Japanese Prime minister Sakae Takaichi announces the Japanese equivalent of the hallyu. Okay girl.

Japanese Prime minister Sakae Takaichi recently announced that there will be a 55 billion yen budget to make Japanese music resonate internationally, saying “We will create a future in which Japanese music resonates across diverse markets”.

So, I guess the Japanese government decided that they want their own version of the Hallyu. This makes sense, given where Japan is as a country right now. But it also doesn’t make sense, given where Japan is as a country right now. Don’t worry. We’ll get into this.

Let’s talk about the hallyu for a minute. Because ‘the hallyu’ is a term that gets thrown around a lot in conversations about K-pop breaking in America, to a point where you’d think the hallyu was just a term specifically about K-pop. But the hallyu actually refers to South Korean pop culture as a whole. The virality of Korean skincare, the successes of Parasite and Squid Game — these are part of the hallyu too. In fact, I’d consider skincare, films and TV shows to be the most important pillars of it, given that Korean films and TV shows haven’t morphed or become Americanised in the way K-pop has. It’s weird, because K-pop has always been based on Americana (Black Americana specifically) with twists. But K-pop kinda stopped being K-pop when it hit America, because Korean acts started releasing regular pop songs in English, having music videos be directed by American directors and having their songs be written and produced by the same American writers and producers who were working with everybody else on the charts. But that’s a whole other paragraph in this post.

Just as Sakae Tanichi announced that the government will be funding Japanese music becoming international, the hallyu eventually saw investment from the South Korean government. The hallyu having governmental financial support is crazy. Because despite the government’s interest in ‘making the hallyu happen’ and investing in it — so much of what made the hallyu actually happen was not down to government coin or any form of propaganda. It was just things going viral organically. The government didn’t make Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” a viral sensation in 2010. It just…was. But I’m sure there are tin foil hat wearing folk on the Internet who have posted on message boards that Girls’ Generation was part of a political scheme, that Jessica being kicked out of the group was a direct order from President Park Geun-hye, and that SM Entertainment receives secret funding from the government. And I’mma be honest — the latter does not seem all that far fetched in the slightest. It would make sense that SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment would receive government investment, as they were the best conduits for the hallyu. But this is a whole other post.

Given Japan’s plan to increase tourism (even in the midst of overtourism, and yes…it is that bad), become more ‘global’ and boost its economy — part of achieving this seems to be wanting their own equivalent of the hallyu. But Sanae Takaichi saying that the Japanese government will fund a Japanese version of the hallyu (Nippon nami / 日本 波?) is crazy to me, because of the Japan of it all.

Being a Japanese music fan when you are not a Japanese resident is the bane of our existence. Because for so long and still to this day, being a J-music fan has felt like scavenging. Scavenging to get physical editions of albums. Scavenging for televised performances. Scavenging to see faves in concerts. And this is all because Japan makes Japanese music so inaccessible to those outside of the country. Sure, streaming is a thing that the Japanese music industry has been forced to get on board with, but I would not say that it has embraced it fully, as much as it has been bullied into accepting it.

First of all, Japan only has one foot in on digitisation. I wouldn’t even say a foot. It’s more like a toe. Hard copies and physical media are still king in Japan. And for the [turns and looks into the camera] record, I don’t think this is something that should ever go away completely in any society. The American entertainment industry is already a mess because of how it put all of its eggs in a digital basket. Streaming has fucked up the old Hollywood model of films, TV and music. And the games industry is going through similar shit, because of how physical releases of games have become an alternative option to digital copies, when it was once the default. Costs are being cut on producing physical copies, which is now pushing an additional cost onto gamers to seek storage solutions on which to save these huge-ass games. And not owning physical copies of games raises questions of whether users actually own their games, when publishers have the access to block them from being played due to many of them requiring internet access to play. And hoops now have to be jumped through to play a game on a system other than the one it was originally downloaded on. Do you remember the days when you could just play a game without the internet? And the days when you could take your copy of a game to your friend’s house?

