Per an earlier tweet (what, you don’t hang on every tweet in your feed??), Neojapanisme is offering a 5 part analysis of the decline of Japanese pop culture and what emerged afterwards. They’re up to part three as of now.
The collapse of spending on popular culture in Japan makes the country an important laboratory for understanding how a “cultural ecosystem” of consumers, producers, distributors, media, trend-spotters, and advertisers operates when market activity decreases. In this context, we must first look at the degree to which middle class consumers made up and then retreated from markets for cultural goods.
We’d agree. We’ve been tracking the decline they describe since we noticed it in the late 1990s. And certainly Japan is atypical in so many ways as to render casual analogies moot.
Yet still, we wonder.