Otaku in Chief

How will Shigeru Ishiba becoming Prime Minister impact Japan’s pop culture?

Japan’s new commander in chief

After many tries, career politician Shigeru Ishiba has taken the reins of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. It is a party many feel is neither liberal nor democratic, even corrupt to its very core, but those are hot takes for another time. What is a fact is that the LDP has been in almost continuous power since 1955 – the year after the very first Godzilla movie came out, just to put a pin in it for you pop-culture vultures. In Japan’s parliamentary system, the party in power selects the Prime Minister, which means Ishiba will be Japan’s head of state for a time, effective October 1.

For the grown-ups interested in sensible takes on what this augurs from a geopolitical standpoint, I highly recommend Tobias Harris’ Observing Japan. In the meantime, I’ve got the perpetual-adolescent angle covered. Because – I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking. The big, big question. What does Ishiba’s ascent mean for Japanese pop culture?!

Photos of Ishiba cosplaying as Majin Buu from Dragon Ball Z several years back have been making the rounds online. He is known to have a passion for building military model kits — so much so, in fact, that he used his connections as defense minister to dispatch Self-Defense Forces armor for display at the Shizuoka Hobby Show, a tradition that continues to this day. His office is decorated with miniature aircraft and ships and figurines of the Seventies idol group The Candies. He has by his own admission seen the 1978 film Farewell Space Cruiser Yamato over a hundred times, and “always cries at the same place.” (He didn’t say which, but I suspect Patrick Macias knows.) Ishiba has blogged about Godzilla. He says that rivals in the party nicknamed him a “left-wing military otaku.”

Otaku. There it is. Once a slur, then practically a crime, and later a rallying cry for kidults across Japan. Adult fan cultures, once dismissed as abnormal behavior, are integral to post-industrial Japan’s health as a society, and its interactions with the global dialogue. Ishiba is coming into power at a time when Japanese pop culture is more popular than ever abroad, and when the Japanese government is more active than ever in exploiting it for the purposes of global diplomacy. He wasn’t the architect of any of these plans, but he will be inheriting them. As the first Prime Minister to admit to weeping at viewings of Yamato, Ishiba would seem inclined to believe in the value of soft power and cultural diplomacy (even if, he said, he “didn’t think foreigners would really understand” Yamato. Seriously? I’ve got Patrick on speed-dial here, Mr. Prime Minister.)

Japan is thriving as a pop-cultural superpower for the moment. But it faces very real difficulties in maintaining, for lack of a better term, this anime supremacy – difficulties that will be a challenge to any leader, no matter how talented or sympathetic.

One of the biggest issues is demographic. Japan is a hyperaged society. But anime and manga, the cornerstones of Cool Japan, are youth cultures. I’ve written about how the nation currently punches way outside of its age-class before. But the demographics of a hyperaged society are scary and real, and barring some sort of Handmaid’s Tale style intervention to compel pregnancies, not going to change anytime soon. This fact of life has big implications for the future of Japanese pop culture in two key ways, one long-term, and another in a much closer timeframe.

Long term first: with fewer and fewer young people, how will Japan continue to make the illustrated entertainment that the world loves? The obvious solution to the problem of less kids is creating (or re-creating) society in such a way that citizens are inclined to have more children. But to date, the best the government – which is to say the LDP – has managed on this front is launching a national dating app, to much-deserved derision. Ishiba, who’s taking the reins of a party that is historically notoriously, shockingly, deafeningly out of touch with the very women they want having more babies, is going to have his work cut out for him on this front. But a recent YouTube video did not inspire confidence. He lamented that shanai kekkon, marriages resulting from intra-company dating, are no longer the norm, while failing to touch on the reason why: women were traditionally pressured to quit when they tied the knot.

