Japan · Crunchbase News
Japan didn’t build Dragon Ball
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 1 source. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
◌ Single Source
From One Piece, Slam Dunk and Hello Kitty characters to Honda, Hitachi and Nintendo, each traces back to a singular, obsessive individual who looked, by Japanese social standards, like a weird outcast.
Key facts
- Under a five-year Defense Buildup Program through 2027, Japan has committed ¥43 trillion (~$275 billion) to defense-related spending
- The global anime market was a mere $1 billion only 30 years ago and is projected to hit around $88.5 billion by 2033, growing annually at more than 9%
- Globally, VC investment in defense-related startups totaled $7.7 billion in 2025, Crunchbase data shows, a record high
- Naruto, a manga serialization that began in 1999, logged 330 million hours watched on Netflix in the second half of 2024 alone
Summary
When the reporter was a child growing up in Japan, Dragon Ball was “contraband.” Their parents were unhappy about me reading manga for hours every day. The country globally perceived as the ultimate collectivist society made its greatest contributions to the world through lone visionaries building what no committee would have approved. Japan’s extraordinary concentration of underleveraged assets, from precision manufacturing expertise, materials science technology, longevity and gastronomical research to a generational cultural content library, is the sediment left by people society once called misfits. The global anime market was a mere $1 billion only 30 years ago and is projected to hit around $88.5 billion by 2033, growing annually at more than 9%.