For the past year and a half, The Hollywood Reporter writes, Netflix’s Minyoung Kim, the Asia-based executive regularly credited with building the company’s winning strategy in South Korea, has been living full time in Tokyo, where she has been laying the groundwork for what Netflix thinks could be their next big thing: Japanese entertainment. Netflix believes that Japanese entertainment could be poised for a major revitalization.
“You know, not long ago there wasn’t much interest in Korean culture, but thanks to the strength of our pop entertainment, we were able to earn that curiosity from people around the world,” Kim said during an interview at Netflix’s Tokyo office. “Japan right now is almost the opposite. There has never been more global curiosity and love for Japanese culture — and with that interest, there is so much potential for Japan’s entertainment industry to regain momentum.”
For much of the latter half of the 20th century, Japan’s television industry was the preeminent creative and commercial leader in Asia, with its dramas distributed extensively throughout the region. Japanese dramas from the 1970s and 1980s served as one of the templates for the innovative television drama industry that would later emerge in South Korea. But sometime in the 1990s and early 2000s, during The Lost Decade, Japan’s once-lauded TV industry began to lose its energy and innovative spirit. While Hollywood underwent the platinum age of prestige TV and Korean drama continually improved and eventually conquered the world, production values and storytelling templates in Japan mostly stayed the same.
But Netflix, and other international streaming services such as Disney+, believe that a Japanese content boom is eminent.
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