WHY and WHAT is an ANIMESCAPE?
Why does an ordinary reality, which seems banal to Japanese people, appear as a bizarre otherworld to foreigners?
Why does the urban landscape of Tokyo look like an anime landscape?
Why does seeing urban landscapes within anime evoke memories of Tokyo’s urban scenery?
✌Note✌: TL;DR? We get it🦥 This deep-dive explains why Tokyo = real-life anime.
🧠Pro tip🧠 Copy-paste to your favorite free AI for instant summary.
The National Narrative
In most countries, whether people like it or not, there exists a national narrative shared by the entire population. Many of these narratives relate to founding myths or embody the spirit most revered by that society. Japan, too, once possessed multiple such narratives. The most famous among them were the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. However, with the defeat in the Pacific War, they were abandoned. After all, for a defeated country to maintain its founding spirit or patriotism—that is, nationalism—would have been obstructive and dangerous for the purposes of control and governance. This cultural disarmament was initially led by the GHQ (General Headquarters), and thereafter the Japanese themselves actively eliminated and shunned such sentiments up to the present day.
On the other hand, following its defeat, Japan acquired “freedom of expression” through the Constitution granted by the GHQ, and in what was almost a reaction against wartime suppression, developed that freedom voraciously. Today, there may be no other country in which every kind of expression can be exercised so freely. In America and Europe, of course, freedom of expression is also foundational—indeed, they are its birthplace, and that is beyond dispute. However, because Japan’s freedom was conferred rather than fought for, and because its history is so short, the concept of freedom itself is different in certain ways compared to the West.
In Europe and America, freedom is conceived in tension with power. It was invented as a countermeasure against oppression by authority, won through struggle, and intended to secure public space under the people’s own control. In contrast, in Japan, freedom is more primitive: it simply means being left alone to do as one pleases—an unrestrained state. In Europe and America, there are still forms of expression that are regarded as criminal acts under certain circumstances or that courts will explicitly order to be suppressed. And that is precisely done in order to preserve freedom itself. In Japan, by contrast, it remains extremely rare for such expressions to become problematic, precisely because leaving things alone is felt to be the guarantee of freedom. In the West, to preserve freedom, there are times when even collaboration with authority is needed to restrain unbridled excess. In Japan, there is a sense that freedom means not letting authority intervene at all and allowing things to remain in an unregulated state.
The narrative void created by defeat, the acquisition of freedom of expression (that is, the state of unrestrained expression), and the neutering of nationalism—these combined to give birth to, and then dramatically evolve, manga and anime. And astonishingly, in today’s Japan, the narratives most widely shared by the population are increasingly becoming those of manga and anime. Despite the fact that this country still has a dynasty said to have continued unbroken for either 2,500 or 1,500 years, the stories now shared by the entire nation were born in just the past seventy years. Doraemon, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Ultraman, Godzilla, Dragon Ball, Pokémon, Gundam, Demon Slayer, One Piece, Detective Conan, Your Name, Sailor Moon—whether or not this is a happy development, it is certainly unique that these are now the national narratives.
Neither Mainstream Culture nor Counterculture
When people think of Japanese cities, most imagine Kyoto and Tokyo. For many foreigners, these are perhaps the only two they recognize. Kyoto was established in 794 CE as a new capital city—a counter to Heijo-kyo in Nara, which had been created by combining Buddhist culture with continental (Chinese) culture. What had begun as counterculture became, over the centuries, Japan’s most authoritative mainstream. In response to this, between the 11th and 12th centuries, samurai culture emerged as a counter to Kyoto’s aristocratic culture, developing through repeated cycles of admiration and antagonism toward Kyoto. After the century-long period of warfare from the late 15th century, Japan entered the peaceful Edo period in the 17th century, when one shogun ruled the country. As this long peace continued, a new urban commoner culture arose in the late 18th to early 19th centuries—neither influenced by samurai nor by aristocrats, but driven by a hedonistic spirit. Unlike Kyoto and samurai cultures, which were deeply linked to politics and could even sway it, the culture of urban commoners in Edo (now Tokyo) emerged spontaneously and independently, revolving around pleasure rather than politics.
The best examples are kabuki, ukiyo-e, rakugo, and sumo. The Edo period enforced a strict class system: Kyoto culture belonged to the aristocracy, samurai culture to the warrior class, but commoner culture, because of its hedonism and lack of political ties, was embraced across classes and developed in unique ways. In the late 19th century, this culture was “discovered” in Europe, where its strangeness sparked a vogue for Japonisme.
Culture that was born in total disconnection from both Kyoto and samurai culture, and thus developed freely, eventually became the most authoritative culture in the 20th century.
