In the early 20th century, Japan's entertainment industry was heavily influenced by traditional forms of storytelling, such as Kabuki theater and Bunraku puppetry. These art forms had been around for centuries, entertaining audiences with tales of love, honor, and drama. However, with the introduction of Western-style entertainment, such as movies and music, Japanese entertainment began to take on a new shape.
: The country is viewed globally as a "must-visit destination" due to the pull of its popular culture, a trend that has been evolving since the 1960s.
Japan is a hub for the video game industry, with companies like:
Crucially, anime embraced moral and thematic complexity that Western children’s animation avoided. Grave of the Fireflies (1988) depicted war’s civilian horror; Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) deconstructed mecha tropes into a study of depression and existential dread; Attack on Titan (2013) explored cycles of vengeance and ethnic hatred. This maturity allowed anime to age with its original child audience, creating lifelong consumers. Today, over 40% of Netflix’s global animated viewing is Japanese content, and the industry is worth ¥3.3 trillion ($22 billion). Yet animators remain notoriously underpaid—a contradiction emblematic of Japan’s broader entertainment economy: global glory, local precarity.