Introduction
Joey Bizinger (born 28 September 1994), known online as The Anime Man, is a Japanese-Australian YouTuber and voice actor. His work focuses on creating videos about anime, Japanese culture, language, and gaming.
Personal life
Joey Bizinger was born in Australia on 28 September 1994, the son of a Japanese mother and an Australian father of Hungarian and German descent. His mother made sure he would retain his Japanese heritage by speaking the language to him and showing him Japanese media, with the manga series, Doraemon being especially prevalent in his early childhood. He went to an international school in Sydney for some time during elementary school, but his parents moved him to the public school system after being dissatisfied with the quality of education it was providing, but he still attended a Japanese school on Saturdays to keep learning the language.
In high school, Bizinger was the only student of Japanese descent in his class, so he was asked by his peers if he knew about anime as the genre began to grow in popularity. This, alongside a school project to create a website, spurred him to make a website where he reviewed anime. He kept making the reviews even after the project ended, but he continued to post the reviews up until when he went to Sydney University. While studying there, he started to make some YouTube videos to be posted on his website, but eventually decided to switch entirely to the platform.
After graduating from Sydney University in 2016, Bizinger moved to Japan where he had originally planned to work in information technology, but by then his YouTube channel had grown successful enough that he could work on it full time. Bizinger is currently dating fellow anime YouTuber Akidearest and they have been living together since January 2019. He has also done voice acting in the video game Grisaia Phantom Trigger as well as a role in the Pop Team Epic anime series.
On 18 December 2019, Bizinger released an album titled A Picture Frame Full Of Memories under the stage name Ikurru performing both piano and vocals.