I live in Japan, and anime is not a niche hobby here the way it can feel abroad — it is background noise. Convenience stores run seasonal tie-ins with whatever show is popular that quarter, trains get wrapped in character advertising, and on Sunday evenings the country’s longest-running anime, Sazae-san, is still airing new episodes after more than fifty years. If you are coming to Japan and wondering why an art form aimed at “cartoons” carries this much cultural weight, the short answer is that anime is not one thing — it is roughly seventy years of overlapping industries, art movements, and business bets that happened to end up under one word. Here is the version I’d give a friend visiting for the first time.
The quick answer
- Anime’s visual roots trace loosely back to Edo-period woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) and the flat, linework-driven style of early 20th-century manga.
- The modern TV anime industry effectively begins in 1963, when Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy became Japan’s first serialized animated TV series.
- Studio Ghibli, founded in 1985, gave anime international arthouse credibility, culminating in Spirited Away winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003.
- Dragon Ball, Pokémon, and Sailor Moon carried anime into global television syndication through the 1990s.
- Streaming platforms turned anime into a mainstream global business in the 2010s and 2020s; some market analyses now put the industry’s global value at over $35–45 billion.
- Akihabara in Tokyo and Nakano Broadway remain the two places most visitors go to see anime and manga culture in physical form.
From woodblock prints to the first manga
The word “manga” is often credited to the ukiyo-e master Hokusai, who used it in 1814 for his Hokusai Manga sketchbooks — loosely, “whimsical drawings.” That’s not a direct lineage to anime in a technical sense, but the aesthetic thread is real: the flat picture planes, bold outlines, and expressive exaggeration you see in ukiyo-e prints carried forward into early 20th-century Japanese comic strips, and from there into the visual language manga and anime still use today. Add in kamishibai — the traveling paper-theater storytelling popular before and after World War II, where a narrator slid illustrated panels in and out of a wooden frame for street audiences — and you have a country with a century-long habit of telling serialized visual stories cheaply and quickly, well before television existed.
Astro Boy and the birth of TV anime
Toei Animation, founded in 1948, produced Japan’s early animated theatrical features and trained a generation of animators, but the industry-defining moment came on January 1, 1963, when Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atom (“Astro Boy”) began airing as Japan’s first serialized TV anime. Tezuka, already famous as a manga artist, needed to produce a weekly episode on a tiny budget, so his studio, Mushi Production, leaned on limited animation techniques — reusing cels, favoring stills with panning cameras, and simplifying motion — that Disney-style full animation avoided. Those cost-driven shortcuts became, over time, part of what makes anime look and move the way it does. Astro Boy was a massive hit, reportedly drawing viewer ratings above 40% at its peak, and it proved a domestic TV animation industry could be commercially viable. Hundreds of studios have followed that same low-budget, high-output model ever since.
The Ghibli era and global arthouse respect
By the 1980s, anime aimed at adults and families — not just children — was well established, and in 1985 animators Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata co-founded Studio Ghibli. Ghibli’s films, from My Neighbor Totoro to Princess Mononoke, treated anime as a medium capable of the same emotional and visual ambition as any live-action arthouse film. That case was made most visibly in 2003, when Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature — still the only hand-drawn, non-English-language film to do so. If you want to see this legacy in person, the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka is one of the hardest tickets in Tokyo to get; I’ve written separately about how to get teamLab and Ghibli Museum tickets before they sell out, since both now require booking weeks ahead.
Dragon Ball, Pokémon, and the 1990s global wave
While Ghibli built prestige, a parallel wave of TV anime built raw audience size overseas. Dragon Ball (1986), Sailor Moon (1992), and Pokémon (1997) were syndicated into dubbed after-school programming across the US, Europe, and Latin America through the 1990s, often stripped of context and edited for local television standards. It worked: an entire generation outside Japan grew up on these shows without necessarily knowing they were watching “anime” as a distinct category, and the Pokémon franchise in particular became one of the highest-grossing media franchises in history, games and merchandise included.
The streaming boom and anime today
The internet changed distribution twice. First, fan-subtitled anime spread online in the 2000s faster than official licensing could keep up. Then legal streaming caught up and overtook it: Crunchyroll built a dedicated anime-only platform, and general streaming services followed — Netflix has reported that more than half of its roughly 325 million subscribers watched anime in 2025, totaling billions of hours viewed. Market research firms disagree on exact numbers, as they always do, but recent estimates put the global anime industry’s value somewhere in the $35–45 billion range for 2026, with merchandising, not streaming subscriptions, still the largest single revenue segment. In Japan, that shows up as constant retail crossover — I regularly see convenience store snack tie-ins, train line collaborations, and pop-up cafés built around whatever series is airing that season.
Where to see anime history in Japan
Akihabara in Tokyo is the obvious starting point: multi-floor stores selling manga, figures, and retro games sit alongside maid cafés and arcades. Nakano Broadway, a less touristy alternative near Shinjuku, is popular with collectors for vintage and rare merchandise. For the history itself rather than the retail, the Kyoto International Manga Museum houses a research-grade archive you can actually browse, and the Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum in Takarazuka (Tezuka’s hometown, west of Osaka) is a quieter, more personal look at the artist who arguably started the whole TV anime industry.
FAQ
Is anime the same thing as manga?
No. Manga refers to Japanese comics (the printed page); anime refers to Japanese animation (film and TV). Most long-running anime series are adaptations of an existing manga.
Does “anime” just mean “animation” in Japanese?
Yes — in Japan, the word anime (アニメ) refers to any animation, domestic or foreign. Outside Japan, “anime” has narrowed to mean specifically Japanese-style animation.
What is considered the first anime?
There’s no single agreed-upon “first,” since short animated films existed in Japan from the 1910s. But Astro Boy (1963) is generally credited as the start of the modern TV anime industry as we know it today.
Do I need to go to Akihabara to experience anime culture in Japan?
Not really — it helps for shopping and arcades, but you’ll encounter anime and manga incidentally almost anywhere in Japan, from convenience store collaborations to train station advertising.
The verdict
Anime’s history is really three stories stacked on top of each other: a centuries-old Japanese visual art tradition, a 1960s TV industry built on tight budgets and clever shortcuts, and a genuinely global streaming business that only fully arrived in the last decade. None of that requires a special trip to appreciate — but if you’re curious enough to read this far, Akihabara, Nakano Broadway, or the Ghibli Museum are worth building into an itinerary rather than treating as an afterthought.
Written from Japan by the Wayfarer Japan team — practical, honest travel guidance from people who actually live here.
Featured image: “20100725 Tokyo Akihabara 5557” by Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
