Soft powering popular culture: Discourse and policy making in Japan's content industries

Over the past two decades, Japanese popular culture has reached consumers of other countries in a variety and scale unseen before. As any lecturer in Japanese studies in any part of the work can testify, anime and manga is what brings students into class, and not the economy or Japanese managerial systems, as it used to be the 1980s. One of the interesting aspects of this unexpected aspect of Japan's internationalization is a growing discourse in Japan about the new opportunities created by the globalization of Japanese popular culture. While some emphasize the economic benefits of cultural exports as a new source for revenues and as a way to upgrade the economy, others point to the diplomatic advantages of popular culture as a way to boost the country's image abroad and attain "soft power". The Japanese government, for its part, has been increasingly interested in this sector and is gradually placing popular culture production and export on its agenda. In such context, this chapter examines the way the globalization of popular culture has been treated in domestic discourse in Japan and analyzes the way it is being bureaucratized and utilized by the state.