TOKYO -- Japan's government plans to create a specialized entity for helping to promote Japanese content including anime and video games in international markets, with a task force holding its first discussions on the formation Thursday. The organization is expected to centrally manage relevant budgets available at different ministries and agencies.

The planned entity "will not be a public-private fund," Toshiharu Furukawa, minister in charge of content strategy, told a news conference earlier this week. "It will specialize in providing support (for the content industry)."

"Content is one of the most promising industries" among the 17 strategic fields the government has identified, Furukawa told the task force's first meeting Thursday. He added that he hopes extensive talks by the group will lead to greater initiatives in the industry.

The creation of the new organization will be led by the Cabinet Office with cooperation from several ministries, including the culture ministry and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The aim is for the new organization to provide centralized support for researching overseas markets, developing skilled personnel, and other initiatives.

The envisioned body is also expected to serve as a single point for handling initiatives currently taken by different ministries and agencies, and managing efficient allocation of budgets.

It will be responsible for focused marketing in certain countries and taking measures to fight piracy -- a task challenging for businesses to do on their own. One idea calls for the formation of an independent audit committee to ensure the transparency of how public funds are spent. The government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has designated the content industry as one of the 17 key fields for focused public-private investment.

In the content industry, efforts are concentrated on the five subcategories of games, anime, manga, music and live-action productions.

The aim is to boost overseas sales of these subcategories to around 20 trillion yen ($127 billion) by 2033, more than triple the roughly 6 trillion yen in 2024. The investment roadmap for growth strategies the government published in July projects combined public-private investment in the content field to total more than 30 trillion yen by fiscal 2033.

Furukawa's comment earlier in the week likely was designed to differentiate the new entity from the Cool Japan Fund, a public-private fund established in 2013 that has invested in a broad range of industries from fashion and content to food and inbound tourism. Expectations were initially high that the fund would supply funds to riskier ventures that private-sector financial institutions would shun. But it was unable to generate enough returns and logged cumulative losses of 54 billion yen through fiscal 2025.

Now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is considering the fund's future, including a potential shutdown. "It seems that Cool Japan used anime and manga as a starting point to bring international tourists to rural areas," said Nobuko Kawashima of Doshisha University, whose studies include public policy on the content industry.

The new organization "will likely reassess the potential creativity and economic power of the content industry and provide support," Kawashima said.