After the war, cultural liberalization and the spread of radio and television caused professional wrestling, professional baseball, and entertainment films—many influenced by American culture—to boom in mid-century Japan. While these flourished, manga drew attention as cheap, childish, low-grade consumer goods for children, anticipating the population surge from the baby boom. Immense demand, postwar poverty, and the arrival of freedom of expression led many young artists to draw manga. As a statistical inevitability, two historic geniuses emerged—Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori—establishing manga as a genre.
At the time, manga was regarded as strictly for children, something one had to outgrow by the end of elementary school—certainly not something adults would ever consume. In other words, it was not considered culture at all, and was seen as lacking any cultural significance. This lack of adult attention—being dismissed as worthless—paradoxically contributed to manga’s growth.
After the mid-20th century, society focused exclusively on mainstream culture and counterculture—both fundamentally imported from the West—and ignored manga, which was not considered culture.
To be ignored was to be free. Just as Edo’s commoner culture had developed independently of both Kyoto and samurai influence, manga gained freedom through neglect, allowing it to grow without interference from society. Occasionally, it attracted public concern as a “harmful influence on youth,” but since it was not seen as culture (it had not been “found out” as culture), each controversy was treated as a problem with an individual work, quickly forgotten, and manga returned to being left alone.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, as manga creators freely developed their art in their own communities, in California garages, geeks were inventing the personal computer. These parallels have inspired a hypothesis in Japan: that the most important condition for creative achievement is not massive investment, but the freedom to form independent communities and create without interference from the mainstream, counterculture, or politics. However, realizing this is extremely difficult, because the moment any kind of institutional support—whether from public agencies, corporations, investors, or philanthropists—is provided, that condition is destroyed.
What Did Manga and Anime Invent?
What did manga invent? Simply put, it invented the character. This was an unexpected alternative to Japanese literature. In expressing literary value, Japanese literature focused on how prose could reflect reality—on constructing a worldview and eliciting the reader’s emotional identification with it. In contrast, Japanese manga concentrated on imagining the character itself and inviting readers to identify emotionally with the character. As a result, every new manga requires the creation and consideration of new characters, and through statistical inevitability, many have emerged that are beloved and embraced worldwide. These characters, born on an island nation with a highly idiosyncratic set of values and aesthetic sensibilities—unlike the West, other parts of Asia, the Middle East, or Africa—became a global phenomenon. In the process, manga also invented a unique tool: panel layout, a technique for manipulating time and controlling tempo and rhythm in perception.
Astro Boy, widely regarded as the origin of Japan’s commercial animation, was based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka, who also directed its animated adaptation. Initially called “TV manga,” Japanese animation developed rapidly as manga’s sibling. At first, it aimed for Disney-style full animation, but budget and schedule constraints quickly forced a shift. Movements were stylized into symbols, and limited animation techniques emerged to create the appearance of motion with minimal drawings—a method premised on human perceptual bias and cognitive limitations. In other words, Japan’s uniquely distinctive animation was born of financial and temporal constraints. Among those who established and refined the technical, directorial, and collaborative methods of this style were Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, who would later lead Studio Ghibli.
Because anime was manga’s sibling, it too produced countless characters.
Since the emergence of Tezuka and Ishinomori, manga and anime continued for about sixty years to inherit and develop their techniques, growing as they pleased. By the 2010s, they had become Japan’s mainstream culture. Today, the only industries in Japan clearly experiencing growth are manga, anime, games, and tourism. In fact, by 2025, the combined market capitalization of the manga, anime, and games industries surpassed that of the automobile industry, which had been the foundation and symbol of Japan’s postwar growth.
Until the 20th century, literature was the medium that best represented Japan. No one feels that way anymore. Today, the creations that most vividly represent Japan—the ones that people discover and think, “This is Japan’s past, present, and future. This is my story”—are manga and anime. Strictly speaking, until the 20th century, “literature” in Japan meant novels. Today, literature in Japan means manga and anime. Literature itself will never disappear, but the way it is practiced will continue to change.
Derivative Works
Hideaki Anno, the anime director known for Neon Genesis Evangelion, said in the 1990s, “All the anime creators of my generation can only imitate our predecessors.” His generation is called the “first generation of otaku” in Japan. Anno was born in 1960, which means that the so-called “Generation Z” otaku are the seventh-generation otaku. The definition of “otaku” has transformed significantly over these fifty years, but I will omit the details here. It is extremely common for the signified to change while the signifier remains the same.
