‘Soft power is such a benign animal’: narrative power and the reification of concepts in Japan

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse how the seemingly natural fit between Japan and the soft power concept has been possible despite the notorious vagueness of the concept and what the consequences of soft power’s reification are. By building on recent scholarship on concepts, expert knowledge and narratives, the article suggests that reification processes are best conceptualized as driven by concept coalitions. The article finds that soft power was narrated and nurtured into Japan’s cultural diplomacy, Japan’s relationship with the United States (US) and its security policy. The article, moreover, shows that the more soft power was understood, framed and accepted as benign and necessary, the more persuasive arguments about what Japan should do or be in order to wield soft power became. This has legitimized narratives that suggest that Japan’s 'proactive contribution to peace’ as a responsible ally of the US constitutes an inevitable source of soft power.

Introduction

The success of the concept of ‘soft power’—‘the ability to affect others and obtain preferred outcomes by attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment’ (Nye 2017, 2)—is an intriguing phenomenon. Sketched out on Harvard Professor Joseph Nye’s kitchen table nearly 30 years ago, it has since travelled to nearly every corner of the world. Despite the vagueness, liberal bias and practical limitations of the concept (Layne 2010; Bially Mattern 2005; Keating and Kaczmarska 2019), Japanese elites very early and eagerly began to discuss, adopt and implement soft power as an official state strategy (Hayden 2012, chapter 3). Most of the scholarship on Japan’s soft power posits that Japan’s constitutional constraints on hard power, its decline anxiety and the challenging rise of China make its embrace of the concept reasonable and commonsensical (Berger 2018, 114–115; Fukushima 2011, 76–79; Leheny 2006, 232; White 2011, especially 8–10). Nye himself has suggested that Japanese politicians picked up on soft power because they found it was ‘useful’.¹ In the words of one scholar and policy adviser, soft power is such a ‘benign animal’ that one should really not be surprised by its success.²

This article challenges the representation of Japan’s embrace of soft power as an inevitable and normal phenomenon. Based on the notion that the social world is constructed, it suggests that, while Japan’s specific context has played an important role, what such a context means and how soft power becomes significant in it do not follow from some objectively knowable social or material reality. Rather, the seemingly easy fit between soft power and Japan requires continuous interpretive and practical ‘work’ (Jackson 2006, 39) to be forged. Hence, the fundamental question this article investigates is: how, despite the concept’s analytical and practical shortcomings, has soft power become so meaningful, useful, normal and widely practised in Japan—and with what consequences?

An analysis focused on the reification of concepts necessarily shifts attention away from what (if anything) soft power ‘really’ is, to how the concept becomes imbued with different meanings, how actors accept, challenge or amend these meanings and how such conceptual choices manifest themselves in the material world. Hence, rather than trying to fix the meaning of the concept or confine the analysis to its political implementation,³ the purpose of this article is to problematize the relationship between the levels of observation (how soft power helps actors to make sense of the world) and action (soft power’s performance in society) (see Guzzini 2005, 498–500).

Previous studies only partially help to address this relationship. Critical constructivist and poststructuralist studies have for instance advanced our understanding of the effects of concepts as a form of discourse that exercises productive power, suggesting that, ‘by giving meaning to “things”, concepts don’t just make these things intelligible, they actually make things’ (Berenskoetter 2016, 14; see also Guzzini 2016). Similarly, scholars interested in the role of expert knowledge in policymaking have underscored the importance of concept entrepreneurs, networks and skilful framing for concepts to become utilized in politics (Haas 1992; Eriksson and Norman 2011; Jerdén 2017).

Nonetheless, individually, neither of these approaches is sufficient to conceptualize reification processes. Whereas critical constructivist and poststructuralist studies remain vague regarding how concepts become reified and tend to underrate the role of agency and material factors, the literature on expert knowledge conceptualizes actors as rational marketers with predefined interests responding to policy world demands. In the latter approach, concepts themselves remain static and of ‘little autonomous significance’ (Pautz 2011, 424). Moreover, while the literature on expert knowledge is helpful for understanding knowledge diffusion processes, it does not address reification processes and therefore does not account for potential feedback loops between levels of observation and action.

To bridge these approaches, this article develops a theoretical framework that proposes that reification processes are driven by ‘concept coalitions’ (see also Hajer 1993; Pautz 2011). In a nutshell, a concept coalition is conceptualized as an ensemble of concept entrepreneurs, such as scholars, intellectuals, bureaucrats and politicians, who encourage the reification of concepts by coining, promoting, contesting and revisiting concepts. This promotion often involves strategically constructing narratives to frame concepts as ‘useful’ tools of policy or answers to emotional turmoil. The initial embrace of concepts as well as the expansion of concept coalitions are therefore best understood as the outcomes of ‘narrative power’, or ‘the capacity of narratives to produce effects and constitute subjects’ (see Hagström and Gustafsson 2019).

