Oriental and Japanese imagery has thrived at the cutting edge of international culture, in the late 1990s. Young people employed in the mass media, advertising, fashion, music, and IT industries, have imagined the future almost entirely through their imagination of Japan or China.

The diffusion of Oriental and Japanese style culture across Europe and America has converged with the powerful trend towards self-conscious, self-Orientalism, in fashion and culture produced in Japan and East Asia.

Oriental-chic in Europe, and Japan-chic in East Asia, (and Asia-chic in Japan!) have merged. To an extent they have become one international cultural trend. This global Neo-Asian cultural theme is fed by a pool of designers, producers, and editors, based just as equally in London, Singapore, or New York.

In its most recent revival in the 1990s, cultural Orientalism has become an abstract theme. Neo-Asian style has been concerned not with national identity, but with personal and corporate identity. Neo-Asian culture has been used to pose people in a new way: to imagine new kinds of people. Neo-Asian style has ultimately been concerned with re- defining and re-inventing the modern person.

Though often futuristic in form, Neo- Asian culture also utilises some of the recurring motifs of old-fashioned, (racist, and romantic), definitions of Oriental people. Motifs such as 'passive', 'inscrutable', 'childlike', 'victim-like', 'lacking subjective will', 'machine-like', and 'ephemeral', have been seperated from their previous, racial context. Some of these motifs are now packaged as the core attributes of a new global model of behavior and style for the cool and mobile person. The Neo-Asian theme in international culture, (especially fashion), illustrates a connection between the flux of fuzzy Neo-Asian values and Neo-Asian style government, and the disOrientating loss of individualism, across global society.