Author: Harumi Befu and Sylvie Guichar
Publisher: Routledge
Genre: Social Science/Japanese Studie
Pages: 288
Retail Price: 9.99
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For anyone with a strong interest in Japanese culture and its extension into other countries, I would recommend this collection of academic essays.

Refuting old conventions of cultural and economic globalization as a unilinear process from Western countries to peripheral nations, the book makes the case for globalization as a multidirectional process whereby there are multiple centers, of which Japan is one.

The chapters in the book are bound both by this theme and their ethnographic approaches, which has its bases in anthropology and is divided into four sections based on their focus: human dispersal, organizational transplantation, cultural diffusion, and imagining of Japan.

Authors discuss a variety of topics, ranging from the ethnoscape of Japanese female employees of a Japanese supermarket chain, Yaohan, who are sent to work abroad in the company’s Hong Kong subsidiary, to the migration of judo to Austria and its establishment as an international sport, to how Japanese comics influenced the local comic culture of Hong Kong, to the influence of Japanese popular music in Hong Kong. The book is interesting in the context of Japan’s present depressed economic climate, though I would liked to have seen the simultaneous decline of Japan’s economy and increased cultural presence abroad discussed in greater detail.

Globalizing Japan represents yet another important contribution to the body of work which effectively argues for a more open reading of globalizing processes, one which doesn’t employ an ethnocentric view as the West as its sole center, but multiple centers and peripheries with a globalization that unfolds in local contexts.

Bottom Line: Academic, but important.
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