To apply the theoretical framework to the reification of soft power in Japan, this article uses an embedded discourse analysis that acknowledges the material underpinnings of discourse (see for instance Huysmans 2006). Based on this analysis, the article identifies three areas in which the soft power concept has been narrated, fitted and nurtured in Japan by a concept coalition consisting of mostly United States (US) and Japanese intellectuals, officials and politicians. First, soft power has been actively nurtured in Japan’s cultural diplomacy, leading to a strong familiarity with the term in Japan and among Japan watchers. Second, the concept’s reification has been encouraged with regard to the US–Japan alliance, where concept entrepreneurs have argued that Japan’s contribution to the alliance lies in its soft power as well as the fact that the alliance itself is an indispensable source of Japan’s soft power. Third, the concept’s reification has been promoted in the context of Japan’s changing security legislation.

Even though a considerable amount of research has highlighted various contributory factors to Japan’s changing security regime, the complicity of the soft power concept has not yet been recognized. That is not to say that the reification of soft power have caused these changes. However, while Japan’s alliance with the US and particularly the new security policies are controversial,⁴ soft power is far less controversial. As this article demonstrates, precisely because soft power has become so familiar and normal, it is increasingly used to legitimize and enable narratives that can frame Japan’s controversial ‘proactive contribution to the international community’ as an ally of the US as a source of soft power.

Conceptualizing reification processes

This section develops a theoretical framework capable of problematizing the reification of concepts such as soft power in Japan. It does so by building on recent literature on conceptual analysis and expert knowledge to introduce the notion of ‘concept coalitions’ as a useful bridge between these two kinds of literature.

In recent years, scholars have increasingly advocated paying attention to the use, reification and performance of basic concepts in society such as ‘security’, ‘identity’, ‘democratic peace’, ‘power’ and ‘the West’ (Berenskoetter 2016; Ish-Shalom 2013; Guzzini 2016; Jackson 2006). While they have done so in different ways, it is possible to identify three core concerns of this ‘critical’ approach to concepts. First, scholars have been interested in how a specific understanding of the world becomes the favoured understanding. They have thus aimed to elucidate the relative normalization of concepts in the academic and political world. Importantly, such normalization is an ongoing—often contentious and political—process that requires continuous ‘discursive, practical, active work’ (Jackson 2006, 39–40; see also Berenskoetter 2016, 14–15).

A second significant concern is to problematize the phenomenon of reification, that is, when concepts are treated as if they were real and concrete ‘things’ (Berger and Luckmann 1991, 106–109; Jackson 2006, 5–9). At the same time—as Kaczmarska (2018, 3–4) notes—reification has seldom been addressed as an empirical concern, as the discussion is usually confined to theoretical expositions and philosophy of science considerations.⁵ This is particularly unfortunate in cases where concepts are widely used or promoted in both the academic and the political world. When a concept’s conceptual and practical dimensions are conflated, this obfuscates and depoliticizes the role human beings play in creating such concepts in the first place. Moreover, reification risks tautological reasoning, such as when the concept of soft power is used to understand a state’s soft power. This problem is further exacerbated when concepts are not only treated as if they were real but have become a ‘thing’ in the world, such as when states explicitly try to ‘do’ soft power.

For this reason, a third concern of the critical approach is to account for the consequences of reification. In particular, this means being attentive to the productive power of concepts in ‘constituting thought, action and identities or subjectivities, on both elite and subaltern levels, as well as altering material realities’ (Berenskoetter 2016, 14). In other words, concepts need to be understood as a specific form of discourse that enables certain courses of action. This means that neither the identity nor the interests of the actors that subscribe to or promote concepts can be presupposed. Moreover, while actors may try to control and discipline the concepts they coin, use and hone, they are unable to manipulate them at will. Instead, concepts and actors are co-constituted (Glynos and Howarth 2007).

In this context, the role of reflexive loops—how concepts move between the levels of observation and action—is particularly important (see Guzzini 2005, 499). Rather like the way a driver adjusts the wheel to keep a car on the track, or US foreign policy adapts in response to negative feedback (Gadinger and Peters 2016), ‘reflexive loops’ refer to how a concept’s reification often prompts its re-conceptualization, which in turn may alter its future performance. It is precisely this reflexive relationship that allows actors to try to discipline their concepts to improve their performance and avoid unintended consequences. Hence, concepts do not remain static, nor do they travel on a one-way street between the levels of observation and action or the academic and the political world.

‘Reification processes’ as understood here thus refer to the entire process through which concepts become increasingly normal, real and produce effects.⁶ However, symptomatic of critical constructivist and poststructuralist research, previous scholarship tends to privilege discourse analysis focused on the form of utterances. That is not to say that either agency or material forces are rejected, but they are seldom discussed in detail. Guzzini (2016, 35) for instance briefly mentions the role of Joseph Nye in the concept of soft power but confines it to a few sentences only. Similarly, Berenskoetter (2016, 14) merely suggests that hegemonic imposition, everyday practice or an unspecified combination of both may underlie reification processes. Where scholars address agency more explicitly, their concern is to argue that ‘rhetoric’ is not epiphenomenal to interests and that the mobilization of ‘rhetorical commonplaces’ or ‘rhetorical capital’ constitutes a competing explanation to interest-based ones (Jackson 2006; Ish-Shalom 2013). However, to trace reification processes requires that attention be paid to the interwoven nature of concepts, actors and interests, rather than privileging one over the other.

