It’s official now… plans for an animation/manga museum and research center has been formally canned.
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Spotted via Danny Choo… an essay at the BBC ruminates on the population decline in Japan, and cites male obsession with the fantastical women of manga and anime as a potential contributing factor. (Sankaku Complex has a few more reactions from 2ch, the popular Japanese BBS that was featured in the Train Man manga.)
I don’t think the writer was being quite so serious as to warrant the most scathing and defensive responses from 2ch, although Japanator points out that there are far simpler explanations for Japan’s plight that Robin Lustig obtusely chose to ignore: the increasing number of people, male and female, placing career ahead of family, and the overall longevity of the population. On the other hand, if anime and manga were in fact the main causes behind the Japanese not getting it on in record numbers, then perhaps we should start handing them out to students as contraceptives, or export them to countries with overpopulation problems…
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The Anime Almanac is troubled by Anime News Network’s coverage of new shows implicitly obtained via fansubs, in an apparent effort to compete with anime blogs that do the same quite openly. Have they overstepped professional boundaries? I seem to recall a news reporter being fired over an early review of Wolverine based on a pirated early print… shouldn’t that same standard be applicable for online media? And is this hypocrisy given ANN’s initial criticisms of anime streaming site Crunchyroll?
Most importantly… do the various anime and manga companies that sponsor ANN care? This is perhaps the only question that matters, and I lament that it is.
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Andrew Wheeler points out the logical fallacy (or ignorance) of those demanding lower prices on e-books… most of the fixed costs of producing a book is the same whether the book is print or digital, which means the pricing of new e-books releases still must follow the same pattern as that of print in order to recoup expenses at the same rate. That’s assuming the digital version can sell the same or better than print… an eventuality perhaps, but far from current reality.
I absolutely agree with Wheeler, except with one caveat: this is true primarily for traditional, mid-to-large publishers. The e-book cost-of-entry for a boutique or self publisher is much lower than print, whose affordability depends on the economies of scale. Without the kind of overhead that larger operations require, self publishers can and should explore lower pricing. This was the promise of internet publishing all along, wasn’t it? (Found via Journalista)
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The Asahi Shimbun gathers up reactions to the manga version of Mein Kampf, both from within Japan and from abroad, although the main reason I’m linking to this article is this short blurb:
Under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, however, Japanese publishers are entitled to publish a translation of a foreign-language book released in 1970 or earlier as long as no other translation was published within the first 10 years of release.
Wow. I wonder if this works the other way around too? Anyone interested in pre-70s manga?
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Is it hypocrisy? Maybe, but it’s also simply an attempt to play at the long game, which is vital to those of us whose livelihood depends on anime thriving. Consider this:
I’ll start by setting up some basic facts we’re all aware of and a few educated guesses: I suspect that no one worth listening to on this debate denies that fansubs have played and continue to play an immense role in how fans become aware of specific series in the first place. Correct?
Now we’re moving into some mild speculation: 89% of the US anime industry is character goods, presumably many (most?) of which gets purchased by people who did NOT purchase the anime content, on DVD or otherwise.
I am of the opinion, having been on the fan side of this scenario for many years, that if fansubs magically disappeared tomorrow, those fans would almost certainly NOT move on to buying DVDs. Some might move to legitimate online copies (which make almost no one money at this point, they’re simply a legal alternative, as was stated at NYAF’s State of the Industry panel). These people may then NOT buy those character goods, potentially resulting in more of a drop in the size of the industry than if they were still watching fansubs. I am NOT suggesting this justifies fansubs in any way, just read along before accusing me of that.
If you agree with the above points, then you can kind of see the equation: fansubs + fans = promotion for anime = sales of merchandise, low sales of content, fans – fansubs = anime is not promoted = loss of merchandise sales, probably only mild gains on the sale of the actual content.
