Make Believe Bonus: J-POP 3.0 Disc Guide 2015 - 2025

The Cool Japan Fund teeters on financial collapse. Recent reports say the government program to invest in projects and companies that could in theory help spread Japanese culture around the world racked up ¥54 billion in cumulative losses in fiscal 2025, surpassing expectations of loss for a project already seen as a money pit by most over the last decade. Many expect it to be merged with some other Diet-approved initiative…or just scrapped entirely.

The potential death spiral of the government’s Cool Japan efforts means it’s a great time to once again dance over the hobbled attempt to spread Japanese pop culture to the globe via the least cool bureaucrats imaginable. How did it fails? What did it actually accomplish? Did Danny Choo and his doll assistant actually accomplish anything at the meeting they attended?

It’s also an opportunity to sigh at all the missed opportunities Japanese entertainment seemingly had to grow in the 2010s…until you remember it actually did. The success of Korean entertainment globally along with the perception that the South Korean government played a huge role in making that happen meant all Japanese cultural developments would be tied to or compared with Cool Japan.

Problem was, growing interest in anime, food or the country itself was well underway even before the Cool Japan Fund was officially established. One of the more annoying legacies of Cool Japan is how its existence and subsequent shortcomings distract from all the real breakthroughs and changes in the Japanese entertainment space during the 2010s, which bloomed into something even bigger in the 2020s.

That’s true for J-pop too, and a reality music journalists Kenta Terunuma and Shun Fushimi (who also operate the YouTube channel Teke & Shun Music Information) explore in J-POP 3.0 Disc Guide 2015 - 2025. It's a collection I enthusiastically recommend to those interested in modern J-pop, largely in part because it’s one of the best efforts to date in charting how the current music landscape in the country came to be…and how it connected with the wider world, far earlier than you might remember.