https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34329

Drew Kerr: Soft power, nation branding, pop culture diplomacy, anime, manga, anxiety, hope, all feature centrally in your wonderful book. Affect emerges, though, as the gravitational center to the book’s ethnographic universe. It seems to me you could’ve picked any one of the topics I just listed to take as your primary object of study for fieldwork, though. Can you walk us through why affect emerged for you and how it came to anchor everything else in your project?

Daniel White: The idea of politically conditioned affect struck me as a phenomenon that was on explicit display in nation branding projects in Japan. Because affect is described in theory as something that we can all feel but cannot always easily find a language for, it also struck me as an important topic to bring forward in anthropology (especially at a moment where, in geopolitics and many domestic political contexts—certainly in the US and Europe—we can feel this turn toward emotional appeals to fear, entitlement, exclusionary politics, and other tactics that often accompany momentum shifts to right-leaning politics. After spending several months working alongside bureaucrats focused on national cultural policy, and finding that their discussions of soft power logics were far less consistent than a sense of urgency and anxiety that fueled those discussions, I realized there was really an affective logic that was driving policy. That logic goes something like this: after decades of economic stagnation in Japan, increasing political economic competitiveness in East Asia, and a sense among Japanese politicians that Japan was losing political prestige to neighbors like China and South Korea in the eyes of the West, Japanese bureaucrats latched on to the idea of pop culture-driven soft power (or what I call Pop-Culture Japan) as a mechanism that could transform that geopolitically generated anxiety into hope for Japan’s national resurgence through culture. This affective logic is what connected all the topics you mention—soft power, nation branding, pop culture diplomacy, anime, manga, anxiety, hope—and held them together in a cultural logic of affective conditioning.

By drawing out that logic ethnographically, I was also trying to answer a question that seemed critical both for people in Japan who found themselves entangled in this logic—consciously or not, whether they wanted to or not—and people elsewhere who are all affectively interpellated by the political systems of which they find themselves a part. The question is, “How do the worlds that state administrators manage become the feelings publics embody?” To me, this is a fundamental question of political affect that presses upon subjects of the state, a question that I think we all want to answer personally. Anthropologically speaking, I also think it is an analytical question that will never go away because the way political affect gets conditioned is so highly dependent on the particular historical, cultural, and technological components of what Jan Slaby and his colleagues call an “affective arrangement.” Accordingly, I think anthropology holds a special tool in the ethnographic method, as well as a heavy responsibility given its disciplinary histories of complicity with regimes of power, to draw this complex arrangement of political affect out with some clarity. 

Drew Kerr: Can you distinguish for us between administering affect and managing feeling? In the introduction, you heuristically set these into two different camps respectively akin to meshwork (Ingold 2011) or structures of feeling (William 1977). I find that orientation theoretically helpful to navigate affect theory and its dis/contents, but you draw this out in a very compelling way from your ethnography later in the book. What is it about the affective elements of Cool Japan that engender administration, per se, as opposed to management? Maybe it would be helpful to hear a little bit specifically about Cool Japan and kawaii diplomacy, too.

Daniel White: This is a beautiful question, as you highlight a really instructive point of disambiguation. In short, managing feeling points to classic political endeavors of seeking to identify and control the emotions of others—your classic framework of propaganda. Administering affect points to a far broader, more complex, and in some ways more subtle field where the affects that are being targeted for control are as much the bureaucrats’ own as they are those of foreign publics. In other words, I’m arguing that although soft power and nation branding campaigns explicitly targeted the feelings of foreign consumers of Japanese pop culture, the way the policies developed—with such enthusiasm and creativity but not always with consistent and defensible administrative logics—suggests that it was really administrators’ own feelings of political insecurity that were the direct motivators and objects of administration.  

For example, one thing commonly argued about nation branding and soft power is that it doesn’t really work. Or, in other words, it doesn’t work when one tries to do it deliberately, as it more often causes a backlash. As nation branding researcher and advisor Simon Anholt regularly asserts, when governments try to control the meaning and imagery around the various cultures within their borders, it can easily come across as propaganda and be rejected. And as Joseph Nye asserts in his scholarship on soft power, a country’s prestige grows most not with explicit political campaigns but rather with the organic growth of and popular support for a nation’s culture, values, and its positive and popular political policies. When Japanese administrators became excited about the potential of Japanese pop culture to grow soft power, encouraged by influential Western voices such as Joseph Nye and Douglas McGray, their excitement led them early on to take a rather heavy-handed approach. So, for example, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK created a show called “Cool Japan” that invited foreigners (usually English speakers) on to directly tell people how cool certain aspects of Japanese culture were, which included such questionably cool items like salarymen, sleeping, and the rainy season. Additionally, some advisors to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs created the idea of the Cute Ambassadors (kawaii taishi), which involved featuring and sometimes literally parading three young girls representative of different youth fashion trends in Japan in front of foreign audiences at overseas cultural events. These strategies definitely backfired for many observers, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, and drew substantial criticisms from Japanese pop culture fans, foreign and domestic press outlets, as well as academics. 

