Let’s hope they really mean it this time.

For many people, the first thing that comes to mind when they hear “Japan” is anime, and rightfully so. It is often the gateway that allows people around the world to experience Japanese culture and aesthetics for the first time.

It’s also big business, with the Japanese-made overseas anime market valued at 1.45 trillion yen (US$10 billion) in 2022, with franchises like One Piece rubbing shoulders with major organizations like the NFL and taking over all of Times Square. And yet, despite all these successes, it’s still an industry fraught with poor working conditions, low-wages and occasional horridness that it defies rather than entices people to enter it.

This is something the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs is hoping to change with a set of new initiatives aimed at maintaining and expanding the industry. The main pillar of these efforts is said to be the Industry-Academic Collaborative Anime Human Resources Training Committee, a name that’s only tentative but extremely self-explanatory.

This committee will be established within this fiscal year and strengthen the anime industry by developing guidelines to provide the necessary skills for anime creation — such as directing, storyboarding, sound engineering, and editing — and encouraging studios, universities, and vocational schools to implement them. Their programs will also focus on foreign language communication and intellectual property management, so creators can be better equipped to expand overseas.

Meanwhile, the Agency for Cultural Affairs will encourage more universities and vocational schools to establish courses in anime while also working with production studios to set up a sort of anime preservation society that helps maintain and restore old footage.

This is a part of the agency’s wider-ranging Public-Private Council on the Content Industry, which was created to bolster all of Japan’s entertainment sectors, such as film, music, and video games. Japan’s entire content industry overseas was said to be worth 5.8 trillion yen, but the council hopes to raise that figure to 20 trillion by 2033.

This news can’t help but conjure up memories of the Japanese government’s ill-fated Cool Japan initiative, which set out to accomplish very similar goals of boosting Japanese cultural properties around the world. It ended up being completely mismanaged and was almost impressive in how utterly ineffective it was at its intended goal.

The agency’s plan this time around feels a lot more focused and cogent than Cool Japan’s was, but it’s hard to celebrate this initiative quite yet after having been bitten once. It’s hard to argue that a lot of potential in anime and other Japanese media has been lost along with the potential money that would have come with it, so hopefully late will be better than never when it comes to support.

Source: Yomiuri Shimbun Online
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