Recently, the writer Derek Thompson published a piece called “The Substack-ification of American Religion.” It takes the form of a dialogue with religious scholar Ryan Burge about a spiritual conundrum: even as Americans grow ever less religious, the nation seems to be experiencing a religious revival. Their theory: skepticism of authority figures and institutions is fueling both the flight away from organized religion and the rush towards what might be called disorganized religion: grassroots preachers who have more in common with YouTube influencers than they do traditional men and women of the cloth.

The pair reserve special scorn for what they call SBNRs – those who identify in surveys as “spiritual but not religious.” Thompson derides them as “Americans who have gone into religion as if it’s a foreign country, harvested certain souvenirs, and brought them back to the world of secularism. They practice yoga but have no interest in understanding its religious origins. They meditate but are not remotely interested in any Buddhist version of nirvana.” To which Burge agrees, “You can’t just pick and choose...A lot of people are doing that with religion right now. They’re walking down the buffet line, picking one piece, putting it on their plate, and calling it a spiritual life. That doesn’t endure.”

Doesn’t it? There’s a new book out that suggests a dramatic counterexample can be found in Japan. It’s called Eight Million Ways to Happiness, and was written by Hiroko Yoda, who is, as many of you know, my wife. It’s a memoir about re-engaging with Japan’s spiritual traditions after the loss of her mother. But Hiroko uses that framing to explore a spiritual conundrum of her own. How is it that surveys regularly rank Japan among the least religious countries in the world, when it has so many shrines and temples – more even than convenience stores?

Hiroko’s reporting leads her to the opposite conclusion of Thompson and Burge. Japanese spirituality endures precisely because locals pick and choose among numerous faith traditions, often without declaring particular allegiance to any, to suit the need or occasion or even simply mood, in a literal buffet of “spiritual pieces.” This “patchwork” spirituality has nourished many generations of Japanese, she argues, and underlies much of what outsiders love about Japanese culture. In fact it might be the defining feature of a nation where citizens only half-jokingly describe themselves as being “born Shinto, married Christian, and buried Buddhist.” And you might have noticed that Japan isn’t falling apart. In fact it seems to be doing a lot better than the US in many respects.

While the book centers on Japan, and more specifically its triad of major faiths of Shinto, Buddhism, and Shugendo, some of its most eye-opening moments happen when Hiroko is brought face to face with American religion. During the orientation for a high school study abroad program, she is urged to describe herself as Buddhist to Americans, despite the fact that neither she nor any of her classmates identify as such. Echoing Burge’s comment about America being “insanely religious,” the organizers tell the assembled that “America is a religious country. We need to give them some kind of a response.” (In a twist worthy of a David Sedaris essay, this episode ends with Hiroko in a Nativity scene in rural Indiana, cast inexplicably into playing the role of Jesus’ father, Joseph.)

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How to explain how Japanese faiths co-exist with secular society to the point that Japanese don’t believe themselves religious? One answer lies in the definition, or rather translation, of “religion.” The word, Hiroko explains, is only of relatively recent import to Japan. Shukyo, as religion is known in Japanese, was only coined in the late 19^th century, as a way to describe the organized, politicized religions of the West. Even though it is ostensibly neutral today, shukyo in fact retains subtle, almost subliminal, connotations of devout, evangelical Christian belief. So when you ask Japanese if they have it – as countless religious surveyors have – they inevitably answer in the negative.

Yet anyone who tallies these responses credulously is simply not doing their homework. Again, there are more religious sites in Japan than all the ubiquitous 7-11s and Lawsons’ and Family Marts put together.

Tradition holds that the archipelago is home to what the Japanese call yaoyorozu-no-kami, the “eight million” deities, scare-quoted here because the idiom is evocatively poetic rather than mathematically specific. On my way home from an errand just now, I saw two earnest young Mormon missionaries (whom I like to imagine were both named Ernest) engaging an elderly Japanese in conversation. I always want to tell these guys, boy, do you have your work cut out for you. Not because Japanese won’t listen to you, but because your God has eight million rivals to contend with – evocatively-poetically speaking, of course. The traditional faiths of Japan aren’t evangelical, nor do their adherents seem to frame them as being in opposition to anything. As practiced by layfolk they’re more like lifestyles, often synonymous with Japanese culture itself. Which is another reason why so many people who, should they find themselves at a Shinto shrine, wouldn’t think twice of bowing, clapping, and praying might still declare themselves non-religious. And that Westerners who conflate spiritual nourishment with dogma might believe this.

One of the parts of Hiroko’s book I found most fascinating involved her linking of Japan’s modern tourist industry to the visiting of holy sites. Of course, holy sites are a pillar of the tourist trade today, as seen in the mobs of foreign visitors cramming in to Ryoan-ji’s Zen rock garden, Kiyomizu-dera’s verandas, or Meiji Jingu’s leafy pathways. But long ago, in the premodern era, the only way Japanese could get papers to travel outside of their town or city of residence was to declare themselves on a religious pilgrimage. As more and more citizens came to have wealth and leisure time, they took advantage of this loophole to see the world. In a kind of side-hustle, Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples began vending all sorts of things for visitors to remember their travels. You can see the modern incarnation of this in the bustling shopping arcades of Asakusa’s Senso-ji and many other temples and shrines. People often display the amulets or talismans they purchase there in their homes or places of business. What Thompson derides as harvesting spiritual souvenirs for the world of secularism, Hiroko frames in far more evocative terms: “prayer and play.”

So. On the one hand we have American pundits who believe picking and choosing among faiths is a symptom of a crumbling social compact. On the other, we have a hundred and twenty million Japanese who’ve been doing just that for as long as history has been recorded here. “My sense is that the West tends to be freer in terms of society and more rigid in terms of religion,” writes Hiroko. “Japan, I’ve come to realize, is the opposite: a nation with a rigid society but a surprising flexibility in regard to religion.” I’ve written a lot about how Americans (and Westerners) have come to resemble the Japanese. I wonder if Thompson and Burge are unwittingly revealing yet another.

It’s an interesting paradox, and if you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking out Hiroko’s book (US edition here, UK edition here).

I spent much of 2025 embedded with artists, editors, and fans of Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump for a feature that was published in The New Yorker. With a million copies in print every week, and many many more distributed digitally, Jump is a literal factory of fantasies – something like six out of Japan’s ten highest-grossing anime series originated as manga in its pages, including legends such as Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Demon Slayer.

Megahits like these have the power to shape the destinies of creators, companies, even Japan’s economy as a whole. To put it in Dune terms, manga is the spice of Japan’s pop-cultural industry, and Jump has a near monopoly on mining the best (or at least most profitable) stuff.

Shueisha has the best of both worlds, possessing a deep back-catalog of classics while constantly incubating new ones. Others dream of replicating this kind of success for themselves, on both personal and corporate levels. After the article came out, I was asked to speak to various organizations about this intersection of creativity and commerce. Some were aspiring artists, some entrepreneurs, and others established companies. All of them had the same burning questions: how does Jump do it, and how can they apply the lessons to their own creative endeavors?

I have extracted from my experiences a handful of principles that may help answer these questions. I’ve come to believe they are in fact relevant to everyone from individuals to organizations, whether they are in the manga biz or not. I’ll summarize them here, then expand on them below.

• There are more people making manga in Japan than anywhere else in the world, so Japanese magazines, and Jump in particular, have their pick of the best.

• Data collection allows editors and creators to gauge reader interest in real-time.

• Only the readers have the power to make something a true hit.

• That process often takes trial and error — meaning more time than many foreign companies are willing to give.

Now, here are those principles.

“The highest peaks have the widest bases.”

So says Takeshi Kikuchi, the head of the Manga Research Institute, evoking how much material it took to loft Mt. Fuji’s peak to its lofty heights.

What he means is that the talent pool is immense. In an interview for the article, he told me that he believes there are as many as ten thousand manga artists working in Japan today, producing the equivalent of fifteen thousand softcover collections a year — at roughly 200 pages each, that’s as many as three million pages of manga being made in Japan annually.

The chance that any one of these manga will prove a hit is low, says Kikuchi. But the chances of the art form as a whole generating hits are quite high. Jump uses contests to lure in young artists, then spends great amounts of time coaching the most promising of them. You can read more about this process in the article, but the point is that Jump succeeds because they don’t put all their eggs in one basket. The reason being…

There’s no making a hit, only reacting to one.

The problem with producing content of any quality is that it takes time, and the more time it takes, the more difficult it becomes to predict what the market will look like when the finished product arrives. (For instance, I couldn’t have imagined, when I was writing my book over the course of 2017-2019, that it would arrive in the midst of a global plague.)

The trick with Jump is that the finished product arrives every week, giving producers a chance to see how the market is reacting in near real-time. This is done through the expedient of surveys. They effectively compel creators to work in concert with the readers, who rank their favorite titles, episodes, and characters every issue.

Although surveys have been a staple since Jump was first founded, the approach strikingly resembles the way in which online games can be quickly updated in response to player metrics than it does with how comics, let alone shows or films, are typically made.

Wait, you might be asking. Aren’t streaming platforms like Netflix the king of using big data to drive creative decisions? Sure. But despite all of the algorithms Netflix uses to craft its content, it has yet to produce anything even remotely approaching the zeitgeist-level popularity of any of Jump’s hits. That’s because Jump understands something critical…

You need data. But not too much data.

“Dragon Ball” debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1984. It is widely hailed as one of the world’s great pop-cultural franchises. Shueisha is a privately-held company, and they have never released sales figures per title. We can make guesses, though: given that licensor Bandai-Namco netted 190 billion yen ($1.2 bil USD) from “Dragon Ball” merch in 2024 alone, one can imagine the enormity of the franchise as a whole.

However, it might surprise you to learn that “Dragon Ball” wasn’t a success at first. Artist Akira Toriyama originally envisioned it as an adventure in the vein of the Chinese classic Journey to the West. Readers reacted to this early arc with great ambivalence. It wasn’t for well over a year, until Toriyama introduced a “tournament arc,” that “Dragon Ball” transformed into the martial-arts saga that made it a global mega-smash.

The lesson here, I believe, is knowing when to ignore the metrics. Had Jump’s editors blindly followed them, they might well have cancelled the series before it had a chance to evolve — killing a “cash dragon” in the process. Jump succeeds because while it studiously collects data, it respects the talents of humans — the artists and editors, who carefully balance metrics from readers against the instincts and know-how of its human team. Which leads us to the last principle:

You can’t build an empire if you’re chasing quarters.

Economists roll their eyes when folks refer to “late capitalism,” but what the critics mean is the tipping point when businesses successfully lock customers into their products, their focus inevitably shifts to pleasing shareholders than customers. When this happens, there can be only one result: enshittification.

Jump is successful. It has a huge audience who is locked-in to their favorite series. Yet it has never enshittified. Why?

One of the biggest reasons, I believe, is that Shueisha is privately held. It is not beholden to shareholders who demand profits quarter over quarter. This allows them to take a longer-term view to nurturing talent.

The point here isn’t that taking investment or going public is bad. Whether individual creator, entrepreneur, or business, everyone has their own situation, their own calculus for what’s necessary at the moment. The point is that making something truly great requires time. Do you as an individual, or as an organization, have the courage to provide it?

The same might be said about Weekly Shonen Jump as a publication. In its fifty-eight years of existence, it has launched many hits — but even more failures, at least from a black-and-white, “did it become a megahit or not?” standpoint. Yet it more than endures. It continues to evolve and thrive. That isn’t thanks to money, or algorithms, or pursuing efficiency. It’s thanks to people. And perhaps that’s the most important principle of all.

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Last fall, just before winter came to the mountains, Hiroko and I went climbing in Toyama prefecture. We climb for many reasons, but one of the biggest is to unplug. On our way down from Mount Tateyama we returned to Murodo, the gateway to the area, a basin-like plain where all of the hotels and inns are located. At the base of the trail, where dirt turns to boardwalk for more casual visitors, we encountered a man who was strangely plugged-in.

