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Toymaker TakaraTomy Arts is undertaking an ambitious plan to grow the footprint of its Gacha capsule toy vending machines in North America, through partnerships with amusement giant Genda and with trading conglomerate Mitsubishi and Sega Fave.

Why it matters: By focusing on selling capsule toys with ties to established Japanese anime and mascot characters, TakaraTomy Arts is filling a gap in the market for anime character merchandise in the United States.

• In Japan, where capsule toys celebrated 60 years on the market last year, their popularity of capsule toys has also surged since the COVID-19 pandemic, both among locals and with visiting tourists.

What they’re saying: “The U.S. capsule toy consumer is someone who already has an interest in Japanese IPs, so there is a strong tendency for them to buy Japanese IP products,” chief executive officer Toshihisa Kondo told Animenomics in an interview at Anime Expo earlier this year.

Zoom in: TakaraTomy Arts has been piloting a capsule toy specialty retail experience in Santa Monica, Calif., with Mitsubishi and Sega Fave, creating a destination for fans looking to buy anime merchandise.

• “The goal of this store is to bring together the best products among well-established Japanese IPs from TakaraTomy and the other two partners and create an authentically Japanese multi-brand retail experience,” managing director Toshio Hasegawa explained.

• Separately, the company has also partnered with amusement giant Genda to place Gacha machines across its vast crane game operation throughout North America.

What we’re watching: TakaraTomy Arts is also redeveloping some capsule toy lines into figurines to sell in blind boxes, seeking new ways for customers to experience the excitement and anticipation of winning a toy.

Go deeper: Read our interview with executives from TakaraTomy Arts on approaches to product development for capsule toys and blind boxes.

TakaraTomy Arts has been expanding the presence of Gacha machines in North America. What have you observed in the demand for capsule toys among North American consumers? Are there differences from Japanese consumer behavior?

Toshihisa Kondo, president and chief executive officer: When it comes to the differences in consumer preferences between Japan and the United States, generally, the U.S. capsule toy consumer is someone who already has an interest in Japanese IPs, so there is a strong tendency for them to buy Japanese IP products. However, in Japan, capsule toys have been around for 60 years, so whether they are IP products or not is not so important for the consumer there. You could say that the U.S. is a narrow and deep market, whereas, in Japan, it’s broad and shallow with a much wider range of options available.

As I mentioned, there are a lot of non-IP products in Japan, but one of the things that we’ve discovered recently after launching Gacha in the U.S. is that there is also interest in our non-IP products here. We’re talking about products that don’t use characters or mascots, for example, cute animals or miniature replicas of popular food items.

How do you choose the types of IP characters and non-IP products to bring to North America?

Kondo: When we’re considering IP products, we’re choosing from things that have demonstrated market popularity in Japan, and we choose from among those what is popular in the U.S. after conducting various surveys of the market.

For products that don’t have a character associated with them, we’re essentially taking a risk on them.

You’re taking two approaches to expand Gacha in North America. One is a partnership with Genda and its Kiddleton subsidiary. The other is a joint venture with Sega Fave and Mitsubishi. How do these two approaches differ from one another?

Toshio Hasegawa, managing director: Yes, you understand well our two approaches.

One is a store in Santa Monica, a collaboration between TakaraTomy Arts, Mitsubishi Corporation, and Sega Fave, focusing on capsule toys, crane games, and merchandise such as figurines. We gather various Japanese IP products in a combined storefront called Gatcha & Catch. The goal of this store is to bring together the best products among well-established Japanese IPs from TakaraTomy and the other two partners and create an authentically Japanese multi-brand retail experience. Based on the success in Santa Monica, we are currently planning to expand on this concept.

In the second model, we are working with Kiddleton, which already has approximately 13,000 crane game locations across the United States. Working with them, we would like to introduce our Gacha machines in places where the crane games already exist, such as Walmart, H-Mart, and various specialty stores. By installing them in supermarkets, movie theaters, and all kinds of other businesses, the goal is to create a synergistic effect between the crane game and Gacha machines.

The Japan Toy Association reported that plush toys had the fastest growth rate of any toy category in Japan last year, growing 38 percent. It’s also a major product category at TakaraTomy Arts. What approach are you taking in product development in this area?

Kondo: Plush toys are part of TakaraTomy Arts’s core business, and thanks to strong growth in the Japanese plush toy market, growth in our plush toy sales is also vibrant.

In Japan, we traditionally had understood plush toys as something that was limited to the kids’ market, but in recent years, their appeal has expanded to include “kidults”. We see a broader consumption of plush toys in the Japanese market. This goes so far as male consumers now collecting plush toys. One recent trend we see in Japan is attaching a ball chain to small plush toys to turn them into keychains, which people then attach in large numbers to their bags. This is something that’s been developing, and we’ve been following that growth.

We’ve really been trying to increase the range of possibility for consumers. We don’t rely just on the trend of these keychain-style plush toys. We’ve devised a new sales approach called “nuidori”, a Japanese term for taking photos with plush toys. We also offer a wide range of products, from standard plush toys to be displayed at home or hugged to enormous plush toys that are the same size as the actual characters. We provide our customers with a diverse selection of products.

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Japan’s second largest toymaker TakaraTomy is preparing to reinvent itself in overseas markets, launching a corporate rebranding in 2027 and stepping up investment in toy development, especially for “kidult” consumers at home and abroad.

Why it matters: TakaraTomy’s international rebranding means the company, formed in 2006 in a merger of toymakers Tomy and Takara, will present itself for the first time with the same name in English as it does in Japanese.

• In English-speaking markets, TakaraTomy had been solely using the name Tomy, a century-old brand with broader international recognition for infant and preschool products at the time of the merger.

By the numbers: Research and development expenses at TakaraTomy increased 14.9 percent year-over-year to ¥6.7 billion (US$42 million) in the fiscal year that ended in March 2026, as the company seeks to meet rising global demand for Japanese toys.

• “The reason we increased the R&D investment is to prepare more products for the kidult segment,” chief executive officer Akio Tomiyama told Animenomics in an interview at Anime Expo earlier this year.

Zoom in: “We want to invest more in existing brands, such as Beyblade,” Tomiyama said of one of his company’s best-known toys. “Beyblade is quite recognized outside Japan, but we still haven’t reached its full potential yet.”

• Trading cards’ surging popularity around the world is also pushing the company to invest more in acquiring new anime licenses, like Detective Conan and Haikyu!!, for which it can create new trading card games.

• TakaraTomy is also reintroducing its Licca-chan line of fashion dolls in the United States for the first time in four decades, hoping to attract new “kidult” consumers.

The bigger picture: As previously reported by Animenomics, growth in Japan’s sales of toys with ties to anime and other entertainment properties is outpacing growth in other toy categories, Japan Toy Association data show.

What we’re watching: TakaraTomy wants to make more localized toys in each of the company’s major overseas markets, like China, and the United States, Tomiyama said.

• He also sees India as a promising growth market and disclosed plans to open a sales office in the country.

Go deeper: Read our interview with TakaraTomy president and chief executive officer Akio Tomiyama, a fourth-generation descendant of Tomy founder Eiichiro Tomiyama.

Many people know your toys, but maybe not many people know the name Tomy or TakaraTomy. Can you explain a little bit about TakaraTomy and your business?

We started this business in 1924, so 2024 was our 100th anniversary. Originally, we started under the name Tomy, and then we acquired Takara in 2006, so this year is our 20th anniversary [as a combined company].

We are famous for Tomica, a collectible vehicle brand, Licca-chan, the fashion doll, Transformers, and Beyblade. These are brands we own—especially Transformers, which we started in Japan through a collaboration with Hasbro—so we have some very exciting brands in the brand portfolio.

As you said, TakaraTomy itself is not known outside of Japan. Sometimes, we still call ourselves Tomy, but the great news this year is that we are going to integrate all our corporate name as TakaraTomy, even for the English name. From next year onwards, we will promote ourselves as TakaraTomy globally more aggressively, so it’s going to be a very exciting year.

Can you explain your motto, “Quality Asobi”, and what it means?

“Asobi” is similar to “play”, but it has more meaning than that. Through “asobi”, we want to make it not only about playing but also connecting people through play. People can enjoy and also know each other. They can learn rules or make promises.

If you visit our booth at Anime Expo, for example, all the fans play together in-person with the Beyblade. That’s the concept of “asobi”. “Asobi” is about building the environment where players can enjoy themselves. That’s how we’ve been doing our business in Japan. We want to apply this concept outside Japan too.

