Corporate Cosmopolitanism, Glocalization and Cyber Ethno-Nationalism

This chapter examines the case of Nike Japan’s online commercial film You Can’t Stop Us: The Future Isn’t Waiting , which was a localized version of Nike’s global advertising campaign launched during the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020. Drawing on cosmopolitan themes of diversity and inclusion derived from its American version, Nike Japan’s commercial localized its narrative based on real-life stories of three young female football/soccer players who experienced bullying and racism in Japan. By deploying analyses of both contexts of production and consumption, the chapter reveals that the negative reactions to this Nike Japan’s ad was most likely driven by netto-uyoku or cyber ethno-nationalists in their attempt to turn the cyberspace into a platform for expressing their anti-China and anti-Korea sentiments and voicing their view of ethno-nationalism. Consequently, the chapter contends that, rather than interpreting such a backlash through the oversimplified frame of ‘an American company versus Japanese people’, there is a need to specifically locate the main actors and their practices of ideological formation at a micro level in order to examine the political dimension of cultural contestations between the right and the left and between the nationalist and the cosmopolitan.

Cosmopolitanism · Globalization · Glocalization · Nationalism · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism · Law