Despite the proliferation of Japanese television, video games, and video cassette recorders, most Western works on Japanese culture still sketch a society of dedicated aesthetes, vari- ously arranging flowers, sipping green tea, plucking the three-stringed samisen. A few books indicate, how- ever, that popular pastimes are more contemporary and less refined.
Kuwabara Takeo, a scholar of French literature, analyzes his coun- try's cultural shifts during the last 150 years in Japan and Western...