Cool Japan: the relationships between the state and the cultural industries

4.5 Conclusion

The aim of this chapter was to explain how Japanese pop culture has been disseminated worldwide. This chapter provided evidence of the global spread of Japanese popular culture. It is first in East Asia in the end of the 1970s that the diffusion of this culture started. Whilst it is true that anime began to be aired in Europe at that time, it is really during the 1990s that Japanese pop culture became massively consumed in Europe. In the US, its massive consumption started in the 1990s as well.

The agents of the spread of Japanese pop culture are Japan’s cultural industries, local distributors, pirates and fans. Of course, fans have used piracy (scanlations, fansubs, unauthorized reproductions of tapes etc.) to disseminate Japanese pop culture. Nevertheless, they are driven by their love for this culture in contrast to for-profit pirates. Japanese companies have commercialized their products abroad but they have been confronted with legal restrictions and/or censorships. In Taiwan and South Korea, there was even a complete ban on the imports of their products. Since its beginning, Japan’s video games industry, in contrast to anime studios and manga publishers, has embraced the exports of their merchandises. The European and American manga markets demonstrate the significant role played by local distributors in the global growth of Japanese popular culture.

Piracy was of paramount importance for the emergence of East Asian markets. It popularized Japanese pop culture in this region by selling illegal versions of Japanese products to new customers at cheap prices. It complemented the efforts made by Japanese companies and their local representatives to create markets. Moreover, piracy paved the way for the legal commercialization of Japan’s pop culture products in South Korea and Taiwan when the ban was lifted. The massive consumption of Japan’s pop culture in East Asia demonstrates the failure of East Asian states to control the cultural consumption of the local population. Whereas in the 1990s physical piracy disseminated Japanese pop culture mainly in this region, the main driver since the 2000s has been online piracy, making it much more problematic for states to fight it. In East Asia, some states such as mainland China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam have been lax with the implementation of copyright.

In Europe and the US, anime was the first Japanese pop culture product to be commercialized. The broadcasting of anime paved the way for the boom of manga because anime created an audience for manga. The localization of such products has been more or less pronounced. In some cases, it has involved censorship of some scenes. In the US, the continual anime’s copyright infringement by fans created a community which provoked the boom of anime in the 1990s.

Based on this chapter, it is clear that it is not the Japanese state which initiated the global spread of Japan’s pop culture. It is more accurate to argue that it reacted to it. Keeping in mind this important point, the next chapter will deal with the Cool Japan policy led by the Japanese state.

Chapter 5: The Cool Japan policy

5.1 Introduction

The Cool Japan policy has two aims: firstly, to boost the exports of the Japanese cultural industries; secondly, to present a friendly image of Japan abroad. State actors involved in this policy range from the METI and the MOFA to the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters (IPSH) established by the Cabinet Office and the MIC. There is also a minister of the Cool Japan strategy in the current Abe government, Tsuruho Yōsuke. Agencies include the Agency for Cultural Affairs which is under the auspices of the MEXT, the Japan Foundation, the JETRO, and the Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) which is under the supervision of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT). In addition, the J-LOP, the J-LOP+, and the Cool Japan Fund were created as part of the Cool Japan policy.

The analysis of the Cool Japan policy in this chapter demonstrates its complexity because many state actors are involved in its implementation. Furthermore, the “Cool Japan craze” (Matsui, 2014) among ministries is another instance of jurisdictional competition, that is to say sectionalism, in the Japanese developmental state. Cooperation and coordination are a tricky issue because the bureaucrats of each ministry want to protect their own domains and tend to apprehend Cool Japan according to their own jurisdictional competences. Even if the ministries and agencies try to coordinate their actions, this policy is not always well coordinated as a result of the sectionalism of the bureaucracy.

Evidence is provided in this chapter that the Cool Japan policy can be regarded as an industrial policy because the state wants to improve the business environment of the cultural industries, and more generally of the creative industries, to boost their exports on the assumption that they will stimulate economic growth and create jobs. This echoes the definition of an industrial policy offered in the Introduction. In addition, two characteristics of the developmental state (see Chapter 2, Section 2.3.1) are confirmed below: the institutional links between the METI and the CESA, the AJA, and the two informal associations representing the manga publishers; as well as the willingness of state actors dissatisfied by the current situation of the cultural industries to promote their overseas development.

This chapter has two sections. The first one deals with the state actors that promote the expansion of the Japanese cultural industries into the foreign markets. It details the role of the Cabinet Office which initiated Cool Japan by setting up the IPSH in March 2003. Then, the policy conducted by the METI, and the activities of the J-LOP, the J-LOP+, and the Cool Japan Fund are examined. This section also considers the role of the JETRO, the MIC, the JTA, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs. The second section analyzes how the MOFA and the Japan Foundation, through the cultural industries, hope to diffuse a friendly image of Japan overseas in order to promote Japan’s soft power.

As explained earlier (see Chapter 1, Section 1.3.3), the terms “cultural industries” and “content industries” are used interchangeably in this thesis. The creative industries comprise the cultural industries and also include the sectors of food, fashion, design, craftwork, tourism and so on (METI, 2014a: 11). Therefore, Cool Japan has a very broad meaning.