This article examines a new mode of ‘Japaneseness’ emerging through increasing cross-cultural
exchanges and interactions since the late twentieth century. Based upon ethnographic data
and fieldwork, it demonstrates how Japaneseness is reconfigured through contact with other
forms such as ‘whiteness’ within popular commodity culture. The article analyses the Japanese
restaurant in Melbourne as an ‘exotic genre’ within which the new mode of Japaneseness is
informed and constructed. It argues that this mode of the exotic can be distinguished from
earlier formations of exoticism that unproblematically locate a subject monolithically within
narrow stereotypes, although the old exoticism has not entirely disappeared. Rather than viewing
the Japanese restaurant as a cohesive category, this study conceives of it as a cross-culturally
implicated formation that challenges a fixed representation of Japaneseness constructed from a
single point of view.