Iron Chef is a Japanese television show in which cooks from around the world challenge the chefs of an eccentric millionaire. By appealing to audiences worldwide, Iron Chef epitomized a new trend in international media trade — a conspicuous rise in the exports of made-in-Japan media entertainment. Scholars have argued that this trend testifies to a shift in Japan’s status in the realm of soft power. This article uses the case of Iron Chef as an entry point to discuss the analytical limitations of the soft power discourse in theorizing shifting patterns of cultural globalization. I argue that this discourse fails to capture the complexities of how cable networks use and how viewers respond to imported media entertainment. I conclude that soft power is a tale of Euro-American modernity that renationalizes transnational cultural traffic in reaction to anxieties that the decentering forces of global capitalism will corrupt the sovereignty of the nation-state.
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