Word: japanized
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...Patriots With his velvet jacket and free- flowing mane, Takanori Aoki has a bit of the alt-rock star about him, but he's actually a designer with Japan's smallest automaker, Mitsuoka Motors. The company can't compete with a Toyota or Honda, so it has focused mainly on building what industry insiders snidely refer to as "replicars." Working at a small, unorthodox company meant that Aoki, 31, was given free rein to experiment. What he came up with in late 2006 was a $110,000 supercar modeled after a mythical Japanese snake with eight heads and eight tails...
...gloss over such wartime atrocities. But in an ex-imperialist country whose identity was so shattered that it ended up adopting peace as a national virtue - during the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics flocks of dove-shaped balloons were released into the air, underlining the not-so-subtle point that Japan wasn't about to declare war anytime soon - the return to traditions is refreshingly, well, normal...
...Then came the long economic languishing of the 1990s, and the effective end of lifetime employment. Today, Japan still suffers a hangover from that difficult decade. The economy expanded by only 1% in the first quarter of this year, business confidence among top manufacturers hit a near five-year low in June, and the R word is being increasingly whispered. Compounding the nation's angst is the sense that it is being overtaken by ancient rival China. Yet one unexpected side benefit has been a flowering of artisanal culture, the antithesis of the monolithic companies that had come to symbolize...
...living selling bean curd. In 2005 Shingo Ito started a company, Otokomae Tofuten, that makes premium tofu. "When I grew up, everyone was going to work for banks or trading companies," says the 39-year-old native of Chiba. "But I thought, I want to create a symbol of Japan that's hip but also draws from our society." Just three years later, Ito's tofu is a cult favorite in Japan and is being exported to America and the U.K. "The great thing is that tofu is seen as cool in places like the U.S.," he says...
...Japan's renewed sense of identity has also stoked a spiritual rediscovery. Under Shinto, the country's native religion, which blends a reverence for nature with Japan's founding myths, the Japanese Emperor is considered the direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu; it was in Emperor Hirohito's sacred name that Japanese soldiers fought in World War II. When a battle-vanquished Hirohito announced in 1946 that he was not, in fact, a god in human form, some Japanese distanced themselves from the animist tradition. While shrines remained and festivals continued, Shinto was initially condemned by the occupying Americans...