Drew Kerr: I found your attention to the type of feedback loop that results from official programs about Japanese pop culture addressing international publics quite illuminating to understand the very real consequences for interpellated domestic publics. On many levels, you help the reader to clearly see the concomitant tensions between representing–producing-being-feeling different elements that define Japanese culture(s). This especially emerges in your chapter looking at gender in kawaii (cute) subculture. What does looking at these tensions through the lens of affect open up for analysis, especially considering the male-oriented, bureaucratic practices and aspirations appropriating so-called girl culture?

Daniel White: Affect is often posited theoretically as something that circulates below the level of discourse, even though—very importantly—it can nevertheless be conditioned by it. Kawaii (cute) culture and girl culture are perfect examples of this. Kawaii is often described as something one immediately feels and that one just knows without having to explain it. Thus, it’s very much both a visual aesthetic and an embodied sensation, an affect—as anyone who has heard the iconic high-pitched “kawaiiiiiiii” from fans of kawaii culture knows well. And yet, the kawaii-oriented culture industries in Japan (manga, anime, toys, J-pop, fashion, idols, and so on) represent enormous discursive factories that are constantly shaping cute tastes in conjunction with consumers and, increasingly, YouTubers and influencers. An ethnographic method that could document the way affective capacities develop in and between bodies, like the ability to sense and be moved by kawaii aesthetics, would be an incredibly powerful one. I think tracing the feedback loops between content industry producers, consumers, and a variety of administrators who all contribute to shaping an affective circuitry of cute culture is one way to do this. 

That said, I do not at all want to suggest here that engaging with and feeling into kawaii culture is a passive act at all. As many of my colleagues have argued (Christine Yano, Laura Miller, Sharon Kinsella, Kazuma Yamane, Gabriella Lukács, Patrick Galbraith, Ian Condry, Kukhee Choo, David Leheny, Emily Wakeling, Mari Kotani, Kumiko Saitō), there is a strong and active political component to cute culture—and especially the figure of the shōjo (beautiful/cute young woman or girl), often depicted in manga, anime, and toys. Shōjo is one of many different figures through which young women in Japan can play with affects of male desire in ways that serve up serious countercultural statements on patriarchy in Japanese society. Especially with shōjo fashion, by producing spaces by and for young women, as well as for nontraditional men, shōjo culture resists male-scripted roles of adult femininity by challenging adulthood itself. It does this in a variety of ways, such as by emphasizing a youthful, alternative femininity unaffected by the pressures of social roles, represented in traditional figures like the obedient daughter (musume) or the doting wife/wise mother (ryōsai kenbo). 

Even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Cute Ambassadors program, which seems like the most direct male appropriation of a particular style of shōjo representation for political prestige-building, left room for the girls—and thus for girl culture at large—to actively determine the meaning and affective impact of their style. As one former Ambassador of Cute Aoki Misako stated, she intends “never to quit Lolita fashion” (isshō Rorīta yamenai), crediting its power as “combative clothing” (sentōfuku) that can save one from images of a “negative self ” (negatibu no jibun). Aoki’s statement suggests that shōjo fashion can offer resources for self-determination against those forces of social patriarchy that manifest as affectively harmful. I feel like long-term, slow, iterative, and detailed tracing of the feedback loops between the various discursive shaping of kawaii affect and its embodied expressions, which often contest and redefine those discourses, is one way to do fieldwork on the politics of affect.

Drew Kerr: I was really compelled by your explicit identification of the interest in affect as shared by many of your interlocutors, the administrator, and you, the anthropologist, though of course with different goals of characterizing, understanding, and engaging affect. I’m curious about the extension of this relationship. Have many of your interlocutors read your book? What have their reactions been? Because of your sustained and wide-reaching analysis, I could picture parts of the book serving administrative needs for bolstering geopolitical and domestic initiatives. If, however, the book hasn’t made its way yet into the soft power playbook, let me ask the question differently: Would you say more about how you situate your work within the broader governmental project of anxiety/hope in contemporary Japan?

