AltJapan

Manga Artist Salaries

Top 100 Manga Artists Make Average of 70 Million Yen, Rest Make Average of 2.8 Million Yen (Yucasee Media)

Thinking of becoming a rich and famous manga artist? These stats might give you pause.

In 2009, some 5300 tankobon (volumes of a manga series) were published in Japan. The top 100 averaged a whopping 70,000,000 yen in royalties for their artists -- that's about $900,000 a volume annually for the top performers. Not bad! Sounds like a pretty good living.

But what about the remaining 5,200 artists out there? Their average annual royalty income was just 2.8 million yen -- about USD $35,000. For a year of work. Not counting expenses, of which a manga-ka has many. Not exactly conducive to a rockin' lifestyle, especially if you're living in one of the world's most expensive cities. And remember, that's the AVERAGE. Which means a significant amount are making significantly less than that.

The bottom line? It's extraordinarily difficult to earn a "middle class" standard of living as a manga artist. (Added 6/1: As mentioned in the comments, it's estimated one has to sell 120,000 copies of their works to even match the average salaryman's annual income.)

Related stories:

Manga! Manga! Poverty! Poverty!

"Love Hina" Akamatsu on the Manga Gap

(Correction 5/31: yes, I know I missed a zero in there at first. It's been fixed. These are the correct figures.)

Project A

Asahi.com: Veteran Animators Guide Young Ones in Making Anime at Government Expense (Japanese Language)

In spite of what the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry would have you believe about "Cool Japan," the anime industry is in serious trouble. Perhaps the biggest problem is that appallingly low salaries have hollowed out the talent pool to the point where even Academy Award winning directors like Hayao Miyazaki can't pull together enough people to animate an entire film by hand anymore. But finally, it seems, the Japanese government has started putting their money where their mouth is.

In an effort to groom more key animators, who create the key cel frames required to make any anime film, the Agency for Cultural Affairs commissioned the creation of four short animated films. The stipulation for receiving the 3.8 million yen subsidies was that each production trained five or more young animators. According to the Asahi.com article, the trainees spent several months under the tutelage of experienced anime directors learning the ropes of key animation.

Dubbed "Project A," details can be found on the Janica website. The four films are "Kizuna Ichigeki" (Ascension), "Ojiisan no Lamp" (Telecom Animation Film), "Banno Yasai NinNin Man" (P.A. Works), and "Tansu Watashi" (Production IG). A trailer for the films can be seen here, and they will be airing both on TV and in a limited arthouse theater run this week.

Is this a ray of sunshine among the storm clouds hanging over the anime world, or is it too little too late? It's hard to tell. There's no question that it's a step in the right direction, but there's also no question that it addresses the symptoms (the shrinking talent pool) rather than the root causes (a production pipeline that strips studios of their royalties and vitality). It's going to take more than subsidies to change the status quo, and it's telling that this tiny bit of good news is the best to come out of the industry in a long while.

Anime Slump: Decade Two

Anime creator looks abroad for a revival (Asahi.com)

It's dangerous to assign too much meaning to the comments of a single individual, but when one of the key staff members of cutsey-girl juggernaut The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya blames the anime industry's woes on moé, you know things are headed for trouble. Remember the State of the Anime Industry 2009? Sad to say things aren't looking any brighter in 2011.

Tough Love, Tomino Style

Global Voices Online posted a great translation of a Japanese blog-response to a magazine advice column answered by Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino. But I actually found the original column interesting enough to warrant translation in and of itself . Here it is!

Old Men's Jump

Associated Press: China making anime push as Japan hits slump

Tomoko Hosaka quotes me in this piece on China 's mounting successes in the field of animation. Does the country pose a real threat to Japan's anime industry, or are they just another "acetate tiger"? Truth be told much of the content currently being produced in China is kids' fare, but the same could be said of the Japanese animation industry fifty years ago as well. 

Speaking of kids' stuff from fifty years ago, one producer Hosaka interviewed cited Osamu Tezuka as an example of what sets Japanese anime apart from that produced abroad. He's absolutely right, but not for the reason he thinks. 

Tezuka was a visionary with the storyboards but not so much with the balance sheets. He successfully established a marketplace for televised anime, but the absurdly low sums of money he agreed to per episode established a culture of poverty that persists in the industry to this very day -- a phenomenon popularly known as "Tezuka's curse." While it's true that his characters enjoyed massive popularity throughout the world, it's also true that his company went belly up in 1973. One thing is for sure: no matter beautifully executed classic "golden era" anime might be, it's no guarantee of future success.

Anime Decade

Anime Decade: From 'Japan Cool' to 'Cooling Off'  (CNNGo)

It hit me while I was writing this article: the story really reads like the plot to some post-apocalyptic anime flick.

A ragtag group of heroes rises from the ashes of war in search of a better life, only to find themselves facing an entirely new threat of destruction. Only this story isn't fiction. Our heroes are the postwar craftsmen and women who turned Japan's anime industry from a wannabe into a world contender. And the threat of destruction is, alas, largely self-created.

The early 2000s have been a roller coaster ride for Japan's anime industry. Read all about it on CNNGo.

Japanimation --> Chinamation?

