Japan’s podcast industry is finally coming into its own. After years of being a niche format, entertainment companies and tech platforms have started putting in greater efforts to make the podcast medium mainstream, and this fall saw a serious push toward bringing established celebrities into the mix to take advantage of a burgeoning interest in the field.
The biggest sign of a shift happened this September when video game maestro Hideo Kojima joined the podcast space. He teamed up with audio streaming platform Spotify to create “Hideo Kojima Presents Brain Structure,” a show promising to “take a deep dive into his brain and shed light on his creative process” in both English and Japanese. The weekly series offers episodes clocking in at an average of 30 minutes and touches on many corners of Kojima’s creativity, along with interviews with creators like film directors Jordan Peele and S.S. Rajamouli. Save for a few special sections tagged on at the end, the show is all about exploring what goes on in Kojima’s noggin.
“Brain Structure” served as one of the most high-profile podcast debuts in Japan, with legitimate hype behind it, a rarity for pods in the country. But it isn’t the only program to shake up this dormant corner of Japanese entertainment.