Live and livestreamed at Temple University Japan Tokyo, Oct. 9
Culture Rules: Japan Found its Cool in the 21st Century, But Can It Keep It?
The branding of "Cool Japan" in the early aughts kickstarted Japan's 21st Century pop culture juggernaut. Global demand for Japan-produced anime, manga, games, fashion and food skyrocketed, and Japanese creatives scrambled to feed it through a rapid succession of media platforms--DVDs, Torrents, Cinemas and Streaming sites--as post-Covid inbound tourism stats exploded. Fiscal analysts now forecast a rosy CGR of 9.8% for Japan's pop culture products and a global market more than doubling to $72 billion in less than 10 years. But spotty government support, a shrinking labor and consumer pool, and rising costs amid a retreat from globalization mean that the sustained business of Cool Japan is hardly a sure bet. Where do we go from here? Pokemon's lucrative lightning might not strike twice.
Roland Nozomu Kelts is an award-winning Japanese American journalist, author, editor and scholar. He is best known for his highly acclaimed bestseller, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US, and the more recent, Blade Runner: Black Lotus. He contributes to numerous media outlets in Japan, the US and Europe, including the BBC, CBS's "60 Minutes," CNN, NHK, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Guardian and The New York Times, and he has been a contributing editor to the Japanese literary journal "Monkey: New Writing from Japan" since its inception in 2011. Kelts has worked as an author, editor and consultant for publishers in Japan, the UK and the US for over twenty years, and he was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard in 2017. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Moderator: Kyle Cleveland, ICAS Co-director and Associate Professor of Sociology, Temple University Japan
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