Politics & Power Quote by Toni Collette

Collette is reaching for a compliment that lands as a familiar kind of romanticization: Japan as the rare “untouched” place in a world supposedly flattened by American culture. The intent reads as admiration, even relief - a fantasy of stepping outside the algorithm of global sameness. Coming from an actress, it also tracks with celebrity travel talk: the hunger for somewhere that feels cinematic, legible as “different,” rich in ritual and texture.

The subtext, though, is where it gets slippery. Calling a living culture “its own entity” and “untouched” frames Japan less as a modern society and more as a curated exhibit. It flattens internal diversity into an aesthetic of tradition: “so traditional and so specific” implies coherence, purity, and continuity, the very tropes Western audiences have long projected onto Japan. The phrase “not Americanized” positions Americanness as contamination and Japanese-ness as preservation, as if cultures don’t constantly borrow, remix, and argue with themselves.

Context matters here: Collette is speaking in the era of peak “cool Japan” export - anime, fashion, design, food, tourism branding - alongside deeply entrenched Western stereotypes of Japan as both hypermodern and ancient. Her line chooses the ancient. It works rhetorically because it offers an easy contrast (authentic vs. diluted) that feels morally flattering to the speaker: she’s not consuming a place, she’s respecting it. The irony is that the very desire for “untouched” cultures is one of the most globalized, Americanized impulses there is.