The Japan Society of Northern California’s sold-out panel on the business of manga and anime on Sept. 13 brought the great pioneers of the manga industry together to reminisce about its history in the United States, as well as future prospects in the American market.
Viz Media was the first company to introduce manga to the United States more than 20 years ago. Founder and co-chairman of Viz Media Seiji Horibuchi gave his account of coming to San Francisco in 1975.
“When we first established the company, the goal was crystal clear: to make the American comics market grow,” Horibuchi explained. “Not just online Japanese manga, but this included the entire American market.”
Early on, only a handful of comics companies were in existence, including Marvel and DC Comics. While competing with these distributors and an increasingly selective market, Viz Media was able to stay a major player in the comics market.
“We were able to survive the economic slump, because American readers appreciated the uniqueness and creativity of Japanese manga,” Horibuchi said. “Our weapon to survive was our uniqueness. The influx of Japanese manga has brought diversity to the American public.”
And survive it did — in 2006, the Japanese manga market was approximately $330 million, and it is predicted to reach $400 million this year, surpassing the entire American comic book market. Panelist Alivn Lu, vice president of publishing at Viz Media, spoke of the “perfect storm” that has allowed it to flourish in a distinctly different cultural market than in Japan and countries like France where manga readership is particularly high.
Referring to Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, Lu described the key elements, or “sticky content,” that allow an epidemic to occur. “Different things need to happen. There was a slow unfolding epidemic of Japanese pop culture … A media company can have all the resources in the world, but if it doesn’t stick, it won’t spread. For whatever reason, Japanese pop culture sticks at a global level,” said Lu, adding that even a large media company like Time-Warner would have had a hard time orchestrating the perfect media campaign to mass market a niche market like manga.
Ken Iyadomi, CEO of Bandai Entertainment, added that Internet and television exposure of anime, such as the “Pokemon shock” of 1999, probably had the most dramatic effect on the increase of manga consumption, from the former cult-level consumers to mass market-level consumption.
Particularly in the increasingly media-oriented youth market that is inundated with video games, YouTube, crunchyroll.com and dailymotion.com, consumers can easily access the latest shows — and Japanese culture is indisputably hot these days. Media companies, including Viz and Bandai, actually have specific departments and acquisition editors that check such Web sites to evaluate the popularity of anime or manga titles.
The Internet has also raised difficult issues regarding international copyright infringement and foreign licensing problems. Panelists shared their concerns about how all these new media outlets may actually hinder its growth.
Iyadomi explained, “We cannot just deal with the problem of copyright as one company. We need to get together with other studios and governments. In Japan, if somebody is downloading a video illegally, we can call the police, but here in the United States, we cannot call the police unless we have proof.”
The difficulty of a foreign licensing and ratings system is part of the problem. The United States’ rating system is more strict than in Japan, where nudity and violence appear in anime and is culturally acceptable. Such an anime show shown in the United States would cause an uproar.
The challenge now is to target the younger audience, many of whom do not have the financial capital to purchase comic books. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore the booming manga market, no matter the age, especially when a book like Naruto is the number three most-sold book at Walmart.
It is Horibuchi’s hope that manga will continue to capture the hearts of the American market. “When I was young, America was the king of pop. Everything I learned and admired was American pop culture. However, among the many American youngsters of today, Japan is viewed as the modern culture — the king of pop.”