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TOKYO – Business has never been so good for Japanese anime. And that’s exactly why Tetsuya Akutsu is thinking about ending it.
When Mr. Akutsu became an animator eight years ago, the global anime market – including TV shows, films, and merchandise – was just over half what it would be by 2019, when it hit an estimated $ 24 billion. The pandemic boom in video streaming has further accelerated domestic and international demand as people see kid-friendly dishes like “Pokémon” and cyberpunk extravaganzas like “Ghost in the Shell”.
But little of the gust of wind reached Mr. Akutsu. Though he works almost every waking hour, as the top animator and occasional director on some of Japan’s most popular anime franchises, he takes home only $ 1,400-3800 a month.
And he’s one of the lucky ones: Thousands of lower rung illustrators do grueling piecework for just $ 200 a month. Rather than rewarding them, the explosive growth in the industry has only widened the gap between the profits they make and their meager wages, and many wonder if they can afford to keep following their passion.
“I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” said 29-year-old Akutsu during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels severe financial pressure to leave. “I know it’s impossible to get married and raise a child.”
Low wages and miserable working conditions – hospitalization due to congestion can be a badge of honor in Japan – has disrupted the usual laws of business. Normally, rising demand would, in theory at least, stimulate competition for talent, raise wages for existing workers, and attract new ones.
This happens to some extent at the highest level of the company. According to statistics from the Japan Animation Creators Association, a labor organization, the average annual earnings for key illustrators and other top talent rose from around $ 29,000 in 2015 to around $ 36,000 in 2019.
These animators are known in Japanese as “Genga-Man”, the term for those who draw so-called keyframes. As one of them, Mr. Akutsu, a freelancer who hops around Japan’s many animation studios, makes enough to eat and rent a stamp from a studio apartment in suburban Tokyo.
But his wages are a far cry from what animators make in the US, where the average salary can be $ 65,000 a year or more and more advanced work costs around $ 75,000.
And it wasn’t long ago that Mr. Akutsu, who refused to comment on the specific compensation practices of the studios he worked for, worked as the “Douga man,” the entry level animators who do the frame-by – frame work that turns a Genga man’s illustrations into illusions of seamless movement. Those employees made an average of $ 12,000 in 2019, the Animation Association noted, but cautioned that that figure was based on a limited sample that didn’t include many of the freelancers who were paid even less.
The problem stems in part from the structure of the industry, which restricts the flow of profits to the studios. But studios can get away with the meager pay in part because there is an almost unlimited pool of young people who are passionate about anime and dream of making a name for themselves in the industry, said Simona Stanzani, who has worked as a translator for almost three years at Business has been in business for decades.
“There are a lot of artists who are great,” she said, adding that the studios “have a lot of cannon fodder – they have no reason to raise wages.”
Huge wealth has flooded the anime market in recent years. Chinese production companies have paid high premiums to Japanese studios for producing films for the domestic market. And in December, Sony – whose entertainment division has fallen sharply in the race to deliver content online – paid nearly $ 1.2 billion to purchase AT&T’s Crunchyroll anime video site.
Business is doing so well that almost every animation studio in Japan is solidly booked years in advance. According to Netflix, the number of households watching anime on their streaming service in 2020 increased by half from the previous year.
However, many studios have been banned from the bonanza due to an outdated production system that channels almost all of the industry’s profits to so-called production boards.
These committees are ad hoc coalitions of toy makers, comic book publishers, and other companies created to fund each project. They usually pay animation studios a set fee and reserve license fees for themselves.
While the system protects the studios from the risk of a flop, it also cuts them out of the windfalls caused by hits.
Rather than negotiating higher rates or profit-sharing with the production committees, many studios have continued to pressure the animators and cut costs by hiring them as freelancers. As a result, production costs for shows, which have long been well below those for projects in the US, have remained low despite rising profits.
Studios are typically run by “creatives who want to do something really good” and “they will try to bite off way too much and be way too ambitious,” said Justin Sevakis, founder of Anime News Network and managing director of MediaOCD. a company that produces anime for release in the United States.
“By the time they’re done, they may have lost money on the project,” he said. “Everyone knows it’s a problem, but unfortunately it’s so systemic that nobody really knows what to do about it.”
The same applies to the punishment for work. Even in a country with a sometimes fatal devotion to the office, the anime industry is notorious for its brutal demands on employees, and animators speak with perverted pride of such devotional acts as sleeping for weeks in their studios on a project.
In the first episode of “Shirobako,” an anime about young people’s efforts to break into the industry, an illustrator breaks down in a fever when a deadline looms. The cliffhanger ending doesn’t depend on her health, but on whether the show she is drawing will be ready in time.
Jun Sugawara, a computer animator and activist who runs a nonprofit that provides affordable housing to young illustrators, began campaigning for them in 2011 after learning of the difficult conditions under which workers were creating his favorite anime.
The animators’ long hours appear to be against Japanese labor regulations, but the authorities have shown little interest, although the government has made anime a central part of its public diplomacy efforts through its Cool Japan program.
“So far, national and local governments do not have effective strategies” to deal with the problem, Sugawara said. He added that “Cool Japan is a meaningless and irrelevant policy.”
In an interview, an official from Japan’s Ministry of Labor said the government was aware of the problem but had little recourse unless the animators filed a complaint.
A handful did. Last year at least two studios reached an agreement with employees over allegations that the studios violated Japanese labor laws by not paying for overtime.
In recent years, some of the bigger companies in the industry have changed their work practices after pressure from regulators and the public, said Joseph Chou, who owns a computer animation studio in Japan.
Netflix has also got involved, announcing this month that it will be partnering with WIT Studio to provide funding and training to young animators working on content for the studio. As part of the program, 10 animators will receive around $ 1,400 per month for six months.
But many of the smaller studios barely come by and don’t have much room to raise wages, Mr. Chou said. “It’s a very low-margin business,” he said. “It’s a very labor-intensive business.” He added that the studios that manage to adapt are the big ones that are public.
Not all studios pay such low wages: Kyoto Animation, the studio that an arsonist attacked in 2019, is known for avoiding freelancers in favor of employees, for example.
But these studios remain outliers. If something isn’t done soon, Sugawara believes, the industry could one day collapse as promising young talent drop out to find work that can make a better life.
Such was the case with Ryosuke Hirakimoto, who decided to leave the industry after giving birth to his first child. Working in the anime was his lifelong dream, he said, but even after years in the business, he never made more than $ 38 a day.
“I started to wonder if this lifestyle was enough,” he said during a video call.
Now he works in a nursing home, part of an industry where the high demand for workers in a rapidly aging society is rewarded with better wages.
“A lot of people just felt like being able to work on an anime they love was valuable,” said Hirakimoto. “No matter how little they got paid, they were ready to get the job done.”
Looking back on his departure, he said, “I don’t regret the decision at all.”
