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I am sad to say I may have directly contributed to Japan’s demise here! Last year a German company paid me to record me playing my conch for a Sengoku-jidai game they were making. I guess I should be more careful! (/sarcasm)

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That's actually really cool! Hope you can post details about it sometime.

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Me too actually, haven't heard back from them!

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Nov 12Liked by Matt Alt

I think we’re missing a broader perspective. Will anime continue to be ‘a thing’? Probably, in some form. It’s a solid medium for expression and entertainment. But will it be like today? If nothing else Miyazaki will continue to come out of retirement every few years to express himself. I suspect many here agree with the idea that not even death will stop him. :)

WE need to examine the ecosystem of anime. Bear with me for a moment. Consider this as a circle:

1. TV stations want to sell commercial time. That’s how they make money. If people aren’t watching, ads aren’t seen, and manufactures and sponsors won’t do ad buys.

2. Animation studios want to sell shows to TV stations. This allows for licensing the show for products which makes the studio money above and beyond their price for the show, and if it’s a show with some ‘legs’, if it turns into an ‘evergreen’, that’s even better.

3. Manufactures want to make stuff that sells, or if not that, at least buy ad time for their product on a highly rated show. Making something and ‘buying in’ as a sponsor which automatically promotes EVERYTHING you make because there’s your name writ large at the OP and ED.

I think that covers it. I debated making Music Industry a 4th point, but I decided that does fall under manufacture, I know their ole in anime has exploded since the mid~80s to be pretty dominate today. Or so I recall.

The cycle started from the first Mighty Atom but in our modern sense we can tag Toei and Mazinger Z and Bandai/Popy as starting the pattern. Hit show, hit toys, kids devouring it whole, what’s not to love?

Happened again with Kamen Rider, I only mention that as it seems that pretty much locked in the Toei/Bandai relationship. But a key thing is, there were two powerhouse creative forces going on now, Go Nagai and Shotaro Ishinomori.

Anime was doing pretty good circa 1974. There was a pattern. Tatsunoko showed up and got hot, if you did a giant robot show it had to look somewhat Mazinger~ish, there was a lot of branded Fish sausage sold, and school supplies, and a thing called Space Battleship Yamato came and went, sunk by a little girl in the Alps. 1977, Star Wars exploded, then Yamato rose from the ashes and exploded even more, and NIshizake, mad genius that he was, created whole new categories of merchandising which fed us all to bursting thru the late ‘70s to around the mid ‘90s. Heady times.

What came from the success of Yamato? Anime book not for little kids. Record albums not just of a song or two but entire suites, full background scores, ‘image songs’ that weren’t actually used in the show, just a way to convey mood and feeling. Model kits that actually liked like what you see and not some disappointing ‘play mpdel’ that was a toy, not a scale re~creation. (That was via Nomura Toy, normally a maker of die~cast toys, then later Bandai. Those 1974 Bandai Yamato kits were rough!) . Fancy Goods for a show that wasn’t based on the kawaii girls culture. All this and more became a staple of the ecosystem.

Then over the years, game changers. Home Video. CDs. OAVs. The music industry started to flex. Cable. Satellite TV. And somewhere along this journey making cartoons for the 6~12 year old male demographic seems to have…stopped. I am willing to be corrected on this point. I freely admit I’ve been out of the game for some time, all I can go by is watching what new stuff is offered for sale via Japanese shops. I am sure there ARE shows aimed at kids, if nothing else Pokemon is going strong. But it’s not like the ‘80s. I know some get upset when reminded that most all of our beloved anime was children’s programming, but it was. All those shows were made to sell school supplies and student desks and sporting goods (on my Yamato III tapes off~air Japan, ENDLESS ads for Zetto baseball items. Zetto is GOOD! :) )

So what I see of anime today, it seems to be all late night Sat channel shows, time bought by various record companies pushing the music and the Idols doing the voice work. An endless stream of Iseki harem shows with plenty of MOE`. And what’s the merch? CDs, PVC statues of underaged girls in provocative poses, and an endless flood of Acrylic stands, basically a sticker on a piece of clear plastic that’s been fun around the edge. I apologize if I offend but that sort of thing is such a low effort product, it actually offends me.

