【Report】Nonstate actors in Japanese-language promotion in Chile: A study of public diplomacy

The speaker’s bio: Dr. Isabel Cabana Rojas is Senior Researcher at Kinugasa Research Organization of Ritsumeikan University. Her research focuses on Nikkei communities in Latin America, Japan’s public diplomacy and Japan-Chile relations.

Lecture summary: The speaker has an educational background in history, Asian studies and International Relations. She also has a deep interest in intercultural communication and developed an online platform ‘Chile Asiatico’ to provide access to information on scholarship opportunities to study in Asia and cultural events available in Chile. She worked as a part-time lecturer in five Chilean universities. She explained how her experience working and studying in both Chile and Japan brought her to examine nonstate actors in public diplomacy. Her main research questions were: 1) How can we make sense of public diplomacy if it’s practiced by individuals? 2) Can language promotion activities be seen as public diplomacy? Her personal motivation driving her research was to make these actors and their efforts more visible.

Although she initially interviewed 21 actors, she ended up selecting 10 interviews with activists running 10 programs officially recognized by Japan Foundation. The findings showed the importance of gender aspects (the world of language promotion is female-led and female-oriented) and generational differences. In her methodology, she used narrative analysis, historical methods and oral history to understand the context. Timeline is important as two organizations started their language promotion activities before 1991 (Chilean-Japanese cultural institute from 1975 and Japanese association in 1954), one more program emerged in 1995, four others in 2000s and yet another one in 2010s. All the programs were initiated by people, not governments. The decade of 1990s is characterized by the rise of anime and Japanese pop culture.

In her theoretical framework, she examines the “agency turn” in diplomatic studies focusing on nonstate actors and individuals instead of traditional government-to-government diplomacy. She presented a circular model of public diplomacy encompassing “new public diplomacy”, relational diplomacy (Brown, 2013; Zaharno, Arsenault & Fisher, 2013) and everyday diplomacy (De Certeau, 1988). She demonstrated the value of looking at the objective (e.g., language promotion) instead of actors. This approach allowed her to identify several functions of the language promotion actors, including most commonly: 1) “target”, 2) “instrument”, and 3) “agent”, while the Japanese government acts as a supporter and a facilitator but never a controller. During her fieldwork, she observed much negotiation and mediation between the actors.

She explained that Japan kept its language promotion low profile until recently because of the use of language for colonization in its imperial past. Although the government of Shinzo Abe had a closer contact with Latin America compared to other governments, Latin America is still far behind Asia, US and Europe on Japan’s priority list. Some channels connecting Japan and Latin America are Nikkeijin communities, ODA and internationalization efforts. According to the lecturer, Japan and Chile have an asymmetrical relationship which one of the interviewee’s characterized as “unrequited love” meaning that Chilean people love Japan while Japan remains indifferent.

Until the 1980s, there was no centralized curriculum in Japanese language teaching in Chile which made Japanese language instructors very flexible and resourceful. Throughout the lecture, the speaker emphasized her key message of the importance of nonstate actors in Japan’s public diplomacy in Chile and the bottom-up nature of language promotion activities.

Attached are the lecture slides.

Attendance: The event was held in a hybrid mode, in Koshinkan building (KS206) and online on Zoom. Eight participants attended it in the classroom and four more on Zoom. Attached are the event photos.

Q&A: The lecture was followed by a lively discussion. The questions from the audience included: 1) explaining the roles played by the actors and the difference between Japan’s approach to language promotion and that of other countries; 2) change in generations vs change over time; 3) whether Japan-Chile relations were mutual or more “one-way”; 3) reasons why the shift in Japan’s language promotion activities occurred in the 1990s; 4) whether bottom-up events attempted to compensate for the lack of higher-level diplomacy; 5) the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on online events in the field of Japanese language promotion.