Presentation: "Cool" is what "Cool" isn't

I plan to use this presentation as a space to explore industry studies as a methodological approach rather than presenting on, or arguing for, a clip I select. Drawing inspiration from Holt, Caldwell, and other contemporary “industry study” scholars, I would like to consider the ways in which discourses and conditions around policymaking might influence the “critical industrial practice” of more globalized/international/transnational media industries, specifically Japan’s animation industry. However, I hope to focus on more contemporary histories rather than the vast history of Japanese animation and globalization. I’m specifically interested in two historical “moments”: 1) the contemporary and 2) the 90s-2012. What is it about these two periods and Japan’s animation industry? For myself, I am interested in the economic stagnation during 90’s and the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and where “Japanese soft power” figured into it then, and how it fits into the conversation now. Most scholarship around Japanese animation have pinned the globalization processes, growth, and “current success” of Japan’s animation industry to the 80s/90s/00s/ “now” and describing the “Cool Japan” phenomenon. “Cool Japan” is an expression referring to Japan’s emergent and growing soft power but has recently become a branding mechanism for the government of Japan to mobilize and distribute their commercial and cultural capital beyond domestic borders. Therefore, instead of a clip, I hope to offer some insight into “Cool Japan” as a way for Japan’s animation industries to imagine themselves discursively and industrially, and how Japan’s METI have mobilized these discourses and strategies into a policy named after Cool Japan itself.

Methodologically, reflecting on the contemporary also allows us to reexamine some of the ways in which industry as such has been conceptualized or imagined not only through media scholarship but by the “industries” themselves. Some contemporary “industry scholars” have begun calling, what our readings have described, the “industry” as an “ecology” or media ecology, in order to think about the dynamism and vibrancy of industrial formations and configurations. (Zahlten 2017, Lamarre 2018). Although I currently don’t have any really developed thoughts or critical positions towards contributing towards scholarship about media industries/ecologies, thinking about the contemporary highlights some of the analytical and conceptual limits of more "traditional" approaches to industry studies. At the same time, focusing on the contemporary industries and approaches to industries allows us to trace the ways in which they developed historically and discursively. Holt sharply emphasizes the role of media industries at the time of her writing, citing Peter Bart: “a major player ‘must mobilize a vast array of global brands to command both content and distribution. Indeed, such an enterprise must be more than a company – it must be a virtual nation state.’” (Holt 11)

Certainly, that seems to be the case with Japan’s animation industry, in which one might conflate the industry to Japan’s national identity itself. There was recent controversy around the very popular series, My Hero Academia, where a character’s name drew immense criticism from China and South Korea. The controversy led to Chinese platforms Tencent and Bilibili removing both comic and animation from their libraries. This comes a couple of years after successful theatrical runs of Spirited Away (officially screened a decade past its initial release) and Your Name. Simply put, not only are these “enterprises” perceived as a virtual nation state, but they must “behave” as if they were a virtual nation state as well.

Enter Japan’s METI’s Cool Japan project. The project initially sought to meet the “global demand” of product that wasn’t as demanded domestically. The following image is taken from the initial 2012 draft of the Cool Japan project, tentatively titled Cool Japan Strategy:

Figure 1 (Cool Japan Strategy January 2012 draft)

Whereas Cool Japan might have initially described medium specific things of Japan’s popular culture in the 90s and early 00’s (Allison 2006), this 2012 draft sought expanding Cool Japan into including more “aspects” of Japanese culture in order to develop creative industries elsewhere.

The following images from the same draft uses cartographic renderings of the “world” in which METI conceptualizes that world in terms of potential market points for the project and various creative industries:

Figure 2 (Top and bottom images are both from Cool Japan Strategy January 2012 draft)

I want to emphasize that the latter image presumes that the products/creative industries imagined within this global market are both desirable and assimilable. But more importantly, various combinations of products and industries are imagined in different markets: India and Italy are conceptualized as potential markets for fashion, food, design, and content, South Korea is food and regional product, France is listed with “town development” and “daily goods”, etc. There are many possible reasons for the different combinations of products and industries imagined for each market, such as: the market might already have a robust industry of that particular stuff, the market’s familiarity with Japanese product or culture is with this stuff and not that stuff, or certain political or economic relations allow for, or resist, certain things.