Secondly, streaming is a bit of a scam which does not monetarily benefit the artists as much as physical sales do. And the money artists make off of physical sales is and always has been doo-doo unless they were in the high millions. And even then, artists could still end up not making a great deal of money because of skullduggery in their management and recording contracts. Just look at what happened to NSYNC and TLC.

Japan is still the second largest music market in the world — where physical sales are much stronger than they are in North America and still treated with some priority. But the digital shift in music at large has already happened — whether Japan likes it or not. We’ve all moved through the looking glass. And even for how much even some of us may not like it, the accessibility and reach it provides music is a good thing, even if it’s not perfect. But the music industry has never been perfect and has always been exploitative to both artists and consumers. Don’t even get me started on the monopoly that has become concert tickets.

I have long felt that a massive contributor to the slight stagnation of the Japanese music industry has been its reluctance to embrace any part of global accessibility. The reality of the situation for the longest time has been that growth for the industry has to factor in international fans. And that increasing access for international fans and bettering visibility for Japanese acts on a global scale will also help them domestically too.

Just look at an artist like Crystal Kay. For years (5 to be exact) many of us fans were asking what the hell is going on with her song “Kirakuni” and why it wasn’t available globally on streaming platforms. But her team dragged their feet, because all they cared about was that “Koi ni Ochitara” was available — because it was the bigger hit domestically. There was no regard for “Kirakuni” being a significant song for Crystal internationally, and that giving it the time of day would benefit her, given that Crystal Kay is an artist with a sizable international fanbase and one who tours North America.

Then there is city pop. A style of music which went viral internationally and saw a resurgence in interest and popularity, all because of an unofficial upload of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” which somehow gamed YouTube’s algorithm. But it took Warner Music years to respond to this virality with an official upload of the song, putting out a music video and making Mariya’s Variety (the album on which “Plastic Love” features) available on streaming. And since then, numerous other city pop artists have found new fans — but not all of them have their discographies available on DSPs and many of them have no official presence on YouTube.

And speaking of YouTube — look how long it took for Japanese record labels to start uploading full music videos to the platform. By that point, K-pop had already been debuting music videos on YouTube for years and American acts / labels were doing the same. But then there was Japan. Still releasing short versions of music videos. And even now, Avex sometimes blocks music videos from being embedded or viewed on other websites, one of which is this very here blog, which is the reason I don’t post performances or music videos from Avex acts.

And whilst the Music Awards Japan making its performances and entire show available on YouTube was a HUGE deal, and the beginning of this plan to make Japanese music resonate internationally — we still do not get regular, full uploads of televised performances on Count Down TV, Music Station or Songs. Meanwhile, Korean networks are uploading every damn Music Bank, Music Core, M Countdown! and Inkigayo performance to YouTube and not setting them to private after 24 hours.

All of this to say that the Japanese Music industry doesn’t need 55 billion yen to expand Japanese music’s appeal internationally. The Japanese Music industry needs to allow for much better access to it for folk outside of Japan, and this needs to be the starting point before anything else. But allowing for better access would require a mindset change, and this just isn’t something I can see happening. Japan is a very ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ type of culture, and one which is adverse to change. Y’all. We’re talking about a country where sending faxes is still a thing and paying utility bills and banking still needs to be done via paper and in person. Japan’s birth rates are lower than Crystal Kay’s album sales and the country has a sizable population of elderly folk — so of course some of these old ways of doing things should not be completely eradicated, even though it would benefit these folk. But the reluctance to provide new and additional methods to sit alongside the old and traditional ones is a bit of a problem in Japan.

