Soft Power Through the Lens of Japanese Materialism and Knowledge Production
Japan has used soft power to reinvent itself from a nation of imperialism and violence to a booming technological country. Japan exemplifies how influential soft power can be and thus be used as the stepping stone to hard power. Japan uses media in multiple ways starting after their defeat in WWII and the Sino-Japanese War, to revitalize their image through the use of kawaii, typically referred to as “cute”. Now Japan has built an entire culture around that word. A popular figure within this culture is Hello Kitty. Money and power are intertwined under the capitalist system where Japan gains more power through the economic exports of kawaii culture. Japan uses economic prowess to shift the narrative, thus showing their power over knowledge production. Yet, Japan is also a receiver of knowledge such as American superheroes, food, and also culture. A point of interest is how queer culture is situated within the exchange between Japan and America. The extent of Japan and its utilization of soft power can be fully contextualized and analyzed by focusing on kawaii and queer culture as an economic and knowledge export that complicates already existing power relationships between Japan and the rest of world.
Asia is often portrayed as a monolith of a single “Eastern” culture of exoticism, collectivism, and discipline by the Western European gaze, perpetuated through knowledge production, media, and diplomacy. Famous Palestinian scholar, Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1997) discusses how Orientalism is a vector of power that European artists and intellectuals viewed and exoticised the “near east”, or what the US now considers the Middle East. The field of the Orient is a field of the imaginary, but the power it holds as a consequence is firmly rooted in reality. Scholars painted grand images of those living in the East, as these new, uncivilized, sexual objects for the Western scholars to voyeur. This was an example of a vector, an unidirectional arrow of power–a fetishization and ignorant view of the Arab countries that can persist into what constitutes common sense about the other culture. It becomes a struggle for control–control over the narrative.
The West also exerts a powerful, coercive force of control over the state of economics through sanctions to sway Asian leaders, closing existing or opening new trade ports in their countries. This is because the West has a monopoly and unequal control over trade, global market, and wealth even when Global South provides the majority of the products and labor behind that wealth. The difference between hard and soft power is the coercive nature of the nation-state. If it’s through media, knowledge, culture, or people–then it’s called soft power. Soft power can also influence their own citizens, seen in Cumings’ 1997 “Boundary Displacement” essay. He coined it as “capillary power” where the implicit power the US government had over its own citizens to hand over their colleagues under the impression that they are spies for the communist nations. Cumings (1997) used Foucault’s words “people do things without being told, and often without knowing the influences on their behavior”. This continues when countries use propaganda to influence their own citizens. During WWI and WWII, Japan used propaganda to justify their involvement. They used it as a tool to “other” and inferiorize the citizens of the regions that they occupy. Thus, when this understanding is added to intersections of gender and sexuality and race, this use of propaganda encroaches on dangerous territory to further marginalize those that belong to the “other”.
Yet, sometimes people want to be considered as “other” or not mainstream. Kawaii culture is a prime example of this. Often associated with hyper-femininity and children due to the pastels, cute characters and mascots, and dresses. The culture encourages consumerism through the art of collecting figures, plushies, clothing, and stationary. Kawaii culture is exported out of Japan through objects or concepts like Hello Kitty. This cuteness continues to turnover 1 billion dollars over merchandising licenses from Sanrio alone (Kelson, 2004). Sanrio is most notably known for their exportation of their cute characters. Hello Kitty, their biggest commodity, herself has connections to thousands of suppliers and corporations and probably millions of inspired merchandise in the world. Since she is under Japan’s economic realm, that grants immense economic control over the rest of the world. She acts as an economic bridge between countries since in 2023, she was appointed to be Japan's cultural ambassador while Japan greeted the governments from ASEAN countries (Busetto, 2023). She has insane power over out of country suppliers’ sales especially if Japan decides not to sell to that country anymore. But also she creates such economic power over other countries because of how much money she will produce for that company. Since Hello Kitty isn’t a governmental entity but rather the companies, the power is dispersed more subtly than through governmental actions. The question then becomes, does kawaii culture perpetuate Orientalist perceptions onto modern Japan?
Figure 1: Hello Kitty and the ASEAN governments on December 17, 2023
Works Cited
Busetto, Arielle. 2024. “Hello Kitty, Japan’s Cutest Ambassador to the World Sponsored.” JAPAN Forward. February 29, 2024. https://japan-forward.com/hello-kitty-cultural-diplomacy-kawaii-sanrio-jica-asean-arielle-busetto/.
Cumings, Bruce. “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, no. 1 (1997): 6–26. doi:10.1080/14672715.1997.10409695.
Belson, Ken, and Brian Bremner. 2004. Hello Kitty : The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon. Singapore: Wiley.
NBC Universal. 2008. “Hello Kitty Named Japan Tourism Ambassador.” NBC News. NBC News. May 19, 2008. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24708771.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. First Vintage books edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.