What is the most powerful instrument of Japanese soft power? If you answered anime or manga, you are not completely wrong, but you are not thinking big enough. A clue to the correct answer was provided at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Tokyo was set to host the Olympic Games in 2020. Shinzo Abe, then prime minister of Japan, popped out of a giant green pipe dressed as Mario, a character from the Super Mario game series developed by Nintendo, a Japanese video game company. The crowd in Rio went berserk, and social media melted.

Abe, a man not previously known for his comedic timing, did more for Japan’s image than years of trade summits and defense white papers. He made the world feel a sudden warmth toward his country, simply by donning the red cap and blue overalls of Mario, the Italian plumber—a character invented by Shigeru Miyamoto, a game developer at Nintendo in 1981. Abe’s stunt worked because it was grounded in the extraordinary, multigenerational grip that Japanese video games have on the global imagination. From post-war pachinko halls to the arcade boom of the late 1970s, Japan already had a popular gaming culture.

After the American video game industry crash of 1983, Nintendo rebuilt the global console market. The Kyoto-based company drew on a design philosophy that prized accessibility and character over graphical realism, producing games whose cultural discount was close to zero. You didn’t need to speak Japanese or understand Japanese social norms to play Super Mario Bros. You just needed thumbs.

Ten years after Abe wore the Mario costume in Rio, a number of Japan’s most iconic franchises prepare for landmark birthdays. Pokémon turns 30 this year. The Legend of Zelda turns 40. Donkey Kong hits 45. Dragon Quest, which essentially invented the role-playing game as we know it, turns 40. Sonic the Hedgehog is 35. As The Japan Times recently noted, these milestones make this a watershed year for an industry whose characters are better known internationally than any Japanese prime minister, living or dead.

Follow the money, then follow the feelings. Pokémon is routinely cited as the highest-grossing media franchise in history, ahead of Star Wars, Mickey Mouse, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even if the exact rankings are debatable (franchise revenue data is notoriously patchy), the scale is not. Guinness World Records certified it as the highest-grossing anime franchise at $105 billion as of 2021. By 2024, its retail licensing alone had surpassed $103 billion, with $12 billion earned in that single year. Furthermore, Pokémon has sold over 75 billion trading cards. Pokémon GO surpassed one billion downloads within three years of its launch. The Pokémon Company’s annual revenue hit a record $1.9 billion in fiscal 2024 — a year in which it didn’t even release a major new game.

Mario is the highest-selling video game franchise of all time, with around 900 million units sold. That is a lot of people who have spent a lot of hours in a world built by Japanese designers, and no amount of television viewing can replicate that kind of participatory attachment. You don’t watch Link save Hyrule. You are Link. You don’t observe a Pokémon trainer catching monsters in tall grass. You choose your starter, name your rival, and grind for hours until your thumbs ache. A study in the journal Games and Culture found a statistically significant link between console gaming and identification with Japanese culture among Taiwanese players—a link that didn’t hold for Japanese television or movies. Interactivity, it turns out, is the superior delivery mechanism for cultural affinity.

Bigger than semiconductors

The Japanese government has been slow to grasp what its game designers figured out decades ago. But the penny dropped in 2023, when overseas sales of Japanese content — games, anime, manga, and film — hit $37.6 billion and  surpassed Japan’s semiconductor exports. Pikachu and his pals had earned more foreign currency than microchips. So when Keidanren, the powerful business federation whose members include Toyota and Mitsubishi, declared that content should be treated as a “key driver of economic growth,” it was preaching to the converted. Late last year, Tokyo launched the “New Cool Japan Strategy,” designating video games and anime as core industries — which is a bit like France officially recognizing that wine is important, but never mind.

Japan is the world’s third-largest gaming market and home to an astonishing concentration of globally dominant companies: Nintendo, Sony, Capcom, Square Enix, Bandai Namco, Sega, and Konami. The Nintendo Switch 2, launched last year, drove a nearly 40% surge in the domestic console market and became the fastest-selling console in Japanese history, shifting 3.78 million units. For 21 consecutive years, nine of the top ten best-selling physical games in Japan have been Nintendo titles.

There is plenty of growth potential globally. To boost exports, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party wants the content promotion budget quadrupled to over $640 million. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has earmarked $224 million as a first instalment. Japan is aiming for $130 billion in annual overseas content sales by 2033—more than three times the current level. These are economic targets, but they are also soft-power targets.

Japan’s constitution, which was written and imposed upon the country by the United States after World War II, bars the country from going to war. With the projection of hard power forbidden, Japan has more reason than almost any other country to invest in cultural influence.

The limits of the power-up

If I am making this all seem sunny and sanguine for Japan, let me set that right. Cultural affinity is not the same thing as political goodwill. Anyone who has spent time in East Asia knows this. In South Korea and China, where resentment of Japan’s wartime conduct runs deep, millions of consumers happily play Nintendo and PlayStation games while maintaining a negative view of the Japanese state. As the University of Auckland’s Rumi Sakamoto, an expert on Japanese pop culture, has put it, people readily “separate state from culture, anime from foreign policy.” Soft power doesn’t automatically become diplomatic leverage. Sometimes it’s just soft.

Nor is Japan’s dominance in this space unchallenged. South Korea’s cultural export machine is lavishly funded; its culture ministry budget dwarfs Japan’s content spending. China’s gaming studios, led by miHoYo (Genshin Impact), Tencent, and NetEase, are producing globally successful titles that no longer look or feel like imitations. miHoYo’s Genshin Impact alone has generated over $5 billion in consumer spending since its 2020 launch. Last year, Game Science’s Black Myth: Wukong, a Chinese-made action RPG steeped in Chinese mythology, sold more than 20 million copies in its first month, numbers that would make any Japanese studio envious.

Japan’s near-monopoly on iconic game characters is eroding. Moreover, there is a dark side to Japan’s gaming success: the chronic exploitation of the people who actually make the games. Content industries in the country are plagued by low wages, punishing hours, and subcontracting arrangements that push risk onto the most vulnerable workers. An investigation by the Japan Fair Trade Commission found that nearly half of anime studios began production without a written contract, and that 60% operated at a loss on production fees alone — a dysfunction that cascades down to subcontractors and freelancers who do much of the actual work. The JFTC is preparing antitrust guidelines to address this. A soft-power strategy that depends on burning out its own creators is not a winning long-term strategy.

The plumber abides

Still, walk through any airport duty-free shop on the planet and you’ll see Pikachu staring back at you. Ask a child in Oslo, São Paulo, or Mumbai to name a Japanese person, and they’ll struggle; but ask them to name a Japanese character, and they’ll reel off Mario, Pikachu, Sonic, and Link before you finish the question. No other country has produced anything remotely comparable: a pantheon of interactive, multigenerational, globally beloved characters that have shaped how hundreds of millions of people feel about a nation from childhood.

The United States has Hollywood. South Korea has K-pop. Japan has the controller. Douglas McGray, a journalist, coined the phrase “Gross National Cool” to describe Japan’s burgeoning cultural influence. More than two decades on, it is clear that the core of that cool was never anime alone, or cuisine, or fashion. It was the interactive worlds dreamed up by designers in Kyoto and Tokyo — worlds that billions of people have not merely watched but lived in.

As Tokyo bets big on content exports, the rest of the foreign-policy community should take note. The most effective diplomatic tool Japan has ever produced doesn’t sit in a ministry. It fits in your hands.