The Evolution of Japan’s Public Diplomacy: Haunted by Its Past History

Abstract

Objectives and Means. Central to the background of the public diplomacy of postwar Japan has been Japan’s history of militarism. The basic goals of Japan’s public diplomacy have therefore been related to this past history: to recover from the image of a militarist nation, and to correct misperceptions and misunderstandings by foreign countries that skew the reality of postwar Japan as a pacifist and democratic nation. In order to achieve these objectives, Japan employed the exchange approach, primarily focusing on culture. The objectives of Japan’s public diplomacy then evolved into permeating the new brand of a “cool Japan” and its soft power, and then into constructing symbiotic relations of peaceful and prosperous coexistence with the world community, thus creating a favorable environment for Japanese diplomacy. The branding and symbiosis approaches that were employed to pursue these goals continued to emphasize the importance of cultural and intellectual exchanges. As the so-called “history problem” began to surface as a diplomatic issue with Japan’s immediate neighbors, China and South Korea, in the mid-1980s, however, Japan’s public diplomacy has come to face a complex external environment in which an emotional vicious circle started to emerge, tangled with the domestic politics of the three Northeast Asian nations. For some time, Japan and its neighbors promoted the symbiosis approach to dealing with the history problem, including joint studies on history.