Soft Power and CSR. The Japanese Case: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Abstract

One of the most important challenges in international relations is to recover from a war defeat and turn the former enemies into sincere allies. Historical evidence shows that the defeated countries tend to seek the restoration of their previous position at all cost. The case of Japan has been paradigmatic: it chose to redesign its model of State by seeking to resignify its role and international image substituting the threatening image of its imperial power for the friendly country of the economic miracle, whose efficiency brought the consumption of goods closer to majority. This Revista Encrucijada AmericanaUniversidad Alberto Hurtado6.huge change explains a relevant part of the diplomatic and economic success of Japan in the post World War II, especially by the harmonization of the soft power (SP) in the foreign policy of the State with the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of its companies abroad. Here lies the core of the tension between the appeal of the SP as an idea and its applicability to the foreign policy of a country. In this paper, we postulate that, for the Japanese case, this stress has been successfully addressed as it has made the SP the central focus of its foreign policy and has achieved harmonize this policy with that of CSR.