I feel like the comparison of Japanese culture and American culture utilizes cherry picking. There’s a lot of Japanese media that is not groundbreaking and is very much not innovative. The manga industry is well known to beat a genre to death with artists changing one small detail to write another story. That’s why you have a thousand isekai that are indistinguishable. Additionally you have big IP stretched into movies, games, collabs, and merchandise to the same amount as well-known American IP. Japan gets a free pass on a lot of mediocrity because it is so different that it seems broadly innovative, yet if you look at it in its own sphere it appears as inbred as American culture maybe even more so because it does not embrace cultural mixing at the same level. Yes American pop culture is a grossly recycled pile of IP slop but are you ignoring the diamonds that always exist in the wider cultural rough? Looking at Japan and other cultures removes the algorithmic blinders that stagnate pop culture here, but maybe then you can do the same by putting in the effort to search for local innovation. Companies are at fault, but consumers are the ones buying slop.
These are all really good points. Japanese creators are really good at “writing to market” which is why you see so many “booms” for similar content (whether kaiju in the 60s, giant robots in the 70s, transforming robots in the 80s, “moe” in the Aughts, etc. isekai is but the most recent example. When you let readers vote through surveys (or in the case of old school broadcast anime vote with wallets by buying merch) you do get a lot of similar content. But on the other hand these conventions can still give rise to innovation, as how Hideaki Anno parodied giant robot and kaiju shows in Evangelion, which became a genre unto itself. I do believe there is way, way less gatekeeping in manga, which is why it is turns out to be such an engine for innovation in the anime world. The next hit genre, whatever it is, will likely come from there (whether paper, or more likely, digital native manga.)
I think that theres a lot more space for smaller creators in japan to pursue their vision - mangaka in Japan are as free as Youtubers in the US and they both have achieved unparalleled success due to the fact that they really are able to pursue their own artistic vision, as odd as that might be. Of course that also results in a lot of failure but also a lot of success.
I really wish America in particular could learn a thing or two from “the Japanese way”. It’s becoming almost impossible for creators to pitch anything new and original to platforms like Netflix. They want “BIG IP”, “the bigger the better” and they will pour stupid amounts of resource into it, but these works usually drive views for a few weeks and then disappear into the void. They do not become cultural moments. When they do “take risks” on something like Adolescence they end up with one of the most impactful and most viewed limited series dramas in their entire history. 🤷♂️
The Japanese manga world is set up to absorb failure, in a good way: they fund lots of different creators to see whose ideas stick. Those who don't aren't shamed or shown the door, just told to try something different. A huge percentage of manga, in fact the vast majority, will not become the next big thing and that's fine. But those that do can hit big, and once in a decade or so you get a "unicorn" like One Piece or Dragon Ball (which famously did not do well at all in reader surveys for the first few years of its run!)
I've read some commentary in Japan that a lot of this flexibility is due to the fact that several of the biggest manga publishers are privately held. Not being publicly traded they do not need to please investors who demand growth, growth, now, now.
That makes sense. Matt! One question I have reach you or your readers may be able to help me with. What’s the average age of mangaka when they are first published (in serialized manga)?
I recently looked into this and while there don’t seem to be official figures, it seems the vast majority of debut serial artists are in their early to mid 20s. There are exceptions (younger/older) of course.
I think the relative young age of the mangaka/author is also a major factor in the relevance of the stories to young readers overseas as well as very good reason why the characters they create resonate so deeply with them.
That does track with what I've observed too, when I was still living in Japan pre/post bubble bursting. One mangaka friend who was attempting to start his own series was working under other established sensei while doing his own during off hours.
Thanks for another informative article Matt-sensei!
Nice, piece! From having translated several Japanese novels and also written several novels for an American publisher, I can say that the approach to editing feels more attuned to the creator in the Japanese publishing world than in the Anglophone one. Some translators complain that Japanese fiction is "badly edited" and maybe that's true sometimes, but I think any apparent roughness stems from a tendency to let the voice and raw thought-stream of the writer remain intact on the page. In North America, on the other hand, there is a tendency toward, if not draconian editing, then micro-managing of the text. This can result in cookie-cutter prose, a kind of generic editing-speak, that permeates much of mainstream publishing. This phenomenon is refreshingly absent from much of Japanese literature, where the idiosyncrasies of the author and the way their mind strings words together are often retained, warts and all..
