How Pokemon became a source of soft power and among the world’s biggest media franchises

As a child, Satoshi Tajiri loved to collect and play with bugs in his backyard. As he grew up, he loved going to the arcade to play video games. So he decided to merge the two.

The result? One of the biggest franchises in the world. 

“Pokemon is almost a lifestyle at this point,” Matt Alt, a Tokyo-based writer and author of Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World, told The Sunday Magazine.

This month, Tajiri’s creation, Pokemon, celebrates its 30th anniversary, which it kicked off with a Super Bowl ad featuring celebrities such as Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Lady Gaga, Trevor Noah, Jisoo, and Lamine Yamal discussing their favourite Pokemon.

And since those creatures arrived on the scene in 1996, Pokemon has become the highest-grossing media franchise, far surpassing popular IPs such as Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Harry Potter. 

So far it has grossed over $100 billion US, with License Global reporting $12 billion US in profit in 2024.

It’s held up by its video games, trading cards and anime series, which has turned it into an economic powerhouse and even a source of soft power that has helped propel Japan’s global influence. 

For the love of bugs

Tajiri began working on a game for the Nintendo Game Boy in 1990 — the latest handheld gaming system at the time — that would include 150 creatures for people to catch, collect and battle. Development took six years, but on Feb. 27, 1996, Pokemon Red and Green were officially released in Japan. 

Alt says when Nintendo realized it had a hit, it threw its weight behind it. It made comic books for the franchise, a cartoon series and trading cards — a common marketing practice in Japan, Alt says.

By the time Pokemon landed in North America in 1999, it already had what Alt calls a fully formed media ecosystem.

“It hit like a meteor,” Alt said. “It absolutely profoundly transformed the childhood fantasy space in the West.”

Hanine El Mir was seven when her brother got a Game Boy Color, the predecessor to Nintendo’s original Game Boy. The siblings started playing Pokemon Blue, and both were hooked.

Since then, El Mir has played every Pokemon game that’s been released, and now she studies video games at Concordia University in Montreal. Even the music from the games has an effect on her, she said.

“It transports me to a different time, a time with less responsibility,” she said. “I’m on my parent’s couch not having to worry about anything, just playing for hours and hours during summer,” said El Mir, who has researched the power nostalgia has over Pokemon fans.

Pokemon cards, which cost just a few dollars a pack when they came out, can now sometimes be worth thousands — or in rare cases, millions — inspiring scalpers to snatch up as many as they can to resell.

Then there’s Pokemon Go, an app that took the internet by storm by allowing people to catch the cute little creatures on their phone by walking around in the real world.

Not to mention the television series, which followed Ash Ketchum for 25 years before recently shifting focus to a new set of characters. 

More than just a franchise

Pokemon’s intense popularity around the world has made it what’s known as a soft power, according to Shaoyu Yuan, a scholar of international relations and adjunct professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.

While hard power is the ability to impose your will — on a global scale that can look like military force or economic sanctions — soft power is a bit more subtle. 

“They don’t arrive as a policy memo, they arrive as a music playlist, weekend movie or TV show binge,” said Yuan. “Once culture becomes a shared reference point, it quietly does something political.”

And that’s what happened with Pokemon.

In the 1960s, Japan became an economic giant, which created fear in the Western markets, Alt said. This prompted the U.S. government to slap tariffs and restrictions on Japanese goods such as cars, electronics and appliances. 

But the government wasn’t worried about toys, action figures, video games or TV shows.

“And kids loved it,” Alt said.  “While the adults were trying to keep Japan out of American markets, they didn’t realize at the same time that Japanese fantasies were flooding in, and they were transforming us young people as we consumed them.”

At the same time, restrictions around television shows that marketed products to kids were lifted, opening the door for Nintendo and its Pokemon products to enter. 

Yuan said video games, anime, and food culture from Japan have had a significant influence on the West. And he said that soft power comes with its own unique benefits. 

“It influences who gets the benefit of the doubt, who can build coalitions faster and who attracts investment and talent — and whose narratives feel credible in the moments of crisis.” 

WATCH | How to tell if a binder of Pokémon cards is worth thousands or less than $100:

30 years and beyond

Pokemon will kick off celebrations for its anniversary on Feb. 27, the same day Pokemon Red and Green were released in Japan 30 years ago. 

And while the franchise continues to turn a profit, El Mir said the biggest challenge for Pokemon will be what happens when the nostalgia runs dry and those who grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s are no longer consuming these products.

“I think there is some element of jeopardy to consider,” El Mir said. 

But Alt said that over 30 years, Pokemon has managed to keep up with its younger fan base. In addition, the franchise has so many facets, from battling to collecting, that it brings in all types of people.

“It’s very accessible, it’s very fun, it’s really cute, and it’s actually cool at the same time,” Alt said. “It’s really a testament, I think, to the vision and to the passion of Satoshi Tajiri.

“Pokemon not only continues to be alive, you know, decades after its release, it’s thriving. It’s not even Japanese culture anymore, it is global culture.”