Anime piracy as a demand creation and sales generation phenomenon
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.
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March 26th, 2008 - 16:38
What would you think about the major anime companies trying to do with anime what Apple did with music?
March 26th, 2008 - 17:35
W4 – American distributors are already trying to do that, with downloadable free or fee episodes. Amazon’s Unbox has some – few, but some – anime episodes for $1.99/episode download.
The biggest obstacle in regards to that model over here are the Japanese companies themselves, which refuse to acknowledge the difference in the distribution model between their domestic market (saw it, want it) and the international market (may or may not have seen it, would like to try it out first before committing money and don’t have instant TV access to it.)
Cheers,
Erica
Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com
March 26th, 2008 - 18:46
Although I’m by no means a supporter for piracy per se, I refuse to be one of those haters who think it is ALL bad and should be completely eliminated. Piracy can be as much as a useful tool as it is a destructive force, and to only consider it the latter I think is not only a mistake by incredibly foolish and close-minded.
Thanks for bringing attention to this article. Now I have something else to rant about.
March 26th, 2008 - 19:39
Kind of semantic not only really tangential to your post, but ever since there was a somewhat lengthy discussion on the amrc-l listserv about all of this talk about Japan’s “soft power” and how they don’t REALLY have soft power as it was defined in the book where it was coined, I’ve been skeptical about the term. The “power” with soft power according to the book was that these cultural products symbolized something, so while American products symbolized freedom to people in places like the Soviet satellites, Japanese pop culture really doesn’t symbolize anything.
To put it another way, people could imagine these oppressed people in places like Poland or Czechoslovakia in the 80’s seeing movies or eating McDonalds, and since these were appealing products, each little bit of that would make America’s values of democracy and capitalism seem better than the communist values that weren’t giving them Levis jeans or Michael Jackson. But by watching Naruto, I’m absorbing what exactly?
March 27th, 2008 - 04:42
I spend thousands of dollars a year on anime/game figures and merchandise. Surely that counts for something?
Regarding cultural exports, I believe it’s an indicator of a country’s standing in the eyes of foreigners. Of course this isn’t always true, but think of how many shows get exported out of China or Russia? Not a whole lot.
A generation of Chinese or Korean kids raised on anime would probably not dislike Japan as much as their parents and grandparents.
March 27th, 2008 - 09:59
W4, I suspect that the anime companies would probably act like the big music majors and that a third party from outside the industry, like Apple for Music, will have to cause enough disruption to shift the way sales and profits are made.
Erica, you know the Japanese industry better than me – I get the feeling that the picture you paint fits in the broad strokes, though I also suspect that some companies with more international success (e.g. Bandai-SUNRISE for the franchise Gundam, Production IG for Ghost in the Shell) increasingly subscribe to the conventional US media model. Even in Japan, fans (and peer anime studio) are careful to keep homages, parodies at a very far arm’s length.
nckl, glad you found the article extract interesting. Might be a good case of disruptive technology a la Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma and Schumpter’s creative destruction.
jp, soft power is a notoriously imprecise term that has many critics. The Otmazgin article reviews some of this literature early on. But the idea is simple and intuitive enough that, after Joseph Nye’s 1990 Foreign Affairs article, it’s entered into the mainstream journalistic lexicon and refuses to die.
uinreli, as Erica points out, the Japanese companies don’t seem to know what to make of foreign markets. This might change if it grows significantly. Fans who bypass DVDs and just buy other merchandise may contribute to the Jp bottomline but local distributors of DVDs will be more hardpressed.
The final section of the Otmazgin article draws on large N survey data as well as in-depth interview data to argue that the success of cultural exports reflects admiration of Japan’s development and ‘cool’ and continued export entrenches this, it also finds that many young people also make a sharp distinction between Japanese culture and Japanese politics/foreign policy. I think this is persuasive and fits with research done by Chris Hughes (particularly the section on the varied historical roles of Japan in Chinese nationalism).