Did the Americans that grew up watching anime in the 90s to early 2000s knew that anime are from Japan?

Did the Americans that grew up watching anime in the 90s to early 2000s knew that anime are from Japan?

Just curious since looking back at the anime that got aired in the 90s to early 2000s, have been heavily edited to remove any tracks of Japanese culture(ex:songs, food, names, etc), so it could appeal more to American kids.
Biggest example would be DBZ.
So another questions that you can answer: Did any of you 90s kids knew that time that DBZ is an "anime" from Japan and not a typical morning show American cartoon? ...And I apologize for this in advanced, but I am not trying to be offensive.
Did any of you 90s kids, at that time, even know the existence of Japan?
I repeat this question only applies to Americans who grew up watching anime in the 90s to early 2000s

>Did any of you 90s kids, at that time, even know the existence of Japan?
Not American, but I'm pretty sure that they would've at least known Japan as the country that pumps out new technology at an massive rate, as well as the country their dad's car is from.

I knew that Pokemon, and by extent Nintendo, was Japanese. I didn't explicitely know what anime was. I knew very little about Japan. I knew that's where video games, godzilla, and cars came from. I knew jackshit about japanese culture. I also knew that Sayounara as a word, but didn't know it was japanese, it was just like "Hasta La Vista Baby" to me. I came from a tiny ass island in the middle of nowhere, and as a kid the only cartoons I watched was Spongebob and Pokemon, the only games I played were Nintendo games, and I only ever watched Disney movies, so I had a pretty warped perception of the outside world.

Oldfag here.

I remember on TV there was episodes of Astro Boy, but I was extremely young and probably didn't even know that Japan existed.

Around the time I was 8 or 9 one of the friends I used to hang out with came back from visiting his family in Shanghai with bootleg tapes of Dragonball Z. It was a few episodes of the Trunks vs. Perfect cell fight and I thought it was AWESOME. It was miles beyond any cartoon airing at that time. I remember him knowing it was from Japan when he talked about it.

Some time later, one of my older friends found a video store that would rent out anime on VHS (the DBZ bootlegs left a big impression on him). There wasn't much to begin with, but their selection started to grow with time, and really hit its stride right when I started going through puberty. The clerks just thought it was like regular cartoons, so we would rent stuff like Burn Up, Akira, Devilman, MD Geist, Genocyber, etc... Watching Akira fucked me up so bad at the time. After it was over I started crying at my friends house and he had to talk me down. That movie was intense as shit for a 10 year old me.

Around this time, the TV stations started airing Sailor Moon and Dragonball. That was kind of the tipping point for it hitting the mainstream. Things were a little niche for a while, and then DVDs hit the market and absolutely everything began to get licensed.

No I probably didn't know what Japan even was then.

I didnt know what japan was at that point as a kid. But you could tell there was something different in terms of art and plot direction which made me gravitate towards that "type" of cartoon. There was more focus on getting somewhere rather than just being episodic.
Then again for some reason I got attracted to japanese games without realising it either.

I didnt know this was anime.

>Did the Americans that grew up watching anime in the 90s to early 2000s knew that anime are from Japan?

If they did an small amount of research or just used common sense they would figure it out easily

I didn't know shit like pokemon and dragon ball were japanese, honestly. I thought all cartoons were made in america and all other products were made in china.

I was an almost stereotypically retarded American kid.

I thought all animation was made in America and China made up the entirety of Asia. So for a brief time when I discovered anime was from overseas and saw kanji for the first time I instantly thought China.

The really stereotypical stuff sure, but I didn't really think the stuff was produced in America either, I just didn't put much thought into where it came from.

I'm german and back in 1989 or 1990 I watched Saber Rider on tv, since it was heavily rewritten for american audiences I had no idea it was japanese.
In 1991 Queen Millenia and Miyuki started and those weren't edited at all, they even had japanese op and ed, and from then on I could easily distinguish anything japanese just from the artstyle.

I knew that they were Japanese, but I was still surprised when hearing Japanese versions of shows. Almost as if I thought that they made these shows for us gaijin.

but why does it matter

Yes. There was still untranslated Japanese signage in most dubbed series. There was also at least one channel that played raw anime at one point. I remember watching untranslated DBZ on TV. And if you ever looked up a series online, you would probably find out it was Japanese in origin. And if you read "graphic novels" then it was pretty obvious because they're read from back to front, and if you bothered to ever find out why, then you'd know "because Japan".

I knew the Japanese had something to do with it just from watching the credits, but I somehow always assumed that it was just a western show with outsourced animation until that reference in TWGOK caught me completely off guard.

Yes, we called it Japanamation. My older sister still does, actually.

I kind of figured it out when I was still pretty young, and half the characters were talking about this place called Japan, living in this place called Japan, the stories were set in Japanese cities, etc. and I also had access to a map that showed more than the United States. To be fair, I was also one of those "gifted" kids (read: probably autistic).

