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PR: Japanese Government Establishes “Creative Industries Internationalization Committee” to Strength

This is what the Japanese people want, not Kpop which sounds about as generic of pop as it gets (which is the reason its successful around the world.. it lacks any identity of its own).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF1peWXYUBc

And this would be the top selling single of the year, at nearly 2 million sold.

This is what the Japanese people want, not Kpop which sounds about as generic of pop as it gets (which is the reason its successful around the world.. it lacks any identity of its own).

Let me give you my impression, based solely on watching SBS PopAsia for a couple of weeks
I quickly learned to identify country-of-origin even before the singing started:

K-Pop - The songwriting and production are incredibly polished and refined. I think the singer/dancers are mostly talent-school types, but the producers are geniuses. Also, their video clips are lavish, epic and cutting-edge.

J-Pop - By comparison has a home-made look; production and songwriting are much simpler. The videos look cheap.

My impression is that the Koreans are focused on doing whatever it takes to earn your buck, whereas the Japanese companies are stifled by their closed-market mentality, providing good-enough product to an audience with limited choice, and every manager taking his cut out of the budget, leaving the artists to scrape by. Same problem that afflicts their movie industry.

As I said, this is just how things seem to me from a couple of weeks' worth of current music videos.

Mate that's been going on since 1854. A world war was even fought because of it too. That's what happens when a nation, allowed to do it's own thing in hundreds of years of isolation, is exposed to finding that lots of what they considered their culture and normal way of life were regarded as indecent and perverse by most of the rest of the world.

Pirates and other rowdy seafarers also helped create something that, were we to see it now, we would call gay liberation. When John Adams explored the streets, he might have walked past men exposing their penises, the eighteenth-century transatlantic code for men seeking partners of the same sex. Adams might have brushed past Ann Alweye or Mary Hamilton, tall women with large hands and protruding Adam's apples, who slept with men and were themselves males--males who dressed as women. Daniel Sweeny was another male who enjoyed bending his gender in early Philadelphia. He was arrested for "being a Nuisance" by "dressing in woman's clothes" but, futher suggesting a looseness of sexual mores, was released after four days. These were the transvestites who appear in the public record. There were many more. In 1784, the newspaper the Philadelphiad described effeminate "fops" filling the city's public spaces: . . . .

[25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom

My questions are; How does Mr. Choo get his info from for how the world outside of Japan feels about all that to relay to the Japanses in the first place? Does he have a blog, or does he lurk about anime forums like this one? Where does he feel the pulse of the fandom so to speak? How can we as fans give him questions, or proposals to ask, or put across the committee for consideration?

As I said, K-pop are now dominating J-pop in Japan with K-pop artists dominating the Oricon chart.

Uh, Mohawk52, you should've heard of Danny Choo, he's from UK like you and he is a big anime/manga and a western liason/expert on Japanese pop culture.

Mohawk52, as far as I'm concerned I never seen J-pop getting this much publicity and attention from British media. When was the last time UK music channel played J-pop music video on the air?

mdo7 wrote:

As I said, K-pop are now dominating J-pop in Japan with K-pop artists dominating the Oricon chart.

But the 2012 Oricon charts tell other wise. And so does the current chart, but surely you know better what's dominating Oricon charts better than Oricon itself: http://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/js/w/2013-04-22/

One thing that concerns me as a self described "Japanophile" is that South Korea are playing the marketing game much better than Japan. Here in Australia there are Korean pop festivals with reasonably big name artists attending, Korean fashion stores and film festivals. I've never seen a single Japanese artist appear here in Sydney. It seems as though South Korean entertainment industries better understand the globalisation of entertainment. It's of concern for me because I'm a Japanese pop culture devotee and I don't want to see the market bottom out because of missed opportunities.

I would like you to bring to them the fact that you can not promote japanese culture industries without making efforts into promoting japanese language which they're doing the very opposite.
JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA) are closing japanese classes in many region of the world specially in North africa (Morocco).
I will here talk about How Japanese culture is doing in Morocco.
We do not recieve any help from the japanese Ambassady nor any Japanese agency, whenever we ask them they always answer "sorry no funds". But even with that we manage to creat and run in a sustainble way over the past 5-6 years. but we are no longer able to do this, as the japanese language classes across the country are being closed by JICA, they basicly say " we have no interest in promoting japanese language".

Ps: japanese cultur good are very rare in my country due to the absence of any retailer for such good, we are forced to buy all of our stuff from france or Spain.

The problem about globalization of the brands and market of Japan is one of the things which also I wanted to expose and discuss with the japanese companies. Since I went to Japan I figuret out how much the companies just focus in Japan , because its bigger enough, however because of this same reason, companies such as Samsung, android (google), facebook, etc have been taking a lot of market which they could took in the past. Now new companies with products (android and iphone for example) are fading the image of Japan worldwide. Korea is with the KPOP has make grow their market globally and has created a lot of fans. So, the main problem for the market in Japan is that, they are not thinking globally. I really would like to expose and write or give my opinions about this issue, because in Latin america and India the problems are worst rather than Asia concerning about the anime or Japan products. Hope you are doing great there and for any help about the market in latino america, I am here.

The biggest challenge they face is their mindset. Short story to illustrate my point:

There is a show on NHK called Tokyo Eye. Its in English and shows places and things all around Tokyo for foreigners to experience. The show is not available for sale so somebody started recording episodes and putting them on Youtube for us in the USA to watch. NHK complained to Youtube and that persons channel was closed. This is a show geared towards foreigners which could bring in more tourism to Japan and they prevented foreigners from seeing it. Makes no sense.

mdo7 wrote:

Uh, Mohawk52, you should've heard of Danny Choo, he's from UK like you and he is a big anime/manga and a western liason/expert on Japanese pop culture.

Mate I've heard of the name and I knew he was a Brit, But until I read this article I had no idea he was involved with anime and manga as deeply as all this. looking at that link he says he's been living in Japan for the past 13 years, so it's not like he's been very vocal here as of late. Thanks for the links BTW.

Quote:

Mohawk52, as far as I'm concerned I never seen J-pop getting this much publicity and attention from British media. When was the last time UK music channel played J-pop music video on the air?

Too bad you don't get our NEO mag or you would have known there have been several J-pop and J-rock bands that have played London and other UK city venues in the past and will do in future too I'll wager. I don't watch much tele on Sky apart from News, Movies, and Documentaries so never heard of Clubland TV on the Music listings. Not even my teenage daughter goes there so that should tell you something about how "hip" (do they still use that term?) it is. I would put down this new interest in K-pop as back wash from the huge Gangnam Style wave that broke across our shores like it did everywhere else. But apart from that i've never heard it on BBC Radio 1, or 2. Digital radio 6 is suppose to be the place for "new and alternative music" allegedly, But I've never heard any J, or K-pop, or rock there either. I e-mailed R-6 about how if they are soo "new and cutting edge" they have never heard of Hatsune Miku, or vocaloid? I've yet to get a reply back either way.

So, the K-drama, Winter Sonata was not made for the Japanese audience (all K-drama were made for the Korean audience only) and yet the Japanese loved that K-drama so much, Bae Yong-joon became very famous in Japan. That K-drama created a Korean Wave in Japan. It was said Bae was more famous then the former Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi in Japan.

You can't denied that K-pop has made several achievements in Japan. Also SNSD and other K-pop groups are well-known in Japan and they have done many achievements on the oricon.

In addition to this, I think AKB48 might have a more fair chance at faring well internationally if they toned down on the sexual theme on some of their PVs.