Hi!
First of all, I would warn against assessments of manga and anime in general if you happen to live outside of Japan - unless you regularly buy manga/anime in Japan and have an overview over the market. After all, if you are relying on translations, you only get those titles that a) seem good chances to make cash in your country (commcercial translations) or b) struck the fancy of the group translating it (fantranslations). B) brings in a lot of personal bias, so you are not getting anything that the people who translate find uncool. A) means that only those things that the business types believe to sell in the target market will get translated.
Example: The most traditional division (which is already obsolete but still applicable) is between shounen and shoujo manga/anime, that is manga and anime for boys and for girls. In Japan, both types roughly have an equal share of the market. If you turn on European television and watch the anime that are shown there, guess what: nearly exclusively shounen anime plus the magical girl sub genre of the shoujo anime, which is, at least on the manga level, a really small and unimportant subgenre of shoujo manga.
Or putting it more bluntly: TV anime in Europe and the US are a selection of the worst (with a few good ones they couldn't ignore) based on the assumption that the rest is not appealing to the audience.
Another example where I want reader participation: What do you know about manga? Especially, what is the most basic type of shoujo manga (manga for girl), which makes up about 90% of the shoujo manga in Japan (please don't use wikipedia or something else, but simply give your gut feeling). Answer will be given in a later post together with my personal reasons for liking manga/anime.
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The next aspect that is very interesting is the doujinshi culture: There is a very strong culture where amateurs produce entertainment products at high quality and sell it. As far as I know, such a culture has not been anywhere else, although the Japan-fandom has recently made it spread to Europe as well. Take, for example, Higurashi no naku koro ni, my favorite anime. Originally, it was a series of sound novels made by amateurs (actually even complete amateurs in as far as they were their first creations). Those sound novels were sold and were able to get turned into anime and get ported to other platforms on a professional level. And this is not such an unusual thing.... Where else do you have a culture that is so strongly artistically inclined?
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Religious tolerance is also an important aspect, but that is actually not unique to Japan, but is something you can find in many South and Southeast Asian countries. It is usually not so important which religion you have and Japanese culture traditionally actually viewed things very flexibly (with a dent of 100 years between 1848 and 1949, where nationalism required the declaration and abstracting of a state religion). Nowadays, if you want to see religious intolerance, the only things you find regularly are the posters "You shalt have no other God", which are spread by those friendly youths New Zealand's Christian churches constantly send over to do missionary work.
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"Uchi" and "Soto". While the strong division between private and public is often criticized for making the public impersonal, I personally think that it is actually a good and useful culture, as by separating private and public completely, it guarantees your privacy. It would seem non-sensical in that context, for instance, to forbid sex in any other position than the missionary position, and even beyond that, as long as you don't cause harm to others, you are basically free to do as you like in your private life. In other words, there is actually a maximum of liberty provided.
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All these factors (and some more) have resulted in a very colorful and creative culture that overs a lot, really a lot for those who know where to look.
Deathworks