TOKYO (TR) – The Cool Japan Fund, a government-backed investment fund designed to export Japanese anime, food, and pop culture, is facing imminent closure after hemorrhaging cash and racking up a staggering 54 billion yen in accumulated losses.
Now widely condemned as a massive waste of taxpayer money, the fund has been entirely excluded from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s (METI) budget requests for the upcoming fiscal year.
In a report appearing in President Online (Oct. 26), the framework of the vehicle was such that it could not succeed, which rendered the work environment to be a place of hostility.
“Doomed”
For the closure, an expert panel has been established to decide on the fund’s abolition or integration by the end of the year.
“It was doomed from the start,” a fund insider confessed.
Staff were reportedly handed an impossible mandate by bureaucrats: generate short-term profits in the volatile entertainment sector without competing with private businesses or risking public money.
Theme park in Okinawa
Launched in November 2013 as a pillar of the Abe administration’s growth strategy, the fund was heavily bankrolled by the state, injecting 140.6 billion yen of public funds alongside a mere 10.7 billion yen from the private sector.
The fund’s financial death spiral was recently accelerated by a disastrous investment in Junglia, an upcoming theme park in Okinawa. The fund injected 8 billion yen into the project’s parent company four years ago, only for the operator to recently project an unexpected 17.3 billion yen net loss by June 2026.
However, catastrophic financial projections are only half the story. Insiders paint a picture of a profoundly toxic workplace plagued by incompetence, political meddling, and internal lawsuits.
“Toxic work environment”
During the tenure of the fund’s first CEO, a former apparel executive, internal friction boiled over. A dispute over a senior executive position resulted in a disgruntled manager allegedly inciting female staff to file lawsuits against the organization, throwing the workplace into total chaos.
“I had never seen such a toxic work environment,” a former fund manager recalled.
Investment decisions were equally chaotic. Final approvals were made by a committee of METI-appointed “experts,” though insiders noted that out of 23 historical committee members, only two had actual investment experience.
Fund managers, working for a fraction of private-sector salaries, were forced to sacrifice weekends to prepare hundreds of pages of documents for monthly meetings. Once there, they faced grueling three- to four-hour screaming matches as unqualified committee members picked apart proposals. High staff turnover became the norm.
The fund was also subjected to political pressure. In 2018, the fund injected 1.75 billion yen into a terrestrial broadcasting station in Myanmar, a move widely known internally to require at least 20 years to turn a profit.
“Voice from heaven”
According to a former investment team leader, the mandate came from a “voice from heaven” — a euphemism for high-level political pressure — ordering the investment regardless of profitability for “national security” reasons. Following the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, the investment essentially evaporated.
While the fund’s third and current CEO, a former securities executive, attempted to pivot the organization toward purely profitable ventures to stem the bleeding, the damage was already done. Out of 204 billion yen in approved investments across 83 projects, realized and unrealized losses have now crippled the organization.
With METI officially pulling its funding requests, the curtain is rapidly falling on one of the government’s most disastrous bureaucratic experiments.
