Anime is the Champagne of Japan

Ersatz "anime" abounds. It's time to make "Japanese Anime" a protected designation.

From Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle: Rhyme Anima

It wasn’t so long ago that anime was the equivalent of a four-letter word in Japan. In the Seventies, parent-teacher associations and other advocate groups railed against the medium for corrupting children. In the Eighties, society disparaged adults who consumed anime as otaku. It’s a nerd badge of honor today, but was originally so discriminatory of a word that it was forbidden to be spoken on TV. Even the creators of Japanese anime seemed to underrate the value of their own products; there are many cases of Japanese rights-holders naively signing over top properties to foreign entities in lopsided agreements.

Today, of course, things have changed. Anime is big business, and every Japanese rights-holder knows it. Exploitative foreign contracts are largely a thing of the past. Global anime sales surpassed those of the domestic Japanese market in 2023. And that combined market is huge: three trillion yen ($22 billion USD), with projections that it could well double over the next decade. The Japanese government, always on the lookout to shore up its balance sheets in the era of shrinking population, has siezed on content exports as a pillar of national economic strategy going forward.

Whether in the form of manga, anime, or games, Japan produces a tremendous amount of illustrated entertainment every year. But production pipelines are limited, so the volume still isn’t enough to satisfy global audiences. And because Japanese creators tend to focus on the home audience almost exclusively, they naturally miss out on foreign trends and needs. Where there’s unsatisfied demand, someone will inevitably step in. This is why non-Japanese products featuring characters or settings that mimic Japanese anime style are proliferating in the global marketplace.

The trend might be traced back to 2020’s Genshin Impact, a free-to-play mobile game made in China but starring characters that looked, at first glance, like something out of a Japanese studio. While it wasn’t the first foreign product to borrow Japanese aesthetics, it was by far the most successful. Genshin Impact’s deft fusion of Ninendo-inspired play mechanics with a more mature anime style has earned an estimated nine billion USD since its release, and cemented the role of anime as a “secret sauce” for game visuals.

Let me be clear that I do not necessarily see this as a bad thing. Cultural cross-overs, mash-ups, and appropriations make the world go around. Japanese manga owes a great deal to imported prewar newspaper strips like The Katzenjammer Kids. Osamu Tezuka, whose 1963 series Astro Boy is considered the first modern anime, borrowed liberally from them and Walt Disney in developing his style. Manga and anime emerged from a stew of influences domestic and foreign, which is key to why they charm so many non-Japanese consumers. It’s a kind of cultural ping-pong. Thanks to the internet and streaming, the ball is bouncing between East and West faster than ever.

Anime-styled aesthetics have emerged as a visual lingua franca for the tech world, not only in games, but also in the field of AI. There are many reasons for this, which I went into in a previous post about anime as a “safe space” for tech innovators. And while it is kind of cool to see what was once a minor subculture get the love it deserves, it makes me worry: not about appropriation, but about dilution. When everything is “anime,” nothing is, and the term becomes meaningless.

Anime is far from the first cultural product to suffer from its own success. Nations have long used regional designations to set their cultural products apart from imitators. This has worked famously well for beverages such as Champagne, Scotch, Cognac, and Bourbon. And there are many non-food designations, such as Swiss Watches, Murano Glass, and Harris Tweed. A regional designation is more than a form of protection: it’s a mark of prestige.

A wave of anime-inspired productions are coming out of non-Japanese game studios. There’s Love and Deepspace (China), AFK Journey (also China), Wuthering Waves (China again), Red Stone (Singapore), Goddess of Victory: Nikke (Korea) and Solo Leveling: Arise (also Korea), just to name a few. Then there are anime-adjacent titles, in which foreign studios embed a Japanese creative in their team. Infinity Nikki is the product of a Chinese firm but “sub-directed” by a former Nintendo designer. Thirty-one million fans pre-registered for the game’s December release.

Shady AI “anime art generators” abound online, many of which, as Nikkei noted earlier this year, seem to have been trained on copyrighted characters without permission. And when OpenAI demonstrated its Sora text-to-video model in early 2024, it relied heavily on Japanesque imagery to showcase the technology.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with this in principle. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But anime is more than a medium — it’s a form of culture, produced at great effort by artisans in the islands of Japan. If we want to see more of it, the solution is to recognize it as such. And it’s more than just an emotional issue: the government’s leaning into anime and manga shows how important these forms of expression are to the future of Japan. Other nations have taken pains to protect the heritage of their cultural products. The official recogninition of Champagne in 1936 helped make the wine the de-facto toast of the 20th century. A regional designation would make Japanese Anime, with a capital A, the toast of the 21st.