Daniel White, "Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety" (Stanford UP, 2022)
New Books in Anthropology
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Cool Japan - The Hyper Normalization of Cool Japan
Cool Japan is the name of this deliberate government campaign primarily engineered by the public diplomacy department in Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was first borrowed directly from the cool Britannia campaign in 1990s UK and was also quite motivated by by other neighbors of Japan also investing in its popular culture like Korea, South Korea above all. The problem though with nation branding which makes it a very interesting object to study ethnographically is that it doesn't really work or it it doesn't work without also usually causing a lot of backlash so again speaks to the contested politics of anxiety surrounding pop culture Japan.
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