The News
Anime is Japan’s next big export industry. Japanese animation and comics were already mainstream — Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise ever — but have expanded hugely. The market for anime doubled in the decade from 2012, to more than $20 billion, mainly driven by overseas sales. Franchises like One Piece and Dragon Ball are huge international brands and new Studio Ghibli releases, such as The Boy and the Heron, are global events.
Even in isolated North Korea, the image of Hello Kitty — whose owner Sanrio achieved record profits this year — has seemingly been reproduced on locally-made products, Japanese outlet The Asahi Shimbun reported.
With a rapidly expanding global audience, anime and Japanese media could boost the country’s flailing economy.
SIGNALS
Anime’s global reach could boost Japan’s flagging economy
The value of Japan’s anime and other content exports, like films and games, are almost on a par with the country’s exports of steel and semiconductor chips, Nikkei Asia reported in August, and, the outlet added, has the potential to surpass the country’s huge auto export sector. Overseas markets now make up around half of all anime consumers in 2022, compared to 18% ten years ago, The Wall Street Journal reported, while in North America, the market value has ballooned from $1.6 billion in 2018 to $4 billion in 2024, according to analysts at Jefferies: “Anime has blockbuster potential, not just for audiences but for investors as well,” the outlet noted.
Anime has long history as arm of Japanese soft power
Anime has long been a facet of Japanese soft power, Australia’s ABC News noted in a retrospective published earlier this year. The industry has had a vital role in shaping Japan’s postwar image. Alongside video games, anime has helped to establish the country as a cultural superpower, even as its post-1980s economic dominance waned. After the 1988 release of film Akira, anime’s popularity has grown in the US, presenting a kind of “anti-Disney” image that helped it grow organically, the outlet added. “Japanese anime came to be [understood] as a new wave of ‘counterculture,’” a Japanese culture expert told the outlet. That popularity has endured: The anime market is projected to grow beyond $60 billion by 2032, according to a 2023 DataHorizzons Research report.