sean1 their hype especially Nishida largely comes more from the anime community rather than from the volleyball community. Anime has an even wider reach than volleyball itself especially within Asia. It doesn't have anything to do with representation at all just otaku behaviour. The perfect example of representation hype is Iran. Marouf even confirms this in one of his interviews
I remember when Kimura was around nobody really cared about Ishikawa or Yanagida it was always about Saori and her spiker squad.