When Piracy Becomes Promotion

How unauthorized copying made Japanese animation profitable in the United States.

Henry Jenkins from the December 2006 issue

div class="bodytext"> p> The global sales span class="CRbreakgrafline">of Japan’s animation industry reached an astonishing $80 billion in 2004, 10 times what they were a decade before. It has won this worldwide success in part because Japanese media companies paid little attention to the kinds of grassroots activities—call it piracy, unauthorized duplication and circulation, or simply file-sharing—that American media companies seem so determined to shut down. Much of the risk of entering Western markets and many of the costs of experimentation and promotion were borne by dedicated consumers. o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p> span class="CRbreakgrafline">Japanese animation was exported to the Western market as early as the 1960s, when Astro Boy, Gigantor , and Speed Racer made it into local syndication. By the late ’60s, however, Action for Children’s Television and other groups had used threats of boycotts and federal regulations to rein in programs they saw as inappropriate for American children. Japanese cartoons increasingly targeted adolescents and adults and often dealt with mature themes. Consequently, the American markets for these cartoons dried up in the early ’70s, and discouraged distributors dumped their cartoons on Japanese-language cable channels. o:p>