He dressed less like a hiker than a denizen of Akihabara, in well-worn cargo pants and parka, baseball cap spun backwards and thick glasses. He shouldered an expensive-looking single-lens reflex camera attached to a tripod. Mounted atop the camera, horizontally, was an iPhone, which I assumed was a bigger viewfinder. As he took photos of seemingly random scenery, the man kept up a steady banter with what I assumed was a friend whose voice I could hear faintly over the speakers. As we stopped together near an overlook, I realized I was wrong about both presumptions. He wasn’t talking to a friend at all. He was speaking to an AI, its faux-female voice cheering him on in Japanese. The iPhone’s camera was serving as its eye.

“You made it all the way to the Jigoku-dani valley overlook,” the AI said encouragingly (and correctly). “Good job! Pachi-pachi-pachi,” it continued, speaking the onomatopoeia for applause. “Did you see any ptarmigans? This area is famous for them.”

“No, not yet,” he mumbled, as he adjusted the lens for a shot.

Far be it for me to judge someone else’s wacky life choices. I bring this up because it was my first inkling that Japanese seemed to be taking a different approach to AI technology than the citizens of my country. In the months since I’ve seen this affinity for AI expressed in many ways here.

When photo-to-video generators arrived, many of my fellow Americans reacted (and continue to react) with horror and outrage. Meanwhile I’ve watched Japanese friends and even creators post generated video after video on social media. Books about harnessing the power of AI get prominent display at Japanese bookstores and on Amazon Japan, many framed as get-rich-quick schemes. It’s a kind of techno-prosperity gospel that reminds me a little of Japan’s headlong rush to modernize at the turn of the 20^th century. Earlier this year, an AI-generated manga hit the top spot on one of Japan’s biggest ebook stores, to little if any criticism. (Local readers declared the story “boring,” but pronounced the “sexy parts” to be “higher quality.” Make of that what you will.)

A great many Westerners regard AI (or perhaps more accurately, the billionaires who control it) with a mixture of deep suspicion and open hostility. A third of Americans surveyed believe the technology has the potential to end life on Earth. Contrast this to a Nikkei BP survey conducted at the end of 2025. “Japan is optimistic about AI, with 44% believing it is not a threat, unusual for a developed country.” (Apparently they missed the survey where 87% (!) of Chinese claimed to trust AI.) Whatever the case, if Japan is really more upbeat about AI than citizens of the English-speaking world, why might that be?

“The human race is now poised on the brink of a new industrial revolution that will equal, if not far exceed, the first industrial revolution in its impact on mankind.” Sounds like a post by any given AI accelerationist, but it’s actually from a 1980 cover story in Time called “The Robot Revolution.” What seems a unique moment is actually a rerun. Long before AI began disrupting creative processes, industrial robots disrupted manual ones. “If robots can do men’s work faster, better and more cheaply, then what will men do? They will be retrained for other things, the robotmakers answer. But by whom, and for what?” asked Time, echoing a now familiar-sounding existential crisis.

In another prequel of the current moment, Western leaders believed that whoever automated their factories quicker would achieve dominance over the global economy -- and that foreign competitors were even further ahead. “If we don’t go to robots,” Time quotes an expert at Carnegie-Mellon as saying, “we’ll just continue to lose to Japan... Our economy won’t grow, and there won’t be any new jobs.” At the time of the Time essay, they were producing five industrial robots to every one America did. Replace “robots” with “AI” and “Japan” with “China” and you get similar hand-wringing headlines today. It’s as though we’ve automated the angst about automation.

Observers have pointed to spiritual traditions as the root of these fears. In the Judeo-Christian West, this thinking goes, humans sit atop the natural hierarchy, and anything that disrupts said hierarchy is inevitably seen as a horror. Frankenstein’s monster is the archetypical abomination, paving the way for modern antagonists like The Terminator, the “hosts” of Westworld, Bender from Futurama, or M3GAN.

In contrast, Japan’s “indigenous religion, Shinto, explains its fondness for robots,” a typical counter-argument would have you believe. “Shinto is a form of animism that attributes spirits, or kami, not only to humans but to animals, natural features like mountains, and even quotidian objects like pencils... Japan’s animism stands in contrast with the philosophical traditions of the West.” In a land legendarily home to eight million gods, the idea there might be a ghost in the machine does not seem to horrify the Japanese as much as it does the monotheistic Westerner. Astro Boy, Doraemon, and a bevy of friendly robot characters prove the point. QED.

Yet when you start tugging at the threads of this argument, it starts to come apart at the seams. Weren’t C-3PO and R2-D2 on the side of the Rebels? Didn’t the T-800 become a surrogate father in Terminator 2? Weren’t humans the bad guys and AI the good guys in The Creator? And there are no shortage of scary machines in Japanese lore. Bahamut, the AI that imprisons humanity in Megazone 23; Project 2501 in Ghost in the Shell; countless bad-guy robots from the cartoons of my youth. And then there are the tsukumo-gami, yokai of human-made objects turned monsters, from ancient lore. There are scrolls of such terrifying parades going back to the 1500s. Just because they’re animist doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

So. Where does this leave us as regards Japan’s affinity for AI? Consider that, as I wrote last year, Japan is still not a major player in the AI space. (More than a few of the big names here are actually run by Silicon Valley refugees who wanted to live and work in Japan -- not that I can point a finger!) The Japanese government has pledged to spend more on AI, and more domestic companies are getting involved in the space, but again, Japan has yet to emerge as a leader on a global scale.

And I suspect that the fact Japan isn’t on the bleeding edge is the real answer to the question. Being behind the curve gives Japan a freedom to experiment with AI in ways that the disrupted West can’t. I’ve written about how Japan is a “super Galapagos,” meaning that having fallen behind other advanced nations is proving a kind of secret superpower; this is another facet of that thesis. Because of it, AI hasn’t disrupted Japanese society in the way it has the US. With no domestic Japanese AI mega-companies, there simply isn’t anyone capable of forcing the technology down throats, as is happening in the US. In 2025, six out of ten Americans surveyed said they wanted more control over how AI was used in their lives.

And can you blame them? Again, compare and contrast. A billionare techbro convinced President Trump to let him launch an AI war on government agencies, all the while looting government databases for more data to train their AI models. Japan’s LDP has made some boneheaded statements about AI but there’s no sign that the nation’s leaders are looking to abdicate their responsibility for governance to algorithms. On the other hand, it’s hard to engage with AI experimentally or playfully when it’s actively being used to undermine your society.

Another benefit of Japan’s being behind the curve is that its society hasn’t been totally disrupted by technocrats and the whims of an erratic President. And as a result AI hasn’t become the litmus test that it has in the US, where professing support or skepticism has become linked to one or another political camp. Actually, zoom out for a moment: Japan simply isn’t as politicized as the US. Speaking openly about politics is frowned on, even seen as taboo.

This is a refreshing contrast to America today, where everything is filtered through politics (and more specifically, one reality show host turned politician’s cult of personality.) Where you stand on any given issue is no longer your opinion but your identity, so that you can be quickly sorted into one tribe or another, the better to crank out more memes for the culture wars. Do I sound tired? I’m tired.

Japan, for all its troubles, hasn’t gone down this rabbit hole yet. Eight-million-gods willing it never will. But politics and society offer far more compelling reasons than spirituality as to why AI hasn’t become a lightning rod here. Now if you don’t mind me, I’m going to unplug and head back into the mountains for a while.

I am not a political pundit, so I’ll leave a detailed analysis of her proposed policies to specialists like Observing Japan. But there’s no disputing that Takaichi is a hugely divisive figure. She’s Japan’s first female Prime Minister, yet also widely viewed as hostile to women’s equality. She is hailed as a “straight talker,” yet continues to downplay her party’s massive ongoing financial scandal and its inability to cut ties with the Unification Church. Even more concerning to many critics domestic and foreign is her campaign to revise the pacifist principles out of Japan’s constitution. And her attitude towards foreign visitors and residents seems rooted more in suspicion than inclusion, making many of us wonder where we really stand in the eyes of society.

She also possesses undeniable charisma. She’s a rare face not descended from any of the political family dynasties that manufacture most prime ministers. She enjoys unprecedented support from young Japanese. (The Japanese media has dubbed this “Sana-katsu,” meaning something like “stanning for Sanae.”) Supporters hail what they see as Japan’s rightward shift; critics point out that most young voters get all of their political information from online influencers rather than news sources. And there’s the undeniable novelty of seeing Japan’s first female Prime Minister, and a very young-feeling one to boot. As professor Koichi Nakano of Sophia University put it recently, “Being more popular of the past leaders of the LDP is not so difficult, given that all of them, all of them, were middle-aged boring men.”

So. What does Takaichi’s victory mean for Japanese pop culture, at home and abroad? If the controversial Chinese AI-generated meme making the rounds of Ultraman blasting her is any indication, there’s a lot of ambivalence out there. But let’s take off our Ultra-hero costume suits for the moment and (sigh) put on our grown-up suits.

Takaichi, not without precedent but in ways arguably deeper than her predecessors, “gets” pop culture. She wove her love for motorcycles and for rock drumming into her public persona, most meme-ably with her counterpart in South Korea. She quoted the anime Attack on Titan to Saudi investors. She has tweeted (or whatever it’s called these days) about how often foreign dignitaries mention anime, films, and music in their interactions with her. Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni, a kind of prototype for Takaichi in being an ultraconservative nationalist herself, went so far as to post a selfie of the two of them, using what seemed to be OpenAI’s pilfered-Ghibli filter. (You can practically hear the progressive Hayao Miyazaki groaning.)

“I feel that the strength of Japan’s anime content enhances our diplomatic power,” Takaichi said in a December 2025 photo-op meeting with content-industry luminaries including Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii, J-pop superproducer Tetsuya Komuro, and the pop artist Takashi Murakami. (Unsurprisingly absent from this lineup: Mr. Miyazaki.) She then pledged 55 billion yen in government assistance to bring Japan into line with the amount other countries such as rival South Korea (75 billion) regularly spend on promoting their cultural industries.

This isn’t the first time a Japanese politician has promised to boost the nation’s content producers. The notorious Cool Japan Fund has been operating in various forms since 2013, spending tens of billions of yen with little to show for it. But the government seems to be taking things more seriously this time around. In September, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry proposed five “principles of Entertainment policy,” the most notable of which pledged never to interfere with the content of the work being supported. Western culture warriors predictably misinterpreted this as a shot at localization professionals. In reality it was more likely aimed at Sanseito, who if you’ll recall, wants to subject manga, anime, and games to government “health reviews” if they ever take charge.

This is important, because Japan’s popular culture is, by and large, progressive. And conservative leaders know it. Takaichi’s predecessor, the late Shinzo Abe, was so upset by the social criticism of Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Shoplifters that he snubbed the director after the film won the Palm d’Or. Miyazaki famously decked Studio Ghibli out in anti-nuclear slogans after the meltdowns of 2011. Japan’s pop culture succeeds because it celebrates individuality and weirdness and speaks truth to power, things that inevitably rub conservative regimes the wrong way. There are exceptions, of course. There always will be. But if you’re looking at anime as a whole, the arc bends towards social justice.

Takaichi doesn’t seem to be as thin-skinned as Abe was. But she faces a more existential problem. Japan’s pop cultural charisma – in academic terms, its soft power – is due only in part to the quality of its content. It is also predicated upon the values Japan embodies. Japan of the Eighties, in its financial tiger phase, was continuously bashed abroad. Modern Japan is more of a (Hello?) kitty. Flying under the radar, staying out of the headlines on touchy issues, Japan’s political vagueness provides a blank canvas for consumers to project their own values upon, whatever they might be. And its leaders know this. It’s key to their efforts to lure millions of tourists here, and it'‘s key to exporting content, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of the economy. The clever hawk hides its talons, as the old Japanese adage goes. The furor Takaichi touched off with her remarks about defending Taiwan a few months back represented a rare slip.