It also helps that my parents have been casual weebs since at least the mid-80's, so I didn't really get the illusion created by localized anime until Toonami/4kids shit started popping up. I watched a lot of subbed and fandubbed stuff. I'm not even sure where my family was getting this stuff.

That being said, beyond understanding that Japan was a different country that also happened to make really good looking cartoons that were frequently "too adult" for me to watch with my parents, I didn't know shit about Japan.

>To be fair, I was also one of those "gifted" kids (read: probably autistic).
Not OP, but I don't understand. Wouldn't it be quite logical to come to that conclusion? Why would you think that you had been autistic because you realized that? Or did I miss something? I'm ESL, after all.

Smart kids in burgerland are often ostracized at a very young age and don't develop basic social skills.

Man, it wasn't even until recently that I learned that many cartoons I thought to be European cartoons as a kid (Maya the bee, Alfred J. Kwak, Heidi: Girl of the Alps, etc) are all animated by japs.

I knew that DBZ, Yuyu Hakusho, Sailormoon, Ranma 1/2 and others came from Japan. But I seriously thought that Pokemon came from the US.

My dad didn't buy jap vehicles

I used to watch this everyday in Italy, being set in the Alps I tought it was an italian/austrian cartoon back then. I also think I didn't know that dragonball or other popular shows were from Japan

>if you ever looked up a series online
we're talking pre-internet here

As a young child I thought samurai were Chinese. But I also thought Siberia was a separate country from Russia.

Yeah, I knew it was from Japan because my parents always referred to it as "Jap crap"

Always thought everything was American. It was only when a dub kept the local of Japan or I could find Japanese trading cards of Pokemon and YuGiOh that weren't released in the US that I came to realize they weren't.

I had internet in 1996, so it's not pre-internet at all. Sure, the internet was very different then, but there were still plenty of anime fan pages.

Of course I did, you'd have to be a complete fucking retard not to realize that. Actually, to be fair, it depends how old you were. Anyone middleschool or above though has no excuse for not knowing.

That said, all I knew about Japan at the time is that was where those slant-eyed dudes that bombed pearl harbor and made all the good RC cars lived. And Nintendo was from there.

I grew up in Singapore and they didn't do the localization shit so they had the jap ops and stuff. I was confused when I moved to the states and saw the american yugioh op.

I remember thinking that DB was "anime" even as a kid, so I was aware that DBZ, Gundam Wing, and Tenchi were anime, I just don't think I realized how much anime there was at the time. I was inside the Toonami bubble in high school, and didn't start looking outside of it until Kazaa and Imesh gained prominence and I was able to find and download shit like Love Hina.

The only show I remember watching that I didn't realize was anime and only found out much later was Samurai Pizza Cats, which I watched around the same time as DB when I was young.

We didn't have cable until I was in 3rd grade. The last few years of my elementary school had me watching Robotech, Voltron, DBZ, Sailor Moon, and maybe a couple others I've forgotten. Maybe Gundam Wing, but that might've been middle school. If I remember right, Sailor Moon had a lot of backgrounds with buildings that had Japanese text written on them, not that I knew what Japanese was. Somewhere in there, I met a friend whose mom was from Japan and so he'd been there a couple times. He explained to me that Sailor Moon, as well as several of the shows I watched, came from Japan and were translated to English.
By the time I was finishing middle school, it seemed to be common knowledge among the kids.
However, I wouldn't learn about the travesty that was Robotech until I was in college. Holy crap, what a mess.

Yes Americans are all stupid and don't know anything OP, just like you want to hear.

Not an oldfag but as a child I was watching Yu-gi-oh and my mom once said

>You know user they make the eyes in anime so big because that's how Asians see the rest of the world.

Around that time I started to connect the dots.

After watching Power Rangers the last few days I now understand how I got into Anime.Never realized until now how heavily Japanese influenced it was.

I grew up in the 80s watching stuff like Robotech and The Wondrous Koala Blinky. We used to call it "Japanimation" back then.

nah how it works for us retarded americans is we acknowledge china and japan as asia, as they are the only countries over there worth half a shit. Also china and japan lines are blurred so most of us knew anime was asian since the art style was different, but we would either think its chinese or japanese and for the life of us couldn't tell which is which.

They didn't erase the Japanese stuff completely on Toonami, so it was recognizable from a young age. And the way they erased it in Pokemon was so blatantly obvious/fucking stupid. What kind of jelly donuts are made of rice?

I got pissed off at this. They kept talking about jelly doughnuts and showing rice balls that I asked my mom to buy me jelly doughnuts thinking I'd get rice balls. I just wanted to try what my favorite characters were eating.

Like everything released then was flipped though

I could tell that it was different from American cartoons but I had no real interest in or understanding of the world outside of my home town until about middle school.