It is also useful to consult the expert knowledge literature, which addresses the role of agency and material forces to a more substantial degree. Particularly influential is the epistemic community concept originally developed by Haas (1992), who conceptualizes such communities as transnational actor networks with claims to authority within given issue areas. Such scholarship has been especially useful in highlighting the role of individuals in promoting expert knowledge, as well as illustrating that not only academic experts but also analysts, bureaucrats and diplomats in various countries can be central members of epistemic communities (Eriksson and Norman 2011; Jerdén 2017, 507).

There are, however, several limitations to such frameworks. First, they tend to treat actors as rational ‘marketers’ with predefined interests responding to policy world demands. With the focus on skilful framing and lobbying, the question of how such communities, their beliefs and the knowledge they advocate are formed is seldom problematized, nor are concepts attributed productive power (Pautz 2011, 424). As a result, these frameworks fail to account for the mutual constitution of knowledge, interests and actors. Second, the migration of concepts from the academic to the policy world tends to be portrayed as a one-way street. This establishes the perception of a clear-cut line between these worlds, but, particularly in international relations, this boundary is increasingly unsustainable (Bueger and Bethke 2014, 33).⁷

Finally, as epistemic community research is interested in the diffusion of knowledge from the academic to the political world, it does not address the interplay between concepts at the levels of observation and action. In other words, it remains blind to the discursive and practical work of concept entrepreneurs in disciplining, revisiting and tweaking concepts to steer their real-world performance.⁸ Nonetheless, the notions of framing and concept entrepreneurs, as well as the emphasis on a conducive institutional environment, are useful in further advancing the critical approach to concepts.

To consolidate this approach with the literature on expert knowledge, the article suggests conceptualizing reification processes as driven by concept coalitions, based on the notion of ‘discourse coalitions’ first developed in the early 1990s, which has thus far mostly been used in studies on public policy and think tanks (Hajer 1993; Pautz 2011; van de Wetering 2018). Fully defined, discourse coalitions are an

ensemble of a set of story lines, the actors that utter these story lines, and the practices that conform to these story lines, all organized around a discourse … Story lines are the medium through which actors try to impose their view of reality on others, suggest certain social positions and practices, and criticize alternative social arrangements. (Hajer 1993, 47)

Like epistemic communities, concept coalitions do not require participants—or concept entrepreneurs—to meet regularly, coordinate activities or even know of each other (Pautz 2011, 429–430). Yet, the more coordination that occurs, the more the concept coalition takes the form of a political project that not only promotes a specific interpretation of the world but also advocates specific measures to be taken based on such an interpretation. However, in contrast to epistemic communities whose members are characterized by shared beliefs, concept entrepreneurs only share a vague commitment to a concept. It is precisely this weak commitment that allows them to formulate a more specific version of the concept, apply it to a new situation and hope that the audience follows because of their pre-existing commitment (Jackson 2006, chapter 2).

This vague commitment, sometimes also known as ‘paradigm compatibility’ or ‘institutionalised ideational frameworks’ (Eriksson and Norman 2011, 424–425), is crucial, as concept entrepreneurs need to embed their concepts in contexts familiar to the audience. To establish and convince others of such compatibility, narratives—what Hajer (1993) refers to as ‘story lines’, Jackson (2006) as ‘rhetoric’ and Eriksson and Norman (2011) as ‘frames’—are of crucial relevance.⁹

Narratives are characterized by a clear and sequential order, which identifies a problem, examines its effects and proposes a solution (see Hagström and Gustafsson 2019). The appeal of narratives does not necessarily lie in their ability to adequately capture reality, but rather in how they simplify and order complex issues, placing the unknown into a framework that is familiar to the audience (Autesserre 2012, 206–210). Narratives thus exhibit, rather than demonstrate, explanations (Polkinghorne 1988, 21). Moreover, they are intimately related to questions of identity and often evoke powerful emotions such as shame, regret or pride, thereby exploiting potential inconsistencies or insecurities in their audience (Subotić 2016). Hence, whenever an audience is affectively invested in the identity that a narrative expresses, the narrative becomes more persuasive (Solomon 2014). Finally, as Hagström and Gustafsson discuss, and many of the other articles in this special issue illustrate, arguments (including academic ones) made in a narrative style are often more successful than other forms of discourse. As meaning-making devices constitutive of reality, rather than mere epiphenomena (van de Wetering 2018; Biegoń 2013), narratives exercise ‘narrative power’, defined as the capacity ‘to produce effects by ascribing meaning and mobilising collective action’ (see Hagström and Gustafsson 2019).

Narrative power is central to both the emergence and the further expansion of concept coalitions, that is, it is central to concept reification (see also Turner and Nymalm 2019). While narratives help actors to make sense of their world, concept entrepreneurs also try to exploit the power of narratives to try to fix a concept’s meaning, shape others’ understanding of the world and enunciate why a particular concept is necessary not only as a way of thinking but also as a way of doing things in the world. The more persuasive such narratives, the more likely it is that concept coalitions will grow and incorporate new members.

At the same time, it is important to note that concept coalitions, like epistemic communities, do not exist in a vacuum. Concept entrepreneurs require financial means, time and various platforms to reach potential new allies (Eriksson and Norman 2011, 433), and an analysis focused on reification processes driven by concept coalitions needs to be attentive to such material foundations (see also Pautz 2011, 426).

