Animation (anime) and comics (manga) are the two legs that have kept the Japan creative content industry running like a champ around the world in the past four decades or so.
In contrast to Korea’s KDramas and KPop (musical content), it is drawings versus live action.
Even so, both are scrambling for the title “Cool,” on top of billions in revenues they rake in for their respective countries.
The manga industry in Japan is so massive that, with its home base alone, it outranks two other prolific comics producers in the world, the USA and France.
Manga, which roughly means to amuse, is not just funnies but has been used for infinite subjects – from golf instructional to cooking, depiction of explicit sex to driving.
In the eighties and the nineties, hentai were sold along with children’s comics in conbeni or convenience stores.
I have been to cavernous stores in Tokyo filled with Japanese comics, shelves after shelves, floor to ceiling, selling new and previously owned copies.
Trains were filled with people voraciously reading manga, not minding each other, rushing to or from work or school.
I saved a lot of money by picking up copies that were discarded on seats or overhead bins.
There was a time when the Japanese manga major publishers were churning out 13 weekly manga magazines, 10 biweeklies, and 20 influential titles monthly.
At least 10 of them were hitting a million copies each issue.
In the 1900s, sales of manga easily reached 600 billion yen a year.
However, in my last two recent visits to Japan, I hardly saw passengers lugging and reading manga; most of them, like PInoys, were on their smartphones.
I guess Japan has also gone digital with their access to content.
Although there had been exports of manga to the US and other Western countries, Shonen Jump magazine was its first true hit in 2002.
The magazine, which features many works, had been around in Japan for more than 35 years and had a circulation of more than 3.2 million.
Manga outside of its territory was facilitated by the inroads of anime. Shonen Jump was ushered in by TV hit series “Dragon Ball,” one of the contents in the magazine.
One of the global anime sensation from Japan is Ghost in A Shell, 1995 and 2004, by Mamorou Oshii.
Oshii had a little help from Toshio Suzuki, producer at Ghibli Studios which, in turn, has a huge and solid following because of its endearing works such as Spirited Away and My Friend, Totoro.
Artists and writers, as usual, are visionaries. Businessmen and an astute government only ride on their balloons.
By 2013, the Japanese government led Prime Minister Shinzo Abe looked at anime and other Japanese soft industries as the leverage to boost Japan’s economy.
The government earmarked a “Cool Japan” fund with an initial $500 million investment of public money to promote Japanese cultural wares abroad - an echo of South Korea’s investment in soft power which we mentioned in Part 1 of this topic.
Elaine Lies of Reuters said that Japan aspired for a huge slice of the world cultural pie, set to surge more than 40 percent by 2020 to more than $9 trillion.
The economic strategy aimed to triple overseas sales of “Cool Japan” content, such as anime, within five years.
“There are a lot of good things and convenient things in Japan that we’d like to offer to the world,” said Yoshiaki Akamatsu, of the Creative Industries Division at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
“As a result, we hope that Japan itself would grow,” Akamatsu said.
A booster to the anime and manga is Japan’s character creations.
Characters are the assets that a company like Disney guards so zealously because, from a Mickey Mouse, for instance, one could create a global empire.
Two of the hugely successful character creations of Japan are Hello Kitty and Pokemon.
Hello Kitty is a fictional character designed in 1974 by Sanrio, only as an embellishment on a vinyl purse but has since moved on to other merchandise such as school supplies, appliances and even motor oil.
It now generates around US$9 billion a year.
Hello Kitty caters to the “kawaii” market segment of Japanese pop culture. This means cute and was originally targeted young girls.
Pokemon, a game launched in 1995, makes use of the digital technology within which the Pokemon Company created dozens of characters that humans could catch and train to do battles.
Pokemon has become a television series, a manga, and a feature length film.
Seniors observe that Pokemon has replaced our hunt for spiders, beetles and dragonflies.
Japan and Korea are trying to grab each other’s market segments. Korea developed Webtoons in which readers could access comics, but it does not have the enormous arsenal that Japan has with it manga.
Japan is trying to tug at the hearts of audiences in Asia with its dramas but has found no success as Korea is having. Yet.
But one thing is clear. Japan and Korea have opened wide their doors to tourists. Tourists are flocking, looking for more high after relishing “foreign products” in their homes.