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Blood-, you are assuming that for some magical reason those 30 billion yen in licenses are majorly reducing the risk involved in a 1,750 billion yen industry by a significant amount (which are not all from Western countries, as countries like Saudi Arabia pay licensing fees). And also assuming that the anime industry has no access to means to reduce risk. Its not reality to assume that.

Without the ca. 20 billion yen of Western licensing fees the revenues of the whole manga/anime industry would be 1.2% smaller so instead of 300 shows and movies they would make 296 shows and movies a year. Not a significant difference.

Also, if Western tastes influenced Japanese pop cultural production so much during the 2000s why that decade was characterized by a shift AWAY from Western styled and sci fi stuff like Cowboy Bebop (1998) to hardcore Japanese slice of life stuff like K-On! (2009)?

In my opinion what happened in the decade from 1998 to 2008 was the full maturing of Japanese otaku culture. In 1998 the Comiket only attracted about 250,000 doujinshi fans by 2008 the number was 550,000. Simultaneously the number of doujinshi circles working in Japan increased a lot (doubled) while manga sales were decreasing, hardcore otaku stuff was booming. By the 2010s with hardcore seinen otaku stuff like Madoka and K-On! generating hundreds of millions of dollars in merchandise revenue, while the biggest box office smash of the decade is a body swap anime where the male character is shown enjoying sexually the female body from the inside: at this point we can safely say that otaku culture became part of mainstream Japanese culture. Since anime is relatively more popular among otaku than manga the relative size of anime industry increased vis the manga industry. Print media is dying while video is booming thanks to the internet, that includes the expansion of the consumption of Manga through video among younger Japanese: internet surveys show that manga is more popular among older otaku (age 23-65) whIle anime is more popular among young college aged otaku.

In essence manga's center of gravity in innovation shifted from the mainstream into way more hardcore moe stuff that is just the type of stuff most Western anime fans hate. So instead of pandering to Western tastes it shifted AWAY from it just during the time when manga/anime sales peaked in North America by 2007. Which just proves how insignificant the NA market is to Japan's pop cultural production: with the first generation of reviewers here at ANN all complaining about moe stuff like Nanoha back in 2008.

I think that historical factors had influenced the development of North American comics and animation to a certain degree. In all other countries of the world comics and animation and linked together but in North America they are divorced. While comics are a much larger share of sales in some other western countries like France. In France, comics make up 7-8% of the publishing industry, in NA, only 2% while French comics and animation are substantialy more varied than NA comics, I could even say that the best of Western animation is mainly French given the French animation I know.

While in Japan comics make up to 40% of the volume of titles in the publishing industry, that's bigger share of publishing than novels and magazines and I think in that case deeper cultural differences must be at play to explain the discrepancy rather than historical factors. The discrepancy of popularity is enormous even compared to France, which is the most developed Western comics/animation culture.

@ Jose Cruz - you are tossing around figures far too casually and you are using some that are suspect. First, I don't believe anybody knows for sure what the total value of license fees, royalty payments and - yes - direct investment (this does happen occasionally) from the West amounts to. As far as I know, those financial details are not made public. And don't forget about revenue created by Western fans who buy Japanese releases and merchandise directly from Japan.

Second, you don't seem to understand that reporting revenue isn't the same as reporting profit. There are unquestionably publishers and anime production entities that are doing quite well. There is also a whole host of anime studios that subsist on razor thin margins who only manage to stay in business because they pay their staff peanuts.

I've worked in the entertainment field and I'm sure the way things work here is the same over there. When you are trying to stitch together financing for a project, you get a piece here and piece there. Even companies that have their own financial resources are reluctant to fully risk just their own money. So in a jigsaw piece financing world, even 10 per cent of budget can be crucial. So just handwaving that manga as a whole generates x amount of revenue per year does not come close to explaining the full financing picture.

In a jigsaw puzzle piece financing world - which is the world of anime financing - without the grease of international money, some parts of the engine would start to seize up. Not the whole thing of course, but there is no doubt in my mind that the number of titles we are currently seeing would go down if that revenue stream dried up.

You throw our a statement that 95% of Japanese have watched Ghibli. Assuming for the moment that that is anywhere near accurate, I could easily say the same thing about Americans and Disney.

I always thought anime was niche in Japan aside from Conan, Gundam, Doraemon, etc.

Squall-Leonhart17 wrote:

I always thought anime was niche in Japan aside from Conan, Gundam, Doraemon, etc.

