TAIPEI, Taiwan — Like many self-respecting young Japanese women, Joyce Chen chooses her wardrobe with care. She takes fashion cues from the Japanese teen magazine Non-No, studies the clothes of Japanese soap opera stars and pays close attention to style in Japanese music videos.
Then she goes shopping at boutiques such as "100%," whose women's wear is exclusively Japanese. Today, Chen sports a trendy T-shirt over blue-and-white checked pants, a simple but expensive ensemble direct from the Land of the Rising Sun.
Therein lies the rub. Chen is not Japanese but Taiwanese. And she knows that her middle-aged parents, mindful of Japan's 50-year domination of Taiwan earlier this century, would not approve of her devotion to Tokyo chic.
So she resorts to a little subterfuge. "I lie," Chen, 20, admits sheepishly. "I tell them it was made in Taiwan."
Throughout this island, Taiwanese youth are lapping up just about everything to do with pop culture from Japan. Young adults spend their pocket money on Japanese designer labels. Teenagers swoon over Japanese pop singers. Students neglect their homework to watch Japanese cartoons or read Japanese comic books. Children of all ages clamor for Japanese toys.
In the latest twist in a long and deep relationship between the two nations, the definition of cool for the young here comes not from the West, on the other side of the Pacific, but elsewhere in the East, across the East China Sea.
And the elders are not amused.
At best, they claim indifference, dismissing the trend as a harmless fad sure to wane as quickly as it waxed. At worst, they are downright alarmed, shaking their heads and talking darkly of a "new colonialism" taking root among Taiwan's youth.
"Be careful!" warned a Taiwanese newspaper headline only half-jokingly. "Your kids are becoming Japanese."
Concern has even prompted some lawmakers to urge the government to foster a stronger sense of Chinese heritage in schoolchildren, lest Japanese influence subsume it entirely.
"They're worried that the next generation will be totally spoiled by Japanese culture," says professor Hsu Chieh-lin at National Taiwan University, the leading expert here on Taiwan-Japan relations.
The complaints may sound similar to fussing by the French, who see their proud national traditions imperiled by the invasion of American music, media and McDonald's.