One might argue that Takaichi’s hawkishness (pun intended) and desire to revamp the constitution are rooted in the realpolitik of changing times: China’s ascendance, and Trump’s undermining of America’s longstanding commitments to allies around the globe. Japan is surrounded by increasingly powerful rivals, and how can it trust a partner as mercurial as the US has become? But the minute Japan wades into controversy, the minute the hawk stops hiding its talons, is the minute that its soft power will begin to wane. You can be feared or loved. You can’t be both. You can buy fear; you have to earn love. Which is, of course, why strongmen (or women) inevitably resort to force. It’s a lot easier to threaten opponents (or chainsaw them) than it is to charm them.

Fortunately, Japan isn’t shooting anyone yet. It still occupies a twilight zone in the collective consciousness untrammeled by current events. So Japan’s content continues to blaze a trail for Japan’s diplomatic power. China and Korea aside, perhaps, the world’s view of Japan is almost unilaterally positive — the popularity of manga, anime, cozy lit, magical cleaning methods, matcha and more are proof of that, all representing gentle alternatives to and escapes from an increasingly dystopian America. Things like “rearming” are the literal antithesis to cozy lit.

So Japan’s success as a cultural superpower is based in large part on good vibes. Interestingly, you can say the same for Takaichi herself. For all of her charisma, all of the promises to “make things happen,” she hasn’t actually done much of note yet, policy-wise. That could well change now that she has her mandate. But not everyone believes she really does. Writing for The Guardian, Karin Kaneko frames her victory as less about politics than prices, while Wada Ikeda, writing for Asia-Pacific Journal, ties it to a “credibility collapse” on the part of legacy media that fuels extreme online voices. And the Asahi noted that the sudden nature of the elections prevented many from voting, particularly those living abroad.

Whatever the case, Takaichi will inevitably face the same conundrum on a personal scale that nations do on a global one. For now, she’s a cool lady who drums to K-pop songs. But the moment the claws come out, the bubble of soft power she’s so cannily cultivated for herself may start to deflate.

Long time no see. I apologize for the long pause between posts, but I spent the last month in the United States. This was the longest time I have spent in my home country since moving to Tokyo twenty-three years ago, in the spring of 2003. I was giving talks in Hawaii and Chicago, and helping Hiroko promote her new book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness, at a special event in Washington DC. I highly recommend giving it a read, and not simply because the world could use a little happiness right now. It’s an amazing book all around. But more on that in a later post.

Most of the time, I have to watch American happenings at a fourteen time zone remove in Japan. For this last month I was able to experience things in realtime. While we had a great trip on a personal level, all of our travels and triumphs and travails played out against a backdrop of sad and scary times. As sad and as scary as any I’ve experienced, and I’m saying that as someone who was living in the Washington, DC area during 9/11, working just a stone’s throw from the Pentagon, and who lived in Tokyo during the earthquake and nuclear meltdowns of 3/11.

The rule of law seems to have been replaced by Presidential whim, and masked militias of true believers are terrorizing American cities, even murdering citizens, with seeming impunity. Watching things unfold in daily installments on the news, something nagged at me. It wasn’t that I was surprised things were going badly. But it felt as though something were missing from the equation. It took a while for me to put my finger on what it was. Where were the artists?

I grew up, as did many a young American Gen X’er, immersed in the artistic products of Sixties and Seventies counterculture. Newsreels of protests. Movies and novels and comics, posters and poetry, peace signs and slogans, all echoes from the Boomers’ great coming of age. And most of all, the music. By the time I was a teen, deejays and admen had already repackaged voices such as John Lennon, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan into the neutered genre of “classic rock,” but there was no sugarcoating the ferocity of their songs. There’s a man with a gun over there / telling me I got to beware, sang Buffalo Springfield in a 1966 song that could well have been written in 2026. So might Neil Young’s refrain about soldiers cutting us down in “Ohio.” Growing up in the far less tumultuous Eighties and Nineties, I could only imagine an America so tormented that its artists felt compelled to pen lyrics like these. It felt almost like fantasy.

No more. Yet I don’t seem to be hearing songs, or seeing posters or slogans or much of anything, really. Far be it from me to demand anyone create art. But it’s hard to remember another time when things went sideways and artists weren’t among the first responders, culturally speaking. When I left Maryland for Tokyo back in 2003, plenty of tastemakers were pushing back against the invasion of Iraq before Dubya even had a chance to declare his “mission accomplished.” We had Outkast’s “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad),” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and The Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is the Love?” among many others. And consider that the George Floyd / BLM protests spawned a great deal music and art in the 2020s, too.

So where are the artists now? I don’t really have an answer, but the question reminds me of W. David Marx’s 2025 book Blank Space: A Brief History of the 21^st Century, which describes how American cultural innovation has seemingly ground to a halt. There is no counterculture anymore, he argues. Rather, there is a “counter-counterculture” of conservative cynics, and a mainstream culture where “selling out” has become the singular goal for creatives. There is little room for artistic innovation in either of these paradigms, which is why things felt stagnant even before the unpleasantness of the current moment.

Now I wonder if the current moment is actually a product of that cultural stagnation. A lot has changed in the five years since the artistic outpouring of BLM. In a bizarre moment dominated by shameless characters doing bizarre things, there isn’t much satisfaction in criticism, parody, or speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, the online platforms where we gather are run by uber-wealthy sycopants who curry favor by eagerly quashing anything that might upset the authorities. Combined with the ceaseless flow of bad news it’s no wonder things feel hopeless.

But hopeless times are exactly when and why we need art. And maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places. Just this morning, on the most recent installment of his Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick wrote of being moved to tears by a song about Alex Pretti, the man who was murdered by ICE on the streets of Minneapolis last week. Garbage Day is quite possibly the most terminally online newsletter in existence, but tellingly, Broderick didn’t hear the song on the internet. He heard it live, in a tiny club in Brooklyn.

One protest song in one club does not a movement make. But it shows the artists are out there. Maybe the movement is just getting started. Maybe the day will come when future generations have to listen to their work to imagine what it must have felt like to live through such trying times. One can hope.

It wasn’t so long ago that purchases of American institutions by Japanese companies sparked outrage in the United States. When Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Center in 1989, a local auto dealership ran a TV spot that invited Americans to “imagine a few years from now. It’s December, and the whole family’s going to see the big Christmas tree at Hirohito Center… Enough already.” Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures that same year caused such unease that chairman Akio Morita felt the need to declare “this is not a Japanese invasion.” A Newsweek poll of the era revealed that 54% of Americans saw Japan as a bigger threat to America than the Soviet Union. Many exploited this fear of Japan for their own ends. Politicians grandstanded by smashing Japanese products and demanding investigations into purchases. Predictably, Donald Trump’s first public foray into politics was a jeremiad against Japan in a 1989 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Contrast this to yesterday, when Sony announced that it had paid nearly half a billion dollars for another American icon: Peanuts Holding LLC, the company that administers the rights to the Peanuts franchise. Talk about A Charlie Brown Christmas for shareholders! The reaction to this Japanese acquisition of a cultural institution? Crickets. This speaks to how dramatically the relationship between the US and Japan has changed. It also speaks to how dramatically Peanuts changed, how Peanuts changed Japan, and how that in turn changed all of us. But perhaps most of all, it illustrates (pun intended) how stories need products, and products need stories.

There are countless stories out there, and countless products. But crossing these streams — giving stories products in the form of merchandise, or products stories to make them more than just commodities, can supercharge both. It can create international empires. Peanuts is a perfect case in point.

When Charles Shultz’ Peanuts debuted in October of 1950, it was utterly unlike any cartoon Americans had seen in the funny pages. The very first strip’s punchline involved an adorable tyke declaring his hatred for Charlie Brown. Li’l Abner creator Al Capp described the cast as “good mean little bastards eager to hurt each other.” Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame recalled being “excited by the casual cruelty and offhand humiliations at the heart of the strip.” To Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury, it “vibrated with fifties alienation.”

A hint of darkness made Peanuts stick out in a crowded comics page. But it’s hard to square these comments with the Happiness Is a Warm Puppy-era Peanuts I remember from my childhood. By that time Schultz had sanded the rough edges off those “little bastards,” distilling them into cute and lovable archetypes. More to the point, he de-centered the kids to focus on Snoopy, who had morphed from his origins as a four-legged canine into a bipedal, anthropomorphic creature with a bulbous head and a penchant for tap-dancing and flying biplanes.

The vibe shift seems to date to 1966, when the animated It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown devoted roughly a quarter of its screen time to Snoopy’s solo flights of fancy. Schultz was already lauded for his short-form social satire: his characters had graced the cover of Time the year before. But he seems to have grasped that the way to riches would be only found by looking at the brighter side of life.

This new Peanuts, less mean, less casually cruel, less alienated, was arguably also less interesting. But there was no question that it was way, way more marketable. You might have identified with one or another of the human characters, with their all too human foibles, but anthropomorphic Snoopy was someone anyone and everyone could inhabit. Kids in particular. You didn’t even have to be American to get him.

This later, kinder, gentler incarnation of Peanuts, and Snoopy in particular, would charm Japanese audiences, thanks to the efforts of a serial entrepreneur named Shintaro Tsuji. He was a would-be poet turned wartime chemist, then a postwar black-market bootlegger of moonshine, and an inveterate hatcher of business schemes ranging from silks to produce to kitchenware. You are undoubtedly familiar with the most successful of his ventures. It is called Sanrio — the home of Hello Kitty.

Tsuji, long interested in American trends, played a key role in importing many of them to Japan. He forged a relationship with Hallmark to translate their greeting cards, and negotiated with Mattel for the rights to Barbie. He acquired the license to Peanuts in 1968, when his company, then known as the Yamanashi Silk Center, was at a low. Snoopy-branded merchandise proved so popular that it put his struggling company back in the black within a year. Snoopy wasn’t the first cute animal to hit big in Japan; Tsuji himself had scored a big hit in the mid-sixties with merchandise featuring Mii-tan, a cute cat designed by the artist Ado Mizumori. But Snoopy’s runaway success seems to have sparked an epiphany in Tsuji.

As he later put it, Japan was “a world in which ‘making money’ meant ‘making things.’ I desperately wanted to leapfrog the ‘things’—the ‘hardware’—and make a business out of the intellectual property—the ‘software.’ I suspect everyone around me thought I was nuts.”

He was nuts. Merchandising characters from hit stories was common sense, then as now. Many Japanese companies did that sort of thing. Creating hit characters without stories was fiendishly difficult, bordering on impossible. Stories breathe life into characters, bestowing them with an authenticity that standalone designs simply do not possess (or need to earn in other ways). Yet Tsuji would not be deterred. In 1971, he launched an in-house art department, staffing it with young women straight out of art school. In the wake of Peanuts’ continuing success, he gave the team a singular directive: “Draw cats and bears. If a dog hit this big, one of those two is sure to follow.”

Two years later, he renamed the Yamanashi Silk Center “Sanrio.” (There’s a whole story about how that came to be, which you can read in my book, if you’re so inclined.) The year after that, in 1974, one of Sanrio’s designers struck gold, in the form of an anthropomorphic cat with a bulbous head and a penchant for hugging: Hello Kitty. Soon, Kitty products were a full-blown fiiba (fever) in Japan. And this time, Tsuji didn’t have to split the proceeds with anyone, because Sanrio owned the character outright. Schultz needed decades of narrative to make stars of Peanuts’ menagerie of characters. Tsuji upended this process by making characters stars without any story at all.

Sanrio famously insists that Hello Kitty isn’t really a cat; she’s a little girl who happens to look like a cat. I take no particular stance on this globally divisive issue. But I think you can make the case that she wouldn’t exist at all, if it hadn’t been for the trail Schultz blazed with Peanuts, shifting away from social satire to make an anthropomorphic dog the star of the show. Tsuji’s genius was realizing that you could make a star without a show — provided you had the ability to print it on countless school supplies, kitchenware, and accessories. That was the trick up his sleeve. The medium is the message, as they say. In essence, Kitty products, ubiquitous to the point of absurdity, became her story.

Interestingly, while Sanrio has expanded Hello Kitty’s biography over the years, they never really succeeded at giving her a true narrative. (And yes, they’ve tried; perhaps Kitty with a mouth is just a bridge too far for people.) Maybe it’s better to say that Tsuji’s storytelling medium of choice wasn’t the newspaper page or television screen; it was Sanrio itself. Hello Kitty is a blank slate that lets anyone and everyone identify with her. Her lack of story is the story.

