Japan hopes for a Manga led economic recovery
Updated
Hard times are often creative times. And so it is that Japan has had a creative idea to pull itself out of recession. It hopes to turn the world on to its own love of comic books and animation to increase exports. The Japanese prime minister, Taro Aso, has promised to put cash from last week's stimulus package, of around US$150 billion, into boosting Japan's biggest cultural exports. And he could be onto something. Comic books, in the distinct Japanese manga format, have been growing in popularity for years, along with animated, or anime, films, pop music, and more.
Presenter: Matthew Abud
Speaker: Hillery Pastovich, Madman Entertainment, Australia; Lillian Diaz-Pryzbyl, senior editor, Tokyopop, United States; Jonathan Liong, founder, Kiseki magazine, Australia
- Listen:
- Windows Media
ABUD: Prime Minister Aso is a well-known manga comic fan himself. He keeps a stash of his favourites in the back seat of his official car. In Japan, he is not alone. The manga comic industry reaps around US$4 billion a year, with the biggest magazine companies, Shonen Jump, selling around 3 million copies each week, over recent years. The enthusiasm is spreading and the West is joining in. Hillery Pastovich, at Australia's Madman Entertainment, which imports the manga, says, nationally, the sector has doubled in just the past year.
PASTOVICH: Manga definitely reads like you're watching a movie. It's very fast-paced, there's a lot going on, not only in the words but also in the art and in the action. And for a lot of people, and the fact that there are so many Japanese cultural references and that most do read from right to left in the traditional style, that's also very appealing. We've seen quite a few people who begin reading manga that become very immersed in Japanese pop culture, they start taking Japanese language classes, they start joining groups and organisations that are focused on learning more about Japanese culture.
ABUD: Japan's cultural exports include manga animated films, pop music and video games. Aso wants this to jump from today's 2% of total exports to 18% by 2020. That's ambitious but it's already part of a trend. Lillian Diaz-Prizbal is senior editor at Tokyo Pop, one of the biggest manga import companies in the US. She says Japanese publishers are already waking up to their fan base outside the country.
DIAZ-PRYZBYL: The opinion of the Japanese licence towards foreign audiences has changed a lot in the last 10 years as well. Suddenly it became a much bigger part of the bottom line. I've gone over to Japan a couple of times to talk to licensors and just meet with the editorial staff in different places and they're very curious about what is it about our comics that really is resonating with all of these fans worldwide, what can we do to appeal to them more, what does work, what doesn't work.
ABUD: Lillian Pryzbal says the global audience varies across markets.
DIAZ-PRYZBAL: The things that really are the biggest successes on a global scale are things that are primarily aimed at kind of a young, teenage audience, so, Naruto, Dragonball Z, Fruit Basket. Market taste depends a little bit on where you are. There are things in Europe that do really well that don't do very well here. Europe is a bit more sophisticated in terms of their taste whereas in the US it's still pretty teen orientated. Taiwan is a huge market, Hong Kong is a huge market. There's a lot of original content coming out of Korea.
MANGA PROMO: Boy moves into town. Boy gets hit by car, boy dies. Boy gets resurrected by girl. Oh, now that's cute.
ABUD: Countries aren't just consuming manga anime and everything that goes with it fans become artists and start producing their own material. Jonathan Leung couldn't find enough outlets for manga artists in Australia so he started the Kiseki magazine in Adelaide.
LEUNG: We wanted to start like a publishing house for Australian manga artists. We knew it was very hard for manga artists in Australia to get exposure in Australia because Australia is very far behind in the manga scene and we wanted the try to change that.
ABUD: Japan's pop culture market is changing. More and more material is delivered digitally to mobile phones and the sector is going through some profound shifts. Exports may not meet the Prime Minister's goal but there's plenty of room for expansion. Lillian Diaz-Pryzbal again.
DIAZ-PRYZBAL: For the US the manga industry is in the low hundreds of millions every year in dollars. The Japanese industry is in the low billions so really it's a huge market there which is translating even a tenth of that to the US market is an impressive sum.
