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The story
On 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board, a thread blew up over a classic question: if Japanese anime, manga, and games are so acclaimed worldwide, why do Japanese movies and TV dramas keep getting called “boring”? Posters threw out a grab bag of theories — differences in production budgets and casting culture, the quality of creators, whether the medium allows for enough variety — without ever landing on a single answer. Some brought up concrete examples, like the rise of Korean content and the hit film “Kokuho” (The National Treasure), turning it into a debate that went well beyond simple “Japan is amazing” cheerleading.
What people said
Aren't they supposed to be good at entertainment in general?
What universe did you crawl out of?
Something like Rurouni Kenshin, which was totally detached from reality, was great.
Yeah, Rurouni Kenshin was genuinely great.
The problem is there just aren't enough shows people actually call great.
What kind of disease makes people keep patting themselves on the back over anime no matter how many times they get called out on it?
Isn't that just because people who want to watch a "drama" all end up concentrated on that?
Where does Hosoki Kazuko even come into this?
She doesn't seem related to either side of the argument.
It's hard to compete on a purely fictional level the way anime does.
So you're saying it's doomed to be boring from the moment they decide the cast?
They all end up looking the same and the whole genre declines.
Anime and games actually have variety.
Isekai! Reincarnation! Villainess!
'Variety,' huh…
Why is Japan so strong specifically in that field?
Even combining every Japanese company together, they still couldn't beat Disney.
Not sure what you're even arguing, but it's a fact that Pokémon ranks #1 on character IP rankings.
No, compare it company to company.
Seriously, the YouTube brainwashing is something else.
That's already addressed right there in Re: #23, isn't it?
They're pathetic creatures clinging to anime as their last shred of identity.
Well, most countries don't even have that much.
Sounds like you've got a serious inferiority complex.
Meanwhile, every talented creator in Japan is an 'inkya.'
Japanese creators are broke because they're untalented, that's all.
I think that's true of Hollywood too — look at someone like Spielberg.
Stop citing some obscure thing nobody's actually heard of as your example.
I don't even know the main character's name.
The content that's still surviving is basically just the lingering scent of the bubble economy.
If it's really about economic power, then why can't any country besides America and Japan make good games…?
Isn't that just because you've been living your life not knowing anything about the outside world…?
When it comes to the actual size of the gaming market, those two countries are overwhelmingly dominant, aren't they?
Europe's market is so small it only ever gets lumped together and discussed as "Europe" as a whole.
And in movies, Kokuho was a massive hit too.
Kokuho was directed by a Korean director.
Tear-jerker movies are still selling well right now too, but people don't want to hear about that — it's just noise getting in the way of their anime self-congratulation.
The first thing you ever see, or whatever you saw when you were young, sticks vividly in your memory.
Watching something at the same level or just slightly better is obviously going to feel underwhelming.
People cite worldwide sales as proof anime and manga are superior, but the movies and dramas from the era they claim was so great didn't exactly sell well worldwide either.
The leftovers, plus people with ulterior motives who just want to get close to celebrities, end up going into drama and film — so of course the quality is low.
But manga and anime have started losing badly to Korea too now, so that excuse doesn't really hold up anymore.
'Talented people'? Pretty much everyone in anime and manga is just a high school graduate.
Do you seriously think they're all natural geniuses or something?
It used to be the exact opposite, though.
I wonder where the root cause of that actually lies.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Japan’s live-action dramas and films have a strong casting culture driven by TV networks, which tend to prioritize famous names likely to pull in ratings, and their budgets also tend to run smaller compared to Hollywood or major anime production committees. Anime, manga, and games, by contrast, operate in fictional settings that are less constrained by budget, and streaming platforms make it easier for them to expand overseas. The thread split over whether the root cause is “economic power/budget” or “the quality of the talent,” and neither side offered verifiable data — it stayed at the level of impressions. There was also pushback over the feeling that “things used to be more interesting,” with some arguing it’s just nostalgia bias rather than an actual decline in quality, and the growing presence of Korean content kept surfacing as background to the whole debate.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (“Nandemo Jikkyo G”) thread “Japan: ‘Anime, games, and manga are the most interesting in the world, but movies and dramas are total garbage’.”
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