‘Cool Japan’ as Soft Power?

By Niels Brix Hornbek

Back in November 2011, the government-backed Japanese Creative Center in Singapore launched a ‘Cool Japan Month’ initiative in the bustling Southeast Asian city-state. A four-week event featuring a series of cultural happenings and workshops, aimed at promoting Japan’s creative industries, and boosting Japanese soft power in the Asian region. The initiative was part of a broader longstanding effort to facilitate the wider global expansion of Japan’s already successful creative industries, which have been identified as the strategic sector with the ability to drive future economic growth, whilst enhancing the understanding and trust of Japan through soft power and cultural diplomacy.

For a long time, foreign interest in post-war Japan has centered predominantly on its remarkable economic achievements, while the cultural aspects of the country’s integration into the global economy have been largely disregarded. Japan was widely considered as a one-dimensional economic power with little cultural sway beyond its own borders. This image, however, has changed dramatically over the course of the last few decades – Japan has quietly grown into a pop-culture powerhouse with global appeal. For some time now, Anime and Manga, TV shows, music and fashion have enjoyed tremendous popularity across the world, particularly with East and Southeast Asian consumers, who despite a troubled mutual history have enthusiastically embraced Japanese pop-culture.

In 2002, Foreign Policy magazine published an article by American journalist Douglas McGray, entitled “Japan’s Gross National Cool”. The article generated quite a buzz in Japan as it not only hailed Japan as a new cultural superpower, but also argued that with cultural prowess comes political influence in the form of ‘soft power’ – a concept coined by American political scientist Joseph Nye, which can be summarized as the ability to influence the actions of others through cultural and political attraction and appeal, rather than threats or coercion. McGray described how Japan, at a time of persistent economic recession, had evolved into an innovative and dynamic cultural superpower, a “mighty engine of national cool” with a unique flair for merging the local and the global in attractive and original products and ideas. ”National cool is a kind of soft power […] a reminder that commercial trends and products, and a country’s knack for spawning them, can serve political and economic ends”, he argued, and quoted Joseph Nye; ”it is […] true that a country that stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its messages across and to affect the preferences of others”.[1]

The ‘Cool Japan’ narrative caught the imagination of Japanese policy makers struggling not only with recession and social distress, but also with articulating ‘Japan’ internationally. Since then, soft power and cultural diplomacy have become leitmotifs in Japanese foreign policy planning. The then Foreign Minister, Taro Aso, claimed that, “what we have now is an era in which diplomacy at the national level is affected dramatically by the climate of opinion arising from the average person […] that is exactly why we want pop culture, which is so effective in penetrating throughout the general public, to be our ally in diplomacy”.[2] Among other things, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed “Ambassadors of Cute” to promote “Cool Japan” around the world, and launched an International Manga Award as part of an ambitious effort at carrying out ”pop-culture diplomacy […] aiming to further the understanding and trust of Japan”, as one government statement read.[3] The Japanese Creative Center in Singapore is one of the latest installments in this soft power-based strategy. Significantly, it is also funded and run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, not the ministerial departments dealing with culture or trade.

“Cool Japan” is a remarkable success story in commercial terms, and the phenomenon also adds to the mounting empirical evidences that seem to suggest a transition to more complex dispersals of power and influence in processes of cultural globalization, which are no longer characterized only by ‘Westernization’ of the remainder of the globe – if that was ever the case. However, the impact of soft power and cultural diplomacy remains difficult to evaluate, and it is still questionable to what extent the effort to capitalize on the commercial success of Japan’s cultural industries for political purposes has made it any easier for the Japanese state to achieve national objectives. A number of research projects focusing on East Asia seem to suggest that while the spread and consumption of ‘Cool Japan’ can lead to positive and sometimes new conceptions of Japan among recipient consumers, there seems to be a fundamental disjuncture between their evaluation of the Japanese state and state practices on one side, and Japanese cultural commodities and brands on the other.[4]

But there may be additional far-reaching political benefits to the ‘Cool Japan’ phenomenon, not only for Japan but also for the region as a whole. Singaporean sociologist Pen Er Lam points to the advantages of international collaboration between cultural industries in the Asian region. According to Lam, businesses should come together and create attractive ‘Asian’ products, and through such partnerships pave the way for a transnational Asian community – ”Cultural products including manga and anime then will not merely be markers of a unique Japanese identity but emblems of a greater East Asia […] If that scenario were to come to fruition, it will be more meaningful to talk about the ”soft power” of East Asia and not merely that of [...] Japan”, he argues, indicating that cultural industries can contribute to the advancement of regional integration.[5]

In line with Lam, Professor of Japanese Studies at Hong University, Yoshiko Nakano, views the spread and consumption of Japanese popular culture in East Asia not just as a Japanese resource, but as a potential focal point for the establishment of a set of transnational Asian collective memories – ”I tend to believe that Japanese pop culture [...] is most powerful when we take an interactional approach, and consider it not just as a resource for Japan, but as a resource for interaction among Chinese, Japanese, and people of other Asian countries, as it provides much-needed shared memories”, she argues, “Memories are at the core of who we are and how we see others and divergent memories of the Asia-Pacific War often disturb the relationship between China and Japan”.[6]

While the spread and consumption of Japanese popular culture will not alleviate such bitter historical memories, it could provide a region-wide, pan-Asian cultural frame of reference, including a new set of warm positive narratives shared by future generations and leaders. Perhaps that will be the real legacy of ‘Cool Japan’ in Asia.