What does this look like for the average consumer? Do you hold events for people who play your toys in Japan?

We do hold some in-person events. I like to see the players enjoy themselves, like shaking hands with one another or something. That’s how we run our business partially, then, of course, we promote ourselves through social media. We also create some environments in Roblox, in the metaverse.

We want to do the same thing outside Japan, including in the U.S.

TakaraTomy recently published financial results from the last fiscal year, and I saw that investment in research and development has gone up. What are your priorities when you’re doing research and development for the next generation of consumers?

That’s a good question. We devised a medium-term strategy for 2030, and the main growth strategy is to expand the business in different regions around the world and also to expand the business for not only kids but also adults.

The reason we increased the R&D investment is to prepare more products and “asobi” for the kidult segment. We also wanted to invest in more localized products for each region. For example, China, the U.S., or even European countries. Because of these, we increased the investment in R&D quite aggressively.

Does that involve more products from existing brands? Does it also involve new brands and new products?

Firstly, we want to invest more in existing brands, such as Beyblade. Beyblade is quite recognized outside Japan, but we still haven’t reached its full potential yet. Of course, we want to invest in existing brands to increase the awareness outside Japan. That’s the first priority.

Of course, we’ll keep investing in new IPs, including new trading card game titles and new digital games. That’s how we prioritize the R&D investment.

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American–Japanese anime production studio N LITE is forgoing traditional production approaches and building its slate of works with Afro-origin stories in public, seeking to create excitement in an increasingly difficult market for original films and shows.

Why it matters: Productions of anime-original works like those in N LITE’s slate have reached a historic low in recent years, with investors preferring to put their money on titles with built-in audiences that have a better chance at commercial success.

• Only one in seven new anime series airing in 2024 was not based on a previous work, according to anime production data collected by the Association of Japanese Animation.

What they’re saying: “In Japan, there is sometimes a resistance to share works early,” N LITE chief executive officer Christiano Terry told Animenomics in an interview earlier this year.

• Because anime studios rarely reveal pre-production designs for original works ahead of time, audiences don’t have insight into the worldbuilding process and aren’t able to build an affinity toward the projects.

• “Once an anime film is announced, people are waiting two to four years for it to come out, so it is important to consistently engage the audience and make them excited,” Terry argued.

Zoom in: N LITE partnered with publishing giant Kodansha to serialize a prequel story for Mfinda, an upcoming anime film inspired by Congolese mythology, to introduce it to potential audiences in Japan, the United States, and around the world.

• N LITE enlisted veteran anime producer Masao Maruyama to help develop the film, and the studio has teased image boards on social media platforms and at anime conventions, increasing anticipation among anime viewers.

• The studio looks for production partners carefully, selecting companies that share the same level of excitement so that they can amplify the project with licensing and merchandise.

The intrigue: Part of N LITE’s business model is also to give back to the places where its stories originate, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique, the latter of which is the inspiration for Chiure: Child of the Sea.

• “Whatever we’re doing, we want to have some type of impact campaign that will help stimulate the economy in a small way,” Terry explains.

What we’re watching: N LITE’s slate includes three additional anime films, including a highly anticipated reimagining of Osamu Tezuka’s Jungle Emperor Leo, and at least one anime series.

• “We also have another series project maybe soon to be announced that is based in more Latin and Caribbean culture,” Terry revealed. “The world is the canvas, and we’ve just started with Africa through Mfinda.”

Go deeper: Read our full interview with N LITE chief executive officer Christiano Terry about how the studio develops and finances original anime productions below.

N LITE recently announced a collaboration with Kodansha for a manga version of Mfinda. How did that collaboration come about?

It’s very hard to introduce original IP, especially international original IP, to Japanese audiences. Even films from very respected directors that are original still have trouble at the box office in Japan, so having a manga was non-negotiable to really introduce not only a U.S. or a global audience to Mfinda. We wanted to focus on readers in Japan, going monthly to engage in this story.

Kodansha is probably my favorite publishing house, and Ghost in the Shell is one of my favorite manga, so I thought that they would be a great fit for the title. [Former Crunchyroll vice president of licensing and former Netflix head of anime editorial and publishing] Rob Pereyda, an advisor of ours, made an introduction to the global business division. Yae Sahashi, who kind of leads the division, was very integral to that.

We had many conversations. They were immediately enthusiastic about the project, and we shared some sample pages with them. Besides the momentum of the project, the quality of the art captivated them, so we moved forward from there.

Anime studios tend to focus on anime production only, but you’ve entered the manga side. What was your thought process in deciding to do an anime film and then a manga tie-in?

It’s really all about how we can engage our audience quicker and give them different avenues and different places to engage.

Once an anime film is announced, people are waiting two to four years for it to come out, so it is important to consistently engage the audience and make them excited. Manga tie-ins, merchandise based on the manga, or other interesting pop-up things while the film is being produced, I think, are very effective ways to promote the work, especially when it’s an original. Even outside of anime, you have a lot of YouTube creators that are building fan bases very early. Anime is unique in that it has a really built-in structure already, so it makes sense to make a manga.

In Japan, there is sometimes a resistance to share works early. A lot of studios don’t like to share things that are in progress, whether it be image boards or art that’s done in pre-production. I think that it’s very valuable now to be able to do that because people really want to get insight into the behind-the-scenes process, whereas anime studios might have done that after a film is released, and you get an art book. That’s something that we think about as well.

As you’re doing these peripheral works, do you find that certain elements of the anime fit better for one type of peripheral work versus another? Did you have a realization that maybe you could have done something better in the anime to make it more possible to do this type of merchandise or this type of manga?

Not every project is going to have the same kind of strategy around tie-ins. We do have projects that may be a little bit too ambitious to try to do a manga, or it may not be the right demographic for merchandise—some things are more merchandisable than others.

For these first few film and television projects that we’re working on, all of them have this approach where we’re going to release the manga and we’re going to have some type of early merchandise. It is a case-by-case basis on how that happens and who we partner with for that.

Speaking about the slate, I’ve seen at least three or four different works other than Mfinda that N LITE has planned. You have Chiure, Ripper, Hotaru, and Spirit Detective. Is there a common thread across all of these works?

The film projects that are on our slate now are Mfinda, Jungle Emperor Leo—which is going to be announced very soon, but we did briefly announce it at Anime Expo last year—Webe: Spirit Detective, and Chiure: Child of the Sea. We have moved on from Hotaru and are now developing a separate series called Ife: Secret of the Star Child with a new producing team, creative direction, and focus. I can’t tell you who it’s with right now, but we will be sharing that soon. So, we have four films and a series that we’re currently working on, and Ripper is paused.

We like to lean into untapped lore and cultural elements that haven’t been explored from different parts of the world. I think for a lot of anime, its strength is that it does pull from many different cultural inspirations, even other than Japan. Obviously, there is a lot of European inspiration to a lot of anime—Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water by Hideki Anno is one of my favorites. Once the works are released, you’ll see little pieces of each film in another film. There might be a small detail that you may see in one film that you notice in another film that’s represented in a different way.

It’s better to know early the things we will be working on for the next ten to twelve years, so then we really have a runway. I think that is important for investors as well to understand, that we have a company, a studio, and a brand. They want to see what this looks like five to ten years from now. They want to know if we’re banking on this one project or these two projects, or if we have a universe to take people into.

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Digital manga platform MangaPlaza is gaining traction in its fifth year of operation in the United States, surpassing 1 million registered users at the end of July, its operator, Osaka-based e-book platform developer NTT Solmare, said this week.

Why it matters: Printed comic books make up the vast majority of manga sales in the North America, but MangaPlaza has found success in the digital space by tapping into an underserved female readership.

• As previously reported by Animenomics, female users made up about 90 percent of the platform’s paying subscribers last year.

What they’re saying: NTT Solmare, which has also operated the digital manga and e-book platform Comic C’moA in Japan since 2004, has found a highly engaged base of readers and fans of adult romance and boys’ love manga across the ocean.

• “While fan communities certainly exist in Japan, I get the impression that in North America, these communities are more extensively established and that users are more open about participating in them,” e-book division senior producer Daichi Katsuki told Animenomics in an interview during Anime Expo.

• Manga publishers in North America are also starting to take notice of an engaged female readership that has grown up on manga, Publishers Weekly reported last year.

