Indonesians increasingly warming to Japanese culture
Indonesians have come late to the party but are increasingly warming to firms flooding in with entertainment, fashion and food from Tokyo
In front of a crowd of thousands, two sumo wrestlers charge at each other with full force, their bodies colliding with a tremendous smack that echoes through an arena in the Indonesian capital Jakarta.
The first official sumo tournament to be held outside Japan in five years saw wrestler Kotoyuki take an early advantage against his opponent with a series of quick stinging slaps to the chest and a steady push forward.
"I love sumo - I've studied it, but this is the first time they've come to Indonesia and it's the first time I've seen it live," Julyana Antika, a 22-year-old student of Japanese literature at a Jakarta university, said at the weekend competition.
Antika, accompanied by a dozen Japanese exchange students from Takushoku University in Tokyo, is just one of many young Indonesians who are increasingly consuming Japanese culture through entertainment, comics, fashion and food.
Indonesians have come late to the party - Japanese culture was embraced in the West in the 1970s and 1980s - but a boom in Southeast Asia's top economy and Japanese firms' hunt for new markets have combined to create a recent upsurge in interest.
"Two years ago, when I first came to Indonesia, we had around 1,000 Japanese businesspeople coming to us for Indonesian market advice," said Kenichi Tomiyoshi, chief of the Japan External Trade Organisation's Indonesian operations.