In the short term, the ruling party’s reluctance to address declining marriage rates and birthrates on a socio-political level means they gravitate towards technological solutions to the problems posed by shrinking older societies. In June, the government announced a “New Cool Japan Strategy.” It is designed to remedy the many flaws of the “Old” Cool Japan initiatives (chief among them the predictable lack of financial oversight that drove it millions into the red.) The new strategy proposes doubling the size of the nation’s content-production industries by training young creators on “digital technologies.” What this means isn’t precisely made clear, but we know that the LDP is wildly gung-ho for AI, as I wrote about a few months back. The paradox of how Japan can lead in original, human-made content while being “the most AI friendly nation on the planet” still remains fundamentally unsolved. And we simply do not know where Ishiba stands on this particular issue. He wasn’t part of the reporting on the topic, and doesn’t seem to have made any public statements about it at all.

And regardless of what his colleagues may call him, it’s reductive to call Ishiba an otaku. He’s a wonk, certainly, but not a nerd or fanboy. He says the cosplay was forced upon him, in an echo of Abe’s brief turn as Mario during the closing ceremony of the Rio Olympics. And the things he likes – idol singers, plastic models, Yamato – would have been tough to miss for any young person growing up in the Seventies.

But the fact that he openly talks about them is an indication of how much things have changed over the decades. When Ishiba was young, authority figures treated manga and anime (and later video games) as vices to be curbed. A wide variety of organizations actively protested the mediums for supposedly sparking anti-social behavior. In the Eighties, a horrific crime sparked a moral panic that linked the words “otaku” and “murderer” in the public mind. The word “otaku” became so radioactive that NHK wouldn’t even allow it to be spoken on air until after the turn of the Millennium.

Despite all of this hand-wringing on the part of authorities, manga and anime continued to be consumed, in absolutely massive quantities. At its peak in the mid-Nineties Weekly Shonen Jump, home to hits like Dragon Ball and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, was moving 6.5 million copies every week. As post-Bubble Japan became post-Industrial Japan, it was almost inevitable that such a robust pop-cultural industry, not to mention fanbase, would begin to attract the attention of politicians, the younger ranks of which were undoubtedly illicit consumers  themselves. Douglas McGray’s 2002 Foreign Policy feature “Japan’s Gross National Cool” gave politicos the fig-leaf they needed to make it official: Japan was a pop-culture superpower, and needed to start acting like one. So they did.

Ishiba may well have the biggest collection of model kits in Parliament, but he won’t be Japan’s first Prime Minister to appeal to otaku sensibilities. That would be Taro Aso, who served as P.M. for less than a year from mid-2008 to mid-2009. As Foreign Minister in the early Aughts, Aso made Japan’s soft power a plank in his platform, ostentatiously reading copies of the gothic fantasy manga Rozen Maiden, launching the ongoing International Manga Award, and even, in a fever-dream moment, attempting to convince Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to invest in a Russo-Japanese Doraemon feature. Not everyone was impressed by his boosterism: Hayao Miyazaki called Aso’s manga reading “embarrassing” and “something that should be done in private.”

In the end, the proclivities and even the policies of the Prime Minister might have very little effect on the propagation of pop culture at all. The whole thing about pop culture is that it is popular: populist, grass-roots, the exact opposite of something that can be legislated, let alone exploited, by something as inherently uncool as a bureaucracy. In 2015, years after Aso’s run as P.M., the media-studies professor Koichi Iwabuchi wrote a scathing report about Japan’s official promotional efforts, which he declared merely “a one-way projection of Japanese culture,” more akin to propaganda than progress, designed to stoke the egos of citizens rather than build bridges between cultures.

That global interest in Japan’s pop culture continues to grow even as Cool Japan efforts have crashed and burned certainly makes you think Iwabuchi was on to something. Do any of these foreign fans really care about Japanese politics? Who knows! But I predict that pop culture will continue to play a growing role in the Japanese government’s interactions with the world. Whether those interactions are clumsy and halting, or healing and invigorating, is up to the people in charge. All we can do is wait and see how Ishiba’s efforts on this front will play out. But if a cosplaying, model-building, Yamato-watching, Godzilla-blogging Prime Minister can’t make Japan cool, who can?

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