New Article: The "Cool Japan" Craze

Takeshi Matsui’s new article, "Nation Branding through Stigmatized Popular Culture: The Cool Japan Craze Among Central Ministries in Japan", has recently been published in Hitotsubashi Journal of Commerce and Management. This article explains how various Japanese ministries are competing to promote “Cool Japan” and make Japanese “content industry” more attractive in order to enhance Japanʼs soft power. The phrase “content industry,” coined by Kontentsu Sangyo (2009,) is a relatively new word in Japanese which means “commercial industries that produce, distribute, and retail cultural and/or entertainment works such as music, pictures, games, manga, and anime as products” or “the industries that deal with reproducible representation such as manga, novels, movies, TV, and music.”

Paper Abstract
This paper investigates how and why various central ministries in Japan have adopted policies promoting Japanese popular culture such as manga (comic books), anime (animated films and TV shows), games, fashion and so forth, which had formerly been neglected by the state due to their stigmatized status. This paper analyzes documents released by bureaucrats and the results of interviews conducted with key persons from central ministries and institutions under their jurisdiction to shed light on institutional isomorphism observed in the central government of Japan.

To read the full article, click here.