Here’s my impression of Cool Japan.
The basic economic policy in the post-bubble Japan is one that generally conforms to what was hotly debated during the latter part of the last decade, and well into the 2012–the economics of government spending (in both actual spending and tax cuts) and its impact on the greater economy. Cool Japan, in spirit, is just another form of government spending aimed to develop or rehabilitate a specific industry sector.
And then, there’s this.
I think here’s the problem. What makes Japan “cool” will vary from person to person. But what made Japanese pop cultural product profitable to the Japanese is not necessarily cool, and it doesn’t vary from person to person at all–it’s factual. It’s even translated into English. Cool Japan is kind of a misnomer–it’s more like “We-used-to-make-money-selling-cartoon-characters Japan.” But maybe some consider sending children to the hospital because your cartoons are too crazy psychedelic, a cool thing. In other words, Cool Japan, as the otaku know it, really started and ended with Pokemon. Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Ninja Scroll are not much more than an appetizer, a place mat. They are just more examples of Redline–cool and acclaimed stuff that makes relatively little amounts of money (Although over the years all three titles raked in good money, by some metrics). All that stuff made maybe a drop in the bucket in the larger scope of thing. You don’t have to take my word for it. In the US, we are talking about 4, 5 billions of dollars. Referencing back to the JETRO report, I think most of that “character good” bar graphs is just Pokemon money. And maybe some Yugioh stuff.
https://twitter.com/kransomwastaken/status/361860898714947584
What bothered me with Surat’s story wasn’t that it lacks any kind of numbers to back up his claims. Or that it’s awfully US-centric (as I am often). Well, actually what bothered me the most is that the term Pokemon didn’t appear once. He kind of mentioned Power Rangers, which was a big deal in terms of Japanese profits and is a driver of a lot of early Cool Japan literature in the US, but he didn’t really talk about that in such contexts (It’s one of the biggest cultural export from Japan in the 90s I thought). He didn’t have to quote any numbers. He only omitted the potentially most important stuff.
Well, that may be okay. None of it really matter to the heart of his argument, which is that Cool Japan might be something some people parroted, a fabricated narrative in which promoted certain interests in light of this capital spending trend by the government. I would think that’s what all the Japanese kids are saying anyway. And as much as I cast lots of my own concerns with the reports and numbers I linked in this post thus far, I got nothing to prove it the other way. There are no indication whatsoever that Nintendo did not make a bijillion bux on Pokemon, or why Konami or whoever was in court with Upper Deck for a couple years. That’s where “Cool Japan” really lives. It’s about China/rest of Asia. It’s about Japan’s strange fashion industry. It’s about sushi. It’s really not about Akira. It’s actually about video games, right? I mean, the cultural cache value, if such a thing is defined, of FF7, is maybe 10 times larger than Cowboy Bebop.
With all that said, I think it’s good to criticize Cool Japan in the sense that it’s tax money going into certain industries that may very well not going to put that money into good use. After all, it’s a form of export, not exactly domestic spending. And Japanese politics is not quite that shining image of “acting for the public benefit.” But then again this money is the kind of money that footed the bills of things like Little Witch Academia and Death Billiards, so as beneficiaries of Cool Japan, it might not be in our place to really say much about that.
Well, no, we can still not like Cool Japan. Because until they solve this problem…well, I guess they are trying? It is a face thing isn’t it. I wonder if that ever crosses Koike’s mind.
PS. And here is Roland Kelts on Cool Japan 2013. You tell me what his take is.
PPS. Hello Kitty is a pretty cool story.
PPPS. This post is brought to you by XKCD.
July 30th, 2013 at 4:47 am
Well, sitting here in the China/rest of Asia, I can definitely say that Cool Japan is working…sort of, in as far as anime/manga at least, even the gross kind that’s not Miyazaki/Ghibli U.S. mainstream fodder is big. It has much bigger penetration among kids. Local TV dubs relatively recent shows into the vernacular, and Animax Asia brings Singaporean English dubs from the same 3 westerners living in SG to everyone.
