Cool Japan Fund to Be Abolished — METI Weighs Skipping Next Year’s Budget Request

Background and Key Points

The Cool Japan Fund is the informal name for the Overseas Demand Cultivation Support Corporation, a public-private investment vehicle METI set up to promote Japanese content, food, fashion, and tourism abroad by co-investing alongside private companies in projects deemed to spread Japanese culture. It draws its capital partly from Japan’s Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP), a government-run investment pool sometimes called the “second budget,” which is why METI simply skipping next year’s FILP request effectively starves the fund rather than requiring a formal dissolution vote. It was launched in November 2013, which places it under the second Abe administration, even though posters in the thread argued it began under the preceding Noda-led DPJ government — a mix-up likely caused by earlier discussion papers on a “Cool Japan strategy” predating the fund’s actual incorporation.

The thread’s real disagreement was over the cause of the deficit: some blamed opaque insider dealing, pointing to money flowing to Yoshimoto Kogyo and the Osaka Castle Park theater venture while working animators saw none of it, while others insisted the loss was mostly one large bet — the Spiber synthetic-spider-silk startup — going bad, a legitimate investment risk rather than favoritism.

What the thread doesn’t mention is that Japanese investigators have found no criminal collusion in any of these deals; the criticism, as one reply notes, is about structural failure — bureaucrat-led vetting without the discipline of private investors, projects justified after the fact as “cultural contribution,” and an unwillingness to cut losses because doing so meant admitting political and administrative responsibility. That distinction between corruption and simple bad governance is the part most outside readers are likely to conflate.