Basically, one of the highlights is that filesharers buy as much music as non-filesharers. They also buy more DVDs, games, merchandise and attend more concerts. This… sounds kind of familiar.

I haven’t bought a pop music CD in years. But I don’t download pop music either. I haven’t listened to the radio using a radio for ages. Once in a while I’ll still tune into BBC World Service and BBC3 via their respective streams on their websites. I haven’t bought a Hollywood movie DVD in ages either. That’s mostly because I don’t enjoy most of them anyway, I’ve given up going to cinemas on my own and I fly pretty often now so I can watch them on the plane if I really wanted to (but most of the time I end up watching Chinese, Korean or Japanese movies).

But I buy lots of anime DVDs and usually only of series that I’ve downloaded, seen before and anticipate wanting to watch again. And again. Stripey and I call this last criteria The Jeff Lawson Test.

Interest in anime and manga, buoyed by a constant bit-torrent of downloads, also feeds the desire to buy other undownloadable stuff. Like figures. T-shirts. Towels. Hug pillow covers. Etcetera. Conversely, fading interest (not another dreaded hiatus post!) in downloading anime also means the drying up of spending on goods and merchandise. And sometimes these matters have their own life cycles.

The diviners of the powers that be can still misread the stars and prescribe some pretty damned silly things like thinking the Water Spirit is really the Drought Demon and that the bearer of its Egg Must Be Killed. Which is why a translated copy of that Institute for International Law report, we needs it.

Oh, and in case anyone didn’t get the title: here and here.

(Manual LOL) Related Post: Anime piracy as a demand creation and sales generation phenomenon

©2012 hontou ni sou omou?. All Rights Reserved.

Got wind of this seminar, organized by the Creative Industries Observatory, via Anime Infatuation, and popped by Strand Poly yesterday. A quick rundown of my main takeaways and reflections on the presentations.

Extract from Andrew Osmond‘s abstract: ‘In American and Britain, Japanese animation has often been presented as something completely different from “cartoons”; darker, more adult and transgressive… [but] anime and Western cartoons have always inspired and mirrored each other.’ He showed several clips from older anime – you knew that they were really old because they were on VHS tapes – that showed how some anime had influenced even Disney as well as significant American and French influences in the apprenticeship works of Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon. My favourite was the Anne of Green Gables OP clip which Osmond said was more popular, in Japan, than Ghost in the Shell or Akira.

Dr Rayna Denison was having a field day filling a huge gap in the academic literature on anime in English (e.g. by Susan Napier, Steven Brown (?), Antonia Levi, Sharon Kinsella etc.) which she claimed was largely concentrated on texts (the anime itself), consumption and fandom but almost nothing has been written about production, the studios and the industry in Japan. A great reminder that anime isn’t just a medium, style or genre but also an economic and industrial activity that needs to make a profit in order to survive. Point that aroused the most interest from the audience was how amateur cosplay was banned at TAIF and all cosplayers were professionals hired by the studios, an interesting dynamic of how industrial players have been able to tap into fan activity and transform it into professional activity.

Dr Yoko Ono‘s paper made pretty big claims about how the popularity of disaster, catastrophic and apocalyptic anime reflected the alienation of Japanese youth from adults and extended it by claiming that its popularity outside Japan reflected resonance of other countries’ youth with distrust of adults who are no longer seen as mentors or models, who are no longer willing/able to care for nor guide the youth. I haven’t read the paper itself but it might suffer from problems of causal inference e.g. how do you prove that popularity of dystopian anime is caused by ideological/cultural identification rather than, say, marketing? Also, there’s a problem of selecting on the dependent variable; the prophecies of Nostradamus, which she cited a lot as an influence in anime and popular culture, was thoroughly parodied in the popular Keroro Gunso which is hardly a dystopian anime/manga. Dr Ono is obviously an Evangelion fan and drew the majority of her references from the TV series; I was also itching to ask her about her views on Rebuild but there wasn’t much time for Q&A in her slot.

Emma Hayley of SelfMadeHero talked about how she had worked with UK-based Japanese and non-Japanese artists to produce manga Shakespeare that was well received by teachers of English literature, particularly those working with young children, as well as British government agencies like the DTI and the British Council as well as winning recognition from the Japanese MFA whose otaku minister Taro Aso had created a prize for international manga. However a British employee with the Japanese Embassy gave a more cynical take on the warm bureaucratic/political reception was because the Brits were happy to be associated with something cool and fashionable and the Japanese were pleased at the seeming success of their cultural imperialism. LOL There was a Shakespeare purist in the audience who regarded this as sacrilege; Hayley’s comeback was (1) Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed and watched, not to be studied in the classroom; (2) the manga could serve as an entry point for children to get into the full text. Someone should have asked the old fuddyduddy to watch GONZO’s R&J (see jpmeyer’s take) – bet he’ll be well and truly frothing at the mouth. LOL A pointed question from a member of the audience was: ‘What are you doing to do when you run out of Shakespeare plays? There’s not that many popular ones.’ Thankfully, there are lots of other classics of English literature to adapt. And, if I might add, whose copyright has expired.

