I was putting a lot of thought into this just yesterday, talking with some friends about the "Thing: Japan" phenomenon

It's important to recognize that any discussion about Japanese media outside of Japan is more or less only receiving the media that Japan is exporting to the world. Yes there are exceptions to this, people going out of their way to fan sub shows and such, but for the majority of Western people who are experiencing Japanese media it is very mainstream popular stuff like Studio Ghibli films and the most popular anime

With that said, I think the approach Japan has towards making media is very different than Western studios, especially when it comes to depictions of real world Japan

American TV and writing is very cynical about America. Consider the common depictions of rural America in most American media (rednecks, racist, boring, dirty) to the common depictions of rural Japan in Japanese media (idyllic, colorful, spiritual, friendly)

Even compare how a fictional Japanese city is depicted in the Yakuza game series (where you play a criminal doing crimes) and how a fictional American city is depicted in the Grand Theft Auto series (where you play a criminal doing crimes)

I really think Japanese creators like Japan more than American creators like America, and it shows through their work by smoothing over a lot of the rough edges of Japanese society

Biggest reason is simply quantity, Japan churns out hundreds of animated stories from new authors every year, the west do barely anything in comparison.

When you create that much content some of them do become hits, and it also encourages more authors to create more content, while western studios only invests in franchises they can control themselves to create another marvel, while Japan just churns out content while the authors retain the rights.

Edit: Many western authors writes about other worlds etc, they just don't get anything animated since it is so hard to get anyone to invest in your story.

> The "isekai" genre (being transported to a different world, usually after dying an unfortune death) is an extreme take on this, where almost all connection to reality is removed entirely.

> Compare those stories to most (not all) modern mainstream western fiction, and you'll find that a lot of it tends to take place within our existing world instead

When people draw conclusions like this it often seems like they're making apples to oranges comparisons. Most "isekai" stuff is light novels. The appropriate comparison with stuff published in the US would might be YA books which also have lots of stuff that does not "take place within our existing world".

I think there might be some confusion about how common different types of fiction are in Japan because people are comparing US literary fiction with Japanese genre fiction because Japanese "pure literature" fiction doesn't tend to receive attention in the US, but in reality I'm not sure the US and Japanese fiction markets are that different overall.

There's a ton of great western fiction that does the same thing, it's just not usually gonna show up on traditional channels. Heck, that's not even entirely true since Travis Baldree's slice of life Legends & Lattes won Nebula and Hugo awards last year.

If you go on Royal Road there's tons of great fantasy stories. The West is just missing the Japanaese pipeline of web serials -> light novel -> manga -> anime -> live action movie. Although there's companies like WebToons that seem to be trying to get such a pipeline going by making comics based on popular western web serials.

I've read my fair share of both Western and Japanese light novels, and you can definitely find quality content everywhere. In Japan they just do a better job at capitalizing on success by giving every slightly popular light novel series a try with an anime season or two. As someone who usually checks out 1 or 2 episodes of most seasonal anime, I can tell you that most of it ends up being barely memorable slop though.

It's worth noting that the West seems to be catching up, a few popular series are getting animated series. Two big ones that come to mind are Cradle by Will Wight, and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman.

Murakami's works, at least, feel quite westernised. They are filled with references to western music and other art, the protagonists generally have jobs that are also common in the west, and (not sure whether this is down to Murakami or his translator) the characters always sound very American in dialogue. Nothing about them feels particularly alien to a western reader, except the surrealism itself (and, perhaps, certain aspects of his portrayal of women that is sometimes considered problematic in the west).

The point you make here is exactly why I often prefer to watch *anime. I think it also applies to my preferences for British period pieces.

As an American, British period pieces[0][1][2] obviously present a different world. I imagine they are more palatable to someone in my demographic because we are relatively disconnected from British culture, society, and history. Recently I became aware of the UK's New Man / New Lad gender stereotypes[3] and realized that the main characters of these shows fit. As a result of this awareness, I can no longer enjoy these shows without being reminded of cultural conflicts of the present day. A story about a social issue set in the 1960s used to be just that, but now it's more apparent to me that the narratives are meant to shape present-day perception of these issues.

It was nice not being reminded of the political struggles we face on a daily basis. Now I'm unsure if media consumers who lack this awareness are the lucky ones or the sheep. I wonder if British people have always felt this way about these shows and I'm only just catching up now. I also wonder if this dynamic is mutual with other cultures - for example, is Rings of Power considered non-controversial in SE Asia due to the cultural disconnect?

