SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS / Admiring Japan makes U.S. less insular
Written by Writer on Friday, October 24th, 2008
SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS / Admiring Japan makes U.S. less insular
Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri
It’s easy to get cynical about “soft power,” the phrase coined by Harvard University Prof. Joseph Nye to describe the benefits of cultural attractiveness over coercion in international relations. The words sometimes conjure the 1960s peace-movement portrait of a daisy stem planted in the barrel of a machine gun: well-intentioned, perhaps, but of little use to blunt the bullets.
Still, each time I encounter fresh evidence of pacifist Japan’s magnetic appeal in the United States, I’m inclined to grant Prof. Nye a little credit.
A student at Tokyo University recently recounted her summer trek to Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. “I don’t really know very much about anime or manga,” she said, “but everywhere I went, I kept getting approached by Americans who said: ‘Wow, are you really Japanese? That’s so cool.’ And I felt kind of embarrassed that I couldn’t tell them more about Japanese pop culture. They wanted to talk to me so much.”
Earlier this month, I spent five days with novelist Haruki Murakami in the San Francisco Bay Area. Murakami, nearly 60, has been drawn to American culture since childhood.
After World War II, “it was everywhere,” he once told me. “And of course we Japanese liked it. We are not French, you know.”
In California, Murakami himself was everywhere: granting interviews to reporters from local newspapers, answering questions from students in an overstuffed classroom, signing books in San Francisco–and sitting right next to me for an onstage conversation in front of a 2,000-plus crowd.
“That was a lot of people,” Murakami muttered to me as we relaxed backstage afterward. “This is kind of like being a rock star, isn’t it?”
It was probably better. Murakami’s audience was polite and sober. Their silence was respectful, cathedral-like.
It was not an attempt at flattery. The theater had been sold out for weeks. Numerous friends and acquaintances asked me if I could get them into the hall at the last minute, and I could only accommodate a few. The place was packed, and the audience was utterly rapt whenever Murakami spoke.
At the author’s request, no photographs were allowed. As far as I can tell, Murakami’s American audience, full of bloggers and fans, readily complied. I’m told that someone at the book-signing event in San Francisco pulled out a camera–and was promptly tackled to the floor.
The United States has become infamous in recent years for granting little respect to foreign nationals. Indeed, it is almost a point of pride for some Americans to ignore the rest of the world, as U.S. President George W. Bush has so brutally proven.
But when Japanese visit the United States in the 21st century, they are often treated as icons of a superior world–a place where the American dream has actually found a taker, and one that may even be better skilled at reproducing it.
After returning to Tokyo, I looked back at America again as I tuned in to watch Boston Red Sox pitchers Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima throw to the Tampa Bay Rays’ Akinori Iwamura in the American League baseball championship, in which Iwamura’s team earned its first trip to the World Series.
At the same time, Barack Obama was shooting ahead of his white rival, John McCain, in the U.S. presidential race. A President Obama, according to Prof. Nye last year, “would do more for America’s soft power around the world than anything else we could do.”
On the examples of Murakami’s embrace by and of the United States, and my Todai student’s experiences this summer, Nye’s soft-power theory is alive and well, daisies and all.
Kelts is a Tokyo University lecturer who divides his time between Tokyo and New York. He is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.” (www.japanamericabook.com) available in both English and Japanese. His column appears twice a month.
(Oct. 24, 2008)