Too often, people in positions of power in Japan make demands for things for a system and an infrastructure in which their wants cannot exist properly. We are seeing this happen with tourism. Japan wants more tourists, but isn’t doing enough of the work to allow better dispersion of tourists across the entire country — away from Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, so that they aren’t constantly being overrun and dealing with the brunt of tourist foolishness. But there is also a mentality of ‘Well, the numbers are still going up and things are fine…enough’. And therefore, nothing really changes. And nobody really challenges it, because challenging isn’t really a part of Japanese culture.

But there is also a mentality of ‘we don’t want change’ from international fans too. Because in instances where an act does something which so much as hints or alludes to international expansion or growth, they reject it. It happened very recently with Fujii Kaze’s third studio album, Prema. A lot of non-Japanese fans do not like the album, because all of the songs are in English and it’s ‘too western’. Even though TO ME, Prema still sounds and feels like a Fujii Kaze album and something he would have always put out at some point. Then there was when Perfume released the single “Spending All My Time”, and it was the same scenario. Non-Japanese fans hated the song and dragged Perfume for trying to appease western audiences — even though the song was great and made sense for them at that point in their career. And when Namie Amuro started recording songs and entire albums in English, non-Japanese fans disliked that shit too. So even non-Japanese fans of Japanese music are adverse to change.

But there is a distinction to be made between rejecting change because of the sense of appeasement to the American market, and rejecting change because it has resulted in the quality of the music getting worse — and these can and do conflate. But a clear cut example is Hikaru Utada. Fans loved their first English album Exodus, because it featured the quirks of their Japanese material and wasn’t trying to appease the American market. But fans hated This is the One, because it was so clearly trying to appease the American market and was a knee-jerk reaction to how poorly Exodus did commercially. So there is a balance which needs to be struck, especially from artists who already have an established international fanbase, such as Fujii Kaze, Perfume and Hikaru Utada. But maybe the key is not balance at all.

We’ve witnessed that K-pop breaking America has kinda screwed up K-pop. Because what happens every single time, is that K-pop acts stop being K-pop after they break America, due to focusing their careers on the American market. K-pop is not K-pop because the acts are Korean. K-pop is a genre with its own sound and language. A Korean act putting out a song produced by the white man from One Republic is no more K-pop than a Tate McRae song. This is why Lisa was considered a K-pop act despite not being Korean. Her having a K-pop sound and look as part of Blackpink made her K-pop.

So, as a Japanese music fan, I really do hope that this whole initiative of trying to make Japanese music international does not result in the sound and the look of Japanese music changing to a point that it loses the charm and essence that made many of us non-Japanese folk fans of it in the first place. But things might not go quite the same way for Japanese music as it did K-pop, because the Japanese music market is so big and lucrative enough that the majority of artists have no interest in trying to break America. Where-as with K-pop, acknowledgement from the American market always kinda felt like the goal — even if it would result in screwing things up.

Also, the Japanese music industry is far better set up to allow for international growth. Largely because so many of the biggest record labels in Japan are international labels. The majority of Japanese acts these days are signed to Universal, Sony and Warner, because so many of the smaller Japanese labels that everybody was signed got dissolved into one of the big three. This makes international distribution much easier than it is for those signed to a label like Avex. But the reason why many of us still have to pay stupid money on CD Japan, is because printing versions of albums to be sold outside of Japan is both a cost and a legal requirement. And then there is the question of tracking sales, and whether sales of international SKUs of an album are eligible to be counted by Oricon. And which record label can be bothered to deal with any of this? Record labels can barely be bothered to deal with the artists they have signed. Just ask Crystal Kay and Koda Kumi.

If the Japanese music industry is not willing to make changes, then this whole international thing will not happen. And to be really honest, despite Sanae Takaichi’s announcement and the government backing, I don’t think the Japanese music industry or even non-Japanese Japanese music fans want it to happen. Because it would mean things…changing.

Girl. I just want to be able to watch Music Station performances on the official YouTube channel and buy my faves’ albums on Amazon. And quite honestly, embracing such practices would actually go a long way towards Japanese music ‘going international’ with minimal effort and money and without bastardisation.