I am a specialist in Japanese politics, but I was in Lexington, Virginia when the Japanese triple disasters of March 2011—the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdowns—happened. At the time, I had a habit of waking up each morning to the Japanese public NHK television news that I got through a special subscription to a satellite channel and watched on an aging TV. I remember that about two weeks after the disaster, when I was spending most of my free time following its aftermath on satellite NHK, I burst into uncontrollable tears watching a feature about a couple who had lost their home and neighbors but were able to see photos of their lost dog on a recovered version of the data from their waterlogged computer’s hard drive. The story was about a technically adept volunteer helping survivors recover their digital records. I canceled my subscription to the Japanese channel and moved the old TV out of my bedroom.

I share this moment because it is what came home to me—and it came hard—as I read the last part of David Leheny’s Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline. Using a qualitative analysis of public texts such as political leaders’ speeches, academic reports, and popular film, Leheny’s book examines affective discourse about community in a range of unexpected cases. These cases include, among others, the fraught US and Japanese negotiations over raising the training ship Ehime Maru, whose accidental sinking by the US Navy killed nine Japanese crew members; the Japanese state’s efforts to promote the nation’s international stature through a “soft power” Cool Japan initiative; and the wild popularity of Caramel Box, a theater group that promotes nostalgic tales of individual strength and the triumph of good Japanese values in times of adversity. Leheny argues that often, rather than responding to tragedies such as the sinking of the Ehime Maru or the unrelenting social erosion produced by Japan’s slow but unabated economic decline with political demands or concrete policy changes, political and pop culture leaders resort to an aesthetics of community that encourages Japanese to turn away from real suffering toward a nostalgic celebration of what is presented as a unique emotional culture.

Readers of The Empire of Hope will find themselves pulled along through compelling and well-written stories about the Japanese popular obsession with helping Vietnamese attached twins, those who suffer from exposure to Agent Orange used by the United States during the Vietnam War, or official attempts to the use the toy Hello Kitty to prop up Japan’s global position. The book does a nice job of demonstrating what affective politics is without bogging us down in theoretical jargon. But at its start, The Empire of Hope was a challenge for me. I could see how each of the distinct stories highlights a use of affective politics to paste over failed policy and intense human costs. But I was unsure whether these cases, when put together, made a coherent argument about either Japan’s international relations or domestic politics.

Then, in the penultimate chapter, Leheny takes on the relationship between social science and the politics of optimism. He recounts his own volunteer work in an evacuee center after the triple disasters of 3/11, as an awkward foreign social scientist lacking many relevant skills for managing trauma. He also examines at length the work of fellow social scientists engaged in the Tokyo University Institute of Social Science-sponsored kibōgaku, or “Social Sciences of Hope” project, whose long-term research field, Kamaishi, a declining rural community in northeast Japan, suddenly was at the center of the tsunami destruction zone.

Before the disaster hit its field site, the kibōgaku group worked to map factors—such as social network ties—that might contribute to revitalization. After the disaster, Kamaishi was heralded for the fact that all but two of its 600 junior high school students saved themselves from the incoming tsunami by insisting on moving higher and higher into the hills near their school’s site, whereas in other communities children perished in schools that used more cautious approaches. Observers attributed the Kamaishi students’ confident actions to the sense of self-reliant optimism that they developed in part through disaster preparation training and, some said, in part through inspiration they had taken from the kibōgaku scholar Genda Yūji, who had told them at a pre-disaster school assembly that his life’s goal was to die “still having dreams” (p. 171). Leheny examines writing by Genda Yūji, one of the leaders of the kibōgaku group, as well as a report by a redevelopment council in which Genda played a significant role. The redevelopment council report, “Hope Beyond the Disaster,” argues that disaster areas’ sense of agency will be essential to their rebuilding; to create that sense of agency, they will need hope, which they must cultivate through “linkages” across various social and economic categories; local people and outsiders; local, regional, and national governments; and private and public sector actors (p. 180).

Leheny debates whether the report is a form of what theorist Laurent Berlant calls “cruel optimism” (p. 181). He stops short of such a piercing critique, suggesting instead that “hope might become something akin to a placeholder for something else: perhaps worry, perhaps grief, perhaps even outrage” (pp. 181–82). Throughout the book, I sensed that the worry, grief, and maybe especially the outrage were also Leheny’s. His raw account of his own desperate sense of ineffectiveness in the face of the disasters startled me into my own troubling memories of watching the disasters on television in my Virginia mountain home. I was also shaken by his painstaking recounting of how, both before and after the disasters, the kibōgaku scholars found that citizens in the grips of structural decline (or a massive disaster’s aftermath) should create hope by pursuing Tocquevillian associational life. I am also a social scientist who has worked in the civil society research field where such approaches were born.

In Leheny’s discussion of the well-meaning but also helpless engagement of the kibōgaku group with pre- and postdisaster Kamaishi, I saw in clear relief what he meant when he wrote that “even socially conscious scholars” get wrapped up in the “official story” of hope, “a melodrama of the national reclamation of innocence as an essential part of a country’s better future” (p. 147). We do not have a means of talking about or working with inevitable decline or of honestly engaging tragic communal loss. We are scholars in fields born to serve the engines of economic growth, to keep the global markets chugging along, to keep the workers fed, the consumers (sort of) safe. But in a world where this cannot any longer be our role, where the globe cannot withstand this sort of energy, where the liberal political coalitions that have relied on it are crumbling and opening the doors to terrifying alternatives, we, too, sell soft power and network theories of the sources of economic well-being and community resilience programs. Because we, too, like the political and pop culture leaders Leheny studies, are mostly just selling a low-art affect.

In a sense, Empire of Hope is best understood not as a book about how nations use sentimental politics, but rather, especially in its rich final chapters, as about the empty agenda of liberal politics and its allied social science in the postindustrial world. The cases Leheny treats will be valuable histories for Japanologists in several fields, including political science, sociology, and anthropology. And his reflections on the social science response to Japan’s triple disasters have much to say to scholars well beyond Japan studies.