Totally agreed. The flip side of this is what I think of as “the cult of the sensei,” where anyone with a modicum of success is editorially indulged to their detriment. It gets more pronounced the bigger an artist gets.
Anglophone fiction publishing has their own version of this. It is sometimes known as bestselleritis. When you attain a certain level of mass popularity (think Stephen King), editors begin to grow wary of meddling, lest they kill whatever black magic is producing the sales. I think the difference is that Japanese editors tend to be more hands off even with less established authors.
“But when you try to make something for everyone, it inevitably feels like it’s made for no one.”
Although I’m excited about the human-centric-art expansion of this piece I’d also be intrigued for you to follow that thread above further…
I wonder about the implications all of these art x commerce something for everyone collabos - whether they haven’t built us a world that itself is made for no one. In such a world engaging in a personal experience and reflecting on it is an act of resistance that says; this world may be tailor made for no one’s but I’m a glitch and proud of it. Maybe this is the era of letting our glitch flags fly alongside our freaky ones.
I had similar thoughts recently. I started watching a netflix series titled 'Bet' based off the manga 'Kakegurui', and it doesn't feel original, especially if you've watched the Japanese adaptation (of same name as the managa) which Netflix also offers. I thought the producers of 'bet' were trying to cater to a broad spectrum of audience and in doing so lost authenticity of the story, somehow. Maybe one can just call it diminishing return from excessive consumer feedback.
Excellent post! Midnight Eye (remember those guys?) wrote in their final post (ten years ago) a fairly scathing piece about the felling of Japanese cinema at the hands of the committee system. Your buddy Marx used to write quite a bit about the similar fate the jimusho system delivered to the music industry. It may come down to any particular individual's perspective on taste on whether you agree with the above. If you do recognize that a distinction can be made from other domestic creative industries' lack of resiliency, why do you think manga/anime (so far) has escaped a similar fate?
The short answer is how fundamentally different manga is than music or film or television in terms of start-up costs. It’s a lot easier (read: cheaper) to produce and print manga. Also, I was told by an editor at a magazine, there’s probably no other medium with so few barriers between the artist and the consumer. It’s pretty much just the artist, and their editor; the publishers take a really hands off approach. It makes for much more visceral content even when coming from a major company. I have a much longer piece on this in the works. Stay tuned.
Thanks! Manga as an industry is quite interesting considering that it brings in more revenue than recorded music and film box office combined yet somehow -- as you point out -- has less of a heavy hand from publishers. I would assume that part of the revenue dominance has something to do with manga's global penetration especially in contrast to film and music which seem to be intentionally hobbled in this regard. Poverty wages for creators, I suppose, also helps keep costs down. It's also of note that dojinshi publishing (from the accounting that I've seen) contributes ~15% of industry revenue. Hard to see something like that existing in film/tv/music under the current system. Look forward to reading the upcoming piece! Thanks for the response.
Honestly I think a huge piece of it is the business model they use. They start out with a ton of submissions per magazine, then publish a dozen or so submissions per week, then a smaller number of the magazine level comics get full book adaptations, then a smaller number get animated. So they start with basically free submissions, edit it up to weekly standards for very cheap, then publish it in more edited books with some additional costs before making it into a show for a much higher cost. It’s way easier to innovate when there’s essentially no risk. When you have a full tv/movie studio it gets way harder to think outside the box as you the consensus will almost always be less creative than a single creator.
Absolutely the business model. Combined, the magazines undoubtedly get many thousands of submissions a year. A certain number of a sample size that large are virtually guaranteed to find an audience, a smaller percentage become big hits, and every once in a blue moon a unicorn (like a Dragon Ball or One Piece or Naruto) appears. It's kind of similar to venture capital investing from that standpoint.
The issue for America is that for decades large media companies essentially held monopolies over the distribution of content pre-internet (and during early internet) and often utilized that Gatekeeper power to effectively subsidize all sorts of otherwise niche, but “interesting” artists across genre (music, movies, TV, and film)… mostly, these efforts failed (there are countless bands who were held up as the “next big thing” that the masses never jumped on), but it worked often enough given the monopoly to keep everyone’s jobs (up until the 2000’s)….
You have always been able to hear or see niche artists who got this dynamic- that they were being subsidized by the Madonna’s and Brittney’s Spears of the world to make a $150,000 album no one would like or listen to…but for the most part artist just feel entitled to be subsidized because they have a superiority chip on their shoulder.
