Regional soft power/creative industries competitionSingaporean young girls especially have aspired to be K-pop singers and many were willing
to sacrifice their highly valued education for the chance to learn Korean and be professionally
trained in the hope of joining a Korean girl band. Finally, Korea has emerged from being a
relatively unknown travel location to becoming a popular destination for regional tourists, and
many of the shooting locations of popular TV dramas have been promoted as, and indeed have
become, tourist destinations. All these diverse phenomena support the idea that pop culture
products can act as a channel for the exporting nation to project soft power.
National soft power rhetoric
In 1983, Tezuka Osamu, arguably the father of postwar manga and creator of “the first serialized
television animation in Japan in 1963” (Shiraishi 1996, 237) wrote,
[Animation has become] Japan’s supreme goodwill ambassador, not just in the West
but in the Middle East and Africa, in South America, in Southeast Asia, even in China.
The entry port is almost always TV. In France, the children love watching Goldorak.
Doraemon is [a] huge hit in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. Chinese youngsters all sing
the theme to Astro Boy.
(quoted in Leonard 2005, 288)However, it was not until more than twenty years later that the Japanese government thought
to capitalize on its media culture exports to enhance the nation’s soft power. The belated move
was provoked by an American journalist, Douglas McGray, who noted: “Japan’s growing cul-
tural presence has created a mighty engine of national cool,” “National cool is a kind of ‘soft
power,’” and that “while Japan sits on that formidable reserve of soft power, it has few means to
tap it” (2002, 7; also Otmazgin 2008b: 75). McGray’s vague concept of Japan’s “Gross National
Cool” provided just the right catchword to spur a 180-degree change in the Japanese govern-
ment’s cultural policies, from a hands-off approach to active engagement with the recreation
and entertainment industries, all wrapped in the language of soft power and national interest
(Leheny 2006).^1
The most explicit and coherent justification for pop culture as an effective instrument
of soft power and international diplomacy came from Taro Aso when he was the Japanese
minister of foreign affairs, before becoming a short-lived prime minister in 2009. For Aso
(2006), a manga enthusiast, “cultural diplomacy that fails to take advantage of pop culture is
not really worthy of being called ‘cultural diplomacy.’” The reason he gave is that the world
is now in
an era in which diplomacy at the national level is affected dramatically by the climate
of opinion arising from the average person. And that is exactly why we want pop cul-
ture, which is so effective in penetrating throughout the general public, to be our ally
in diplomacy.The beginning of the twenty-first century is
at a point where culture made in Japan—whether anime and manga or sumo and
Japanese food culture—is equally able to nourish the people of the world, particularly
the younger generation. We [the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Japanese
culture industry practitioners] would be remiss not to utilize these to the fullest.