Japanophilia in Kuwait

This part is most interesting

It is not the “officially” modernized youth consuming mainstream Western culture and who has recently added Japanese and Korean mass culture to their menu of entertainment. Nor is it the – often affluent – youth that has in past decades acquired Western knowledge by spending time in the West and by attending Western universities. The youths I am talking about are not westernized in a straightforward, “modern” way but in a more tortuous, “funky,” individualized, or postmodern way.

tl;dr: they're not chicken nuggets

Globalization through the internet functions in a very personal way since subjects can receive new ideas from foreign online friends. This kind of online communication is particularly frequent for people who are interested in Japanese or Korean culture.

The “Meme Café” is a Japanese restaurant serving Japanese food and is located on the top floor of a videogame shopping mall in a slightly “messy” urban area of Kuwait city called Rihab (Hawalli Governorate). Here one can meet many of the above described young people. The customers are practically all male and, according to the waiter, practically all of them are Kuwaiti. The public here is not the rich crowd of Kuwaitis arriving with Ferraris and wearing Rolex. Those people can be seen at shisha places in the city center or in Salmiya; nor is it the poorer Bedouin type who will often be encountered in fast food outlets. In this mall we find a middle class youth that has had some access to education and educated themselves over the internet.

This is the crowd that I consider as representative of a new subculture in Kuwait and which I wanted to interview.

/r/Kuwait Thread Link - botzbornstein.org