Zoom in: Thanks to relationships built through Comic C’moA, NTT Solmare has been able to accumulate titles from more than 120 publishers on MangaPlaza.

• Both platforms also share a single team for marketing and technology operations, allowing lessons learned from operating Comic C’moA to be applied to operating MangaPlaza and vice versa.

The bigger picture: MangaPlaza is one of nearly a dozen Japanese-run digital manga platforms that have opened in North America since the COVID-19 pandemic as efforts to combat online piracy grow.

• Yes, but: Not all platforms have found the same level of adoption among readers. Manga Mirai, a service operated by NTT Docomo, a cousin company of NTT Solmare, is closing at the end of this year and migrating content to MangaPlaza.

What we’re watching: Seeking to grow its presence in North America, NTT Solmare in February opened a subsidiary in Sunnyvale, Calif., as it looks to partner with Silicon Valley technology companies.

• “If there are tools available that enable us to effectively to reach our customers on the website, we would like to utilize them and pursue such collaborations,” e-book division manager Ryusuke Ishii explained.

Go deeper: Read our interview with NTT Solmare leadership about MangaPlaza’s U.S. expansion and its strategies in North America and in Japan.

MangaPlaza is now in its fifth year of operation. In these four to five years, manga publishers and distributors have opened digital manga sites one after another in North America. How has the region’s digital manga market evolved from the viewpoint of NTT Solmare?

Daichi Katsuki, e-book division senior producer: Over the last four or five years, I believe the North American digital manga market has transitioned from its nascent stage into a period of growth. As you said, other companies have also been entering the market one after another. However, this is something we view very positively, as it helps to stimulate the market as a whole.

The shutdown of the pirate site Bato in January of this year has also made a significant positive impact on our business. We believe that users who previously relied on pirate sites are gradually adopting a habit of reading on official platforms like MangaPlaza since then.

Overall, I think a healthy market has been rapidly taking shape over the last four to five years.

I believe the works that are on Bato are translated unofficially by manga fans. Generally, have the works on MangaPlaza already been published and translated into English, or are they titles that have never been released in the United States?

Katsuki: When it comes to pirated editions, there are two main types of cases. One involves official materials being scanned and uploaded without permission, while the other involves fans taking it upon themselves to translate and upload the content.

Regarding the second question, there are cases where we receive officially translated versions from publishers, and there are also cases where we translate and distribute the material ourselves.

MangaPlaza has a specific focus on boys’ love, romance, and adult romance manga titles, which are popular among female readers. What are some similarities and difference that you have seen between the works and genres that female readers in North America and in Japan read?

Katsuki: When it comes to similarities, I think what’s universal across all countries are strong emotional connection to the characters, the ability to understand the depth of their psychological portrayals, and an appreciation for the beauty of the artwork, like the cover art. The overall aesthetic of the work seems to resonate across borders.

Another shared element is the fan community. While fan communities certainly exist in Japan, I get the impression that in North America, these communities are more extensively established and that users are more open about participating in them.

As for differences, when it comes to the romance genre specifically, North American readers tend to strongly prefer works where the heroine is an independent woman.

Also, this might be unique to our site, but within the boys’ love genre, subgenres like omegaverse [with male characters that can become pregnant] and beastman stories [featuring humanoid animal characters] are extremely popular. Boys’ love within high school settings is very popular in Japan, but the trend on our site leans toward fantasy-themed boys’ love.

If a work is popular in North America, does it generate interest back in Japan?

Katsuki: Since romance and boys’ love are already popular genres in Japan to begin with, we at MangaPlaza haven’t seen a pattern where something gains popularity in Japan simply because it became a hit in the United States

Given that the Japanese market is much larger, the impression I have is that popular genres are more comprehensively covered in Japan.

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Saudi anime production studio Manga Productions is pivoting toward production of its own intellectual properties after years of working with Japanese anime companies to co-create and import anime into Saudi Arabia.

Why it matters: Manga Productions is capitalizing on a rapidly growing entertainment market at home and in the Middle East as Saudi Arabia eases cinema restrictions and shifts its economy from oil toward culture and entertainment.

• “For many decades, Saudi Arabia had been a country that consumed content, but now we are producing our original content,” chief executive officer Essam Bukhary told Animenomics in an interview at AnimeJapan earlier this year.

Zoom in: At the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and Market earlier this summer, Manga Productions announced Henna, its first in-house anime project.

• Creating its own IPs has also allowed the company to build rapport with Japanese anime rightsholders when acquiring titles for distribution in the Middle East.

• “Being IP producers means that we understand how difficult and how challenging it is to produce IP, and we understand how important it is to protect our IP,” said Bukhary.

What we’re watching: Manga Productions intends to introduce artificial intelligence technology in its production processes whenever possible, but Bukhary acknowledged some employees are resistant toward the introduction of AI.

• Bukhary likens Japan’s entertainment content industry today to its electronics industry of the 1990s, faced with the pressure to transform as new competitors and new technologies enter the market.

Go deeper: Read our interview with Manga Productions chief executive officer Essam Bukhary about the company’s various initiatives below.

Please introduce Manga Productions and what the company is about.

Manga Productions is a Saudi company. We produce anime, we develop games, and we also produce manga. We do the IP management for anime distribution, game publishing, IP licensing, but our greatest mission is to inspire the heroes of tomorrow. Our real business is to use the power and impact of content to shape a better future for those young generations by providing them with good content.

Can you speak about the demographics of those young people in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East? What kind of shows do they enjoy?

Seventy percent of the population is under the age of 35, so we are a very young country. I think this is similar to other countries in the region.

I grew up watching Japanese anime—Captain Tsubasa, Grendizer, Rose of Versailles—so I was inspired by those anime. When I decided to come to study in Japan, I watched the anime that I used to watch in my childhood to learn Japanese.

Now, in Saudi Arabia, even in the Arab world, a lot of the young generation are very keen toward Japanese anime. Even my daughter, who is 15 years old, started watching Haikyu!! After watching, she decided to play volleyball. It changed her character. Her academic performance became better, and she became a public scholarship student just last month.

I can say with full confidence that Haikyu!! changed the life of my daughter. I think it’s happening with a lot of kids in the young generation in Saudi Arabia.

Outside of anime, what kind of content have there been traditionally for children in Saudi Arabia, and what makes anime so different from local content?

If you look at food, we have healthy food and junk food. This is identical to content. There are junk content and good content.

In general, Japanese content are very deep. They have deep, meaningful messages, especially about the growth of characters. In a lot of comics, you find superheroes who eat something, take some medicine, or go to another planet and become superheroes. In most Japanese anime, they have very weak characters. Step by step, they become strong and try to achieve their goals. This is what makes Japanese anime more relatable to young audiences. You find the ethics of friendship, of achieving your dreams, of taking care of your family, your loved ones. All those things make Japanese anime very attractive to many audiences.

For many decades, Saudi Arabia had been a country that consumed content, but now we are producing our original content. We are very glad that, for example, The Journey was the first ever movie from the Arab world to be premiered in the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It was the first IP from the Arab world on the Chinese platform Bilibili. We had Jackie Chan as a voice actor. We had premieres in Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and Japan as well. This shows how we can transform from being a content consumer into a content producer and content exporter.

So what’s next? We have been producing content, distributing our original content. Now, we are dealing with Japanese content, and we are exporting them to the world. This is what happened with Grendizer U, for example. We are distributing that globally excluding Japan, Captain Tsubasa in MENA, and Great Pretender in MENA as well. We are also publishing different games. Recently, we started publishing Dynasty Warriors in MENA in Arabic, Nioh 3, and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. We are very glad that last year we won two awards for best localization.

The next stage is we are taking those IPs into the entertainment industry. You may be familiar with the statue of Grendizer in Riyadh, 33 meters tall. It is in the Guinness Book of World Records. We are dealing with IPs in 360 degrees, so the future is not dealing with IP and content only on screens online. You have to go offline, and going offline is the key to success.

According to a number of data, between 2024 to 2030, the growth rate of the anime and entertainment business in Japan will be 4 percent. Globally, it is 7 percent. In Saudi Arabia and MENA, 14 percent. It’s a great potential here in the region.

What are the challenges that you’ve had in working with Japanese companies? Are they open to working with foreign partners in distribution, especially with Saudi partners? If they don’t have experience in working with Middle Eastern companies, are there certain challenges in that area?

