Anime, Games, and the Next India-Japan Bridge

India Japan Kaizen — Pop Culture Bridge Series, Part 1

Anime and games stopped being a niche Japanese export years ago — they're now one of the country's most successful cultural industries, with an explicit government mandate to grow much bigger, much faster, overseas. Quietly, India has become one of the biggest audiences in the world for exactly that content. This is the first post in a series on what that overlap could mean, long term, for both countries — starting with this week's Tokyo Game Show, the industry's biggest annual gathering.

Japan's Content Industry Just Had Its Biggest Year Ever

Japan's anime market hit an all-time high of ¥3.84 trillion (about $25.25 billion) in 2024, up 15% year on year — the second-fastest growth on record. For the first time in the medium's history, overseas revenue overtook domestic: ¥2.17 trillion ($14.27 billion) from abroad, up 26% year on year, against ¥1.67 trillion ($10.98 billion) at home. Overseas sales are now 56% of the total.

The government has taken notice. Japan's "New Cool Japan Strategy," adopted in June 2024, sets a target of ¥20 trillion in international content sales — anime, manga, games, film, and music combined — by 2033, up from roughly ¥5.8 trillion in 2023. That's not a modest ambition; it's a near-tripling, with an explicit mandate to find growth markets outside Japan because the domestic market alone can't get there.

Tokyo Game Show, This Week: A 30-Year-Old Show's Biggest Edition Yet

Tokyo Game Show turns 30 this year, running September 17–21 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba — its first-ever five-day format, split between two business days and three public days. Organizers expect around 300,000 visitors. More than 759 exhibitors from 51 countries and regions had confirmed as of the latest count, already surpassing 2025's 46 countries, with headliners including Bandai Namco, Capcom, SEGA, Square Enix, and PlayStation.

TGS isn't just a fan expo — it's where publishing deals, localization contracts, and regional distribution partnerships for the year ahead actually get negotiated. The exhibitor count from a given country is a rough proxy for how seriously that country's industry is treated as a market and a partner, not just an audience.

Where India Already Shows Up in This Story

The connective tissue between the two industries is thinner than the audience numbers suggest, but it already exists in a few concrete places:

• Viewership. India is the world's third-largest anime market by viewership penetration, behind only Japan and China, at 41% penetration and growth of more than 30% between 2020 and 2025, according to GEM Partners' Anime Global White Paper 2026. Crunchyroll added Hindi dubs for most of its library starting in 2023, and for titles like Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man, Hindi-dub viewership in India now outpaces English.
• Gaming. India's gaming market crossed $1 billion in annual revenue in 2025, with mobile devices accounting for over half of all gaming demand; combined in-app-purchase and advertising revenue in mobile gaming alone is projected to reach $2.4 billion by 2029.
• Live fandom. Comic Con Bengaluru 2025 drew more than 50,000 attendees and 500-plus cosplayers; Anime India Convention's Mumbai debut pulled in 29,000 people, including meet-and-greets with actual Japanese anime directors, and is expanding to Kolkata and Delhi through 2026.
• Production. Toei Animation's "Vision 2030" plan commits ¥20 billion (about $128 million) to new studios in Southeast Asia, India, and the Middle East. It's not the first such link — Reliance MediaWorks co-produced 26 episodes of a Ninja Hattori-kun revival with TV Asahi's Shin-ei Animation over a decade ago, and Kyoto Seika University now partners with Hyderabad's International Academy of Computer Graphics to teach anime and manga production techniques directly.
• Policy. India and Japan signed a film and animation co-production MOU back in 2013, forming a joint working group specifically to develop co-production and skills exchange. The institutional door has technically been open for more than a decade.

Why This Matters Beyond Fandom

For Japan, India is close to the textbook answer to its own strategy: a massive, young, increasingly paying audience that's already there, at a moment when Japan's anime production pipeline is reportedly strained by domestic labor shortages. An Indian animation industry with growing capacity — the kind Toei is explicitly investing to build — isn't just a market for Japanese IP; it's capacity Japan's own industry needs.

For India, animation, gaming, and visual effects are sectors its own policy apparatus has already flagged for growth and jobs — the government's AVGC (Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics) push exists for exactly this reason. Deeper access to Japanese IP, co-production credits, and localization work is a faster route to a globally competitive industry than building one from zero.

And there's a slower, compounding effect worth naming directly: cultural affinity built through anime and games in one generation has a track record of turning into the next generation's students, workers, and business relationships. It's a large part of how Japanese pop culture became a quiet on-ramp to Japan for millions of people worldwide over the last two decades. India's audience for that on-ramp is already the third-largest in the world — the relationship just hasn't caught up to it yet.

What's Missing

For all the scale on both sides — a $25 billion anime industry, an Indian audience of hundreds of millions, tens of thousands of people showing up to conventions, a decade-old government MOU — very little of it has turned into named business relationships beyond Toei's studio plan and a handful of education and dubbing partnerships. There's no visible Indian delegation or pavilion at Tokyo Game Show the way Korean or Southeast Asian publishers increasingly have. A decade after that 2013 joint working group, the on-the-ground output looks modest next to the plans. That gap, between real audience and production potential on one side and thin actual dealmaking on the other, is exactly where a community-level bridge is useful — connecting Indian studios, localization businesses, and game developers with their Japanese counterparts long before either side has the scale to justify a dedicated corporate development team.

If you work in animation, games, localization, or content distribution in India or Japan, and you're curious what this bridge could look like for you — get in touch. This is exactly the kind of introduction India Japan Kaizen wants to help make.

This is Part 1 of India Japan Kaizen's Pop Culture Bridge Series. Part 2 will look closer at India's own AVGC push, and where Indian studios and Japanese IP holders are already finding each other.