Boys (and girls), be ambiguous!

When Japanese leaders wade into the culture wars, pop culture suffers.

No longer coming to China: “Cells at Work!”

“Boys, be ambitious!” were the apocryphal parting words of educator William S. Clark to his students at Hokkaido University in 1876. They’re inscribed on a monument there, and in the hearts of Japanese thanks to a famed newspaper column on the topic. But when you think about it, Japan isn’t really known for its ambition these days. What it’s better known for is ambiguity.

This might seem an odd adjective to describe a country so many seem to love, if inbound tourist numbers are any indication. But two recent incidents have thrown what I’m talking about into sharp relief.

On November 7th, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi stated that any attempt by China to seize Taiwan by force would represent an existential threat to Japan. This meant that if the US responded militarily, Japan could be obligated to join the response. Many assumed this was the case, but it had never been articulated openly until this point.

Last weekend, Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda showed up to a NASCAR-sponsored racing event at Fuji Speedway dressed head to toe in MAGAwear. Sporting a Make America Great Again cap and a “Trump/Vance 2024” T-shirt, he declared that “we are exploring ways to make tariffs a winner for everyone.” Again, many assumed the leaders of Japanese manufacturers were eager to curry favor with Trump, but none had gone quite so public with their fellat — I mean fealty! — as Toyoda had.

The short-term effects have been… bad.

China is raging, calling in diplomats for dressings-down and demanding official retractions, cancelling concerts, banning Japanese films including Crayon Shinchan the Movie: Super Hot! The Spicy Kasukabe Dancers and Cells at Work! from opening in local theaters, and pointedly advising Chinese citizens, who make up a very large percentage of tourists to Japan, to cancel their trips. (Such is the risk Japan exposes itself to by making content and tourism a pillar of its economy, but that’s another story.)

On the other hand, Toyoda’s fashion choices seem to have provoked general confusion, not least of all among Toyota’s American executives, according to one trade paper. Trump’s tariffs have cost Toyota billions. And Tesla’s fate has made automakers keenly aware of what happens when a leader decides to steer their company straight into the culture wars. Automotive News called Toyoda’s cosplay “a tone-deaf mistake.” The Financial Times framed it more sympathetically, declaring it “humiliating but all too necessarily strategic.”

I’d call it naivete. But more on that in a moment. For now let’s leave aside whether these declarations — Sanae’s on China, Toyoda’s on MAGA — represent tactical blunders or canny diplomacy. Because one thing is absolutely certain: they represent a rare failure for Japan in terms of strategic ambiguity.

Strategic ambiguity is the term for when one keeps their intentions obscure so as to achieve a goal. The American government’s policy regarding Taiwan is a stereotypical example. At the moment, the US seems committed to defending only “the first island chain,” which does include Taiwan, but also islands belonging to Japan, the Philippines, and Borneo. An ambiguous swath of sea indeed.

Japan is a nation steeped in ambiguity. There’s an old kotowaza proverb that goes, the clever hawk hides its talons. This is a country whose leaders were so famed for never clearly articulating what they really wanted that someone felt the need to write a book called The Japan That Can Say No.

When Japan was on top of the world in the Eighties, Westerners interpreted this reticence with deep suspicion, describing it with “W-bombs” like waffling, wishy-washy, and weasely. Karel van Wolferen’s controversial 1989 bestseller The Enigma of Japanese Power captured it best, portraying a Japan so governed by group consensus that no one was really in charge: a place where the buck never stops, but keeps circulating around like a game of musical chairs.

Some critics felt Wolferen’s take was uncharitable; others believe he nailed an issue that persists today. A great many Americans could probably name five people most in control of their nation’s political situation; I suspect many Japanese would be hard pressed to do the same about their country. In ways better and worse, there simply don’t seem to be as many charismatic politicians, or leaders in general, here as there are abroad.

Nevertheless, you don’t hear much criticism about Japan’s prominence or lack thereof on the global stage anymore. And that is because, as I wrote in “The ‘Dark Matter’ of Japan’s Fantasy-Industrial Complex,” Japan’s dropping out of the headlines as an economic titan is quite possibly the best thing that could have ever happened to its pop cultural industries. The general obscurity of Japan’s political stances should infuriate, but it is in fact a quiet strength. I should note that I don’t believe this is some kind of well-planned tactic — it’s totally unexpected add-on value from something that has long been a thread in Japanese culture, manifesting in a different way in modern times.

Consider how Western celebrities are subjected to a constant litmus test of their political values. It is far harder to do this in Japan. So many of Japan’s top creators are literally anonymous that it’s like The Enigma of Japanese Pop Culture. The latest Demon Slayer film has so far generated more than 700 million USD in global revenue, and we don’t know the creator’s real name or even gender, let alone anything about their political leanings. When I emceed an event featuring another of Shonen Jump’s top artists at AnimeNYC, he wore a custom Lucha libre mask the entire time.

As I wrote in “Japan is not ready for the culture wars,” there is at the moment a huge gap between Japan’s interest in the outside world, and the outside world’s interest in Japan. A great many Japanese with whom I have interacted — even “captains of industry” sorts — seem blissfully unaware of how divided America is as a nation, and how unstable our socio-political situation is at the moment. This is the real reason, I suspect, that Toyoda felt comfortable going “full MAGA” without so much as mentioning it to his American counterparts.

Ambiguity is soft. It’s key to kawaii products: squishy, in-between, neither baby nor grown up, neither masculine nor feminine, an aesthetic that Japanese designers have mastered. Ambiguity in politics makes Japan seem safe and approachable. It is why so many Westerners see Japan as an oasis and want to visit. It’s also why anime fans can somehow see the same medium — and sometimes even the same series — as “woke” and “a safe haven from political correctness” at the very same time. Ambiguity provides a blank slate upon which fans of different cultures and creeds can project their own values. You might see Japan’s traditional reluctance to take a public stand on divisive issues as deliberate or wishy-washy, but it is also the secret sauce of its soft power.

So: the more that Japanese leaders wade into sticky issues, or make hard pronouncements about — well, anything, really — the more they will compromise their nation’s soft power. To which one (especially one who wants to provoke) might say, so what? To which I’d reply: because these very same leaders also seem to be banking on it, in the form of content and tourism, to save the economic fortunes of their nation. In other words, if you want to be ambitious… you’ve got to know when to be strategically ambiguous.