In later years Tsuji, now unimaginably successful and wealthy, would claim that it was he who gave Schultz the idea to make Snoopy the star of Peanuts in the first place. There’s no evidence this was actually the case, but I don’t hold it against him. You need to be something of a fabulist to launch a fantasy empire in the first place.

Which brings us back to Sony’s acquisition of the Peanuts. The specific entities involved are Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment, which are sort of like products in search of stories in their own right. Peanuts gives those stories to them.

We do not know what this portends for Sanrio, who has so carefully tended the franchise in Japan all of these decades. (Personally, I think Sony would be nuts to throw all that expertise out the window, but who knows.) The irony is that most of us consume Peanuts in a very Sanrio-esque way these days, which is to say bereft of narrative. I can’t recall the last time I read a Peanuts comic, but I see the characters everywhere on clothing and all sorts of products. Perhaps that’s exactly why Americans are greeting Sony’s acquisition of Peanuts with a collective shrug: it has already been Sanrio-ized. As have all of us, in a sense. So what better steward of America’s cutest cast of characters than the Japanese?

“Without shadows, there would be no beauty,” wrote Junichiro Tanizaki in his classic In Praise of Shadows.

I’d say the same thing about toys. Toys are play in physical form. And without play, life isn’t worth living.

Sure, I’m biased. This photo of me ran in the September issue of Figure Oh (“Figure King”) magazine, anchoring an interview about Bandai’s re-launch of the“Jumbo Machinder” series of giant-sized robot toys, which debuted in 1973, and the re-release of one of its bestsellers, the titular hero of the 1975 UFO Robo Grandizer. At left, a now fifty year old (sigh) vintage original; at right, the upcoming new version. Sandwiched in the middle, of course, sits another fiftysomething original grinning at the camera.

They called me in because they knew I was crazy about toys. (And also, I suspect, because Patrick Macias and I used to write a monthly column for them.) I leapt at the chance, because UFO Robo Grandizer was more than a cool robot; the show, translated into Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages, gripped European kids in a way no cartoon had before. It, and the accompanying tsunami of merchandise that hit foreign toy store shelves, were foreshocks of the Japanese franchises that would transform global tastes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Japanese toys changed the direction of my life. Really! I would not be living here without them. I wasn’t lucky enough to get a Grandizer as a kid; it wasn’t sold in the States. But I did get one of his comrades. One of the first presents I recall ever getting was a giant red robot produced for the anime series Getta Robo G in Japan, and sold in the US as a “Shogun Warrior.” Back in 1978, a mixture of broadcast restrictions and cultural insularity kept the vast majority of Japanese cartoons off the airwaves. In those days, American anime fandom wasn’t a subculture so much as a secret society. (How times change in (double sigh) fifty years, where the medium is supposedly more popular among Zillenials than the NFL.) That robot sparked something deep inside me: the idea that somewhere far away could be found a people who took robots as seriously as I did. The hunt was on. I never really stopped.

I was very fortunate that my high school in the suburbs of Maryland just so happened to offer one of America’s very first Japanese-language courses. I was surrounded by kids who studied Japanese because it was the smart thing to do, in that Eighties fever-dream when it seemed Japan would rule the world. I didn’t care if Japan ruled the world or not. I just wanted more toys. On my first visit to the country, an Easter break homestay in 1989 or so, I snuck away from a guided tour to Asakusa and spent the entire time in the toy shops of the Nakamise shopping arcade instead. It would be decades before I ever set foot in Senso-ji, the resplendent temple that was our ostensible destination.

I could, and at some point probably should, write a history of Japan in toys one of these days. It would be my history, too.

I wasn’t anywhere near the first person to notice Japan’s toys. The first foreign visitors to arrive in Japan, after its ports opened in the mid-19th century, noted the gusto with which Japanese played. “We frequently see full-grown and able-bodied natives indulging in amusements which the men of the West lay aside with their pinafores, or when their curls are cut,” wrote the American educator William Elliot Griffis. “We do not know of any other country in the world in which there are so many toy-shops, or so many fairs for the sale of things which delight children,” he marveled in 1877.

Toy exports played a key role in jump-starting Japan’s economy in the Meiji era. By the turn of the 20th century, they had evolved from their folk origins into exquisite — and occasionally politicized — playthings. This one, made of tin and celluloid, portrays General Nogi leading his Russian counterpart to surrender negotiations after the Russo-Japanese War. Then as now, the toys adults produced often said more about them than it did the kids for which they were ostensibly made.

As Germany became embroiled in World War I and shifted its factories to wartime production, Japanese toymakers leapt in to fill the gap. “Looking through the Christmas stock at the department stores,” wrote The Star and Sentinel in 1916, “one is impressed by the presence of Japanese goods in unusual quantities, especially in fancy goods and toys.” By 1934, US toy companies were petitioning their government for tariffs to help stem the “invasion of the American market by Japanese toys” — a precursor of trade wars to come.

It might not surprise you to learn that world’s first robot toy was dreamed up by a Japanese toymaker. But it probably will surprise you to hear where it was made: China, or more precisely the Japanese puppet-state of Machukuo, in the late 1930s. In this charming little wind-up “Liliput Robot,” made by Chinese laborers to Japanese specifications for export markets, we see an early example of globalization — and trace the edges of Japan’s malignant Imperial ambitions.

During World War II, the government compelled toymakers to stop producing toys and convert their workshops into factories for churning out necessities for the war machine. This did not go unnoticed by the Americans. Military planners specifically targeted the areas of the city where toymakers clustered, such as Taito-ku and Sumida-ku, for firebombing raids. “It made a lot of sense to kill skilled workers by burning whole areas,” blandly remarked an Air Force colonel in a postwar interview that reminds one why Curtis LeMay quipped “if we lose, we’ll be tried as war criminals.”

Toys then jump-started Japan’s shattered economy. Within just months of war’s end, toys began rolling off of makeshift production lines, first in Kyoto, then in other major cities. Many were effigies of American military might: Jeeps hammered out of scavenged tin cans, cars and tanks, and later, B-29 bombers, assembled and painted in the very same neighborhoods that had been bombed by them just a few years earlier. None of this was compelled by the Americans; rather, it emerged organically, out of economic imperative, for Japan had been laid low and toys were among the only products they could produce quickly. They were also among first products the occupation forces green-lit for export after the war. The company Yonezawa sold more than a million tin B-29s to American buyers.

One can also chart the rise of Japan as an economic superpower in toys. Cheap tin playthings and vinyl dolls predominated until the Seventies. By that time Japan emerged as the planet’s second largest economy. This is where I enter the picture, being the recipient of one of those Jumbo-sized toys. Both the series, and me, arrived in the world in 1973. That’s pretty much me in the ad below, rocking the Seventies stripes and dreaming about the many and varied ways robots might wreak havoc on other robots. By this point Japan had more than recovered from WWII — it was feeling downright wealthy. And this manifested in all sorts of ways, including the increasing imaginative opulence of the playthings they bestowed upon their children.

The two characters shown here, Kamen Rider at left and Mazinger Z at right, are interesting in another respect: they’re characters that debuted on television and manga, respectively, making them early representatives of Japan’s rapidly growing fantasy-industrial complex.

Even here we see politics creeping into the mix, albeit indirectly. These “Jumbo Machinders” were roughly two feet tall and molded out of a sturdy plastic called polyethylene. OPEC’s boycott of any nations that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War sent the world into the 1973 oil crisis, sending the prices of petroleum products skyrocketing.

Grendizer (here flanked by his predecessors Mazinger Z and Great Mazinger, all designed by the manga legend Go Nagai) arrived in 1975. It aired in France the following year, sparking a boom that quickly spread across Europe. That boom was fueled by one Haim Saban, an Israeli concert promoter who lost his fortune when all of his shows were cancelled by the Yom Kippur war. He emigrated to France with one of his youngest stars, where he produced the recording of Grandizer’s French-language theme song. The record went platinum, making Saban a new fortune. Grendizer became a hit in many French-speaking territories, including in the Arab world. Saban used this new capital to continue purchasing the rights to Japanese shows — and create new ones of his own. But we’re getting ahead of the story.

The Iranian revolution caused a second oil crisis in 1979, forcing the world to reconsider its use of petroleum products — Japanese toymakers included. The giant-sized Jumbos weren’t just expensive to make; they were difficult to ship and took up vast quantities of space on the shelves of tiny Japanese toy stores. As such toys began getting more compact — and getting more complex.

The very first toy produced after war’s end had been a tin Jeep, the brainchild of Matsuzo Kosuge, whose story anchors the first chapter of the book Pure Invention. It was created from tin scavenged from American military bases, hammered into shape on wooden forms in a dilapidated barn. It was one of the first manufactured products of any kind to go on sale in late 1945, and Jeeps would remain a staple Japanese toy for many decades to come. Kosuge passed away in 1971, but I wish he’d lived long enough to see this:

By the Eighties, thanks to the advent of precision engineering and molding technologies, now cars could turn, origami-like, into robots. Transforming cars (and planes, and all sorts of things) flooded into global kids’ spaces right alongside the real-life cars roiling grown-ups’ markets. But even bigger changes were to come. To understand how big, you need to understand that we were in the middle of a trade war so fierce it was known as Japan Bashing. American politicians on both sides of the aisle portrayed Japan as an enemy. In April of 1987, President Ronald Reagan imposed a 100 percent tariff on Japanese semiconductor imports. The idea was to protect the American computer industry.

There was just one problem: he forgot to include toys.

A practically unknown toymaker named Nintendo released the Family Computer, aka Famicom, in 1983 in Japan. “It started with a phone call in 1981,” the creator of the device, Masayuki Uemura, told me. Nintendo “President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges. He always liked to call me after he’d had a few drinks, so I didn’t think much of it. I just said, ‘Sure thing, boss,’ and hung up. It wasn’t until the next morning when he came up to me, sober, and said, ‘That thing we talked about—you’re on it?’ that it hit me: He was serious.”

Serious indeed. The Famicom, released in the USA two years later as the Nintendo Entertainment System, upended the idea of what it meant to play. Japanese didn’t invent video games, but they arguably perfected them, as a new class of heroes like Mario and Zelda won hearts and minds of children (and more than a few adults) around the globe, heralding a new era of virtualized play. Not to mention a “console war” in which Japanese companies like NEC, Sega, and later Sony fought for global mindshare, a battle Western gamemakers all but sat out for the duration.

Midway through the console wars in 1993 came an unexpected contender: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It was based upon a Japanese series called Zyuranger, created by a Japanese company with the intent of selling toys to Japanese children. But an Israeli entrpreneur by the name of Haim Saban — remember him? — repackaged it in a new format for American audiences, sparking yet another boom that has, in many respects, never really ended. Power Rangers, with its glorious spandex suits and the use of giant robots to solve problems, made me wish I was ten years old instead of an (ostensibly) adult twenty when it arrived. I’ve never actually watched an entire episode, yet even as a late middle-aged man dream of using giant robots to solve all of my problems, too. Bandai made a fortune selling “Megazord” robots and Ranger figures to kids from the show, bringing a distinctively Japanese sensibility to the childhood fantasyscape.

Japan’s “Bubble economy” popped in 1990, a few years before the Rangers arrived. But even as Japan should have been getting less and less relevant, an even more influential toy line arrived at the cusp of the 21st century.

Pokémon dropped in Japan in 1996. Nintendo had small hopes for the game, originally. “I was told this kind of thing would never appeal to American audiences,” recalls Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto of its development. Yet the corporate pundits were wrong. Pokémon Red Version and Pokémon Blue Version spread from schoolyard to schoolyard in Japan, surprising Nintendo, who quickly produced a card game and anime to promote the surprisingly popular title. When the trio arrived on American shores in September of 1998, they swept the nation like a virus. Time called it a “pestilential Ponzi scheme”; The New Yorker dedicated multiple covers to the franchise. This was more than a fad — it was a global phenomenon. Christian groups protested it; Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa against it.

