Forum - View topicAnswerman - Are There More American Otaku Than Japanese Otaku?
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AnimeAddict2014
 Posts: 925 |
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i doubt it.
maybe in another 15-20 years with japan low birth rate.. it might be possible.. i'm too poor to be an otaku.. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4104 |
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I love the fact that no US company would release sales numbers yet there is an answer for sale numbers. I've had the impression that the US market was larger once physical release companies went for North America online streaming for more growth while Japan is... I'm not sure what they're doing. They're trying to bulk up physical sales with cross-marketing gimmicks? How is that working out?
Probably for 2005 but this is 2015, last time I've checked. The idea they could be equal is ridiculous for both decades for different reasons. I'm under the impression US sales are larger as it's my guess to why no NA company would ever want to release a single hard number. Take those pallets of lost Bandai titles someone found a few years ago; 10,000s of remaindered special editions... well, they're gone now, mostly so I guess a lot of people did take them but outside of the Patlabor movies, it had no effect on the secondary market prices. Kind of wish I bought all those Haruhi sets myself because then I could have sold my OOP set for a profit and had the even rarer broadcast/chronological order combo for a song... and I would have the song CDs as well. So, is the fanbase bigger or just more voracious? I don't know, I don't even know what the word means but I do know this: Hard buyers are just a fraction of the online viewers these days. A smaller fraction every day even as the DVD numbers don't change? There are so many legal streaming sites- there may be 700,000 paid subsribers to CR but I'll never be one of them or even one of the millions of registered users of the site- that you can never calculate anything here... but you can always look at Japan's hard sales? It's a question of " more or less?", not "how many?" |
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omiya
 Posts: 1834 Location: Adelaide, South Australia |
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Well, I bought the Japanese Haurhi Suzumiya blu-ray boxed set (with English subs and dubs), bought some song CD's, decided in 2011 to visit Japan and have now visited ten times (although total time spent in Japan is only a couple of months). My anime collection is still small (and I haven't borrowed many videos or watched much streaming anime) and I probably have more music of anime concert videos (e.g. Animelo Summer Live) than anime videos. Any measure one could come up with to count someone as an otaku would probably fail (total time spent on interests and earning money to pay for them might be an indication but very difficult to measure). |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4478 |
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That distinction between "fringe fans" and otaku isn't an easy one to make. Similarly, live action adaptations of American comic books are a huge business in Hollywood, and yet the comic book publishers are still struggling with the fact that they depend on a smaller "hardcore" audience that is also aging. It isn't hard to find somebody who will say they are a fan of The Dark Knight movies or the Avengers movies, yet sales of the comics don't seem to get a consistent boost.
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Wrial Huden
 Posts: 149 Location: McKinney, TX |
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Are you talking about anime conventions specifically or cons that are pop culture gatherings like Wizard World or Comic-Con? What you described sounds more like the latter two, because the last time I attended an anime con, I didn't see anyone cosplaying as Iron Man or Darth Vader. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It used to be that any title from Marvel or DC that had sales hovering around the 100K-a-month mark was on the bubble for cancellation. Now if a comic from either breaks the 100K-a-month mark, it's a cause for celebration. Reasons for this recent trend vary, but current cover prices have a lot to do with it, with most new comics being about $4 to $5 a pop. The average comic book takes about 15-20 minutes to read cover to cover. For about the price of two comic books, one can buy admission to a movie down at the multiplex and be immersed for about 2 hours. And then there's the speculator market. All these inflated back-issue prices on comics not even a year old (due to variant covers, limited editions, etc.) are alienating the potential comics fan who might be into comics simply for the pleasure of reading. It seems there were no lessons learned from the bust of the mid-90s.... {Combined serial posts. ~nobahn} |
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Shenl742
Posts: 1524 |
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Ok this kind of thing coming back is total news to me, as I haven't seen it. And with trade-paper-backs collections getting printed coming out quickly, and digital platforms like Comixology becoming the norm, the idea of a new fan having to buy a price-hiked (and only 1 year old!) back-issue is pretty much a thing of the past. |
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Hameyadea
 Posts: 3679 |
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I think that answering the question of where there are more otaku is inherently difficult; to simplify it somewhat, let's change [Otaku] with [Devoted Fan]. How can one -- be it a production company, a marketing firm, a store chain, an individual, etc -- differentiate between [Casual Fans], [Devoted Fans], and [Hardcore Fans]?
(Glossary: [Casual Fan] = those who occasionally buy a manga volume or couple of home-media discs as a present for someone else, for self-consumption, or any other reason. [Devoted Fans] = those who'll buy all the manga volumes and/or home-media releases available. [Hardcore Fans] = [Devoted Fans] + figurines, mouse pads, dakimakura, and any other available peripherals.) And then there's the whole "who can be considered a fan, and when?" debate. At the end of the day, one can look at the bottom-line statistics, and try to conjecture based on that, but since there isn't any Central Fandom Bureau, I highly doubt that there ever will be a definitive answer. |
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Tempest_Wing
Posts: 305 |
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A couple months ago, he asked for people to send him any questions because he was running out of questions to answer. I guess this was a result of that. Also, there are only so many intelligent questions one can ask that haven't been asked before regarding a very specific topic....anime. |
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Ambimunch
 Posts: 2012 |
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How would you even define an otaku? Is there a fine line that you cross to become one, and if so, is that line objective or quantifiable? What is the difference between an "otaku" or a regular fan? Never understood that honestly
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1779 Location: South America |
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The average Japanese probably has watched more anime in form of manga in his/her lifetime than the average North American anime fan: there are like 30 billion manga in existence in Japan considering about 40 billion manga were sold over the last 20 years. Each manga can and is usually read by several different persons. Hence since there are about 80 million people over 30 in Japan who passed the most intensively reading age, each of these 80 million probably read at least 400 manga volumes, probably much more than that liek over a 1,000 volumes. That's about 4,000 anime episodes since each anime series usually adapted into a manga at the rate 4 episodes per volume. That's equivalent to about 200 late night anime series.
So there are like 100 million otaku in Japan by the American definition. |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1117 Location: Puget Sound |
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Non-anime cosplaying is quite common at Sakura con - even though ECCC is two weeks before, and NorWesCon is the same weekend. |
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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China has 20x the population of the UK, but I'm sure you can find demographic statistics where the UK has a higher number... for example there are "ten of millions" of Christians in China (2-4%), but 26 million Anglicans alone in the UK (20%). |
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Pidgeot18
 Posts: 101 |
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The United States has ~326 million people and Japan has ~128 million people; the difference in total population is actually not that large. It also has to be countered that anime is a domestic phenomenon in Japan and not the US, and you would naïvely expect that a larger fraction of Japanese would consume anime than the US.
A good way to illustrate the size of the US compared to its population: If you take every household in the US and divvied up all the land in Texas between them, you'd get an average size of... 1.39 acres (about the size of a football field). By comparison, the median lot size appears to be about .2-.25 acres. |
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M. Northstar
 Posts: 9 |
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Granted, but the thing about Justin's version of the Answerman is that he tells you why he doesn't know, and the things that he does know. In other words, even his I-don't-knows make for interesting reading.
There is no such thing as a stupid question. That's just a myth invented by people without good answers. |
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