Advocating Israel in Japan is a challenging task. Since most of the information which is delivered by the news focuses on politics and conflicts, there are often misconceptions about the country. With our original animation series, we are seeking to utilize the wonderful Japanese pop culture as a platform to increase interest in Israel while showing its softer sides.

This government-to-people PR campaign aims to engage with younger audiences in their own language and same eye-level, in an entertaining and original fashion through social media.

While traditional country-branding may often be perceived as conventional and distinct, this first of its kind attempt by a foreign embassy in Japan is a custom made effort to improve the country's image in a nonpolitical way through animation. To achieve this vision, we've hired a young and promising production company to create an original and fictional series of 7 episodes about Israel, the story of a journey of two sisters.

There are 5 main steps to creating an anime episode: Concept, storyboard, drawing, editing, voice recording. Each of these steps for each episode is of a long "ping pong" process between us and the production company, exchanging ideas and comments until the outcome is satisfactory for all sides.

The first episode was launched in an exclusive press event held on the International Animation Day, October 28th 2014. Some 20 media, local and international, together with top anime bloggers and critiques came to the premiere. Ever since, we are releasing one episode per month.

1. Finding a production company:

We started looking in mid-2013. After contacting dozens of anime producers and seeing their sample films, we chose our partner on November 2013.

2. Concept:

On January 2014 we agreed that the main characters should resemble our target audiences: Ages of 20's and 30's.

3. Story-line:

The story-line was continuously adapted and developed until January 2015, after the 7th and last episode was finalized.

4. Animation production:

Between June 2014 and March 2015. Every frame and every photo were thoroughly discussed and considered.

5. Premiere, release and press:

The premiere was held on October 28th 2014. With every new episode we are issuing a press release to the mass media, anime bloggers and critiques, and a notification for our SNS followers.

The campaign ran according to the long-discussed plan. Some changes were made in the plot according to reactions and requests from our audiences and followers.

The media's response to our project was 100% positive, and the attention we got was overwhelming. Over 20 articles were written about the campaign, including several TV stories. Shalom-chan, our mascot, was invited to participate as a panel member in a live broadcast on one of Japan's most popular entertainment shows which featured our animation (Asahi TV, 5-Nov-2014).

Together with the media exposure and the promotion, our first episode hit nearly 400,000 views in Japan. Our Embassy's Youtube page, which was not active before, now has around 1,500 subscribers.

Although the series is in Japanese, it was featured in major news outlets and blogs in several other countries and languages, including the Wall Street Journal online and all of Israel's main medias. Today, we are already in advanced discussions with several travel agencies and land operators regarding opening a new package to Israel, with an itinerary which is similar to the journey of the main characters of the series.