Part of the reason is since internet penetration is lower media consumption models are more traditional, so the majority still get their anime watching TV direct, just like the Japs do.
The whole “bootleg HK subs or burned fansubs on DVD” model persists, and manga tends to be imported from the states in a 3-step chain of unprofitability, so Cool Japan as an effort to spur merchandise/disc sales is still probably a failure here, but as a soft power effort, it’s a success, which is probably the better feel-good metric anyway.
Nobody cares about dorama though. That’s all Taiwan.
July 30th, 2013 at 11:17 am
I had a talk with one of my Japanese colleagues about this last week. She thinks “Cool Japan” is just being used by Japanese companies to make money. It’s a trend that they’re willing to exploit.
I think a bigger concern is that, with a few notable exceptions, the majority of “Cool Japan” doesn’t seem to value fan input and feedback. I understand Roland’s frustration and Danny Choo’s too, since he’s working with the gov’t now. They are trying to emphasize two-way communication more.
July 30th, 2013 at 4:24 pm
“Being used by Japanese companies to make money” is kind of the TL;DR version of what I’m trying to say.
July 30th, 2013 at 2:04 pm
“Cool Japan” is a problem because it’s ahistorical and conflates tons of different cultural products together.
“Japan’s Gross National Cool” was originally about leveraging Japan’s pop culture in general, rather than being just an anime/manga thing. Of course, part of what I believe was missed here is that Japan had been leveraging much of its pop culture for decades, especially in Asia. Japan was already known for Sony and Nintendo and whatnot, so this wasn’t anything new. The goal though was the “leveraging” aspect, not just “selling more shit”. (Of course, the reason that Japan’s soft power wasn’t really any power at all was because there was no ideology behind it in the way that American pop culture gave it soft power during the Cold War.)
Then, “Cool Japan” has gotten appropriated to really mean like “Get gaijins to buy anime”, which was like supposed to be this small fraction compared to like Hello Kitty and selling doramas in Taiwan and whatnot.
(Also, it pre-dates things like the growth of Korea’s entertainment industries or the waning importance of Japan in video games and consumer electronics.)
July 30th, 2013 at 4:23 pm
The Korean comment is appropriate, although the latest Cool Japan initiative addresses this somewhat in the literature.
Can you explain why conflating different cultural products is a problem?
July 31st, 2013 at 2:27 pm
Because within anime circles, people start associating “Cool Japan” entirely with anime rather than it being about Japanese pop culture in general. This then also leads back to how it’s noticeably easier to push things like J-Pop or horror movies (back in like 2002 when that was a thing, not in 2013 when it isn’t a thing any more) as “cool” than it is to try to push like My Little Junior High Incest Fantasy Can’t Be This Unmarketetable Overseas-type anime as “cool”. Similarly, the biggest anime related stuff in America was stuff that wasn’t “cool”, like Pokemon (and at the same time, Pokemon is also a good example of exactly the sort of property that the whole Cool Japan thing was hoping to emulate.)
July 31st, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Here is Kelts on Cool Japan, elaborated
http://japanamerica.blogspot.com/2013/07/japan-throws-cash-at-pop-culture-pop.html
September 5th, 2015 at 7:00 pm
I know this is written in 2013. And 3 years later, Cool Japan seem to be ineffective and probably a failure and here’s why:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/03/21/music/japan-needs-to-rebrand-for-sxsw/#.VetuChFVhBc
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/14/who-gets-to-decide-japan-is-cool.html
Even this year Gackt has blasted Cool Japan and citing South Korea being better at representing their pop culture better then Japan:
http://en.rocketnews24.com/2015/07/03/gackt-lashes-out-at-cool-japan-almost-no-results-of-japanese-culture-exported-overseas/
http://www.sbs.com.au/popasia/blog/2015/07/08/gackt-has-asked-what-it-is-that-cool-japan-does
Meanwhile South Korea has already been acknowledged to have outcool Japan:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/08/opinion/yang-korea-cool/
http://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/how-korea-became-the-worlds-coolest-brand
http://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/Culture/view?articleId=121047
Even now, Japanese classes in US has decline for the last few years according to a latest report from MLA:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/11/mla-report-shows-declines-enrollment-most-foreign-languages
As you can see between 2009-2013, Japanese classes decline 7.8% while at the same time Korean language classes jumped up 45%. We’ve been getting a lot of anime streaming on Crunchyroll, and Hulu in Japanese w/ English sub and yet Japanese classes in US has decline. So anime is not making people learning Japanese language at all. The report doesn’t say why Japanese classes in US decline but please don’t use the “Japanese language is so hard to non-native speaker or of non-Japanese decent, maybe that’s why it’s on the decline” as an excuse. If that was the case, then Chinese would’ve decline too (according to the report, Chinese language in US went up 2% in that same time period). Chinese is just as hard as Japanese, and yet Chinese language classes didn’t decline like Japanese did according to the recent MLA report.
