Japanese Culture

Imagine a giant humanoid war machine piloted by a teenager who would rather be anywhere else, fighting incomprehensible alien beings called Angels while a secret organization pulls strings in the background — and beneath all of that science fiction spectacle,...

Few video game franchises have carved as deep a groove in global popular culture as Street Fighter. Born at Capcom's studio in Osaka in 1987, it grew from a single arcade cabinet into one of the most recognized names in...

Picture a spinning top — but engineered for combat, customizable down to the last component, tied to a global anime franchise, and backed by official world championship tournaments. That is Beyblade in a sentence. Developed by Takara (now Takara Tomy),...

Picture a beagle with an overactive imagination — one who naps on top of his doghouse, dreams of dogfighting the Red Baron over World War I France, and somehow became one of the most recognizable characters on the planet. That...

Say "Sonic" to an eBay collector and you might get three very different answers. One person pictures a blue hedgehog mid-sprint across a Sega cartridge. Another pictures a white-haired anime girl with oversized headphones. A third pictures a Japanese-made electronic...

Chances are you already know the face — red cap, round nose, blue overalls. But if you just stumbled onto a Mario item with a price tag that made you do a double-take, you're not alone. What started as a...

Picture a plastic egg roughly the size of a large key fob: tiny LCD screen, three small buttons, and inside it, a creature waiting for you to take care of it. Feed it, play with it, clean up after it...

Picture a device small enough to clip to a school bag, housing a digital monster you hatch from an egg, raise through daily training, and pit against a friend's creature via infrared beam — and that creature could die if...

Search "Kirby" on eBay and you will find something remarkable: four completely separate collector markets, each with its own devoted fanbase, its own grading language, and its own route to four- or five-figure prices. There is the pink, round Nintendo...

Imagine a manga so gripping that its own fanbase has turned the author's absences into a running cultural joke — and that joke has been going for over two decades. That's Hunter x Hunter in a nutshell. Created by Yoshihiro...