Cool Japan
Based on Wikipedia: Cool Japan
Japan lost World War II, and in doing so, stumbled onto something far more powerful than any military could ever be.
After the war, the United States essentially rewrote Japan's constitution. Article 9 of that constitution did something unprecedented: it forbade Japan from maintaining military forces capable of waging war. For a nation that had built its identity around samurai honor and imperial expansion, this was an existential crisis. How do you matter on the world stage when you can't project power the old-fashioned way?
The answer Japan found would eventually reshape global culture more profoundly than most conquering armies ever have.
The Invention of a New Kind of Power
Political scientists have a term for influencing other countries through military might or economic coercion: hard power. It's the power of the stick, of threats, of "do what we say or else." But there's another kind of power, one that makes people want to do what you want. It's called soft power, and it works through attraction rather than coercion.
Japan, stripped of its military stick, became perhaps the world's greatest practitioner of soft power.
In 1983, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched what would become an unlikely cultural weapon: a television soap opera called Oshin. The show told the story of a woman born into poverty at the dawn of the twentieth century who perseveres through unimaginable hardship. It wasn't flashy. It wasn't action-packed. But it was deeply human, and Japan distributed it for free to any country that wanted it.
Forty-six countries did.
Oshin became a phenomenon across Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. In Iran, streets emptied during broadcast times. The show demonstrated something remarkable: Japanese culture could resonate across vastly different societies. It planted a seed.
The Birth of "Cool"
By 2002, something strange was happening. Japan had just emerged from what economists call the Lost Decade, a brutal stretch of economic stagnation following the bursting of its asset bubble in 1991. Its economy was struggling. Its political influence was waning. By all conventional measures, Japan was in decline.
Yet Japanese culture was exploding across the globe.
That year, a journalist named Douglas McGray wrote an article in Foreign Policy magazine with a provocative title: "Japan's Gross National Cool." It was a play on Gross National Product, the standard measure of a nation's economic output. McGray argued that Japan was "reinventing superpower" through culture rather than economics or military might.
He catalogued the evidence: Hello Kitty had conquered the world. Pokémon was everywhere. Japanese anime and manga were developing devoted followings far beyond Asia. J-pop was spreading. Japanese fashion and cuisine were becoming aspirational. Even the concept of kawaii, that distinctly Japanese celebration of cuteness, was becoming a global phenomenon.
Here's the counterintuitive part: McGray suggested that Japan's economic recession might have actually accelerated its cultural influence. The Lost Decade had partially discredited Japan's famously rigid corporate culture, with its lifetime employment and strict hierarchies. Young Japanese people, freed from the expectation that they'd spend their lives in a single corporation, became more creative, more rebellious, more interesting.
The phrase "Cool Japan" entered the lexicon.
From Accident to Strategy
The Japanese government noticed. In 2010, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry created something called the Creative Industries Promotion Office. Its job was to take what had happened organically and supercharge it.
The scope was breathtaking. Cool Japan, as officially defined, encompasses video games, manga, anime, fashion, commercial products, Japanese cuisine, traditional culture, robots, environmentally friendly technologies, and high-tech industrial products. Essentially: anything Japanese that foreigners might find appealing.
In 2013, the government launched the Cool Japan Fund with fifty billion yen, roughly five hundred million dollars, committed over twenty years. They hoped to attract private investment to bring the total to sixty billion yen. The mission, as one deputy director put it, was to "brand Japanese products with the uniqueness of Japanese culture."
This wasn't just about spreading culture. It was about converting cultural appeal into economic returns. If young people in Germany or Brazil loved anime, could you turn that into tourists visiting Japan? Into purchases of Japanese products? Into a general sense that "Japanese" meant "quality" or "innovation"?
The Ghost of Empire
Not everyone was charmed.
For South Korea, the phrase "spreading Japanese culture" triggered painful memories. From 1910 to 1945, Japan had occupied the Korean peninsula with brutal efficiency. The occupation attempted to erase Korean culture entirely, forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese names and speak Japanese. The wounds run deep.
