01/03/2021
!!!!!Bad news 🗞️ !!!!!
TOKYO – Business has never been better for Japanese anime. And that is exactly why Mr Tetsuya Akutsu is thinking about calling it quits.
When Mr Akutsu became an animator eight years ago, the global anime market – including TV shows, movies and merchandise
- was a little more than half of what it would be by 2019, when it hit an estimated US$24 billion (S$31.6 billion).
The pandemic boom in video streaming has further accelerated demand at home and abroad, as people binge-watch kid-friendly fare like "Pokémon" and cyberpunk extravaganzas like "Ghost in the Shell". But little of the windfall has reached Mr Akutsu. Though working nearly every waking hour, he takes home just US$1,400 to US$3,800 a month as a top animator and an occasional director on some of Japan's most popular anime franchises.
"I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life," Mr Akutsu, 29, said during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. "I know it's impossible to get married and to raise a child."
The low wages and abysmal working conditions – hospitalisation from overwork
can be a badge of honour in Japan – have confounded the usual laws of the business world. Normally, surging demand would, at least in theory, spur competition for talent, driving up pay for existing workers and attracting new ones.
That's happening to some extent at the business's highest levels. Median annual earnings for key illustrators and other top-line talent increased to about US$36,000 in 2019 from around US$29,000 in 2015, according to statistics gathered by the Japan Animation Creators Association, a labour organisation.
These animators are known in Japanese as "genga-man," the term for those who draw what are called key frames. As one of them, Mr Akutsu, a freelancer who bounces around Japan's many animation studios, earns enough to eat and to rent a postage stamp of a studio apartment in a Tokyo suburb.
But his wages are a far cry from what animators earn in the United States, where the average pay is US$75,000 a year, according to government data, with senior illustrators often easily clearing six figures.
And it wasn't so long ago that Mr Akutsu, who declined to comment on the specific pay practices of studios he had worked for. wastoiling as a "douga-man," the entry-level animators who do the frame-by-frame work that transforms a genga man's illustrations into illusions of seamless motion.
These workers earned an average of US$12,000 in 2019, the animation association found, though it cautioned that this figure was based on a limited sample that did not include many of the freelancers who are paid even less.
In recent years, some of the industry's larger companies have changed their labour practices after coming under pressure from regulators and the public, said Mr Joseph Chou, who owns a computer animation studio in Japan.
Netflix has also gotten involved, announcing this month that it will team up with WIT Studio to provide financial support and training to young animators working on content for the studio. Under the program, 10 animators will receive around US$1,400 a month for six months.
But many of the smaller studios are barely scraping by and don't have much room to increase wages, Mr Chou said. "It's a very low-margin business," he said. "It's a very labour-intensive business."
He added that the studios "that manage to adapt are the big ones, the ones that are public".
Not all studios pay such low wages: Kyoto Animation, the studio that an arsonist attacked in 2019, is known for eschewing freelancers in favour of salaried employees, for example.
But those studios remain outliers. If something is not done soon, Mr Sugawara believes, the industry may one day collapse, as promising young talent drops out to pursue work that can provide a better life.
That was the case for Mr Ryosuke Hirakimoto, who decided to quit the industry after his first child was born. Working in anime had been his lifelong dream, he said, but even after years in the business, he never made more than US$38 a day.
"I started to wonder if this lifestyle was enough," he said during a video call.
"I started to wonder if this lifestyle was enough," he said during a video call.
Now he works at a nursing home, part of an industry where the high demand for workers in a rapidly ageing society is rewarded with better pay.
"A lot of people just felt that there was value in being able to work on anime that they loved," Mr Hirakimoto said. "No matter how little they got paid, they were willing to do the work."
Looking back at his departure, he said, "I don't regret the decision at all."
What do paradox? you think of this seemingly strange!!
