Japan's soft power in Latin America: corporate diplomacy under the shadow of US hegemony
Within the "Latin American Critical Thought Notebooks" Collection, CLACSO presents "Japan's Soft Power in Latin America: Corporate Diplomacy Under the Shadow of US Hegemony" – Author: Olga Rosa González Martín
Japan's soft power in Latin America: corporate diplomacy under the shadow of
US hegemony
Authors: Olga Rosa González Martín
Introduction: Asymmetry and the limits of liberal "soft power"
Japan ranks fourth in the 2025 Global Soft Power Index (Brand Finance), with a score of 71.5 out of 100—a tenth of a point improvement over the previous year (70.6)—just behind the United States, China, and the United Kingdom. It is a solid and stable position: Japan has held this fourth place for years, sustained primarily by its Business and Trade pillar (9.2 out of 10, one of the highest in the ranking) and by Education and Science (8.7). But one fact stands out when looking at the complete list: no Latin American country even appears in the top 30. Brazil, the region's largest economy, ranks 31st with 48.8 points—27 points below Japan; Mexico is 43rd, with 44.3; and Argentina is 42nd. The gap is not only one of economic size: it is a gap in global perception that places the entire region on the structural periphery of the world cultural map.
This asymmetry is the starting point of this work, but also its theoretical provocation. Reading Japan's influence in Latin America through Joseph Nye's liberal concept carries the risk of obscuring the relations of dependency and power that operate in what has historically been considered the "backyard" of the American empire. Unlike other regions of the world where Japanese soft power openly competes with that of South Korea or China—both with much more aggressive cultural strategies, such as South Korean K-pop or the diplomacy of
While China's infrastructure is a major factor, Latin America has an older, quieter, and less visible link with Japan: centuries-old Nikkei communities in Brazil, Peru, and Mexico; a modest trade relationship compared to Japan's relationship with Asia-Pacific; and a cultural image built more on mass cultural products—anime, gastronomy, technology—than on explicit cultural diplomacy.
The question guiding this research, therefore, is not only how Japan projects its culture in the region, but also how the architecture of US power—both corporate and geopolitical—mediates, facilitates, captures, or blocks the arrival of Asian culture in Latin America. To answer this, this article proposes a conceptual shift: abandoning the liberal interpretation of soft power and adopting a political economy of communication perspective, inspired by the tradition of Latin American critical thought, that allows us to unravel the structures of dependency that sustain—and limit—Japanese corporate diplomacy in the hemisphere.
II. Theoretical framework: from liberal soft power to imperial hegemony
The concept of soft power, coined by Joseph Nye (2004) in the late 1980s, has been the dominant framework for analyzing the cultural influence of states in the international system for decades. According to Nye, soft power is the ability to achieve what one wants through attraction rather than coercion, and it relies on three resources: culture (when it is attractive to others), political values (when they are lived out in practice), and foreign policy (when it is considered legitimate). From this perspective, Japan would be a paradigmatic case: a country that, after its military defeat in 1945 and the loss of its territorial empire, rebuilt its international standing through culture, technology, and its national brand.
However, from the perspective of Latin American critical thought, this reading is insufficient. As authors such as Dorfman and Mattelart (1971) have pointed out in their analysis of cultural imperialism, or Aníbal Quijano (2024) in his theory of the coloniality of power, international cultural relations are never symmetrical or neutral: they are permeated by historical structures of domination that determine who produces, who distributes, who consumes, and who benefits economically from cultural circulation. In Latin America, this warning is particularly relevant, since the region has historically been subject to what Cardoso and Faletto (2002) termed a “situation of dependency”: a structural condition in which cultural accumulation and reproduction are subordinated to the hegemonic centers of the world-system.