What Anno meant was this: any creative genre experiences its most vigorous experimentation with expressive techniques and produces its finest works at the moment of its birth. Just as the pinnacle of literary works was already reached in the 19th century. Anno’s generation became otaku through works created by artists born during the prewar, wartime, and immediate postwar periods. Among the most famous wartime-born creators today are Hayao Miyazaki and Yoshiyuki Tomino, both born in 1941. The generations around them had already fully explored original expression in anime—just as Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori had done in manga. When Anno became a professional animator at age 23, he was already Japan’s most skilled action, mecha, and effects animator. Yet he discovered there was not a single original expression in his craft. This was true not only for himself but for all the best animators of his generation. Anno was not only the most talented among his peers but was also part of the collective where the country’s top animators gathered. What he realized was this: “There are no animators in my generation creating original expressions—in fact, within the genre and techniques of anime itself, there are no undiscovered forms of new expression left.” By the early 1980s, when Anno began his professional career, anime already faced a structural problem: it could only produce the imitation of the original.
Because Anno’s remark was so shocking, it is often assumed he was referring only to anime. But of course, manga is no different. Just as cutlery and umbrellas reached their ultimate forms almost immediately after being invented, manga and anime will no longer evolve. You might think that 3DCG and VFX were new technologies that didn’t exist then, but the visual grammar used to direct and animate them is unchanged from the grammar that existed fifty years ago.
Yet this was not a weakness. The imitation being carried out was not the simple replication of entire works—the characters, story developments, and visual styles all resembling some earlier work. Original works inherently have necessary reasons behind every element and how those elements are combined: they became what they were because they had to be. But in imitation, those elements are dissected, individually imitated, and recombined in ways entirely different from or unrelated to the originals. And this process uses not one but multiple, countless original works. Through this selection, dismantling, and recombination, the possible combinations become effectively infinite. This means there is also an infinite possibility of creating works in which “every individual element has been seen before, but as a whole, it has never been seen.”
In current manga and anime creation, whether the creator is conscious of it or not, what is happening is the imitation of the imitation of the original, the imitation of the imitation of the imitation... and so on. To put it differently, this is derivative works. Here, it inevitably connects structurally with the culture of fan-made derivative works that are inseparable from Japanese manga and anime. Fan-made derivative works are created by extracting personally appealing elements from the original work, freely combining them, and recreating them into forms entirely unrelated to the original. Since the rise of derivative works, every “primary creation” in manga and anime has always existed in a conspiratorial relationship with this derivative culture. The level of derivative activity has come to correlate directly with a work’s popularity. In other words, creators produce original works anticipating that vibrant derivative works will follow. Can you grasp this astonishing twist? In Japanese manga and anime, there are no longer any purely original creations. Every new creation (primary creation) is structurally imbued with the atmosphere of a derivative work. At the same time, these primary creations are produced in anticipation of derivative works by fans. And then, influenced—whether consciously or unconsciously—by those derivative works, new creations are born. These new creations are, by that point, multiple generations removed derivative works, and they too are created with further derivative works in mind.
Why & What Is an Animescape?
At last, we are ready to explain the Animescape. Manga and anime, which were born after the war as neither mainstream culture nor counterculture, and which for half a century were left alone by society, have now become Japan’s most powerfully “Japanese” culture, embraced by the entire population regardless of gender or age. And in today’s manga and anime, there is no such thing as a purely original work. All are derivative works in relation to preceding creations, and at the same time, they are derivative works that preemptively project the modes of consumption by audiences. In contemporary Japan, people enjoy derivative works as the most quintessentially Japanese.
Any landscape depicted in manga and anime—no matter what it is—inevitably becomes a derivative work. Whether the landscape is drawn from reality or imagined, the moment it goes through the process of being rendered in manga or anime, it becomes a derivative work. And of course, the most powerfully “Japanese” mainstream culture inevitably influences how people perceive reality itself. This results in the following inversion:
Originally, culture referred to the accumulation of tendencies within real-world activities—culture was reality itself. But manga and anime culture is a derivative of reality, and at the same time, it is filled with elements that preemptively project consumers’ derivative activities. In Japan today, people encounter this accumulation of derivative works—this non-reality—before they ever encounter reality itself. Or they encounter it as part of reality. Before they meet the real city, they first meet the derivative city depicted in manga and anime. They come to recognize the derivative city as the real, or to put it differently, they recognize the derivative city as the archetype of a city. This impact is even stronger for those living in rural areas than for those living in metropolitan areas like Tokyo. In the countryside, there are no real urban environments in daily life, yet from childhood, people constantly encounter the cities of manga and anime, which are derivative creations. While there is a vast disparity between Tokyo and rural areas in access to education and culture (art, concerts, theater, film, fashion), there is almost no disparity in access to manga and anime. If, for those in big cities, the derivative cities of manga and anime are part of reality, then for those in rural areas, the derivative city is the only reality available to them.
