IT IS an irony worth pondering that, a couple of weeks before the World Trade Organisation meets in Seattle, the entire child population of America is enslaved by a Japanese fad. The most heartfelt complaint of globalisation's critics is that the process leads inexorably to the triumph of American pop culture. The French believe this so strongly that they have repeatedly threatened to scupper trade talks unless “cultural” goods are exempted. The world's non-governmental organisations believe it so strongly that a collection of them have placed a series of huge advertisements in the New York Times complaining about the McDonaldisation of the world. But any trade negotiator who feels tempted to agree should take the precaution of consulting a ten-year-old child.

“Pokémon: The First Movie”—parents, note that threatening adjective—raked in $32.4m over its opening weekend; and when a Los Angeles radio station announced a contest for free tickets, 70,000 calls a minute overwhelmed its switchboard. A television series based on the Japanese pocket monsters is the most popular childen's programme in the country. More than 50m Pokémon game cards have been sold. The five top-selling video games are all Pokémon-themed. Pokemon.com is the most popular website for children of 12 and under, and eBay, an Internet auction house, is doing a roaring business in rare Pokémon cards.

The British are not far behind the Japanese in the race to seduce America's children. The literary sensation of the summer was J.K. Rowling's trilogy about Harry Potter. Hollywood is so lathered up about the child wizard that all the town's leading directors, from Steven Spielberg to Barry Levinson, are squabbling over the rights to direct the film and Time Warner, the studio that owns the rights to the books, is muttering about a billion-dollar franchise, with sequels, television shows, cartoon spin-offs, theme-park rides, interactive games and merchandising. And for younger children yet another British product, the Teletubbies, is almost as popular as that quintessentially American programme, “Sesame Street”.

This triple invasion not only disproves the idea that Americans have a monopoly of popular culture. It also disproves the idea that non-Americans have a monopoly of silly complaints about the evils of popular culture, particularly the foreign-made variety. Jerry Falwell, a televangelist, played on a widespread American suspicion that the British favour homosexuals when he “outed” one of the Teletubbies, Tinky Winky, on the ground that he carries a handbag. Other evangelists have called for the Harry Potter books to be banned for promoting superstition and witchcraft.

Time magazine calls Pokémon a “pestilential Ponzi scheme” that encourages acquisitiveness and aggression. It also portrays its inventor as a Japanese misfit who obsessively collected beetles as a child. Newsweek asks “Is Pokémon evil?” (though, to be fair, it answers “probably not”). A San Diego law firm has filed a class-action suit against the manufacturer of Pokémon cards on the ground that they promote illegal gambling; and a Colorado preacher required children in his congregation to watch as he torched Pokémon cards and chopped up a Pokémon toy with a sword.

An important part of the anti-globalist growl is that global companies are marketing fads to children with a ruthlessness that verges on the obscene. Hasbro is indeed churning out licensed toys and collectibles. Burger King is giving away 57 varieties of Pokémon in a $22m promotion. The Pokémon television show functions as a relentless advertisement for a cavalcade of products. There is something in the fad for every age. Toys pull in young children, who then move on to cards and other collectibles before finally graduating to Nintendo's video games. And there is more to come: a hundred more Pokémon on their way from Japan to add to the 151 that have already arrived on America's shores.

Yet many of the conclusions that anti-globalists draw from this evidence of ruthlessness are mistaken. They are wrong to argue that everything is being reduced to marketing, for example. The remainder bins of the world's toyshops are full of brilliant ideas that were dreamed up by marketing departments only to be forcefully rejected by children. And the people behind the latest fads sweeping through young America are mavericks, not cynical marketers. J.K. Rowling is a publicity-shy divorcee who wrote her first Harry Potter book when she was on the dole. Satoshi Tajiri, the man behind Pokémon, persisted with his idea even when Nintendo told him that technology was passing it by. He then persisted with it again when Nintendo America told him that role-playing games were not popular with the local children, and when a bizarre incident, in which 700 Japanese children had fits while watching a Pokémon television programme, put the idea of exporting the craze under a cloud.

The anti-globalists are also wrong when they argue that conglomerates inevitably homogenise the ideas that they choose to hoover up. Some of the Pokémon have certainly had their names westernised: Zenigame, a turtle who squirts water, has became Squirtle, for example. But the little monsters still teach distinctively Japanese values about the importance of team-building and performing your duties. The only way to succeed at the game is to co-operate with others—and the easiest way to fail is to neglect to care for your charges.

There was some talk in Hollywood about setting the filmed version of Harry Potter in an American school, Hogwarts High, complete with cheerleaders and a blonde girlfriend. But the moguls soon decided that Britishness is part of the book's charm. Harry, played by a British actor, will still attend a 1,000-year-old school with crenellated towers and a Latin motto. Hermione will not change her name to Bailey.

The Pokémon will soon be history; with luck, the sickeningly cute Teletubbies will be history even sooner. The next generation of children will find a new craze to fill their time and soak up their parents' money. But why so many cultural protectionists assume that the craze will be dreamed up by some faceless American corporation rather than by a Japanese bug-collector or a British welfare mother is getting more mysterious by the day.