Table of Contents for Administering Affect
Introduction: Pop-Culture Japan and the Circuitry of Affect
The introduction describes the recent history of how during the last two decades in Japan, state bureaucrats have increasingly identified anxiety as a national problem, and built a new national image based on pop-culture branding as a remedy. It describes how by drafting creative policies featuring anime diplomats, Cool Japan branding campaigns, and so-called Ambassadors of Cute, administrators helped create Pop-Culture Japan, an imagined figure of the nation that constructs the country as cool, cute, and culturally cutting-edge. The chapter introduces the book's argument that although Pop-Culture Japan transformed administrators' geopolitical anxieties into hopes for national resurgence, it also amplified anxieties among broader publics in Japan by projecting images of national culture as hypercommodified, highly gendered, and celebrative of Japan's historical ascendancy in Asia. It also introduces the book's theoretical contribution to affect theory through a conceptual figure called the "affect-emotion gap."
1.Soft Power: An Affective History of the Politically Possible
Chapter 1 describes an affective history of the conditions creating an interest in soft power among Japan's political elites. It also introduces soft power as as the first critical component of Pop-Culture Japan. The chapter illustrates how soft power's adoption in Japan and its ideological framing gave birth to pop-culture diplomacy and nation branding as strategies for cultivating political prestige. Most importantly, it describes how the geopolitical arrangement of cultural politics in East Asia generated an atmosphere of anxiety processed by bureaucrats at the level of the body, which motivated state administrators of culture to emphasize popular culture as a public policy tool. The chapter analyzes examples of soft power in administrative action, such as in discussion over Japan's proposed but ultimately failed National Media Arts Center.
2.Nation Branding: The Hypernormalization of Cool Japan
Chapter 2 discusses nation branding as the second component of Pop-Culture Japan. The chapter shows how nation branding serves as an illustrative case of how the critical term "affect-emotion gap" functions not merely as an analytical figure of theory but also as a practical strategy through which affect becomes targeted as an object of administration. The chapter applies this term to examine nation branding strategies in two major sites: the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Neo-Japanesque project and NHK's television program, Cool Japan. The chapter also showcases how processes of hypernormalizing discourses of "Cool Japan" seek to intervene in the affects of both foreign and domestic publics through branding, slogans, and narratives of national cultural pride.
3.Anime Diplomacy: Characterizing Obligatory Nationalism
Chapter 3 analyzes pop-culture diplomacy as the third discursive dimension of Pop-Culture Japan. It examines how administrators in Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Japan Foundation created policies to support anime diplomacy, such as the creation of an anime ambassador in the robot cat Doraemon, the state sponsorship of cosplay events, and the dissemination of anime industry statistics to overseas fans of anime and manga. It uses the concepts of animation and characterization to characterize two different styles of administering affect embodied by officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Japan Foundation. It also introduces the term obligatory nationalism to describe how patterns of office organization that affectively bind an individual to one's work similarly bind one to a relationship of care for the nation.
4.Kawaii Diplomacy: Ambassadors of Cute and the Gendering of Anxiety
Chapter 4 analyzes Pop-Culture Japan's gendered dimensions through a cultural diplomacy program promoting the Ambassadors of Cute. It considers how gender is unequally built into national policy and disproportionately distributed through networks of state administration. The chapter highlights points of contrast between male and female administrators in order to illustrate a masculine approach to diplomacy typical of cultural administration. The chapter concludes with observations on how soft power not only reorganizes the meanings of kawaii culture in the present but also how it reimagines genealogies of cute aesthetics into the past in order to construct a smooth and linear history of national culture.
5.Administering Affect: Anxiety and the Everyday
Chapter 5 treats the administration of affect as a distributive function, meaning that anxiety is manufactured by cultural administrators and circulated among publics through institutions of the state. By following soft power discourses outside bureaucracy and into sites of the everyday, the chapter examines the way anxieties over national culture shape and shift among Japanese publics differently from how they do among state bureaucrats. The chapter also analyzes how images of Pop-Culture Japan penetrate news media, creative arts industries, and academia, illustrating its ability to circulate outside bureaucracy while at the same time noting its mercurial nature as it does so. Making a reflexive point about the overlapping aims of Japan's state administrators and academics studying Japan's popular culture, it analyzes the potential complicity between area studies and government investments in culture.
Conclusion: Melancholic Belonging and the Future of Pop-Culture Japan
The conclusion describes how the anxiety and discomfort that become tied to images of a Cool Japan inspire projects for imagining alternatives among Japan's artists and authors. It features most specifically reflections on the popular fiction writer Murakami Haruki and, through his interviews and fiction, examines affective strategies of coping within and alongside structures of the state that feel imposing. The chapter also explores possible futures of Pop-Culture Japan in the context of recent national challenges such as the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear fallout; preparation for and postponement of the 2020 Olympics; and the global COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so it examines how Pop-Culture Japan's tendency to interlock multiple anxieties in the present to hope for cultural resurgence in the future is being accommodated by alternative forms of relating to the nation through a feeling of "melancholic belonging."