With some notable exceptions like Famitsu game reviews, it seems that professional media reviews don’t seem to be very common in Japan, at least not as much as they are in the West. For example, I don’t think there are that many if any professional Japanese sites that deal with reviewing anime, manga, music, etc., are there? If so, are there any cultural or economic reasons for this? At the very least, I don’t think anime music ever gets reviewed professionally in Japan, but as I’m less familiar with mainstream Japanese music I don’t know if that’s something in general to J-Pop.
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/uymymk/is_it_me_or_are_media_reviews_not_as_ubiquitous/
2 comments
Game reciews and movie reviews are in famitsu, entertainment magazines, yahoo, gaming and movie websites, movie reviews are likely in newspapers sometimes too.
There are a number of well known Japanese gaming sites alone that do reviews. They’re just all in Japanese. 4 gamer, hachima, oreteki, 4gamer, shinobi, (or sinobi… i forget). There are lots.
But for the most part japanese gaming reviews are seen as a bit more.. pay your way, if that makes sense. Maybe not directly bribes but companies are sometimes included in games and journalistic integrity isn’t the same in game reviews specifically a good chunk of the time.
Case in point the metal gear games did well in famitsu, but the head is a friend of the developer, to the point he features as a character in death stranding, another game they received well, so this kind of thing.
Also, its Japan, shit on something and the studio is less likely to request you interview their next game, and unlikely to give you early access to their next titles, so it helps to play ball.
Most people use yahoo and amazon user reviews instead.
Magazines. You could literally flip that around and say why doesn’t (X random country) publish 20 Anime magazines a month, but only..2? Japan literally publishes more magazines about the MLB than the US.
Hobbies in Japan are usually very niche – people tend to pick just one hobby and instead of reading some website about it printed media and in-person events are the norm.