Throughout the semester the topic East Asian countries has been presented specifically in regards to their popular culture and its correlation with historical events. The one East Asian country that stood out was Japan due to its interesting history along with its well known popular culture that has extended throughout a multitude of various countries. In fact, Cool Japan is the expression used to describe the rise of Japan's soft power and prevalence internationally as a popular cultural influence. Japan is a chain of islands that prior to World War II prided themselves upon their military strength and economic skills. Although Japan relied on these traits in order to thrive, Japan’s actions within World War II forced them to change and rebuild their national image. Japan no was longer able rely on military and economic control for their national image, instead they were rebuilt on the foundation of cultural diplomacy. Japan realized that in order to establish peaceful diplomacy with other countries, a strong military was not necessarily the image that they needed. Instead, Japan built upon popular culture as its new non-military image in order to maintain healthy diplomacy and gain something new, soft power.

Popular culture within a country is extremely important due to the fact that it reinforces soft power. In order to simplify, Joseph Nye states in his book, Soft Power The Means to Success in World Politics, that hard power is essentially twisting someone's arm in order to obtain a desired outcome while soft power on the other hand involves the twisting of one's mind. Hard power is not very difficult to obtain and use seeing as how it relies solely on military power, but considering that Under the post-war constitution, Japan is not allowed to have offensive military forces, it is clear that they do not have the ability to have hard power meaning they must rely only on soft power. Although soft power is Japan’s one and only choice, it is not easy to obtain similar to hard power. Joseph Nye argues that soft power is harder to obtain due to the fact that many of its critical resources are outside of the government's control and that soft power sometimes take years to achieve the desired outcome. Although establishing a strong sense of popular culture is not an easy task, the western occupation of Japan played a large role in the creation of Japan’s popular culture. During the time after World War II when America occupied Japan, western culture was very prevalent in the everyday lives of Japanese citizens meaning that Japan was able to take aspects of western culture and apply it to different things such as video games and movies in order to make them more popular amongst western audiences which would therefore, increase their soft power.