Applying this lens to the Japanese case means questioning not only the appeal of its culture, but also the material, corporate, and geopolitical infrastructures that make that appeal possible. Soft power doesn't flow in a vacuum: it needs distribution channels, platforms, licenses, visas, trade agreements, and regulatory frameworks. And in Latin America, these channels are overwhelmingly owned by US capital or subject to Washington's jurisdiction. To operationalize this approach, this article takes up the framework of the "three diplomacies" proposed by Barrón Soto and González Monte de Oca (2025), who identify three complementary channels through which Japanese soft power is built in the region: public diplomacy (state strategies such as Cool Japan, promoted by the Koizumi and Abe governments), cultural diplomacy (the transmission of values through anime, manga, film or gastronomy with Studio Ghibli and washoku as paradigmatic examples) and corporate diplomacy (the idea that Japanese companies —Nintendo, Bandai Namco, Sony Music Japan— operate as ambassadors of the country, exporting not only goods but an image of Japan).
The authors' thesis is compelling: in Latin America, the most active of the three pillars is corporate diplomacy. But this article goes a step further: it argues that this Japanese corporate diplomacy, far from operating autonomously, is outsourced, mediated, and conditioned by the architecture of US power in the region. Japan exports the content; the United States owns the distribution channels, controls the intermediation, and captures most of the surplus value.
III. Methodology: Institutional fieldwork in Japan
This research draws on fieldwork conducted in Japan between June 22 and July 23, 2026, as part of a research stay at the Institute for Developing Economies (IDE-JETRO). During this period, semi-structured interviews were conducted with experts from key institutions involved in Japanese cultural and trade policy. These interviews were complemented by a systematic review of institutional reports (JETRO São Paulo 2025, JETRO Mexico 2026, Intellectual Property Strategic Program 2025, New Cool Japan Strategy 2024), academic literature on the reception of Japanese culture in Latin America, and recent studies on Cuban otaku communities. This cross-referencing of sources allows for a comparison of official Japanese discourse with actual practices of cultural exchange in the region.
IV. The thermometer of perception: the GSPI 2025 and its silences
The breakdown by pillars of the GSPI 2025 is revealing about the kind of soft power Japan projects. It is not, above all, a country that wins on pure cultural appeal: in Culture and Heritage it scores 7.0 points, below its performance in Business and Trade (9.2) or Education and Science (8.7). Japan accumulates fourteen medals in the ranking by attributes—the same total as the United Kingdom and Canada—but its gold medals are concentrated in sustainability, advanced technology, and high ethical standards, not in the entertainment or lifestyle categories where one would expect to see the appeal of anime or Japanese cuisine anchored in the Latin American imagination.
In other words, it is a soft power built on technological and commercial reputation rather than on
Direct cultural export. The contrast with South Korea is instructive. Korea climbed to 12th place this year—the fastest-rising nation among those already established in the top 100—driven explicitly by K-pop and the global success of its audiovisual industry, according to Brand Finance's own report (2025). Japan, on the other hand, is improving more slowly and steadily, without a comparable leap. This suggests a question I will return to later: if Japan's advantage isn't in pop culture in the strictest sense, where does its influence in Latin America really lie? Does it align with what the global index measures?
These numbers, however, are merely an aggregate indicator: they measure perception, but they don't explain their sources or allow us to distinguish what is specifically happening in Japan's relationship with Latin America, a region that the index barely makes visible. For that, the framework of the three diplomacies, now subjected to critical scrutiny, is more useful: who owns the infrastructure that allows this "corporate diplomacy" to function?
V. The US distribution infrastructure: Brazil and the streaming oligopolies
If Japanese corporate diplomacy involves its companies acting as ambassadors for the country, Brazil offers one of the clearest examples of how this mechanism works in Latin America—and, at the same time, how it is mediated by US oligopolies. According to the JETRO São Paulo report (2025), Brazil is now one of the world's most important anime markets outside of Asia, a position that is not recent: it rests on three decades of television exposure—from Saint Seiya and Pokémon to Naruto and Bleach—and on the largest Nikkei community outside of Japan, factors that help explain why the country boasts, according to specialists consulted by JETRO, nearly three million manga fans.
