It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the Japanese government has appointed me as a member of the "Creative Industries Internationalization Committee" (CIIC).

As a member, I will be representing the overseas audience to make sure that your recommendations or criticism is heard on the subject of how Japan could be doing better at bringing you their products, services or content.

This committee is a METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) initiative to financially support and implement any measures needed to strengthen the proliferation of Japanese culture and contents throughout the world.

The government selected committee members based on the wealth of their knowledge in the globalisation of their brands. Members of this committee are mostly Presidents of companies. The ones which you may be familiar with are:-

Unozawa Shin (Bandai Namco Games President)

Kitagawa Naoki (Sony Music Entertainment President)

Noma Yoshinobu (Kodansha President)

Hori Yoshitaka (Horipro President)

Oonishi Hiroshi (Isetan President)

Komoda Masanobu (Mitsui Fudousan President)

Takeda Shinji (Tokyo Broadcasting System President)

Danny Choo (Culture Japan Producer)

The full list of members was announced by METI on their website while the establishment of the Creative Industries Internationalization Committee was announced by the Minister of METI earlier in March.

While I have been working with the Japanese government on various projects for a few years now, I didn't expect to be asked to take on such an key role. As a committee member, apart from making your voice heard, one of the things I do is make recommendations on how Japan should allocate budget to various products, services or contents which not only helps promote Japanese culture but also leads to the industrialization of these contents overseas.