The world is hooked on anime. Japan, its creative homeland, could use the win.
In recent years, Japan’s economic prospects have offered little good news. Its population is aging and shrinking. Its manufacturers are under pressure from low-cost Chinese competitors. Headlines are dominated by energy shortages and ballooning government debt.
In New York last month, there was none of that gloom.
A decade ago, New York Comic Con — the annual four-day pop culture convention at the Javits Convention Center — was dominated by American comic books and superheroes. At this year’s gathering, anime was everywhere. This Japanese subset of animation, traditionally featuring flat graphic illustrations and characters with large, expressive eyes, had taken center stage.
Fans dressed as Nezuko, the heroine of the hit “Demon Slayer” series, clutched Hello Kitty bags and wore lanyards printed with characters from the ninja anime “Naruto.” Chris Cosentino, a New Yorker, pushed a stroller ferrying his 13-year-old Pomeranian, Haku, dressed in the straw hat and red vest of Luffy from the pirate anime “One Piece.”
The prevailing sentiment among attendees: They love anime, and they love Japan.
“Anime has become such a cultural phenomenon all over the world,” said Hiroki Totoki, the chief executive of Sony Group, the conglomerate behind recent blockbusters such as “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle” — North America’s highest-grossing international film ever. For Japan, with its aging society, “it’s one of the bright spots,” he said.
Over the past decade, anime has transformed from a niche, countercultural art form into a global phenomenon. American rappers like Megan Thee Stallion rap about it. European soccer players celebrate goals with anime battle poses. Roughly one in three streaming viewers worldwide now watches anime, and the industry is projected to grow to $57 billion by 2030, from $32 billion in 2023.
The cultural boom is quietly reshaping Japan’s economic identity. Once a titan of consumer electronics and manufacturing, Japan now earns more foreign revenue from tourism than from any export other than cars, and more from overseas content than from traditional mainstays like semiconductors and steel.
“Japan has built a very strong soft power,” said Naoyuki Iwatani, managing partner of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company’s offices in Japan. But in an economy where decades of reluctance to cut loose declining businesses have held back productivity, he added, the test is whether corporate Japan can change quickly enough to capitalize.
Sony is a textbook example of a company that has made that leap, Mr. Iwatani said.
Once defined by consumer electronics like the Walkman and Trinitron televisions, Sony has spent decades shedding loss-making businesses and redirecting resources toward building an entertainment empire. Spanning music, movies and gaming, its entertainment divisions now generate about 70 percent of its profits.
Mr. Totoki witnessed that transformation firsthand. Rising through Sony’s finance and corporate-planning departments over four decades, he saw the height of its consumer-electronics dominance in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by the bruising arrival of lower-cost South Korean and Chinese competitors. More recently, he watched anime become an international sensation — and moved quickly to double down.
In the lead-up to his appointment as chief executive in 2025, Mr. Totoki helped oversee a roughly $300 million investment in Kadokawa, a Japanese media conglomerate. He has expanded Crunchyroll, the global anime streaming platform that Sony acquired in 2021, and forged a strategic partnership with Bandai Namco, an anime and gaming giant.
He also made the painful decision this year to transfer a majority stake in Sony’s TV and home entertainment business to a Chinese manufacturer. When the deal was announced, Japanese newspapers lamented the end of an era for a once unrivaled national industry.
Letting go of legacy businesses “is not easy,” Mr. Totoki said, noting that Japanese firms often struggle with such decisions because of emotional attachments. But industries change quickly. As a child hooked on Japanese comic books, he said, he never imagined Japanese content would become such an overseas hit.
“To adapt to this situation, we need to evolve,” Mr. Totoki said.
However, Sony and its peers face major obstacles in trying to cash in on the content boom.
For one, picking winners is difficult. Sony developed the film “KPop Demon Hunters” but sold its distribution rights to Netflix before it became a global phenomenon and the streaming platform’s most-watched movie ever.
And unlike industries where factories can ramp up production to meet rising demand, anime poses a paradox. Industry leaders say much of its appeal is in its niche countercultural roots — qualities that are inherently difficult to mass-produce.
Critics say that was one of the central problems with Cool Japan, an initiative that the government launched in 2013 to promote Japanese creative exports. The program ultimately burned through hundreds of millions of dollars trying to engineer “cool” from the top down.
“The anime fandom is large, and they all want Japanese anime,” said Rahul Purini, the president of Crunchyroll. Yet the titles that break out globally tend to come from artists more interested in telling their own stories than producing content for mass audiences, he said.
“They’re very specific stories — the authentic ones that creators want to tell, not stories built on the idea that they need to be exported,” Mr. Purini said.
Growing demand is also attracting new competitors. Studios in South Korea and China are quickly ramping up high-budget anime-style productions. The American private equity firm Blackstone spent $1.7 billion to acquire Infocom, a Japanese provider of manga, the comics often adapted into anime. Artificial intelligence can now generate anime-style video clips in seconds.
Meanwhile, Japan’s own capacity to produce more content is constrained. Years of population decline have left studios short of artists, a problem worsened by the industry’s longstanding culture of long hours and low pay. While A.I. might seem an obvious solution to those labor bottlenecks, Japan’s creative community has largely greeted the technology with suspicion.
Geoffrey Wexler, a former chief of international operations at Studio Ghibli, the studio behind hits like “Spirited Away,” recalls a moment in 2016 when an early A.I. animation program was demonstrated to the renowned animator Hayao Miyazaki, one of the company’s founders. He famously recoiled, declaring the technology an “insult to life itself.”
Mr. Wexler now works at Studio Ponoc, a Tokyo-based animation studio that hand-draws every frame of its films, requiring well over 100,000 individual drawings and years of labor per project. While A.I.-driven newcomers may unleash a flood of content, the capacity to produce traditional handcrafted Japanese animation remains limited.
“I don’t know that there’s ability to create more,” Mr. Wexler said.
Sony’s Mr. Totoki said he believed that scarcity might be Japan’s winning formula in the anime content wars. For now, the numbers appear to support his view. In his first year as chief executive, Mr. Totoki led Sony to a record operating profit of $9.2 billion, driven by strong growth in its music, anime and camera chip businesses.
In industries like consumer electronics, Mr. Totoki said, once a product becomes commoditized, competition turns into a race to produce it at the lowest cost. “It’s hard to survive in this environment,” he said.
But with content, he added, “it’s a different story.”
When Mr. Totoki first watched the “Demon Slayer” movie in a theater, the longtime finance chief said, he nearly cried, moved by his emotional connection to the characters. That “human craft,” he said, is what audiences will pay for.
“You can create copycat and similar content,” Mr. Totoki added, “but originality and authenticity are ultimately most important.”
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: River Akira Davis
- Visuals: Lucía Vázquez
