Sunday July 5, 2009
What’s the remedy?
By ROLAND KELTS
Can government action lead to a cure for the ailing Japanese animation industry?
NEWS that the Japanese animation industry held its first ever state-of-the-industry symposium in May in Tokyo is as welcome as it is disturbing. Welcome, of course, because healthy organisms generally try to keep one finger on the pulse of their welfare. And disturbing because, after 60-plus years of activity, this was the anime animal’s first voluntary checkup – and the diagnoses are predictably bad.
Anime News Network, the largest English-language anime news website, notes that the pre-symposium survey received responses from at least 700 anime producers and directors. The results?
Anime employees in their 20s earn an average annual salary of 1.1mil yen (RM40,000) while those in their 30s get 2.14mil yen (RM80,000). Worse, veteran artists in their 40s and 50s survive on roughly 3mil yen (RM100,000) per year. And most of them live and work in Tokyo – one of the most expensive cities in the world.
The changing social landscape in Japan is causing the sales of anime and manga products to decline. – Reuters How’s that for soft-power glamour?
Nearly 50% of the respondents are working on spec (without contracts), and nearly 40% have no healthcare coverage whatsoever.
As Tokyo-based American author and blogger Matt Alt points out, “the problems aren’t going to be fixed until the real issues with the current state of domestic market flooding, subcontracting, and sponsorship are addressed”.
In this column, I’ve frequently voiced the challenges for the Japanese pop industry when confronting the international market: rising interest and interactivity amid slipping DVD sales and poor or nonexistent marketing. But what’s happening in Japan?
Plenty. The declining birthrate and rising legions of technophile Japanese youth mean that anime and manga are no longer selling as hard commercial products to Japan’s next generation. They may be downloaded for free, just as they are on personal computers abroad, and glimpsed briefly on tiny cellphone screens. But there’s little profit in that.
The industry is focusing its efforts on the dwindling and ever more effete demographic of 40-something (or arafo, “around forty”) otaku – mostly single males who are seeking a kind of sexual-romantic therapy via so-called moe, or soft-core porn, titles. Producers create 10 or 13 episodes of soft-core cartoons for late-night TV to hook their lonely johns, then release a box set of additional scenarios on DVD for obsessive completists.
Problems are legion. By producing erotic anime, the industry is abandoning titles for children and sophisticated adult consumers. And the erotic titles don’t easily export – partly because cartoon porn doesn’t have the same appeal in Peoria or Kent, where live-action porn is just a mouse-click away, and partly because the government and the more “official” arms of Japanese export trading giants like Itochu and Mitsubishi are less likely to feel comfortable pushing schoolgirl bondage and domination than promoting Doraemon.
So now the Japanese government is stepping in, as they’ve been threatening to do at least since the 2002 publication of Doug McGray’s essay “Japan’s Gross National Cool” in the US political journal Foreign Policy. Governments around the world are blithely intruding upon private sectors in an attempt to stem the slide of the global economy, but Japan’s national interest in soft-power propaganda was well underway prior to Wall Street’s collapse and Detroit’s demise.
But what does or can government action amount to?
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, an avowed manga fan, pledged his support to the industry three years ago, in a speech at Digital Animation, a school for animators based in Yoyogi, Tokyo. Now he’s talking about walking the walk: pouring money into a new anime museum in Tokyo.
It will cost 11.7bil yen (RM420mil). One trek to Akihabara is a visit to an anime museum, sans cover charge.
Meanwhile, in the United States, VIZ Media founder Seiji Horibuchi will unveil his “New People” Japanese pop centre at the ground zero of a newly revived Japantown in San Francisco. Isn’t that a better locale for promoting Japan – not to mention a better buy for your dollar, euro or yen, if you want to sell soft power? – The Daily Yomiuri / Asia News Network
What do you think about this situation? E-mail us your thoughts at otaku@thestar.com.my.
Roland Kelts writes the column ‘Soft Power Hard Truths’ for Japan’s ‘The Daily Yomiuri’. He is a Tokyo University lecturer who divides his time between Tokyo and New York, and is the author of ‘Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.’.
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