Japan is not ready for the culture wars

The next four years may be tough for Japanese content in the American marketplace.

This week, I was invited to give a series of presentations to a business organization here in Japan, in which I was asked to contextualize how America’s lurch rightwards (or perhaps more accurately, Trumpwards) might affect the consumption of Japanese cultural products going forward. More about that at the end! But first, I wanted to touch on a bigger-picture concern that struck me during the proceedings: how utterly and totally unprepared Japan is for the culture wars that will define America for at least the next four years.

Let’s start with the fact that the concept of a “culture war” is not particularly widely known here. Sure, there’s a Wikipedia Japan page for bunka senso (as the transliteration goes), but I’ve never heard this phrase spoken, or written anywhere non-academic, even on domestic social media. Perhaps this is because it resembles bunka daikakumei, which is what Japanese call the Cultural Revolution of China. That chaos is what leaps to mind when one says bunka senso, and since American society hasn’t descended to that level (yet?), there’s a sort of underlying incredulity about the concept.

This doesn’t mean that Japanese people aren’t aware of strange happenings in the U.S., such as criminalizing toilet usage, pardoning convicted domestic terrorists, or renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” But it is virtually impossible to contextualize these decisions without understanding that they are products of the culture war, not so much policies as provocations, specifically designed to divide the populace along ideological lines.

Ironically, Japan was the first country to experience how online spaces might divide a society. The anonymous bulletin board 2channel, which opened for monkey business in 1999, presaged how the internet might plug into cultural flows, channeling societal ennui into real-world chaos and political extremism. More than a decade before 4chan paved the way for the internetization of American society, Japan’s “net-right” was lobbing metaphorical Molotovs into the public discourse there.

So why didn’t Japan go crazy first? Because then and now, a sort of societal firewall exists between social media and the mainstream media in Japan. This is why, at one point, a participant in my talk spoke up with a question:

“This ‘culture war’ you’ve described seems to be happening on the internet. But that couldn’t possibly affect politics or policy, right?” Oh, my sweet summer child.

Social media is most definitely a thing in Japan, but it isn’t The Thing that it is in the United States. American social media functions as the greenroom for a 24/7 news cycle. In this always-on attention economy, a single wayward post by anyone with enough pull can make chyrons and headlines within minutes. You can literally find yourself catapulted into national celebrity (or infamy) simply by getting enough likes or views. The constant demand for outrageous content can platform the bizarrest of folks and the wildest of untruths, mainstreaming fringe voices and transforming American politics into even more of a reality TV show than it was before we elected a reality TV star president. Twice.

In Japan, broadcast networks are governed by a fairness doctrine, which curtails the rise of partisan media outlets. And there are no 24/7 news channels. There are certainly positives and negatives to this approach, but there is no question it tamps down the attention/outrage economy. One, of course, exists online, but in another key characteristic of the Japanese mediascape, online happenings are largely ignored by legacy media gatekeepers and politicians. There are pluses and minuses to this approach, too, but it certainly makes it harder to sane-wash fringe fictions into the mainstream. Meanwhile, America saw Pizzagate in 2016, Q-Anon in 2020, allegations of pet-eating immigrants in 2024, and so on.

So. Given all of this, how will Japanese cultural products fare over the next four years in the United States? There’s cause for concern. Tariffs on Chinese imports will almost certainly raise the price of manga. You might think that digital distribution would pick up the slack, but American fans have long shown a preference for physical media, and it’s hard to imagine them being happy about price-hikes given how much of a factor retail prices played in the last election.

A bigger concern is the Trump administration’s antipathy to diversity in all its forms. Japan is, arguably, a conservative culture, where the proverbial nail that sticks up is hammered down. But its anime and manga industries are most definitely not. They have long given a voice to societal minorities and nonconformists who gleefully question the status quo. It is for precisely this reason that Japanese authority figures such as parent-teacher associations and politicians have targeted manga and anime over the years.

Recently, we have been seeing the same in America, as conservative-leaning school districts have moved to ban certain titles from library shelves. Anime and manga have long bridged the differences of American society, finding fans among people of all political leanings. But every bridge, no matter how sturdy, has its maximum capacity. Diversity, protest, and queerness are woven deeply into the DNA of Japan’s illustrated entertainment. Those concepts are the equivalent of four letter words to America’s current leadership, so it’s easy to see manga and anime, and their incredibly diverse fan bases, coming under official scrutiny, too. There is also the inconvenient fact that manga and anime are foreign, and the Trump administration has made it clear that this is not a very good time for things with foreign names or that use foreign languages in the U.S.

As for how social turmoil in America will affect the production side of things, the answer is probably very little. Japanese content producers have always made things for the domestic market first, with foreign consumers a secondary concern. This is in fact key to why fans around the globe find Japanese content fresh and authentic. However, there’s no question that whatever choices Japanese creators make, whatever fantasies they produce, will be viewed through the lens of politics in an increasingly polarized America. We already saw this with the brou-ha-ha over Dragonquest III HD-2D. We will undoubtedly see a lot more of it in the months and years to come.