Tuesday, May 9, 2017

The Power of Japanese Popular Culture

A very long debate that goes around the limitation of Japan’s military capability apparently does not leave the country with a dead end option. Instead, the growth of Japan’s economic on the other hand has sent the country to experience the all-time highest GDP record in 2012 by 5957 billion of U.S dollars (Trading Economics, n.d.). Given that fact, there is a quite clear picture to argue that the dynamics of economic activities has somehow embraced Japan’s national power.

As people might know in general that Japan is home to many big automobile and electronics companies which are most likely to be the major contributors to their own economic development. But, leaving the hard power perspective, we have to admit that japan is also a dominant beauty pageant in terms of popular culture.

To understand that, we firstly need to borrow the term coined by Joseph Nye in 1980s in which he defines soft power as “the ability of a country to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion.” The argument emerged in the shadow of the end of Cold Ward. In his publication he basically argues that as the Cold War ended, there was a big shift in understanding the state power. To seize the power is no longer about how states could manage the resources that are in hand, but it’s about “…the ability to change the behavior of the states.” By that, he also argues that there are some changes in the face of power in which somehow essentially reinterpret the way of persuasion by putting ahead the more intangible power resources such as culture, ideology, and institutions (Joseph S. Nye, 2004).

In that case, the author would like to support the argument of McGray which says that Japan is a cultural superpower. Starting from the viral outbreak of Japanese anime Pokemon, all the way to the worldwide acceptance of an adorable pink cat character called Hello Kitty, this particular industry currently has 2 trillion yen of global market share and it is projected to be 900 trillion yen by the year 2020. In addition to that, McGray created a term called Japan’s Gross National Cool to express the on-going phenomenon of Japan becoming a cultural superpower (McGray, 2002).

The Japanese pop culture prodigy is indeed not a result of one night work. The author believes that it is actually more about a work than involves well-measured strategies which make the outcome of their popular culture can be accepted not only by the ‘native’ consumers. But instead, it could transcend the cultural boundaries that the world often sees as the limit of the market. The purpose of this essay is to explain some of the marketing ideas used by the Japanese popular culture industry to gain the acceptance in foreign markets until it can be well translated into “Gross National Cool.”

One way done by the Japanese popular culture creators to attract foreign market is by creating their product to have the appearance as if it is not from Japan but instead of fulfilling some characteristics of the local identity. This particular sense of domesticating Japanese popular culture to the place where it’s marketed has become possible to happen as the Japanese creators apply the national ambiguity into their products.

Hello Kitty is probably the most suitable example to this national ambiguity strategy case. Giving the Kitty character with both Japanese and Anglo-Saxon identity, the creator of Hello Kitty is probably the most iconic figure of cat that has ever been applied to numbers of kinds of products starting from clothing up to the adult biological recreational self-pleasuring tool. The success has also been measured by number, Hello Kitty, as McGray stated, has reached global sales worth $1 billion dollar (McGray, 2002).

This particular product of Japanese popular culture also happened to have certain adjustments along the way. For example, there are several details which involve colors, ornaments, up to the supporting characters that need to be put on the consideration before it finally touches foreign markets. So if any of you go to Japan and see the picture of Hello Kitty with its little snail friend caught in a rain scene attached to a kid’s raincoat, and the next day you travel all the way to the United States, you will probably never find the same Hello Kitty picture being sold (McGray, 2002).

In addition to the process of getting the national income from its popular culture, Danielle Leigh Rich (2011) argues that starting from this (popular culture), Japan has gained the opportunity for enjoying extra privileges by building its foreign consumers’ interests in understanding more about Japanese language, history, and –of course– the culture itself which, not to mention, will affect to the aspect of Japanese national tourism, media consumption, and others (Rich, 2011 ). From this particular grand mechanism, we can see that Japanese popular culture products are actually not only aiming for a focused media-related profit, but they also set a sustain relations with the possibility of getting the income from other major aspect of the state. In the other words, Japanese popular culture has succeed to place their product in position where it can actually outgrow the dense of Japanese nuance and can be easily recognized as a universal identity, or as Iwabuchi calls, that Japanese popular culture is an “odorless culture.” (Iwabuchi, 2002)

With that being said, the author expects that this essay could give a quick overview that in the effort of increasing the national power, a state should not be blocked by the conservative ways. Having a very little scrutiny, soft power such as popular culture can also be significant to increase national power as exemplified in the case of Japan.   



Saturday, February 11, 2017

Frank Underwood and the Reality of Politics

“The road to power is paved with hypocrisy, and casualties.” –Frank Underwood.


