Ask John: Is Anime in America a Dying Fad?

Question:
In an earlier question, you mentioned that of the 1,000 Haruhi Suzumiya DVDs being sold, only 500 made it out the door. Doesn’t this incident, along with the slower licensing and declining sales, tell us that the home video anime market in America is, for the most part, a fad that has finally run its course?

Answer:
Anime – the product of Japanese animators expressing their personal and cultural creativity – has been exported to America for over 45 years now. The first anime ever released in America, the Japanese movie Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke, opened in American theaters in 1961. America’s anime industry started in earnest 17 years ago when the first commercial subtitled anime videotapes hit the American market. (The domestic debut of anime in its original Japanese language, I think, delineates the first time America quantifiably recognized anime as imported foreign animation.) A fad doesn’t have a strict length; there’s not a specific number of days after which a fan turns into an establishment, convention, or tradition. But by any estimation, I think that 17 years constitutes more than a fad. And while America’s anime industry is definitely in a period of change, I don’t believe that America’s anime industry is in its demise.

Allow me to clarify that I recently cited an example of less than a thousand limited edition version Haruhi Suzumiya DVDs selling from a single major retailer. That’s not a national total of Haruhi Suzumiya DVDs sold, it’s just the sales of one out of many American retailers. The statistic isn’t representative of total American sales, but it provides some perspective on domestic sales. Reportedly an anime DVD that sells more than 10,000 copies in Japan is considered a blockbuster success. It seems as though, increasingly, that measure of success is likewise coming to apply to the American market. It’s a little bit disconcerting that a major American anime convention may attract 30,000 hardcore fans, yet there are entire anime series released on American DVD that will never sell that many discs during their entire American lifetime. American consumers do seem to be purchasing fewer anime DVDs, and they’re spending less on the discs they do buy, resulting in American licensing companies having less money to apply toward licensing and distributing. But there’s no shortage of anime fans themselves.

The anime production industry is in no danger of becoming extinct as long as there are viewers that diligently watch anime. And as long as anime exists, it will have fans. Fads are based on the transience of popularity, but the popularity of anime is not transient. There will always be anime fans in America, so there will always be a business or industry that caters to those consumers. Since the massive popularization of anime in America that occurred in the early 2000s, critics and doomsayers have called America’s anime boom a fad, sought to marginalize and trivialize it, and predicted its demise.

No, I don’t think that American anime distribution is a passing fad that will end because American interest in anime evaporates. I think that anime has established permanent roots in America, and will continue to flourish in America. During the early 2000s anime looked like a rapidly blossoming field of flowers with plenty of space for growth. Now it seems more like a small garden with barren patches and blooms with stunted growth. But the garden isn’t going to wither entirely. Now that Americans have gotten a taste of anime, there will always be a hunger for anime in America, although it may periodically increase or decrease. The methodology of the American anime industry may, and inevitably will evolve. We’ve already seen smaller distributors exit the industry, and in recent years there’s been an upswing in Japanese distributors distributing their product in America directly. In fact, at the recent Sakura Con, Bandai Visual USA CEO Tatsunori Konno explained that Japan’s anime distribution industry is beginning to perceive America as an equal primary market for anime rather than a supplemental market. Circumstances suggest to me that events and trends in the current American anime market and industry are merely growing pains and transitional phases, not signs of a wholesale eminent demise of anime distribution in America. The future of anime distribution in America may not resemble that of the past, or what fans have become used to, but I fully believe that there is a future for anime distribution in America.