Last week, the Institute of Geoeconomics hosted me for a discussion at the International House of Japan. I spoke with research fellow Gabriele Maletta about the Takaichi administration’s efforts to make pop culture a pillar of the Japanese economy. The talk was recorded in its entirety — click here or the image above to watch it!
Back in 2020, I wrote a book about Japan’s impact on the global imagination. I explored this through the concept of fantasy-delivery devices, which was the term I coined to describe inessential products that transformed lifestyles around the globe: things like the karaoke machine, anime and manga, Hello Kitty, the Walkman, the Game Boy, and more. Readers often ask me what comes next. Now the answer is clear. These devices represent the foundation of what I call a fantasy-industrial complex.
I define this as a governmental initiative in which official policies treat entertainment companies as part of the public sector, encouraging their growth for the explicit purpose of supporting the economic health of the nation. In normal human language, that means the government is throwing money at the manga, anime, video game, and film industries, hoping they make more, more, more. The goal is to raise exports, the promise of which is catnip to the leaders of a post-industrial Japan.
Other nations exploit pop culture for economic and diplomatic reasons, too. America is a big one. So are India and South Korea, of course. But none are proposing linking their economies to the entertainment industry on the scale that Japan is proposing. To paraphrase a famous mad scientist, where they’re going, there are no roads.
It’s an interesting idea, a kind of Hail Mary for a country facing relentless demographic decline. And as I say in the video, I hope it works — I want Japan to succeed. But as we discuss, there are many hurdles to making this policy a viable reality. One is the politicization of Japanese products by outside actors, as the President of the United States of America helpfully illustrated for us last week.
But perhaps the biggest is the fundamental premise that dumping (say) three times the amount of money into the entertainment industry will guarantee that it produces three times the number of megahits. For as anyone who’s worked in a creative field can attest, nobody, and I mean nobody, can tell you what’s going to break through and become the next big thing.
So in a sense, the Japanese government is gambling the nation’s future on what might be charitably called magical thinking. Are lawmakers runaway optimists? Or are they simply unaware of the risks? All topics of discussion at the link above (or right here.)