For someone who stands to gain from the hot topic of Japan's "Gross National Cool," Taeko Baba ought to be the last to pop the phenomenon's bubble.

But get the Manhattan-based events organizer behind the New York-Tokyo Music Festival 2006 (Sept. 30 in New York City) on the subject and she starts popping away.

"Japanese media people will go to an animation convention and look at all the Americans there and think: 'Oh, anime and J-pop are so hot.' But that's because they haven't looked beyond the doors of the convention center," says Baba, who's been promoting Japanese film, music, video games and robotics in the United States since the mid-1990s.