That's basically true from what I understand. Anime seems to be divided into two sorts in Japan: there is anime designed for children that plays during the day and there is "late night" anime which plays in the early hours of the morning that generally gets far fewer viewers than the day time shows.

First, one shouldn't talk about "anime", it's manga which is the real deal. Anime is a by-product of manga. In Japan manga is the core of the country's popular culture (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/05/26/reference/manga-heart-of-pop-culture/), it's more influential and popular than any other medium and has been more popular than live action movies since the late 1960's, in 2010 for every movie ticked sold, 10 manga books and magazines (which are often 800 pages long) were sold.

Manga's cultural impact in Japan was enormous and similar to the cultural impact of popular music in the West (like Jazz, Blues, Rock, Pop, Metal, Hip Hop, etc). Like popular music it started out among young people and is most intensively consumed by teenagers and young adults and like popular music it is consumed by all age ranges now. Like popular music it has mainstream stuff (One Piece, Red Hot Chili Peppers) and more "hardcore" underground stuff (Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, Entombed (a Swedish Death Metal band)). Like popular music it's more hardcore underground stuff is shunned by "mainstream society": A lot of the appeal of the otaku stuff is about rebelling against older people. For instance, adult men like to read/watch stuff like K-On! as a way to rebel against society (at least that was what The Moe Manifesto book said).

Most anime are essentially TV adaptations of manga (think Dragon Ball, One Piece, JoJo, Saikano, Kobayashi's Dragon Maid). They started out as a tie in to manga franchises (mainly to drawn viewers to buy the manga) and are the way Westerners consume manga. That's because westerners have a visual culture based on TV and movies, so it's easier for westerners to consume TV adaptations of manga rather than to consume manga directly (which tends to be quite expensive and sold mostly to Western hardcore fans). Most Western fans of manga tend to be comic book fans and since comic books are very niche in the west there are way less manga fans than anime fans in the west.

In other words, the North American anime fandom is essentially a small Western subculture defined as "western people who like watching TV commercials of manga".

But while manga is dominant, anime is getting more popular in Japan now as I said before, among college aged people near graduation (who are around 21-22) who self identify as otaku (which are about 40% of all), anime is more popular than anything else (manga comes in second, videogames in third and live action movies come in fourth place). So, it's plain wrong to say "anime is niche in Japan", saying that is like saying "popular music is niche in the US". Well, that depends in which band and genre you are talking about, Entombed is indeed niche in the US, Red Hot Chili Peppers? Not so much.

There are a lot of mainstream late night shows: Attack on Titan, Love Live and Seven Deadly Sins are late night shows and part of mainstream franchises that lots of people know about. Attack on Titan is perhaps as popular in Japan now as Dragon Ball was back in the day. Also, in manga they often advertise the anime in the manga (In this Corner of the World manga has advertising for the movie in the cover), the Kingdom Manga Japanese website is full of images from the anime. So, how can manga be mainstream while the anime that's advertised in the manga cannot?

Also one shouldn't think too hard about differentiating "kids stuff" or "adult stuff" either. These are terms more valid to western stuff (i.e. simplistic stuff like Disney animation and Nickelodeon cartoons). In Japan there are a lot of artistic masterpieces that are "kids" stuff: Hunter x Hunter (2011), FMA (2003), Princess Tutu (2003), Ashita no Joe (1967-1973) most of Miyazaki's movies, etc.In fact, Ashita no Joe is my favorite manga/anime of all time and it's a shounen manga while my favorite anime is My Neighbor Totoro (1988) which is like a movie for "5 year olds", but it's very different from the Western approach to "movies for 5 year olds".

By the way, JoJo's is classified as a kids manga while Love Live and K-On! are classified as an adult manga. Which shows how fluid these classifications can be.

Anyway, manga is popular in Japan because their culture is essentially different from Western culture: in the Western world the dominant mediums for fiction are literature and live action film, in Japan, they have another medium: manga. Anime is film made using manga-style art, hence, it is closer to the Western medium of film and hence easier for westerners to consume than the raw manga.

So, the West will not develop comics and animation to the same degree as Japan because the Western culture is fundamentally different. Japan developed the 2D world but western mentality is 3D and so fundamentally incompatible with the 2D mentality of manga.

ChibiKangaroo wrote:

You throw our a statement that 95% of Japanese have watched Ghibli. Assuming for the moment that that is anywhere near accurate, I could easily say the same thing about Americans and Disney.

