[Book Sip] Super Mario, Pokemon, Slam Dunk... The Secret Behind Long-Loved Japanese Content

Editor's NoteSome sentences encapsulate the entire content of a book, while others instantly resonate with readers, creating a connection with the book. We excerpt and introduce such meaningful sentences from books.

Super Mario, Pok?mon, Ghibli, Slam Dunk... There are Japanese contents that remain beloved even after a long time since their release. The author, an entertainment sociologist, analyzes the enduring appeal of these Japanese contents. An entertainment sociologist is an expert who studies methods to analyze and structure entertainment from industrial and cultural value perspectives. The content areas covered include nine categories: Japanese performing arts, film, music, publishing, manga, TV, animation, games, and sports. The book introduces the continuous innovation process, such as character branding and collaborations with games, that “surpasses the times and is sometimes surpassed by the times.”

While dramas and films belong to the directors, as actress and singer Mori Mitsuko said, “Once the curtain rises, the stage belongs to the actors,” actors and performers respond to the audience’s enthusiasm by expressing their creativity, resulting in various secondary creations. This is why the term ‘legendary performance’ cannot apply to films or streaming. Live performances like concerts or stage arts are meant to enjoy the ‘atmosphere that can only be felt there and then,’ and are works created together with passionate fans who visit the venue ten or twenty times to see the same actors and performances. - pp. 66?67, from Chapter 1 Performing Arts: The Archetype of Entertainment

The digital manga market is mostly dominated by South Korea’s Kakao’s ‘Piccoma’ and Naver’s ‘LINE Manga.’ (...) It is natural to wonder how Korean manga applications have come to hold such value. Even popular Korean manga works like Solo Leveling (this work recorded monthly sales of 200 million yen, which is about 400,000 copies in print) are unfamiliar in Japan, which only deepens the suspicion. Although webtoons, which are basically in color and read vertically, look similar to Japanese manga, the market inside is completely different. Webtoons are a ‘Korean-style manga market specialized in digital and globalization’ from production to distribution and sales. - pp. 189?190, from Chapter 5 Manga: Surpassing the Times and Then Being Surpassed by the Times

Did you know that Nintendo’s origin is ‘Hwatu’ (Korean playing cards)? (...) Gambling houses that secretly grew during the Edo period began to open with the deregulation of the Meiji era. Nintendo paid attention to this. Yamauchi Fusajiro, the first president of Nintendo Koppai, the predecessor of today’s Nintendo, sold Hwatu cards to over 70 gambling houses nationwide while ‘doing business with gambling houses,’ accumulating enormous wealth. The company name ‘Nintendo’ means ‘to entrust luck to heaven’ because it was a company that secretly sold Hwatu cards. - pp. 270?271, from Chapter 8 Games: An IP Empire Built Without Nationality

The lesson to be learned from looking into the history of the entertainment industry is that no model ever ‘goes extinct.’ (...) “When the internet world arrives, you can access the same content anytime, anywhere. If you can enjoy global content anytime without language barriers, the entertainment that existed until now might disappear.” Such concerns were actually raised in the 1990s, the dawn of the internet era. “If an era comes where free music files are exchanged, no one will go to live performances or buy CDs. If that happens, the music industry itself will collapse due to the internet,” people said. But when the lid was actually opened, what the internet world brought was a ‘rediscovery of the value of live performances.’ - pp. 355?356, from Epilogue: Entertainment Never Ages

The Secret of All Things That Rise | Atsuo Nakayama | Translated by Ji-Young Kim, Yoo-Sun Kim, and Jiae Shim | Sahoe Pyunron | 376 pages | 18,000 KRW

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.