So when Japan started actively promoting its culture across Asia as a form of influence, some Koreans saw uncomfortable echoes. During its imperial era, Japan had promoted something called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a grandiose name for what was essentially forced integration of conquered territories into the Japanese empire. Cool Japan, to skeptical eyes, looked like the same thing with better marketing.
Japan also faced a more practical problem: relatability. When Japanese television shows and movies spread across Asia, audiences in other countries sometimes struggled to connect with the characters and stories. This wasn't just about language. Japan's imperial history had created a kind of cultural distance. Countries that had suffered under Japanese occupation had actively worked to distinguish their own cultures from Japan's.
The Japanese entertainment industry had to adapt. They learned to create characters and stories with broader appeal, less rooted in specifically Japanese experiences. It worked. Japanese media eventually found massive audiences across Asia, but it required genuine effort to overcome the historical baggage.
The Korean Counterattack
Japan wasn't the only Asian country that figured out soft power.
South Korea watched what Japan was doing and thought: we can do this better. The result was Hallyu, better known in English as the Korean Wave. K-pop groups like BTS would eventually become the biggest musical acts on the planet. Korean dramas would captivate audiences across Asia and beyond. Korean beauty products would become aspirational worldwide.
A 2010 editorial in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper complained that the Korean Wave was overshadowing Japan's efforts. The editorial blamed structural problems in the Japanese government. Three different ministries were involved in Cool Japan: Economy, Trade and Industry handled the overall strategy; Foreign Affairs managed cultural exchange; Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries promoted Japanese food. Too many cooks, not enough coordination.
The competition revealed an uncomfortable truth. Japan had pioneered cultural soft power as a national strategy, but being first doesn't mean you'll be best. South Korea, learning from Japan's example and mistakes, was often more effective at the same game.
Money Problems
The Cool Japan Fund, that fifty billion yen government initiative, ran into trouble.
Within five years of its 2013 launch, the fund had accumulated pretax losses of ten billion yen, nearly ninety million dollars. Many of its projects failed to generate earnings. A Japanese business journalist named Yuta Saito diagnosed the problem as "lack of strategy and discipline" leading to "unprofitable projects."
The Japanese musician Gackt, famous for his elaborate visual aesthetic and theatrical performances, was more blunt. In 2015, he criticized the government for setting up a huge budget while having "no idea where that money should go." Tax money, he said, was flowing into little-known companies with no accountability. Meanwhile, Japan was "falling behind its Asian neighbors in terms of cultural exports."
Another critic, Benjamin Boas, pointed out an almost absurdist problem: Cool Japan initiatives meant to appeal to foreigners were being designed and promoted without any foreign participation. The very people the program was supposed to target had no voice in shaping it.
In 2017, the fund faced an internal scandal. A senior executive and several other senior male employees were accused of sexual harassment targeting female employees. The women formed a labor union to fight back. It was a reminder that organizations promoting a cool, progressive image can harbor deeply uncool practices.
The Deeper Question
Does Cool Japan actually work? The answer depends on what you think it's trying to do.
If the goal is to make the world like Japan, the evidence is overwhelming: it worked. Japan consistently ranks among the most positively perceived countries globally. Millions of tourists flock there annually. Japanese restaurants have spread to every major city on earth. Young people worldwide grow up watching anime, reading manga, and playing Japanese video games.
If the goal is to convert that goodwill into economic returns or political influence, the picture is murkier. The Cool Japan Fund's financial losses suggest that government-directed cultural investment is difficult to execute profitably. And despite Japan's enormous cultural appeal, its political influence in Asia remains constrained by historical resentments that no amount of anime can fully dissolve.
