I came across an interesting post on Victory Manual that deals with the often narrow world-view found in Japanese media. The writer says: "the idea that Japanese are especially uniquely unique is only an obstacle into the culture, and really proves to not be the case in reality."

"I was reading through the 8th and 9th issues of Salaryman Kintaro and was struck by the ethnocentric impression it left me with. But I should first tell you about a distinction I make for these kinds of topics.The way I see it, at the most basic level, there are two kinds of discrimination: Malicious and naive. Malicious discrimination is made with the effort to injure those different than oneself. Naive discrimination is the result of a deep-seeded, innocent, ethnocentric view of the world. What I saw in Salaryman Kintaro was the latter. But still, I wouldn’t mind seeing it gone and over with." As an added bonus, I added the Japanese-language Salaryman Kintaro anime (with English subtitles) below:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB1GRZiX1cY[/youtube]You can read the rest of this post here.