How did anime get so popular overseas, when Japanese companies did not care?

Meet Roland Kelts, an author known for his book Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. He sits down to talk to us about the anime industry and the spread of Japanese pop culture overseas, as well as his work on the upcoming documentary Tezuka: God of Manga. -- 0:00 Intro 0:50 Meet Roland 4:29 Building a stronger connection to Japan 8:55 Joining the JET Programme to write about Japan 15:20 Living alone in Japan 24:04 Leaving Japan to build a career 29:43 Writing Japanamerica 36:40 Studying Tezuka and anime 40:22 How otaku brought anime overseas 45:34 The 4Kids incident 47:49 Has the anime industry changed over 20 years? 55:58 The Tezuka documentary 1:00:14 Why Tezuka was so influential 1:03:27 How Tezuka came to be 1:06:44 Challenges of producing a documentary 1:11:08 Looking back 1:21:39 The power of pop culture 1:26:03 The world viewed from Japan -- Follow Roland: https://www.instagram.com/rolandkelts/ https://x.com/rolandkelts https://www.japanamericabook.com/ Follow us: https://unpacking.jp/ https://www.instagram.com/unpacking\_japan https://www.tiktok.com/@unpackingjapan https://www.facebook.com/unpackingjapan https://www.youtube.com/@unpackingjapanshorts https://www.x.com/unpacking\_japan https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/unpackingjapan Subscribe for more in-depth discussions about life in Japan! Interested in working at a global e-commerce company in Osaka? Our parent company ZenGroup is hiring! To learn more, check out https://careers.zen.group/en/