Perhaps the most interesting question is how much of Japan's cultural success can be attributed to government strategy at all. Pokémon wasn't created by a ministry. Studio Ghibli's films weren't funded by bureaucrats. Nintendo's games emerged from private creativity, not public planning. The organic explosion of Japanese cultural influence that Douglas McGray documented in 2002 happened before the government's Cool Japan initiative existed.
Governments, it turns out, are better at taking credit for cultural success than at creating it.
Cuteness as Power
Of all the elements of Cool Japan, none is more distinctly Japanese than kawaii.
The word translates roughly as "cute," but that doesn't capture its full meaning. Kawaii is an aesthetic sensibility that permeates Japanese culture in ways that often puzzle Western observers. Corporate mascots are kawaii. Police stations have kawaii characters. Government safety campaigns feature kawaii cartoons. Even serious institutions embrace an aesthetic of adorable roundness, big eyes, and childlike innocence.
Hello Kitty, created in 1974, became the global ambassador of kawaii. She's a white cat with no mouth, wearing a red bow. That's it. She has no personality, no story, no particular reason to exist. And she's worth billions of dollars annually.
The power of kawaii lies partly in its universality. Cuteness triggers nurturing instincts that appear to be hardwired into human psychology. A round face with big eyes reads as "baby" to our brains, regardless of culture. But Japan took this universal appeal and built an entire cultural infrastructure around it.
The result is something unprecedented: a country whose global image is inseparable from adorable cartoon characters. This might seem frivolous, but consider the alternative. Most countries are known for their military history, their political conflicts, their economic might. Japan is known for Pikachu.
For a nation trying to escape the shadow of wartime atrocities, that's not a bad trade.
The Academic Ripple Effect
Cool Japan has changed how scholars think about culture itself.
Western universities report increases in applicants for Japanese Studies programs, driven not by interest in traditional topics like samurai or Zen Buddhism, but by anime and video games. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology established a Cool Japan research project. The academic study of Japan has been transformed by the same pop culture that conservative scholars once dismissed as trivial.
More surprisingly, Cool Japan helped spawn an entirely new academic field: girl studies. Japan's fascination with kawaii culture placed an unusual emphasis on schoolgirls and young femininity. Characters like Sailor Moon presented powerful girls as cultural icons. This caught the attention of scholars, who began studying the specific experiences of girls as a distinct subject.
Previously, questions about girlhood were scattered across adolescent psychology and feminist theory. Cool Japan helped crystallize them into an interdisciplinary field that takes girl culture seriously on its own terms. It's a strange legacy for a government initiative about promoting exports.
What Cool Japan Teaches
The Cool Japan story offers lessons that extend far beyond Japan.
First, soft power is real. Japan demonstrated that a country can reshape its global image and influence through culture alone. For a nation constitutionally prohibited from military force, this wasn't a choice. It was a necessity. But the success of the approach suggests that other countries overestimate the importance of hard power.
Second, authenticity matters more than strategy. The Japanese cultural products that conquered the world weren't designed to do so. Pokémon's creators wanted to evoke the joy of collecting insects in the Japanese countryside. Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki made films that expressed his personal environmental and pacifist values. The government's attempts to manufacture cool have been less successful than the organic creativity they tried to harness.
Third, history constrains the present. Japan's imperial past continues to shape how its cultural initiatives are perceived in Asia. No amount of marketing can fully overcome the memories of occupation. Countries seeking to project soft power must reckon honestly with their histories, or those histories will undermine their efforts.
Finally, competition is inevitable. Japan pioneered Asian soft power strategy, but South Korea, China, and others have learned from the playbook. The Korean Wave demonstrates that cultural influence isn't a permanent possession. It must be continuously renewed.
Japan set out to prove that a country could matter through culture rather than conquest. It succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. Whether the government's Cool Japan initiative deserves credit for that success, or merely managed to attach itself to forces already in motion, remains an open question.
What's not in question is this: somewhere in the world right now, a child is watching anime, a teenager is reading manga, and an adult is eating sushi. Japan's bombs fell silent eighty years ago. Its culture never stops speaking.