The application of this theoretical framework to the case of soft power reification is based on an embedded discourse analysis (see Huysmans 2006). Such an analysis examines not only narratives around the concept of soft power, but also the material practices of various actors and institutions that aim to secure or contest the meaning of soft power. The first step in the research process identified the central members of a soft power concept coalition by tracing references to soft power in academic articles, workshops, lectures, think tank reports, Diet debates and newspaper articles in and on Japan. Based on this identification process, the second step consisted of 25 semi-structured, largely anonymous interviews with central concept entrepreneurs between August 2017 and June 2018 in Tokyo, Washington, DC and New York. Finally, in the last step, the theoretical framework was applied to the material collected.

A soft power concept coalition for Japan

Neither concepts nor narratives emerge in a vacuum, and soft power is no exception. As such, the concept’s emergence would have been inconceivable without the longstanding US foreign policy discourse, in which Nye and many other concept entrepreneurs were deeply entrenched, and which revolved around the appropriate role for and engagement with the US abroad. While the empirical focus of this article is on Japan, it is important to note that Nye—as a member of what can be considered a liberal internationalist discourse coalition—originally developed soft power out of unease with the increasingly conventional view in the late 1980s that the US was in decline and therefore would have to retreat from its global engagement (Nye 2017, 2). To him, such ‘mistaken beliefs in decline—at home and abroad—can lead to dangerous mistakes in policy’. Therefore, Nye argued that it was ‘time for a new narrative about the future of US power’ (Nye 2010, 4, 11).

In this new narrative, Nye suggested that the US was not in decline, since it could rely on its pre-eminent soft power resources. By arguing that the declinists misunderstood ‘power’, Nye effectively challenged declinist narratives and suggested that—as long as the US invested in its soft power and used it smartly together with its hard power—there would be little reason to be anxious about decline (Nye 2010, 11). Furthermore, as Nye anticipated the effects of his conceptual intervention in the ‘real world’ and soon actively began to promote the concept in policymaking,¹⁰ soft power also constituted a practical intervention.

At the same time, for such a new narrative to be successful, soft power would need to become something analysts and politicians believed in and incorporated into their work. In other words, soft power would need to become reified and become a ‘social fact’ (Guzzini 2016, 35) not only in the US, but also elsewhere, including Japan. After all, the more soft power appeared to be both a valid reconceptualization of power and a ‘real’ fact of international politics, the more pressure would be exerted on those who had not yet accepted the concept’s validity. For this reason, Nye and soon also other concept entrepreneurs aimed to fit soft power not only to the US, but also to Japan. This has played out in several ways.

Embedding soft power

First of all, the concept of soft power was embedded in contexts that were already familiar to its audience. For instance, for those who believed in the benignity and necessity of US hegemony and great power responsibility, soft power’s emphasis on prudent foreign policy, cultural attraction, and participation in multinational organizations and a vibrant civil society was already familiar. Nye’s discussion of soft power thus vindicated what those intellectuals and politicians in the US, Japan and elsewhere knew all along. In contrast to ‘backward’ hard power adherents, it was their efforts that had provided the world with relative stability and peace.¹¹ At the same time, it was also important to extend the concept coalition beyond such a liberal internationalist discourse coalition. Nye, for instance, hoped to provoke a ‘slightly oxymoronic resonance in the traditional discourse of [his] field’ (Nye 2017, 2) by integrating the concept with the well-known power literature that was popular with all IR perspectives. In Japan, it was the familiarity with cultural diplomacy that enabled the concept coalition to inject soft power into such debates.

Second, as soft power needed to perform in both the academic and the political world, it was deliberately kept simple. While scholars often see this simplicity as one of its major shortcomings (Layne 2010, 53; Berger 2018, 114), it has been a central reason for the relative ease with which narratives have been spun around the concept. Indeed, despite all its ambiguity and measurement problems, the basic meaning of ‘soft power’—getting what you want through attraction—is easy to grasp. Nye’s books are printed by non-academic publishing houses, with an accessible running text and detailed information tucked away in endnotes, which has significantly increased the potential audience for soft power beyond the academic world.

Third, a crucial element that facilitates the reification of soft power is the efforts of Nye and others to revisit and hone the concept based on how it performs in academia and the political world. Particularly noteworthy is the diligence with which Nye responds to his critics, suggests that states such as Russia or China do not understand soft power or rebrands soft power as ‘smart power’ to improve its performance in the US (Nye 2004; 2017).¹² Nye has published at least 80 books or articles that touch on soft power, all intended to clarify but also to control the concept. At the same time, he also deflects responsibility. Likening soft power to a child, he suggests that ‘you can love and discipline them when they are young, but as they grow they wander off and make new company, both good and bad. There is not much you can do about it, even if you were present at the creation’ (Nye 2017, 3).