From shows like Transformers and Power Rangers, everyone knew Japanese toymakers were good at their jobs. That they had this kind of cultural clout was shocking — to Japanese and Americans both. Perhaps no other plaything transformed the way children dreamed than Pokémon — and it was a product of Japan, no different from the amusements that had shocked observers way back in 1877, a century and more earlier. It heralded an age where the traditional markers of a nation’s success would be superceded by the power of fantasy — and Japan, supposedly out of the game economically, was now inexplicably leading the pack culturally.

It was a sign of all sorts of weirdness to come. But that brings us to the turn of the 20th century. Anyone care to read the toy-history of the 21st?

“Boys, be ambitious!” were the apocryphal parting words of educator William S. Clark to his students at Hokkaido University in 1876. They’re inscribed on a monument there, and in the hearts of Japanese thanks to a famed newspaper column on the topic. But when you think about it, Japan isn’t really known for its ambition these days. What it’s better known for is ambiguity.

This might seem an odd adjective to describe a country so many seem to love, if inbound tourist numbers are any indication. But two recent incidents have thrown what I’m talking about into sharp relief.

On November 7th, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi stated that any attempt by China to seize Taiwan by force would represent an existential threat to Japan. This meant that if the US responded militarily, Japan could be obligated to join the response. Many assumed this was the case, but it had never been articulated openly until this point.

Last weekend, Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda showed up to a NASCAR-sponsored racing event at Fuji Speedway dressed head to toe in MAGAwear. Sporting a Make America Great Again cap and a “Trump/Vance 2024” T-shirt, he declared that “we are exploring ways to make tariffs a winner for everyone.” Again, many assumed the leaders of Japanese manufacturers were eager to curry favor with Trump, but none had gone quite so public with their fellat — I mean fealty! — as Toyoda had.

The short-term effects have been… bad.

China is raging, calling in diplomats for dressings-down and demanding official retractions, cancelling concerts, banning Japanese films including Crayon Shinchan the Movie: Super Hot! The Spicy Kasukabe Dancers and Cells at Work! from opening in local theaters, and pointedly advising Chinese citizens, who make up a very large percentage of tourists to Japan, to cancel their trips. (Such is the risk Japan exposes itself to by making content and tourism a pillar of its economy, but that’s another story.)

On the other hand, Toyoda’s fashion choices seem to have provoked general confusion, not least of all among Toyota’s American executives, according to one trade paper. Trump’s tariffs have cost Toyota billions. And Tesla’s fate has made automakers keenly aware of what happens when a leader decides to steer their company straight into the culture wars. Automotive News called Toyoda’s cosplay “a tone-deaf mistake.” The Financial Times framed it more sympathetically, declaring it “humiliating but all too necessarily strategic.”

I’d call it naivete. But more on that in a moment. For now let’s leave aside whether these declarations — Sanae’s on China, Toyoda’s on MAGA — represent tactical blunders or canny diplomacy. Because one thing is absolutely certain: they represent a rare failure for Japan in terms of strategic ambiguity.

Strategic ambiguity is the term for when one keeps their intentions obscure so as to achieve a goal. The American government’s policy regarding Taiwan is a stereotypical example. At the moment, the US seems committed to defending only “the first island chain,” which does include Taiwan, but also islands belonging to Japan, the Philippines, and Borneo. An ambiguous swath of sea indeed.

Japan is a nation steeped in ambiguity. There’s an old kotowaza proverb that goes, the clever hawk hides its talons. This is a country whose leaders were so famed for never clearly articulating what they really wanted that someone felt the need to write a book called The Japan That Can Say No.

When Japan was on top of the world in the Eighties, Westerners interpreted this reticence with deep suspicion, describing it with “W-bombs” like waffling, wishy-washy, and weasely. Karel van Wolferen’s controversial 1989 bestseller The Enigma of Japanese Power captured it best, portraying a Japan so governed by group consensus that no one was really in charge: a place where the buck never stops, but keeps circulating around like a game of musical chairs.

Some critics felt Wolferen’s take was uncharitable; others believe he nailed an issue that persists today. A great many Americans could probably name five people most in control of their nation’s political situation; I suspect many Japanese would be hard pressed to do the same about their country. In ways better and worse, there simply don’t seem to be as many charismatic politicians, or leaders in general, here as there are abroad.

Nevertheless, you don’t hear much criticism about Japan’s prominence or lack thereof on the global stage anymore. And that is because, as I wrote in “The ‘Dark Matter’ of Japan’s Fantasy-Industrial Complex,” Japan’s dropping out of the headlines as an economic titan is quite possibly the best thing that could have ever happened to its pop cultural industries. The general obscurity of Japan’s political stances should infuriate, but it is in fact a quiet strength. I should note that I don’t believe this is some kind of well-planned tactic — it’s totally unexpected add-on value from something that has long been a thread in Japanese culture, manifesting in a different way in modern times.

Consider how Western celebrities are subjected to a constant litmus test of their political values. It is far harder to do this in Japan. So many of Japan’s top creators are literally anonymous that it’s like The Enigma of Japanese Pop Culture. The latest Demon Slayer film has so far generated more than 700 million USD in global revenue, and we don’t know the creator’s real name or even gender, let alone anything about their political leanings. When I emceed an event featuring another of Shonen Jump’s top artists at AnimeNYC, he wore a custom Lucha libre mask the entire time.

As I wrote in “Japan is not ready for the culture wars,” there is at the moment a huge gap between Japan’s interest in the outside world, and the outside world’s interest in Japan. A great many Japanese with whom I have interacted — even “captains of industry” sorts — seem blissfully unaware of how divided America is as a nation, and how unstable our socio-political situation is at the moment. This is the real reason, I suspect, that Toyoda felt comfortable going “full MAGA” without so much as mentioning it to his American counterparts.

Ambiguity is soft. It’s key to kawaii products: squishy, in-between, neither baby nor grown up, neither masculine nor feminine, an aesthetic that Japanese designers have mastered. Ambiguity in politics makes Japan seem safe and approachable. It is why so many Westerners see Japan as an oasis and want to visit. It’s also why anime fans can somehow see the same medium — and sometimes even the same series — as “woke” and “a safe haven from political correctness” at the very same time. Ambiguity provides a blank slate upon which fans of different cultures and creeds can project their own values. You might see Japan’s traditional reluctance to take a public stand on divisive issues as deliberate or wishy-washy, but it is also the secret sauce of its soft power.

So: the more that Japanese leaders wade into sticky issues, or make hard pronouncements about — well, anything, really — the more they will compromise their nation’s soft power. To which one (especially one who wants to provoke) might say, so what? To which I’d reply: because these very same leaders also seem to be banking on it, in the form of content and tourism, to save the economic fortunes of their nation. In other words, if you want to be ambitious… you’ve got to know when to be strategically ambiguous.

Galapagos is, of course, an archipelago off the coast of Ecuador, named for the giant turtles that are its most famous residents. It is famed for its remoteness and for how the wildlife evolved to match the peculiarities of that local environment. But it has another meaning in Japan. Engineer and “open source guy” Shuji Sado jokingly started calling Japan “Galapagos” in 2004. But the term didn’t enter the popular lexicon until 2007, when a truly transformative product went on sale, unseating Japan from its role as the king of consumer technology. It was called the iPhone. In the wake of its success, pundits glumly began referring to their nation as suffering from “Galapagos syndrome.” The idea was that Japan had grown too insular, too focused on the peculiarities of its local market to compete globally.

Until that point, the dominant narrative about Japan was that it had gotten to the future a little ahead of the West. Books like Japan as Number One (1979) and films like Blade Runner (1982), with its Tokyo-esque Los Angeles of the future, set the tone: the coming century would be Japanese. This image held firm even as Japan’s economic bubble burst in 1990, ushering in decades of depression of the financial and psychological varieties. As late as 2001, the sci-fi writer William Gibson could still remark that “Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future...The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.”

The iPhone changed all that. In the years after, an even more cynical narrative emerged. There’s a joke that captures it perfectly: Japan has been living in the year 2000 since 1980... And it’s still living in the year 2000 today. Whether in social media, generative AI, scientific publishing, personal wealth, even (gasp) dance music – reports pile up of a Japan falling further and further behind. “Japan used to be a tech giant,” lamented CNN in August. “Why is it stuck with fax machines and ink stamps?”

Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that America, Germany, and other high-tech nations still use fax machines, too. First, the story went that Japan was ahead of the curve. Then, the story went that the rising sun had set. Now, yet another viewpoint has been gaining traction on social media. It’s called the “Japan really is living in 2050” meme.

At first blush, this sounds like history repeating. But these videos (and they’re inevitably videos) actually focus on everyday consumer products and services. Things like convenience store condiment packets, refrigerators with doors that open from either side, toilets whose lids lift automatically, automated cash registers, train seats that rotate, and…uh, single-serving yogurt. Never mind that most of these things exist in some form abroad. Or that they are expressions of convenience rather than futurism. The yogurt one got 2.6 million views on TikTok.

The fascinating thing about the meme it isn’t whether it’s true or false, but rather what it says about those sharing it. This is Japan as neither futuristic utopia nor failed empire, but simply a nice place to live. Which can probably be interpreted as a reflection of how bad things are getting for young people abroad.

Once the West feared Japan’s supposed technological superiority. Then came the schadenfreude over Japan’s supposed fall. Now a new generation is projecting upon the country an almost desperate longing for comfort. And is it any wonder? The meme centers on companies producing products that make the lives of consumers easier. That must feel like a dreamy fantasy to young folks who’ve only known life in an attention economy, where corporations are the consumers and they’re the products.

To them, Japan isn’t in the past or the future. It’s a very real place — a place where things haven’t gone haywire. This is Japan as a kind of Galapagos, but not in a pejorative sense. Rather, it’s a superlative, asking, a little plaintively: Why can’t we have nice things like this in our country?

* * * * *

I remember the arrival of the iPhone in Japan well, because I was here when it happened. 2007 was an interesting moment. The anonymous message board 2channel had entrenched itself as the preferred online hangout for young Japanese, spawning new trends like netto-uyo (“net right wingers”) and netto-ijime (“net-bullying.”) A then-unknown anime director by the name of Makoto Shinkai had just released a groundbreaking film called 5 Centimeters Per Second. And Shigeru Ishiba, then Minister of Defense, made headlines by remarking that if Godzilla hypothetically attacked Japan, the self-defense forces would be legally justified in fighting back.

When the iPhone dropped in America that January, it sparked a consumer frenzy. SoftBank spent the next six months laying the groundwork for its release in Japan that June. As a lifelong Apple user (I’d grown up with an Apple II+ and a IIGS in my home, then lugged a Macintosh Portable to university) I anticipated its arrival with excitement.

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It was right around this time that Sony announced a new product. What might that titan of consumer electronics, the creator of the boombox, the Walkman, the Trinitron, the PlayStation, Aibo, and so many other innovative products, be bringing to market?

Its name was Rolly. Sony touted it as a robot, but it was really an egg-shaped MP3 player that “danced” in tune with whatever music you loaded onto it, or that could be remote controlled with a cellphone. At a shop in Akihabara I watched the thing listlessly roll about a tabletop, flashing its LEDs and flapping its ear-like wings to tracks by Hikaru Utada and Arashi. It was cute enough. But in the face of the incoming iPhone, it felt utterly and totally irrelevant. It reminded me of that scene from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions where an alien lands on Earth bearing wondrous technologies, but gets ignored because it can only communicate by farting and tap-dancing. The contrast between Rolly and the Walkman or the PlayStation felt stark, even a little unnerving. Revolution was on the horizon, and this was the best Sony could do? So this, I thought, was the “Galapagos syndrome” I’d been hearing about.

For a long time, when it came to communication technologies, Japan really had been “several measurable clicks down the timeline” compared to West. Japan is where early digital compulsion-loops, the building blocks of attention economies, were first honed in video games. It was the first society where mobile texting became a youth phenomenon. It was where emoji were invented. It was the first nation to experience how fast-ramping an entire population online might affect the national conversation, back in 1999, which is when both the “i-mode” mobile internet service and 2channel debuted. They may have been doing it on flip-phones, but the Japanese were experiencing the internet-in-your-pocket lifestyle a decade before the West.

