Californian Cultural Revolution

Summary

The Californian Cultural Revolution was a cultural phenomena which lasted from the 1980s to the 2010s, and marked the explosion of Japanese cultural influence on the United States of America. While, in our universe, there is Japanese influence on the United States, it is mostly relegated to neighborhoods and subdivisions in the biggest cities on the west coast, it never went as far as the Cultural Revolution took it.

Japanese printed on packaging and signs much the same as Spanish in our modern day, Japanese celebrities and cultural phenomena being immediately recognizable to tens of millions of Americans, and most people on the west coast having at least a passing knowledge of the Japanese language.

History

Population Exchange

The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were planted in the late 1940s when, after the surrender of Imperial Japan in 1945. The United States was mostly left to its own devices by their European allies after 1944, when the German Reich surrendered to the Allies, but was even more so alone post-war, left with the task of rebuilding Japan.

As such, left with this task, the Americans put to work on reconstructing their former enemy, and in the process, many thousands upon thousands of American workers, especially those in industrial professions, left for the high-paying, high-demand factory and construction jobs that awaited them in Japan. Along with those Americans leaving for Japan, many Japanese left for the New World, often former Japanese soldiers who had survived, seeking a new life inside the United States. This event tied a near-inseparable knot between the two nations, and singlehandedly stopped the Japanese population crisis of the 2010s.

Japanese economics and the birth of Osakastyle

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese economy was booming, with many millions across the world finding that the Japanese made very good computers, cars, and television. With their cultural and ethnic link, an eccentric, punk-esque Japanese aesthetic was able to make its way to the United States, mixing the cultural and popular trends of Japanese fashion and design, and merging them with the newly birthed Cyberpunk aesthetic birthed in the 1980s, and the rampant counter-culture of the 1990s, created an aesthetic juggernaut known as Osakastyle, currently in the midst of its third revival.

Suddenly, everyone was buying Japanese things, marrying Japanese people, getting jobs in Japan, it was the 1950s all over again, and the people most likely to shoot for those Japanese jobs were the people descended from the Japanese-American families forged after the reconstruction, most of which lived in or near, the massive, coastal megalopolises of California.