Anime magic

Julian Ryall appraises the phenomenal growth of animation and its role in Japanese business and society

Within days of being named Japan’s new Prime Minister last September, Shinzo Abe had detailed his plans for the way forward. As with any politician looking to hit all the right notes with an expectant electorate, he laid out his commitment to education and healthcare, vowed to continue structural reforms to keep the economic recovery on track and emphasised the role of the family in society.

Abe, who lists among his personal hobbies reading ‘manga’, then indicated how much he believes Japan can earn from a new economic model – one that is based on anime, electronic games, techno-pop and the humble comic book over the old-fashioned reliance on heavy industry and manufacturing – by announcing his ‘Asia Gateway’ initiative.

In his first term as a politician, Abe was famously told in no uncertain terms by a senior member of the Liberal Democratic Party to put his manga away in the Diet members’ hall. Now he has appointed Takumi Nemoto to promote an economic scheme to ‘disseminate animation and other visual arts’ to Asia and, subsequently, the rest of the world.

If the interest demonstrated by the rest of the world to date in modern-day Japanese culture is anything to go by, Abe is on to a sure-fire winner.

‘Animated television programmes and films have obviously been around for decades – just look at how far back Tom and Jerry goes – but those were always made for kids,’ says Kentaro Yoshida, head of international sales for Tohokushinsha Film Corp. ‘In Japan, about 40 years ago, manga first started to be made into animated television that appealed to both children and an older audience.

‘And in the last 15 years or so, the arrival of such ground-breaking series as Ghost in the Shell, Sailor Moon and Dragonball has had the same effect on audiences in Asia and, more recently, the United States,’ he says. ‘Britain still produces a lot of its own animation, and it is broadly considered a genre for kids, but I think we will see a similar pattern to what happened in the US in the next few years.’

In the US, the boom began when a home-grown version of what was previously a Japanese phenomenon known as ‘otaku’ first appeared. ‘Otaku’ are variously described as geeks or fanatics of entertainment genres who know every minuscule detail of their chosen field of speciality. Ridiculed as somewhat weird, obsessive loners when they first appeared, they are now accepted as a mainstream element of Japanese society. And the fact that they are older and have a far higher spending power than the average child means they are driving the development of anime and manga to new heights.

A recent report by Nomura Research Institute put the annual spending power of Japan’s ‘otaku’ at more than Y400bn (US$5bn), a sizeable sum in a sector that accounts for as much as 5% of Japan’s total GDP.

Manga – in all its shapes, from kids’ baseball tales to the more graphic new genre of ‘boy love’ – accounts for around US$6bn of the total, music is a US$40bn industry, toys and character goods are worth another US$5bn domestically.

And while the total movie sector cannot compete with the might of Hollywood, turning out a mere 300 titles a year in comparison to some 800 a year in the US, it generally produces high-quality films for a fraction of the cost, with budgets averaging US$8m per film.

‘There have been two major waves of influence on the entertainment scene in Japan that have made it a ripe environment for this kind of production,’ believes Stuart Levy, founder and chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based entertainment brand Tokyopop. ‘Japan has a long cultural history of art, such as “ukiyoe” prints, that tell a story and have their own character, while that was fused by the man known as the grandfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka, back in the early 1950s with the influences of early Disney works to become the foundations of modern Japanese manga and anime.’

Levy describes Tezuka, who created the Astro Boy comic tales in 1952 and then transferred the title to the small screen in the following decade, as ‘a real revolutionary’.

From Tezuka’s flying superhero, Japan gave the world Speed Racer and Gigantor, Doraemon and Mobile Suit Gundam. And while popular at home, it was the arrival of the internet in the 1990s that saw Japan’s pop culture take off globally, says Levy. And that was a business opportunity.

The first to introduce manga publishing to the US a decade ago, Tokyopop is based in Los Angeles, where the company employs 80 people, and Tokyo, while it also has offices in Germany and London. It made its name overseas with Akira and Ghost in the Shell and, 10 years down the line, Tokyopop is developing its manga-oriented intellectual properties into entertainment for the big screen to go with its television and digital products. It is also leaping into the production of live-action feature films with Lament of the Lamb, which was originally a manga tale by Japanese author Kei Toume, and won an ‘In the Spotlight’ place at the Tokyo International Film Festival last October.

‘My dream has always been to act as a bridge between Japan and Asia and Hollywood, and the goal was to use the manga books as a platform to move into film, television and new media,’ says Levy. ‘And that is what is unfolding before my eyes; look at The Matrix and Kill Bill, which were live-action films but very heavily influenced by manga and anime.’

Influence

And while the cinema and entertainment industries in Hollywood and Europe have learned much from Japan’s pop culture world, the same is also true of Japan’s Asian neighbours. South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and China are all deeply influenced by what is coming out of Japan. China recently enacted rules for its own television stations that limited the amount of Japanese programming on during peak viewing hours in an attempt to promote its own producers.

Anime also transcends borders in less likely parts of the world. Japan’s Ground Self-Defence Forces placed stickers of Captain Tsubasa on the sides of their water supply trucks during their deployment on humanitarian aid operations in southern Iraq in 2004. The animated show had been translated into Arabic and the character was known locally as Captain Majed, but the troops reported that they were mobbed by Iraqi children whenever they arrived.

‘The exciting thing about manga, anime and the whole pop culture phenomenon is that the people who were watching the earlier versions are now in their 30s and 40s and are the ones who are behind this new wave of growth in the film and entertainment business,’ says Soya Azusa, a spokeswoman for UniJapan, which promotes Japanese movies overseas. ‘And they, in turn, are influencing output in other countries. The South Korean movie Old Boy is based on a Japanese manga; Hollywood has turned Nana into a live-action movie, and is planning to remake Death Note as well. It’s a huge compliment to Japan’s entertainment industry.’

Perhaps the best-known Japanese anime director is Hayao Miyazaki, famous for making the enthralling My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle at his Studio Ghibli. All have won acclaim around the world for their stories, their imagery and their production values. Putting a price on their contribution to Japan’s economy is difficult; the contribution they – and countless others of the same genre – have made is priceless.

Julian Ryall is a freelance journalist who has lived in Japan for 13 years, covering business, politics and social issues.