TOKYO (TR) – The Cool Japan Fund, a government-backed funding fund designed to export Japanese anime, meals, and popular culture, is dealing with imminent closure after hemorrhaging money and racking up a staggering 54 billion yen in accrued losses.
Now extensively condemned as a large waste of taxpayer cash, the fund has been completely excluded from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s (METI) finances requests for the upcoming fiscal yr.
In a report showing in President Online (Oct. 26), the framework of the automobile was such that it couldn’t succeed, which rendered the work atmosphere to be a spot of hostility.
“Doomed”
For the closure, an skilled panel has been established to determine on the fund’s abolition or integration by the top of the yr.
“It was doomed from the start,” a fund insider confessed.
Staff have been reportedly handed an unattainable mandate by bureaucrats: generate short-term earnings within the unstable leisure sector with out competing with non-public companies or risking public cash.
Theme park in Okinawa
Launched in November 2013 as a pillar of the Abe administration’s progress technique, the fund was closely bankrolled by the state, injecting 140.6 billion yen of public funds alongside a mere 10.7 billion yen from the non-public sector.
The fund’s monetary demise spiral was not too long ago accelerated by a disastrous funding in Junglia, an upcoming theme park in Okinawa. The fund injected 8 billion yen into the challenge’s dad or mum firm 4 years in the past, just for the operator to not too long ago challenge an surprising 17.3 billion yen web loss by June 2026.
However, catastrophic monetary projections are solely half the story. Insiders paint an image of a profoundly poisonous office tormented by incompetence, political meddling, and inner lawsuits.
“Toxic work environment”
During the tenure of the fund’s first CEO, a former attire government, inner friction boiled over. A dispute over a senior government place resulted in a disgruntled supervisor allegedly inciting feminine workers to file lawsuits in opposition to the group, throwing the office into whole chaos.
“I had never seen such a toxic work environment,” a former fund supervisor recalled.
Investment selections have been equally chaotic. Final approvals have been made by a committee of METI-appointed “experts,” although insiders famous that out of 23 historic committee members, solely two had precise funding expertise.
Fund managers, working for a fraction of private-sector salaries, have been pressured to sacrifice weekends to arrange a whole lot of pages of paperwork for month-to-month conferences. Once there, they confronted grueling three- to four-hour screaming matches as unqualified committee members picked aside proposals. High workers turnover grew to become the norm.
The fund was additionally subjected to political strain. In 2018, the fund injected 1.75 billion yen right into a terrestrial broadcasting station in Myanmar, a transfer extensively recognized internally to require at the least 20 years to show a revenue.
“Voice from heaven”
According to a former funding group chief, the mandate got here from a “voice from heaven” — a euphemism for high-level political strain — ordering the funding no matter profitability for “national security” causes. Following the 2021 navy coup in Myanmar, the funding primarily evaporated.
While the fund’s third and present CEO, a former securities government, tried to pivot the group towards purely worthwhile ventures to stem the bleeding, the harm was already executed. Out of 204 billion yen in authorized investments throughout 83 initiatives, realized and unrealized losses have now crippled the group.
With METI formally pulling its funding requests, the curtain is quickly falling on one of many authorities’s most disastrous bureaucratic experiments.