There is no doubt that the Anime is at your best worldwidewith series and movies sweeping at the box office and streaming platforms. But behind all this brightness, the reality for those who work in the industry is another: low salaries, eternal work days and delayed payments. The 60 -year -old Yumiko Shibata voice actress told Bloomberg in a report how she had to work in nightclubs during her 20 years to pay the accounts, simply because the dubbing did not give her to survive.
Now, in addition to continuing in the middle, he also dedicates himself to cleaning houses to win something extra, and is not the only one in this situation. Young animators earn less than 2 million yen per year on average (about 13 thousand dollars), which is well below the average salary in Tokyo. To top it off, many work without a fixed contract, and it is common for them to pay them with months (or even years), if they ever pay them.
The thing has reached such an extent that the UN put pressure in 2023, denouncing that industry workers are exploited with miserable salaries, exhausting days and zero rights over their work. All this while the Japanese government boasted about its promotion of anime as for a strategy known as “Cool Japan.” In response, Japan had to approve a law in November 2023 to improve the working conditions of the freelancers, forcing companies to pay in a maximum of 60 days and to give clear contractsalso opening an investigation in January 2024 on labor abuses in the industry.
The problem is that, although these measures are already underway, workers are still waiting for real changes, because the anime industry continues to work as always. And this is where everything becomes ridiculous: anime is a business that moves billions of dollars a year, with franchises dominating the box office and streaming platforms. The producers are making solid gold with this, but those who really do the work (animators, illustrators, voice actors) barely receive crumbs.
Thus, the problem is evidently in the business model. Production committees (formed by publishers, toys and media companies) take most of the money simply because they were investors, while animation studies are subcontracted and just see a part of the profits. It is as if the studies were simply “one more employee”, and since the freelancers are “employee employees”, they suffer even more of this poor management.
If we compare with Hollywood, where unions have achieved salary improvements after strikes that paralyzed the industry for weeks, in Japan almost no one is unionized. The animators and voice actors are afraid that they are vetoed from the industry if they get to raise their voice against their working conditions. Tesuya Numako, animator and now union representative, mentioned that convincing people in Japan to demand their rights is impossible.
The Japanese live with the terror that raising the voice leads them to be excluded, and prefer to be poorly paid and exploited while complaining first of the world, except those who should. Shibata herself lived in her own flesh when she realized that a video game in which she worked her voice without paying royalties, but she did have the balls of putting together a scandal and managed to compensate her.
Despite everything negative, there are signals of improvement. With the lack of labor in Japan and the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), companies will have to improve their working conditions if they want to retain talents. Philippines and China have also become emerging threats, offering attractive contracts that make the most promising animators prefer to work in these countries. But while the animators and other anime workers continue with their heads bent down, the industry will continue to benefit only fat fish. How much more can such an industry be sustained before collapsing?
Fountain: Bloomberg
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(Tagstotranslate) Anime
