Among the many results of the 19th-century "opening" of Japan to the West was a truly massive internalization of foreign culture, one which is now so advanced that concepts such as "self" and "other" can no longer be effectively distinguished and the boundaries of "Japanese" culture have been enlarged to the point of obliteration. As critic Hideo Kobayashi said as early as 1933, Japanese have "become so used to the reception of Western influence that we no longer can identify it as Western influence."
A result has been the common experience of seeing native culture as somehow exotic; the former "self" has become the present "other." The Japan Travel Bureau advertises trips to Kyoto as a kind of time travel, the home town is billed as some alien utopia ("Tora-san Land"), and the modern Japanese becomes, in U.S. historian Miriam Silverberg's memorable phrase, "a Westerner who is not Western."
There is nothing drastic in all this. It is through such patterns that culture moves itself along. At the same time, however, prior assumptions are broken down, and new ones have to be made. At present, the concept of some mutual exclusivity between things Japanese and things not Japanese has all but disappeared. Just last weekend, at the summer festival in Ueno, I saw young women wearing black leather, stiletto-heeled pumps with their traditional yukata, a sight that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.