A Tail that Wags the Dog? Cultural Industry and Cultural Policy in Japan and South Korea

Abstract

How is a policy initiated and implemented toward a newly arising industrial sector? This paper addresses that question by looking at the way the Japanese and the South Korean governments respond to the massive production and export of pop culture. The investigation focuses on the emergence of the local cultural industries, the policy issues they raise, and the domestic discourse they initiate. The central argument of this paper is that these governments no longer perceive the cultural industries in only ideological terms, but following the success of the private sector, they have recently shifted their attention to the economic benefits derived from the commodification of culture. However, their efforts to foster the pop culture sector heavily emphasize investment in infrastructure as a part of a developmental-state strategy. This attitude is too rigid to accommodate the dynamism of the cultural industries and should be supplemented with a more nuanced approach that considers the distinctive structure and the organization of the cultural industries.