Daniel White: This is really tricky territory to navigate, but important to address. In one sense, nation branding and soft power rhetoric in Japan remain so powerful in Japan because the ambiguity of their definitions allows for easy appropriation. In so much as any public display of Japanese popular culture abroad represents soft power in the eyes of (mostly male) bureaucrats who advocate for it, anything can look like an example of soft power. In this sense, my own book with flashy pop-culture icons splashed across the cover, and written by an American academic, is a perfect example of their version of soft power—even if the contents of the book contain ample critique of their soft power strategizing. But, as I also outline in the book, many administrators are aware of the many critiques and criticisms of soft power. I often raised these critiques with those I interviewed: some were comfortable with the criticisms (such as the flattening of culture, claims of propaganda, or simply criticisms that nation branding doesn’t build soft power); however, they felt like the point was simply to raise the presence of Japanese culture in global imaginaries. Other administrators understood those criticisms but felt like if pop-culture could be a gateway to building genuine cross-cultural understanding, government investment in it was not such a bad thing. Still other officials fully agreed with those critiques and felt like the government shouldn’t be thinking about soft power at all. This diversity of administration, or what Yael Navaro calls the many “faces of the state,” is important for ethnographies of the state to draw out, I think. 

As for my own relationship with my interlocutors, it no doubt exhibited the challenges, constructive alignments, and contested moments that all mark what George Marcus calls the “complicity of fieldwork,” especially when studying those in power. My interlocutors clearly saw that I held some skepticism toward the explicit policymaking surrounding soft power, which was grounded in ethnographic observations of a gap I and many others observed between the critical academic literature on soft power and the government’s optimistic endorsement of soft power programming. (This gap, incidentally, is what most brought the prevalence of anxious affect underlying soft power discourses to light.) But because these terms (soft power, nation branding, culture) are all often discussed and contested within and between government agencies, my own sometimes critical questions were often welcomed. The negotiation of these contested views was often reconciled in very detailed and specific ways, such as in a joint translation of a PR note for a Cute Ambassador event I assisted with, which I discuss in chapter 3. That some of my anthropological background was written into a public diplomacy note, while government soft power attitudes were written into my book, feels quite representative of both the reciprocity and messy complicity of fieldwork today. Key interlocutors of mine read portions of the book before publishing and offered suggestions and requests for changes. And I suspect the strongest advocates for soft power among my interlocutors will, again, see the book itself as evidence of Japanese soft power. Given the overlapping political interests of academics and administrators, as they both appropriate culture toward various forms of knowledge production and prestige, this two-way appropriation is something I tried to be reflexive about throughout the book, as you keenly and kindly noted. I think this commitment to reflexivity and complicity remains indispensable for anthropologists, as the discipline continues to grapple with the ethics and equity of its knowledge production. 

Drew Kerr: I’d be remiss to not take this opportunity to ask you about connections between this book and your current work on affective software and artificial emotional intelligence. In the context of Administering Affect, I can’t imagine that personal data mining and interventions facilitated by artificial intelligence haven’t played a role in administrative decisions and policy-making. I’m curious what you might have observed about the dynamics between digital platforms and emergent technologies and the administration of affect domestically in Japan and globally. Do you see any new trends in how emotional design in policy and affective computing may be informing one another?

Daniel White: The question of automation and AI in political administration is a fascinating one, with global implications and vectors. Japanese culture is sometimes characterized as combining cutting-edge technology with traditional and hierarchical organizational structures. This can result in what looks from the outside as curious composites of very putatively high and very low tech in a single office, which a brilliant article title from a colleague of mine, Erica Baffelli, demonstrates superbly: “The Android and the Fax.” In short, it’s not uncommon to see a fax machine still in use in some offices that also embrace the latest humanoid robotics technology. Of course, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to posit technologies on a spectrum of low to high, as these often reflect quite ethnocentric expectations of what technology means. Although my current research (modelemotion.org) is focused more on emotion modeling in emerging technologies of artificial intelligence (companion robots, virtual companions, wearable devices) rather than on the process of automating decision making in policymaking, I will be curious to see the different ways affect does or does not get incorporated into automating administrative work culture, and the degree to which affect becomes entangled with quantifying productivity or workplace satisfaction. I couldn’t yet comment on the applications of emotional design and affective computing in policy, although I cannot wait for that book from someone else. However, I can say that the rise of affective computing and emotional AI shows that anthropologists are not the only ones doing things with affect. Accordingly, to the degree that the digital modeling, algorithmic reading, and mechanized replication of affect takes off, anthropologists will certainly need to keep refining their theories of and methods for conducting fieldwork on affective processes.