It's accurate, I read in a newspaper a month ago or so. Now, Disney, an entertainment corporation is a very, very different thing from a film auteur such as Miyazaki. In Japan now everybody knows that Miyazaki's films are the real deal and movie critics when reviewing movies don't need to explain that his movies are "good despite being cartoons" like Roger Ebert said about a Ghibli film.

Miyazaki is perhaps more comparable to the likes of Spielberg, Coppola or Hitchcock. There are no animation auteurs in the west who are simultaneously popular and critically acclaimed.

@Blood-, The 30 billion yen figure of license revenues I got from a translated Japanese report on the anime industry in the years 2004-2005. I don't recall if it's from 2004 or 2005. The same report had figures for overall industry animation industry revenue and breakdown from the different sources: disk sales 100 billion yen, TV licenses, 85 billion yen, movie box office, ca. 40 billion yen, foreign license rights, 30 billion yen. Though it has been over 4 years since I read that report so these figures are not precise.

Jose Cruz wrote:

First, one shouldn't talk about "anime", it's manga which is the real deal.

You seem to be having trouble following the plot. For the last few responses, I've been talking about my theory that the profusion of late night anime titles in Japan has been made possible, in part, by profits derived from Western sources. In that context, discussion of manga is meaningless to my point.

As for some of your other points, like the so-called pointlessness of drawing a distinction between anime specifically aimed at kids and other kinds, I really can't be bothered doing the research that would show your contention simply isn't true.

I am folloing perfectly, thing is that you dont seem to understand that anime is not some isolated thing. Its part of a multi media project.

Late night stuff is made to sell manga and merchandise which are combined 75 times bigger source of revenue than licensing revenues from Western countries. Specially because most of these revenues are probably from day time shows like Dragon Ball and Saint Seya which are 100 times more popular in the West than late night shows which are watched only by a very small group of Western fans.

So, NA fans of late night anime are a tiny group. This tiny group mostly supports firms that distribute anime in NA and very few of those revenues go back to Japan where they are just a few billion yen (like about 3-4 billion yen from Crunchyroll) compared to domestic revenues of 1,750 billion yen for the whole manga/anime industries plus hundreds of billions from videogames.

Now, if Crunchyroll had like 25 million subscribers things would be different. With 25 million people paying 85 dollars a year that's over 2.1 billion dollars or about 190 billion yen, if a large fraction of those went back to Japan then the Japanese firms would increase their revenues by a significant amount and so it would significantly affect the industry: by adding abput 80-90 billiom yen to the Japanese market would justify producing more shows by a factor of perhaps several dozens per year, incerasing animaton output by 15-25%. But there are only 1 million Crunchyroll ssubscribers which is a too small of a market, they can only add a few billion yen in licenses which is not significant.

No, you don't understand. You think you do, but you don't. Yep, a lot of late night anime titles are adapted from manga. Naturally, the manga publisher who is probably on the animation production committee, hopes the anime will boost sales of the manga. Everybody on the production committee hopes the anime title will do well and generate merchandising potential. However, the the number of anime titles that actually accomplish these laudatory goals is relatively small compared with the number of titles that perform in mediocre terms or even poorly. So it's not like manga publishers are footing the full bill for anime production. You do not understand anime production financing and you refuse to educate yourself which, on this particular topic, makes discussion with you pointless.

Back in 2012, Justin Sevakis wrote a series of three articles about producing anime. Here's a link to the first of the three which then gives you links to the other two:
animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2012-03-05

Keep in mind the articles are a couple of year old and the digital (streaming) landscape has changed since then. Which by the way, makes the West MORE important to anime financing not less.

Justin Sevakis is the same guy who said that almost nobody in Japan knows their country produces animation... Anyway these articles make no quantitative arguments regarding the relative relevance of North America compared to Japan, Europe, Continental Asia, South America and other regions of the world. No quantitative argument means no argument: you cannot claim North America is a relevant substantial market for anime without quantitative arguments regarding the actual size of the revenues of NA vis other regions. Otherwise it's just a void exercise.

