The North Korean abduction issue has long been an important factor in Japan’s foreign policy towards the DPRK, the Japanese government has made attempts at raising awareness among people living...Show moreThe North Korean abduction issue has long been an important factor in Japan’s foreign policy towards the DPRK, the Japanese government has made attempts at raising awareness among people living outside of Japan through various media. This research set out to analyze how the Japanese government used emotion in a video posted on the government-run rachi.go.jp website, in an attempt at gaining the support of English-speaking viewers for its stance on the issue. In this way, the research contributes both to the fields of emotion in IR, as well as to the extant scholarly work on the abduction issue. I have carried out the analysis by using discourse analysis, as proposed by other scholars in the field of emotion in IR. From this analysis, I conclude that the Japanese government attempts to create three primary emotions in the viewer: compassion, hope and outrage. These three emotions are created through various visual, as well as audible symbols, ranging from colors used in the video to the music played while giving general information on the issue. While the intended emotions are successfully created in the viewer, the full potential effectiveness of the video is not reached due to a lack of circulation caused by the obscureness of the website which hosts it.Show less
There is an academic debate in scholarship on the question of how religion and nationalism relate to each other. This essay approaches the debate from a different angle by asking how the two...Show moreThere is an academic debate in scholarship on the question of how religion and nationalism relate to each other. This essay approaches the debate from a different angle by asking how the two notions relate to each other in propaganda posters centering around Khomeini and Atatürk. In combining propaganda analysis with semiotics and iconography, the essay finds a new approach to extract symbols of nationalism and religion that facilitates the comparison between the two different posters. From this analysis, it becomes clear that the relationship between nationalism and religion is more complex than the debate suggests.Show less
