ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the relevant literature on the creative/cultural industries (CCI), and the classical music profession in particular, laying out the theoretical and methodological groundwork for an ensuing analysis of the transnational careers experienced by Japanese classical musicians. Ample literature, whether academic or policy-based, has been devoted to the topic of the CCI, addressing the empirical and ideological underpinnings of the phenomenon. Scholars link the origins of the CCI with the ‘cultural industries’, a term denoting a sector of cultural production that since the 1990s has become ‘increasingly attached, in a new era of local and regional development policy, to the goals of regeneration and employment creation’. Given the Western critiques directed at the CCI, it may come as a surprise that the Japanese government has been uncritically following the British model of creative industries since the early noughties.