Now that the cultural gates have been torn down and distribution is free and “going viral” cannot even be bought, we are constantly seeing gatekeepers lament the current dynamic without even coming close to describing the world as it is (or was) for years.
You are right that Japan basically missed all this by never indulging in the first place… but it sort if misses that artists here feel way more entitled to “reach” and audience size because they just do not get that their appeal was subsidized for years by gatekeepers who cleared the field for them and that is no longer possible.
I deliberately stayed away from music in this analysis, but I don’t know if I would call artists who Spotify pays pennies for even viral hits “entitled” for wanting more. There’s no question the systems of distribution have fundamentally changed. The question is did they change so much that it’s going to keep future talents from even trying. Kornhaber’s Atlantic essay I linked to at the beginning does a really great job of wrestling with that question.
The value of all media (be it music or television or print) is being driven to near zero thanks to digitization, sheer abundance, and effective “perfect competition” for the only remaining constrained resource (people’s time spent not sleeping)…so value going toward pennies / stream seems hard to avoid no matter what artists or creators do. But we definitely have seen a huge delta in “cultural value” and “consumer value” in many mediums (like television where “prestige” shows like Succession peak at 2MM viewers while shows like The Good Son often hit 6-7MM)
As for whether future talents will bother, i just think it misses the fact that more people than ever are *trying* to attain notoriety and “create”…the only difference is now people have more avenues for attaining that attention from the masses than they did in the 60s or 90s…. you ask kids these days what they “want to be” and the answers are all “influencer” or “Youtuber” or “Tiktoker” and in general I am not sure that job is much different than being a writer for GQ in the 70s or 90s (both involve spon-con trips to far off locals you are expected to pontificate on)…but the later is just more “democratically” elevated because there are way fewer gatekeepers in the influence marketplaces to steer opinion because the masses will always have more to gain personally by working alone rather than with a “distributor” who helps them, mostly due to overall low start up costs…and for a lot of folks this sort of content is not seen as “art” at all (though, guess some of it could be “performance art”, but i digress) …and so, it’s more like a “lost arts” type conversation IMO… because folks are definitely trying”.
Guess the key question I have is how Japan culture insulated itself from those distributional affects society wide allowing key gatekeeping institutions to hold onto power?
I feel like the comparison of Japanese culture and American culture utilizes cherry picking. There’s a lot of Japanese media that is not groundbreaking and is very much not innovative. The manga industry is well known to beat a genre to death with artists changing one small detail to write another story. That’s why you have a thousand isekai that are indistinguishable. Additionally you have big IP stretched into movies, games, collabs, and merchandise to the same amount as well-known American IP. Japan gets a free pass on a lot of mediocrity because it is so different that it seems broadly innovative, yet if you look at it in its own sphere it appears as inbred as American culture maybe even more so because it does not embrace cultural mixing at the same level. Yes American pop culture is a grossly recycled pile of IP slop but are you ignoring the diamonds that always exist in the wider cultural rough? Looking at Japan and other cultures removes the algorithmic blinders that stagnate pop culture here, but maybe then you can do the same by putting in the effort to search for local innovation. Companies are at fault, but consumers are the ones buying slop.
These are all really good points. Japanese creators are really good at “writing to market” which is why you see so many “booms” for similar content (whether kaiju in the 60s, giant robots in the 70s, transforming robots in the 80s, “moe” in the Aughts, etc. isekai is but the most recent example. When you let readers vote through surveys (or in the case of old school broadcast anime vote with wallets by buying merch) you do get a lot of similar content. But on the other hand these conventions can still give rise to innovation, as how Hideaki Anno parodied giant robot and kaiju shows in Evangelion, which became a genre unto itself. I do believe there is way, way less gatekeeping in manga, which is why it is turns out to be such an engine for innovation in the anime world. The next hit genre, whatever it is, will likely come from there (whether paper, or more likely, digital native manga.)
I think that theres a lot more space for smaller creators in japan to pursue their vision - mangaka in Japan are as free as Youtubers in the US and they both have achieved unparalleled success due to the fact that they really are able to pursue their own artistic vision, as odd as that might be. Of course that also results in a lot of failure but also a lot of success.
