This meme just won't quit.
With its films and cartoons drawing strong followings abroad, Japan should promote its "Gross National Cool" as a tool of foreign policy, experts advised Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.But the country also needs to help young people to better understand their own language and culture so they can promote Japanese thinking abroad, the Japan Forum on International Relations said in a report.
It's great that Japan is realizing that it's media is valuable. But the reaction of that Japanese anime company to attack the fansubtitlers is wrong. They should be working to release those anime to a global audience simultaneously, instead of releasing DVDs years later. The demand is global.
Japan advised to promote "Gross National Cool" as foreign policy [news.yahoo.com]
also
That's retarded. There's a huge market for Japanese cultural artifacts like anime-style animation precisely because it's so different from U.S.-style animation. The best way to preserve a culture and its cultural artifacts is in fact to export them.
A lot of Jap stuff doesn't map to U.S. tastes really well, such as squid-flavored ice cream and vending machines with used girls' undies, but some of it does - and it should be marketed broadly, if only to stick a pin in Hollywood's ass to hopefully get them to stop churning out crap like "Bridge Jones' Diary" and whatever the Christ else they have on tap for us this year (oh yeah - that Affleck straight to video thing, and Oliver Stone's fevered but wildly inaccurate Alexander of Macedon thingy).
cdg