Today SBS is running one of those bright-eyed pieces about how Australia could be “making billions with this untapped export.” Cultural exports, soft power, follow Japan and South Korea, etc. The usual litany: more government support, help the creatives, build a national identity. And the kicker: since we supposedly don’t have one, Indigenous culture must be the backbone.
There’s a truth in that, but only in the way a single tree tells you something about a whole forest. You feel it as you read: the whole frame is off.
A Japanese manga artist nailed the deeper point years ago. Asked why Japan rakes in billions while Western nations struggle, his answer was brutally simple: censorship.
Because here’s the part people don’t like to hear. Across East Asia, visual literacy runs high. People know an image is not a contract, not a confession, not a literal instruction manual for living. They know imagery can be symbolic, ironic, interior. They know that text and subtext dance.
Take some random panel from a Boys’ Love manga—two beautiful young men in an intimate moment. A Western reader scans it and starts generating alarms:
Is this LGBTQIA+ content? Is one partner too young? Is this appropriate? Does this violate any of our forty-seven categories of protected narratives?
The reflex is to supervise, classify, restrict. Sometimes punish.
But the Japanese female reader doesn’t see “two males.” She slips herself into the scene. She becomes the younger partner; the older man’s devotion becomes hers to enjoy. The whole appeal of the genre is romance unburdened by gender roles. And most of the creators are women making stories for women because gender, in Japan, is still an armour you want to slip out of, at least in fiction.
Here, that same creative space would summon not a fandom but a taskforce.
And even without the law stepping in, you hit the bureaucratic reef of “acceptable representation.” Whole pages of legislation telling you what you can and can’t say about certain demographics. And if you try to draw from Indigenous cultures without being Indigenous, you’re liable to be accused of appropriation. Meanwhile the SBS piece floats this fantasy that endless Indigenous stories are enough to sustain a global audience. They aren’t. They matter, they’re vital, but any culture that exports well exports universals: longing, alienation, power, identity, death, freedom.
Think of Ghost in the Shell—half Japanese cyber-myth, half Western philosophy, all of it translatable because it speaks to the human condition, not a committee.
Japan expects cultural exports to hit $198 billion by 2033. Could Australia do anything like that?
Yeah. Possibly. But only if we stop treating art like a hazardous chemical that needs to be handled with gloves and a police escort. Only if we trust audiences with complexity. Only if we let creators risk being misunderstood, disliked, controversial, excessive, strange.
Because no country ever exported culture while being scared of its own imagination.