Within our company, I think we are very glad to have Japanese team members and made-in-Japan Saudis, those young talent who studied and graduated from Japanese universities. They can not only speak Japanese but understand the mentality and the business culture of our friends in Japan. Having that differentiates you from many other companies, and especially when you have your branch in Japan, especially when you participate in AnimeJapan for four years in the business days and public days, and people see you and interact with you, that makes you more familiar to our friends in Japan.

There is a Japanese proverb “tooi shinseki yori chikaku no tanin”, which means a stranger who is near to you is better than a relative who is living far from you, so I tell our friends in Japan that we are not faraway strangers. We are not nearby strangers. We are nearly friends. That’s all facilitating our work with Japanese companies.

I think one point that supported Manga Productions in our business with Japan is that we produce our original IPs. Being IP producers means that we understand how difficult and how challenging it is to produce IP, and we understand how important it is to protect our IP. Having that experience and having that knowledge, it makes it easier for us to negotiate with other Japanese IP holders when dealing and managing their IPs in the region.

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Kadokawa’s migration of BookWalker Global earlier this year to a new platform run by San Antonio, Tex.-based subsidiary M12 Media has opened a door for the English-language e-book store to grow beyond serving manga and light novels from Japan.

Why it matters: Since the closure of ComiXology by Amazon in 2023, no other digital comics platform has been able to reach the scale of its distribution catalog and fill the gap it left behind, but several players are already vying for the crown.

• Webtoon Entertainment, the digital comics company controlled by South Korean internet giant Naver, is accelerating investment in North America, and New York-based GlobalComix earlier this year announced a US$13 million investment from Japanese and American venture capital firms.

What they’re saying: “We may very well start talking with the comics publishers and putting good old-fashioned comics on our site, assuming we can work out a deal,” M12 Media chief executive officer Samuel Pinansky told Animenomics in an interview earlier this year.

• BookWalker Global already sells original English light novels from J-Novel Club, Pinansky’s digital publishing company that was acquired by Kadokawa in 2021, and is in talks to add manga-adjacent titles from other publishers.

• The platform also sells comics and novels originally published in Korean from Ize Press, a joint venture of Yen Press, in which Kadokawa has a majority stake, and South Korea’s Redice webtoon studio.

The bigger picture: As reported by Animenomics, Kadokawa chief executive officer Takeshi Natsuno has said in interviews with Japanese media that the publishing giant could eventually source a large percentage of new works from outside Japan.

• “I think what Natsuno-san is saying is let’s not worry too much about the original language of the content. If the work is […] attractive to our reader base, […] then, yeah, why don’t we carry those books,” Pinansky explained.

Rewind: BookWalker Global, like many e-book platforms, saw a large surge of users in early 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with active users nearly doubling between February and April.

• Following this newfound success, BookWalker’s corporate leadership undertook management reforms four years ago and began separating BookWalker Global’s identity from its Japanese domestic counterpart.

• Those reforms didn’t come with a technology budget, however, and it wouldn’t be until around 2024 when it was decided that BookWalker Global needed to live on a separate platform from the Japanese service.

What we’re watching: E-book sales in the United States, which makes up the largest user market for BookWalker Global, slid 0.3 percent year-over-year in 2025, the first decline in three years, but Pinansky is optimistic that BookWalker Global can adapt to changing consumer behavior.

• “The thing I worry about in the long term is that we are seeing less people reading,” he noted. “We need to reinspire the joy of reading in young people, and manga is one way to do that.”

Go deeper: Read the second part of our interview with M12 Media chief executive officer Samuel Pinansky about the relaunch of BookWalker Global’s e-book platform below.

BookWalker Global has been split off from BookWalker Japan and now sits in the same corporate entity as J-Novel Club. Can you give it a little bit of context into the background of how that happened and why Kadokawa decided to split up BookWalker?

Around ten years ago, BookWalker’s Japanese store, which at that point was already around four or five years old, expanded into selling English content. This was mostly because the Japanese publishers that worked with BookWalker had English content and English manga that they wanted to sell as well. This was little known, but there were actually some English manga sold on BookWalker Japan before BookWalker Global even started, which were mostly sold to Japanese people who wanted to learn English.

This sort of started the idea that they should launch BookWalker in English with big English publishers. At the time, Kadokawa was already in talks with Yen Press about purchasing them, and it was part of the overall global expansion for the company. That’s exactly what happened. They took the Japanese site, localized it, hired people who spoke English, made a global division, and BookWalker Global was born.

Fast forward many years later, there had been a lot of growth, COVID had happened, and there was more growth. Japanese BookWalker had grown into one of the biggest e-book stores for manga and light novels in Japan. BookWalker Global had also grown really large, and the manga market in the United States in English had also grown.

But despite the name, BookWalker Global was not really a global company. It was the Japanese company’s global division, and it was still operating very, very much like the Japanese store. Whether it was the way they were running campaigns, the organizational structure, the employees, or the way that they communicated with publishers, it was very Japanese.

The market for digital manga and light novels overseas is not the same as it is in Japan. The demographics are different, the marketing is different, and the incentives are different. Japanese people love loyalty programs where you stick with one store for five years and you finally get 5 percent off. Those sorts of promotions that work well in one area in the world just don’t work that well elsewhere. This was not something that Kadokawa was unaware of, but there were a lot of institutional problems to sort through. How do you run the global store in a different way than the domestic store when it’s really the same thing?

Around four years ago, some changes were made in the management of BookWalker Global and the way that marketing was being decided on, but that was not enough. Even if you change the way that the business decisions are made, the system was still the same Japanese system—the types of promotions, the front page, the way that the design works in the system, and the app development.

The app that you used for BookWalker Global was not a separate app. It was the same exact app as BookWalker Japan, just localized into English. To be frank, the design of the app works in Japanese, but it doesn’t really work in English. You need a separate app because of the reading direction, because of the way text works, and because of the aesthetics and the way text is displayed.

In order to execute different designs, you needed an entirely different tech budget, which didn’t exist, so the management reforms alone weren’t effective. Ultimately, Kadokawa knew that what they needed to do to really have BookWalker Global exist and thrive in the English market is to have it be its own business.

That was the original plan that started around two or two and a half years ago: to just create a new company overseas for BookWalker Global and transfer the global business to that new company. Because that new company was always going to be run by myself anyway as part of a proposal that I created maybe a year or a year and a half ago, it was actually decided that we could just use the J-Novel Club company. We didn’t need to create yet another company with yet another board of directors.

That is the origin of the transfer that happened April of last year, where J-Novel Club absorbed the BookWalker Global business. We also changed the name of the company to M12 Media in order to reflect that now it wasn’t just running the J-Novel Club business but also a separate BookWalker Global.

What does the name M12 Media mean?

We couldn’t just call the company J-Novel Club anymore because that would be rude to BookWalker Global. It also would not reflect things accurately, so we were trying to think of various names.

M can stand for manga. It can stand for media. It can stand for magic, mystery, and membrane. The M is designed to be ambiguous, but for the most part, it stands for media. We’re a media company that is producing, selling, and distributing media.

Twelve is a very important number in Asian culture, like the twelve signs of the zodiac. It sort of gives it this eastern play, but the real reason it’s called M12 is because I have a Ph.D. in string theory. In string theory, there’s a theory called the M-theory, which proposes an eleven-dimensional universe. In that theory, the M is also ambiguous.

I took that eleven-dimensional theory and went even one higher dimension to M12.

Did Kadokawa propose the vision where BookWalker Global would eventually become a separate platform when J-Novel Club joined the company, or did that come up later?

J-Novel Club was actually purchased by BookWalker, though not officially. Ultimately, we were purchased by Kadokawa’s U.S. holding company, which at the time was called Kadokawa Pictures America. It owns Yen Press, J-Novel Club, and M12 Media.

When I originally sold the majority share to Kadokawa, we were actually operated by the Japanese subsidiary BookWalker. The president of BookWalker was the primary person who was involved with the acquisition. All of Kadokawa was involved with the acquisition for due diligence, but I was reporting to BookWalker. I was actually on the board of BookWalker Japan up until the BookWalker entity was dissolved. We were very closely tied with BookWalker, but there was never a direct talk about BookWalker Global being managed by J-Novel Club at the time.