What has changed in recent years is the scale. The massive influx of anime onto Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Crunchyroll has taken the genre out of the otaku niche and into everyday audiovisual consumption: productions like Dandadan, Demon Slayer, One Piece, and Sakamoto Days have remained in Netflix Brazil's top ten for weeks—Dandadan for eleven consecutive weeks—and the report projects market growth exceeding 13% annually until 2030. But this is where critical analysis reveals what the liberal discourse of soft power obscures: these platforms are not neutral. They are the distribution arms of American technological and audiovisual capital. The mass consumption of Dandadan or Demon Slayer enriches the oligopolies of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, which act as indispensable intermediaries between the Japanese industry and the Latin American public. And there is a key fact: Crunchyroll, the most specialized anime platform, was acquired by Sony (an American corporation) in 2021, further consolidating US capital control over the distribution of Japanese culture in the region.
JETRO is explicit on a point of particular interest to the logic of corporate diplomacy: this mass consumption has not yet fully translated into business. Official licensing remains limited by the slow pace of rights negotiations, competition from localized products, and a lack of coordination between Japanese companies and local partners—a gap between cultural popularity and commercial exploitation that the report itself urges be closed. The recommendation is twofold: accelerate licensing and invest in localization, starting with dubbing, which experts identify as a decisive factor in preventing anime from being perceived as a foreign product.
The report also documents something that almost literally illustrates the idea of companies as ambassadors: the growing Japanese institutional participation in major anime festivals—Anime Friends, CCXP, SANA, AnimeXtreme—including the presence of the Japanese Embassy itself at the Anime Summit, where the ambassador appeared in cosplay at the opening ceremony. In this gesture, commercial promotion and cultural projection become one and the same. But even this success has its downside: the major festivals where anime shines are, to a large extent, events organized by local or multinational entertainment companies operating under the logic of American conglomerates.
VI. Mexico: a logistics hub under the orbit of Los Angeles
While Brazil exemplifies a mature market with trade frictions, Mexico offers a distinct and even more revealing example of structural subordination to the United States. The JETRO Mexico report (2026) doesn't limit itself to anime, but rather analyzes an entire ecosystem of content industries—film, streaming, manga, music, and video games—supported by favorable structural conditions: over 130 million inhabitants, a median age approaching thirty, and over 80% internet penetration in a country where the smartphone is the gateway to audiovisual consumption.
Here too, the roots are historical. The report attributes the consolidation of this phenomenon to two series broadcast in the 1970s and 80s, Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball, whose success is explained by an unexpected emotional connection: themes such as friendship, loyalty, and self-improvement resonated with the Mexican telenovela tradition. Decades later, that link remains strong—Dragon Ball symphonic concerts fill auditoriums, the series is still on broadcast television—while streaming adds a new layer of mass consumption, with titles like Dandadan and SPY×FAMILY among the most-watched in the country. However, fieldwork with institutional sources linked to cultural promotion in Mexico nuances and deepens this dynamic in crucial ways. Mexico is not just a final market, but a linguistic and logistical hub: as those interviewed pointed out, much of the content distributed in the United States arrives in Mexico and, from there, is subtitled or dubbed for distribution to the rest of the region. This regional hub position is not the result of a sovereign Japanese strategy, but rather the logic of its US subsidiaries. Japanese companies like Aniplex operate from Los Angeles into Mexico (bringing Demon Slayer to TV Azteca, for example). Japanese video game and toy companies use Mexico as a base to expand into Colombia, Peru, or Central America because major international distributors—like Sony, owner of Crunchyroll, or Netflix and Amazon themselves—divide their continental licenses between the United States and a Mexican subsidiary.