* My preference for anime has waned as certain tropes have become quite overused and tiresome.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foyle%27s_War

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_George_Gently

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsomer_Murders

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Man_(gender_stereotype)#

There does seem to be a unique form of escapism in the aesthetics. I often think of it when I think about the jazz cafe phenomenon that is popular in Japan. It's warm and cozy but it can also be a cozy sterility (but hey we have cats!) that a lot of societies seem to be going through now (in the West as well). A sleepy existential crisis that plays itself out in quotidian surrealism. It's not unpleasant but also feels somehow like a miss on both an individual and civilizational level.

Honestly I don't remember any time when Japanese manga/anime/video games weren't popular.

90s kids grew up watching Dragon Ball & playing Metal Gear Solid and Super Mario 64.

I think most attempts to rationalize why media from an entire culture is popular are going to fall short, and while this is better reasoning that usual it's still overthinking the problem. At the end of the day, every culture produces media, some percentage of that is going to be really good, and sometimes other groups end up really enjoying it because of quality and novelty.

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Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy was excellent. The second entry in the series, Runaway Horses, is in my opinion the 20th century's best novel. The fourth, with its surprising conclusion, was also astounding.

Much to my surprise, I've found that the books actually read better in English translation than they do in Japanese. Mishima was inordinately fond of using complicated, and sometimes archaic, Chinese-style (kanji) characters that even native Japanese readers have trouble with. His books flow a little bit more smoothly in English, and they don't seem to lose much in translation.

I've read a few of Murakami's books (including Wind Up Bird) and enjoyed them. They certainly have their flaws and if you ever browse through a thread in a books subreddit, they will be pointed out with glee by one person after another. The primary complaint seems to be how he writes women.

You'd think a books subreddit would be a place for people to celebrate books and writers but it mostly seems to be a place for people who dislike particular books in particular ways to vent and rant. They don't like book X and they don't want you to either.

Thanks for the recommendations. I'm going to check them all out.

> Another aspect is that of this is that Western culture is beginning to inspire Japanese creators.

I just want to mention that "beginning to" is selling it short a bit

Japan has been influenced heavily by Western culture for a very long time

Dungeons and Dragons was huge in Japan for a while and inspired things like Record of Lodoss War. Famous composer for Final Fantasy Nobuo Uematsu has talked about one of his biggest inspirations being Elton John. Many episodes of Cowboy Bebop are titled after popular American classic blues-rock songs, and the whole show is very "American". After all, Cowboys and Blues Rock are very American

This may be becoming more prevalent as time goes on but it's been a shift that is happening for a long while

Likewise, Japanese media was affected massively by WW2 and the nukes hitting Hiroshima / Nagasaki; think Godzilla as the most famous one, starting as an anti-nuclear message - although in recent iterations, Godzilla is a protector against similar monsters.

WW2 had a similar impact on both the US media - as heroes, liberators, etc - and European media - often more historical in nature.

People often consider the 2000 X-Men film to kick off the explosion of superhero films in the new millennium, and that was pre-September 11, so I’m not sure that correlation is causation here. Moreover, a lot of European artists in the early–mid 1960s remarked how superheroes were oddly prominent in American pop culture, and at that point the USA was still on top of the world and hadn’t been shamed by Vietnam.

Then you had Don Quixote where the Enlightened materialism made fun on the old-fashioned, Middle Ages' idealist Don Quixote (and vice-versa on Sancho Panza, a common hick) until they complement each other along the journey.

Are western comics "trojan horses for activism and ESG scores"? What do you mean by this (activism and ESG)? Who is "they"?

I agree, but it's worth considering that all media is a "trojan horse" projecting and shaping a certain view of the world. We must do more than object to agendas driven by media. Take control of your attention. Create your own narratives.

I wouldn't put it this quite this way but I think you're onto something.

Japanese novels are almost uniformly un-woke...yet they don't come off conservative. It's hard to find novels in the West that seem so politically detached, and it's always nice when you do.

Comics have a huge impact on pop culture. They form the basis for some of the biggest budget TV shows and movies which last for a long time in our collective consciousness: The Dark Knight series, Watchmen, the Avengers, etc.

Several just on their own are huge cultural juggernauts: Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, XKCD, Penny Arcade, etc.

I don't know why you think comics are. Trojan Horse for ESG/activism. Like all media, they seek to reach wider and wider audiences, for a good chunk of time, the best perceived way to do that was to diversify those offerings. Even if that didn't end up working (assuming your POV in good faith), that doesn't mean it was a "Trojan horse for activism" anymore than the rise and fall of the shonen genre in manga was a subversive attempt to inject masculinity into the populace.

What you term as ESG and all is not a shadowy cabal to force people to think a certain way. It's just companies trying to do what sells. You forget that in the beginning it did work, which is why it caught on.

They always have been, the X-Men were a metaphor on exploited minorities. Also, you don't understand what's actually Evangelion about. Is not about just metaphysics and philosophy, but a satire and puns on womanizing otakus.

The X-Men are the superhero comic version of the ACLU.