Which leads nicely on to Dr Hye-Kyung Lee‘s paper on scanlation which went into a lot of ethical debates related to fansubs that anime bloggers will be familiar with. This was backed up by impressive interview work with scanlation group founders and leaders as well as those working in the manga publishing industry. Clear difference between music filesharers (an ethic of resistance and industry hostility) and scanlators (an ethic of ‘love of manga’ and ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with industry that saw it as a means of promotion, marketing). Points from the audience included points about copyright law (not a clear case of infringement because of (non)licensing in jurisdictions where the scanlation takes place as well as fair use provisions), the influence of Japanese otaku culture (to buy lots of stuff is a way to show love) and scanlation being one case within a wider phenomenon of ‘user-led innovation’ (cf. Eric von Hippel) that has been observed in fan communities of kite flyers, surf boarders, inline skaters etc who innovate to fulfill desires that commercial entities are unable to address well and/or speedily enough as well as the validation of Bourdieu‘s concept of ‘the economic world reversed’ (see the 1983 Poetics article or the first chapter of The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, 1993). ‘Everyone OTL’ moment when someone quipped: ‘So the French are right after all.’ orz

Overall, from my academic POV, IMHO Dr Denison’s paper was strongest in terms of locating it within a theoretical literature, Dr Ono’s made the strongest claims about the applicability of her analysis to wider socio-political phenomenoa, Dr Lee’s was the strongest methodologically.

On the one hand, DEKKAI JEALOUSY that all of them really seem to enjoy doing research into this area (3 out of 5 having jobs that is mainly about studying, writing, teaching about anime in a university FTW); on the other hand, I’m not sure that I could do this kind of research because it’s like making a hobby into work. A really fun and interesting and (one of those rare and magnificient creatures) truly multidisciplinary seminar.

©2012 hontou ni sou omou?. All Rights Reserved.

Dr Nissim Kadosh Otmazgin, Kyoto University, recently published an article ‘Contesting soft power: Japanese popular culture in East and Southeast Asia’, International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Vol.8 No.1 (2007) which examines the relationship between Japanese cultural products and Japanese soft power. In the second section of the article, he discusses the proliferation of Japanese games, anime/manga, live action TV drama and karaoke in East Asia, concluding that:

East Asia’s pirated markets thus paved the way for the Japanese popular culture industries’ entry into new markets. The informal circulation of pirated versions of Japanese popular culture has effectively popularized the products in the markets they were legally banned from [e.g. South Korea]. By the time the Japanese popular culture industries were allowed to export to the newly opened markets, the demand for their products were already created and they could immediately generate sales. (Footnote 17) The consequences was a wider circulation of Japanese culture.

(17) In interviews with media industry personnel in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, some have indicated that the Japanese media companies are investing very little, or none, in fighting the piracy of their own products. This is in sharp contradiction to the American media companies. In this regard, a few have speculated that this was intentional, as ignoring piracy allowed the Japanese popular culture to become popular, while profit was generated after the markets had been opened and regulated (Author’s interviews, June to August 2004). [p.85]

There might be a more simple economic explanation. One standard line is that anime downloads cause sales to fall. This is true to the extent that the downloaded files are perfect or close to perfect substitutes for their products; raw watchers who do not hoard their non-fansubbed downloads (i.e. delete after watching) are the prime example of such a group. To them, it’s like trying to force them to buy the DVD for Friends or NCIS when they can understand English, have seen it on their TV already and don’t intend to rewatch that episode again EVAR.

Which has some parallels like what the market situation is like in Japan where most anime is broadcast on cable TV first and then released on DVD. Of course, the anime studios still make money from cable subscriptions but it’s arguable that DVD and merchandise (visual collection picture books, figurines, pillow cases etc.) are more lucrative and are an essential part of the revenue stream. In the latter case, the anime studio may make peanuts from the cable broadcast and zilch from the Winny downloaders and video streamers but sections of the latter group have been sufficiently seduced into buying stuff by the mere exposure to their pirated product.

I think that enforcement action against commercial bootleg pirates is reasonable particularly if legit releases are of decent quality, timeliness and sold at reasonable prices. But it seems to me that it would be more productive to leverage on the otaku culture that comes with Japanese anime, which Kadokawa’s ASOS Brigade campaign and Limited Edition DVD release was a shining example of how fans want to own something nice even though they’ve already seen it, nay, precisely because they’ve already seen it.

Conversely, if fans feel hounded and coerced, even with as a great a power as Anime Tenchou’s GEASS on Konata, I would not be too surprised if many would just drop the hobby completely, shift to something else, leading to Market Assured Destruction.

©2012 hontou ni sou omou?. All Rights Reserved.