Seriously?! How the hell can Japan export anime jobs? That's ridiculous.
Reporting from Tokyo –
Aya Yokura spends her days hunched over white sheets of paper, drawing intricately costumed characters whose creation can be painstaking and time-consuming.
For the last two years, she has spent up to 100 hours a week at her workstation – a low-paying, labor-intensive job that helps bring Japan's famous style of animated cartoons to life. Although the 26-year-old earns only about $10,000 a year and lives with her mom to make ends meet, she and a few thousand Japanese artists like her fill a crucial role in the technical process of creating this visual entertainment form, known as anime.
But even as anime's popularity grows worldwide, the Japanese artists who do much of the work are finding their jobs at risk.
"I left a Tokyo Disneyland job, which had benefits and a higher pay, to pursue this dream" of being an anime artist, said Yokura, who works on the popular series "Naruto" and "Bleach" for the animation production studio Pierrot Co.
The problems plaguing the industry are numerous. Seeking lower costs, production companies for decades have been outsourcing the work to animation companies in South Korea, India, Vietnam and elsewhere, where scores of trade schools have cropped up and artists can be hired more readily.
More recently, competitors in China are cranking out their own lines of films and anime shows, in an effort to draw business away from Japan. Piracy is also on the rise, as bootlegging flourishes on YouTube and other Internet sites. And the popularity of the art form is cooling at home in Japan, as video games and the Web compete for consumers' time and money.
The domestic industry oversaturated the TV market, which led to fewer hits and more shows being cancelled. (The number of anime TV series being created in Japan has been cut by almost half since 2007, according to the trade group Japan Animation Creators Assn.)
As a result, experts say, the Japanese cultural icon that became well-known through hits such as Osamu Tezuka's "Astro Boy" – and the generations of artists behind it – is in peril.
"Japan risks losing its cultural icon, and part of the reason is because we are losing animators," said Yasuki Hamano, media professor at the University of Tokyo.
Read full report here
Reporting from Tokyo –
Aya Yokura spends her days hunched over white sheets of paper, drawing intricately costumed characters whose creation can be painstaking and time-consuming.
For the last two years, she has spent up to 100 hours a week at her workstation – a low-paying, labor-intensive job that helps bring Japan's famous style of animated cartoons to life. Although the 26-year-old earns only about $10,000 a year and lives with her mom to make ends meet, she and a few thousand Japanese artists like her fill a crucial role in the technical process of creating this visual entertainment form, known as anime.
But even as anime's popularity grows worldwide, the Japanese artists who do much of the work are finding their jobs at risk.
"I left a Tokyo Disneyland job, which had benefits and a higher pay, to pursue this dream" of being an anime artist, said Yokura, who works on the popular series "Naruto" and "Bleach" for the animation production studio Pierrot Co.
The problems plaguing the industry are numerous. Seeking lower costs, production companies for decades have been outsourcing the work to animation companies in South Korea, India, Vietnam and elsewhere, where scores of trade schools have cropped up and artists can be hired more readily.
More recently, competitors in China are cranking out their own lines of films and anime shows, in an effort to draw business away from Japan. Piracy is also on the rise, as bootlegging flourishes on YouTube and other Internet sites. And the popularity of the art form is cooling at home in Japan, as video games and the Web compete for consumers' time and money.
The domestic industry oversaturated the TV market, which led to fewer hits and more shows being cancelled. (The number of anime TV series being created in Japan has been cut by almost half since 2007, according to the trade group Japan Animation Creators Assn.)
As a result, experts say, the Japanese cultural icon that became well-known through hits such as Osamu Tezuka's "Astro Boy" – and the generations of artists behind it – is in peril.
"Japan risks losing its cultural icon, and part of the reason is because we are losing animators," said Yasuki Hamano, media professor at the University of Tokyo.
Read full report here