Yahoo Japan News "Chinese Animation" as Seen By the Japanese Anime Industry (Japanese language)

Kazuo Obara, CFO of anime firm Madhouse Studios' Peking office, spoke to Chinanet about the difficulties facing the his industry. "The Japanese anime industry is stagnating. It's facing a harsh reality. Television station revenues are falling, the number of shows airing and the amount of money available for production in serious decline. DVD sales are dropping precipitously, a lethal development for production companies, which depend on DVD sales for some 40% of their revenues. The time has come for the Japanese animation industry to revise its thinking and devise a better business model for a new age."

Obara continued that if properly trained, Chinese animators could well usher in a new era of animation history, but said hurdles remain -- the main one being that of time. "China doesn't have the luxury of taking as long of a time as Japan did to become good at animation. They need to push onto the world stage immediately."

Reactions from the always-reliably-reactive 2ch crowd varied. "The anime industry is already saturated, so it's going to be extremely difficult to break through no matter how much technology you have," remarked one poster. "Given the political stance there, can anyone really create something truly free-thinking or thematically complex?" commented another. Others took a less thoughtful approach: "So the Japanese anime industry is going to sell itself out to the Chinese." And: "This is like an article from a North Korean paper! What is it really saying? 'Japan is out of the game, and China's giving its best?'"

Manga! Manga! Poverty! Poverty!

Tokyokeizai Online The Manga Industry's Dirty Secret: the 'Working Poor' (Japanese Language)

Are the declining fortunes of the Japanese comic industry threatening its once legendary diversity? That's what this article from Japanese economics website Tokyokeizai Online seems to suggest. In 1995, Weekly Jump, that cornerstone of otaku dreams, sold some six million copies every week. That number is down to 2.8 million today. And they aren't an exception: Jump is just one of many manga magazines struggling with slumping circulations and revenues.

The manga industry is structured such that weekly comic magazines are the "proving ground" for new content that are eventually collected into pocket-sized tankobon volumes. That's where the real money is made, especially when a series is turned into an animated show or film. Or at least it was. Nowadays, the hits sell like wildfire and the non-hits don't move at all, forcing editors to become far choosier about the content they select for publication.

"The industry is struggling; there's a sense that the marketable standout series have been exhausted," according to Masaharu Kubo of The Research Institute for Publications. "Now the market continues to polarize into series aimed purely at the mainstream, and series aimed purely at otaku." In other words, the niche stuff that makes the Japanese comic scene so great is becoming a much harder sell.

The situation has a trickle-down effect on those who actually create manga as well, of course. Generally speaking, a comic artist can't turn a profit based simply on the per-page rate they're paid for publishing their comics. Particularly interesting is the economic profile of artist Chin Nakamura, creator of the series "Gunjou." Although she is paid from 9,500 yen to 12,350 per page of work, crushing deadlines require her to hire numerous assistants, cutting deeply into her revenues and in some cases forcing her to borrow against her salary from the publisher.

Everyone agrees that the key to ensuring the industry's health is quality content. But the current system, which pretty much forces all published artists to take assistants to crank out huge volumes of content, is taking its toll on the creators. "If we don't take serious action," concludes Nakamura, "the system that allows so many quality manga to flourish will collapse." The article concludes that until the issue of the "working poor" artists is addressed, it will be all but impossible for the vast majority of manga artists to enjoy a decent standard of living -- but where will the money come from given the declining sales of comic magazines and books?

Girls Who Like Boys (Who Drive Giant Robots)

Gemuste: Anime/Comic Ranking By Gender (Japanese language)

Compiled by the otaku matchmaking service (!) Otakuma from a poll conducted between April and August of this year, here are the top anime series ranked by popularity by gender. 

Males

1) K-On!

2) The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi

3) Lucky Star

4) Gundam (all series)

5) Saki

Females

1) Gundam (all series)

2) K-On!

3) Code Geass

4) Macross Frontier

5) Evangelion / Toradora! (tie)

So what do we have here? Four out of five of the top shows watched by girls are about giant robots, while four out of five of the top shows watched by boys are about little girls! Welcome to the new world order, otaku-style...

Special Delivery: Anime Style

Men's Cyzo: Make the Broadcast Deadline Even if it Kills You: Anime Production Behind the Scenes  

More tales of terror from the anime industry in the latest issue of Men's Cyzo, which features a report on the insane deadlines faced by animators. That production companies often run seriously behind schedule is no major scoop -- Gainax was forced to deliver a series of barely-animated pencil sketches and watercolors for the final episode of Evangelion -- but the trend is accelerating: the massive number of televised anime episodes airing weekly in Japan is overwhelming the capacity of the country's anime production companies. 

"Searching through old posts on an anonymous BBS for animation industry insiders, talk of 'delivering episodes a few hours before broadcast' is common," remarks the article. "But there are rumors of 'delivering episodes thirty minutes before broadcast' as well." As you might expect, quality is often an issue in these situations. In extreme cases, this can lead to a television station outright refusing to broadcast an episode, resulting in penalty fees and restitution being demanded from the already beleaguered anime companies. (It's only happened a handful of times, though, due to the difficulty of finding replacement content at such a late date.)

Even now, when there are fewer series on air than several years ago, there are still far more episodes airing than there were a decade previously, in 1998. "Given the thousands of cels and hundreds of backgrounds that a staff needs to produce by hand," laments Cyzo, "it is a miracle that the vast majority of weekly anime episodes make it on air without fail."

The article concludes that while the fixed schedule of television forces animators to stick to deadlines no matter the cost, the transition to online distribution of episodes will almost undoubtedly herald in a new age of perpetually delayed release dates.