by How is Japanese anime viewed overseas? Entertainment sociologist Atsuo Nakayama said, “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is incredibly popular. I thought it peaked in popularity around 2021, but it has bounced back with the latest work. It is now a work driving the entire Japanese entertainment industry.”
Most highly rated anime in spring 2024, when famous works were plentiful. My Anime List (from now on MAL), which brings together approximately 20 million anime fans worldwide, is like Wikipedia for anime lovers.
A new page is created for the latest anime broadcast every three months. It has 60 to 70 titles, and four items are displayed at the top: Members (people who have listed the anime), Score (anime rating), Popularity (all-time ranking of the number of Members), and Ranked (all-time ranking of Score). It is a site for overseas anime fans, and everything is in English.
This site is a treasure trove for people in my position as an entertainment researcher. It is a site for purely “non-Japanese anime fans,” with 60-70% of the users being young people in their teens and twenties, 50-60% being Western users, and the rest being Asian and South American users, with less than 1% being Japanese. Here, we can see how anime is distributed worldwide by Netflix and Crunchyroll, one of the largest anime distribution sites overseas. Spring 2024 (April to June) was when long-running, large-scale series were all in full swing.
Led by “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba,” which is already in its fifth season, “KonoSuba: God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World!” (Konosuba), That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (Tensura), and The Irregular at Magic High School (Mahouka) are in their third seasons, Mushoku Tensei II: Jobless Reincarnation II and The Misfit of Demon King Academy II: History’s Strongest Demon King Reincarnates and Goes to School with His Descendants (Maogaku) are both in their second season or second cour, Date A Live is in its fifth season, and My Hero Academia is in its seventh season.
All these are “big name” works that have been serialized for over ten years, and anime alone for 5 to 10 years. In particular, in the light novel world, so many works have been inducted into the Hall of Fame for 15 years. Even before the anime started, there were seven works such as “Demon Slayer,” “Konosuba,” “Tensura,” “Mahouka,” “Maogaku,” and “My Hero Academia” that had over 100,000 subscribers on MAL, so it is not good timing for new works.
