Japan is an Asian entertainment powerhouse, is it not? This October's Japan Contents Showcase, which was held in Tokyo's Odaiba and Shibuya areas, included markets for film and TV (TIFFCOM), animation (TIAF) and music (TIMM), with 356 Japanese companies selling to 1,539 registered buyers, most from Asia. Surely the region's multiplexes, TV channels and smartphones are awash with Japanese content?

Or maybe not, as I learned on a press junket to this year's Singapore Media Festival, Singapore's version of JCS, which was held from Nov. 23 to Dec. 9. I found myself looking through the other end of the telescope, in which Southeast Asia loomed large while Japan suddenly seemed far, far away.

At a welcome dinner sponsored by the Singapore Tourism Board, which is an SMF partner, the Singaporeans present all testified to the local popularity of Japanese pop culture.

"Anime, manga and cosplay are very big here," one tourism official told me. But she and the others had not yet heard of "Your Name.," the megahit Makoto Shinkai anime — even though it opened in Singapore theaters on Nov. 3. "But everyone knows (Hayao) Miyazaki," the official added helpfully.

Another eye-opening SMF event was the 21st Asian Television Awards. Held on Dec. 2 at a cavernous events complex, the splashy award ceremony was packed with local celebs in the VIP seats and, behind them, thousands of mostly young, female and enthusiastic fans, whose screams, handmade signs and fluorescent wands were a good barometer as to the popularity of the performers and awardees.

Several Japanese shows did receive nominations in the 45 awards categories, but the only winner was "The Three Japanese Beauties: Looking Beyond the Win," a Kansai Telecasting Corp. show about three women athletes. By contrast, one Taiwanese program, the Chinese Civil War drama "A Touch of Green," scooped five prizes, while most of the other awards went to shows and talents from Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Also affiliated with SMF was the 27th Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF), held Nov. 23-Dec. 4. SGIFF executive director Yuni Hadi told me the festival "is committed to the development of Southeast Asian cinema." In addition to its Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, it sponsors a mentorship program for first-time feature directors and a film literacy program for students. "We believe in building the audience for our own films and culture," Hadi explained.

That audience wasn't always there: For decades after becoming an independent country in 1965, Singapore had little in the way of a local film industry. That began to change in the mid-1990s when Eric Khoo's "12 Storeys" (1997) became the first Singaporean film to screen at Cannes and "Money No Enough" (1998), a comedy written by and starring local funnyman Jack Neo, became a box-office hit. Now about 15 to 20 Singaporean films are released annually.

Hadi has contributed to this revival by co-producing "Ilo Ilo," a family drama that won the Camera d'Or prize at Cannes for director Anthony Chen in 2013. This year, two films from Singapore premiered at Cannes: Boo Junfeng's "Apprentice" and K. Rajagopal's "A Yellow Bird." This equaled the Japanese total in the festival's three main sections.

"The world has a vision of Singapore as modern and fast-paced. I wanted to show another perspective," Rajagopal told me at a meet-and-greet for directors with films in the SGIFF competition. The hero of "A Yellow Bird," an ex-con from the director's own Indian community, scratches out a living as a professional mourner while being discriminated against for his ethnicity.

"When I was younger I also felt like a foreigner in my own country," Rajagopal said. "Singaporeans are not accepting of minorities."

When asked if it was different since he had been to Cannes, he replied with a glint of a smile, "People here have started to believe in me."

At SGIFF, Japan was represented by a five-film retrospective dedicated to director Naomi Kawase, the 1965 Tomu Uchida classic "A Fugitive from the Past" ("Kiga Kaikyo"), Katsuya Tomita's slice-of-nightlife "Bangkok Nites," Daisuke Miyazaki's female-friendship drama "California" ("Yamoto") and Akihiko Shiota's "Wet Woman in the Wind" ("Kaze ni Nureta Onna"), part of a reboot of Nikkatsu's famed Roman Porno softcore films from the 1970s and '80s.

"We've seen some very interesting independent films coming out of Japan," said Hadi. "They're a reflection of what the new generation are thinking and feeling."

Meanwhile, Kawase, a leader of the '90s Japanese New Wave and a frequent invitee to Cannes, took part in SGIFF as not only a guest but also as the chairwoman of the Asian Feature Film Competition Jury and the lecturer of a master class.

"Naomi Kawase remains one of the most genuine voices in Japanese contemporary cinema and having her lead our jury as well as do a master class here is a great opportunity for our audiences to connect with her," said Hadi. "It is also important for us to celebrate a strong female voice in Asian cinema. Her work remains very much admired by filmmakers in this part of the world."

But inevitably and rightly, the festival's focus was on Singapore and Southeast Asia, just as it has been for most of its three-decade history.

"Filmmakers in the region explore who we are as people, what we are doing as a society and where we are heading," Hadi said. "Film festivals and alternative film spaces are important for showing these films and putting a context to them through dialogue with the audience. Over time, all these films collectively will tell us something about who we are and what was going on at that time."

SGIFF's motto is "Telling our stories," which sounds right for a place where films were once telling hardly any home-grown stories at all. What, I wondered, would be a similar slogan for the Japanese film industry? "Escaping our echo chamber"?