The global sales 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.
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.
With the rise of videotape recorders, American
fans could copy shows off those channels and share them with their friends.
Soon they were sending American shows such as Star Trek or Battlestar
Galactica to Japanese fans and American GIs
in exchange for Japanese programs such as Getter Robo. These tapes
toured a circuit of science fiction conventions in the late ’70s and early
’80s, often shown without translation. In a format much like a radio broadcast
of an opera, someone would stand up at the beginning and tell the plot, often
drawing on what he or she remembered from another recital of the plot at
another screening. Japanese companies were vaguely aware of such screenings but
didn’t try to stop them. They didn’t have permission from their mother
companies to charge these fans or provide the material, but they wanted to see
how much interest the shows attracted.
By
the late ’80s, student organizations were building extensive libraries of both
legal and pirated material. The early ’90s saw the emergence of “fansubbing,”
the amateur translation and subtitling of Japanese anime. Time-synchronized VHS and S-VHS
systems allowed fansubbers to dub tapes while retaining accurate alignment of text
and image. The high costs of the earliest machines meant that fansubbing would
remain a collective effort: Clubs pooled time and resources to ensure their
favorite series reached a wider viewership. As costs fell, fansubbing spread
outward. Soon clubs were using the Internet to coordinate their activities,
divvying up series to subtitle and tapping a broader community for would-be
translators.
Beginning in the early 1990s, large-scale anime
conventions brought artists and distributors from Japan, who were astonished to
see a thriving culture surrounding content they had never succeeded in
marketing in the United States. They went back home eager to try to tap this
interest commercially.
The first niche companies to distribute anime on
DVD and videotape emerged
as fans went pro, acquiring the distribution rights from Japanese media
companies. The first material to be distributed—titles such as Akira and
Bubblegum Crisis—already had an enthusiastic fan following. Interested
in exposing their members to the full range of content available in Japan, the
fan clubs often took risks no commercial distributor would have confronted,
testing the market for new genres, producers, and series. Commercial companies
followed their path wherever they found popularity. The fansubs often ran an
advisory urging users to “cease distribution when licensed.” The clubs were
trying not to profit from anime distribution but to expand the market; they
pulled back from circulating any title that had found a commercial distributor.
In any case, the commercial copies were of a higher quality than the
unauthorized dubs.
The first commercially
available
copies of series such as Sailor Moon were often dubbed and re-edited as
part of an effort to expand their potential interest to casual consumers. The
Japanese cultural critic Koichi Iwabuchi has used the term “de-odorizing” to
refer to the ways that Japanese “soft goods” are stripped of signs of their
national origins to open them for global circulation. In this context, the
grassroots fan community still plays an important role, using their websites
and newsletters to teach American viewers about the cultural references and
genre traditions that define these products. The fan clubs continue to explore
potential niche products that over time can emerge as mainstream successes. If
the first anime series to reach the market were mostly boy-oriented science
fiction, fans later discovered a whole tradition of romance stories (including
same-sex romance) aimed at young girls.
The Japanese media companies’ tolerance of these
efforts is consistent with their treatment of fan communities at home. The
underground sale of fan-made comics (known as dojinshi), often highly
derivative of the commercial product, occurs on a massive scale in Japan, with
some comics markets attracting 150,000 visitors per day. Rarely taking legal
action, the commercial producers sponsor such events, using them to publicize
their releases, recruit new talent, and monitor shifts in audience tastes. In
any case, they fear the wrath of their consumers if they take action against
such a well-entrenched cultural practice—and if they did pursue infringers, the
legal penalties in Japan are relatively light.
Many media companies in the U.S. would have
regarded all this underground circulation as piracy and shut it down before it
reached critical mass. Instead, we have moved from a world where Speed Racer
operated on the fringes to one where Pokémon is better known in the United
States than many of its American counterparts.
Henry Jenkins is director of
the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and author of Convergence Culture
(NYU Press), from which this article was adapted. He would like to acknowledge
the help of MIT alumnus Sean Leonard, whose research on fansubbing has appeared
in the International Journal of Cultural Studies and The UCLA Entertainment Law
Review.
