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NEWS: "Cool Japan" Initiative Gets Government Investment Fund

Capsule hotels? They sound cool, but it's more of a scary concept than it is actually "cool" to most people here. If anything, the stuff is "fascinating," but too far a world for most Westerners to understand or truly care about seeing with their own eyes in today's world.

Well, I certainly can't see why anyone wouldn't want to sleep in a hotel that had more in common with a Morgue than any other kind of accommodation.

10 billion yen (about US$100,000)

50 billion yen (US$500,000)

460 trillion yen (US$462 million)

Well, I certainly can't see why anyone wouldn't want to sleep in a hotel that had more in common with a Morgue than any other kind of accommodation.

As a government official from Outbreak Company said, having the government promote anime and manga will end badly.

There are a number of problems with Cool Japan, starting with the fact that the government ministers involved in promoting it aside from Aso are a bunch of old curmudgeons who wouldn't know cool if it bit them. Most of them are tangentially aware that foreigners enjoy anime and such, and are keen to tap that interest economically, but they don't understand the first thing about the subject.

Fortunately, they're smart enough to realize this and go looking for experts. Unfortunately, the council they've selected is made up of similarly crusty old executives and traditional cultural representatives who are more interested in improving the bottom line of their own companies than helping budding artists and entrepreneurs get ahead on the international market, and are themselves largely removed from the aspects of Japanese pop culture that resonate overseas.

Chris asks:

You can find anime cover songs on iTunes pretty easily (and even some theme songs, albeit completely divorced from their anime of origin), but why are so few actual anime soundtracks on there? They're not even on the Japanese iTunes store, I checked.

If there's one place where Japanese and American media are completely divergent, it's music. Japan's music industry is a bizarre, frustrating collection of old-school publishers, talent agencies, yakuza, talent agencies that act like yakuza, and all sorts of other characters that often don't play nice with each other, let alone foreign companies. They move slowly, don't adapt to internet culture well (or at all), and attach themselves onto inane rules that seem to have no basis in reality, and won't bend for anyone. It's one of many reasons why so few Japanese musical acts have ever hit outside of Asia.

That little consumer revolution didn't really happen in Japan the same way it did here. Japan has had its issues with piracy, but it never completely took over the market like it did here. Japanese publishers relied more on collectors than casual music consumers, and simply didn't need a savior.

And so, things haven't changed over there nearly as much. People still buy a LOT of CDs, and as evidence, there are still quite a few CD stores, including chains like Tower Records and HMV that have long since died out on this side of the Pacific. Japanese record labels and talent agencies still hold tightly onto business practices and rules that seem to ignore the very existence of the internet.

Where are the representatives of J-rock labels? Sci-fi authors? Cutting-edge manga-ka? Software engineers? AKB48 and tea ceremony are about as interesting to most Westerners as Ukiyo-e. The closest thing they have to someone who has knowledge of material that would appeal to a sizeable foreign audience is the head of Kadokawa, but he's many steps removed from their publishing division and I'm not sure he has the background to really know what is and isn't marketable overseas.

It's great that the Japanese government wants to invest in their cultural capital, but if they want that money put to good use, they need it to be directed by a larger body with a better understanding of what is truly popular, both in Japan and in the wider world, that can see to it that the money benefits the Japanese tourism and entertainment industry as a whole, rather than just to prop up the poorly planned attempts by council members to market their own company's products.

bhl88 wrote:

As a government official from Outbreak Company said, having the government promote anime and manga will end badly.

That will depend on how Japan govt know how to effectively pull this off. It work for Korea and look where K-dramas and K-pop is right now. If Japan can pull this off the right way and correctly, then maybe anime and manga will have another golden age and Japan may end up having it's own Hallyu.