The Road towards a Cultural Promotion Policy in Contemporary Japan and the Beginning of a Campaign for the Strengthening of the National Identity

During the last pair of decades, Japanese culture has acquired a progressively greater importance among economic, cultural and academic spheres. At the beginning, the presence of Japanese popular culture products in markets around the world was produced by market forces and the Japanese government had not made any major moves to benefit from the growing interest that culture had been attracting towards the country at more general levels. Nevertheless, academic and economic analysts from Japan and the world began to notice the increasing global influence that cultural products of Japanese origin —such as anime, manga, video games, music and other contents— were gaining against the hegemony of American culture. It was after many calls for attention from specialists, several years of planning and projecting, as well as the economic and cultural promotion advances from other Asian powers, that the Japanese government released an official plan of policies for the promotion of the country’s cultural productivity. This article presents a contextualization and discussion of the establishment of these policies called ‘Cool Japan’. First, we examine the internal situation and external influences that prompted the recognition by the government of nationally produced popular culture as a key field for the support of the economy by means of the attraction of foreign capital and tourists. It is argued that economic competition and the aggressive cultural policies of South Korea, which threated the national content market, caused the cultural and economic Japanese elites to call for government action; these demands in turn abstracts gave birth to the Office for the Promotion of the Cultural Industries ‘Cool Japan’. The need Japan had to expand its soft power in order to improve its international relations and its economic situation is then analyzed. In this sense, one multifaceted tactic used by the government since the year 2010 is studied. Through this analysis, it is found that the initial goal of the policies was to promote national tourism, improve rural economies, and stimulate the consumption of national products and services by means of regenerating the interest of Japanese people in their own culture and by representing conventional images of the country outside its borders. Finally, the paper examines the impact that the natural and nuclear disaster of 2011 had on the national government’s priorities and their focus on the cultural policies. A change is to be found in the interest on the exterior and the development of a double media discourse that, on the one hand, seeks to attract foreigners to Japanese traditions and culture, such as kindness, respect and creativity, and on the other, is focused on the strengthening of the national identity evoking ideas from the cultural nationalism discourse of the Nihonjinron, which defends putatively ‘unique’ qualities of the Japanese people and implicitly rejects the insertion of foreign influences