Pokémon (short for "pocket monsters") is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world, according to Guinness World Records, with total revenues of $150bn—more than Star Wars or Marvel.
Pokémon was created by Tajiri Satoshi, a Japanese designer who grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo. As a child he was obsessed with collecting insects, but urban development quickly swallowed nearby fields and ponds. He hoped Pokémon would allow children to explore and collect creatures in a digital world, even as the natural one disappeared. The first Pokémon video games were released in Japan in February 1996; few executives expected them to become a global craze. "Pokémania" quickly spread.
The Pokémon Company has sold nearly 500m video games and over 75bn trading cards, and broadcasts an anime series to around 190 countries. Pokémon GO, an augmented-reality app, enjoys around 30m active monthly users. Top players battle it out in the annual Pokémon World Championships, and collectors pay monster sums for trading cards: in February 2026 a rare Pikachu card sold for a record-breaking $16m.
A study in 2002 found that eight-year-old children in Britain knew more about Pokémon than common wildlife.
The franchise blends two Japanese sensibilities: kawaii (cuteness), which the creatures display through wide-eyed innocence, and otaku (geek culture), in which fans enjoy cataloguing creatures' appearance and traits. Pokémon was a "Rosetta stone" that unlocked Japanese storytelling for Western audiences, according to Roland Kelts, a pop-culture expert in Tokyo. It cleared a path for subsequent hits such as Digimon and today's booming anime industry. Officials of Japan's "Cool Japan" initiative, launched in 2010 to boost cultural exports, have long sought to emulate the franchise's success.
There are over 100 video games, more than 1,000 episodes of anime, films, trading cards and merchandise. The first Pokémon film, "Mewtwo Strikes Back", was released in America in 1999. PokéPark Kanto, the first permanent Pokémon theme park, opened in Tokyo on February 5th 2026; tickets for its first three months sold out immediately.
Any philosophy that can be put "in a nutshell" belongs there.