What I, and I presume ANN, and many many blogs are attempting to do is establish a framework to replace fansubs in that equation. That is to say, we’re trying to find ways to promote new series so that fans get used to coming to us, coming to websites where they can find the information about what shows are coming out, what they’re about, etc. As more and more shows become legally available so quickly here, as in this season with Crunchyroll claiming they’ll have 50% of all (non-child-oriented) anime in Japan, we can link out to the legitimate sources, making things painfully convenient for readers, for whom even BitTorrent can be a hassle (hence Crunchyroll’s initial popularity as a fansub haven).
As I mentioned at the beginning of this little essay: it’s a long-term goal, and the current phase of it is to build that framework and build the audience for it. In the short-term this may mean for ANN that they’ll be watching and reviewing fansubs, but it’s done in the name of reaching the same goal as Mssr. VonSchilling has. He may say that the ends don’t justify the means, but in this case I think they do.
As for advertisers caring about some ANN writers watching fansubs for review purposes…of course they don’t. From a bottom-line standpoint, it’s better for FUNimation if 50,000 people watch fansubs and 500 people buy DVDs than if no one watches fansubs and 50 people buy DVDs. Especially if some of those 50,000 people buy merchandise for those titles! It’s simply practical business at this point.
I believe we are moving towards better things for this industry, but it takes a lot of education for fans, for American licensing companies, for Japanese content owners– it’s happening, but not overnight. In the meantime, attempts such as Scott’s to “boycott” ANN in order to bring “awareness” to the issue is, in my opinion, ineffective at best. At worst, his attitude puts people so on the defensive about their fansub habits that they become HARDER to reach, it becomes harder to educate them, harder to push that watching legally is “Cool” (and yes, that is something I know many bloggers on many sites are actively attempting to push).
I’m sorry for going on so long and moving into something a little personal now, but I do wish people who flailed about these things realized what a difficult and precarious position we writers are in on this. The onus of fan education is, for the most part, on us, and we have to find a way to say “do the right thing, kids!” that doesn’t cause them to just laugh or tune out like they would for a bad PSA. And we ALSO have to still give them the information that they want in order to ensure that they come to us, in order to keep our livelihoods AND so that we continue to have some power to push the “legit is cool” mindset in the first place! It’s not an easy task and I have no idea if I’m at all effective at it, but it would be a lot easier without someone trying to convince people that you’re destroying the industry that you love in spite of every attempt that you make to help it. They’re just quieter, subtler attempts than Scott’s.
…But I should end this by saying that Scott is a *really* great guy, I’ve known him a couple of years now and I probably owe him a drink after all this ;) He and I (and ANN, and many others!) really have the same end goal: we want both the US and JP industries to break out of this slump and we want fans to support the people who make the content they love. We simply have a disagreement about how to go about it. :)
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If we’re playing the ‘How ethical is….’ game, I tend to think ANN’s recent ‘pledge drive’ to buy a new server (they have the budget in January for three, but want one early) is a lot more distasteful. A for-profit business, a *growing* for-profit business, hitting up readers for donations towards standard business expenses? Mmmm.
ANN has always struck me as a nice encyclopedia/press release site wrapped around questionable editorial leadership/content. Operates as a for-profit, but is run like a fan blog.
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Thanks for the thoughtful post Gia and I agree with you to a degree.
I don’t have a lot to say about Scott’s piece but it really is beating a dead horse; ANN, if they were to function like a reporting service that gives fans, not industry bobbleheads, the low-down, then reporting on fansubbing/fansubs is totally reasonable as fansubbing is a sizable portion of our fan culture and consciousness. It seems to me that it is more a matter of hurt feelings that are solidified into false dichotomies between people who deals in the industry and industry-related things and fan related things. There are no logical contradictions between the two, as Gia pointed out; it’s about the bottom line and I think even fansubbers desire a prosperous, flourishing anime industry.
It’s just that the crappy way our copyright law works in the new millennium becomes a nucleus that a lot of this unnecessary, us-versus-them mentality crystallizes around.