The 45% jumped in Korean language classes got a lot of attention from US and Korean media:
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-korean-language-20150401-story.html
http://www.voanews.com/content/enrollment-in-korean-language-classes-growing/2731075.html
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/03/397263103/way-more-college-students-are-studying-korean-is-hallyu-why
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2015/04/06/Korean-language-courses-soar-in-popularity-at-US-universities/3881428332976/
http://iamkoream.com/korean-language-enrollment-at-u-s-colleges-sees-sharp-rise/
And they cited the popularity of K-pop and K-dramas as the reason for the spiked in the Korean language classes in US colleges. So what does that say, Cool Japan didn’t work at all.
Even now, other aspect of Japanese pop culture has not gotten the same critical acclaim as their Korean counterpart like for example, J-music/J-pop still has accessibility issue:
http://blog.onehallyu.com/japanese-entertainment-101-accessibility/
And people on Dramafever complain about the lack of J-dramas:
http://www.dramafever.com/forums/threads/why-doesn-t-dramafever-add-more-japanese-dramas/4255c4d6271947e2ba2abdefebd6c109/
I mean Viki and Crunchyroll does get 1 or 2 J-dramas now and then, but the catalog for J-dramas on US streaming sites is very small compared to the # of Korean and Taiwanese dramas we’re getting.
Japan is not learning anything from South Korea, and I can safely say this: Cool Japan is pretty much a failure. South Korea has played this game better. Taiwan are learning from their Korean counterpart and now are keen to rival South Korea in the pop culture mass export game. So Taiwan, not Japan will probably (depend on if Taiwan get it right) rival South Korea because Taiwan has launched it’s own wave before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Wave
In my opinion, I think Taiwan has the expertise and the know-how on how to replicate their wave on a global level. So Taiwan will be the one to rival South Korea. I don’t think Japan can rival South Korea if Japanese entertainment industry continue to make their stuff inaccessible to foreigners.
I apologize for this rant, but it’s the truth and it may surprise all of you. I know it’s hard to believe that back in early 2000’s, people said Japan was the coolest:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2000-02-15/asian-hipsters-japan-hot-u.s-not
Now it’s no longer what it was, Japan’s former colony which is South Korea has now outcool it’s colonizer and many people today was so surprised that South Korea was able to outcool Japan.
September 6th, 2015 at 9:01 am
I think you missed the point about Cool Japan. A more convincing way to look at it would be via spending. South Korea probably outspends Japan by a lot…
September 6th, 2015 at 10:07 am
No, I understood your point. Remember, you written this in 2013, I’m showing you what happened to Cool Japan since your post. You did the right thing by criticizing Cool Japan, and now I’m helping increasing the criticism by showing you what went wrong and the real effect of the failure of Cool Japan. That’s why I included Gackt’s comment about Cool Japan and the decline of Japanese language classes in US as additional proof. I hope these help and why I was giving you these evidence.
September 6th, 2015 at 9:46 pm
The point behind Cool Japan as the common Japanese criticism is that it is government pork. The influence of anime and manga overseas is self-evident culturally, and honestly is besides the point (like much of your earlier comment).