So where are we now? Toy makers, model kit makers, just a small number. Books (art books I guess, not the manga. That’s its own world), hardly made.Record albums, I don’t know. The closest thing to the Yamato boom years is probably a mix of Evanglion and Cowboy Bebop. Altho, I shou;d note, the Shonen Jump kings of Dragonball (et al) and One Piece are still cranking the merch, and I’m the proud owner of a Senbei cap from Dr. Slump (thank you Tim!) so, that goes to…

Mining the past. Lot of that goes on. We’re in a peak time for 50th Anni.events and merch, and good. Does anyone believe there’s going to be any celebration for ‘That time my big brother saw me naked in another world dungeon’ ? A gallery of hug pillows! :)

For anime to survive, it needs a robust DOMESTIC ecosystem. There needs to be shows that makes kids want to be the hero of, and bug mom for the toys (note, not mentioning Super Sentai and Kamen Rider, again, parallel systems). Continuing on what I see is the path, it just becomes and smaller and smaller circle of eyeballs.

But maybe I’m off~base here. As I said, I’ve been out of the ‘floating world’ of anime (for the most part) for some time. What am I missing?

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Biggest things you're missing are that local TV stations and toy companies are no longer the prime drivers of content creation here. Streaming platforms are often paying for series outright, subverting the traditional production committees, and even in more traditional arrangements, there is a now lot of foreign money (American and Chinese streaming rights, mainly) involved in the process now.

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Nov 13Liked by Matt Alt

Right. I was about to write an apology for not actually tying up the thread I was spinning. :) It’s my understanding that on some of the Sat channels you have record labels buying up half~hour blocks for their shows, essentially treating the program like an infomercial. So again, call it narrowcasting?

Streaming is its own devil and I can see maybe an exodus from broadcast and even Sat TV for that sweet, sweet streaming paycheck. Again, it becomes narrowcasting. What local stations and toy companies gave was a shared experience. All the 8 year olds were watching Gatchaman and karate chopping the living daylights out of each other the next day at school. Much like kids in the U.S, 1992 and Power Rangers. Altho some in the early ‘80 with Spectreman. :)

Shared experience is the missing factor. And toys.

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Stellar analysis and reportage as always - but it all begs the question:

What, exactly, is your preferred cup of green tea?

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That powdered stuff at the conveyor-belt sushi place? I jest. I am nowhere near knowledgeable enough to have a preferred brand!

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Somehow, the scenario you presents resembles a lot what happened with Brazilian and Mexican telenovelas. The two countries not only dominate this marketing in Latin America, but also succeed in export their audiovisual pieces overseas, gaining a captive public in countries like Portugal, Mozambique, Turkey, China and even the URSS. But time passes and the ones who import the telenovelas from Mexico and Brazil now made their own telenovelas. Today, Turkey, Portugal and Chine not only excels in the production of that genre, but also exports for Mexico and Brazil, which current production of telenovelas pales on what used to be.

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Oct 31·edited Oct 31Author

It's only natural that when something hits, others will attempt to copy it. The manga world is going to be more "resistant" to replication due to the peculiar structure of the Japanese manga editorial system. But anime is already being copied and absorbed by foreign producers. It may well be that we see a split, with made-in-Japan productions dominating the Japanese marketplace and foreign-made Japanese-style ones proliferating abroad (as is the case with mobile gaming today.)

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Eh, I see it as another part of both the domestic and global cultural dialectic, the latter of which is getting the most attention and the former of which is far past its prime, a shadow of its old self.

And that’s fine, or at least within the logic of this version of modernity: it’s just another sociological superposition collapsing in on itself to reflect economic realism.

What concerns me is not anime’s growing popularity; it’s that the facade that is Anime Inc. doesn’t reflect the conditions on the ground, made evident by the occasional but always sad story about inhuman work environments in the industry getting reliably drowned by those that flaunt the miraculous power of the industry. Meaning, the public won’t or can’t accept the truth in the face of the spectacle.

That leaves a creative void in part of Japan’s cultural profile/portfolio/self, which will not be filled until the spectacle loses its luster and forces a new outlet to burst into existence. The same can be said of most of Japan Inc., the important thing now is to set the stage to best support those new pursuits when they begin to emerge.

Which, I think, is now just starting.

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I agree, and I think a big part of the problem is how little even hardcore anime fans know about the creative ecosystem in Japan. I hope to start addressing that in the months to come.

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It's interesting that you haven't mentioned that most Japanese now get their manga online - and overwhelmingly, they're increasingly turning to non Japanese apps (and stories!) for comics

So we'll see how that plays out

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Digital delivery is definitely the majority in Japan right now. (30% paper, 70% digital as of this year's stats.) It's interesting seeing Korean apps (LINE, Piccoma) dominating the charts for digital distribution, but software has always been the Achilles heel in Japan. My understanding is it's mainly Japanese content being read on them.

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The issue is that there's just no data being tracked, no? Combined charts don't really exist and oricon doesn't offer any data either which is interesting

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