Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

Last week I tentatively opened up a new site dedicated to bento, the Japanese meal in a box. I have been kicking around the idea of such a site for quite some time now but I was not sure if I should open a new site, or just fold more bento-related content into my existing, more general food site, Just Hungry. While there are already several bento blogs out there, I was not sure if there would be enough interest in a whole site dedicated to Japanese-style lunch boxes, so I procrastinated, before decided that I wanted to organize all that information in one, separate location.

In less than a week, the traffic to Just Bento, discounting the lack of search engine generated visits, has almost equalled that of the almost 4 year old Just Hungry. I'm simply astonished.

But then it's not the first time that I've been surprised at just how much interest there is in things Japanese, from non-Japanese people, in recent years. Whether it's anime or manga, gadgets or toys, fashion or sushi, amigurumi or Hello Kitty, each time I see how 'hot' and 'cool' something Japanese is it throws me for a loop. The funny thing is that all of this interest seems to have come after the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy in the late '80s to early '90s.

I'm old enough to remember when Japanese was exotic at best, odd and foreign at worst, and really not cool. I remember being teased and taunted for my Asian-ness and Japanese-ness in school. I remember my mother being asked to pose (in her kimono of course) as a model for a painting class in England, and being painted by most of the students as a slant-eyed geisha, even though she has rather prominent round eyes. I remember the stories my father used to tell of calling upon companies to sell them precision ball bearings, and being coldly rejected.

I remember accompanying a Japanese lady who was buying gift items for her store chain as a translator to a major trade show in New York in the early '90s, asking for a brochure from a stall holder, and being told that he did not 'sell to your people' because 'your people just copy and steal'.

Who is copying who now, exactly?

I keep on expecting the interest to fade. Sushi for example. Given that a certain segment of the population is fad- and trend-oriented, I would not be surprised if sushi suddenly became last year's thing, the Nouvelle Cuisine of the period. But I expected this to happen way back in the '90s, but sushi has becoming just more and more popular and ubiquitous. Kids in middle America even dress up as sushi for Halloween now.

So far, there doesn't seem to be that much effort from within Japan to aggressively capitalize on this interest in Japanese culture. The major online purveyor of 'weird stuff from Japan' is run by an American living in Japan. Japanese corporations seem to be more used to pushing something that needs no translation like a piece of electronic equipment (except for the manuals), than a piece of culture. Japanese people could learn from the French, who have always been good at selling their culture, giving it a cachet. If French cheese can be so highly regarded, why not Japanese pickles? What about farmers packaging and selling expensive packets of glorious shinmai (new harvest rice), say at $50 retail for 1 kilo? I'm sure there will be people who would buy it.

In any case, after being a member of an uncool race for most of my life, it's difficult to adjust to the cool neighborhood.