"Japan cracking US pop culture hegemony"

To be read in conjunction with Ian Condry's book on Japanese hip-hop. From the Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 15, 2008, by Amelia Newcomb. Excerpts follow:

Today, Japan sets the trends in what's cool. Sarah Palin's famous glasses came from a Japanese designer. [Palin, cool???!!! T.S.] Tokyo has the most Michelin-starred restaurants in the world, with eight of them earning three stars. Even America's favorite food show, "Iron Chef," is a Japanese import. Japanese women are pushing the limits of literary pop culture with blogs and cellphone novels. Japanese comics occupy ever-greater shelf space in bookstores, and animé-influenced movies like the "The Dark Knight" and "Spider-Man 3" find huge audiences in the West.

What all these media share is a nuanced Japanese aesthetic that has infiltrated global sensibilities – a sort of new "soft power" for Japan. In the process, they're challenging delineations of good and evil from the world's main purveyor of pop culture, Hollywood, as well as American ideals of the lone action-hero."The American 20th-century ideal of the individual superhero is wearing thin," says Roland Kelts, professor at the University of Tokyo and author of "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S."