Return to Asia?

A pendulum of Japanese history is slowly swinging towards return to Asia again, with the ascent of Asian economic power. In the audiovisual market, the Japanese cultural industry is becoming keen to enter the Asian market by producing 'localised' cultural products based upon the strategy of 'global localisation'; global corporations should be sensitive to local preference while spreading standardised commodities. In this 'return to Asia', Japan claims a common 'Asianness' whose main characteristics are 'Americanised' popular culture and urban consumer culture. This claim is crucial for Japanese cultural industries in terms of economic and marketing strategy and, in so doing, cultural hybridisation is becoming constitutive of contemporary 'Asianness', since its dynamic process is exactly what the Japanese cultural industry is trying to sell in Asian locales.