Fourth, another main dynamic in the reification of soft power lies in the emotional resonance between the concept and its audience. For instance, as several scholars note with regard to Japan, by addressing and soothing declinist fears, soft power prioritizes ‘hope over experience’ (Berger 2018) and provides a ‘ray of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape’ (Leheny 2006, 216) or ‘hope amidst the increasing despair’ (White 2011, 55). While hope certainly constitutes an important aspect of Japan’s embrace of soft power, such emotions do not erupt accidentally but are evoked and made explicit through narratives. Hence, it is important to account for the deliberate evocation of emotions and the role of agency, something that is not addressed in White (2011), Leheny (2006) or Berger (2018).

In this context, it is precisely the role of Nye as an accessible, charismatic and engaged narrator that has greatly assisted the advance of soft power in Japan. While Nye may be one among many public figures and intellectuals in the US, he has been one of the most authoritative US nationals in Japan since the early 1990s. Nye has been a lifelong fan of Japan,¹³ and his career has been based on a close relationship with the country. In a typical example of the revolving door culture in Washington, shortly after his first publication on soft power in 1990, Nye joined the US Ministry of Defense as assistant secretary for international security affairs, in which role he was responsible for US policy on East Asia. While the core focus of his work during this time was on hard power, it allowed him to discuss the issue of soft power with his colleagues.¹⁴ After he resumed his academic career at Harvard in 1995, Nye continued to engage with Japanese officials, intellectuals and students, flying regularly to Japan to attend conferences and give lectures to packed halls.¹⁵ As a commentator on Japan, his insights are still taken very seriously today in both academic and political circles in Japan.¹⁶

While the discussion until this point has mostly revolved around the persona of Nye as a concept entrepreneur, various other governmental and non-governmental organizations in both the US and Japan provided the crucial institutional environment in which soft power could be placed on the agenda. These activities have been wide-ranging and include the provision of financial and logistical support, granting access to interesting sites for soft power research, convening workshops and seminars, publishing and disseminating research findings and generally ensuring that the right people have the opportunity to learn about and help Japan improve its soft power and that such work is taken seriously in both Japan and the US.¹⁷

Soft power in this context also benefited from the fact that many organizations, such as the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, the US–Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON), the Japan Forum for International Relations, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Japan Foundation, already had considerable institutional knowledge and experience of organizing events involving scholars and officials from the US and Japan. While these events were mostly concerned with discussing, grooming and strengthening the US–Japan security alliance, these ‘alliance managers’ (Jerdén 2017, 18) were pivotal to broadening the understanding of soft power in Japan, as is demonstrated below.

The activities of these organizations, as well as Nye’s popularity, authority and access to Japanese intellectuals and officials—and of course his decision to promote the soft power concept—have been central to increasing the potential audience for soft power.¹⁸ Members of this emerging Japan soft power concept coalition broadly agreed that soft power mattered for Japan, but differed on what precisely it meant or why it was important. Effectively, this led to a multitude of interpretations of what soft power was and what made it ‘useful’ for Japan, which allowed intellectuals and politicians across the political spectrum to actively fit soft power into coinciding debates. Some members of the concept coalition tried to move other members over to their understanding of soft power by exploiting this already-existing vague commitment to the concept. Such efforts have primarily played out in three areas: Japan’s cultural diplomacy, the US–Japan alliance and Japan’s changing security legislation.

A benign and cool soft power

Among the various interpretations of soft power, the most striking is undoubtedly the cultural dimension. Linked in no small part to the offence taken at Nye’s initial assessment that Japan’s culture was too inward-looking to be a valuable soft power resource, the majority of the literature on Japan’s soft power since has been concerned with the potential global appeal of Japan’s traditional and popular culture (such as Shiraishi 1997; Otmazgin 2012). Such debates played out in various locations outside academia, such as the Gaiko Forum of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) or in newspaper articles, but were also driven by various workshops, seminars and policy proposals (Bukh 2014, 471–474). Moreover, certain concept entrepreneurs—such as the politicians Asō Tarō and Kondo Seiichi and the journalist Douglas McGray—were essential drivers of the notion of Japan’s soft power with regard to culture.¹⁹ By 2004, Nye had revisited and given his approval to Japan’s cultural attractiveness (Nye 2004, 83-88). Kondo, for instance, remarked that ‘we were very encouraged that what we had been doing was appreciated positively by this professor from Harvard. Since then, we have engaged in public diplomacy with “soft power” more consciously’ (quoted in George 2016, 71).

While the leveraging of soft power in the name of culture did much to familiarize Japan with the term, not everyone appreciated these developments. Many people working in or with the cultural sphere eyed the effective politicization of culture with suspicion.²⁰ Some scholars also remarked that the government’s meddling in the field might restrict Japan’s soft power (Hayden 2012, chapter 3). Nonetheless, it became increasingly common for cultural policies to be undertaken and legitimized in the name of soft power, often in the vague hope that attraction to Japan’s culture would result in an overall positive attitude to Japan.²¹ When Prime Minister Abe Shinzō memorably climbed out of a chimney dressed as Super Mario during the Olympics closing ceremony in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, it was precisely because he wanted to ‘demonstrate the soft power of Japan’ (Abe quoted in Takamoto 2016).

Some scholars have been frustrated that the majority of research seems to have revolved around cultural soft power (Heng 2015, 282–283; Söderberg 2011, 37; Hagström 2015, 130). However, an important consequence of this focus of research was to make Japan’s approach to soft power appear inherently cool, cute (kawaii) and benign.²² As is shown below, this had crucial discursive spillover effects as new narratives built on soft power were able to benefit from such a depoliticization of the concept.