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Unfortunately, Gia is repeating the same ‘yeah, it’s illegal but it’s a good thing’ idea that fansubbers have been for years. How is illegally obtaining any kind of content a good thing in any way when it hurts the original creator as much as ‘The Man’. If this argument were true, would Japan be outsourcing such a large quantity of its animation to Korea compared to a decade ago, 2 decades ago? Obviously, it is a crystal ball question and impossible to say. But if you can’t make as much money off your product because more people are acquiring it without paying for it, then as a business you have to find a cheaper way to make it; hence outsourcing, which is an evil word to most Americans.
I cannot argue with Gia’s idea that the real money is made from merchandizing as it is quite true, on some levels. Many large series are created with the expectation of making large amounts of profit off the toys, Gundam being an excellent example. But what about so many anime series with their original beginning as a manga? The idea that the original creator (mangaka), who sold the rights to the anime production company, will make money off the toys, shirts, cd’s, etc., down the line is a tough sale for me. Especially, if one were to use the argument that watching fansubs quickly gets the news about the series out there so American fans can buy the merchandise and the money will eventually make it back to the original creators hands seems very far fetched. Much of the merchandise takes close to a year to make it to the U.S. and by then fansub conneasuires have moved onto to other newer shows.
What I really don’t understand is this idea that American companies licensing and releasing anime can’t promote their own product. The idea that fansubbers lay the golden egg that leads to the eventual sales for American companies, profits for the Japanese anime production company, and the original creator is just really odd to me. Granted, I’m a trained biologist and don’t have a degree in business or economics, so I could just as easily be as wrong as anyone else here.
In my opinion, if easy internet access to fansubs were completely wiped off the map and fans could only obtain anime through moving to Japan or checking American licensers websites and brick and mortar stores (like a decade or so ago), fans would still be able to find information from the companies legitimately releasing anime here in the U.S. Plenty of fansub watchers that never buy legal DVD’s would quit watching anime because they don’t want to pay for it. However, those of us purchasing DVD’s would continue and many fansub watchers would buy some DVD’s, hence increased profit for the legal chain of distributors and rights owners.
It is probably because I’m from an older generation, but I have never understood the big deal of watching a show from a foreign country the week it originally airs. So I have to wait a year, the same amount of product becomes available for purchase, it is just staggered on a time scale. Will American fans miss some shows because American companies didn’t license it and fansubbers would have made it available? Sure, just like we miss a lot of manga that never gets licensed. That sucks, but that’s life, you can’t always get what you want, but life doesn’t come to a screeching halt.
I just want to finish my tirade with an apology for its length and one last thing. I could never watch fansubs or read scanlations for one major reason: it is illegal acquisition of an intellectual property. I know struggling musicians, writers, artists, and actors and it bums me out when I see them eventually give up on their dreams to join the rat race I live in. Artistically creative people lose their ability to pay for living expenses when people illegally obtain their creations.
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I NEVER said that fansubbing is “a good thing,” I said that it has promoted anime in the past and continues to do so now, which is a fact. Nor did I attempt to justify the continued existence of fansubs based on their own merits.
What I was trying to say– and I thought I was very clear, but perhaps not –is this: the predicament is now such that the US anime industry cannot simply go “cold turkey” from fansubs. It is simply unrealistic to expect fans used to them to give them up immediately, and too much of anime’s promotional machinery still depends on them, a result to some extent of US localizers tolerating them for so long.
This is an ongoing, organic process that involves, as I said, more education and innovation and a lot less loud tilting at windmills. Yes, it is slow. Yes, it would be better if everyone would just do the right thing and just started acquiring content only in legal manners right this second.
But ideals that exist outside of reality are nothing more than that: ideals that the vast majority of people will not live up to, leaving the people who cling to them nothing but disappointed. Those of us who make a living at this have to apply those ideals to the real life situation at hand and do the best we can, playing for the overall war instead of today’s battle.
I hope that clears things up a bit.
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You may not have come right out and said “fansubbing is a good thing”, but you did use some unsubstantiated statistics that “89% of the US anime industry is character goods, presumably many (most?) of which gets purchased by people who did NOT purchase the anime content, on DVD or otherwise.” I don’t know where you came up with the number that only 11% of anime merchandise sold in the US is DVD’s, but you are arguing that fansubbing is a good thing.
