Gaming Enters the Bridge as IMAGE-75 Gets a Name

India Japan Kaizen — Pop Culture Bridge Series, Part 5

Part 4 closed on a split: two Japanese publishers, Kodansha and Poplar, had just incorporated in India without waiting for a treaty or a festival deal, while the series' original anime storylines — the Toonz-1st PLACE alliance, Geek Pictures India's Panchsheela, and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's audio-visual co-production list — stayed exactly where they'd been for months. One week later, three new things happened at once, and none of them is the treaty. The Indian government finally put a name on the "anime, manga, gaming" line from July's leaders' summit. A Japanese company signed its first gaming-specific MoU with an Indian one. And a Doraemon film, a franchise this series hadn't tracked before, quietly became one of the five highest-grossing anime releases India has ever had.

IMAGE-75: The Treaty Talk Gets a Name

On 2 July 2026, India's Ministry of External Affairs announced that 2027 — the 75th anniversary of India-Japan diplomatic relations — will be marked as the 'India-Japan Year of Shared Horizons,' built around ten commemorative programmes. Most are what you'd expect from an anniversary year: Japan-India Week in the last week of April 2027, RASA-75 for arts and culture, SPORT-75 and a Cricket Kizuna-75 track, and a Shared Future-75 policy-recommendation exercise. One of the ten, though, lands squarely inside this series: IMAGE-75, short for Manga, Anime, Gaming, described as a push to support people-to-people exchange and co-creation across those three categories, explicitly citing Japanese pop culture's resonance with Indian youth and India's emergence as a hub for animation, gaming, comics, and immersive creative technology. It's the first time this series has seen the three words from the July summit's joint statement — 'anime, manga, gaming' — attached to a named government programme rather than a paragraph of appreciation. It is not, however, the audio-visual co-production treaty Part 2 through Part 4 have been watching for: the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's list still runs from Italy and the UK (2005) to Israel (2018) with no Japan entry, and MEA's announcement names no budget, no implementing ministry on either side, and no events calendar. IMAGE-75 could become the vehicle that finally produces that treaty sometime before April 2027 — or it could become another well-intentioned line with nothing under it. This series now has a specific, named thing to check progress against, which is more than it had before.

Gaming Joins the Bridge: JetSynthesys and MIXI

On 28 September 2026, Pune-based JetSynthesys — the gaming and digital-entertainment company chaired by Rajan Navani — signed a memorandum of understanding with Japan's MIXI, the mobile-gaming and social-platform company, to explore game development and publishing support, marketing and user acquisition, esports, market intelligence, and 'strategic investment opportunities' in India. Ryo Shima, CEO of JetSynthesys Japan, and Sadaaki Kaneyoshi, a MIXI senior corporate officer, both framed it around India's growth as a market rather than any signed project — no dollar figure, no named title, and no joint-venture structure have been disclosed, and outlets covering the announcement are explicit that none of that has been decided yet. What makes it worth tracking is the quieter history underneath it. MIXI has run a $50 million corporate venture fund targeting early-stage Indian B2C gaming and digital-entertainment startups since August 2023. And JetSynthesys already has a working Japan tie that predates this MoU: Digital Hearts Holdings, a Japanese QA and game-testing group, took a 9.5% stake in JetSynthesys's Japan unit in 2023 and co-founded JetSynthesys Digital Services, a Pune-based joint venture doing debugging work for clients in India and globally. Gaming has been the quiet third word in 'anime, manga, gaming' throughout this series — the MIXI MoU is the first time it's produced a headline of its own.

Theatrical Anime Keeps Climbing

Part 1 clocked India as the world's third-largest anime market by viewership penetration; the newest numbers suggest that lead is still widening. Doraemon: Castle of the Undersea Devil opened in Indian theatres (including Hindi and 4DX formats) on 2 October 2026 and took a reported ₹7.1 crore net over its opening weekend — ₹1.95 crore on Friday, ₹2.15 crore on Saturday, ₹3 crore on Sunday, according to tracking site Sacnilk. By its ninth day in release, Sacnilk had it past ₹13 crore net domestically, enough, per the same tracker, to overtake Jujutsu Kaisen 0 and enter India's five highest-grossing anime releases — for a long-running children's franchise this series hadn't previously covered, not one of the marquee shonen titles that usually drive those lists.

• Distribution got easier, not just bigger. In May 2026, Crunchyroll became a ₹99-a-month add-on inside Sony LIV — removing the separate-app, separate-account friction that had limited casual conversion — with a ₹49 introductory price for the first two weeks.
• India's Crunchyroll library has grown to more than 900 titles, with over 180 dubs across Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu; the company reports localized content now drives more than 65% of its India viewership, and total watch time in the market is up roughly 3.5x.
• GEM Partners, the research firm whose Anime Global White Paper 2026 Part 1 already cited for India's viewership penetration, now ranks India and South Korea as the two fastest-growing anime audience markets in the world.

Where the Original Two Deals Stand

Neither of the production stories at the center of this series has moved since Part 4. Toonz Media Group's March 2025 alliance with Tokyo's 1st PLACE still hasn't produced a finished, released title credited to both studios, now more than eighteen months in. Geek Pictures India's Panchsheela still has no announced release date or streaming platform. Both remain exactly what they were three parts ago: real partnerships, no finished product to show for either one yet.

What's Still Missing

The honest accounting this week is that almost everything new is still a framework, not an outcome. TIFFCOM 2026, Tokyo's content market, runs 28-30 October — after this piece publishes — with a dedicated Anime Co-Production Conference on structuring and financing international deals; its confirmed speaker list (Robot Playground Media, Salamander Inc., Foliascope) has no Indian company on it yet, and no India-specific session has been confirmed. JETRO's own matchmaking programme, which doubled its matched-company pool to nineteen this year, still hasn't produced a single named deal or MOU for this series to point to. IMAGE-75 has a name and a theme but no budget, implementing agency, or event on a calendar. And the JetSynthesys-MIXI MoU is, by its own description, an agreement to keep talking, not an agreement to do anything in particular. The pattern across four parts now is consistent: government language and new-vertical announcements are arriving faster than signed, dated, named outcomes.

If you work in gaming, game publishing or esports, manga or book publishing, anime or AVGC production, or have visibility into how IMAGE-75 is actually being staffed and funded — get in touch. This is exactly the kind of introduction India Japan Kaizen wants to help make.

This is Part 5 of India Japan Kaizen's Pop Culture Bridge Series. Part 6 will check whether TIFFCOM 2026's anime co-production conference (October 28-30) produced anything India-specific, look for the first concrete step out of the JetSynthesys-MIXI MoU, and watch for the first detail on how IMAGE-75 will actually be implemented.