Otaku, No Video

Just used Google’s new Real-Time Insights Finder to look at the search term “anime”. Here’s interest in that search term, by country:

Note that the United States, Britain, and Australia aren’t even in the list. (Japan isn’t listed, because Japanese otaku would search using Japanese characters.)

Search by city, and a few American cities show up, but are still dwarfed by Pacific and South American cities.

This tells me that America is far from the largest potential overseas market for anime. Now, the average American surely has more spending money than the average Chilean, so that’s a factor. But as countries like Chile, Peru, and the Philippines rise in economic power, and American fans buy fewer and fewer discs of anime, I can see Japan looking elsewhere for money and increasingly ignoring America.

Maybe.