Because Japanese media are incestuous in their inter-corporate dealings, those writers referred to as hyōronka (critics) tend to be less critical about popular culture than their counterparts in North America and Europe. They are more likely to engage in punditry or public relations, because complaining about the quality of a movie, album or novel risks upsetting someone in the same business — publishing, broadcasting, advertising — who could influence your professional life.

Some years ago I wrote movie reviews for a local publication whose editor encouraged us to express our opinions frankly, and on occasion he was punished for it by distributors who uninvited his reviewers to their press screenings. The magazine was in Japanese. When I write in English in Japan, I can say whatever I want because, well, who cares?

This Japanese code applies also when the subject is foreigners appropriating Japanese material. Local critics reacted enthusiastically to Hollywood's take on Japanese femininity when it adapted the best-seller "Memoirs of a Geisha" for the screen. Though the novel, written in English by an American, was well received, the movie version was generally derided overseas for its canned melodramatics and the awkward earnestness of its Japanese depictions, not to mention its casting of a Chinese actress in the title role because she had more international star cachet than any Japanese actress the filmmakers could think of. Japanese critics simply expressed their delight in the notion that Steven Spielberg, an executive producer, would deign to cover such a subject. They even liked "Pearl Harbor."