Hug of death

Will Japan's content industries survive the government's efforts to promote them?

You can be loved or you can be feared.

In a January interview, the White House’s chief of staff declared that we live in a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” signaling America’s choice to take the latter path.

Japan, on the other hand, seems dedicated to the former. In February, Japanese government officials announced a plan to expand the size of the nation’s content production industry, meaning its books, manga, anime, games, movies, and more, to $130 billion USD by 2033.

Is this a realistic goal? That’s another story, one I tackled last month. But let’s put the punditry aside and say they succeed – that the Japanese government manages to create the world’s first true fantasy-industrial complex, a government and private industry working together to make content a pillar of the nation’s economy. (What about Korea, you might ask? They are a pop-cultural powerhouse, but the nation’s fortunes still rest upon the physical products it produces — content currently only accounts for 2% of their economy.) The question then becomes: what are the broader implications of linking a nation’s economic well-being to its entertainment industry? In other words, what happens when a country doesn’t simply promote its pop culture but comes to depend on it?

I’ve written for years about how Japan’s network of cultural producers has won hearts and minds around the globe – how their efforts have contributed to Japan’s considerable soft power. But that was an organic development, entirely grass roots, the product of countless creators and consumers collaborating over many years to build one of the most vibrant environments for pop culture on the planet. The government is well aware of its nation’s reputation as a pop superpower, but it played little role in making it so.

What about the Cool Japan fund? Notoriously ineffective. Critics (who include the fund’s own CEO) frame this as a bad thing. But I think otherwise. The scandals, the questionable investments (Cars? Refrigerators!?), and general ineptitude are a blessing in disguise. I say this with no schadenfreude. The Cool Japan bureaucrats I’ve met all seem like good folks. I say it because a government getting involved in the production of fantasies has huge implications for societies. And to be frank, I don’t think any of the architects behind Japan’s big push have really thought them through.

But I heard the government is taking a hands-off approach, one might argue. Indeed, “no interference in the content of creative works” is one of the five key principles of the government’s freshly announced Entertainment and Creative Industries Policy. This was predictably misinterpreted by foreign culture warriors as being about the supposed censorship of material abroad. Never miss an opportunity to bash those translators, right? But it is in fact entirely about freedom of expression in Japan. The Takaichi administration’s push arguably represents the government’s most substantive involvement in Japan’s pop-cultural machine since World War II, when toy companies were compelled to produce war materiel and publishers patriotic propaganda.

Freedom of expression is a good thing, most of us will agree. But free speech is where the problems will begin, and compound, for the Japanese government. If the authorities are really going to take an active stand in promoting everything, without interfering in those creative works, they’re going to find themselves associated with things that get, well, creative with social norms. More than that, things that anger and disgust.

The dark matter of Japan’s pop-cultural industry is huge amounts of edgy content. Some of it is quite disturbing. (Don’t worry, that isn’t a risky click: it’s a link to the time I got “lolicon” into The New Yorker.) I’m not a fan of this material, but I’ve always believed that the freedom Japanese artists feel to go places that polite society doesn’t, is part of what gives the content industry such vitality here. I mean, even if you aren’t producing crazy stuff, the knowledge that nothing’s off limits has to unshackle imaginations. Or shackle them. I don’t judge.

Anyway, promoting the industry as a whole doesn’t equal endorsement of any given content, right? The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers, blah blah blah, right? Right. But also wrong. Because once you’ve made Content with a capital C the pillar of your nation’s economy, this stuff is now your official face to the world. That includes all of the skeevy stuff that freaks people out, in Japan and elsewhere. And the implications of that are downright existential, as in “can a nation really exist on pop culture alone?”

Consider a public discussion that unfolded at a festival sponsored by Niconico, the Japanese streaming platform that allows users to freely spam messages atop videos, giving it a unique YouTube meets Tourette’s Syndrome kind of feel. Onstage were the CEO of Kadokawa and cabinet minister Kimi Onoda, whom you might know better as the “Minister in Charge of a Society of Well-Ordered and Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals.”

But Onoda, whose title ironically makes foreign nationals feel as though they’re about to be ushered off to some kind of camp, very harmoniously of course, wasn’t there to talk about getting rid of pesky foreigners. She was there in her other capacity, which is selling Japanese content to them. For Onoda is also the Overfiend – I mean, overseer! Overseer of the Cool Japan initiative. The plot thickens. The Takaichi administration has been effusive about the potential Japan’s content industries as a vague whole, but it has released precious few details as to how it actually plans to achieve its goals. Onoda’s comments represented a rare window into the government’s thinking.

And they were a very mixed bag. When asked what the government needs to do to support the growth of the content industry ten years out, Onoda opines that Japan’s patchwork of game, comic, and anime production companies all work in their own ways that it’s tough for employees to use the skills they’ve learned in one firm at another, so the government should step in and create standards. This makes little sense – the government is going to compel every company to make content the same way?

(I should note that the entire time she’s speaking, viewers are streaming messages encouraging her across the screen, such as “Don’t let foreigners steal from Japan!” “Political correctness makes me 🤮” “Don’t let Japan become a third world country!” and, getting right to the point, “Down with foreigners!”)

“What the country needs to do,” she continues beneath the flurry of racist missives, “is take the stance that, no matter what creators make, no matter what problems it causes abroad, that we’re going to protect it. When content is exported abroad... viewers either get into it or get upset and come over and express outrage, or when creators get attacked, we as a country need to say ‘be quiet, this is made for Japan,’ so that creators feel free to keep making what they want to make, and that’s what we need to prepare ourselves for.” (To a text chorus of yeah! yeah! yeahs! from the unseen viewers.)

Yeah, indeed. Onoda’s delivery makes it clear that she envisions herself defending Japan’s pride and joy from all enemies domestic and foreign. What she misses is that Japan’s pride and joy isn’t the sort of content that’s going to cause problems. Japan’s most shameful stuff is.

In the Aughts, a Japanese pornographic video game called “Rapelay” caused scandals around the world leading to international letter-writing campaigns, official denouncements, and outright bans in numerous regions, including England, Australia, and all of North America. Putting aside the debate around the censoring of fantasies, this is precisely this kind of content that’s going to cause problems.

In the past, the Japanese government took a predictable approach to scandals like this, ignoring them until they went away. But when you’ve got your fingers in the pie, it’s impossible to be hands off. If the government is going to defend Japan’s content, it’s going to inevitably find itself defending the worst of it, not the best of it.

The big irony is that the secret sauce of Japan’s pop cultural success is that its government has a knack for staying out of the headlines for anything controversial, which allows consumers of all political leanings to project their values upon a blank slate.

The “Dark Matter” of Japan’s Fantasy-Industrial Complex

Now imagine Onoda, or any other official, speaking up in favor of a game like Rapelay: “Be quiet! This is made for Japan!” Not for nothing have I written previously that Japan is not ready for the culture wars. This is yet another example. And the culture wars are coming, as those screeds screaming across Niconico’s screens shows.

This paradox Japan faces is clear. It is banking, literally and figuratively, on the world loving it. Yet the content industries that have cultivated this love flourished because of the government’s lack of involvement, both in their industries and on the global political stage. The more the government involves itself in content production, the higher the chance that it will find itself dragged into politicized conflicts that will poison the well.

And really, does anyone want their government involved in their nation’s pop culture? America is currently governed largely on social media, its policies delivered through memes. If Japan doesn’t want to suffer a similar fate, it will need to navigate these waters far more carefully than its leaders seem to be doing.