceptance of ambiguity rather than rigid either-or choices, a willingness to value and preserve objects rather than discard them, and a conception of human life less detached from nature. His recent JBpress essay also cautions that the Japan seen from abroad is not necessarily Japan as it exists.
That qualification points toward a larger question: Did Japanese culture change America, or did a changing America become receptive to Japan?
Yukikazu Nagashima, a former editor of the Rafu Shimpo, once offered me a useful historical perspective. In his view, Americans began looking outward more seriously in the 1970s, partly as a consequence of the Vietnam War and the self-questioning it produced. Interest in foreign food, health foods, and eventually manga and other forms of popular culture reflected a broader willingness to look beyond established American assumptions.
Vietnam was not the only cause. The civil rights movement, environmentalism, feminism, Watergate, economic upheaval, immigration, and the counterculture all contributed to a period in which Americans increasingly questioned their own institutions and assumptions. But Vietnam became one of the defining experiences behind that questioning.
This helps explain why Japanese culture found an expanding audience. America did not simply receive Japanese culture; it was becoming more interested in alternatives.
American film and television then amplified that interest.
The 1980 NBC television miniseries Shōgun introduced millions of Americans to a Japan presented as a complex and unfamiliar social order. The Karate Kid (1984) offered another influential image: Pat Morita’s Mr. Miyagi became an older Japanese American mentor through whom an American teenager learned discipline, patience, repetition, and self-control. The film also brought the wartime experience of Japanese Americans into popular culture.
Two decades later, The Last Samurai and Lost in Translation presented Japan in very different ways, but both treated Japan as more than an exotic setting. Japan became, respectively, a place associated with values perceived as endangered and a setting in which Americans could reconsider themselves. Both films also have obvious limitations and have been criticized for relying on Western projections of Japan. That limitation is precisely why they are useful: they reveal what some Americans wanted to find in Japan.
The 2024 The Shōgun marks a further shift. Unlike the 1980 version, it places Japanese characters, Japanese language, and Japanese political and social worlds much closer to the center of the narrative. The change is not simply about greater “accuracy.” It reflects a different relationship between American popular culture and Japan: Japan is increasingly treated not merely as an exotic object but as a world worth entering on its own terms.
Intellectual history is equally important.
Graham Parkes has used Japanese aesthetics, Zen, and Japanese environmental philosophy to question assumptions about the relationship between human beings and nature. Thomas P. Kasulis, in Intimacy or Integrity, distinguishes different cultural orientations toward knowledge, relationships, and the self without reducing them to a simple “West versus Japan” binary. Steve Odin’s work comparing Zen and American pragmatism similarly asks how the self can be understood through relationships rather than as an isolated individual.
These scholars do not demonstrate that “Japanese values are better.” Their importance lies elsewhere. They show how Japanese thought can become a resource for Western thinkers examining questions within their own intellectual traditions.
That distinction is crucial.
Japan does not possess a monopoly on ambiguity, relationality, environmental consciousness, restraint, or care for objects. Nor is American culture reducible to competition and consumption. Such binaries would turn a complex cultural history into another form of essentialism.
The more interesting proposition is that Americans have increasingly wanted to explore possibilities beyond familiar assumptions—and Japanese culture has provided an unusually rich vocabulary for doing so.
In that sense, history may be read as a paradox.
Japan did not simply change America. A changing America discovered Japan.
Once discovered, however, Japanese cultural forms could themselves influence American habits, tastes, aesthetics, and ideas. Cultural exchange is therefore not a one-way export process. It depends on receptivity on both sides.
From Japanese food and gardens to anime, design, craftsmanship, Zen, and everyday objects, the question is no longer simply why Americans like Japan.
The deeper question is why, at particular moments in American history, Americans have wanted to look beyond themselves.
The story may have begun not with the 1980 Shōgun, and not with today’s renewed fascination with Japan, but much earlier—when America began to question itself.
And that process is continuing.
The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cultural News.
Note: English translation was prepared by the author. Translation assistance tools may have been used.
2026 SEP | A Japanese View from America | PRI | アメリカ人はいつから日本を見直し始めたのか――ベトナム戦争、ハリウッド、そして「もう一つの価値観」捜し