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The story
It’s come to light that some of the projects funded by the “Cool Japan Fund” — the organization you might recognize from TV — racked up roughly ¥3.3 billion in losses without ever managing to release a single thing. On 5ch, criticism poured in over how sloppily these investments were vetted, with comments like “Go collect the money back!” and “Nobody takes responsibility even after losses like this” piling up, fueling widespread frustration over how tax money is being spent.
What people said
Honestly, the least the bureaucrats could do is nothing at all — just cut corporate taxes instead.
they spent every last yen of it properly, so nobody's got any right to complain, right? (sarcasm)
Were all these companies really unknowns, and did they really need to set up brand-new companies and ventures for this? Instead of putting the money into companies that are already thriving
the whole process behind how funding decisions get made is just baffling
It's just handouts to their buddies, isn't it.
What's the point of learning a lesson?
They still get to keep milking the money, don't they?
If they know who they invested in, they should be able to claw the tax money back
Go collect it!
I remember seeing "Kumo no Su" (Spider's Web) on TV — did that one flop too?
And on top of that, a ¥3.3 billion loss — what were they actually doing?
Some mysterious force steps in and nobody ever digs any deeper.
Sounds like it's actually going to be built in France, funded by Saudi Arabia.
Just eating and sleeping, probably
Can I get in on this gig too?
They were probably just sightseeing under the name "on-site research."
It's just bureaucrats playing around on the taxpayer's dime.
There's responsibility, but no one who's actually responsible.
Of course, this would have to include investments past prime ministers decided on the spot in conversations with foreign presidents, so it's a given the top of the list would run into the tens of trillions of yen
That would go viral worldwide, no doubt about it
Somebody make a website for that.
Well, that one can't really be helped.
Is it on purpose that it's nothing but garbage at this point?
Background and Key Points
The Cool Japan Fund (officially Cool Japan Fund Inc.) is a public-private investment vehicle set up by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2013, seeded mostly with government money, to help “cool” Japanese content — anime, manga, food, fashion, tourism — expand overseas. Unlike a subsidy, it’s structured as equity and loan investments meant to be repaid with returns, which is why a single project burning through ¥3.3 billion without ever releasing anything is notable: that’s investment capital effectively gone, not a grant that was merely spent. The fund has drawn Diet scrutiny for years over its track record, and posters clearly assume this is part of a longer pattern rather than an isolated incident.
Where the thread actually splits is less about whether the fund is wasteful — that’s near-unanimous — and more about who’s to blame: some posts (10, 12) frame it as cronyism, money funneled to new shell ventures instead of already-successful companies; others (11, 13, 71) frame it as structural, comparing it to Japan’s earlier failed “third-sector” public-private projects and arguing bureaucrats simply can’t be made to learn since no one is personally penalized.
What’s likely to mislead outside readers is post 99’s claim that the Tokyo Olympics were “Cool Japan Fund” — the Olympics were funded through an entirely separate public budget, and no source in the thread substantiates that link, so it reads as a joke or conflation rather than fact. Also unaddressed: the fund’s successor restructuring (mentioned in 92) is a real, ongoing government response to this exact criticism, which the thread treats mainly as more of the same rather than as reform in progress.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyou G) thread “[Images] The List of Investments Behind Cool Japan’s Massive Flop Is Insane lolololololololol.”
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