FOREIGN ENVOYS come in all shapes and sizes but rarely decked out in miniskirts, schoolgirl uniforms and polka-dot dresses adorned with bunny rabbits. Until now.
A dramatic new look for Japan’s diplomatic corps was unveiled by the country’s ministry of foreign affairs yesterday, part of a plan to boost its soft power abroad with what it called “ambassadors of cute”.
In place of the traditional buttoned-down bureaucrat, trailing the whiff of stale cigarettes and mild distress, the perfumed power trio of Misako Aoki, Yu Kimura and actor Shizuka Fujioka were wheeled out to the foreign press yesterday.
Representing Japan’s Lolita, schoolgirl and gyaru subcultures, the three pop envoys from Japan’s manga and animation world will be tested out this year at cultural festivals in Bangkok and Paris, said the ministry’s head of cultural affairs, Tsutomu Nakagawa.
“It’s all about mutual understanding,” he told the foreign media. “We want people abroad to know these kind of people exist in Japan and to feel close to them.”
Dressed in a school uniform, Fujioka, who was billed by the ministry as an “adviser to a well-known shop that sells school-uniform-type clothes”, said she loved her look, despite graduating from school a year ago.
“I think I can continue to dress like this all my life. Age has nothing to do with it,” she said.
Aoki, sporting a frilly pastel pink dress and dubbed “a charismatic leader who features Lolita fashions”, said people of all ages “love clothes”, “from small girls to grandmothers”.
One of Tokyo’s most prestigious universities, Meiji, is building the world’s largest manga archive near the city centre – another sign, according to the archive’s curator, Kaichiro Morikawa, that official Japan is embracing what was until recently a subculture associated with schoolboys and nerds.
“The government, universities and think tanks increasingly recognise that this is an important aspect of Japanese life, and that it is popular elsewhere,” he said.
Tokyo has recently shifted emphasis from extolling traditional arts to pop culture, under the rubric of “Cool Japan”, a response to the growing international interest in comics, anime and Japanese music.
Japanese prime minister Taro Aso, a manga fan, has raised the possibility that Japan’s soft power, in the form of otaku (nerd) culture, might be used to promote the nation’s interests.
“American comics had an influence that we simply cannot ignore,” he said last year.