Japan's anime industry popular but not profitable
Updated
Japan's distinctive style of comic book illustration is enjoying a worldwide boom, but the anime industry is in crisis
So when Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso recently announced that a multi-million dollar anime museum would be built in Tokyo, the news was greeted with anger by anime workers, not able to make a decent living and who see their industry in decline.
Presenter: Jonathan Gadir
Speakers: Roland Kelts, author of 'Japanamerica'
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(anime sounds)
GADIR: The sounds from a recent anime series whose title roughly translates as 'Goodbye Mr Despair'. It combines video syncretic visuals with rapid-fire jokes and sophisticated satire on Japanese high schools and society in general. Just one example of the diverse range of genres found in anime, but will such clever creations keep coming for much longer?
Roland Kelts is a lecturer at Tokyo University and the author of "Japanamerica", a book about Japanese pop culture and how it has spread around the world. He keeps in touch with many of the people who create Japan's distinctive anime series for television and DVD.
KELTS: The anime industry in Japan is very much a mom and pop operation. They almost run like little families and a lot of the work on a specific title is accomplished at a variety of different tiny studios, I mean really tiny. I would sometimes have to go navigate behind a little noodle shop, so there are all these little operations. In fact it's almost a misnomer to call it the anime industry. It's like a lot of anime cottages.
You're seeing mobs of young Australians or Americans or Europeans flocking to anime conventions, dressing up as their favourite characters and it certainly looks like an enormous popular boom. However, the amount of money those kids are actually paying for the product being produced in Japan is quite small.
But it's also because of the nature of digital media. The fact is noone has figured out how to monitise products over the internet. The product is being posted and downloaded and uploaded by fans.
GADIR: Roland Kelts also says that in order to survive financially, anime producers have outsourced work to China, meaning the next generation of Japanese animators are not being trained. To keep making money, they have also had to divert time and energy into making erotic stories which sell largely to a market of middle-aged men in Japan.
KELTS: The problem there is that most of them are virtually undistinguishable from one another and they are just made to titillate. They can't really reach a market beyond those men and they are not easily exportable, partly because the foreign market does not go for a cartoon porn as the Japanese have for years.
GADIR: And finally says Roland Kelts, there is the blockage created by a traditional strict heriarchies in these small, family like companies.
KELTS: Young, fresh, talented and perhaps in today's world text-savy animators enter the industry and have very little clout or power and they can foresee that it's going to take 20 years before they might be able to do their own original work. In otherwords, they will be working as 'in-betweener' labours, sketching 'in-betweener' movements as they call it in the industry for 20 years. Animators in the 20's make roughly $US11,000 dollars a year, $11,000 US dollars a year and they are living in Tokyo, which is the most expensive city in the world.
(anime sounds)
