Big in Japan Forget Honda, Fujitsu and Sony--take your next big cue from Tokyo's teenage girls.

They gather in Tokyo's Shibuya district-teenage girlswith unnaturally dark tans, hair streaked with gray, cell phonesdangling like charms from chains, schoolgirl uniforms shortened upto there. Or they're wearing Hawaiian prints and cork wedgies,hair bleached blonde. Or next week-well, that's too faraway to guess what the world's trendiest teens will bedonning.

But why should you care? Because not only do these harbingers ofhip affect trends in their native Tokyo, but their last-minutedecisions on the next "kawaii" thing (think obnoxiouslycute) often show up here. Take a look at many of the trends fromthe past 10 years, and you'll see "Made in Japan"stamped underneath-Tamagotchi, Pokémon, Hello Kitty,photo sticker machines, sushi and sake, Zen-inspireddécor.

"[Japanese consumers] seem to be more fickle [thanAmericans] and have an incredibly short attention span when itcomes to consumer products, thus creating constant pressure oncompanies to come up with a 'new' product-anyproduct," says Ken Matsuno, a marketing professor and theregional director of the Asia Institute at Babson College inWellesley, Massachusetts.

Matsuno says the ubiquitous adolescent girls are the ones towatch. SarahLonsdale, author of Japanese Design (Carlton Books), noticedthat was the case with the recent popularity of NTT DoCoMo'si-mode, a wireless Internet-enabled phone that has 26 millionJapanese subscribers. "These girls wore the phones aroundtheir necks. They were more like accessories, and that reallyhelped fuel the development of Internet telephones."

Teen girls aren't the only ones making trends. Foot-stompingvideo game Dance Dance Revolution is turning out scores ofadolescent boys with happy feet. And the Japanese have long airedreality TV, points out MarkSchilling, author of The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture(Weatherhill). The gaman taikai (endurance contests)don't seem so strange now that people regularly eat live bugsin prime time. And all Japanese generations enjoy anime and manga(animation and comics), which have steadily gained popularity here,due to Princess Mononoke, Pokémon and CartoonNetwork's Toonami animation block.

"I felt good content-meaning great story andcharacters-would work in any industrialized nation,"says Gen Fukunaga, 40, who co-founded Funimation Productions Ltd., theNorth American master licensee of Dragon Ball and DragonBall Z, two Japanese hits currently shown on the CartoonNetwork. Fukunaga first viewed anime while living in Japan ineighth grade and always wondered why such good content wasn'tbeing shown in the United States. In 1994, he asked his uncle, whoworks at a major Tokyo studio, exactly that, and soon found himselfin business with wife Cindy and one of his angel investors, DanielCocanougher. Since then, he's gained the licenses to severalother properties and has built a $35 million business.

"For Americans, the appeal of Japanese comics, animationand toys-often all part of the same marketingmachine-comes from a creative freedom harder to find in U.S.products," says Schilling. "Japanese animation can besexy and violent in ways that are taboo in the U.S. Or it can bewildly imaginative in ways that American adults, raised on blanderfare, consider off-puttingly bizarre, but that American kids, withfewer cultural blinders, find fresh and exciting."

But don't think U.S. adults are the only fuddy-duddies.There are reasons tech trends start with Japanese youth."Japanese [adults] are generally more risk-averse and [wantto] understand technology first," says Fukunaga, "hardlya qualifying attribute to be an innovating consumersegment."

For risk-taking entrepreneurs, Japanese hits are ripe for thepicking. "Many large American corporations tend to shy awayfrom those new and trendy Japanese consumer products," saysMatsuno. "In many cases, Japanese companies had [to] bringproducts here themselves due to the lack of interest amongpotential U.S. partners of a large scale."

Like Japanese youth who grasp a product's worth before theirparents even realize it exists, you have an obvious advantage overbig corporations. Look at Fukunaga: He jumped on a property that,while enormous in Japan, was nonexistent here, likely becausecompanies were loath to license an animated hit so unlike Americancartoons. Open your own eyes-and mind-and you, too, mayfind the next big (Japanese) thing.