After a Landslide Victory, Will Sanae Takaichi’s Election Reshape Japan’s Artworld?

On 8 February, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi led the Liberal Democratic Party to its largest postwar victory, securing a single-party supermajority. The result marks a significant political shift, with likely knock-on effects across economic policy, foreign resident rules, security, and Japan’s relations with China and the US. Given the art sector’s reliance on public funding and cross-border mobility, it is reasonable to ask what such a mandate would mean in practice for the arts.

Within Japan’s artworld, the mood remains indifferent rather than dramatic. And given the sector’s historically peripheral status in national policy, it’s unlikely to shift quickly. This continued indifference underscores the long-standing position of contemporary and fine art within national policy priorities, separate from globally marketable cultural exports such as anime, gaming, and manga.

Rather than anticipating abrupt change, this political moment provides an opportunity to examine more soberly how Japan’s art ecosystem is structured, financed, and how it is experienced on the ground.

Lost opportunity

Economic revitalisation sits at the centre of the Takaichi administration’s agenda. Among its 17 designated growth sectors are AI, semiconductors, defence and ‘content’. Japan’s overseas revenue from content industries, including games, anime, film, music and publishing, has grown from approximately ¥1 trillion in 2010 to around ¥5.8 trillion in 2023 (approximately £4.7 billion to £27 billion).

In June 2025, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s ‘Entertainment and Creative Industries Strategy’ framed this impetus as the ‘content overseas expansion 2.0’ era, outlining action plans across 10 sectors. Although art is formally included within this scheme, it does not necessarily occupy an equivalent position to intellectual property (IP)-driven sectors in terms of market scale, investment priority or political attention.

While art and ‘content’ have historically overlapped, today’s policy environment is determined by the rapid growth and political appeal of IP-driven industries. Meanwhile, art institutions and practitioners continue to face chronic funding constraints, even as cultural exports are celebrated as engines of growth.

“At the core of Japan’s cultural appeal rests ‘Japanese culture’ itself […] yet I do not sense that current approaches fully recognise this. At this rate, Japan risks becoming a country of subcultures without a main culture. What is frustrating is the inability to share this sense of urgency with national policymakers,” says a senior cultural worker in Tokyo who wishes to remain anonymous.

Artist Ryuta Aoki reflects from a more structural point of view: “Investment in arts and culture is, ultimately, an investment in the soil from which innovation grows, especially in an AI age, where cultivating human connection and the capacity to ask questions matters most. Japan possesses that soil, yet lacks the political voices to advocate for it. This is both our fundamental weakness and our greatest lost opportunity.”

Under an administration prioritising largescale economic growth, it is difficult to imagine this structural imbalance narrowing. As Kiyohiko Nagai, former Deloitte Managing Director and contributor to the ‘Art & Finance Report’ 2023, observes: “Unless fine art develops a framework oriented toward IP management, it will not benefit from investment directed at the content industries.”

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, 2023. Courtesy Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan

Marginal position

A closer look at public funding reveals the structural imbalance. Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs operates on an annual budget of approximately ¥107.3 billion (£0.5 billion, FY2026), equivalent to roughly 0.1% of the national budget. This number is significantly lower than cultural allocations in countries such as France or South Korea. The figure has remained largely unchanged year-on-year.

More than half of this funding is allocated to the ‘utilisation of cultural resources’, which focuses on heritage preservation. Of the ¥45 billion (£211 million) designated for ‘creation, promotion and human resource development in arts and culture’, only around ¥24 billion (£113 million) reaches artists and cultural organisations directly through grants and subsidies.

A senior cultural official ascribes this imbalance to institutional conservatism, noting that more personnel are dedicated to heritage protection than to contemporary arts policy. He adds that fine and contemporary art have long occupied a marginal position in public consciousness.

However, throughout this time, there have been modest signs of change. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has expanded its engagement with the arts, publishing its first ‘Study Group Report on Art and the Economy and Society’ in 2023 and launching related programmes and grant schemes.

Hozu Yamamoto, president and CEO of the contemporary art gallery, Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, and a long-time collaborator with the Agency for Cultural Affairs, notes that Japan has traditionally assumed that culture does not generate economic value. That perception, he argues, is gradually shifting, with new attention to culture’s economic role. Support systems for galleries expanding overseas have been further developed, and although many of these initiatives predate the current administration, Yamamoto hopes Prime Minister Takaichi will recognise their impact and provide sustained institutional backing.

Tokyo Gallery 70th Anniversary (Part 1), 2020 (installation view, Tokyo Gallery+BTAP Tokyo, Japan). Photo: Kei Okano. Courtesy Tokyo Gallery+BTAP

Foreign labour

Beyond funding, mobility is a key concern, particularly for foreign artists, curators and cultural workers operating in and out of Japan, as the new government has signalled stricter immigration oversight.

So far, this has not led to a reduction in the intake of foreign labour. While quotas under the skilled worker programme have expanded to address labour shortages, artists and curators are not included among the designated fields. No direct policy shift currently targets cultural workers, and residency schemes for fixed-term visa holders remain largely unchanged.

Eiji Sakamoto of Nikkei notes that the prime minister has framed her approach as more stringent but not exclusionary. “Her stance is not that foreigners should be barred,” he explains, “but that greater vigilance is required where national security may be concerned.”

In practice, the most instant mobility restrictions stem from measures taken by Chinese authorities following Takaichi’s controversial remarks last November, which suggested Japan could deploy its Self-Defence Forces in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In response, Beijing issued travel advisories and reportedly suspended some cultural relations with Japan. 

Zhai Qiutong, a Chinese-Singaporean artist-researcher based in Japan, says: “Most people I know are taking a wait-and-see approach, paying close attention to the situation. There are frequent collaborations between artists and curators across China and here. Conversations within those existing working relationships are around immediate and practical impacts: mobility, flights, visas and residency paperwork. These are the things that change how artists and curators make projects that happen next month or next year.”

Yamamoto, who also maintains a gallery in Beijing, will continue to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong (27–29 March). He shares that there has been no particularly severe response from the Chinese side, and that Hong Kong remains a relatively flexible space for international exchange, even amid broader geopolitical strain.

Under these circumstances, Nagai points to wider developments within the Asian art ecosystem, with activity increasingly centred on Singapore. In this context, he says: “It is entirely possible that Japan, as a third party, could provide a space for more measured exhibitions and perspectives. However, these developments are not the result of any particular policy shift by the Japanese government.”

Based on policy developments and on-the-ground perspectives, Takaichi’s victory appears unlikely to directly reshape Japan’s domestic art ecosystem in terms of funding or institutional support. The more visible tensions have emerged in international collaborations with China, where recent restrictions stem primarily from Chinese authorities' measures.

Rather than immediate disruption, the more pressing question concerns long-term direction: whether contemporary and fine art will remain peripheral to Japan’s economic strategy, or gradually be integrated into it.