Ask John: Why Does Anime Have to be Licensed by US Companies?

Question:
Why do Japanese companies have to get US companies to license anime for distribution here? Shows like Kodomo no Omocha and Akazukin Chacha have made a profit in Japan, and have a great fan base in the US. Why can’t the owners of these titles just subtitle the anime in English and sell them to us over the web. While the monies these titles could generate might not be big to US media companies, they could bring in a modest profit to Japanese companies. Do these companies actually want potential profits going to fansubs?

Answer:
For the most part, Japanese companies do not “get US companies to license anime.” It is the American companies that offer or request the ability to purchase English language distribution rights from the Japanese companies that gets anime brought to America. Anime is created for the Japanese market, and to a large degree most Japanese studios and distributors are not concerned or not interested in foreign or international distribution. In most cases, when an anime production is completed it is released in Japan. If some other country wishes to buy the distribution rights to it, so be it. If not, it doesn’t matter to the Japanese distributor since the series has had the Japanese exposure it was created for. With rare exception, Japanese companies simply aren’t particularly interested in international distribution.

The 2000 Vampire Hunter D film was intentionally created with English dialogue in part to make it more marketable overseas. The Animation Runner Kuromi-chan OAV was released on DVD with optional English subtitles at the request of director Akitaro Daichi so that it would be more marketable to foreign fans. These are rare exceptions, though. It’s much more common for Japanese releases with English language or English language options such as Memories, the Studio Ghibli movies, FLCL, and the Armitage the 3rd Polymatrix movie to be released with English language either to provide a bit of novelty and “western appeal” for Japanese viewers, or to expand “special edition” DVD releases for the Japanese market.

Presumably the amount of profit international sales and distribution of anime generates for Japanese distribution companies isn’t significant enough relative to results from Japanese sales, to make focusing on international distribution a priority for Japanese companies. It’s only logical to assume that if international distribution was really as profitable for Japanese companies as many American fans seem to think it is, more Japanese companies would be doing it. And especially given the nature of the internet, it’s debatable whether pay-per-view internet broadcasts of anime would be profitable. Anime fans are well known to be very tech savvy, so if anyone is likely to figure out how to get around paying to see something online, or figure out how to “steal” and distribute something for free online that shouldn’t be available for free, it’s anime fans. Japan has experimented with broadcasting anime over the internet. I Wish You Were Here, Azumanga Daioh, Maho Yuugi, SD Ryvius, and Psychic Academy have all been available online in Japan as free streaming downloads. Portions of the anime film 6 Angels have been available for download in Japan for a small fee. AIC Studios offers some of its older titles as pay-per-view downloads to Japanese web users. And Bandai has announced plans to offer a massive amount of anime online in conjunction with Sunrise Studios sometime in the future, but so far online availability of anime in Japan has been limited, and mainly limited to being a tool for promotion rather than profit.

Certainly the market may change in the future, but at the present, for the same reason why Japanese companies have for so many years virtually ignored the existence of American anime fansubs, Japanese companies just aren’t really that concerned about what does or doesn’t happen to anime outside of Japan. At the present time Japan seems to be much more concerned with the critical and artistic acceptance and recognition of anime in the international community than with international commercial appreciation.