Introduction
Any fan will tell you that Japanese anime is the world’s best quality television, surpassing the much larger body of work in the US. In 2016, I wrote “UX Prototyping, User Feedback, and the Rise of Anime”, describing exactly why Japanese anime alone has such a high success rate: Animes are predominantly based on popular manga; once a Japanese comic book sells a certain number of copies, it will likely become an anime; converting a serialized manga into a serialized anime is far more straightforward than using original content like novels and scripts, the approach predominantly used in the West. The result of this naturally-occurring, feedback ecosystem in Japan is a higher percentage of popular TV shows.
Read the full article on BoxesAndArrows, an online Interaction Design journal.
Note: The editor had a bit too much fun with the article’s title, so I’ve included the original, more descriptive title here. The article’s current title is “A New Challenger Appears”, the editor’s homage to the game Street Fighter. Video games and anime are the two most prominent means of children being introduced to Japanese culture. The passion and fascination just compounds from there.
The article was also featured in August’s Super8: Eight intriguing articles from March 2016.
Coming soon
What’s happened with TV in the 2 years since my anime article was published? Surprisingly quite a lot. Hopefully I can find another online magazine to feature my latest hypothesis.
