The Change of Japanese Contents Policy 1/3

■The Change of Japanese Contents Policy 1/3

　これは2012年2月、UCバークレー大学にて講演した際のメモです。3回に分けて。

1 Yesterday

A) Outline

 Just before I joined the government in 1983, a company located near my house in Kyoto named Nintendo launched a “machine”. This enabled people everywhere on the earth to play with visual images.

 After this, a lot of media other than TVs and telephones were developed. In Japan, these were called new-media, and they were basically developments of analog hardware.

 Ten years later, the multi-media boom happened; a movement where various media were converged to digital devices represented by PCs, mobile phones and the digital information highway called the internet.

 Then, various kinds of information products were also unified into a unique notion termed “contents” and became highlighted to be a hot issue.

  Policy relating to this has been conceived and implemented since the latter half of the 1990s. In 2001, the government drew up e-Japan strategy. This mainly focused on construction and development of network infrastructure. Contents policy was categorized as a utilization policy of the network.

  Contents policy including support for contents industry, culture promotion, copyright protection, and so on were also developed. But they were not well sharpened up. They included both analog and digital, both package and network delivery and both traditional and pop. In network policy, competition and regulation were the main topics. The main topics of contents policy were promotion and protection. They were separate and not connected.

  IT strategy HQ and IP strategy HQ were set up in the Prime Minister’s office in 2003, but the interface between them hasn’t been working effectively enough, so far.

B) Japan’s Model

  We can find two characteristics in contents policy. One is that its method is broad and various. Support for industry, promotion of culture and art, regulation of expression, privacy and security. So the same product can be subsidized and regulated at the same time.

Another is that there are many players. IP strategy HQ, the Ministry of Communication, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Police Agency; almost all the ministers participate in the meeting of Intellectual Property Policy. So sometimes we face difficulty to make a decision of national policy.

 There are various policy models in the world. It may be one characteristic. Allow me to talk very roughly about this. The US is private sector oriented and focuses on industry policy. France is government oriented, culture policy, mainly focuses on fine arts. Korea is a government and Pop culture industry.

  Japan has no clear position. In 1993, at the GATT Uruguay round, I was in Paris sent by the government. There, a battle occurred between the US Clinton administration that demanded openness of the visual contents market and the French administration of Mitterrand that demanded protection of each country’s culture. I asked Tokyo about the stance of the government of Japan between industry and culture. The answer was “we can’t determine who should be responsible about this issue.”

  I personally think private-culture should be Japanese strategy, but it is not a consensus.

  Anyway, the priority of contents policy is low in Japan. When we compare the percentage of the budget of culture policy in the national total budget, it is also low. The US is also low, because this is the comparison of the central governments’budget not including local governments, and US culture policy approach is mainly to circulate the private sector’s money to the culture sector through tax system for donations.