Japan's fan base narrows to 33.6%, but the fans who remain are spending far more

The share of Japanese consumers who say they actively follow and support an oshi — a person or character they choose to root for and spend on — narrowed to 33.6%, according to a nationwide survey by the market-research firm Intage. At the same time, the amount that remaining fans spend rose sharply: Intage's own release, published 10 September, describes the pattern as "polarisation" — fewer self-identified fans, spending considerably more.

Intage fielded the survey between 14 and 19 January among 5,000 men and women aged 15 to 79 nationwide, weighting responses to census figures for gender, age and region via its "My Mighty Monitor" panel, and compared the results with a year-earlier reading. Among respondents who have an oshi, average annual spending on gaming-related activity rose 2.6 times year on year, from ¥14,116 to ¥36,698, and spending on anime-related activity rose 2.0 times, from ¥11,259 to ¥22,584, the company said.

Asked why their spending rose, respondents most often pointed to buying more merchandise (45.7%) and attending more live events (37.3%), followed by simply feeling more attached to their oshi (36.1%), according to Intage. Only 16.3% cited price increases — evidence, on Intage's own figures, that this is a genuine rise in fan engagement and discretionary spend rather than an inflation artefact.

The narrowing base skewed older. Men in their 70s reported the steepest year-on-year drop in oshi ownership, down 10.5 points, followed by women in their 70s, down 5.0 points, and men in their 60s, down 3.8 points, Intage found. Younger women remain by far the most engaged group — 75.9% of women aged 15 to 19 say they have an oshi — while young men are shifting category rather than dropping out: among men aged 15 to 19, anime overtook YouTuber and VTuber content as the top fan category, rising from 16.2% to 22.1% year on year. Nationally, domestic idols remain the single most common oshi category (9.4%), ahead of musicians and bands (8.3%) and anime (7.4%).

For retailers who plan floor space and merchandising calendars around fan spending — department-store character-goods corners, anime and idol pop-up operators, collaboration cafes — the practical read is less about how many fans a title can draw through the door and more about how much each of them can be persuaded to spend once inside. On Product, that argues for depth over breadth: a narrower run of titles carried in real quantity and variety, rather than a shallow selection spread across many franchises to catch a wider but thinner audience. On Place, it favours fewer, bigger, time-boxed events over permanent broad-based floor space, since a shrinking base of active fans is less likely to fill a fixed corner year-round. And on Promotion, the finding that over a third of spending growth tracks live and event attendance argues for tying merchandise drops to events rather than treating goods and events as separate calendars.

The open question is how durable this looks once inflation, currently a minor factor by Intage's own figures, becomes a bigger one — and whether department stores and event operators actually rebalance floor allocation toward fewer, larger character-goods events, or keep spreading thin across titles out of habit.