How Do Casinos and Other Entertainment Sites Stay True to Japanese Culture?
June 13, 2025
Japan has long been one of the dominant forces in global entertainment. The black and white samurai movies, particularly those from Akira Kurosawa, and the advent of giant monster flicks in the 50s swept across cinemas far and wide, but then came the arcade and, subsequently, the home video gaming craze. Through major video game companies like Sony and Konami, Japanese culture has remained at the forefront of the entertainment industry.
A major player on the world scene, it won't come as a surprise that Market Research Future finds the Japanese entertainment media market size as having claimed an estimated $115 billion last year and set to continue growing through to 2035 at a rate of just over nine percent. It's rampant, but with all of this success, how do entertainment platforms from online casinos to modern streaming manage to stay true to Japanese culture?
Japanese culture covers a wide spectrum, from the ancient to the very modern.
Ranking and Reviewing by Cultural Appeal
The culture of any country takes a lot of nuance to fully understand. For many people born overseas, they'll never fully grasp the culture of another nation, even if they do come quite close. So, when creating an entertainment platform for somewhere like Japan, local expertise is required, as is a strong consideration for cultural preferences. This, of course, goes far beyond the more stereotypical entertainment exports associated with the country.
For example, one of the key aspects to the review approach taken by Casino Alpha is to examine how culturally relevant each online casino is. This way, they can filter out those sites that don't quite factor in as strongly the cultural implications of offering certain entertainment to Japanese people in Japan specifically. Through their rigorous review process, they can present a ranking of only the sites that they believe will most appeal to people in Japan, based on their understanding of the culture.
As noted in their mission statement, Casino Alpha offers a distinct and separate platform for each nation that it covers. For every one, be it Ireland, Japan, or Spain, they judge casinos on their merits as an entertainment platform for that particular culture. This makes culture a crucial consideration of theirs in weighing up review scores and rankings, something which is best practiced not just by one sector, but across the board of the entertainment. As we'll see below, a number of sites are already well up to par.
A Focus on Japanese Creations
It's well-known that selling a video game to the Japanese market from outside of Japan is rarely a successful endeavour. There are a few gems that broke through, but for the most part, the culture loves its own productions and is happy to lean into them and promote them beyond its borders. Japanese pop culture across the board, as Japan Experience rightly notes, is the nation's soft power.
Already, we've seen a couple of waves of fascination with Japanese TV shows and books – both of which are riding high around the world right now. While books need translating, the emphasis and mannerisms are often kept true to the source. For TV shows, many online platforms like Netflix, Mubi, and Crunchyroll have popped up to show these creations. Usually, these are kept in Japanese and are repackaged with subtitles for new audiences.
Be they in Japan or looking to showcase the incredible entertainment and media products of Japan, online platforms often put a lot of weight on the importance of culture to ensure that their services land correctly.
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