The interview with the JETRO Mexico team reveals a Mexican consumer with a distinctive trait: they are "passionate but very critical." This demanding nature is evident in the localization process. One executive consulted explained that dubbing is not a mere formality but a contractual and creative bottleneck: local companies like Anime Onegai hire actors and must consult every decision with the parent company in Japan. Poor-quality dubbing is unacceptable to Mexican fans, making the local dubbing industry an unwitting pillar of Japan's soft power. But even this local dubbing industry—which could be interpreted as a form of national appropriation—operates under contracts dictated from Los Angeles or Tokyo through American intermediaries.
What distinguishes the Mexican report is its interpretation of anime as a gateway to an entire intellectual property ecosystem: it boosts the manga publishing market, fuels tours by Japanese artists, and sustains video game consumption. At major events (AniMole, CCXP Mexico, Expo TNT), large corporations and companies outside the entertainment industry are already incorporating anime characters into their own marketing strategies.
Furthermore, promotional offices have begun to leverage this ecosystem in the country. Through platforms like "Japan Street"—a B2B business directory—and their presence at trade shows like MIP Cancun, they have moved from observation to action. The first webinar focused on the Japanese content market in Mexico (2025) brought together more than 150 companies, demonstrating that the interest in monetizing this relationship is no longer theoretical. However, the next challenge is merchandising: currently, there are no strong Mexican companies managing licenses for physical products, a gap identified as a key opportunity. And this gap, again, benefits large US distributors, who capture the added value of physical merchandising through their regional networks.
VII. Structural Limits: Piracy, AI, and the Geopolitics of Intellectual Property
If the fieldwork reveals anything, it is that Japanese corporate soft power in Latin America is not without friction, and that many of these frictions have less to do with culture than with the legal and commercial architecture that sustains that culture—an architecture that, once again, is deeply marked by US hegemony.
The most prominent issue is piracy. As an intellectual property specialist from the Japanese Cabinet explained to this investigation, combating unauthorized copies is delegated to a specific agency, the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), and the problem is of a magnitude that the Japanese government itself considers critical: losses of 30 billion yen in animation and film alone. This is the other side of the growth figures: the same mass consumption that fuels the business also fuels counterfeiting. From a critical perspective, piracy in Latin America is not only a “cultural problem”—as official Japanese reports tend to frame it—but also a symptom of the region's economic inequalities and the inability of formal cultural industries to offer prices and accessibility that align with local purchasing power.
The perspective from the liaison offices in Mexico adds a layer of complexity. For Japanese executives on the ground, piracy in Latin America is also a symptom of a lack of formal access and a “cultural difference” in the perception of intellectual property. The proposed solution involves not only litigation—lengthy and costly processes—but also education: teaching Latin American consumers that piracy “is not a good thing.” This is a challenge that reveals the extent to which soft power requires not only appealing but also changing consumption habits, a pedagogy that, viewed from a critical perspective, has a clear disciplinary bias aimed at protecting corporate interests.
The licensing model is also changing in ways that reduce regional flexibility. A decade ago, licenses were granted country by country; today, they are organized by language, and major US platforms—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and a Sony subsidiary that distributes Japanese animation throughout Latin America—compete with each other to acquire the rights. Mexico continues to function as a kind of regional gateway, though not necessarily because Japanese companies choose to negotiate there directly, but because major international distributors divide their continental licenses between the United States and a Mexican subsidiary. The commercial geography of Japanese culture in Latin America is, quite literally, mapped from Los Angeles.
The other challenge, further into the future, is generative artificial intelligence. Japanese government sources have warned that much anime content is relatively easy to imitate with AI, and that neither the general public nor many adults can distinguish between original and counterfeit content, foreshadowing an intellectual property problem distinct from traditional piracy. The Intellectual Property Strategic Program 2025 confirms that this concern is already a matter of state policy: it proposes adapting copyright legislation to the AI era, clarifying the protection of inventions assisted by these systems, and establishing clear rules on the data used to train models, while also continuing to use AI itself as a tool to accelerate content production.
