The idea for this essay came to me while interviewing a Vietnamese journalist and small businessman in Oimachi, just off Tokyo’s Yamanote line. He had been telling me, with resignation, that after more than a decade of activism for Vietnamese and other migrant community causes in Japan, he had finally given up in the face of official immovability and indifference. A little like a traditional Vietnamese mandarin in times of trouble, he had retreated into scholarly pursuits. After a pause, he brightened up as he began to describe the recent emergence of a Japanese craze for things Vietnamese, telling me with some pride how not long ago he had had a camera crew from NHK television in his tiny shop. Pulling a magazine out of his desk drawer, he bemusedly translated the text on the cover into Vietnamese. One of the bold headlines read “[Let’s go] To ‘cheap’ ‘cute’ things paradise Vietnam.”1