Nation Strategy: Cultural and Brand nationalism in Japan.

Abstract

In the face of multiculturality nations and nationalisms have been put to the test in order to maintain their identity and the validity of their assumptions. The present work focuses on nationalism as a phenomenon and ,by tracing a diachronic development of it, hopes to shed light on its dynamics and its changes in the wake of the acceleration of globalization in recent years. In particular, it focuses on nationalism in Japan, as formulated by thinking elites, its history and recent developments. The first chapter will be structured as an overview of nationalism and its developments. It starts by looking into characteristics and basic elements of nationalism with the aim of defining useful categories in the following analysis; I will then analyze how nationalism changed with the acceleration of globalization and how it came to be understood as a phenomenon deeply related to economics. Chapter two will focus on the historical development that brought Japanese nationalism into being during the last years of nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century and will proceed to show how it developed in postwar years until the 1970s. Chapter three focuses on discourses of Japanese uniqueness (nihonjinron) and on cultural nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The fourth chapter will analyze how nationalism came to change in Japan in the twenty-first century with the phenomenon of Cool Japan, the branding of the Japanese nation and implications in the approach of multiculturality.