A report released by a Kansai business group earlier this month notes the amounts for the art and culture budgets of Osaka prefecture and Osaka city are well below national averages on a per person level, and has a lot of tongues wagging about Osaka being run by a bunch of philistines.
That's nothing new among local cynics who guffaw when Osaka Gov. Ichiro Matsui puts ice cubes in his red wine (to freshen up that old Chateau Margaux). But it at least shows that influential Osakans are worried about being perceived as rubes even though one can usually, and with corporate and government official statements virtually always, replace the word "important" with "money-making schemes" and not risk being seriously misunderstood.
One of the more nontraditional ways in which culture is important to local governments around Japan is the promotion of what is known as contents tourism. Trying to define what constitutes contents tourism can be a bit tricky, but it often evolves from a desire to visit somewhere based on a pop culture image and includes things such as traveling to the location of a popular film or television series, or perhaps visiting the old haunts of a now famous singer