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Japan entered American bedrooms
Late-1990s hits
Pokemon and Dragon Ball both emerged as hits in the late 1990s, around the same time Studio Ghibli, the studio of Hayao Miyazaki, made a deal with the Walt Disney Company to distribute Miyazaki's films. That put My Neighbor Totoro in front of young Americans, and it became an iconic film for them.
The internet carried Japanese media into the bedrooms and living rooms of Americans and of people around the world, and those hit series and films transformed Americans' image of Japan.
A country of stories
Japan has little oil and little land, and rice can be grown only in tiny paddies, but the country is very rich in stories. The Tale of Genji, a thousand years old, is considered by most academics and critics to be the first novel in world history.
Soft power
The same pull once worked in the other direction. Harvard professor Joseph Nye coined the phrase soft power in an essay on how the United States was winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union, partly because Hollywood movies, Levi's jeans, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, rock and roll, and Elvis Presley made America look much more attractive. Japan has that kind of power in the twenty-first century.
How did Ghibli end up with Disney?
In 1996, the Walt Disney Company agreed to distribute Studio Ghibli's films outside Japan. Disney commissioned English dubs with well-known actors, including Kirsten Dunst in Kiki's Delivery Service. Ghibli's Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003. It was the first non-English-language animated film to win that category.
How did Pokemon get to America?
Pokemon began as a pair of Game Boy games, Red and Green, created by Satoshi Tajiri and released in Japan in 1996. Nintendo brought them to North America in September 1998 as Pokemon Red and Blue, and the animated series premiered on US television the same month. The trading card game reached the United States in January 1999.
Why is The Tale of Genji called a first?
Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the Heian court, wrote The Tale of Genji in the early 1000s. It runs to 54 chapters and follows the life and loves of Prince Genji and his descendants. Many scholars point to its long, psychologically detailed prose narrative as the reason for calling it the first novel. Arthur Waley's English translation appeared in six volumes between 1925 and 1933.