[Buckeye Native 001]

Originally Posted by Shawn

I'll say this though: before I moved to Japan in 2002, if you wanted to get your hands on manga, you needed to go to a specialty shop or order directly from Japan. Now, every Barnes & Noble in every suburb in the country's single biggest section is manga. All in English too, meaning the demand is high enough to justify the localized print runs. Japanese comics, graphic novels, and anime (more through stylistic influences on Western animators) are waaay bigger in America than ever before.

Ai Nori is one of the most watched Netflix properties in the US and Canada markets. That's nuts to me - it's reality TV without any of the trashiness, so what's the point? - but the North American markets eat it up.

In markets like Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and to a lesser extent Thailand, Japanese cultural exports still dominate. Especially fashion cues and J-pop style girl groups.

I was a late 80s early 90s kid, and a lot of my Japanese cultural exposure happened without my realizing it was Japanese in the first place: Transformers, Battle Beasts, GoBots. I was vaguely aware Nintendo and Sega were Japanese, but an Italian plumber and an early 90s attitude hedgehog didn't scream "Japanese". The only thing that was clearly Japanese was Dragon Ball. All of my younger cousins were late 90s kids, and they all obsessed over Pokemon, which they all understood to be Japanese and "Cool Japan" from the get-go.

So to tie this back to the OP: while Japanese may not be traveling abroad and spending as conspicuously as before, I'd say Japan's cool profile has risen considerably in many Western markets, and consequently many Japanese cities are seeing profile boosts in Western markets.

There was a saying/joke from my friends who were into anime in the early 2000s when I was in college: "Cocaine is cheaper"