An allied soft power

The soft power concept coalition also incorporated those who were concerned that the US–Japan alliance was becoming redundant because the threat from the Soviet Union no longer existed, and who therefore started to frame the alliance as a matter of soft power. Expressed in the notion of ‘Japan-passing’ and later as ‘Japan-nothing’, there was growing concern in the 1990s that the US might disregard Japan’s security concerns or even abandon the alliance altogether (White 2011, 55). In this context, it is particularly noteworthy that it was Nye who played a central role in reaffirming the US–Japan alliance in the post-Cold-War era in what is commonly referred to as the ‘Nye Initiative’ (Christensen 1999, 59). While he did not explicitly discuss soft power in this context, his dual position as a friend of the alliance and a proponent of soft power greatly facilitated the emergence of both a discursive and an institutional link between the two.²³ As former vice director of the Defence Agency, Akiyama Masahiro, recalls:

We [Nye and Akiyama] happened to join an international seminar organised by the Yomiuri News Paper at the end of 1996 to discuss the renewed Japan–US alliance and its role. I advocated in the meeting that the Japan–US alliance provided ‘international public’ goods to the Asia Pacific area so that it could enjoy peace and stability with strong economic growth … Joe Nye admired the use of ‘public goods’ for the alliance … As you know, provision of international public goods is not brought by a hard power but by a ‘soft power’. I believe that the ‘soft power’ concept led me to use ‘public goods’ for the renewed Japan–US alliance.²⁴

This argument would be pursued and expanded in numerous reports and books after 2000 by like-minded alliance managers who framed soft power as yet another argument for maintaining the alliance. To them, soft power played a role in a soothing reassurance narrative that Japan would continue to matter internationally and that the alliance would remain a cornerstone of US and Japanese security policy as long Japan and the US took soft power seriously. Hence, soft power was increasingly depicted as something that held the alliance together and that Japan could contribute to it. Moreover, the alliance itself could also be portrayed as a matter of soft power in a way that would enhance Japan’s overall soft power. The peace and stability that the alliance was seemingly bringing to the region and beyond were thus both interpreted and framed as a form of soft power (Wakabayashi 2008, 6; Watanabe and McConnell 2008, xviii–xxvi; Kamiya and Przystup 2018).²⁵ The more soft power was recognized as a real thing, the easier it was to argue that the US–Japan alliance was indispensable. Crucially, such an argument could appeal to an audience that might otherwise be less inclined to support this controversial alliance, but was committed to the notion of soft power.

A responsible and proactive soft power

The third key area in which soft power featured was the highly emotive question of Japan’s international responsibilities. In this context, the emergence of soft power at the same time as the Gulf War trauma is particularly relevant. Japan contributed US$13 billion to the US-led coalition but it was heavily criticized both abroad and at home for engaging in ‘chequebook diplomacy’. This criticism left many officials and scholars feeling humiliated and held back by the Japanese Constitution’s war-renouncing Article 9 (see Gustafsson et al 2019). This led to a realization in Japan’s MOFA that it ‘will become increasingly important for Japan to participate in and cooperate with international cooperative activities through human resource contributions to secure the peace and stability of the international community’ (MOFA 1999). This reaction was epitomized by the enactment of the 1992 International Peace and Cooperation Law, which began the process of changing Japan’s security regime.

For an audience grappling with the question of Japan’s international profile, soft power resonated well, as this supposedly embarrassing profile could be interpreted and framed as something that diminished Japan’s soft power and therefore had to be overcome. Moreover, Japan’s international contribution could be framed as enhancing its soft power. For some, this mostly revolved around issues such as Official Development Assistance (ODA), or humanitarian aid. As Takano Hiroshi argued in 1999, Japan should ‘contribute with soft power in the broader sense of culture, education, non-military matters and humanitarian aid’ beyond Asia.²⁶ Similarly, Ogata Sadako, President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Japan’s central ODA institution, argued in 2009 that the ‘core of Japan’s contribution to the international community is “soft power’” and ‘JICA bears an important responsibility’ in this regard (JICA 2009).

For others in the soft power concept coalition, the question of Japan’s international responsibility revolved more directly around peacekeeping operations and the dispatch of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF). For instance, in a discussion in the Japanese Diet leading up to the 1992 legislation on peacekeeping operations, Endō Otohiko argued that the post-Cold-War era was the ‘age of soft power’, which made Japan’s participation in peacekeeping operations increasingly important.²⁷ In 2005, Ōno Yoshinori suggested that the SDF’s participation in Iraq’s reconstruction or tsunami disaster relief efforts in Indonesia were important sources of soft power.²⁸ In 2009, Shindō Yoshitaka also adduced Japan’s anti-piracy and counterterrorism activities as something that would increase its soft power.²⁹ Moreover, various policy recommendations and academic articles over the years have lauded these activities as something that Japan needed to do in order to shoulder its responsibility and display its soft power (see for instance Heng 2015; Japan Forum on International Relations 2004). Importantly, such debates revolved around the ‘right’ understanding of soft power, that is, it was argued that soft power needed to be understood more broadly and also to incorporate Japan’s international responsibility as a source of soft power. This in turn meant that Japan’s practice of soft power needed to be broader. Effectively, debates about the meaning of soft power are thus also about steering its performance in society.

