{"id":97627,"date":"2026-11-08T07:11:20","date_gmt":"2026-11-08T14:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=97627"},"modified":"2026-11-08T07:12:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-08T14:12:00","slug":"the-world-cant-get-enough-anime-can-japan-cash-in-on-its-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/the-world-cant-get-enough-anime-can-japan-cash-in-on-its-success\/","title":{"rendered":"The world can\u2019t get enough anime. Can Japan cash in on its success?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The world is hooked on anime. Japan, its creative homeland, could use the win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, Japan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In New York last month, there was none of that gloom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A decade ago, New York Comic Con \u2014 the annual four-day pop culture convention at the Javits Convention Center \u2014 was dominated by American comic books and superheroes. At this year\u2019s gathering, anime was everywhere. This Japanese subset of animation, traditionally featuring flat graphic illustrations and characters with large, expressive eyes, had taken center stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fans dressed as Nezuko, the heroine of the hit \u201cDemon Slayer\u201d series, clutched Hello Kitty bags and wore lanyards printed with characters from the ninja anime \u201cNaruto.\u201d 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 \u201cOne Piece.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prevailing sentiment among attendees: They love anime, and they love Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnime has become such a cultural phenomenon all over the world,\u201d said Hiroki Totoki, the chief executive of Sony Group, the conglomerate behind recent blockbusters such as \u201cDemon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle\u201d \u2014 North America\u2019s highest-grossing international film ever. For Japan, with its aging society, \u201cit\u2019s one of the bright spots,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cultural boom is quietly reshaping Japan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJapan has built a very strong soft power,\u201d said Naoyuki Iwatani, managing partner of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sony is a textbook example of a company that has made that leap, Mr. Iwatani said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Totoki witnessed that transformation firsthand. Rising through Sony\u2019s 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 \u2014 and moved quickly to double down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also made the painful decision this year to transfer a majority stake in Sony\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Letting go of legacy businesses \u201cis not easy,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo adapt to this situation, we need to evolve,\u201d Mr. Totoki said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, Sony and its peers face major obstacles in trying to cash in on the content boom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For one, picking winners is difficult. Sony developed the film \u201cKPop Demon Hunters\u201d but sold its distribution rights to Netflix before it became a global phenomenon and the streaming platform\u2019s most-watched movie ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 qualities that are inherently difficult to mass-produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201ccool\u201d from the top down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe anime fandom is large, and they all want Japanese anime,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey\u2019re very specific stories \u2014 the authentic ones that creators want to tell, not stories built on the idea that they need to be exported,\u201d Mr. Purini said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Japan\u2019s own capacity to produce more content is constrained. Years of population decline have left studios short of artists, a problem worsened by the industry\u2019s longstanding culture of long hours and low pay. While A.I. might seem an obvious solution to those labor bottlenecks, Japan\u2019s creative community has largely greeted the technology with suspicion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Geoffrey Wexler, a former chief of international operations at Studio Ghibli, the studio behind hits like \u201cSpirited Away,\u201d recalls a moment in 2016 when an early A.I. animation program was demonstrated to the renowned animator Hayao Miyazaki, one of the company\u2019s founders. He famously recoiled, declaring the technology an \u201cinsult to life itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know that there\u2019s ability to create more,\u201d Mr. Wexler said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sony\u2019s Mr. Totoki said he believed that scarcity might be Japan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to survive in this environment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But with content, he added, \u201cit\u2019s a different story.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Mr. Totoki first watched the \u201cDemon Slayer\u201d movie in a theater, the longtime finance chief said, he nearly cried, moved by his emotional connection to the characters. That \u201chuman craft,\u201d he said, is what audiences will pay for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou can create copycat and similar content,\u201d Mr. Totoki added, \u201cbut originality and authenticity are ultimately most important.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n