Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. xi, 246 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781503632196.
Daniel White is a researcher at the University of Cambridge specializing in emotion, politics, and media analysis in both Japan and the UK. His monograph Administering Affect investigates how male bureaucrats’ feelings manifest in the management of national narratives and policies central to Japanese cultural diplomacy. Popular political narratives and assumptions about Japanese ethnicity, culture, and identity have been well studied in Japanese and Asian studies, but the role of individual bureaucrats within government agencies and how their feelings shape the management of Japan-as-brand is less well understood. White investigates how officials’ feelings shape how Japanese culture is presented, and how government interests can overlap with but also diverge from the agendas of businesses, creators, and consumers. Drawing on ethnographic data, White illustrates how bureaucrats’ feelings produce a recursive loop that habituates and normalizes particular ways of feeling and thinking about “Japan” and the nation’s past, present, and future.
The book is arranged in five chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 defines soft power as a concept, traces this history of soft power policies, and compares the British Council and Japan Foundation as soft power agencies. Chapter 2 discusses Japan’s national branding campaigns, and how products like the “washlet” (toilet-bidet) embody “Japan” as a blend of cutting-edge modernity and “traditional” values like cleanliness. Chapter 3 explores how government agencies such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Japan Foundation interpret and advance Japan-as-brand through the presentation of anime. While both agencies are pursuing similar goals, they do so though their own organizational values about what constitutes Japanese culture and how they can best advance Japan’s national interests. Chapter 4 investigates Japan’s “Ambassadors of Cute” program, which draws on three different kinds of Japanese women’s fashion to embody Japanese culture as a whole. Ambassadors are tasked with giving prepared remarks and posing for photo-ops, but as White stresses, they also have their own motivations and desires. Chapter 5 and the conclusion reflect on the implications of Japanese political messaging for creators, businesses, and anthropologists. Businesses pursue state patronage and funding in order to access consumers and sponsors, but outspoken artists feel deeply ambivalent about having their art and social commentary co-opted for state purposes.
An important element White mentions is how the promotion of Japan-as-brand collapses the diversity of Japanese culture and practices in favour of curated imagery and messaging. As White notes, there are immense consequences for individual citizens and groups when it comes to Japanese soft power. Even the term “soft” power is a matter of perception. White draws our attention to how women in Japanese society must navigate hegemonic narratives and assumptions of femininity informed by the bureaucratic male gaze. Artists and fashionistas alike must negotiate the cost-benefit of Japanese state patronage that coincides with collapsing the nuance of women’s fashion and eliding the social commentary embedded in fashion, literature, and art in favour of state narratives. The result is a deep disconnect between the perceptions and narratives the state hopes to promote and influence, and the consequences of those narratives for ordinary citizens. It is worth noting that while state narratives and interests may not resonate with audiences, consumers, and creators who attend state-led conventions and presentations, soft power narratives nonetheless become the “official story.”
White’s work is useful in examining how Japanese agencies and their representatives draw on their own experiences, perceptions, and anxieties to shape Japanese social narratives. Narratives about Japanese society or the Japanese are often imagined as totalizing, monolithic, and hegemonic. White draws our attention to how they are produced by individuals. The strength of the book lies in its discussion of how individual bureaucrats manage Japan’s brand and infuse it with their own anxieties, assumptions, and hopes. Yet this focus is also a limitation of the book. Because White works with government representatives, much is left publicly unsaid and undocumented in the book regarding individuals’ opinions on government programs. In order to study how power is wielded, researchers sometimes must accept the influence of that power over their work. As White notes in the conclusion, it is important and necessary for ethnographers to reflect upon the process of “doing ethnography”: we are not robots who dispassionately document “just the facts.” Rather, we are human beings who live in the world and are telling stories about the world and how we and others experience or make sense of that world. Framing is a central part of the ethnographic process. This process requires us to emphasize, edit, and in some instances, omit information.
Administering Affect is of interest to researchers of Japan, Japanese politics, and popular culture. White’s work is also significant and relevant to those interested in studying how public agencies operate and how their messages reach audiences with varying efficacy. For scholars who study power, White draws our attention to how power is exercised by individuals in individualized ways, but also how power is diffused through the bureaucratic apparatus. White encourages ethnographers and anthropologists to reflect on the people, processes, and organizations we choose to document. Ethnographers should be conscious of how “obligatory nationalism” shapes public servants’ dispositions and actions. We should also be mindful of how governments shape research. If we wish to recognize the pluralism of Japanese society, we must continue to explore and center diverse voices and minority experiences. Like Dorinne Kondo’s Crafting Selves (University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Jan Bardsley and Laura Miller’s Manners and Mischief (University of California Press, 2011), White’s study us to consider how narratives about Japanese culture are circulated, reinforced, and subverted. It also serves as a useful supplement to more critical studies of Japanese cultural narratives like Sonia Ryang’s Japan and National Anthropology (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) and Yuko Kawai’s A transnational critique of Japaneseness (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). White’s work underscores that in furthering our understandings of Japanese society as a whole, we cannot be beholden to dominant narratives and groups. We must recognize the diversity of experience and practice that state narratives often elide and obfuscate.
John Ostermiller
University of Nevada, Reno