So what happens when someone whose standard of reality is defined by derivative works encounters the original? As I explained, derivative works are created by dissecting the elements of the original, imitating them individually, and recombining them in entirely different or unrelated ways. When a person who recognizes derivative works as the archetype sees the original reality, they cannot help but perceive it as another derivative work. At that moment, the original seems like nothing more than a combination of elements already familiar from countless derivative works, rearranged in ways different from or unrelated to the versions they know. And so the real city, even though it is the original, is perceived as a derivative of manga and anime. This is why even Japanese people born and raised in Japan perceive Tokyo as deeply “anime-like” when they visit it.
In Tokyo, which took on the role of counterculture toward Kyoto, the urban commoner culture that developed independently of Kyoto’s aristocratic and samurai mainstream later became the mainstream itself. And then, disconnected from that mainstream, manga and anime were born and developed in Tokyo. This means that within Japan, Tokyo—the birthplace and center of manga and anime, and the place where their aesthetic norms and production processes were refined—remains the place most profoundly shaped by the influence of derivative creation. In other words, no matter what manga and anime depict—whether they portray parts of Japan other than Tokyo, or fantasy or science fiction worlds—because they are made in Tokyo, every landscape inevitably includes a derivative of Tokyo’s landscape.
At the same time, in recent years, it has also become common for real cities and real urban attitudes to deliberately emulate (that is, produce derivative works of) manga and anime. And then, manga and anime once again re-appropriate these cities—now physically infused with derivative elements—and transform them back into manga and anime.
Astute readers may already have noticed an important point not yet discussed: social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are now also mainstream culture for today’s teens and people in their twenties. So doesn’t this mean that those generations are more influenced by SNS than by the derivative culture of manga and anime? The answer is no. In Japan, photos and videos produced for social media and streaming platforms are also created as derivative works of manga and anime. Put simply, they are composed with manga and anime as their model—their compositions, colors, selection and density of information, pacing, and editing all emulate manga and anime. One reason is that producing derivative works of manga and anime is the most efficient way to generate impressions and engagement, because manga and anime are the most refined form of visual art developed over seventy years to capture readers’ and viewers’ attention. Another reason is that images and videos that do not feel derivative of manga and anime already seem “unnatural” to today’s teens and twenty-somethings. When these SNS-native young people first encountered social media, manga and anime had already become Japan’s mainstream culture. The derivative techniques I described above had already been established on those platforms. In other words, to be SNS-native in Japan is to be native to the practice of expressing derivative works of manga and anime on social media and consuming them daily. Naturally, many in their teens and twenties are unaware of this. But that only means the practice has become so deeply internalized that they create derivatives subconsciously. That is why they feel posts that do not echo manga and anime as unnatural. Astute readers may notice again that the reason Showa-era (1970s–80s) or Heisei-era (1990s–2000s) pop music and design periodically go viral among young Japanese is precisely because they appear so unnatural—and therefore fresh—to them. As a side note, in Japan’s social media landscape, topics related to manga and anime are consistently the most likely to trend and go viral.
The Answer
Why does an ordinary reality, which seems banal to Japanese people, appear as a bizarre otherworld to foreigners? Why does the urban landscape of Tokyo look like an anime landscape? Why does seeing urban landscapes within anime evoke memories of Tokyo’s urban scenery?
The answer is this: The landscapes appearing in manga and anime are depictions that derivative Tokyo, and modern people encounter the derivative Tokyo of manga and anime before they encounter the real Tokyo. As a result, they end up perceiving real Tokyo (the original) as if it were a derivative work. At the same time, the real urban landscape of Tokyo itself is also increasingly created as a derivative of manga and anime.
This dynamic has only grown stronger in the era when anyone can become a creator via social media. For that reason, Japanese youth today are not only SNS natives but also Animescape natives. Even for Japanese people themselves, Tokyo’s urban landscape has already become an anime-like landscape, while the urban landscapes within anime have become reflections of real Tokyo.
Therefore, for foreigners—who find it far more difficult than even rural Japanese to encounter Tokyo in person, but who can now access manga and anime as easily as Japanese can—it is only natural that Tokyo’s urban landscape appears anime-like, and that anime’s urban landscapes evoke memories of real Tokyo.
The Future
No one knows when it will happen. However, now that manga and anime have become mainstream culture and gained authority, it is inevitable that entirely new and unique cultures, completely unrelated to manga and anime, will someday emerge. Right now, at this very moment, they are surely taking shape somewhere unnoticed by us—being freely expressed and left to develop on their own, without any connection to manga and anime.
History will record that the Animescape was a landscape visible in Japan—and especially in Tokyo—only during a particular period of the 21st century.
