Recent years have seen the rise of instrumental cultural policy in Japan, following the same trend seen across the globe over the last thirty years. In Japan, too, like elsewhere, discourse on cultural policy for the purpose of economic development and social inclusion now appears more prominently than before. This is so particularly in the area of cultural heritage, as heritage is seen as a valuable asset for tourism development. This chapter charts the development of cultural policy in Japan since the 1970s with details on the process of its instrumentalisation since the 2010s in the area of heritage. The paper also analyses three kinds of Japanese public opinion polls regarding the value of culture. The analysis suggests that the Japanese public may understand and believe in the intrinsic value of culture and the arts. However, the public seems less certain about the economic contributions culture can make.

This volume investigates emerging trends, issues and problems seen in policy shifts from conservation to utilisation of cultural heritage. The breadth of topics covered in the volume ranges from a critical examination of such policy trends, identification of values added by cultural heritage to tourism in general in Japan, expectations and experiences of cultural tourists to the use of cultural heritage in urban regeneration in Italy. The volume breaks a new ground in the bourgeoning studies of tourism, heritage and cultural policy by adopting an international, inter-disciplinary approach. The chapters on Japan in particular make an original contribution to these fields in the English literature in which discussion of Japan despite its economic and cultural presence on the globe has hitherto been less available. The Introductory chapter discusses general trends of cultural heritage policy and issues of management by comparing Italy and Japan and introduces the structure of the volume.

Believing that a better understanding of cultural tourism may be obtained by identifying the "orientations" of tourists than by classifying tourists according to attributes, we conducted a large-scale survey in Japan that asked respondents about their general lifestyle, consumption, and travel preferences. Eight distinct orientations were identified: luxury brand, reliability, outdoor, low price, used/rental, nightlife, my way, and thrift oriented. We used these orientations in an analysis of cultural heritage, travel, and willingness to pay for cultural tourism and heritage preservation. We found that luxury brand, reliability, and outdoor oriented people are particularly familiar with and interested in cultural heritage. We also had respondents view and react to two short videos on tourism in Kyoto; this revealed that orientations can predict the influence of online material on people's travel decisions. We argue that a focus on "orientations" can help cultural heritage tourism promoters to devise services attuned to the diverse needs of people in a society where values in both lifestyle and cultural heritage are increasingly complex.

Digital transformation has affected the media and entertainment industries (“content industry”) in the last two to three decades. The broadcasting sector in Japan is no exception. The industry is now facing the question of whether or not to distribute broadcast program content over the Internet. This chapter discusses the overall picture of the transformation of the content industry, the changes in business models in the digital age, the position of commercial broadcasters in this context, and the challenges they face. It argues that the acquisition and utilization of broadcast program viewing data can render TV as a form of media useful for advanced marketing activities. Broadcasters, who have long provided services delivering content in a unidirectional manner and who have relied on viewer ratings, are now at a critical juncture as to whether they can shift to a data-driven business that accurately understands the needs of their customers, namely viewers as well as advertisers.

Media industries such as film, music, and publishing have traditionally relied on three models of revenue generation: payment by users for ownership of (or for access to) content, advertising fees, and the hybrid of these.For a long time, the models have largely been sustainable, but in recent decades advances in information and communication technologies and changes in consumer behavior have been so revolutionary that they pose unprecedentedly serious challenges to these models; the issue is no longer copyright infringement on its own, but how the industries respond to the changes in the market and find new, sustainable business models.This article discusses several of these new models, including Do-It-Yourself artist, expanded exploitation of copyright, diversification, dual-market model, and digital marketing for third-party marketers via social media and using own sites.Examples from Japan are drawn to illustrate the new developments.

In Korea, 'neoliberal socialisation' or forming of a new ideal self has been under the influence of implicit cultural policy that intends to instil in Koreans a new ethic so that they can better manage the tough socio-economic reality. The new patron state in Korea has been impressively successful in accommodating democratic agendas, increasing public cultural funding, playing entrepreneurial roles in developing systematic support for cultural industries and cultural export, making cultural policy 'actually happen', and advocating the importance of culture for national prosperity. The emergence of the new patron state reflects the complicated and contentious transformation of Korean society itself from the late 1980s. Culture became decoupled from statist ideological propaganda; however, it has still been taken as a determining factor and strategy for the survival, prosperity and success of the nation state. The centrality of …

'Cool Japan' has been a cross-departmental policy agenda for Japanese government that has gained prominence over the last 10 years or so. Although the government has been reticent about cultural policy in general and particularly to East and Southeast Asia in post-war decades, attention has recently been given to the international popularity of Japanese popular culture such as manga and anime with policies aiming to cash in on what is named 'Cool Japan' phenomenon. Policy has been, however, patchy and disjointed. This paper will examine the background and emergence of this policy with industrial and economic aims, its recent transformation and impact on cultural flows in Asia. It will argue that whilst the government's policy for popular culture industries may not have led to significant results, it has done what it could legitimately do without riding on the bandwagon of the creative industries discourse that has swept across the rest of the world. The chapter will also stress the importance of the industries to broaden their regional perspectives.

