Media
Anime and video games are basically Japan’s biggest cultural exports, and for good reason. Whether you grew up watching Saturday morning reruns or you’re knee-deep in a JRPG right now, there’s a rabbit hole here worth falling into.
Video Games
Japan doesn't just make games, it makes legends. Come along for industry stories, the histories, deep dives into the fun and intriguing, and honest picks on what I enjoyed playing.
Anime
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Sony spent thirty years insisting video games were beneath it. Then Nintendo broke a handshake in the worst possible way, and one engineer's stubborn side project turned into the PlayStation.
Before Sega meant Sonic, it meant coin-operated jukeboxes for American troops in occupied Tokyo, a periscope-shaped submarine game that invented the arcade quarter, and a home computer stripped down and rushed to market in months to keep pace with a rival called Nintendo. This is the story of how a jukebox importer became a console maker, told through the people who lived it.
Quality in animation isn't about pretty drawings. It's about weight: whether the density and chaos on screen are enough to make an audience believe the world in front of them is real.
When the American video game market collapsed in 1983, industry giants walked away and retailers swore off consoles entirely. Yet in Kyoto, Nintendo took the opposite bet. Built under ruthless budget limits by an engineer working off a late-night phone call from Hiroshi Yamauchi, the Family Computer didn’t just survive the fallout—it established the blueprint for modern console economics and turned video games into a global cultural fixture.