> I don't think it's accurate to say that the Japanese have been "able to resist" English-language media. Like you said, Japanese culture is insular; xenophobic

> I don't think it's accurate to say that the Japanese have been "able to resist" English-language media. Like you said, Japanese culture is insular; xenophobic, to put it bluntly. It's a combination of Japan being hesitant to embrace culturally foreign media and thus producing more locally, and western cultures being more willing to embrace foreign things. Right, that's... how they've been able to resist it. Even the French, probably the most infamously-jealous and protective of their culture and language in Europe (and against whom accusations of xenophobia are leveled pretty regularly!), haven't been anywhere near as successful, because they don't take it nearly as far as the Japanese. For all its other downsides, a strong culture of xenophobia seems to be the only way to resist this aspect of globalization—even top-down heavy-handed laws don't work, historically speaking, even before the Internet. A genuine (if somewhat cultivated) culture of reflexively dismissing the foreign seems to work, and not much else. I do agree that Youtube has probably closed the gap somewhat, though that became a usefully-well-populated resource long after I gave up. Even with dedicated instructional material on Youtube, it's goddamn hard to maintain motivation when all the media you genuinely want to read/watch are "high" art and come with language/complexity barriers to match (Proust, Racine, Molière, Renoir, Godard, et c.), with little material to provide the sugary-sweet, approachable appeal of sprawling, crappy anime series, or American sitcoms. Best the French language has for that is comic books, and even that's got nowhere near the volume and selection of, say, manga. About the only media I still consume in French is the occasional French news article, just because their slant on things or selection of what to cover is sometimes interesting—no coincidence that the ability to stumble through reading a French news article is currently where my French tops out, much reduced from where it once was.