The Japan Culture and Entertainment Industry Promotion Association (CEIPA) announced its partnership with the Toyota Group in 2025. We asked Board Member Yutaka Inaba why CEIPA was formed and what it hopes the Toyota Group will bring.
“I hope cars and entertainment can unite and become recognized around the world as part of Japanese culture.”
So said Yutaka Inaba, board member of the Japan Culture and Entertainment Industry Promotion Association (CEIPA), imagining the future CEIPA and the Toyota Group are working toward together.
From Kyoto to the world, MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN 2025 brought Japanese artists and their music to a global audience. This year, the event moves to Tokyo, where artists and works will be recognized across 78 categories.
The organization behind MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN is CEIPA.
In February 2025, CEIPA and the Toyota Group announced the launch of their collaborative project, the CEIPA × TOYOTA GROUP “MUSIC WAY PROJECT.” Some readers may be wondering: why is Toyota involved in music?
Now, to coincide with MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN 2026, we sat down with Board Member Inaba, who helped set the collaboration in motion, to hear why CEIPA was created, what he hopes for from the Toyota Group, and what to watch for this year.
How did CEIPA come about?
CEIPA was established at the end of 2023. It was formed by five organizations—the Recording Industry Association of Japan, the Japan Association of Music Enterprises, the Federation of Music Producers Japan, the All Japan Concert and Live Entertainment Promoters Conference, and the Music Publishers Association of Japan—to promote Japanese music and the wider entertainment industry globally.
According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan, one of CEIPA’s member organizations, Japan’s 2025 sales of physical and digital music are estimated at around 400 billion yen. A Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry survey, meanwhile, finds that Japan’s music market, anchored in domestic demand, has grown into the world’s second largest after North America.
Yet as the global music business shifted onto digital and streaming platforms, accelerated by stay-at-home demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan’s music market did not grow as hoped. Part of the backdrop was the sheer size of Japan’s domestic market, the world’s second largest, along with barriers of geography and language.
“The shift to digital is a pressing issue for Japan’s music industry,” Inaba notes.
CEIPA Board Member Yutaka Inaba
Going digital breaks down physical barriers, making it easier for music coming out of Japan to reach the world regardless of geography. In other words, digital effectively means global.
To put numbers on it: especially during the pandemic, stay-at-home demand gave a real push to video streaming services, and music streaming grew within that broader shift.
Globally speaking, the market grew to around 130% of its size in the two to three years from 2020. In Japan, though, it was around 104–105%, only slightly above the previous year.
So where did that gap come from? When we looked into it, the answer was that Japan had not shifted decisively enough toward digital. That, in turn, meant that overseas expansion wasn’t being pursued all that deliberately.
Around the same time, Shunichi Tokura, then Commissioner for Cultural Affairs (until March 2026), highlighted the need to develop Japanese music into a global industry. In response, Japan’s five major music organizations united, and CEIPA was born.
The MUSIC WAY PROJECT and MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN
CEIPA’s mission is to bring Japanese artists and music to global audiences. To make that happen, CEIPA is pursuing two projects, the MUSIC WAY PROJECT and MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN.
As Toyota Times reported last year, the MUSIC WAY PROJECT focuses year-round on nurturing talent and creating opportunities for those taking on the world through music.
MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN, meanwhile, serves as a showcase for what the MUSIC WAY PROJECT has achieved, both at home and abroad. Of course, with the project still in its early stages, few artists or works that have emerged from the project have yet taken the MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN stage.
Even so, Inaba sketches out the blueprint: “Over a span of five, ten years, I hope that kind of cycle takes shape.”
The MUSIC WAY PROJECT and MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN work in tandem, like two wheels of the same vehicle, to bring Japanese artists and music to the world.
So what role does CEIPA hope its partner, the Toyota Group, will play in these efforts?
Why Toyota?
At the press conference announcing the collaboration in February 2025, Chairman Akio Toyoda explained that his support for CEIPA was rooted in “my love for Japan,” and put it this way.
Chairman Toyoda
And if I’m being honest, the Japanese automotive industry is competing in the world as a representative of our country, but it feels like people don’t understand that.
I was struggling with these thoughts when I met with those at CEIPA and Mr. Tokura.
I learned that Japanese entertainment is also trying to compete globally for Japan.
It made me genuinely want to support their efforts.
From the music industry’s perspective, then, why Toyota?
CEIPA Board Member Inaba
When it came to how we take Japanese artists and music global, I felt an undertaking of this scale could never be achieved without all kinds of support, public and private alike.
In a sense, when Japanese artists and music reach the world stage, they carry Japan on their shoulders.
So we asked ourselves: what kind of corporate partner would make the clearest statement to people around the world? Toyota represents Japan and is the world’s No. 1 automaker. It is recognized by people almost everywhere in the world. Working with Toyota, I felt, would send the clearest message to people around the world.
And with most of Japan’s music market still concentrated domestically, Inaba says there are also “aspects of the Toyota Group’s know-how that we should learn from” as Japanese artists and music try to build a global industry.
“When it comes to the basics of how marketing works in each country, or the character of each market, the people in charge of Toyota’s marketing in each region could probably give us a clearer view, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than anyone from the music business could,” he said, expressing his hopes for the partnership.
As noted earlier, it was Inaba himself who originally reached out to Toyota for support, through a Toyota subsidiary. That was about two years ago, and at the time, we are told, the request was for help with MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN alone.
The ceremony was still only an idea. No performing artists had been lined up. All Inaba could do was convey, with every ounce of passion he had, the thinking behind CEIPA’s founding and what the awards were meant to achieve.
Initially, Inaba had hoped simply for Toyota's support of MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN. But Chairman Toyoda’s response, as Inaba recalls it, went further: "MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN is great in itself, but I feel a strong affinity with CEIPA’s broader mission. If there is a way for the Toyota Group to support CEIPA’s activities as a whole, we should explore that as well.”
“I was completely stunned.”