Koichi Iwabuchicrucial areas to explore. What roles do governments and the media and culture industries play
in these processes, and do their, sometimes nonaligned, interests result in incoherent or contra-
dictory policy actions? Only an elaborated ethnographic research of policy implementation and
audience reception would help illuminate the complicated process of national image projection.
In considering the pragmatic discourse on the usefulness of (national) culture, we also need
to question how it discourages rather than promotes serious discussions on the uses of culture in
the service of wider public interests. A market-oriented nationalist policy discussion on the uses
of popular culture does not adequately address important issues that have been (re)generated by
transnational cultural flows: the high concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few
global companies, the monopolization of intellectual property rights by popular culture indus-
tries, or the exploitation of creative workers by a hierarchical international outsourcing system.
Even more relevant here is the examination of how soft power and nation branding work not
just as externally oriented cultural policies but also as instruments facilitating internally oriented
governance. Specifically, we should consider how soft power discourse and practice eventually
suppress one of the crucial roles of cultural policy: attending to the voices and concerns of hith-
erto unattended marginalized groups in the public sphere. While it would be rather problematic
or even impossible to judge whether and how national images are internationally enhanced,
the discursive and performative impact of soft power and nation branding on the social insti-
tuting of a national outlook has been examined. Recent studies show how nation branding has
engendered the reessentialization of national culture and exclusive notions of national cultural
ownership and belonging (e.g. Aronczyk 2013). Such conceptualization is facilitated by the
above-mentioned “global screen” through which nation branding is internationally promoted
and mutually consumed. It can be argued that nation branding renders a highly commercial-
ized, dehistoricized, and incoherent narration of the nation. As Nadia Kaneva (2011, 11) argues,
“branded imagination seeks to infiltrate and subsume the symbolic order of nationhood,” but
there is no guarantee that it succeeds in obtaining people’s acceptance of the national narrative
with which they are encouraged to identify. Nevertheless, the action of searching for legitimate
content to fill the national form itself presupposes the existence of an “authentic” national
culture. As Melissa Aronczyk (2013, 176) argues: “The mundane practices of nation branding
do perpetuate the nation form. Why? Because they perpetuate a conversation about what the
nation is for in a global context.” This suggests that the practice of nation branding and people’s
participation in it work to confirm the nation as a form of collective identification and belong-
ing. As such, nation branding endorses the nation’s claim to sole ownership of the national
culture and its cultural DNA. This serves to further solidify banal inter-nationalism as nation
branding discounts various sociocultural differences within the nation and disavows their exist-
ence as constitutive of the nation (Kaneva 2011). Indigenous groups’ traditional cultures or the
promotion of tokenized multicultural commodities might occasionally be included insofar as
they are considered useful for the international projection of the nation’s image, but there is not
much space for non-useful kinds of socially and culturally marginalized voices within the nation.
The fact that the advancement of political and economic national interests through the
international promotion of a nation’s popular culture accompanies a disengagement with cul-
tural diversity and related multicultural issues has important policy implications. For example,
one of Japan’s cultural policy statements declares that the advancement of international cultural
exchange, rather than the use of military power, is vital to the creation of a peaceful world
where cultural diversity is mutually respected and celebrated, and multilateral understanding
and dialogue is promoted.^2 However, soft power policy in Japan actually promotes a particular
kind of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue, one that does not adequately address the
diversity within the nation-state or engage with serious concerns regarding the inclusion of