Some Nintendo fans in the US are still like this.

I love Breath of The Wild, but I’m playing my third run of it on my steam deck with a significant amount of mods because those devs have a serious aversion to simple and basic qol

Using established characters in your own works has long been accepted in Japan, especially for smaller doujin works, and that's awesome. But the analogy between that and modding just isn't the same.

If we apply the 'modding' analogy to manga, that would basically be taking someone else's published work, applying white-out on half the frames, drawing in partial new contents of your own, and then republishing it. That would be incredibly disrespectful of the author to use not only their character, but their exact art in such a way. Very different from creating a whole new derivative work.

I'm personally very in-favour of modding, but I can understand why the Japanese in particular, when seen through that lens, do not like it.

Really weird way to look at it. Mods are basically fan art. It's from people who appreciate the original work so much that they want to diversify the experience. Yes, you change the original work to a degree, sometimes vastly, but that's not meant as a disrespect to the original work. But I guess this is also people having their heads deep up in Nintendo's ass specifically, who has always been extremely toxic & hostile towards any sort of fan modding or recreations. I guess that sort of corporate dominance leaves a mark on people. The West has different but similar corporate based rewiring / brainwashing for their products too.

yeah fan manga is popular and theres fucktons of authors who started their career that way

someone def has been spreading bad press about "those dirty modders and hackers" being the source of all video gaming evil

You shouldn't wash kitchen knives in the dishwasher. Or any utensil with wood or bamboo in them.

Tbh this is first time I learned japanese being divided over mods. As stated on the written article, Capcom and Square Enix on Final Fantasy are those that "worried" by mods because they deem some stuff are too "over to the top".

On Assetto Corsa for example Japanese players embrace modding because it is one of the only way to fully experience driving over real course like The infamous Shuto Expressway network that back in the day used for street racing.

A lot aren't going to have a huge opinion because easily-modded games aren't a thing due to platform. PC gaming was always a very niche hobby here with most people not owning PCs. That has somewhat started to change recently, but that basically left other platforms where mods were either available (for free or paid) from the publisher or very difficult to go about at all as compared to modding common games on PC.

Based on my incredibly non-scientific "watching some stuff on youtube over the years" method, my money would be on Minecraft turning things around a bit as I did see Japanese creators playing a lot of modded minecraft on youtube.

The article explains it well. At least some of them see it as defacing a work of art, which I think it would be fair if games were unique pieces and not mass produced - it would piss me off if someone drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa in the Louvre but if you want to do it on your mass printed Mona Lisa copy, be my guest.

Yup, I almost never play with mods, but I have no problem with them existing. Play however you want...