For years, piracy has been cited as the main problem facing manga, but there is another obstacle inherent in Japanese society itself that appears to be an even greater barrier to the market’s continued growth: the manga publishers themselves.
The Japanese publishing system is holding manga back
From Japan, industry insiders have revealed in a lengthy article how the expansion of manga and anime IPs in the West works, pointing out the system’s main problem: publishers monopolize absolutely everything… even when they lack the necessary expertise.
Below, I’ve summarized the key points of the presentation:
- There is a fundamental difference between manga artists and publishers in Japan and how the industry operates in the West: there are no literary agents.
- In the West, authors typically hire a literary agent or agency to act as an intermediary, negotiating all kinds of agreements with distributors and various companies in order to maximize the value of their work.
- In Japan, it doesn’t work that way: publishers are the ones who decide every single step of a manga/anime’s international release. And that poses a problem for the sector’s expansion.
- The reason for this is that, in most cases, these tasks are seen as additional responsibilities for editors, who are not specialists in this field and who must also juggle this work alongside their other duties as manga editors.
- This leads to an inefficient system that publishers partly want to protect, as they fear that authors might grow accustomed to working as they do in the West and thus lose all the control they have over publications.
- After all, by monopolizing everything related to publication, publishers and affiliated companies take the lion’s share of the profits, leaving authors with a smaller share despite being the main contributors.
In other words, the reality is that we’re dealing with a system in which manga publishers keep everything under their control to maximize their profits, even if that means slowing down or outright blocking international expansion (which, as a result, often leads to piracy).
Japan needs to change even more than it already has
It is absolutely true that Japan has gradually opened up to the West over time: services like Manga Plus or K-Manga are proof of this, as is the fact that so much anime can be watched through services like Crunchyroll. But an even greater revolution is essential. An example of the control prioritized by Japanese companies can still be seen in how, in anime production, the studio is often the one that sees the least money from the whole operation. It’s exactly the same with manga: the creator gets a smaller share, while the distributor ends up with the lion’s share of the profits.
That is why, in the anime industry, many studios have tried in recent years to create successful original IPs, or, as in the case of MAPPA, to acquire the full rights to an IP like “Chainsaw Man” (in the anime realm, of course, not in its entirety). It’s not uncommon to see financial reports from anime studios that, despite having released some of the year’s most successful productions, are either in the red or barely breaking even. And that’s truly a very difficult situation to justify.
If the manga and anime industries are already huge in their own right, they could be even bigger if Japan didn’t clip its own wings. Ultimately, what many of these things demonstrate is that, in most cases, the creators and studios we love so much aren’t being rewarded as they deserve.
