ABSTRACT
Japanese popular culture, including animation, video games, comic books, and other audio-visual media, has been circulating widely in the global market over the past two decades. Of the aforementioned popular media, Japanese animation and video games are arguably the most prominent examples of how mass-distributed pop culture can become major effective tools for the market economy as well as for other socio-cultural phenomena. The sudden surge in market sales abroad during the mid-to-late 1990s motivated the Japanese government to officially support the popular culture industries, also known as the “Content industry,” at the turn of the new millennium, fundamentally believing that they had great potential to benefit the Japanese economy in the long run.
