Resilient Borders and Cultural Diversity : Internationalism, Brand Nationalism, and Multiculturalism in Japan

This book discusses how the evolution of market-driven cultural globalization has reinforced the administration of national cultural borders in Japan. As a result of these processes, a particular kind of cross-border connectivity and exchange is embraced while dialog and engagement with multicultural questions within Japan are discouraged.

The acceleration of media culture globalization processes cross-fertilization and people’s exchange beyond the confinement of national borders, but not all of them lead to substantial transformations of national identity or foster cosmopolitan outlook in terms of openness, togetherness and dialogue within and beyond the national borders. Whilst national borders continue to become more and more porous, the measures of border control are constantly reformulated to tame disordered flows and tightly re-demarcate the borders—materially, physically, symbolically and imaginatively. Border crossing does not necessarily bring about the transgression of borders. Transgression of borders requires one to fundamentally question how borders in the existing form have been socio-historically constructed and also seek to displace their exclusionary power that unevenly divide “us” and “them” and “here” and “there.” This book considers how media culture and the management of people’s border crossing movement combine with Japan''s cultural diversity to institute the creation of national cultural borders in Japanese millennials. Critical analysis of this development is a pressing matter if we are to seriously consider how to make Japan’s national cultural borders more inclusive and dialogic.