Japanese newspapers carried an intriguing story in early July 2006. Two French girls, both aged sixteen, who lived in the suburbs of Paris, were taken into police custody in Poland after making a train trip through Belgium and Germany. Their final destination was Japan. Fascinated by Japanese manga and pop music, they had planned to make train connections across Europe and Russia to the Korean peninsula and then travel by ship to Japan, which they fantasized about as the land of manga and a dreamlike lifestyle. Not knowing that visas were required to cross national borders, the girls left France with a small amount of money, a mobile phone, a portable audio-player, and manga books but were detained by border police when they attempted to enter Belarus. They were good school friends and were enthralled by Japanese ninja manga series NARUTO, girls’ manga series Peach Girl, visual rock music, and other popular Japanese art forms. Longing to live in the fairyland of Japan’s fantastic culture, the girls had left home without letting their parents know, in the belief that the adventure they embarked upon could realize their exciting dreams.

The episode itself could constitute a comical manga story, and one can laugh at the girls as naïve and gullible. Yet, although extreme, eccentric, and far-fetched, their ideas of Japan appear to resound in the predominating representations of the nation, which are influenced by the global explosion of Japanese pop culture and range from manga, animation, and sushi to television dramas. Although these elements do represent aspects of Japanese society, interpretations based excessively or merely on these lenses lose sight of Japan’s variegation and heterogeneity and verge on a new kind of stereotyping. Since Japanese society embraces a rich variety of cultural forms that reflect its tradition, stratification, and regional stretch, this chapter examines the internal diversity of Japanese culture as thoroughly as possible and then returns at the end to the Japanese cultural presence in the transnational context.