You claim that somewhat the North American anime market has been decisive in increasing the growth of anime production in Japan from 1995 to 2007. To prove your claim you have to show that North American licensing revenues were a major share of the revenues of companies who decided to produce anime and these shares increased a lot over the period 1995 to 2007. Its a quantitative argument pure and simple and one you never made. You just say stuff without empirical backing. And it's easy to see it's wrong on several levels:

North America is itself only a fraction of the world economy (about 17% of the world's GDP) so most anime foreign license revenues obviously don't come and never did come from North America anyway. Those foreign license revenues were always small on the aggregate compared to domestic revenues. They were 30 billion in 2004-2005 compared to 250 billion domestic revenues, they probably were already substantial in 1995 at 15-20 billion yen, so they increased by perhaps 10-15 billion yen while aggregate revenues of the anime industry directly increased by 100 billion yen. And those 10-15 billion yen increase includes revenues from many regions of the world not only North America. And I am not considering merchandise sales, manga, novels and videogames which are the major reason why anime gets made in the first place, this applies to late night shows even more than shows that air during the day: Attack on Titan was made to boost Manga sales, SAO was made to boost novel sales, the bulk of Madoka's profits came from merchandising revenues not disk sales. So, these 30 billion yen in revenues should be compared to 1,750 billion yen of manga, anime merchandising revenues plus revenues of novels, music and videogames. A K-On! soundtrack album for instance placed 1st in the Japanese music sales charts in 2010 which was year when the Japanese music market was bigger than the North American music market (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_music_industry_market_share_data).

So these are the numbers:

Domestic anime market: 250 billion yen
Domestic manga market: 500 billion yen
Domestic anime merchandise market: 1,000 billion yen

North American anime streaming revenues: ca. 10 billion yen assuming Crunchyroll corresponds for the majority and that all Crunchyroll subscribers are in NA (which is not true).
North American manga sales: 11 billion yen
NA Physical disk sales: 9 billion yen

And only a fraction of these NA revenues totaling about 30 billion yen go to Japan. Probably around 10-15 billion yen which is a magnitude of about 0.6-1% of the domestic revenues of the industry. That's not significant. Out of the 30 billion yen in license revenues I guess NA was about 1/3-1/4 in 2004-2005.

The fact is that NA is just a tiny market for Japan's pop culture and its not in fact relevant. Its perhaps less relevant internationally than other markets like Europe, Animax for instance was a 24 hours anime channel, had a global coverage except for NA since the fanbase in NA was too small. France was a higher variety of translated manga than NA has even though it's a much smaller market. While today China is certainly like 10 times more important than NA for Japanese pop culture industries given their fanbase potentially numbers around 200 million people although widespread piracy is a serious issue: the manga industry loses about 500 billion yen of revenues due to piracy, mostly due to the Chinese: manga losses to piracy in China are alone worth dozens of times the revenue from NA streaming.

North America had a tiny number of anime fans who are a small subculture that has no weight on the 2D Japanese industry that generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue. It's manga/anime is a major industry like videogames and Hollywood, it's not a small industry that can be severely affected by a small group of fans in some foreign country.

I will not post more about these facts. I guess your belief on the supreme importance of the small group of NA fans of Japanese animation for the industry is kinda like a religion. So we should agree to disagree: The West in general and North America in particular are not a relevant market for Japanese visual culture, never was and never will be.

Jose Cruz wrote:

Justin Sevakis is the same guy who said that almost nobody in Japan knows their country produces animation... Anyway these articles make no quantitative arguments regarding the relative relevance of North America compared to Japan, Europe, Continental Asia, South America and other regions of the world.

So, you write off Justin Sevakis so easily. I think that says everything we need to know.

@ Jose Cruz. You have a real hard problem with reading comprehension, don't you? But before I get into the specifics of that, Justin Sevakis has forgotten more about anime production in the last five minutes than you will ever know in your life. I know the idea that Western funds might actually help some anime titles to get greenlit fills your soul with an existential chill and the ridiculous arguments you trot out to hold that heinous possibility at bay are grimly amusing.

First, your point about a lack of quantatative numbers is true. Because nobody reports the actual value of license fees, royalties, direct investment and direct importation from Japan, nobody really knows the amount of Western financial "grease" that is in the anime production system. That's why I was careful to say my assumption that, over the years, this grease has probably meant more titles getting made than otherwise would have been the case is a theory, not necessarily a fact. However, you skepticism over a lack of quantitative figures doesn't seem to have any impact your continued fetish to quote numbers that are utterly irrelevant to the debate at hand. We'll get to those.

I'm making guesses, but unlike your meaningless figures, at least they are educated guesses. For example, perhaps there is absolutely no correlation between the fact that we begin to see a rise in the number of anime TV titles not long after anime starts to gain more popularity in the West, particularly North America. And a rise in popularity, of course, means more profit (not revenue, profit) flowing back to Japan. Yes, Jose Cruz, perhaps those two facts are COMPLETELY UNRELATED, but it is certainly not "wooga-wooga crazy" thinking to ponder that there might be a connection.

