Impact and International Fanbase
J-pop is an integral part of Japanese popular culture, being found in anime, commercials, movies, TV shows, and video games and other forms of Japanese entertainment. Some television news programs even run a J-pop song during their end credits. In anime and television shows, particularly dramas, opening and closing songs are changed up to four times per year. Because most programs have a combination of both opening and closing songs, it is possible for one show to use eight tracks for a single season.
Over the past decade, J-pop has continually gained fans worldwide through video games and anime. Many video game fans import games from Japan well before they are released in their respective countries. The theme songs and soundtracks from these games and anime can be a gateway to further interest in J-pop and other genres of Japanese music. One example is the Kingdom Hearts game series, in which popular J-pop singer Hikaru Utada performs the main theme songs. Her single "Easy Breezy" was also used to promote the Nintendo DS. The Ouendan Series and Band Brothers for the Nintendo DS both feature a lot of J-Pop songs. In the case of anime, shows are normally sold in the West with their original soundtracks untouched, affording more direct exposure. Some shows aired on television in the United States, for example, have seen their themes go so far as to become commercially available as ringtones through mainstream vendors in that country.
With changing music trends in India and Bangladesh, J-pop has gained some ground. After the channel Animax was introduced, the knowledge and popularity of J-Pop further spread among the youth of Asia.
Pop duo Puffy, one of the Japanese acts that have their material released on the United States market, had their own animated series on Cartoon Network—Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, which premiered in 2004 and ran for three seasons. Prior to that, the duo recorded the theme song to another cartoon on the same channel, Teen Titans. Because of the success of their show, video clips of Puffy, who are known as Puffy AmiYumi in the United States, were shown several times during the channel's programing.
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Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)