Though you may be tempted to hear the word “diplomacy” and imagine leaders in stuffy suits shaking hands, their pictures forever inked unsmiling into even stuffier, impenetrable textbooks, the truth of cultural diplomacy, particularly coming out of Japan, is about as vibrant and bombastic as you can get. Owing much to Japanese cartoons (anime) and comic books (manga), cultural exchange between Japan and other nations is now a literal page-turner. At the 2024 Olympics in Paris, record numbers of international athletes (think the US, Spain, Colombia, France, etc.) took to their events striking famous poses from One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, Dragon Ball, and other legendary works from across Japan, drawing the cheers and applause of recognizant fans the world over.

During their modern origins post-WWII, anime and manga were inspired by classic western cartoons like Disney and Betty Boop. The tides have since turned. Now, endless anime fan-projects, adaptations, collaborations, and crossovers permeate the western (and international) entertainment landscape, drawing thousands in anime costumes to events like Fan Expo and Anime Expo across North America and beyond (costumes that even appear on Halloween, now and then). This inseparability of Japanese and western fan culture is itself a kind of cultural diplomacy, the kind that sees Japanese and international fans brought together at conventions, powerless to communicate by language except for the lingua franca of dramatic posing, smiling, and pointing to elaborate costumes as if to say, “I know that character!” Anime and manga, as visual mediums, transcend the barriers of language. In this way, the spiky haired, superhuman Goku from Dragon Ball is often a more effective interface of cultural exchange than speech itself, his iconic “Kamehameha!” pose (also emulated by Olympic athletes last year) a completely wordless, utterly emphatic “So, we have an understanding, right?”