What ended up happening relatively soon after that was that the holding company was renamed to Kadokawa World Entertainment, more specifically the global business department of Kadokawa. About a year after our acquisition, management of J-Novel Club was transferred from BookWalker to the global business department, which was consolidating the management of all of the overseas subsidiaries, even though our board directors included many people with BookWalker and I was on the board of BookWalker. We were still very closely linked, but the reporting line went through the global business department.

The acquisition of J-Novel Club was much more about acquiring a successful digital-first light novel publisher. The combination with BookWalker Global was something that I would like to think a lot of the executives and myself always considered an option, and the opportunity to do this was there initially, but it became really clear that this was the right thing to do about two years ago after the issues with the management transfer, but the system transfer not being able to be fully independent. Then it just became a question of what’s the right vehicle to handle this business.

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BookWalker Global is now the first commercial e-book service owned by a Japanese company to adopt an open, vendor-neutral standard for digital rights management, deploying the European Digital Reading Lab’s Licensed Content Protection standard.

Driving the story: Kadokawa last month completed the move of its English-language BookWalker Global e-book store to a new platform operated by M12 Media, a Texas-based subsidiary that also runs the digital light novel publisher J-Novel Club.

• “The most important thing is getting the best experience for users and the best ecosystem for them to buy manga, light novels, and audiobooks and read it on our site,” M12 Media chief executive officer Samuel Pinansky told Animenomics in an interview earlier this year.

What they’re saying: The LCP standard allows the new English-language BookWalker service to meet demand from readers for more compatibility of its e-books with other platforms and to ensure the reliability of its own platform, Pinansky explains.

• For consumers, the adoption of an internationally governed open standard also ensures that BookWalker isn’t able to unilaterally change the terms of its e-book licenses and take away readers’ access to titles they have already purchased.

• “We’re trying to break out of this idea of a proprietary Galapagos system that is only for BookWalker and use more and more industry standards as we can,” he elaborated. “It’s good for us as a business, but ultimately, it’s also good for our business partners.”

• Instead of using other DRM solutions that impose a flat fee for every e-book sold, the new platform takes advantage of LCP DRM’s revenue-based pricing, making it more affordable for M12 Media to maintain.

The bigger picture: The Japan Electronic Publishing Association, whose mission is to develop and expand the country’s e-book publishing industry, has advocated for wider adoption of the LCP standard due to its potential benefits of increasing accessibility.

• In a presentation to JEPA members in November, EDRLab leadership highlighted the LCP standard’s growing use among libraries, publishers, and e-book platforms around the world.

• Kobo e-book readers by Japanese technology conglomerate Rakuten are already planned to transition into using the LCP standard sometime this year.

What’s next: Pinansky wants the new BookWalker platform to also serve its publisher partners by helping them streamline e-book delivery to other platforms.

• “We’re also planning on adopting an open specification for publisher royalty reporting, which is not yet widespread in the publishing industry, but we hope they’ll become more widespread.”

Go deeper: Read the first part of our interview with M12 Media chief executive officer Samuel Pinansky about the relaunch of BookWalker Global’s e-book platform below.

BookWalker supports more than just light novels. It also supports manga and audiobooks. Since joining Kadokawa and BookWalker from J-Novel Club, what have you learned about how that side of the business operates versus just the digital light novel publishing side?

At J-Novel Club, we work directly with all kinds of e-book stores, whether it’s Amazon, Google, iBooks, or BookWalker itself. BookWalker Global is very much a boutique e-book store. It’s not like iBooks, Kobo, or Nook, where the goal of those e-book stores is to publish all the books. Those stores aren’t sitting here going, “Well, we don’t want this because it’s not the kind of thing that our audience would want.” Each publisher has a representative on BookWalker’s side that is their contact point. Every publisher’s delivery specification is different because we want to make sure that we are as accommodating as possible.

That’s one thing that I had to learn about. It’s the diversity of content providers that we have to handle. We have Penguin Random House, one of the big five publishers. We have people delivering things through ONIX files, and we have people delivering the same files they deliver to Amazon because they don’t want to convert things. Everybody is very different, and there’s a lot of individual service to the publishers that provide the content. The biggest thing I learned is all of the business-to-business side of running a boutique e-book store that you don’t see as the customer.

Obviously, I understood the business-to-consumer side: we’re selling e-books; we’re letting people buy books; they’re downloading them; they’re reading them; they’re searching for them; how the website works; the campaigns that we’re advertising to them. That much I was fairly familiar with. On the publisher side, I was only familiar with my experience at J-Novel Club and from that side of the coin. I wasn’t as familiar with the other side of the coin and all the work that goes into what happens after the publisher sends the book.

That ties into the new system we’re building. The most important thing is getting the best experience for users and the best ecosystem for them to buy manga, light novels, and audiobooks and read it on our site. At the same time, we’re trying to improve and streamline the publisher’s experience as well, whether it’s the royalty reporting system, so that they can actually see real-time sales, or the distribution system.

Only a few of the publishers that we currently publish on BookWalker use ONIX feeds to distribute the information about their books to BookWalker and other places. Only the biggest ones. However, internally, the system we built converts everybody’s books into an industry-standard format. Now, whether they deliver them through Excel files or whatever format, we convert them internally to our own ONIX feed that we then import into our system. In theory, they could be re-exported out to other publishers.

This not something that we’ll have at launch, but we’re also planning on adopting an open specification for publisher royalty reporting, which is not yet widespread in the publishing industry, but we hope they’ll become more widespread.

Another thing that we’re doing is the LCP DRM. That’s another industry standard that we’re trying to adopt at BookWalker, which, ultimately, is for the consumers. The more standards you use, the more widely compatible your system is with other platforms and other software. It’s also for the publishers. By using the industry-standard system, they have more confidence that it works in the way that they expect it to.

We’re trying to break out of this idea of a proprietary Galapagos system that is only for BookWalker and use more and more industry standards as we can. It’s good for us as a business, but ultimately, it’s also good for our business partners. All publishers, especially small and medium-sized publishers, struggle to keep organized and keep all their books in a catalog. When you get to a certain size, the growing pains begin to get really bad, and I experienced this is at J-Novel Club.

If BookWalker can help with that and be a good partner to the manga publishers, then that’s another really important aspect of business development with the new system and the way that we’re running business.

Can you give more context into how LCP DRM was selected? My understanding is that LCP is more heavily used in Europe and that there are some talks about having wider adoption in Japan. How did that conversation come about where it was decided that BookWalker should use LCP?

My primary developer has actually been on the board of the European Digital Reading Lab standards and was involved in the specification-compliant EPUB reader system called Thorium, so the architect of the new system has always been tightly aligned with that group.

There are two other reasons. One is that the licensing fees are very reasonable. Digital rights management technology isn’t free, and Adobe is a classic example of DRM that is available to purchase and use. Adobe’s DRM has a per-title fee, which scales really poorly when we’re selling chapters. The fee for most DRM systems is a flat fee based on each individual title or sale, not a percentage, whereas LCP’s DRM fee schedule is based on the overall size of your business.

If you’re a small software creator and you want to make an EPUB reader that is LCP-compliant, I believe you have to pay in the range of a hundred dollars a year. LCP is really affordable. If you’re a large corporation like us, you’re paying many thousands of dollars, but it’s still affordable, and it’s the best solution because it’s predictable. We know that it’s based off our revenue, not the jumper titles that we’re selling, so it was the best choice financially.

The other reason is because it’s tightly linked with the open standards body that is behind EPUB itself. The LCP DRM people are overlapping with them by a large degree, so there is no better choice for compatibility and futureproofing. All of the other DRM systems are essentially owned by corporations, not non-profit organizations, but our money—our licensing fees—goes to support this nonprofit.

When it comes to protecting publishers’ content and content production in general, the more open standards there are, the better the user experience, and we feel more confident that we can give assurance to the user that when you buy an e-book, you do own it.

I know people will push back on this and say, “If there’s any restriction at all, then you don't own it,” but at the same time, if you buy a physical book, you can’t go and make 100 copies and then sell them. There will always be restrictions up to the copyright law in the country. In this case, the idea is to make those restrictions as transparent and as clear as possible to the consumer, so they know exactly what they’re buying.

Right now, I think the problem that most people have with content protection isn’t the content protection itself. I think actually most consumers believe authors and creators, and maybe even corporations that make things a little bit, should be paid for their work.

