This article presents an unusual angle for the study of consumer culture in a case
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‘culture’, or more specifically, of a product, which carries the
label: ‘Japanese culture’, and which crosses national borders.
The general context is that of cross-cultural consumption and cultural
globalization. Globalization cannot be easily described anymore as having
‘a distinctly American face’. There is more and more evidence
for competing centers or multiple globalizations. Japan has no doubt become one of
these centers. The case at hand is that of the re-production and consumption of
‘Japanese culture’ in Israel. The article emphasizes the
significance of looking at local cultural discourses or discourses about culture
both at the ‘exporting’ and ‘importing’
destinations in trying to have a deeper understating of the processes of cultural
globalization. I show how the Japanese cultural discourse - largely through the
extremely popular genre of writing detailing the essential qualities of what it
means to be Japanese known as Nihonjinron!- yielded a global cultural
product known as ‘Japanese culture’, which is delivered to the
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