So watching Japan totally miss inventing the smartphone felt less like a letdown than some kind of betrayal. And Sony had been so, so close. They had released a proto-smartphone in 2002. Japan’s best-selling mobile phone in 2006 was the Sony-Ericsson “Walkman Phone,” a fusion of MP3 player and cell phone. Sony even owned its own record company! Then the iPhone dropped in 2007, laying waste to the entire Japanese phone market like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.

No exaggeration. Three years later in 2009, Apple owned 72% of the market for mobile phones in Japan. The following year, that rose to 90%. It was brutal. People began calling the bespoke domestic models that had once dominated the scene gara-kei, short for “garapagosu keitai” – Galapagos mobiles.

But looking back with the benefit of hindsight, the arrival of the iPhone wasn’t precisely the debacle for Japan that it initially seemed. Had it been any other product, from any other company, it might have been. But the iPhone was perhaps the single most Japanese piece of technology ever to be invented by an American company. Jobs “didn’t want to be IBM,” recalled John Sculley, who served as Apple CEO from 1983 to 1993. “He didn’t want to be Microsoft. He wanted to be Sony.” Jobs so worshipped at the altar of Sony’s consumer electronics that initially attempted to name the iMac the MacMan, after the Walkman, until someone convinced him he’d decided otherwise.

The iPhone sweeping the world was a triumph for Jobs, for Apple, and for Silicon Valley. But it was also a quiet triumph for Japanese sensibilities, aesthetics, and lifestyles. Thanks to it, the whole world started living a lot more like the Shibuya schoolgirls who’d pioneered mobile gaming, texting, emojis and selfies back in the Nineties. The iPhone was American. But the new lifestyles it delivered were the ones Japanese had already been living for a decade.

The critics were right in that the iPhone signaled the end of an era for Japan, putting a definitive period on the end of the sentence, Japan as factory to the world. What they missed is that it also signaled the start of something new: Japan as global influencer.

* * * * *

I agree that Japan is a kind of Galapagos, in the sense that it can be oblivious to global trends. But I disagree that this is a weakness. The reason being that nearly everything the planet loves from Japan was made for by Japanese, for Japanese in the first place.

Looking back, this has always been the case. Whether the woodblock prints that wowed the world in the 19th century, or the Walkmans and Nintendo Entertainment Systems that were must-haves in the Eighties, or the Pokémania that seized the planet at the turn of the Millenium, or the life-changing cleaning magic of the 2010s, or the anime blockbusters Japan keeps unleashing in the 2020s – they hit us in the feels, so we assumed that they were made just for us. But they weren’t.

As I wrote a few months back, Japan’s creators have traditionally never paid much mind to foreign consumers. Kozo Ohsone, engineer of the Walkman, told me that he built the first one simply to see if it could be done; Sony initially had so little faith in its prospects that they made only 30,000 in the first production run. Hayao Miyazaki has said that he is “baffled” by the popularity of his work abroad. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, has said in interviews that most at Nintendo initially assumed Pokémon would only be released in Japan.

The editor of a major manga magazine put it to me succinctly: “I don’t think we should worry about foreign audiences. I don’t mean that we should be ignoring them. I mean that trying to create something specifically for them doesn’t work. It has to succeed in Japan before it can succeed globally.”

This makes me recall a moment from 2014, when I had the chance to meet a childhood idol of mine: the anime director Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of Mobile Suit Gundam. The occasion was a press conference for an international co-production that never came to fruition. After, I asked him about the government’s Cool Japan initiative to promote Japanese content abroad.

“I hate that term,” he said. “There’s no way the government can make anything ‘cool.’ Anime developed on its own without any help. The moment a bureaucracy focuses on creativity, creativity dies.”

“Japanese content has a local flavor,” he continued. “That sense of culture, that localness, is why it has sold for so long. People never expected any of it to sell abroad. They never promoted it because they were embarrassed about it. Japanese didn’t realize that proudly embracing the differences and marketing it to people of other cultures was a way of doing things.”

They’re realizing it now. Anime exports are now equivalent in size to that of semiconductors or steel. Revenues from foreign markets surpassed those of the domestic market in 2023. The content industry is growing wildly, attracting all sorts of people who’ve never shown much interest in manga or anime or games before, from politicians to venture capitalists. This brings opportunity, but also pressure. As cartoons begin contributing to GDP, politics come into play. The LDP has spoken of wanting to triple the size of the content industry by the end of the decade, and private equity firms are already placing their bets.

But true cool, as Tomino says, can’t be bought. It has to be earned. This is the double-edged sword of Japan’s pop-cultural momentum. It didn’t set out to become a soft-power superpower. It emerged as one organically, thanks to the authenticity of its cultural products. And that authenticity is a result of Japanese producers doing their own thing, for local consumers, with little if any oversight or support from the authorities.

Japan’s market for fantasies is crowded and ferociously competitive. What survives is the fittest – and often the weirdest, as in the least likely to emerge from a corporate boardroom. Demon Slayer didn’t succeed because of government support or venture capital. It succeeded because Shueisha, over many years, created a system for platforming talented independent creators, and giving readers the chance to choose their favorites from among many rivals. Shueisha has used this system to create dozens of global hits. Meanwhile, witness how Netflix, an entertainment behemoth whose revenues dwarf Shueisha’s, hasn’t landed a single zeitgeist-level hit from the dozens of anime titles it has directly funded.

This indirectly illuminates another aspect of the “Japan is really living in 2050” meme: there are upsides to living in a country that hasn’t become a pay-to-play petri dish for the social experiments of techbros and billionaire CEOs. Perhaps this is due in part to the fact that there are a lot less of them here. As Warren Buffett put it recently, Japanese executives are “far less aggressive about their own compensation than is typical in the United States.” The head of the US wing of Seven & I Holdings, which operates the world’s 7-Eleven stores, took home $49 million in 2024 — almost 23 times the salary of the CEO of the parent company in Japan. For all of its many and varied flaws, Japan does not feel like a place where CEOs occupy a different plane of existence from mere mortals.

So this is my advice. Japanese creatives should keep doing exactly what they have been doing: making things for themselves first, and worrying about global markets later. And all of us need to stop thinking about Galapagos as syndrome, because a measure of isolation and dislocation from global trends is Japan’s secret to success. Japan may no longer be the global imagination’s default setting for the future, but then again, the future isn’t as bright as it used to be. In an era of incessant disruption, sitting out the tech wars seems less like a syndrome than a savvy strategy. It’s certainly playing a big part in the nation’s global charisma of the moment. It’s time for Japan to acknowledge this, and embrace its role — as a super Galapagos.

Demon Slayer is, by the numbers, the most popular anime franchise on the planet right now. A glance at the box-office charts really drives it home. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is outperforming not only Superman, but F1: The Movie and Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning. Think about this: Tanjiro Kamado is putting more butts in seats than Brapi (as the…

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Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle is now the most profitable movie Japan has ever made. It is also rocketing up international box-office charts, and recently out-earned the latest Superman in the United States. Its global, ongoing success is such that it is being bandied about as more than just a hit, but “mind-blowing” (BBC), …

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You might have read that activists in Nepal and Indonesia are using the pirate flag from the anime ONE PIECE to protest their respective governments. The flag has also shown up in protests in support of Palestine in London, and the “Block Everything” campaign in Paris. Demonstrators…

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The shooting of Charlie Kirk has thrown an already divided America into deeper existential turmoil. Did you know that he spent the weekend before his death in Japan? Sanseito flew him in to address their troops. That they did so should tell you everything you need to know about their politics, but if not, here’s a…

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The year is 2008. A globally popular product finally reaches Japanese shores – only to crash and burn because customers didn’t find it cute enough. That product was the iPhone, and it initially failed here for a reason that surprised Apple: it didn’t include support for emoji. The little glyphs were, at the time, peculiar to Japan — unknown abroad but indispensable for local mobile phone users.

The year is 2025. A globally popular product finally reaches Japanese shores – only to crash and burn because customers didn’t find it cute enough. That product is the Labubu doll, and its inability to gain traction in the planet’s capital of cuteness tells us a lot about China, Japan, and the state of the world in general.

Labubus are plush dolls of furry little elves with mischievous toothy grins. They represent one of the biggest fads in global pop culture of the moment. The figures debuted in China in 2015, but remained a local curiosity. Then a K-pop star flashed one in 2024, and they went viral, becoming must-have accessories for celebs, sports stars, and influencers around the globe. That in turn makes them them must-haves for anyone who aspires to be anyone. The Chinese firm Pop Mart has sold so many of the things that they’ve made more than 1.9 billion USD in just the first half of this year alone.

It isn’t particularly surprising that something like Labubus spawned a fad. In a world gone mad, humanity has developed an insatiable appetite for ubercute characters with the power to delight and soothe. But the vast majority of them have traditionally come from Japan, led by the indefatigable Hello Kitty. Thanks to her and her cohorts, Japan’s cute factor has so thoroughly permeated the global imagination that kawaii, the Japanese word for things adorable, is now firmly entrenched in the global lexicon. (The Oxford English Dictionary added it way back in 2011.)

Does the appearance of a Chinese contender represent a sea change in global tastes? The New York Times has wondered as much, asking if “This Not-Particularly-Cute Elf Can Make China Cool?” Other pundits are more enthusiastic: The Diplomat has declared Labubus “a brand new frontier in Chinese soft power,” while the People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, has proclaimed Labubus “a benchmark for China’s pop culture making inroads overseas.”

With just one exception, it seems.

“Character-crazed Japan has little appetite for Labubu,” declared The Japan Times in a feature exploring one of the few markets the little goblins have failed to penetrate. Yuko Tamura portrays Japan as a kind of cuddly Kumite from Bloodsport, filled with world-class mascots who defend the nation from outsiders, no matter how big their followings abroad. Every fad is a delicate balance of the familiar and novel; Tamura theorizes that Labubu is a little too familiar to spark joy among Japanese audiences. There are already plenty of deviously cute characters running around the islands of Japan.

To this I’d add another observation. My sense, after twenty-plus years here, is that Japanese are not really plugged into global trends, not really citizens of the world. Young people aren’t travelling abroad in the numbers they once did; they don’t follow foreign news (or any news) as closely as previous generations. Much of Japan’s cool factor is built on the fact that creators and consumers don’t really care about the outside world. Labubus are out-competed in Japan, while Japanese audiences’ inward forcus strips away the dolls’ questionable “utility” as signifiers and status symbols.

This one-two punch of being a nation is so steeped in kawaii and so oblivious to global trends has resulted in a sort of pop-cultural immune response — a Labubu vaccine. This resistance isn’t borne of hostility or protectionism; there’s a PopMart store in Harajuku, and Uniqlo is about to launch a Labubu T-shirt collab. Rather, it’s a combo of having been exposed to a far greater number of cute characters than anywhere else, and not really caring about what’s going on in the outside world. Thus Labubus don’t hit here in the way they do in the West. Or, apparently, Kyrgyzstan. In Japan, it’s Chiikawa time, all the time.

Japan may well represent an edge case. Labubus really are popular around the globe. But do they really represent a surge of soft power? That’s a lot harder to quantify. The late Joseph Nye, who coined the term, described soft power as “the ability to get what one wants by attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment.” It’s about making others want the same things you do because they like you. But those who toss around the term casually often forget that a nation’s cultural exports are interpreted through the lenses of its politics and foreign policies.

In other words, it is extremely difficult to achieve or maintain soft power if you’re constantly associated with scary, controversial, or rage-inducing things. This is, in fact, one secret to Japan’s rise as a cultural superpower. I call it the “dark matter” of Japan’s fantasy-industrial complex: Japan is beloved by everybody precisely because its political stances are clear to nobody.

Consider that much of what the world loves about Japan today – anime, manga, video games, “city pop” – was already well established in the Eighties. Yet Japan enjoyed little soft power then, because its trade policies made it the adversary of the Western industrial world. Only after Japan’s economy collapsed and it disappeared from the headlines did it slowly but steadily emerge as the soft superpower it is known as today.

