Pop culture. Japan's today is thriving, vibrant, spreading, turning people the world over into manga/anime freaks and costume players.
It's a new role for this once introverted, quietly workaholic nation. As recently as the 1980s, "culture" in Japan meant, if not corporate culture, then high culture. Pop culture — culturally if not commercially — was peripheral. Now it is central, one of the few buoyant sectors in a society that otherwise seems to have lost its way.
Four hundred years ago there lived a woman who might have foreseen it. She launched it. Popular culture before her is an oxymoron. Japanese culture was ancient, elegant, stately, nuanced, refined, classical, exclusive.