That document—which places anime, manga, and video games on the same strategic level as scientific research or technological innovation, as part of the "national intellectual capital"—also quantifies Japan's ambition: by 2033, the government aims to generate 50 trillion yen in content exports (New Cool Japan Strategy, 2024). Soft power has ceased to be a side effect of cultural popularity and has become a public policy goal with quantifiable objectives. But even this ambition unfolds on a playing field where the rules of the game—the platforms, the algorithms, the intellectual property frameworks—are largely defined in Washington.
VIII. Imperial extraterritoriality: the encirclement of Cuba
While in Brazil and Mexico US hegemony manifests itself through control of technological platforms and commercial distribution, in Cuba it reveals itself in its purest and most coercive form: geopolitical imperialism and extraterritorial blockade. This case is perhaps the most compelling empirical demonstration of how US foreign policy toward Latin America conditions the sovereignty of third countries and their relations with extra-regional powers.
When asked about Cuba, one of the interviewees shared a revealing fact: a decade ago, Japanese promotion did participate in the Havana International Fair with its own pavilion, although the products showcased were not specifically from the creative industries. However, today that presence has disappeared. The reason is not only a lack of cultural interest, but also the US imperial embargo.
Japan is part of the United States Visa Waiver Program, which allows its citizens to travel for business using an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). However, U.S. law dictates that traveling to Cuba results in the automatic loss of this authorization, forcing the Japanese executive to undergo a traditional visa process, which is far more expensive and uncertain. This illustrates a corporate cost-benefit calculation: given that the United States is Japan's largest trading partner globally, Japanese businesspeople pragmatically prioritize protecting their access to this vast market. No executive risks their business agility in North America to explore a small market with serious logistical constraints like Cuba.
This case is empirical proof of how US foreign policy toward Cuba has an extraterritorial effect, forcing a power like Japan to exercise self-censorship in its commercial activities in the region. Washington's hegemony not only stifles Cuba; it also dictates the limits of diplomatic and corporate action by extra-regional powers in the hemisphere. Japan's "soft power" yields to US "hard power."
From the perspective of dependency theory, this phenomenon clearly illustrates how the Latin American periphery—even in its relations with third countries—is structured by the architecture of imperial power. Japan, despite being the world's fourth-largest soft power, must defer to Washington's dictates when it comes to operating in the Caribbean. In this case, Tokyo's commercial sovereignty is subordinated to Washington's geopolitical sovereignty.
This institutional void, however, does not translate into a cultural void. A recent article on Cuban otaku communities on Facebook (Torres, Fonseca, Villafaña, and González, 2026) shows that, in the absence of official commercial infrastructure, anime in Cuba never ceased to circulate: its users appropriated it. Young Cubans do not passively receive anime, but rather reinterpret it and blend it with local references—Luffy with the Cuban flag, Naruto wandering through Old Havana—giving rise to what the article calls a "Creole otaku culture," characterized by hybridization, autonomy from the state and major cultural industries, and a form of symbolic resistance against official and dominant commercial culture.
Within these communities, a distinct hierarchy of prestige and knowledge operates—"gurus," creators, regular consumers—organizing events, translating materials, and sustaining a gift economy based on recognition rather than money. This dynamic is vitally important for Latin American critical thought: it represents a form of symbolic resistance and autonomy in the face of two hegemonies. On the one hand, they appropriate Japanese culture outside of US commercial circuits (which cannot operate in Cuba due to the embargo). On the other, they function as a youth culture that negotiates, and sometimes resists, the discourses of local official and state culture. On the fringes of the imperial map, soft power no longer depends on Tokyo or Silicon Valley, but on networks of solidarity, the gift economy, and the creativity of those who choose to appropriate it despite all borders.
IX. Final reflections: soft power on the periphery of the empire
At the beginning of this work, I raised an uncomfortable asymmetry: Japan, fourth in the 2025 Global Soft Power Index, and no Latin American country among the top thirty. After examining the framework of the three diplomacies, the cases of Brazil and Mexico, the structural challenges, and the extreme case of Cuba, this gap becomes better explained—and, above all, politicized.
