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.
References
Iwabuchi, K. (2002). Recentering Globalization:
Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Copenhagen Journal of Asian
Studies , 95.
Joseph S. Nye, J. (2004, June). Soft Power: The
Means to Success in World Politics. Retrieved from Forreign Affairs:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2004-05-01/soft-power-means-success-world-politics
McGray, D. (2002). Japan's Gross National Cool. Foreign
Policy, 46.
Rich, D. L. ( 2011 ). Global Fandom: The Circulation
of Japanese Popular Culture in the U.S. University of Iowa, 14.
Trading Economics. (n.d.). Japan GDP Growth Rate.
Retrieved from Trading Economics:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-growth
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