I don’t imagine that this will be the last time this column talks about Cool Japan film financing boondoggles. It certainly isn’t the first – way back in NEO #60 we discussed the likelihood of bail-out packages; then in NEO #63 there was all that hoo-hah over the proposed Media Arts Centre. We’ve followed Japanese studios as they tentatively embraced not only crowd-funding but also charity for their underpaid staff, and the gravy train of J-LOP funding for copyright holders.

But producer Hironori Masuda has just behaved in a decidedly un-Japanese way by blowing the whistle on what he calls the “institutional corruption” of Cool Japan. The subject of his ire is ANEW, a film fund announced with great fanfare in 2011, promising $80 million for new projects. Recently rebuffed for a film funding application, Masuda followed the money trail, and discovered that there wasn’t any cash to be found. ANEW had been sold off in 2017 to venture capitalists for just $311,000, while all those millions injected into it to pay for movies had frittered away on administrative salaries and dead-ends.

ANEW had five or six film projects under its aegis, including a putative live-action adaptation of the anime Tiger & Bunny, but none of them have come to fruition. Then again, isn’t this precisely what you expect to happen when government quangos dabble in media manipulation? Cool Japan has always been a marketing-focussed, image-obsessed concept, in which officialdom has lumbered far beyond the real achievers, trying to reverse-engineer their success. You can’t just make a new Pokémon happen. If you could, Bandai would have already done it. Nor does Japan go for those tax-break film initiatives that so many countries have successfully parleyed into movie success. There’s a reason The Walking Dead films in Atlanta – they get massive tax breaks, as long as they come to Georgia to spend their money. But that doesn’t work in Japan, where a tax break won’t take away the language barrier or the red tape. Instead, the Cool Japan policy wonks tried to make Cool Japan happen by starting their own movie projects.

Some might say that Masuda is just sulking because he didn’t get a piece of the pie, or that it was unrealistic all around for anyone to think that a mere handful of movie ideas might generate the next blockbuster. Regardless, after seven years, it seems that ANEW has absolutely nothing to show for all its investment, an amount of money that if spent more judiciously, could have paid for four Spirited Aways! Not even the Japanese government can create its own luck.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #178, 2018.