China plays the role of that adversary now. Unlike Japan, it is in the headlines all the time. And many of those headlines are not positive. The New York Times and Nikkei Asia are reporting that the top films playing in Chinese theaters are stirring hatred for Japan; foreign papers are filled with imagery of Xi Jinping welcoming Vladmir Putin to a summit; Chinese warships are colliding as they attempt to drive Filipino fishermen out of contested waters. It’s tough to square this kind of thing with the cuddly image Labubus project.

In the end, that might not even matter, because it is questionable as to how many consumers of Labubus connect them to China. Labubus are made there. But they don’t really transmit Chinese values. They are the creation of a Hong Kong artist who was raised in the Netherlands and based his designs on Nordic folklore. They came to the attention of the world through a Thai singer in a Korean pop group. And they are most often spotted dangling from European luxury bags. Their globalized origin is entirely of the moment, but it doesn’t leave much of a thread to trace back to China, save, perhaps, the steady stream of revenues.

The New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka has described Labubu as “IRL brainrot,” in that memes and AI slop have reshaped the tastes of Millennials and Zillenials into a defensive, ironic embrace of ugliness. W. David Marx pegs them to dynamic in which popularity isn’t driven by how liked something is, but also by how many people dislike it enough to comment on it. “There are engaged, paying consumers of Labubus,” as he puts it, “and there are sour, reluctant consumers of the Labubu narrative.” (I feel seen.) It’s a yin-yang of controversy that fuels viral buzz of plushies and political culture-wars everywhere. Everywhere but Japan, that is.

Back in 2008, Softbank quickly realized Apple’s mistake and lobbied to have a makeshift emoji palette installed on Japanese iPhones. This had the twin effects of making the iPhone a hit, and putting emoji on the radar of Silicon Valley, which brought them to the world. Could the reverse happen? Could PopMart engineer a work-around for Japan’s Labubu vaccine, making the little gremlins as popular here as they are in the outside world? Maybe. But they’ll have to get through Chiikawa, and a whole lot of societal ennui, first.

Manga is big business around the globe, and Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump is Japan’s top manga anthology magazine. This isn’t hyperbole. In 2024, six out of the ten top-grossing manga and anime series originated in the pages of Jump. Despite this, very little has been written about how the magazine seems to hav…

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In the meantime, I wanted to re-share this essay about an unsung titan of the anime industry: Nizo Yamamoto, who passed away two years ago this month. Nobody captured Japan’s skyscapes like he did, and these lazy late-summer days are the perfect time to look back at how his handiwork changed the way the world watches anime.

We love it when anime transports us to castles in the sky, or lets us leap through time. We lavish attention on directors of anime, and also on the animators who keep the protagonists and antagonists moving, and on the voice actors who bring the cast to life. This makes sense – anime is drama, after all, and the characters and their stories naturally grab viewers’ hearts. 

But where would these heroes and villains be, without the dynamic backdrops that accentuate their emotional arcs? Directors direct the action; they don’t create the fantastic settings. Those backgrounds are the responsibility of the bijutsu kantoku, the art director – the title of the person who creates the visual appearance of an animated world on screen. They work under the film or series directors, but the director’s vision wouldn’t come to life without them. And the anime industry just lost one of its most visionary bijutsu kantoku: Nizo Yamamoto, who died at the age of 70 two years ago this week.

You probably don’t know Yamamoto by name. But you are almost certainly familiar with his work. Yamamoto was a man who spent his career in the background of anime – literally. While others specialized in characters or vehicles, he was different. “I seem to have a certain facility for painting things that can’t be touched by human hands,” he said in a 2013 interview. “Clouds, skies, forests, flames, water, snow, wind.” Yamamoto fiercely resisted the siren call of digital tools, working with brush and paint until the very end. His approach and his subjects call to mind Nihonga painting, which uses natural pigments to capture the feel of dramatic vistas and terrain.

Yamamoto painted the backdrops for some of anime’s most celebrated titles. The epic European cliffs and ruins of Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro; fantastic floating worlds of Laputa: Castle in the Sky; the big-band apocalypse of Robot Carnival; the wartime streets of Kobe that frame the tragedy of Grave of the Fireflies; the cozy urbanity of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time; the towering cloudscapes of Weathering With You. 

Yamamoto will undoubtedly most be remembered for his work on Hayao Miyazaki’s fantasy-historical epic Princess Mononoke. It was he who brought the dense forests of that primeval Japanese wonderland to life. There’s a classic scene, about halfway through, in which the protagonist enters the realm of the Shishi-gami, a powerful deity that is something like the forest incarnate. In a documentary, Yamamoto is seen fretting over the background for this very moment, while Miyazaki tries to calm him. The sight of a mercurial control freak like Miyazaki playing the role of soother highlights just how much he depended upon Yamamoto’s talents.

If you keep watching, Yamamoto then shows how the elaborate backdrop came to be. He starts with a meticulously hand painted and airbrushed backsheet; then he lays numerous other scenic accents atop it, eight sheets in total, to create a gloriously lush and inviting sylvan world. When the late Roger Ebert called Princess Mononoke “one of the most visually inventive films I have ever seen,” he was, in essence, talking about Yamamoto’s handiwork.

Like manga, anime is, at its heart, a medium for adolescents, which is why so much of it features young protagonists raging against various authority figures. But the actual work of directing anime generally falls to older folks. The average age of an employee in the Japanese animation industry is just under 40 years old. Auteurs tend to be significantly older. Mamoru Hosoda is 55. Hideaki Anno is 63. Miyazaki just released his latest film at the age of 82. [As of this repost, they are now, 57, 65, and 84, respectively.] These long careers are a testament to the time it takes to hone one’s craft. “I always tried my best to strive for quality,” lamented Yamamoto in that same 2013 interview, “but I feel like I could have done more.” He indeed kept doing more: the last film on which he worked, Weathering With You, came out in 2019, and Yamamoto’s family said that he’d been painting all the way up until the day before he passed away.

They’re also a testament to an aging society – the median age in Japan is just over forty-eight. It’s a paradox: one of the oldest nations on the planet has created a genre that represents one of the planet’s biggest youth subcultures. People in their twenties and thirties make up the bulk of the tourists to Japan, and a not-insignificant number of them visit because of an interest in anime. I get it. I did, too, back when I first started coming here in the Nineties. Back then, I was an outlier. Today, there’s an official word for it: an anime pilgrimage. 

Anime characters aren’t real (sorry!), but the settings of many anime are, and this is precisely what aficionados seek out on their pilgrimages. In essence, they want to find the backgrounds – they want to walk through them and experience them just as their favorite characters did, a sort of real-life metaverse. Studio Ghibli understands this. Neither its museum in Tokyo nor its theme park in Aichi prefecture features anything in the way of rides or traditional attractions; only re-creations of settings from the films. They are essentially “background art” re-engineered in three dimensions for flesh and blood humans. Otaku, as adult fans of anime were once known in Japan, pioneered the consumption of anime as a lifestyle – but even they were locked into consuming it on screens. Anime is a medium, but as the parks and pilgrimages show, it is also increasingly a sort of habitat. 

Background artists played an important role, perhaps the key role, in bringing anime to life in this way. Japanese fans have known this for a long time; they call puffy clouds of the sort Yamamoto paints nizo-gumo, or Nizo’s clouds, a tribute to his craftsmanship. There have been numerous exhibitions of Yamamoto’s work in Japan over the last decade, and there’s a museum dedicated to him in his hometown of Goto, on an island off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture.　

But abroad, at least in the English-speaking fandom, there’s little attention paid to these literal background characters, the technicians and craftspeople who quietly build animated worlds for the flashier directors to play in. Yamamoto only belatedly received a Wikipedia entry after his death was announced. Kazuo Oga, whose backgrounds on My Neighbor Totoro are practically another member of the cast, has a Wikipedia page consisting of just three sentences. Hiroshi Ono, who painted the obsessively detailed backdrops that brought Neo-Tokyo to life in Akira, doesn’t have one at all. Anyone up for the task?

Although Yamamoto’s early work was set entirely in fantastical worlds, over the years reality began to creep in in all sorts of ways: studying the forests of Yakushima Island for inspiration in Princess Mononoke, for instance. And more recently, his work on Hosoda’s films is all the more striking for its grounding in Tokyo cityscapes – a sort of hyperreality that enhances the fantasy of the stories through its concreteness. (See what I did there?)

Fans have compiled websites juxtaposing real-life and animated scenes for easy visiting. The image above is based on an intersection in Takadanobaba, right off the Yamanote line. It’s interesting comparing a photograph of this totally unremarkable street scene to Yamamoto’s idealized re-imagining of it – tweaked in countless subtle ways so as to feel, somehow, even more realistic than the photograph. All of us hold idealized visions of ourselves in our minds; Yamamoto’s painting feels like the intersection’s idealized vision of itself. If cities dream, I suspect the dreams look like this.

As someone who got into anime because it was so wildly different from reality – space battles, giant robots, post-apocalyptic dystopias, futuristic cityscapes, etc. – I have mixed feelings about how the medium is increasingly coming down to earth. I’m as wowed by the hyperrealism of Sonoda’s theatrical releases as anyone, but there’s something about seeing Japan’s top animators pour so much effort into portraying a Shinjuku Starbucks that feels like a letdown. (This scene wasn’t, to be clear, Yamamoto’s handiwork.) Still, for many anime fans, real-life Tokyo must feel as exotic a destination as Macross City felt for me as a kid. And, come to think of it, most of the stuff I watched back then was set in thinly-veiled fictionalizations of real-life Tokyo, so maybe we’ve just come full circle.

Whatever the case, whether he was envisioning castles in the sky or the streets of residential Takadanobaba, there’s no denying Yamamoto’s talents. He was truly a creator of worlds – both onscreen in the form of his backgrounds, and offscreen, in the sense that the settings, even more so than characters, are attracting increasing numbers of anime fans to Japan. 

Once, anime was a fantasy for entertaining kids. Thanks in part to Nizo Yamamoto, it is a new form of reality for fans around the globe. I’ll be thinking of him next time I see one of those summer cumulonimbus clouds towering over the city, untouchable by human hands – at least, none save Yamamoto’s.

A few weeks back I was in Kyoto for Bitsummit, the annual event for indie game developers, and took a taxi from my hotel to the venue. Along the way, I used the reporter’s trick of asking a cabbie for his thoughts. We bantered about the hordes of tourists that have profoundly transformed the vibe of the city, and I was surprised to hear that locals, des…

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Sanseito, a.k.a. “the do it yourself party,” is a far-right political group that’s pretty much anti-everything. Semitic. Vaccinations and masking. LGBTQ rights and same-sex marriage. Anything critical of Japan in school textbooks. Married couples having separate names. Women taking the throne. But perhaps most of all, Sanseito is anti-immigrant. The party’s motto is “Japanese First.” Not Japan, mind you. Japanese. No dog-whistling here. It’s right there on all the campaign posters.

Japan held national elections for its House of Councillors, the upper house of its parliament, yesterday. Sanseito secured 15 seats, a remarkable surge from the previous one that it had held. It succeeded through canny use of social media, newsletters, and pop-cultural appeals, successfully drawing in voters who felt so disenfranchised by the mainstream parties that they wouldn’t have participated in the elections otherwise. The party, which launched on YouTube in 2020, has been described as “a nexus for the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation.” This time, it toned down the conspiracies in favor of playing up fears of a “silent invasion” — their words— of foreign residents, who they claim are cheating Japanese out of welfare, housing, labor, education, and healthcare. (You may recall a certain anime star parroting similar rhetoric just last month.)

Even before the big wins at the polls, the party’s success at promoting itself began affecting the national conversation. The (now formerly) majority Liberal Democratic Party hurriedly proposed tighter controls over foreign residents in a last-ditch effort to win over swing voters. It didn’t work. The LDP lost its majority, which means otaku-in-chief Prime Minister Ishiba will be undoubtedly be hanging up his Majin Buu costume very soon.

