> caused by multiple psychological and social factors. The Japan
> case is not a clear test of the media aggression hypothesis,
Sure it is. They're both extremely rich, urbanized, highly developed capitalist societies, with very similar consumption patterns and ideologies -- it'd be much harder to compare, say, Indonesia with the US.
Cultural documents are complicated networks of associations, memories, experiences, etc. None of this is reducible to any single factor, either positive or negative. The most you could say about our media culture is that it fosters various forms of consumerism, but even that is contradictory -- those raised with lots of commodities and saturated with TV advertising tend to be much more critical of the consumer culture.
-- Dennis