For you guys who watch the Netflix series called “House of Cards”, you must be familiar with the Character named Frank Underwood. A character played by Kevin Spacey is one of the main characters in the series that has been airing since 2013. Frank Underwood is portrayed as a very ambitious and cold-blooded politician who would do anything to reach his political goals. Very often (if not every single time) he does things that are considered morally inappropriate.

In the effort of completing his ambitions, Frank is apparently not a one man show type of guy. Along with his wife, Claire Underwood, Frank is a lot helped (although it doesn’t work every time). Moreover, the presence of Frank’s right-hand character, Doug Stamper, makes it seems to be nothing impossible for Frank to get what he wants in his political career.

From left to right: Frank, Claire, and Doug
Source: google image


As a fan of the show, “House of Cards” has obviously become one of the references for me in seeing the reality of politics in the real world these days. Although once I had a discussion with a friend of mine about it, he told me not to entirely believe in the situation portrayed by the show because “…it’s just a show after all.”

I was quite sure that he was only looking for a validation that nothing that cruel actually happens in the real world politics. I thought he also knew that he was ignoring the reality at the moment he said that.

On the contrary, I keep on believing that Frank Underwood and all his acts pretty much represent the politics in real world. But before you call me as a fine product of western propaganda, I am going to stop you right there.  What I intend to imply by saying so is that the stories presented by the show are, somehow, fit to how the politics itself is being commonly defined and described. Politics is always about power. Or so realists would say.

In political realism, politics is often described as a cold and hostile form of human interaction within a certain system. In the other words, political realism sees that the world is an anarchic place. That practically means that every individuals have to struggle in looking for the power and position in order to “survive” as long as there is no higher authority that governs all of them. More on that, Robert Jackson and Georg Sorensen described that realists are those who always feel anxious with their position while in the competition with the others. They generally are the people who always want to be in control and never want to lose the benefit of being in power.

Hans J. Morgenthau, one of the eminent international relations scholars, similarly described politics as the same thing to which he described it as “struggle for power.” What he meant by that was simply to say that power is a universally valid definition for the concept of interest that is commonly articulated in the context of politics, although it might endow the same meaning all the time. That being said, political realism, in Morgenthau’s words, is also aware of moral existence in exercising political actions by recognizing that there is an inevitable relations between moral the existing moral values and the political action. However, instead of completely denying that relations, it tends to bias it by creating a justification that moral principle cannot always be applied along with the political action. In order to do that, there has to be some sort of rigid selection that involves the contextual consideration of time and place. Those are how political realism works in a nutshell.

On those basis, Frank is a physical specimen. His journey from the very first beginning of the show –up to the latest– has always been covered by a warm layer of excessive ambitions for power. From his first appearance as a congressman until the recent episodes where he already became the president, he has never been in distant with some “dark” political strategies. A bit of spoiler for those who are not yet watching this show, in the first season, Frank involved himself in an affair with a journalist named Zoe Barnes as he wanted to deploy his revenge strategy after he was turned down from the previously-promised position as the Secretary of the State. Frank fed Zoe with the scandal of the subsequent nominee Michael Kern about the anti-Israel issue. In that scheme, both Frank and Zoe are mutually benefited. Frank succeed running his strategy and Zoe earned a higher profile as a journalist. To cover up the secret between both of them after the plan has succeed, Frank eventually killed Zoe by pushing her up into the rail track as the subway came approaching and finally ran over Zoe’s body. Poor Zoe, I know. But this is Frank Underwood, everybody!  

That is just one example of how Frank Underwood turns on the dynamics of the show, in which in my opinion it contains some significance to the way politics is being theoretically explained. Further scrutinized, I also observe that Frank, apparently, does not only reflect the politics based on its theoretical context. But, based on the existing empirical evidences, he also reflects the real situation of how modern politics is actually run by the politicians.

For a very specific example, as we might see quite recently, there is a similar scheme happening in the case of Jakarta gubernatorial election 2017. Regardless who is actually right in that particular case, we can see that the competition to power in politics can take advantage of almost anything including racial and religious issue. Of course, using those two issues to discriminate others in any circumstances cannot be morally and legally justified. Speaking on legal basis, in Indonesia it has been regulated by the Law No. 40/2018 regarding the elimination of race and ethnic discrimination. However, apparently now we can see that politics can make it looks like it is legitimate to use those kinds of issue.    

The other example is the case of Donald Trump. We may have wondered why he can be eventually elected as the 45th President of the United States after the controversial campaign that took the world’s attention. Looking from the perspective of Trump as an allegedly-racist figure, we think that it is almost impossible for him to gain the support from the American constituents. But the fact that he won the election shows us that there are still numbers of American constituents who think the same way as Trump. That consideration, in my opinion, makes Trump’s controversial campaign can be justified in order to win the U.S. presidential election.


With that being said, would we still believe that Frank is nothing more than just a character of a show?