The Anime Man Bio

Joey ‘The Anime Man’ had started reviewing Japanese animation on a website as part of a school project and later launched his YouTube channel on May 27, 2013 to share his first video,Dubbed Anime Sucks! As the popularity of anime grew, he made more review videos on his channel before realizing that he was not very good at making actual reviews. He then switched to uploading let’s play videos of visual novels and particularly remembers getting a huge boost to subscribers count for his Corpse Party 2 playthroughs because he live-translated its dialogue into English at a time when there was no official English version of the game. He continued to make let’s play videos up until a few years back when he felt that they were overdone and YouTube's Community Guidelines also made such content, often near-explicit, problematic.

His channel surpassed the 100K subscriber milestone in the first half of 2015, following which his video, 7 Types of Anime Fans, posted on June 17, 2015, went viral, doubling his fan base within a week. He created a second channel called Joey in February 2016 primarily as a vlogging channel, but his less-polished content of various types often end up there. He had originally moved to Japan in May 2016 to work in information technology, but decided to focus fulltime on YouTube as his channel hit one million subscribers in January 2017.

Along with fellow YouTuber Akidearest, The Anime Man hosted the weekly SBS podcast The Anime Show in 2017-18 to discuss anime, manga, and otaku culture. In 2018, he did a cameo voice role in the video game Grisaia Phantom Trigger Vol. 4 and narrated one episode of the Japanese digital manga series Pop Team Epic. The same year, he appeared as a guest on four episodes of Chris Broad’s ‘Journey Across Japan’ series on his Abroad in Japan YouTube channel and travelled with him from Niigata to Itoigawa on bike, documenting local life and participating in various challenges.

He later returned to the follow-up series Escape to Fuji (2020) and The Lost Islands (2021) along with Japanese musician and hairdresser Natsuki Aso. He also featured in the promotional single of the latter series, titled Too Much Volcano!, which peaked at 65 on the UK downloads charts.

He began his musical career with the stage name ‘Ikurru Kamijou’ by releasing his debut studio album A Picture Frame Full of Memories on December 18, 2019. Next year, he voiced the role of Music Elitist in the video game No Straight Roads. Also in 2020, he began hosting the weekly audio-and-video podcast Trash Taste alongside fellow YouTubers Gigguk and CDawgVA in which they discuss anime, manga, and otaku culture, as well as their experiences of living in Japan.

The Anime Man was born as Joseph "Joey" Tetsuro Bizinger VI on September 28, 1994 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. His mother is Japanese, while his Australian father has German and Hungarian descent. While he was mostly raised in Australia, his mother spoke to him exclusively in Japanese to make sure he retained his Japanese heritage and also showed him Japanese anime like ‘Doraemon’, ‘Sazae-san’ and ‘Pokémon’. As a child, he grew up with other multiethnic children around, but faced bullying as the only Asian kid in his year at St Paul’s Catholic College. However, he eventually embraced his dual ethnicities and even started sharing anime and video games with friends. He later attended the University of Sydney and obtained his degree in Computer Design Technology in 2016.

Joey has been dating Akidearest, a fellow anime-focused YouTuber and cosplayer of Filipino-American descent, since July 2016, which both of them “confessed” on separate videos on their respective channels on November 4, 2016.