Will Japan’s creative appeal last?

Shigeru Miyamoto, Toru Iwatani and Satoshi Tajiri might not be household names, but they’ve clearly left their mark on the world.
They are respectively the creators of Super Mario, Pac-Man and Pokemon, and they can be said to be the “robber barons” of Japan’s creative industry, tapping the nation’s unique cultural DNA to create characters that have stolen hearts all over the world.
Several events last year ensured that Japan’s characters stayed at the top of people’s minds. The smartphone games Pokemon Go and Mario Run were launched and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared in Super Mario’s red cap in the Rio Olympics closing ceremony. Capping it off was the box office mega-hit “Kimi No Na Wa” (“Your Name”).
Japan’s creative scene, often referred to as ACG (animation, comics and games), has the backing of a multibillion-dollar “Cool Japan” fund as part of a strategic push, both at home and abroad. Popular characters such as Astro Boy and Sailor Moon are also emblazoned on official merchandise for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.
But, even so, observers in the ACG industry fear a bleak future, given an insular mindset and increasing competition.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Meti) is in charge of the Cool Japan blueprint, through which the country aims to raise the presence and appeal of its cultural products abroad.
The ministry reported last April that the market size of Japan’s content industry, which includes ACG as well as TV dramas and music, was around 12 trillion yen (Bt3.7 billion) in 2013.
The Japanese market for content industries might be second only to the United States – worth over 2.5 times more – but Meti noted that growth was slowing and the industry ought to increase its presence in foreign markets.
It proposed a strategy based on promoting the appeal of Japanese culture overseas in order to boost sales of Japanese content products. Companies appear to already be doing so – to a certain extent.
The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) valued the anime industry at 1.83 trillion yen in 2015, up 12 per cent from 2014. The engine behind this rise was the 583.3 billion yen clocked abroad, the highest figure ever and a 78.7-per-cent surge from 2014.
The evident appeal of Japan’s ACG industry also means there is no lack of entrants, both Japanese and foreigners. One of them is Chuah Zean, 22, a native of Penang, Malaysia, who grew up indulging in anime and manga series such as Naruto, Gundam and One Piece.
Now a final-year undergraduate at Tokyo’s Digital Hollywood University, he chuckles that he used to spend entire days devouring anime and manga.
“I love Japan’s kawaii [cute] characters and the very novel stories with interesting and diverse plot lines,” says Chuah, who specialises in computer-game design.
His schoolmate Yuto Kuriyama, 19, hopes to be a movie director. His “all-time favourite” films are the City Hunter spy series that’s spun out a Hong Kong movie, a Korean TV drama and a Japanese video game.
It was also the love for video gaming that led Michael Susetyo, 28, to the industry. The programmer for Japan’s SquareEnix was part of the 200-strong team behind last year’s Final Fantasy XV game.
“In the past I was very much into Japanese hairstyles and rock bands,” says the graduate of DigiPen Institute of Technology in Washington. “So the designs of the main characters also line up very well with what I consider cool video-game characters, as well as being instantly recognisable as Final Fantasy characters.”
But working in the industry has got Susetyo worried that Japan won’t be able to keep up with Western studios.
He didn’t cite specific games, but titles that topped best-seller lists last year include Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare, published by US firm Activision, and Grand Theft Auto V, a British export but now published by New York’s Rockstar.
And then there are studios such as Electronic Arts in the US, which is behind sports titles such as Fifa and franchises such as The Sims.
Susetyo says English standards have to be improved to allow Japan to “continue to reach new heights at the same pace as the West”.
“Technology evolves from the spread of information, and with so much information on the Internet being available in English only, it takes much longer for information to reach Japanese developers.”
Hisatsugu Kasajima, founder of the Japan arm of Czech production house Eallin, echoes the view. The 40-year-old, who started the outfit in 2010, attributes the lack of interest in English to an insular, inward-looking mindset perpetrated by the bursting of an economic bubble in the late 1980s that has led to stagnation.
This is the reason creators tend to cater to a domestic market that thrives on subcultures that might not take flight elsewhere, says AJA vice-secretary-general Naoki Ishikawa.
Many domestically popular series contain explicitly sexual and violent scenes or fantasies that might not be easily understood or accepted elsewhere in the world, he notes. The global success of movies such as “Kimi No Na Wa” is “rare”.
Moreover, Hideo Uda, 38, who founded animation firm Studio Colorido, says the anime industry is hindered “from becoming a major player like Disney or Pixar” because it uses traditional pen-and-paper methods, which are increasingly unproductive in a fast-moving industry.
“As craftsmen they have very good techniques. That’s an advantage, but it’s also a disadvantage. Innovation hardly takes place and not many people can be involved in the process. So it will remain a domestic industry without any cross-border collaboration.”
Given that ACG is a costly business, Ishikawa points out how companies are trying to “mitigate risks by sharing the burden across several stakeholders” – which means the future of the anime industry will “lie in the hands of the financiers, not the creators”.
But the industry has had a record of having no pulse on the market. A recent example was the historical anime “Kono Sekai No Katasumi Ni” (“In This Corner of the World”), which was a sleeper hit in Japan. It failed to get financial backing and was produced only after it raised funds through crowdfunding.