Every December, news organizations in Japan obsess over words and phrases that have described the local zeitgeist during the previous 11 months. Some of these terms last no longer than a season, but a few have become perennials, entering the vocabulary as standards, understandable to everyone who knows the language.

One of the most enduring phrases of the Heisei Era (1989 to the present day) has been "Galapagos syndrome," which was coined to describe products that were principally made for domestic consumption and which demonstrated no perceivable traction in other markets. The term was initially coined for certain home electronics models and features whose point on the evolution of appliances indicated a closed system, like that of the titular Pacific Ocean islands made famous by naturalist Charles Darwin for their unique animal and plant species.

As a descriptor, however, Galapagos turned out to be flexible, and could be used for a lot of peculiarly Japanese phenomena, such as ATMs that didn't accept foreign credit cards or the lingering marketability of music CDs well after they had been replaced by digital downloads and streaming in other countries. Another was the concept of Japanese TV personalities called "tarento," a localization of the English word "talent." In Japanese showbiz, image and demeanor are paramount, which means TV personalities don't really need talent. Ostensibly, they are comedians who get jobs on variety shows because they can humorously extemporize about almost anything, and during the Heisei Era, as programming formats became narrower but more refined, so did requirements for tarento. The ability to tell jokes or ad lib was less important than an identifiable trait that viewers would remember and want to see again. Certain TV personalities were hired specifically because they were, conventionally speaking, "unattractive," or they conspicuously displayed a naive and uninformed view of the world. Such distinctions made these entertainers desirable to producers, who could count on them to act predictably on air in accordance with type.