Cool Japan might be room temperature soon

Japan, you don't have to tell me taiko is cool

Japan, I thought you were cool before. You didn't have to tell me. Back in the 1980s, my classmates and I were glued to the television every morning, following Leiji Matsumoto's animation serial Starblazers (Uchu Senkan Yamato). We begged our parents for quarters to go play Donkey Kong in the video arcades. In the 1990s, we were assailed by the guitar rock of Shonen Knife, broadcast on campus radio. In the early 2000s, Final Fantasy and Ghibli took off. Japan was super cool.

PM Abe clinched it in 2016 when he appeared as Mario at the close of the Rio Olympics. It was a Japan cultural marketing coup. You'd think the government was on to something here. And they kind of were, with the Cool Japan Fund, a public-private promotion of Japanese culture and industry to the tune of Y37.5 billion yen back in the mid 2000s.

So what did Cool Japan accomplish? It's hard to say. The fund has more failures than successes, and has been running in the red for years.

And Japan has succeeded anyway, thanks to the international interest in pop culture exports, the global taste for Japanese food, and the low yen.

This week, the government is considering scrapping the fund. The losses are staggering - Y33.3 billion as of the end of 2024. That's a lot of coins to miss collecting.