Comments on: Anime piracy as a demand creation and sales generation phenomenon

By: Zyl

Zyl — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:59:51 +0000

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).

By: uinreli

uinreli — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:42:53 +0000

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.

By: jpmeyer

jpmeyer — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:39:01 +0000

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?