Still today, criticism of Japan’s reluctance to do its share and the deep humiliation many felt after the Gulf War are used to argue that the international community expects Japan to do more.³⁰ The Commission on the Constitutitution concluded in a report in 2011 that Japan should conduct a strategic review of the use of a form of ‘super soft power’ to contribute to the peace of the international community (Secretariat of the Commission on the Constitution 2011).³¹ By 2015, the argument that the ‘international community expects Japan to play a more proactive role for peace and stability in the world’ had become a central pillar of Abe’s proactive contribution to peace policy (Government of Japan 2016). The fact that Nye had been involved in the report by the National Institute for Research Advancement (2000),³² which popularized the idea of a proactive contribution to peace and, moreover, publicly supported Abe’s policy of constitutional reinterpretation, is particularly instructive (Fisher 2016).

This relation between soft power, the sense of shame, and international responsibility is perhaps most clearly expressed by Kamiya (2014):

As Joseph Nye of Harvard University has written, the importance of a nation’s ‘soft power’ (the ability to attract others through appeal) is growing in today’s world as a form of national power. But criticisms on the lack of contribution to peace and a decline in international presence hinder Japan’s power to attract other nations. With the economy contracting, ‘soft power’ offers Japan new opportunities to expand on its national strength, but to use this situation to its benefit, the nation needs to respond to the criticism quickly. The minimal requisite to doing this is to win the world’s recognition that the nation is fulfilling its international obligations commensurate with its power.

As can be seen from the above discussion, over the years, various interpretations have emerged of what soft power means and for what form of soft power Japan should stand. While different groups in the concept coalition may diverge on what constitutes soft power, they share the underlying assumption that soft power truly describes a real-world phenomenon. It is precisely this tacit agreement that soft power is real that makes it possible to use the concept in other narratives of what Japan should do or be in order to possess or exercise soft power.

Importantly, the more soft power was recognized as benign, scholarly, necessary and commonsensical, the more any issue framed as a matter of soft power was able to benefit from a discursive spillover effect. In other words, the very fact that the normalization of soft power in Japan and the portrayal of Japan as a soft power superpower raises few eyebrows can be leveraged to build ‘new’ narratives of what role Japan should play. For instance, during one of the interviews, the interviewee shifted gear constantly between soft power as culture and the need for Japan to contribute internationally.³³ Interestingly, the argument that something is detrimental to Japan’s soft power and should therefore be addressed is used by those who find Japan too isolationist, pacifist and constitutionally constrained and by those who find Japan too militaristic or too unapologetic about its war history.³⁴ Eventually, the more people within and outside Japan used soft power to make sense of their environment, and believed in its truth and benignity, the more persuasive the arguments became that Japan needed to be an internationally responsible partner of the US and contribute proactively to peace, or otherwise risk losing its soft power.

Conclusion

Empirically, this article has challenged the reification of the soft power concept in Japan by shedding light on the manifold ways in which soft power’s ‘usefulness’ as a conceptual tool, a state practice or anti-anxiety medication is a constructed and narrated, rather than a natural, phenomenon. Instead of suggesting that the reification of soft power in Japan can be attributed to skilful framing or to the power of the concept in constituting identities, the article has argued that both dynamics are involved by illustrating how soft power shapes interests and how interests have shaped soft power. As the article demonstrates, this has played out primarily in three areas: Japan’s cultural and public diplomacy, Japan’s relationship with the US and Japan’s security policy.

The degree to which soft power has affected policymaking is difficult to judge, but what should be clear is that—contrary to the findings of the majority of research on Japan—the reification of the concept is far-ranging and not limited to the realm of Japan’s cultural diplomacy. While this article has not focused in detail on the ongoing framing contest regarding Japan’s security regime, recognizing that soft power has become part and parcel of such debates constitutes an essential first step in assessing, disentangling and contesting claims that Japan necessarily needs to change its security regime.

The impression that soft power was taken up naturally because intellectuals and officials made a rational assessment of its utility is thus misleading and obfuscates how this rationality was the product of narrative power. A senior MOFA official’s remark that the soft power concept in Japan was ‘jointly nurtured by diplomats and scholars’³⁵ is an excellent description of how the concept became reified in Japan.

This article has, moreover, made an important theoretical argument by proposing the notion of concept coalitions as a useful heuristic tool for conceptualizing reification processes. Thus far, despite for instance Guzzini’s (2005; 2016) repeated insistence on studying the relationship between the levels of observation and action, empirical work has mostly focused on what the reification of a concept does, but has not addressed in detail how such reification comes about. By shedding light on the relevance of narratives in constituting identities and enabling the emergence of concept coalitions, as well as the role of concept entrepreneurs in coining, promoting and revisiting concepts in order to enhance their performance in society, this article has therefore advanced the critical research agenda on concepts.

