Tag Archives: japan

The dark side of Japan’s anime industry

Anime brings in more than $19 billion a year. Its artists are earning barely enough to survive.

Pikachu’s thunderbolt struck America in 1998 and .

The US anime craze started at the turn of the century with Sailor Moon’s middle-school magical girls out to save faraway planets; One Piece’s pirates, cyborgs, and fish people seeking a legendary treasure; and Pokémon’s Ash Ketchum on a noble quest to “catch ’em all.”

These classic shows and many others led the charge; between 2002 and 2017, the Japanese animation industry doubled in size to more than $19 billion annually. One of the most influential and renowned anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, finally debuted on Netflix this month, marking the end of years of anticipation and a new pinnacle in anime’s global reach.

But anime’s outward success conceals a disturbing underlying economic reality: Many of the animators behind the onscreen magic are broke and face working conditions that can lead to burnout and even suicide.

The tension between a ruthless industry structure and anime’s artistic idealism forces animators to suffer exploitation for the sake of art, with no solution in sight.

Anime’s slave labor problem

Anime is almost entirely drawn by hand. It takes skill to create hand-drawn animation and experience to do it quickly.

Shingo Adachi, an animator and character designer for Sword Art Online, a popular anime TV series, said the talent shortage is a serious ongoing problem — with nearly 200 animated TV series alone made in Japan each year, there aren’t enough skilled animators to go around. Instead, studios rely on a large pool of essentially unpaid freelancers who are passionate about anime.

At the entry level are “in-between animators,” who are usually freelancers. They’re the ones who make all the individual drawings after the top-level directors come up with the storyboards and the middle-tier “key animators” draw the important frames in each scene.

In-between animators earn around 200 yen per drawing — less than $2. That wouldn’t be so bad if each artist could crank out 200 drawings a day, but a single drawing can take more than an hour. That’s not to mention anime’s meticulous attention to details that are by and large ignored by animation in the West, like food, architecture, and landscape, which can take four or five times longer than average to draw.

Read Full

Downloaded music causing legal headache for wedding parties

An increasing number of wedding halls are not permitting the use of music downloaded from the Internet, even legitimately, for wedding parties. Doing so is considered beyond private use of the music and in violation of the Copyright Law.

Since playing music on CDs is permitted at wedding halls, customers of online music distribution services are complaining that it is unfair to prohibit legitimately purchased downloaded music.

“Please purchase a CD, because you cannot use this music here,” a wedding hall employee told one woman in Tokyo who was asked about the entertainment for her friend’s wedding party. The woman had paid for the song and downloaded it from an online music distribution service.

“Recently, some songs have only been distributed via the Internet,” she complained. “Although I purchased it, like a CD, I was told using it at my friend’s wedding party would be in violation of copyright. I can’t agree with that.”

However, the wedding hall has a legitimate reason for not allowing her to use the music she bought: According to the Copyright Law, copying and playing music and other media without permission of copyright holders is prohibited, except for private use.

An official of the copyright section of the Cultural Affairs Agency says that legally, “private” means use of a copyrighted item among four to five people with an intimate relationship similar to that of a family. Use of downloaded music at wedding parties is considered in excess of this restriction, according to the official.

Even if a song is legitimately purchased, playing it at a wedding party constitutes a violation of the Copyright Law because the song is considered a copy, having been downloaded from the Internet to a portable music player or computer.

The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) and the Recording Industry Association of Japan asked the Bridal Institutional Association, a group of hotels and wedding halls, in July 2014 not to use copied music at wedding parties without permission.

Distribution of music via the Internet has spread worldwide since Apple Inc. started selling its iPod portable music players in 2001. Although CD sales still account for a large portion of Japan’s music industry, the share of songs distributed online doubled to over 19 percent of all music sales in 2014 from a little less than 9 percent in 2005. On the other hand, the total production value of CDs in Japan dropped to ¥184 billion in 2014 — about half of the ¥359.8 billion seen in 2005.

“It is natural that copyright holders want to protect their rights because high-quality copies can be made easily today thanks to the advancement of digital devices,” said Kensaku Fukui, a lawyer knowledgeable about copyright. “However, it is also understandable that consumers find it unfair that use of legitimately downloaded songs at wedding parties is prohibited, because they don’t intend to distribute pirated copies. It is necessary to discuss solutions moving along and at the time.”

Using CDs permitted

According to JASRAC, the “copying right” must be obtained to play downloaded music, which is considered copied, at wedding parties and other public occasions.

The copying right might be granted if a user directly contacts a music creator or record company to seek permission and pays several thousand yen per song. Yet, most people do not try to deal with this by themselves, an official of the Cultural Affairs Agency said.

Read Full Article – http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0002697689