Manga and anime began to assert their hold on Japanese culture in the aftermath of World War II. There is hardly an aspect of modern Japan that isn’t in some way rooted in this cataclysm, which, in the blinding flash of an atomic bomb, obliterated one way of looking at the world and ushered in another. Emperor Hirohito was no longer the father of the nation; General MacArthur was. The old hyper-nationalistic order was completely discredited, and came to be seen as the source of Japan’s ruin; but out of the ashes of defeat a new order, imported from America, could be erected. The taste for militarism and global domination vanished, and in its place rose an intense desire to be a paragon of gentle innocence, so much so that many Japanese saw themselves as the victims of the war’s Pacific Theater, instead of its principal perpetrators. And the notion that the Japanese were a superior race gave way to the humiliating reality of victorious, physically imposing American soldiers occupying their country and turning it into a virtual brothel.

The first meeting between General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito on September 27, 1945.

Americans, when they think of Japan at all, consider it just another foreign country rather than one with a special relationship to the United States. But Japan views itself as uniquely entangled with America, their fates intertwining like the strands of a double helix. Americans wrote Japan’s pacifist constitution. To this day, Japan is protected by the United States’s military umbrella. And America has been a source of cultural inspiration for a country that, in the post-war era, has been distrustful of itself and has associated modernity with the West.

This has manifested itself in countless ways. The novels of Haruki Murakami, whose popularity in America is only exceeded by his popularity in Japan, are steeped in Western influences: “jazz music and Dostoevsky and Kafka and Raymond Chandler,” as he told The Paris Review. Akira Kurosawa’s films swallowed Western artworks whole and made them Japanese, whether they were stealing from Shakespeare (Ran, Throne of Blood) or Dashiel Hammett (Yojimbo, which in turn was the template Sergio Leone used to make A Fistful of Dollars). The novelist Minae Mizumura—whose A True Novel is a retelling of Wuthering Heights by way of The Great Gatsby—has argued that the Japanese artist is essentially defined by Japan’s relationship to the West, particularly America.

The logo for Bitch Skateboards.

Japan’s absorption of American culture only becomes more frenzied at the consumer level. Every fashion subculture—punk, skater, preppy, goth, grunge, lumberjack, hip hop—is stripped of its original significance and blended together in an exhilarating melange that is somehow singularly Japanese. (Japanese fashion is, in many ways, the apotheosis of hipsterism.) The most ordinary salaryman has a David Bowie haircut circa Aladdin Sane, while housewives slip on pairs of Vans to go to the supermarket. The clothes of Comme des Garçons, the premier arbiter of Japanese chic, appear to be Western mainstays that have been chopped in a blender and stitched back together in a Frankensteinian hodgepodge.