Even in anime’s good times, animators struggle in Japan
TOKYO — Business has never been better for Japanese anime. And that is why Tetsuya Akutsu is thinking about calling it quits.
When Akutsu became an animator eight years ago, the global anime market — including TV shows, movies and merchandise — was a little more than half of what it would be by 2019, when it hit an estimated $24 billion. The pandemic boom in video streaming has further accelerated demand at home and abroad, as people bingewatch kid-friendly fare like “Pokémon” and cyberpunk extravaganzas like “Ghost in the Shell.”
But little of the windfall has reached Akutsu.
Though working nearly every waking hour, he takes home just $1,400 to $3,800 a month as a top animator and an occasional director on some of Japan’s most popular anime franchises.
And he is one of the lucky ones: Thousands of lowerrung illustrators do grueling piecework for as little as $200 a month.
Rather than rewarding them, the industry’s explosive growth has only widened the gap between the profits they help generate and their paltry wages, leaving many to wonder whether they can afford to continue following their passion.
“I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” Akutsu, 29, said during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. “I know it’s impossible to get married and to raise a child.”
The low wages and abysmal working conditions — hospitalization from overwork can be a badge of honor in Japan — have
confounded the usual laws of the business world. Normally, surging demand would, at least in theory, spur competition for talent, driving up pay for existing workers and attracting new ones.
That’s happening to some extent at the business’s highest levels. Median annual earnings for key illustrators and other top-line talent increased to about $36,000 in 2019 from around $29,000 in 2015, according to statistics gathered by the Japan Animation Creators Association, a labor organization.
These animators are known in Japanese as “genga-man,” the term for those who draw what are called key frames. As one of them, Akutsu, a freelancer who bounces around Japan’s many animation studios, earns enough to eat and to rent a postage stamp of a studio apartment in a Tokyo suburb.
But his wages are a far cry from what animators earn in the United States, where the average pay is $75,000 a year, according to government data, with senior illustrators
often easily clearing six figures.
The problem stems partly from the structure of the industry, which constricts the flow of profits to studios.
But studios can get away with the meager pay in part because there is a nearly limitless pool of young people passionate about anime and dreaming of making a name in the industry, said Simona Stanzani, who has worked in the business as a translator for nearly three decades.
She said studios “have a lot of cannon fodder — they have no reason to raise wages.”
But many studios have been shut out of the bonanza by an outmoded production system that directs nearly all of the industry’s profits to so-called production committees.
These committees are ad hoc coalitions of toy manufacturers, comic book publishers and other companies that are created to finance each project. They typically pay animation studios a set fee and reserve royalties for themselves.