WakuWaku Japan

» see wakuwakujapan.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

WAKUWAKU JAPAN was a Japanese pay television channel that did not broadcast in Japan. SKY Perfect JSAT started the project in 2011 to put Japanese programming in front of overseas viewers across Asia, in Japanese, with subtitles and dubbing into Indonesian or Mandarin or English depending on the market. The word means something close to thrilling.

It went on air on 22 February 2014 at five in the afternoon Jakarta time, seven in the evening in Tokyo, carried in Indonesia on Indovision and OkeVision, opening with a program called WakuWaku Japan Music Festival. It began on a twelve-hour broadcast day and moved to twenty-four hours once Myanmar came online. In February 2016 it went back to twelve.

On 25 February 2022 the channel published a notice saying it would cease operations on 31 March, citing bankruptcy and losses. The last program aired was the 2020 edition of Summer Vacation with Ariyoshi. In several countries the feed stopped minutes or hours before the stated deadline, which viewers recorded and put on YouTube.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the soft power budget ~

The thing that separates this from an ordinary failed channel is where the money came from. The Japanese government allocated ¥15.5 billion to it, roughly $126 million at the time, earmarked for the cost of dubbing and subtitling plus promotion and production. That is state money spent on the proposition that if Asian households could watch Japanese drama and anime in their own language on a normal cable package, something good would come back to Japan eventually.

It bought a real channel. There were in-house productions and a slot carrying NHK's morning serials, plus a pair of original mascots called Waa and Kuu, launched on 25 March 2017 alongside a children's program. A four-language audience means every one of those has to be finished four times before it airs.

~ the map it drew ~

The expansion reads like someone working a list. Myanmar in June 2014 on a terrestrial pay service called 4TV. Singapore in July 2015. Thailand in March 2016 got two mornings of a ninety-minute block called WakuWaku Japan Hour, and that was the entire launch. Taiwan in September 2016, Sri Lanka a month later on Dialog TV, where it was the first Japanese entertainment channel anyone had launched. Mongolia in early 2017, Vietnam properly in April 2018 after two years of borrowed timeslots.

The last country added was the Philippines, on Cignal, on 5 April 2021. The channel had under a year left at that point. Four months after the Philippine launch it lost MNC Vision and MNC Play in Indonesia, the platform it had launched on seven years earlier, which left it carried in its founding market by three competitors and nobody else.

~ the final program ~

Everything that was on this channel is still available in Asia. It sits on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and half a dozen regional services besides, which is precisely why there was no longer any reason to pay a satellite transponder to deliver it on somebody else's channel number at a fixed hour.

WakuWaku never came anywhere near Turkey, and the dates make a small joke out of that. By 2022 I was watching Japanese shows the same way everyone here was, which is to say through the same global streaming platforms that had taken this channel's audience away from it. The soft power project arrived at the exact moment the delivery mechanism it was built on stopped mattering.

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