-> This is an ongoing, organic process that involves, as I said, more education and innovation and a lot less loud tilting at windmills.
If people are used to getting things for free, why would they ever voluntarily pay for it? Only if it becomes impossible to gain access for free, whether through technology, lawsuits, or business practices that force them to pay for the content they want, not through “education”, especially when those doing the “educating” are also doing the illegal act.
-> Yes, it is slow. Yes, it would be better if everyone would just do the right thing and just started acquiring content only in legal manners right this second.
I can’t help but feel that anyone who believes fansub watchers are going to grow a conscious and do the right thing (in any kind of numbers) is enjoying too much free content to understand reality.
-> But ideals that exist outside of reality are nothing more than that: ideals that the vast majority of people will not live up to, leaving the people who cling to them nothing but disappointed. Those of us who make a living at this have to apply those ideals to the real life situation at hand and do the best we can, playing for the overall war instead of today’s battle.
First of all, if you are making “a living” off of fansubs then you are making an illegal profit off of someone else’s loss of legal profits. So, you’re saying it doesn’t matter that this or that is illegal because everyone is doing it and I’ll never be friends with the people it really hurts so everything is okay? And your talk of “war” and “battles” is a poor taste in hyperbole. But let us go with it, what happens when resources are exhausted while losing “battles” because you think you will win the “war” in the end? In what you are trying to use this example for, what probably happens is the people legally making a living end up jobless.
Sadly, proponents of illegally acquiring merchandise will never change their mind and have all the time in the world to come up with excuses to “justify” their means.
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I apologize– I assumed most people reading would be keeping up with industry news enough to be familiar with the number. The 89% figure comes from JETRO, the Japan Export Trade Organization, as reported by anime!anime! back in April. That said, Simon is right that it points as much to Pokemon/Naruto/etc as anyone else– but they’re as much a part of this industry as the more adult proponents.
http://www.animevice.com/news/89-of-us-anime-industry-is-character-goods/897/That said, I can’t help but feel that you’re being deliberately obtuse– I don’t see how anything that I’ve said amounts to anything remotely resembling “everyone is doing it so it’s okay.”
What I have said– and I will give it one more attempt –is that slow and steady will win this race. That it is unrealistic to think that the problems we have will change overnight, and that the methods I am attempting to utilize are subtler and slower (and, I believe, more effective) than the louder and quicker methods advocated by some bloggers.
My tactics are not designed to change the minds of hardcore fansub watchers. They are designed to educate NEW fans coming in– to make them think, “why go to all the effort of installing BitTorrent and figuring out how to do stuff, when I can just watch a streaming video legally and support the creators who make it?”
See, the thing about fansubbers is that they don’t do it for money; they do it more or less for attention. I base this on the fact that shows that no one is interested in tend not to get picked up by fansubbers, and shows that don’t earn an audience in the first few episodes tend to get dropped by them.
From this I extrapolate that if you start siphoning off the audience, the fansubbers will slow down and not fansub as much, causing some of the more hardcore fansub-watchers to move to legal means, causing the fansubbers to slow down further, etc.
Secondly, I am not making a living off of fansubs. I am a full-time journalist working for a company that gives me a paycheck to write about anime news primarily, with some reviews. I have not reviewed a fansub in quite some time and have no plans to in the future. My paycheck depends as much on the industry (the people who might advertise on my site) doing well as it depends on fans being interested enough to visit the site.
As for your straw man argument about my terminology “war” and “battles” being in poor taste, you’re welcome to your own opinion of course, but it’s metaphor, not hyperbole. :)
If you disagree that my methods will work, that’s perfectly fine– but I hope you can see from what I’m saying that you and I are on the same side; we want fansubs to cease and fans to legally enjoy anime content and support its creators.