However, the “Cool Japan” strategy/policy/phenomenon is not the “first of its kind.” There have been other policies that sought similar efforts, such as Cool Britannia and the Cool Korea Strategy in 1997. And this brings me to some questions: what is the work of “Cool” and why target cultural product and creative industries?

Holt and Caldwell’s essays certainly provide models of analysis towards answering these questions. For Holt, policies are the discursive, material, and literal realizations of the relationships between industries and governments. I feel the same. Analyzing policies become a way to unpack how these relationships are configured and imagined. Yet this approach seems to gloss over the specificity of the products that do circulate—the stuff that sells—and why they circulate. Simply put, markets need to buy into the product you’re selling, it needs to appeal to them in whatever localized, regionalized, globalized way that allows those industries to “expand” and do their work. Recent studies show that Cool Japan is “failing”. The global market isn’t buying what Japan’s METI is selling, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not buying what the Japanese animation industry is producing. The recent 2019 annual report from the Association of Japanese Animators shows the sixth straight year of revenue growth earning an industry-wide 2.1814 trillion yen, or 10.939 billion dollars. Why the gap? Where can we locate the gap? What is the gap?

Caldwell’s work on the stunt-genre and critical industrial design, for me, provides one way into exploring this gap. If METI thought that Cool Japan was “this”, and has been enacted as “this”, but failing at “this”, while thinking all this time that "this" was “that,” then what are the differences between “this” and “that”? Is the Japanese animation industry, or some studios, doing "that"? Maybe it's something different from what Cool Japan meant initially during the 80s/90/s/early 00s. I personally feel that this question and related questions require similarly different answers that deploy the historical, textual, and conceptual approaches of all three readings for this week.

Historically, the economic stagnation of 2009 might have encouraged Japan’s METI to enact the policy 3 years after the global financial crisis, hoping that the “expansion” into the global market (again?) might bear the same fruit of some international economic success during Japan’s Lost Decade. The rising anti-Japanese rhetoric emerging into the global conversation from Japan’s imperial history from countries like China, South Korea, and Taiwan might have also forced Japan’s government to deploy “Cool Japan” as a means to deflect “Imperial Japan.” (Ching 2019)

Aesthetically, the appeal of Japanese animation continues to growth globally, or at the very least, the commercial appeal of it. Where is the appeal coming from? Koichi Iwabuchi suggests that it’s the lack of  “cultural odor”,　無国籍 , or "Japanese-ness"　日本人論  that allows for a globalized legibility for the non-Japanese market. (Iwabuchi 2002) Yet such assimilability seems to be conditional on past and present political and economic relations, such as the My Hero Academia controversy. So how can one locate, examine, or analyze that appeal which continues to commercially grow? For myself, one way into grappling with that appeal is through looking at representations of environment and space in isekai anime. Isekai (different world) is a fantasy subgenre of Japanese light novels, comic, anime, and video games that generally revolve around the protagonist transporting from Earth to another parallel universe. These parallel universes are typically depicted as a fantasy world, laden with iconographies of vast fantastical landscapes, characters, and object. How might these spatial aesthetics narrativize or characterize not just isekai anime or anime as such, but Japan’s animation industry as textually and commercially appealing to the non-Japanese market? What are the similarities and differences between representations of environments and spaces in isekai and other “genres”? Under what conditions does that appeal fail? 

Figure 3 (“Tokyo” in Your Name)

Figure 4 (Fantasy world in KonoSuba: God's Blessing on this Wonderful World!)

Figure 5 (Fantasy world in Log Horizon)

Conceptually, I continue to grapple with “industry.” I entered the CAMS program as an “industry scholar” but had no idea what that entailed in terms of “industry” as an object of analysis. I was faced with a lot of epistemological questions. At the end of the MA, I am confronted with a similar set of intellectual questions pertaining to approaches to, and definitions of, “industry.” It might be the division of labor, corporate strategy, annual sales reports, cultural policy, regulation, critical industrial design, or dynamic producer-consumer relationships. Ideally, I’d like to pitch a model that can address them all, yet I know that no one’s going to buy that.