Japan has formally put filmed and written entertainment on the same industrial-policy list as semiconductors and artificial intelligence. The ambition is big: under the IP360 banner, the government wants overseas sales of Japanese content to reach $127 billion by 2033, with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) overseeing the push.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi announced the policy last November. This summer, the government set a wider public and private investment goal of more than $2.3 trillion across 17 priority sectors by 2040. For content, IP360 is meant to replace years of smaller, annual-budget subsidy programs with longer-term support.
What sellers heard at TIFFCOM
At the TIFFCOM content market inside the Tokyo International Film Festival, the official target collided with frontline experience. Sales agents described previous support programs as complex, slow and tilted toward projects that already had scale.
- Domestic live-action films need a budget of at least 800 million yen, currently $5.1 million, to qualify for overseas support.
- One mid-sized company sales agent said past schemes felt aimed at “the majors and to small ventures rather than places like us.”
- Several agents said application forms and hearings were difficult even for Japanese teams, and that selection has favored famous actors and big-name directors.
The skepticism is not abstract. Multiple sellers said earlier Cool Japan and related subsidy programs had little measurable impact on their export business. A sales representative at a major Japanese publisher was blunt: “There have been a lot of support schemes up to this point and none of them have had much impact.”
A longer-horizon defense
Not everyone at the market dismissed IP360. Makito Sugiyama, executive director at the Broadcast Program Export Association of Japan, said the government’s thinking has shifted from short-term annual subsidies to longer-range planning, and that production-side attitudes have become more global over the past five years.
That matters for buyers and sellers deciding whether to factor Japanese state support into their content planning. The realistic read from the floor is that government programs may eventually help, but the near-term growth signal is coming from global streamers, not ministries.
What this means for the trade
For entertainment marketers and licensing teams, the immediate move is to keep benefiting from streaming-led demand for anime, manga and Japanese live-action titles while tracking how METI writes the IP360 selection rules. The risk is that IP360 becomes another top-down support mechanism that rewards the biggest players and leaves mid-budget sellers, who need it most, waiting for clarity.
The test will be simple: whether the program reaches independent and mid-size sellers quickly, with transparent criteria, or whether the gap between Tokyo’s target and TIFFCOM’s cynicism widens.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
