Anime Makes its Way Around the World (Week 12)

Anime is everywhere. From billboards in Times Square to cosplayers filling convention centers, Japanese animation has become a truly global phenomenon.

In the United States, anime’s early years were marked by a process scholars have called the “denationalization” of anime. When shows like Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and Gigantor first aired on American television in the 1960s and 70s, most viewers had no idea they were watching Japanese content. Studios stripped away Japanese names, cultural references, and visuals, making the shows feel Westernized and generic.

That began to change in the 1980s and 90s, when dedicated fans started forming clubs, publishing newsletters, and trading subtitled VHS tapes. These fan communities—often operating outside of legal distribution channels—were crucial to anime’s spread. Pirated copies of shows were passed around college campuses, anime conventions emerged as community hubs, and fanzines helped educate new viewers about Japanese culture, language, and storytelling.

Fan translators played a major role in shaping the anime experience abroad. These “fansubbers” provided high-quality subtitles for shows that hadn’t yet been released in English, often adding cultural notes to explain untranslatable jokes or references. The result was a grassroots education in Japanese life. As fans became more interested in Japanese culture, some of them even embarked on “anime tourism,” where fans travel to Japan to visit animation studios, buy merchandise, and see the streets they saw on screen.

This fan-driven approach gave rise to cosplay (costume play), where fans dressed as their favorite characters. What began as a niche activity is now a multi-billion-dollar industry, with global events like Anime Expo and Comic-Con drawing hundreds of thousands of attendees. Cosplay became a form of cultural participation, turning passive viewership into active identity.

While the American story of anime fandom is one of gradual discovery and growing legitimacy, the narrative in Korea and China is more complex. Due to historical tensions and political control, Japanese media was heavily restricted in both countries throughout much of the 20th century. In South Korea, Japanese pop culture was banned outright until the late 1990s. In China, while some shows like Astro Boy aired in the 1980s, imports were limited, and censorship was common. China later banned the airing of foreign animation during prime time.

Despite this, Japanese anime thrived underground. Fans smuggled in VHS tapes, pirated DVDs, and later, torrent files. Online forums and fan communities kept the culture alive and growing. Even today, surveys show that a majority of young people still prefer Japanese animation to domestic offerings.

In both Korea and China, anime reshaped domestic industries. Korean manhwa and webtoons drew inspiration from manga, and many Chinese animation studios adopted anime-style aesthetics. The explosion of titles like Genshin Impact—an anime-style game developed in China and adored worldwide—is a testament to how deeply Japan’s visual culture has embedded itself in East Asian products.