japanamerica

Will digital piracy ruin the future of manga? Chigusa Ogino (photo: Toru Takeda) Author and manga translator Frederik L. Schodt once pointed out to me that many of Japan’s cultural products are embraced abroad just as they are declining at home. Ukiyo-e prints became the rage in Europe in the late 19th century, nearly 100 years after they’d peaked in Edo and Kyoto. Sake sales have been climbing steadily in overseas markets, with the value of exports doubling over the past five years and hitting a record in 2017, as they continue a decades-long slide in Japan. And now: manga? According to a survey by the Research Institute for Publications, domestic manga sales were flat last year, but the big reveal in the numbers was that digital outsold physical for the first time, rising 17.2 percent while print slipped 14.4 percent. Weekly manga magazines saw the steepest drop in sales, to below a third of what they were in 1995. A lot of digital manga content is cheap or costs nothing at ...

New markets may save Japan’s manga exports BY ROLAND KELTS [Simon & Schuster India] The North American manga business took a beating last decade. After peaking around 2005-06, the lethal storm of oversaturated shelves, a collapsing U.S. financial industry and the bankruptcy of major American bookstore chain, Borders, left publishers and distributors in a panic. Downsizing, restructuring and layoffs became de rigueur. “The bankruptcy of Borders in 2011 was definitely the final straw in forcing me to close down the office and stop print publishing,” says Stu Levy, the founder and CEO of Tokyopop, a pioneer and stalwart of the North American manga market that once introduced millions to the iconic “Sailor Moon” series. Levy believes rampant digital piracy and reduced print runs combined with the closing of Borders to force his hand. But after the losses sustained in the wake of Japan’s natural and nuclear disasters of 2011, manga publishers and their overseas partners see si...

SOFT POWER HARD TRUTHS / Japan's pop industries: blind at home, beloved overseas Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri By now it's no secret to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection: The gap between the popularity of contemporary Japanese culture overseas and its anemic industries at home has become a chasm. Anime conventions in the United States continue to proliferate, not only in cosmopolitan coastal cities like New York, Boston and Los Angeles, but also in more rural areas in Ohio and Tennessee. Annual attendance at these conventions is record-breaking. Sakura-Con in Seattle in late April, the convention I most recently attended as a guest, tallied 19,040 individual attendees this year. Elmira Utz of the Asia-Northwest Cultural Education Association, a host of Sakura-Con, notes that their celebration of Japanese pop culture fed roughly 50 million dollars into Seattle's economy from 2006 to 2010. Not sneeze-worthy numbers in post-Lehman shock economies. Yet ...