This study analyses representations of Finland in three contemporary works: the fantasy manga and anime series Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by CLAMP, Haruki Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and Yōko Tawada’s dystopian novel Scattered All Over the Earth. We conduct the analysis using the concepts of nation/countrybranding, social imaginary, and the Self-Other dichotomy. The imagined Finland, with its cultural exports and stereotypes such as sisu ‘guts,perseverance’, nature, and Moomins, functions as a mirror image of Japan. In our data, Finland is used to code characters, advance the plot, and understand history.
Ceniccola et al. (Wed,) studied this question.