And just for clarification, I am using "the West" loosely as a term to describe any non-Asian sources of profit (not revenue) for anime of which North America provides the dominant share. Again, I don't have the exact dollar figures that establish the amount of money flowing back to Japan from North America but given the profusion of anime publishers here relative to other parts of non-Asia, it is obvious NA is the most important non-Asian market for anime. Which leads to the first of your howlers:

Quote:

North America is itself only a fraction of the world economy (about 17% of the world's GDP) so most anime foreign license revenues obviously don't come and never did come from North America anyway.

That statement was so surpassingly dopey that I had no choice but to burst out laughing. It's a classic Jose Cruz "argument" ... quote a statistic that has no bearing on the topic and hand and then try to draw a conclusion from it. Quoting GDP percentages has NO RELEVANCE when discussing a specific and specifically niche industry like anime. To use a generic example ... I'm willing to guess the revenues generated by the sale of perogies is greater in the Ukraine than in all of India despite the fact that India's share of the world's GDP outstrips the Ukraine's. Oh my god, I can't believe I even actually had to make that point.

Then you quote a bunch of numbers, including Japan's domestic revenue numbers for anime, manga and merchandising which are - as I've pointed out before - meaningless to my argument. Japan does not self-finance it's anime production. As Justin pointed out, a 13 episode anime series can cost between $2-$4-million US. That pie is made up of domestic sources and revenue that comes in from international markets. And even then, the only way anime gets made is by paying staff peanuts and outsourcing work to countries where animation can be done even more cheaply. So the fact that manga is a 1,000 billion yen domestic market (which only measures revenues, not profit) is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT to whether or not profits from international sources helps fund anime production. But, naturally, you being Jose Cruz, you will a) not understand that and b) repeat that meaningless number in a future post. And I will laugh.

And, of course, you completely mischaracterize my position by saying I attach a "supreme importance" to the influence of NA (and other non-Asian) sources of profit. My original contention was a theory that the number of anime titles would be lower if that profit wasn't available to help piece together the jigsaw puzzle method that is anime production. You are correct that I do not have the quantitative numbers to prove that ... just as you don't have the quantitative numbers to disprove it. But at least my educated guesses don't involve quoting global GDP figures as if they have some sort of bearing.

Blood- you clearly claimed that a large fraction of anime made is made because of the NA market and you claimed that the increase in anime producton from the late 90s to the 2000s was caused by that market. It's easy to see that if demand for animation were that large in North America the continent would have developed it's own animation industry which would fit better their local culture anyway.

I already showed the numbers which clearly proves that NA is not a very large market. I don't think I need to argue anything more. So I shouldn't say anything more. I don't feel like I need to explain why things like GDP figures were relevant for my argument.

TarsTarkas wrote:

Jose Cruz wrote:

Justin Sevakis is the same guy who said that almost nobody in Japan knows their country produces animation... Anyway these articles make no quantitative arguments regarding the relative relevance of North America compared to Japan, Europe, Continental Asia, South America and other regions of the world.

So, you write off Justin Sevakis so easily. I think that says everything we need to know.

His articles are full of inaccuracies. I don't think they they are completely useless but I think they might misinformation more than inform in many cases. For instance, I don't think he knows the relatively importance of disk sales for the anime industry, given that disk sales have been collapsing in Japan since 2005 while animation production increased over the same period that points out to its relative lack of importance.

Why he thinks disk sales are important? Because disk sales are important in his region (North America), because people there like to built up disk collections at home. In Japan, people don't usually acumulate large collections of disks. Disk sales are much lower in value than other things: anime disk sales in 2016 were only 72 billion yen while sales of manga and merchandise combined were 20 times that figure. Franchises that have anime shows rarely rely on disk sales as primary means of revenue, they are a very small fraction of total revenue and a declining fraction that does not reflect the whole market. Otherwise you would never develop a massive animatiom industry that produces 200 TV shows per year plus 100 movies and OVAs on ca. 800 million dollars of disk sales. However if you look at sales of related stuff like merchandise and manga plus TV rights the whole manga/anime complex is a 20 billion dollar industry in annual domestic revenues.

