A hobby project measuring which real-world professions actually appear in anime — across 21,988 titles, keyed to the UN/ILO's ISCO-08 occupation classification. Fantasy roles (ninja, mage, royalty…) are counted in a separate stratum, never mixed into the real totals.
How it works. Professions are detected in text — plot summaries, character bios, and ~128,000 Japanese subtitle files — with a high-recall keyword lexicon, then every candidate mention is judged in context by an LLM (Claude Haiku) to strip out jokes, negations, and mix-ups (a mecha “pilot” is not an airline pilot). A stronger model (Claude Opus) grades a sample to estimate precision, so shaky counts get flagged rather than trusted.
Reading the numbers. “Appears in N anime” means the job was named in the text. A profession shown on screen but never labeled — a festival food stall, a hotel receptionist — won't be counted, which is why the “never-named” list is named, not shown. Rows marked unreliable are upper bounds.
Data & ethics. Metadata and titles via AniList; occupations via ISCO-08 (ILO). Counts include mentions derived from community-provided Japanese subtitles, but only counts and locators are used — never the subtitle text. Non-commercial fan project.