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Eh, I think everybody actually agrees for the most part. I wasn’t trying to argue per se, I just wanted to illustrate that these days, fan translation communities are doing more harm than good and when publishers and retailers tally up the budgets at the end of the day, they’re reasoning out that some series appeal to people who won’t buy it and some series appeal to people who will buy it. You point out here that there’s no point in trying to woo the hardcore scanner/dubber which I agree with, but I think it’s important to take a good look at the content and ask what inherent worth it has before we give it to that new generation coming in. If the biggest scan-famous series have no real value on the point of its very content, the new generation will only continue to view it as not worth a real buck.
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Hmmm…it’s true that fansubs have been promoting anime/manga since Fred Schodt was in college, but I don’t think it’s really quite as productive anymore. I can remember reading some Monster scans years ago and that directly led to my buying the entire series, but the fansub demographic has shifted to feeding the interests of people who just don’t want to buy.
I hopped over to OneManga and up at the top of the popular rankings you see: Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Fullmetal Alchemist, Reborn…the lower you get, you start seeing more unknowns, but overall, the popular spots are dominated by franchises that are readily available commercially and certainly in no need of any increased visibility. Probably the most ridiculous case is Vampire Knight at number ten: back in January ‘07 the book debuts at 16 for top manga sales http://precur.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/january-manga-numbers/ and the first scan chapter doesn’t appear on OneManga until May ‘07. You could argue that previously available scans helped, but OneManga itself has done nothing but provide a free alternative to buying the book.
For another lackluster look at scans informing sales, manga scan darling Maid-Sama, which still holds a spot at 43 on OneManga’s rankings, tops out at 237 for its debut published volume back in April in the ICv2 GN sales ranking: http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/14980.html. Compare that to the relatively unheralded Freakangels Vol. 2 at number 16 which, with Duffy’s pedigree, could be argued as fitting into that icky english manga genre everyone hates so much.
Any rate, there’s logic behind the idea that you can use established interests to lure people in for the fresh ideas, but showing people something interesting that they’ve never seen before, especially within niche markets, is never a bad way to sell. If you really want to, you can choose to appeal to someone who desires to read Naruto or Maid-Sama for free and gamble that they may also be interested in buying volumes of Welcome to the NHK, but it’s just a safer bet to try to appeal to a purchasing public and -their- interests in the market if you want people to make purchases. There’s just too much time and money across the anime/manga board being wasted trying to woo people who don’t want to buy when the purchasing fans make their interests pretty clear.
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> Hmmm…it’s true that fansubs have been promoting anime/manga since Fred Schodt was in college
Err—Mr. Schodt’s undergraduate career predates fansubs by nearly two decades. ^_^;
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I’m having trouble finding specific dates, but Dadakai was formed around the same time as that first link of yours, maybe a couple years after, so 1972 – 1974 abouts.
http://electricantzine.com/ea1-fred.html
They were basically a fan translation group and they actually shopped around for some legit publishing options, but didn’t have much luck Stateside.
That’s actually a pretty cool article though, they dip into the scan/sub thing a bit into it which is interesting because Schodt still looks at it as a big grey area.
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Oh man, if you can pull together a nice pre-seventies book, I’m on it.
How far back does erotic manga go anyhow? I’d really dig a history book on it if anyone ever had the time.
Note on your response to Wheeler: Yeah, ebooks seem cheaper for self-publishing, but if you have the big promo machines justifiably setting higher price points, Joe Indie is used to the idea of pricing his media higher to justify his lighter sales. The idea of competitive pricing just isn’t all that big on the independent scenes right now and if it did catch on, I think there’s a real possibility indie publishers will start turning on each other in a big way and the bigger publishers will just come along and pick whatever meat is left on the bones. Kinda like one of your ‘The more things change…’ scenarios.
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What I find odd is that the ANN issue has arisen now, when they have been doing it since 1999.
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Anime Almanac has not, to my knowledge, existed THAT long, although I believe it had some iteration prior to its current one. He really has become active in the last couple of years, and so probably only had access to any kind of confirmation re:fansub usage from ANN within that time.
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