What they don’t like about the content protection is the uncertainty: “Do I really own this? What if some magical switch is pulled, and suddenly I can’t read my e-book?” That’s also why, for example, geographic restrictions, among other things, are not good because people will think they can watch something, but then the rules are different and they can’t, so ultimately, the problem with content protection is that the rules aren’t clear and are not clearly stated.

LCP gives us a very clear opportunity to make sure that it’s not just us that are inciting the rules and that we can’t just change them at any point in time.

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Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump manga magazine has become a household name for manga readers outside Japan, but other manga magazines remain largely unknown to overseas readers, a dilemma that manga technology startup Comici wants to solve.

Why it matters: As Japan’s domestic manga market stalls, publishers are looking to grow their sales abroad, but overseas readers and Japanese readers consume manga very differently from one another.

• Traditionally, manga readers in Japan discovered new titles through magazines, which are curated by a team of editors, but this system is unknown to overseas readers, who usually treat manga as auteur-driven works.

What’s happening: Comici launched an English-language digital manga app and web platform earlier this year, seeking to bridge the gap between manga magazine editors and overseas readers.

• “I believe the most irreplaceable function of manga magazines has been their ability to bring diverse talents together within a single editorial context and help readers discover new works,” Comici founder and chief executive officer Daisaku Manda told Animenomics in a recent interview.

• Comici Manga launched in 12 countries in January and hosts works from digital manga brands operated by Bushiroad Works, Kill Time Communication, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, Fusosha Publishing, Ohzora Publishing, and Hero’s.

Zoom in: Comici is best known in Japan as the developer of the Comici+ software-as-a-service platform that allows smaller manga publishers to build hosted digital manga services without needing to build their own web infrastructure.

• Comici+ powers digital platforms for manga magazines like Hakusensha’s Young Animal and Shogakukan’s Weekly Big Comic Spirits. It surpassed 3 million users across all supported magazines in February.

• “What Comici+ wants to recreate is not a simple digital copy of print magazines,” Manda explained. “We want to reconstruct the discovery, editorial context, nurturing function, and sense of closeness with readers that magazines originally had, in a form suited to the digital age.”

• Taking an example from the growing use of data analytics in baseball, Manda says Comici shares Comici+ user behavior data with publishers in order to inform how editors can maximize the reach of manga titles in their portfolio.

Backgrounder: Founded in 2018, Comici is backed by manga publishers Shogakukan and Akita Shoten and by LINE Yahoo-affiliated Z Venture Capital and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital.

The bigger picture: Top Japanese manga publishers are attempting to forge a closer relationship between manga editors and overseas creators and readers.

• At the Anime Expo fan convention in Los Angeles earlier this month, Kadokawa flew in a team of editors to conduct portfolio reviews and recruit promising manga artists.

• In April, as part of Kodansha’s Manga Academy program, the publisher launched a virtual community on the messaging platform Discord, allowing creators and fans to read manga critiques written by editors.

Go deeper: Read about Manda’s approach to building a “common operating system” for digital manga, plus his full interview (for paying subscribers), below.

Comici’s primary business in Japan is a digital manga magazine production and publishing platform for small and mid-size manga publishers. What did publishers tell you they needed most? What surprised you about the operational realities inside editorial departments once you began building tools for them?

What publishers needed most was not simply a distribution system. I believe what they needed was a place where editorial teams could deliver their own passion and editorial intent directly to readers.

As manga distribution became digital, it increasingly centered around e-book stores and large-scale platforms. This is extremely important from a sales perspective. However, on those platforms, works that are already selling well, or works that can generate short-term numbers, naturally tend to stand out.

As a result, I felt that it had become harder for readers to feel the passion behind the works that editorial teams truly wanted to promote, the works they wanted to nurture, and the works into which creators had poured strong personal feelings.

In the era of print magazines, editorial teams had a clear voice—which work should be on the cover, what order the chapters should appear in, what kind of special features should be created. Behind all of that was the editorial team’s passion: “We want readers to discover this work.” That passion was closely connected to the passion of the creators. But through digitization, that magazine-like context and sense of closeness began to fade.

The web magazines provided by Comici+ are a mechanism for bringing that passion back into the digital space. Editorial teams can have their own magazines, deliver works directly to readers, see how readers respond, and then think about the next action.

Of course, selling through e-book stores and large platforms is important. But sales alone do not nurture works. I believe that when editorial teams can directly feel readers’ reactions, that sense of closeness creates a new kind of passion.

What surprised me was not that publishers were reluctant to go digital. In fact, many editorial teams had a very strong desire to deliver their works to readers. What they lacked was the place and system to express that passion digitally and deliver it to readers. I see Comici+ as the common infrastructure for that purpose.

Your stated goal is to build a “common operating system” for digital manga distribution, which is also an objective in the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry’s IP360 strategy. Platforms like Netflix and Spotify have become the default in many parts around the world for consuming entertainment content, but they also receive criticism for monopolistic practices. Why do you think it’s in the best interest of the manga industry to have a “common operating system” versus a diversity of distribution platforms?

I believe the greatest value of manga lies in its diversity: boys’ manga, girls’ manga, men’s manga, women’s manga, boys’ love, girls’ love, essays, experimental works. Entertainment has value precisely because it is diverse. Japan’s manga culture became strong because there are so many genres, creators, editorial teams, and labels.

The “common operating system” we are aiming to build is not something that integrates all of that diversity into one single form. Rather, it is a way to standardize the data foundation and distribution infrastructure so that diverse talent can properly reach readers.

On today’s large-scale platforms, data tends to accumulate on the platform side. Of course, e-book stores and distribution platforms are extremely important for sales. But when data is locked inside the platform, publishers, editorial teams, and creators cannot fully understand how readers discovered a work, where they felt passion for it, and how the work is growing. As a result, there is a risk that the initiative in creating and nurturing works gradually shifts toward the platform side.

We are not a company that creates manga, nor are we a company that intervenes in the talent of editors and manga creators themselves. Our role is to build a common data foundation, visualize the points of contact between works and readers, and return that information to publishers, editorial teams, and creators.

Infrastructure and data foundations should be shared. On top of that, editors and manga creators should compete through their talent. I believe this is the healthiest form for the manga industry.

Manga can become a hub for the entire entertainment industry, including anime, film, games, merchandise, and overseas expansion. For manga to function as that hub, data should not be locked inside a specific platform. It needs to return to the people who create the works, so it can be used to create future works and build relationships with readers.

In other words, a common operating system is not a mechanism for reducing diversity. It is a foundation that allows diverse works, diverse editorial teams, and diverse talents to be properly evaluated and delivered to readers in the digital age.

We believe Comici’s reason for existence is not to lock works inside our own platform, but to return value to talented creators as a common operating system.

What do you see as the most irreplaceable functions that manga magazines provide, and how does the Comici+ “common operating system” recreate those functions?

I believe the most irreplaceable function of manga magazines has been their ability to bring diverse talents together within a single editorial context and help readers discover new works.

Manga does not exist through collected volumes alone. Print magazines had an editorial philosophy, a publishing order, special features, and covers. Readers bought magazines to read the works they were already following, but they also encountered works next to them that they had not yet discovered. In that sense, a magazine was not merely a distribution surface. It was an editorial device for discovering and nurturing works.

In e-book stores and large-scale platforms, search and rankings tend to be centered around individual works. Of course, this is very effective for sales. On the other hand, readers tend to concentrate on highly ranked works or works that are already selling well. Works that editorial teams want to nurture, or works that are still small but have strong passion behind them, can become harder to discover.

That is where the value of manga magazines lies. An editorial team thinks, “We want readers to discover this work.” A reader thinks, “If it is in this magazine, I should try reading it.” New creators and works grow within that relationship of trust. Comici+ is trying to recreate this function of the magazine in the digital space.

With web magazines, each editorial team can express its worldview and the context of its label. Instead of simply lining up works, they can deliver the works they want to promote through special features, update flows, recommendations after reading, campaigns, and social media initiatives.

In addition, Comici+ can visualize reader responses through data: Which works are bringing in new readers? Which works are being read repeatedly? Which works are leading to purchases? Which works have strong core passion? This makes it easier for editorial teams to find not only works that are already selling but also works that have the potential to grow.

In other words, what Comici+ wants to recreate is not a simple digital copy of print magazines. We want to reconstruct the discovery, editorial context, nurturing function, and sense of closeness with readers that magazines originally had, in a form suited to the digital age.