Crackdowns on outsiders are nothing new in populist movements. But Japan is a peculiar case. As I wrote about just a few weeks ago, its economy is increasingly dependent on inbound tourism and entertainment exports. This means that Japan’s fate is linked to how it is seen by foreign people. And increasing numbers of these folks are lured in by entertainment such as anime, manga, and games. Which raises an interesting question: how will a far-right party like Sanseito gaining more power impact Japan’s pop culture?

Normally, this is the kind of question one might only answer through speculation. But Sanseito has published a policy manifesto on its website, and one of the planks deals specifically with this topic. It reads in part:

Manga, anime, and games are more than just entertainment: they are vital tools of cultural diplomacy and international influence. Japan must strategically leverage these cultural assets to deepen mutual understanding with the world.

This isn’t the first time far-right populists have embraced cartoons in their quests for glory; the “rootless white males” of 4chan, as Steve Bannon called them, blazed that trail way back in 2016, with anime avatars and Pepe the Frog memes. But this may well be the first time a party has incorporated them into its platform.

Sanseito proposes to achieve this goal by improving working conditions for creators, exporting even more content into foreign markets, aggressively pursuing pirates, and using pop-culture to promote tourism and Japan as a whole. So far, sounds good!

But — cue record scratch — there’s just one catch. And it’s a doozy.

The Ministry of Culture shall be given the authority to ensure that manga, anime, and games are developed in a healthy way as a form of culture, rather than based upon their economic value.

The idea of putting a government agency in charge of what is considered “healthy” entertainment is frightening enough, but it gets even scarier when you consider that this section comes under a broader heading dedicated to improving “The State of the Nation, National Character, and National Identity.” Currently, manga and anime, like other forms of pop culture, succeed or fail based on the choices of citizens in an open marketplace. It’s about as democratic of a process as you can imagine. Sanseito proposes to remove personal choice in favor of dictating what citizens can read. In other words, this isn’t really about promoting the production of pop culture at all. It’s about creating propaganda and policing thought.

More to the point, it’s a paradox. As I wrote back in January in an essay called “Japan is Not Ready for the Culture Wars,” progressive values are woven deeply into the DNA of Japan’s illustrated entertainment. The very first episode of the very first cartoon to be called an anime, 1963’s Astro Boy, ended with a demonstration for equality in the streets of a futuristic Japan. Over the course of the Sixties manga nourished anti-war protestors of all stripes (including some unfortunate extremists.) Diversity, anti-authoritarianism, queer characters, and non-traditional family structures are signature features of Japan’s illustrated and interactive entertainments. They speak truth to power and let outsiders be seen. This, perhaps even more so than their technical virtuosity, is why they are so beloved by fans around the world.

Far-right thinking is in fundamental opposition to everything Japanese anime, manga, and games stand for. Hostility to science, progressive thought, and societal change is baked into Sanseito’s platform. If you believe that anime and manga are drivers of interest in Japan — which the party does, as per its manifesto — then Sanseito, or any right-wing, anti-progressive party taking real power would be an unmitigated disaster for Japan’s creative industries, its soft power, its tourism, and its economy. A vote for Sanseito was literally a vote against everything that makes manga and anime great, both as artforms and as keys to Japan’s global charisma.

This wouldn’t be the first time a populist party convinced its supporters to vote against their own best interests, but it’s particularly shocking in a nation that reveres manga and anime, and that is dependent on foreign affection for them to keep its economy afloat. It’s even more egregious given that said party is actively using manga and anime imagery in its campaigns!

Yet all is not lost. Sanseito may have won big, but only in relative terms. With just 15 out of 248 seats, it doesn’t have anything even remotely approaching a majority in parliament. Their rise is concerning, particularly so if one is a foreign resident, as I am. But for all its bluster, Sanseito still lacks any ability to enact real change. Still, the party’s win amplifies the voices of those who blame foreigners for their nation’s troubles. It’s a siren song all too familiar to post-industrial democracies around the world. Only time will tell if it resonates with more than just the fringes.

I moved from the U.S. to Japan in the spring of 2003. As a result, I missed seeing one of the single biggest developments in American pop culture unfold: the explosive rise of reality television. It’s almost trite to note that we’ve elected a reality TV star to the presidency twice, or that his reality TV style has reshaped the law of the land, transfor…

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Last year, nearly thirty seven million tourists visited Japan. To put this into perspective, that number is equivalent to almost thirty percent of the Japanese population. The comparison is even starker when you consider that the vast majority of these visitors congregate in a few major cities: Tokyo (population: 14 million), Osaka (2.7 million), and beleaguered Kyoto (just 1.4 million).

When you get as many tourists as a percentage of population as Japan does, there is bound to be friction. Stories of bad behavior abound – “nuisance streamers” provoking passerby for pageviews, paparazzi-like photographers stalking geisha in Kyoto, unlicensed go-kart drivers courting death on the streets of Tokyo. But even the well-behaved are arriving in such huge numbers that they’re overwhelming popular neighborhoods such as Asakusa and Shibuya. Fortunately, this hasn’t translated into much negativity about foreigners (or foreign residents). But nobody’s really happy about the situation. Even the tourists themselves are starting to complain.

Nevertheless, the Japanese government is forging ahead with plans to nearly double the numbers of inbound tourists to sixty million by 2030. Why? Japan’s ruling party of the LDP has historically been, shall we say, resistant to the idea of admitting more foreigners into the country, particularly refugees and immigrants. This began changing in the 2010s, but it still doesn’t explain why the Japanese government is so gung-ho on getting more tourists into places so packed to the gills that cities have begun pushing back. “Residents’ comfort level is deteriorating,” Yusuke Ishiguro, a tourism specialist, told the Mainichi. “If this were Europe, I think there would be protests.”

It’s especially curious given that until surprisingly recently, the Japanese government paid almost no attention to luring international tourists at all. So again: what gives? The short answer, to paraphrase an American aphorism: “it's the economy, stupid.”

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In the Eighties and Nineties, few foreigners saw Japan as a getaway. It was the era of Japan bashing, and headlines about the country were almost universally negative. The yen was absurdly strong, making Tokyo one of the most expensive cities to live in or even simply visit. Japanese food was the butt of jokes in the Western media, and there was little interest in the country’s pop culture (aside from a handful of freaks who would grow up to write newsletters like this one.) All of this conspired to make Japan feel something like a hermit kingdom. It was the least-visited of the G7 countries until 2014.

When I first started studying Japanese, in the late Eighties, the conventional wisdom was that it was one of the world’s “less useful” languages. Natives seemed to agree: we were such rare beasts that the Japanese mass media dubbed us hen na gaijin, which meant “any foreigner weird enough to learn Japanese.” On my first visit in 1990, I was often asked “why?” by locals shocked to see a foreign face. 1990 was actually a something of a watershed year for tourism in Japan, with a record-setting three million inbound visiting the country. But by comparison, nearly eleven million Japanese traveled abroad that same year -- almost a tenth of the nation’s population. Everyone in Japan wanted out, it seemed. And the government wanted them out!

During the Bubble era and well into the Nineties, Japanese leaders relied on outbound tourists – and more specifically the large sums of money they spent abroad – to help smooth over complaints about the massive trade deficits that Japan was running with foreign countries. So, less inbound tourists were actually more, from a bargaining standpoint. Japan may not be interested in foreign products, the argument seems to have gone, but look how much more our tourists spend in your countries than yours do in ours!

The big turning point came in 1995. What was the impetus for this sudden shift in the wind? Shame played a small role – it was becoming obvious how embarrassingly little the government spent on tourism in comparison to other advanced nations. But mostly, it was cold, hard math. The stock market, which crashed in 1990, wasn’t showing signs of recovering; the Bubble was well and truly over. The population was relentlessly ageing and shrinking. Manufacturers were offshoring. Bureaucrats cast about for new ways to bolster the nation’s balance sheets.

Enter the “Japanese Tourism Policy Council,” first convened in 1994. After “intensive and heated discussions,” led by a former chairman of the trading house Itochu, the council offered a proposal in the form of the 1995 “Welcome 21 Plan.” It aimed to increase inbound visitors from what was then 3.5 million to 7 million by 2005. The council couched their arguments in cultural terms, “promoting and maintaining Japan’s standing as a truly global and internationally competitive country.” But the real meat was the promise of money: an “alternative revenue strategy” in the face of declining exports. In fact, the council argued, “Japan should strive become a nation based on leisure tourism,” because this might “lead the Japanese economy in the 21^st century.”

When you look at the Council’s report, it’s a little shocking how closely their projections mapped to the actual rise in tourism over the next decade. They didn’t quite hit seven million in 2005, but they came close: 6.7 million. In a sense this was probably better from a bureaucratic standpoint: we didn’t make it this time, but look, we’re on track! We just need more money! And the government was willing to give it to them. In 2003, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi launched the “Visit Japan Campaign,” better known by its slogan, “Yokoso! Japan.” The press release features the same mix of culture and financial appeals, declaring “a view to increasing international exchange and” – this is critical – “revitalizing the Japanese economy.” It extended the Welcome 21 Plan’s projections to 2010, aiming for ten million visitors.

But the global financial crisis of 2007-8 triggered a plunge in inbound tourists. The hyperbolic Western media coverage of the Fukushima disaster in 2011 caused even more foreigners to stay away. I recall seeing those forlorn Yokoso! Japan posters at Narita Airport during those years and shaking my head at what seemed yet another government boondoggle. But then, the unexpected. As Abenomics caused the value of the yen to drop, Japan became cheaper to visit, and tourism rose rapidly – very rapidly. In 2013, ten million tourists arrived in Japan. It took only two years for that number to nearly double, to 19 million in 2015. And, with the exception of the inevitable drop during pandemic, it has been rising steadily ever since.

Which brings us back to the original question: why is the government so focused on bringing even more tourists in, even as citizens complain? There are multiple factors at play here. One is that, unlike the various Cool Japan promotional campaigns, tourism can be easily tracked in terms of numbers. Set a goal, see if it is attained, repeat. This kind of thing is catnip to bureaucrats, particularly when there are so few other bright spots from an economic standpoint. And this industry most definitely is bright. Tourism is now Japan’s second-largest “export,” right behind cars. Visitors spent more than eight trillion yen (over fifty billion USD) in 2024. These are the kinds of numbers that affect a nation’s GDP.

On the one hand, the surge in tourism might seem to represent the fruits of thirty years of effort on the part of the government. But I don’t think so. Given its track record with other cultural campaigns, I think that they simply got lucky. The leap in interest is better explained as an extension of the Pure Invention thesis: that foreigners have come to resemble the Japanese, after so many decades of consuming gadgets, gear, and content from the country. And now they have moved from consuming products to consuming Japan itself (literally, if you take a certain anime star’s comments at face value.) Japan isn’t an exotic or even particularly distant presence for anyone Gen X or younger; we grew up on its manga, its anime, its music, its foods. For a lot of folks, going to Japan now feels less like a trip abroad than a trip home. (Which, in conjunction with ongoing political chaos abroad, is why we are also seeing a surge of interest among foreigners in acquiring cheap land/homes here.)

The increasing number of foreign faces is the product of a powerful resonance between pop culture and tourism. The government knows this, too. It helps explain why the LDP, after many attempts to restrict anime and manga over the years, is now embracing content as a pillar of of the economy for the 2030s. You don’t have to be a genius of strategic planning to see to that tourism is locked in orbit with pop culture, and that the pair operate as a money-making dynamo for the country. The equation is simple: so long as Japanese content continues to grow in popularity, so will interest in Japan as a destination. It’s easy to understand why the government is invested in nourishing both trends, even as citizens grow increasingly ambivalent about the increase in inbounds. Given the nation’s demographics, lawmakers do not have many other options.

Regardless of how one personally feels about it, the tourism boom is also an interesting experiment. It gives concrete form to the ethereal concept of soft power. It lets us explore questions: How far can cultural charisma really take a nation? Can a country sustain its image as a leader in youth culture even as its population grows old? And more to the point, can Japan keep packing in visitors in without sacrificing its cultural sites and angering its citizens? The answer to all of these questions is, nobody knows. And so an ageing Japan, long written off as irrelevant, finds itself at the cutting edge once again. All we can do is watch and see what happens. If there’s any consolation, there’s plenty of people around to watch with.