What Comes After Cool Japan.

   - At the Japan Expo that is held in early summer in the suburb of Paris. Men in their 30s dance intensely to the theme songs of Japanese anime. European girls are dressed up in Japanese high school uniforms.
　This Japanese cultural event, which started with 3,000 participants 12 years ago, received 200,000 people in 4 days in 2013. Japanese manga, anime, and games are firmly established overseas. Japanese government is also keeping its hopes up about this content industry.
　However, this content industry has not been experiencing market expansion; rather, it is shrinking. Publication, music and movies are all suffering from losses. Manga, anime, and TV games are facing declines in the national market. 
　The word “Cool Japan” was coined by an American journalist 10 years ago but it has become commonly used within Japan as well. However, the international competitiveness of the whole content industry is not very high. The revenue ratio of overseas and domestic  is 4.3% in Japan which is far behind the 17 percent in the United States.

　However, the fact that the government is treating manga and games as the nation’s legacy, which used to be mere objects of enforcements, is because that gives energy to the industry. Even though the scale of the industry is small, images and the brands which derive from such contents have the effects of boosting other industries as well. 
　There comes the need for the multilateral Cool Japan measures - namely, the collaborations among the content and other industries. This entails collaborative works of making business models, by mixing and matching entertainments, consumer electronics, fashion, and food. The cultural power of the contents and technical capabilities of manufacturing are to be put together. Both of them are the strengths of Japan.
　Cooperationsfor a product or among corporations have been seen in business development, utilizing such contents in multi-faceted aspects; however, cooperations across different industries have rarely been done. 
　After the Wars, people started watching American TV dramas and Hollywood movies, drinking coke, or wear jeans in Japan but people finally started to think about trying to apply the contents of their own.

　In America, apparently, Japanese candies have been a hit among some people. People like the tastes of candies, cute package designs and characters and nowadays you do not need to go to Japanese stores and you can just buy them on the Internet. In this, you can see the potentials of the combination of manufacturing and cultural powers to open new markets through digital technologies.
　Japan needs export strategies that bring different fields together. The coordinators to unite different industries are indeed needed. However, that should not be done by the government like it used to be. I think that universities can work well.