Manga magazines were hubs connecting talented creators and readers. I see Comici+ as the magazine infrastructure of the digital age, supporting that hub function with data and technology.

Japanese readers are more familiar with the characteristics of various manga publishers and have an affinity toward certain labels. Readers abroad don’t usually pay attention to the label or publisher of a manga series. What makes you confident that Japan’s manga magazine‑style community model can be scaled globally in Comici Manga?

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Programming note: This weekly briefing is going on a summer break for the rest of July after I return from Anime Expo. In the meantime, a series of insightful interviews that I’ve had in the backlog will take its place.

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Aniplex posts record sales, but its anime studios suffer

Sony Music’s anime production planning company Aniplex posted record net sales in the most recent fiscal year thanks in part to the box office success of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, but its affiliated anime studios are reporting mixed earnings results.

Why it matters: The earnings gap reflects an ongoing concern among anime industry observers where consolidation of anime studios results in the monopolization of profit by their parent anime rightsholding companies.

By the numbers: Aniplex’s net sales rose 45 percent in the twelve months ending in March 2026 to ¥212 billion (US$1.3 billion), while operating profit jumped 62 percent, according to an earnings announcement filed in the Japanese government gazette.

• Aniplex had a blockbuster year with two investments—the first installment of the Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle anime film trilogy, which is Japan’s second highest-grossing film of all time, and Kokuho, Japan’s highest-grossing live-action film.

• Fate Grand/Order, Aniplex’s highly successful mobile game, also celebrated its milestone tenth anniversary, leading to the gaming business performing above expectations, Gamebiz reports.

Yes, but: As previously reported by Animenomics, primary contractor studios like the ones Aniplex owns are facing shrinking profits from higher production costs.

• Two subsidiary anime studios—Spy × Family co-production studio CloverWorks and 3D CG anime subcontracting studio Boundary—posted net losses for the year.

• Solo Leveling anime studio A-1 Pictures posted a net profit, but that studio also saw a net loss in the previous year for the twelve months ending in March 2025.

• Even live-action production firm Myriagon Studio reported a net loss despite its participation in the Kokuho production committee.

What we’re watching: Egg Firm, the anime production planning company acquired by Aniplex earlier this year, saw its net profit fall by more than 50 percent in the most recent fiscal year.

METI awards IP360 program subsidies for anime, manga

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry announced last week dozens of the first anime and manga production and promotion subsidies under its IP360 program, designed to triple anime and manga exports by 2033.

Zoom out: As previously reported by Animenomics, METI raised the floor and ceiling award amounts in an attempt to boost blockbuster productions and increase private sector investments in anime and manga.

Anime production subsidies of up to ¥1.5 billion (US$9.2 million) each were awarded to eight production planning companies and studios, focusing on theatrical releases.

• Anime studios Wit Studio and Trigger are slated to create new anime films, while MAPPA will produce new anime titles targeted for the global market.

• K2 Pictures, the film production and finance company by former Toei producer Muneyuki Kii, will create new anime films based on popular manga titles.

• Aniplex, CoMix Wave Films, Twin Engine, and Production I.G will use the subsidies to improve anime planning and production processes.

Localization support worth up to ¥40 million (US$250,000) each were awarded to ten companies for projects that involve translation and cultural adaptation of anime and manga properties.

• Award recipients for anime localization projects include short anime creator Plott, Shueisha-backed anime distributor Remow, Bushiroad’s upcoming BanG Dream! Ave Mujica film.

• Manga localization project recipients include digital manga platforms Ganma! (operated by Comisma) and Comic Growl (Bushiroad Works) and an effort by manga publisher Bunkasha Publishing to translate manga in-house and distribute them for the North American market.

Content distribution platform investments of up to ¥3 billion (US$18 million) each were awarded to Crunchyroll, Bandai Namco and its North American toys subsidiary, illustrator platform operator Pixiv, and DeNA’s virtual YouTuber streaming app Iriam.

• Subsidies were also awarded to expand digital manga platforms K Manga (from Kodansha), Manga Plus (Shueisha), Manga Up! (Square Enix), and MangaPlaza (NTT Solmare).

Software development subsidies worth up to ¥100 million (US$600,000) each were awarded to Sony Group and OLM Digital for in-house development of digital anime production software and to four platforms using artificial intelligence technology in anime and manga production.

Subsidies for anime and manga events worth up to ¥200 million (US$1.2 million) each were awarded to the Japan–China International Animation Film Festival, events held by Crunchyroll, a manga festival at Japan Expo Paris, and manga promotion at the Seoul International Book Fair and the Beijing International Book Fair.

Clippings: Kadokawa CEO survives shareholder vote

Kadokawa CEO Takeshi Natsuno survived an effort by Hong Kong-based hedge fund manager and activist investor Oasis Management to oust him from the position as the publisher seeks to reassure investors after disappointing year-end earnings. (Reuters)

Cool Japan Fund’s cumulative investment losses ballooned by 41 percent during the fiscal year ending in March 2026 to ¥54 billion (US$332 million), making it more likely for Japan’s government to abolish or consolidate the fund. (The Mainichi)

Bandai Namco is strengthening identity verification on its Premium Bandai online store for anime merchandise to combat a growing number of purchases made by people buying up limited edition items and reselling them at high prices. (Otaku Lab)

The Association of Japanese Animations and Tokyo Metropolitan Government plan to unveil on the sidelines of the Tokyo International Film Festival a new anime industry event to be held in 2027. (Tokyo Metropolitan Government)

Crayon Shin-chan fans from around the world are flocking to the city of Kasukabe in Saitama Prefecture, the setting of the manga and anime series. Foreign visitors more than quadrupled between the 2023–24 and 2025–26 fiscal years. (Nikkei Asia)

Stripe seeks to woo Japanese entertainment companies

“Many of our major domestic clients are gaming companies and media companies, and as this is currently the fastest-growing sector, our Japanese team is particularly strengthening its investments in this area.”

— Daniel Heffernan, Stripe Japan representative director

Context: Ireland native Heffernan, who became an anime fan through Love Hina, told the ITmedia Business Online outlet that financial technology firm Stripe sees an opportunity to win over Japan’s entertainment companies that want to take advantage of a new law on mobile app stores and avoid app store fees by establishing their own payment systems outside of the Apple and Google ecosystems.

Zoom in: Commenting on recent efforts by global payment networks like Visa and Mastercard to restrict payments for adult media in Japan, Heffernan says Stripe has no choice but to comply, but he points out the company also supports other methods of payment like JCB credit cards.

1 chart to go: Indian anime viewers prefer smartphones

Smartphones are the most popular device for Indian viewers to watch anime, a survey organized by Hakuhodo India and conducted by Intage India found, demonstrating a mobile-first viewing culture in the country.

Why it matters: Smartphones also double as social communication devices, allowing Indian fans to quickly communicate with each other about their favorite anime.

Where things stand: Out of a sample of 1,200 respondents, 96 percent indicated that they watch anime on smartphones, while 72 percent watch it on television.

• About 61 percent of respondents preferred watching anime that is dubbed into a non-Japanese language, while 35 percent favored subtitled content.

• Dubbed anime viewers overwhelmingly prefer to watch in Hindi, while subtitled anime viewers prefer English subtitles.

The bigger picture: “According to interviews with multiple industry experts, India boasts approximately 150 million active anime users, ranking third globally in total viewing time and experiencing rapid growth of 16 percent year-on-year,” a Hakuhodo India researcher noted.

• “The core audience consists primarily of people in their teens through thirties. […] The combination of a massive user base and high engagement demonstrates significant monetization potential.”

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In case you missed it: The Korea Creative Content Agency, the government agency responsible for providing funding to companies producing South Korean content, will kick off the third annual World Webtoon Festival next Wednesday in Los Angeles, one day before the start of Anime Expo.

• Today is the last day to register for the kickoff business networking and creator networking events.

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Fair Trade Commission sets anime contract guidelines

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission has published formal guidelines on anime production contracts in an effort to establish standard practices for players in the anime industry, from the production committees that commission new anime to the studios that make them and the streaming platforms that distribute them.

Why it matters: Japan wants to triple anime exports to ¥6 trillion (US$37 billion) by 2033, and it believes more governance is needed to transform anime into an IP-driven industry with sustainable management and human resources.

• Anime companies already use contracts in many business dealings today, but the industry as a whole was historically built on numerous informal agreements, and the guidelines seek to change that practice.