In this context, the reification of soft power in Japan has served as an ideal case. Not only is soft power a concept that performs at the level of both observation and action, but its reification has also relied on the persistence of its central concept entrepreneur, Joseph Nye, who has spent the past 30 years promoting the concept. To further assess the utility of the theoretical framework, two steps should be taken. First, research should look at the reification of soft power in other geographic contexts, particularly where, despite the existence of an engaged concept coalition, the concept has been less successful at producing effects. Second, the theoretical framework should be applied to the reification of other concepts where individual concept entrepreneurs are less pronounced but where the concept has nonetheless reified. Good contenders would, for instance, be the concepts of ‘human security’ and ‘responsibility to protect’.

All in all, the findings of this article beg the question of what role concepts should play in both research and politics. Does the fact that some concepts are actively promoted and performed not only in the conceptual realm but also in the world of politics mean that we need to dispense with these concepts? Does this mean we need to forget soft power? Does it mean we need to build and defend a wall between academic concepts and politics? For scholars such as Jackson (2006, 8), the answer is a clear yes. However, at a time in which knowledge about issues such as climate change is increasingly contested, is it advisable or even possible to remain on the analytical side? The point here is not to suggest that there was ever a golden age of apolitical knowledge, but to suggest that international relations now more than ever needs to discuss how to move in the direction of a more ethical and reflexive engagement with the production of knowledge.

Notes on contributor

Stephanie Christine Winkler is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University. She is also an associate researcher at the Swedish Defence University and an associate fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs (UI). Before this, she worked as an instructor in International Studies at the University of Leiden. She holds an MA in International Relations from Leiden University. Email: [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This article has received funding from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation MMW2013.0162, the Forum for Asian Studies and the Forskraftstiftelsen Theodor Adelswärds minne foundation.

Notes

1 Interview with Joseph Nye, 18 October 2017.

2 Interview with expert #1, Advisory Panel on National Security and Defense Capabilities, 28 November 2017.

3 On the former, see Arase (2011, 9–11), Watanabe and McConnell (2008, 18–24) and Roselle et al (2014); on the latter see Hayden (2012).

4 Such as the dispatch of the SDF to various peacekeeping operations, the promotion of the Defense Agency to ministerial status or the adoption of new security legislation in 2015. These developments are attributed to a changing international security environment, ‘securitization’ moves or a changing security identity (see Gustafsson et al 2019).

5 Kaczmarska’s (2018) work on the English School is concerned with reification within the discipline, although reification can also occur in the political world.

6 Following Berenskoetter (2016), I refer to this whole process from now on as ‘reification’, though it has to be noted that for Jackson (2006) or Kaczmarska (2018) reification processes do not incorporate the production of material effects.

7 This criticism also applies to Ish-Shalom (2013) and Jackson (2006), both of whom underscore the validity and importance of this boundary.

8 This point is also missed in the otherwise excellent work of Bueger and Bethke (2014, 37), who explicitly recommend conflating theory with empirics and concepts with practices.

9 See (Hagström and Gustafsson 2019) the introduction to this issue for a mocise discussion of the differences in these terms.

10 Interview with Joseph Nye, 18 October 2017.

11 This point became very clear throughout my interviews.

12 Interview with Nye.

13 Interview with expert #2, 6 June 2018.

14 Interview with Nye.

15 Interview with expert #3, 17 November 2017; interview with Nye.

16 Interview with expert #2.

17 Academic work funded by such organizations includes Heng (2015), Otmazgin (2012) and Watanabe and McConnell (2008). The influential piece on ‘Cool Japan’ by Douglas McGray was enabled by the Japan Society’s US–Japanese Foundation Media Fellows Programme and various later workshops were also funded by similar foundations. This article has also hugely benefited from the fact that my doing research on soft power in Japan meant that many officials developed an interest in my work and were thus very helpful.

18 Interview with Nye.

19 Interview with expert #3.

20 Interview with representative, Japan Foundation, 23 November 2017.

21 Interview with official #1, MOFA, 27 November 2017.

22 Even where scholars such as White (2011) or Leheny (2006) are critical of the application of soft power, their focus lies on the the cultural dimension of the concept.

23 In addition, they also discussed the issue of soft power on the side. Interview with Nye.

24 Personal communication with Akiyama Masahiro, 1 March 2018.

25 Committee on Diplomacy and Defense (upper house (UH)), 22 March 2012.

26 Study Group on International Affairs (UH), 11 March 1999; Study Group on International Affairs (UH), 11 March 1999.

27 Special committee on international peace cooperation etc. (lower house (LH)), 19 November 1991.

28 Budget Committee (UH), 11 March 2005.

29 Special Committee for Cooperative Activities Supporting the Prevention of International Terrorism and Counter-Measures against Piracy (LH), 23 April 2009.

30 Interview with expert #1.

31 House of Representatives (2014) ‘Commission on the constitution’, <http://www.shugiin.go.jp/internet/itdb_kenpou.nsf/html/kenpou/en/index_e.htm>.

32 Interview with expert #1.

33 Ibid.

34 The former expressed for instance in Fulbright/CULCON (2009) or Kamiya and Przystup (2018); the latter expressed for instance by Lam (2007, 350) and Nye (2004, 88).

35 Interview with official #2, MOFA, 16 November 2017.