Curated playlist
Japan in non-Japanese culture
- Tomb Raider (2013 video game)In November 2010, Square Enix filed a trademark for a slogan, "A Survivor is Born," to promote a new Tomb Raider game. That game arrived in 2013 from the developer Crystal Dynamics, and it did not simply continue Lara Croft's story. It…
- Street Fighter: Assassin's FistA Kickstarter for Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist was cancelled, yet not because it failed.
- Stone Bridge PressPeter Goodman bought back Stone Bridge Press in 2009, twenty years after founding it.
- Kappa MikeyKappa Mikey began in a toy company, not a television studio. Larry Schwarz conceived the cartoon in 2000 at Rumpus Toys.
- ChinpokomonSouth Park's Chinpokomon episode turns a Pokémon-style fad into a fake plot to train kids for Pearl Harbor.
- For HonorIn the sword-fighting game For Honor, you block duels by guarding left, right, or top.
- Ghost of YōteiGhost of Yōtei, a 2025 action-adventure game from Sucker Punch Productions, begins with its heroine as a girl pinned against a burning ginkgo tree by her own father's katana. Her family has been slaughtered. Her home has been destroyed.…
- Good Times with WeaponsIn South Park's "Good Times with Weapons," a thrown shuriken lodges in Butters's eye.
- Call of Duty: World at WarCall of Duty: World at War had sold 15.7 million copies by November 2013. That total belongs to a World War II shooter made by the studio Treyarch and released in 2008 for PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360, and Wii. Its campaign sent…
- Cyberpunk 2077Cyberpunk 2077 broke a record within hours of its midnight GMT launch on the 10th of December 2020. More than one million people played it at once on Steam, and one million viewers watched live on Twitch. Together, the figures doubled the…
- Teenage Mutant Ninja TurtlesIn November 1983, in Dover, New Hampshire, the artist Kevin Eastman drew a masked turtle standing on its hind legs and gripping nunchucks. He drew it to make his fellow artist Peter Laird laugh. Laird answered by adding two words above it:…
- Power RangersPower Rangers owes its existence to a hotel television in Japan. Haim Saban was on a business trip there in the 1980s. The only thing his hotel set would show was a series about five masked people in spandex suits fighting monsters. He was…
- Ghost of TsushimaGhost of Tsushima is a 2020 action-adventure game from Sucker Punch Productions, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Its hero is Jin Sakai, a samurai defending Tsushima Island during the first Mongol invasion of Japan, which began…
- Anime-influenced animationAn American web series, RWBY, was called American anime in 2013. Rooster Teeth later licensed it for release in Japan.
- Death Note (2017 film)A train crash in Netflix's Death Note was real footage. It showed a 2010 collision in Buizingen, Belgium.
- JapanophiliaWeeaboo first appeared in a 2005 webcomic that never mentioned Japanese culture.
- KamishibaiKamishibai, the Japanese art of telling stories with painted boards on the street, turned up in Tokyo's Shitamachi district around 1930, "like the wind on a street corner." Nobody knows exactly where the twentieth-century version came…
- DaikatanaDaikatana sold only 40,351 copies in the United States through September 2000. Forecasts had once hoped for 2.5 million.
- Assassin's Creed ShadowsAssassin's Creed Shadows is the fourteenth major game in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series, released in 2025 as the follow-up to Assassin's Creed Mirage. It sends players to 16th-century Japan, near the end of the Sengoku period, and hands…