What is clear is where Japan's advantage does not lie: not in the pure cultural appeal measured by the GSPI, nor in a cultural offensive comparable to that of South Korean K-pop. Rather, it lies in something quieter and older: generations of Latin American consumers who grew up with Saint Seiya, Dragon Ball, or Pokémon on broadcast television and who today maintain, perhaps without fully realizing it, a relationship with Japan mediated almost entirely by corporations—Nintendo, Bandai Namco, Crunchyroll—rather than by embassies or cultural programs. It is the corporate diplomacy that Barrón Soto and González Monte de Oca (2025) describe as functioning, quite literally, as the most active of the three pillars.
But fieldwork also complicates the linear success story. Behind the growth figures lies an unresolved tension between cultural popularity and commercial exploitation—mass consumption that doesn't always translate into licenses, royalties, or formal business—and a cultural clash in the perception of piracy that requires both education and litigation. Generative artificial intelligence threatens to make this problem even harder to contain.
What this article has sought to demonstrate, however, is something deeper: Japanese soft power in Latin America is not a uniform policy toward “the region,” but rather an uneven geometry dictated by two intertwined hegemonies. In large markets (Brazil, Mexico), Japanese corporate diplomacy is successful, but it is outsourced to US technology and streaming oligopolies, which control distribution and monetization. In blockaded markets (Cuba), the extraterritorial jurisdiction of US imperialism forces Japanese corporations to abandon the territory, demonstrating that, in the hemisphere, the sovereignty of third countries and their relations with Asian powers are subordinated to Washington’s designs.
Japanese soft power in Latin America is, ultimately, a phenomenon that occurs through and despite US hegemony. Understanding this tension is fundamental to Latin American studies, as it reminds us that, in our region, no foreign culture—not even that of the world's fourth-largest soft power—escapes the long shadow of empire. It also reminds us that, on the fringes of that empire, as the Cuban case demonstrates, popular communities continue to find ways to appropriate, hybridize, and resignify global culture, constructing forms of autonomy that neither Tokyo nor Washington can fully capture.
Highlighted
Barrón Soto, María Cristina and González Montes De Oca, Andrés. (2025). The cultural image of Japan in Latin America: diplomacy, soft power and student perceptions in Mexico, Peru and Chile (Latin American Monographs Series No. 33). Institute of Ibero-American Studies, Sophia University.
BrandFinance. (2025). Global Soft Power Index 2025. https://static.brandirectory.com/reports/brand-finance-soft power-index-2025-digital.pdf
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Faletto, Enzo. (2002). Dependency and Development in Latin America. Siglo XXI Editores.
Dorfman, Ariel and Mattelart, Armand. (1971). How to Read Donald Duck. Siglo XXI Editores.
Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters. (2024). New Cool Japan Strategy. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. https://www.cas.go.jp/jp/seisakukaigi/titeki2/chitekizaisan2024/pdf/siryou4_e.pdf Intellectual Property Strategy
Headquarters. (2025). Intellectual Property Strategic Program 2025. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. Japan External Trade Organization Mexico Office. (2026). Report on the Content Market in Mexico. JETRO.
Japan External Trade Organization São Paulo Office. (2025). Brazil Market Report on Anime-Related Services and Products. JETRO.
Nye, Joseph. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Public Affairs.
Quijano, Aníbal. (2024). Coloniality of power and social classification. Journal of World-Systems Research, 11(2), 342-386. https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/228/240
Torres Rodríguez, Alejandro, Fonseca Muñoz, Beatriz, Villafaña Cruz, Jennifer, and González Martín, Olga Rosa. (2026). From the screen to the feed: The cultural consumption of anime and the construction of otaku identity in Cuban digital communities. Estudios del Desarrollo Social: Cuba y América Latina, 14(1), 123–137. https://revistas.uh.cu/revflacso/article/view/12421/10721