I really wish America in particular could learn a thing or two from “the Japanese way”. It’s becoming almost impossible for creators to pitch anything new and original to platforms like Netflix. They want “BIG IP”, “the bigger the better” and they will pour stupid amounts of resource into it, but these works usually drive views for a few weeks and then disappear into the void. They do not become cultural moments. When they do “take risks” on something like Adolescence they end up with one of the most impactful and most viewed limited series dramas in their entire history. 🤷♂️
The Japanese manga world is set up to absorb failure, in a good way: they fund lots of different creators to see whose ideas stick. Those who don't aren't shamed or shown the door, just told to try something different. A huge percentage of manga, in fact the vast majority, will not become the next big thing and that's fine. But those that do can hit big, and once in a decade or so you get a "unicorn" like One Piece or Dragon Ball (which famously did not do well at all in reader surveys for the first few years of its run!)
I've read some commentary in Japan that a lot of this flexibility is due to the fact that several of the biggest manga publishers are privately held. Not being publicly traded they do not need to please investors who demand growth, growth, now, now.
That makes sense. Matt! One question I have reach you or your readers may be able to help me with. What’s the average age of mangaka when they are first published (in serialized manga)?
I recently looked into this and while there don’t seem to be official figures, it seems the vast majority of debut serial artists are in their early to mid 20s. There are exceptions (younger/older) of course.
I think the relative young age of the mangaka/author is also a major factor in the relevance of the stories to young readers overseas as well as very good reason why the characters they create resonate so deeply with them.
That does track with what I've observed too, when I was still living in Japan pre/post bubble bursting. One mangaka friend who was attempting to start his own series was working under other established sensei while doing his own during off hours.
Thanks for another informative article Matt-sensei!
Nice, piece! From having translated several Japanese novels and also written several novels for an American publisher, I can say that the approach to editing feels more attuned to the creator in the Japanese publishing world than in the Anglophone one. Some translators complain that Japanese fiction is "badly edited" and maybe that's true sometimes, but I think any apparent roughness stems from a tendency to let the voice and raw thought-stream of the writer remain intact on the page. In North America, on the other hand, there is a tendency toward, if not draconian editing, then micro-managing of the text. This can result in cookie-cutter prose, a kind of generic editing-speak, that permeates much of mainstream publishing. This phenomenon is refreshingly absent from much of Japanese literature, where the idiosyncrasies of the author and the way their mind strings words together are often retained, warts and all..
Totally agreed. The flip side of this is what I think of as “the cult of the sensei,” where anyone with a modicum of success is editorially indulged to their detriment. It gets more pronounced the bigger an artist gets.
Anglophone fiction publishing has their own version of this. It is sometimes known as bestselleritis. When you attain a certain level of mass popularity (think Stephen King), editors begin to grow wary of meddling, lest they kill whatever black magic is producing the sales. I think the difference is that Japanese editors tend to be more hands off even with less established authors.
“But when you try to make something for everyone, it inevitably feels like it’s made for no one.”
Although I’m excited about the human-centric-art expansion of this piece I’d also be intrigued for you to follow that thread above further…
I wonder about the implications all of these art x commerce something for everyone collabos - whether they haven’t built us a world that itself is made for no one. In such a world engaging in a personal experience and reflecting on it is an act of resistance that says; this world may be tailor made for no one’s but I’m a glitch and proud of it. Maybe this is the era of letting our glitch flags fly alongside our freaky ones.
I had similar thoughts recently. I started watching a netflix series titled 'Bet' based off the manga 'Kakegurui', and it doesn't feel original, especially if you've watched the Japanese adaptation (of same name as the managa) which Netflix also offers. I thought the producers of 'bet' were trying to cater to a broad spectrum of audience and in doing so lost authenticity of the story, somehow. Maybe one can just call it diminishing return from excessive consumer feedback.
Excellent post! Midnight Eye (remember those guys?) wrote in their final post (ten years ago) a fairly scathing piece about the felling of Japanese cinema at the hands of the committee system. Your buddy Marx used to write quite a bit about the similar fate the jimusho system delivered to the music industry. It may come down to any particular individual's perspective on taste on whether you agree with the above. If you do recognize that a distinction can be made from other domestic creative industries' lack of resiliency, why do you think manga/anime (so far) has escaped a similar fate?
http://www.midnighteye.com/features/reflections-in-a-midnight-eye/
The short answer is how fundamentally different manga is than music or film or television in terms of start-up costs. It’s a lot easier (read: cheaper) to produce and print manga. Also, I was told by an editor at a magazine, there’s probably no other medium with so few barriers between the artist and the consumer. It’s pretty much just the artist, and their editor; the publishers take a really hands off approach. It makes for much more visceral content even when coming from a major company. I have a much longer piece on this in the works. Stay tuned.
