The Washington Post today carried this article discussing how one country has taken a western pop-culture phenomenon and made it its own:

[Turkish TV producer Pelin Akat's revelation] came while [she] was casting a show in which young men and women share a house with several dozen surveillance cameras. Akat noticed that, at the auditions in suburban Istanbul, the female candidates usually showed up alone.

The male candidates, however, brought along their mothers.

"They were saying, 'My mother should have a say,' " Akat recalled.

That's exactly what the mothers got in "Will You Be My Bride?" The hit series moved the matrons from backstage to the set, which they promptly took over.

The show's finale drew seventy-four percent of Turkish viewers on its broadcast night. They've already sold rights to the show's format to a half-dozen countries in the region.

Which just proves something the Japanese have known for decades... if you're clever and rational about it, western culture is neither corrosive or destructive. It can be used to provide a framework that presents your own culture in new and innovative ways, invigorating and expanding it at the same time.