According to Manchester City Council, Japan Week is

a prestigious annual event taking place in a different world city each year.

It wasn’t an accident that Manchester was chosen as the host for 2025; this was the outcome of an international mission and lobbying:

The city’s bid to host Japan Week followed a successful Greater Manchester mission to Osaka and Tokyo in December 2023, led by GMCA Mayor Andy Burnham and Leader of Manchester City Council, Councillor Bev Craig, and supported by Marketing Manchester.

It’s organised by the International Friendship Foundation, which operates from the fourth floor of a nondescript Tokyo office building (above a dog grooming business, but that’s not particularly unusual for Japan). According to their accounts they have assets of around ¥100,000,000 (about £500,000 at the current exchange rate), so they’re not a huge organisation.

There isn’t a lot about previous instances of Japan Week online. It seems to have visited in Colmar in 2024, although from the pictures it looks like a small scale event that took place in one room.

Nonetheless, for Japan Week 2025 in Manchester they seem to have reeled in some big sponsors like Manchester Airport, Mizkan, and Calbee.

So what are they spending their sponsorship money on? I don’t know. But I can tell you what they aren’t spending it on: the performers at their events.

Last week, we received an email inviting us to play:

If you are interested performing Sanshin in Manchester, please consider join the event.

We would like you to perform at Opening Festival held on 5Sep(Fri) at First Street Square

And perform either 6Sep(Sat) or 7Sep(Sun) at First Street Square.

The cost is JPY 20,000 (about 100GBP) Per Person to participate.

Surely some mistake, I thought. A loss in translation. I asked for clarification:

Could I please clarify the details? Are you offering to pay JPY 20,000 per performer? And if so, would travel and accommodation expenses be covered on top of that?

Alas, I had not misunderstood. They were offering us the opportunity to spend our own time and money to work at their event:

No, we need to be paid JPY20,000 per person to participate Japan Week. With this participant fee, we will have the staff and stage equipment.

I took them to task:

I’m speaking only for myself here, but I find this offer offensive. You want people to give up their time to play at your commercial, sponsored event, but you want them to pay you to do so? Why on earth would anyone take you up on such a deal?

Do you ask the security guards to pay you? Do you ask the lighting and rigging crew to pay you? Are you, yourself, paying a fee to send out this email? If you value having live performance at your event, you should be paying for that as well. To do the opposite, to ask performers to pay a fee on top of all the costs involved with travel and accommodation, shows profound disrespect to artists and to art itself.

I strongly urge you to reconsider this exploitative attitude towards the performers who add value to your events.

(In the interests of accuracy, it might not be strictly accurate to call it a “commercial event”: the organisation is nonprofit, but they’re taking commercial sponsorship to run it.)

And if you thought that paying ¥20,000 to play was a bad deal, one of my bandmates looked into it further: they’re asking performers from Japan to pay twice that!

If, after all the effort and spending on jollies to Japan for the mayor and council leader to land this prestigious event, and despite the major sponsors, there isn’t any money left to pay for performers – so little, in fact, that the performers have to chip in to keep it on the road – then someone has really messed up calculating the return on investment.

But I don’t believe that. I see people who don’t value the effort, skills, and time of live performers and who think they can exploit the desperate. Perhaps they’ll find some mugs, but I won’t be among them.

This kind of exploitation needs to be resisted everywhere. If you’re thinking about going to Japan Week in Manchester, maybe don’t.

I asked both Manchester City Council and the Mayor’s office for a comment. They didn’t respond.