Digitization has significantly changed the process for producing and consuming music: from analogue to digital, albums to songs, possess to access, audio to visual, and end products to promotional products. In this globalized digital era, actively embracing digitization would likely help enhance the competitiveness of the music industry. The rise of K-pop and the decline of J-pop clearly demonstrate the different results from whether to embrace or wrestle with digitization. The Korean music industry recognized changes brought on by digitization earlier and was more active in responding with effective strategies. By contrast, the Japanese music industry did not immediately respond to these changes but stuck to its rent-seeking behavior in order to take advantage of its larger market size and “sophisticated” copyright regime. The implications from this paper is that business activities are the core element for creating and enhancing competitiveness of the music industries.

Reviewed by: Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club by Ory Bartal Nobuko Kawashima (bio) Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club. By Ory Bartal. Dartmouth College Press, Lebanon, N.H., 2015. xii, 263 pages. $85.00, cloth; $45.00, paper; $44.99, E-book. It has been some decades since our economy has become culturized and our society media-saturated, and commercial culture in particular permeates our daily lives today. Research on Japanese culture available in English has advanced in recent decades by expanding its earlier focus on classical, high culture to include elements of commercial culture such as manga and anime. However, research on advertising has remained relatively scant until recently, despite the prominence of advertisements in contemporary media and their important role in financing the production of commercial culture. Thus, Postmodern Advertising in Japan, which discusses the visual culture of advertisements in Japan, is a very welcome, long-awaited addition to the literature. Ory Bartal specifically focuses on graphic art (posters) for advertising in Japan designed in the 1980s and the 1990s by members of the Tokyo Art Directors Club (Tokyo ADC), a prestigious and exclusive association to which only highly acclaimed art directors in the commercial advertising world are admitted. For Bartal, these advertisements are postmodernistic, of high artistic quality, and have gained a worldwide reputation. New styles, concepts, and visual strategies are employed in these posters, which, Bartal asserts, blur the distinction between art and commerce. With the ultimate purpose of untangling the “Japanese-ness” of Japanese advertising, Bartal distances himself from an orientalist direction and situates the commercial visual culture of Japan within the global context. He does this not only by undertaking aesthetic and cultural decoding of the advertising posters under investigation but also by emphasizing the exploration of the social, economic, and industrial contexts in which the commercial art works were created. Readers might wonder how the author combined these different approaches so successfully. Bartal holds an MBA and was a marketing expert in Israeli companies for more than ten years before pursuing a doctorate at the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Tel Aviv. Bartal’s mixed academic background straddling the social sciences and humanities is unusual—and valuable for content analysis in advertising. Marketing research (in which advertising research is normally included) is typically about business efficiency and effectiveness with little or no content analysis, whereas aesthetic research is about the textual analysis of [End Page 379] cultural expressions with little regard to how they are made in economic terms. The sociology of advertising may examine the context in which specific advertisements emerge at the macro-societal level but not really at the micro level, leaving aside questions of financing and business interactions that must have influenced the production of those advertisements. Cultural studies of advertising may pay attention to the business structure of the advertising industry that produces art works but are mostly concerned with the power relations between different classes and groups of employees and professionals in the industry. Bartal takes a tack different from any of these approaches and analyzes the structures, colors, and words of the posters; discusses why the posters took the forms they did within the Japanese economic and social contexts of the times; and investigates under what conditions and with what thoughts and intentions they were produced by individual art directors. A useful strategy undertaken by Bartal in exploring the conditions of production at the micro level is his interviews with selected art directors, all of whom are members of the Tokyo ADC, as he saw the club as a pivotal point around which visual expressions of advertising blossomed during the 1980s and the 1990s. The book is organized into four parts: the history of Japanese advertising and the place of the Tokyo ADC within it; the aesthetics of Japanese visual culture and its relevance to the postmodern, commercial posters that are the focus of the book; the marketing and business features of the Japanese advertising industry that are different from the global norm; and, finally, social forces. All these factors, Bartal argues, have contributed to postmodern advertising culture...

This special issue on Film Policy in a Globalised Cultural Economy' is devoted to the changing economic and technological context in which filmmaking occurs, the policy responses that these changes have generated and their consequences for the pursuit of cultural objectives. The issue offers discussions of the general economic, technological and political shifts shaping the global film industry as well as case-studies examining the specific policies adopted by different states. While these indicate how governments have been obliged to respond to the economic and technological changes wrought by globalisation they also highlight the variations in approach to film policy and the continuation of tensions between economic and cultural, and public and private, objectives.