He also claims that mostly anime is niche in Japan, which is nonsensical statement: Anything is mostly niche anywhere! Or do you think the average guy on the street has heard all the 800 American movies produced in the US in a single year? No, he probably knows 10 or 15 out of the 800. Clearly, American movies are in fact almost always niche in the US: 90% of movies released in US theaters sell less than 5 million tickets. That is not an informative statement because it says nothing about the popularity of a medium: 95% of anything is niche anywhere. Live action film is a popular medium in the NA. In the same way, comics and animation are not popular mediums in NA for anything other than crude comedy. He also claimed that there are only 200,000 "anime fans" in Japan, first such kind of people don't exist: aniotas are anime otaku who are a different kind from Western fans and the figures I have seen from surveys points out to about 4-6% of the adult population or about 4-6 million people. That's a huge number for hardcore anime geeks.

The reality is that in Japan they have a different culture than in Western countries which allowed then to develop comics and animation as general mediums for narrative. So far, Japan is the only place on Earth that has actually done that. These cultural differences are deep and that has informed the research of serious scholars of the field. That's just a fact of reality and I notice NA people tend to deny that ("oh but in Japan comics are for kids too").

I think the reason for this kind of statements is that it's just too hard for some people to accept that other societies might have different cultural values that allowed them to develop certain mediums in ways that their own culture just can't.

Jose Cruz wrote:

Blood- you clearly claimed that a large fraction of anime made is made because of the NA market...

Here's the revelant part of my original post on this topic.

Quote:

My theory is that license fees and royalties from international markets (i.e the West) make some of the poorer selling titles more viable. In other words, one of the reasons there are as many late night anime TV shows as there might be because of us "anti-stylized artistic representation" Westerners.

Here's another statement:

Quote:

In a jigsaw puzzle piece financing world - which is the world of anime financing - without the grease of international money, some parts of the engine would start to seize up. Not the whole thing of course, but there is no doubt in my mind that the number of titles we are currently seeing would go down if that revenue stream dried up.

Notice I didn't say the number of titles would go down "by a large fraction."

Quote:

I know the idea that Western funds might actually help some anime titles to get greenlit fills your soul with an existential chill and the ridiculous arguments you trot out to hold that heinous possibility at bay are grimly amusing.

Notice my use of the word "might" and "some" as opposed to "do" and "by a large fraction."

That's what I meant earlier when I pointed out you have terrible reading comprehension.

Jose Cruz wrote:

I already showed the numbers which clearly proves that NA is not a very large market. I don't think I need to argue anything more. I don't think you understand that magnitudes really matter in this kind of thing. So I shouldn't say anything more.

Oh, like how North American's share of the world's GDP "proves" it couldn't possibly a substantial source of international profit for anime production? Laughing

Yeah, I'm still chortling over that one. Remember, I have never denied that the amount of money generated by anime in NA is small relative to what the domestic Japanese market generates. That's obvious. All I'm saying is that the the amount of money it does bring in helps to contribute to anime budgets. Justin Sevaksis wrote that a license (without royalties) for localizing a 13 episode TV title could bring in $130,000 in pre-sale money. Licensing fees can be higher, by the way. Anyway, on a $2-million dollar budget, $130,000 is nothing to sneeze at. It's not a huge percentage, but in a jigsaw puzzle piece financing world - which is a chunk of the anime financing world - missing $130,000 COULD be the difference between getting greenlit or not, especially if some of the production committee feels that the commercial viability of the title is risky, for whatever reason.

I want to stress that this a theory of mine, not something that I know for a fact. But only someone who was bizarrely mentally committed to the idea that Western money flowing into Japan has ABSOLUTELY NO IMPACT, NOT AT ALL, NO SIRREE BOB, IT'S A COMPLETE NON-FACTOR would not be at least willing to consider the possibility.

I never said it had zero impact. I said it had a small impact, like 2-3%. Which means that the total number of anime produced in Japan wouldn't change by a wide margin, I would guess something like 2-3% fewer titles without the NA market. Which is not nothing but it's nothing that would substantially alter the industry so that the variety of stuff we have wouldn't change. The 17% GDP figure means that the rest of the world is 83%, since Japan is only 5% of worlds GDP then the anime market outside of Japan would be perhaps 20% NA and 80% outside of NA. If 15% of the anime industry revenues are international then perhaps 3-4% are North American and 3-4% is not very substantial.

Usually to get the money back a 2 million dollars budget for a 13 episode series would require total revenues of 6-7 million dollars in revenues from different sources. The 130,000 dollar of a localization would contribute to 130,000 dollars out of these 6-7 million which is 2%. It helps but it's not something that would seriously alter the industry.

Manga/anime is not something that achieved globalization like Hollywood whose revenues are usually 60% foreign. Hollywood's internationalization is the result of many factors but a main difference is that Hollywood stuff is live action which is the mainstream visual language of the world.

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