How did anime spread from Japan to the rest of the world?

Anime travelled in overlapping waves. Japanese TV series were sold abroad from the 1960s, often reworked for local audiences. From the mid-1970s, fans with video recorders began copying and sharing shows, and later translated them themselves. Companies founded by fans and then new formats such as laser discs, DVDs and the internet widened the audience further. [1] [2]

Helen McCarthy describes Osamu Tezuka's early export as one show sold to one American broadcast network, in a period when Japanese translation skills were scarce. Philip Brophy notes that from the 1960s many Japanese TV series were sold cheaply to America and packaged as if they were American products. Several of these, including Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, also screened in Australia between about 1965 and 1973. [3] [1]

Bryce's article says foreign countries accepted anime largely through television, initially because licence fees were low. A paper on fansubbing adds that these early shows were altered to suit what broadcasters saw as the tastes of American children and their parents. [2] [4]

One account holds that the pull came from abroad: people who studied or served in the military in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s returned to America wanting to share anime and manga. The introduction of the VCR to the American and Japanese mass markets in 1975 let fans tape shows and screen them for friends, often at science-fiction conventions, despite the language barrier. By March 1976, Japanese community TV stations in the United States were running subtitled giant robot cartoons such as Getter Robo, which fans could record. The same account says fansubbing, meaning fan translation and subtitling, was added to this underground distribution network by 1990. [5]

Brophy points to a technical factor: Japan and America both use the NTSC video standard, so pen pals and fan networks could swap tapes easily. Britain and Australia use PAL, and the manga and anime boom reached the UK with substantial force only at the start of the 1990s. [1]

By the mid-1980s Japan was producing more animation than ever, including original video animation (OVA) releases that appealed to Asian communities in Los Angeles, San Francisco and later other cities. American companies, many involving convention-circuit fans, appeared to supply subtitled OVAs, among them AD Vision, US Manga Corps and Animeigo. Laser discs and the translation of manga by publishers such as VIZ and Dark Horse helped stabilise them by the early 1990s. Manga Entertainment then bought translated material for the UK and later focused on dubbing. [1]

Bryce says Akira (1988 in Japan, 1990 in the US) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) helped establish anime as adult entertainment abroad, and suggests wider Western acceptance came when Spirited Away won an Academy Award in 2003. DVDs, downloads and video-on-demand then expanded access. [2]

Bryce notes that fansubs and scanlations (fan-translated manga) are illegal, yet they probably show publishers which titles might succeed in official releases and expose consumers to works that might otherwise never have been available. The same source says a significant share of readers and viewers consume manga and anime illegally online, which has pushed distributors toward digital releases. [2]