Thanks! Manga as an industry is quite interesting considering that it brings in more revenue than recorded music and film box office combined yet somehow -- as you point out -- has less of a heavy hand from publishers. I would assume that part of the revenue dominance has something to do with manga's global penetration especially in contrast to film and music which seem to be intentionally hobbled in this regard. Poverty wages for creators, I suppose, also helps keep costs down. It's also of note that dojinshi publishing (from the accounting that I've seen) contributes ~15% of industry revenue. Hard to see something like that existing in film/tv/music under the current system. Look forward to reading the upcoming piece! Thanks for the response.
Honestly I think a huge piece of it is the business model they use. They start out with a ton of submissions per magazine, then publish a dozen or so submissions per week, then a smaller number of the magazine level comics get full book adaptations, then a smaller number get animated. So they start with basically free submissions, edit it up to weekly standards for very cheap, then publish it in more edited books with some additional costs before making it into a show for a much higher cost. It’s way easier to innovate when there’s essentially no risk. When you have a full tv/movie studio it gets way harder to think outside the box as you the consensus will almost always be less creative than a single creator.
Absolutely the business model. Combined, the magazines undoubtedly get many thousands of submissions a year. A certain number of a sample size that large are virtually guaranteed to find an audience, a smaller percentage become big hits, and every once in a blue moon a unicorn (like a Dragon Ball or One Piece or Naruto) appears. It's kind of similar to venture capital investing from that standpoint.
Beautiful post!
Beautifully outlined!
The issue for America is that for decades large media companies essentially held monopolies over the distribution of content pre-internet (and during early internet) and often utilized that Gatekeeper power to effectively subsidize all sorts of otherwise niche, but “interesting” artists across genre (music, movies, TV, and film)… mostly, these efforts failed (there are countless bands who were held up as the “next big thing” that the masses never jumped on), but it worked often enough given the monopoly to keep everyone’s jobs (up until the 2000’s)….
You have always been able to hear or see niche artists who got this dynamic- that they were being subsidized by the Madonna’s and Brittney’s Spears of the world to make a $150,000 album no one would like or listen to…but for the most part artist just feel entitled to be subsidized because they have a superiority chip on their shoulder.
Now that the cultural gates have been torn down and distribution is free and “going viral” cannot even be bought, we are constantly seeing gatekeepers lament the current dynamic without even coming close to describing the world as it is (or was) for years.
You are right that Japan basically missed all this by never indulging in the first place… but it sort if misses that artists here feel way more entitled to “reach” and audience size because they just do not get that their appeal was subsidized for years by gatekeepers who cleared the field for them and that is no longer possible.
I deliberately stayed away from music in this analysis, but I don’t know if I would call artists who Spotify pays pennies for even viral hits “entitled” for wanting more. There’s no question the systems of distribution have fundamentally changed. The question is did they change so much that it’s going to keep future talents from even trying. Kornhaber’s Atlantic essay I linked to at the beginning does a really great job of wrestling with that question.
The value of all media (be it music or television or print) is being driven to near zero thanks to digitization, sheer abundance, and effective “perfect competition” for the only remaining constrained resource (people’s time spent not sleeping)…so value going toward pennies / stream seems hard to avoid no matter what artists or creators do. But we definitely have seen a huge delta in “cultural value” and “consumer value” in many mediums (like television where “prestige” shows like Succession peak at 2MM viewers while shows like The Good Son often hit 6-7MM)
As for whether future talents will bother, i just think it misses the fact that more people than ever are *trying* to attain notoriety and “create”…the only difference is now people have more avenues for attaining that attention from the masses than they did in the 60s or 90s…. you ask kids these days what they “want to be” and the answers are all “influencer” or “Youtuber” or “Tiktoker” and in general I am not sure that job is much different than being a writer for GQ in the 70s or 90s (both involve spon-con trips to far off locals you are expected to pontificate on)…but the later is just more “democratically” elevated because there are way fewer gatekeepers in the influence marketplaces to steer opinion because the masses will always have more to gain personally by working alone rather than with a “distributor” who helps them, mostly due to overall low start up costs…and for a lot of folks this sort of content is not seen as “art” at all (though, guess some of it could be “performance art”, but i digress) …and so, it’s more like a “lost arts” type conversation IMO… because folks are definitely trying”.
Guess the key question I have is how Japan culture insulated itself from those distributional affects society wide allowing key gatekeeping institutions to hold onto power?