Anime for Japanese Audiences Is No Longer the Priority, Says Japanese Site
The Japanese site Tokyo Keizai published an article that is making the rounds on the Japanese internet. Apparently, the anime industry in Japan is changing, and anime is now being planned more for international audiences instead of Japanese viewers.
Tokyo Keizai says that today, many anime are planned from the very beginning with the international market in mind. And this helps explain why certain genres and types of stories appear so frequently each season.
It isn’t simply because authors have run out of creativity or because Japanese people only want to watch the same things.
The reason is much simpler: money.
Producing an anime is expensive. A 12- or 13-episode season can require hundreds of millions of yen, and much of that investment has to be made before the first episode even airs.
That’s why the people financing a production want some assurance that they will be able to recover that money.
And this is where the international market has become extremely important.
The International Market Changed the Anime Industry
In the past, the Japanese market played a much bigger role in recovering an anime’s investment. Blu-ray and DVD sales, manga, merchandise, and other forms of domestic revenue were extremely important.
But the physical media market has declined significantly.
At the same time, streaming services began competing for anime broadcasting rights around the world. Companies such as Netflix, Crunchyroll, Disney+, and Amazon Prime have turned the international market into a huge source of revenue for the anime industry.
This means that when an anime is being planned, it’s no longer enough to simply ask:
“Will Japanese audiences like this?”
They also have to ask:
“Will this work overseas?”
And this change directly influences which works receive anime adaptations.
An anime with a premise that is easy to understand in any country can be a safer bet than a story that relies heavily on customs, references, or situations specific to Japanese society.
That’s Why Some Genres Appear So Often
A good example of this is the famous isekai genre.
The basic idea is extremely easy to understand: a character ends up in another world, gains some kind of power or starts a new life, and has to deal with the problems of that new world.
This doesn’t mean that every isekai is created with foreign audiences in mind. But the ease of selling this type of story in different markets certainly helps explain its huge presence in the industry.
The same can happen with other genres that have concepts that are easy to present to international audiences.
There is another important detail: when an original work already has many readers, high view counts, or a large community, investors can see it as a less risky project.
It’s much easier to justify a multimillion-yen investment when you can point to a work and say:
“Millions of people are already following this.”
So Are Anime No Longer Made for Japanese People?
Calm down, that’s not exactly what this means.
Japanese audiences are still extremely important to the industry. After all, the production companies, studios, authors, and a huge part of the market are still based in Japan.
The point is that anime is no longer a product designed exclusively for that audience. Today, it is a global product.
And this may explain some of the changes fans have noticed in recent anime seasons. Certain types of stories receive multiple adaptations, while other works that seem interesting to Japanese audiences may have a harder time getting their chance.
In the end, it’s not necessarily the fault of the authors, viewers, or studios.
It’s the result of an industry that needs to recover increasingly large investments and has found the international market to be one of the main ways to do it.
And perhaps that’s the most interesting part of all: once you understand how money flows through the anime industry, you start looking at anime in a completely different way.
via Tokyo Keizai