>>104958820People often underestimate just how popular Japanese culture was in the mid-00s these days. At its height in the US, there were 13 channels with competing anime blocks, some of which were major movie channels, manga collections like Shonen Jump were sold at the front of kiosks in everywhere from newspaper stands to airports, video and book stores had their anime and manga sections at the front and center of their stores, often with promotional material like large cardboard cutouts advertising new releases, Adult Swim's anime block was getting some of the best ratings in prime time, and I even very briefly recall hearing a couple of J-rock songs playing on regular radio stations, the kinds that a few years later would be playing Party in the USA. I still fucking remember total normalfag kids discussing new chapters of FMA as they were released in English.
If anime's more popular, the overall presence of Japanese culture is dramatically less than it was in the mid-00s. I think that a modern Kappa Mikey would probably work, but the fact that it even got pitched and accepted at all was very much a product of the way that Japanese culture and media seemed to be pervading American society at the time.