Rewind: The publication is a culmination of an investigation into possible contract abuses in film and anime production that was launched in 2024 and whose findings were published at the end of last year.

What they’re saying: While 98 percent of primary contractor studios surveyed by the commission said that transaction terms with production committees are clearly stated, the guidelines encourage closer communication between the two sides.

• To ensure the sustainability of studio operations, the commission emphasized the need for additional payments in production delays, reimbursement for work done in cancellations, and compensation when transferring copyright to committees.

• The commission also urges increased transparency from streaming platforms in sharing viewer data during production fee negotiations to ensure fair compensation for anime creators.

The bigger picture: Despite the commission’s guidelines, the relationship between studios and production committees remains complicated.

• “In recent years, the shortage of anime production lines has become chronic, and it isn’t uncommon for production committees to make requests that are almost like pleas, urging studios to secure production lines,” writes Gamebiz chief editor Hidehiko Kimura.

• However, as previously reported by Animenomics, anime studio financials have diverged between larger studios and smaller ones, and not all studios have seen increased ability to negotiate higher fees from the shortage of production lines.

Anime and IP-based toys ties grow dominance in Japan

Japan’s domestic market for character merchandise and toys based on entertainment IPs, including anime, grew 9.3 percent to an estimated ¥665 billion (US$4.1 billion) in the twelve months ending in March 2026, according to Japan Toy Association data.

Why it matters: It’s the fifth year in a row that the growth in Japanese toy categories typically associated with entertainment and anime IPs has outpaced that of other toy categories.

• Toy categories with IP ties now make up about 57 percent of Japan’s ¥1.17 trillion (US$7.22 billion) domestic toy market, a 13-point increase from seven years ago.

Zoom in: Card games and trading cards, such as the globally popular Pokémon cards, grew 12 percent, the eighth consecutive year of growth, and now make up 29 percent of the domestic toy market.

• Japan’s trading cards are fetching high prices abroad, Nikkei Asia reports, driving increased demand as many are purchased in the country before finding their way overseas to be resold.

• Aside from the Pokémon franchise, trading cards from Duel Masters and Yu-Gi-Oh! also drove growth in the category over the last year.

What we’re watching: Plushies reported the fastest growth rate of any Japanese toy category last year, growing 38 percent to ¥62.4 billion (US$386 million) in market size.

• Monchhichi maker Sekiguchi has seen demand for the monkeylike stuffed animal surge for the first time since the 1980s after Pop Mart’s Labubu became popular.

• Plushies from video game properties like Super Mario, Kirby, and Pokémon have also been popular.

Clippings: TV Asahi makes ‘Doraemon’ distribution push

TV Asahi’s Doraemon anime could see a new distribution push in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and multiple European markets under a distribution deal with London-based Cake Entertainment. (Licensing Magazine)

• TV Asahi is also partnering with India’s PVR INOX Pictures to bring Doraemon the Movie: New Nobita and the Castle of the Undersea Devil into the country, one year after Crayon Shin-chan opened in Indian cinemas, and with Eurozoom in France.

Crunchyroll will enter South Korea later this year, where it’s expected to run head-to-head with local anime streaming leader Laftel, which is operated by pay television broadcaster Aniplus and investment firm Keistone Partners. (The Korea Herald)

• Laftel is South Korea’s only profitable streaming video platform and distributes 90 percent of new anime titles released in Japan, Maeil Business Newspaper reported in 2024.

• Zoom out: Crunchyroll’s debut in South Korea comes after earlier Asian launches this year in Thailand and in Taiwan.

Japanese government plans for a unified domestic platform for subscription-based digital manga distribution are running into early resistance from publishers who prefer to maintain their own platforms. (The Mainichi)

Japan’s vending machine operators and manufacturers are tapping into customers’ ‘oshikatsu’ spending with new machines that dispense acrylic cards featuring anime characters and beverage cans printed with names of favorite pop stars. (Nikkei Asia)

Isao Takahata anime short The Adventure of Panda and Friends is finding renewed popularity in Japan months after the last giant pandas left the country amid tensions between Tokyo and Beijing. (The Yomiuri Shimbun)

China’s animation boom faces AI and cost disruptions

After a blockbuster year in 2025, China’s animation industry is facing new headwinds from labor constraints and disruptions from artificial intelligence technology, putting pressure on studios, the Caixin Weekly magazine reports.

Why it matters: Expectations from Chinese audiences for visual and narrative quality have grown after Ne Zha 2 earned a record CN¥15.4 billion (US$2.3 billion) last year, capturing a 30 percent share of the country’s total box office earnings.

What’s happening: A shortage of capable animation directors and screenwriters has created a bottleneck in China’s animation industry, says Wang Changtian, chairman of Beijing Enlight Media, the studio behind Ne Zha 2.

• China’s 2D animators are facing high workloads and mediocre pay. Key animators aren’t typically paid a salary, relying instead on piecework compensation while enduring lengthy development cycles.

• 3D animation projects with more established industrial processes have grown in number, but most projects involve up to 1,000 or 2,000 people, placing immense pressure on the production system.

The other side: While AI-generated animation has fallen short of theatrical standards and has yet to make their way into high-end production workflows, now low- and mid-budget productions are being threatened by the growth of AI motion comics.

• “Since late 2025, platforms have been advising content suppliers to incorporate AI to cut costs,” a streaming platform insider familiar with motion comics told Caixin.

• In the past, these platforms regularly commissioned animation series from more traditional Chinese animation studios, which typically employ between 50 and 100 people and whose animators have been resistant toward AI.

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In case you missed it: The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan will host an anime panel next week with Tetsu Fujimura, the founder of film distributor Gaga and producer of live-action One Piece whose Cannes Film Market presentation last month became a topic of discussion in film industry circles.

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Kodansha starts manga publishing joint venture in India

Kodansha will begin localizing and publishing manga in India this autumn, becoming the first Japanese publisher to enter the emerging market through a new joint venture with printing giant Dai Nippon Printing.

Why it matters: India is a rapidly growing market for anime and manga, but Japanese rightsholders often hesitate to directly enter business in the country due to high levels of content piracy and complex regulations.

How it happened: Consulting services firm IJ Kakehashi, whose chief executive officer Sanjay Panda helped Kodansha negotiate a children’s book deal with India’s National Book Trust in 2017, is supporting the joint venture with a 5 percent stake.

The details: Kodansha aims to put out 200 manga releases a year in English and Hindi, printing them in the country in order to take advantage of lower printing costs and compete with pirated editions, the Nikkei financial newspaper reports.

• Kodansha imports English-language editions of popular soccer manga Blue Lock from its subsidiary in the United States and sells them at about ₹1,100 (US$11.60) each, but street vendors sell pirated editions at a fraction of the price.

• “Import costs are a common complaint of manga readers in India,” Varun Gupta, chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based publisher Manga Mavericks Books, which prints some of its manga in India, told Animenomics. “There are printers in India that have lower unit prices than even China, so this makes it very beneficial when trying to print for the domestic market there.”

Between the lines: Kodansha’s choice of working with Japan’s DNP, which has been expanding in India this year and took a 14 percent stake in the venture, instead of a local printer is notable.

• Quality control is a major concern “as a lot of printers in India simply aren’t used to printing manga”, Gupta said, recalling his experience in working with multiple printers in Mumbai region and finding bewildering printing mistakes.

• “One book was printed upside down, while another had the spine breaking apart,” he noted. “Neither of these books are difficult to print in concept, but the floor for quality at some printers in India can be far too low for comfort at times.”

Disney+ France adds titles from French anime streamer

Animation Digital Network, the anime streaming video service provider bought out by French publishing conglomerate Média-Participations from Crunchyroll in 2022, will share about 8 percent of its 18,000-episode anime catalog with Disney+ France.

Why it matters: The new collaboration between ADN and The Walt Disney Company France brings new anime content to an estimated 10 million Disney+ subscribers in France without any additional fees.

• Disney+ already has anime titles like One Piece, Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, and Dragon Ball Z Kai in its own catalog in France.

Zoom in: Anime series being added to Disney+ France include Naruto, Assassination Classroom, The Eminence in Shadow, and more, totaling over 1,500 episodes.

• ADN will also supply the streaming service with several simulcast titles every year at the same time those anime series are released in Japan.

• The partnership will also bring in Disney+ as a potential co-producer for any of ADN’s original French productions, part of a commitment made last year to invest 25 percent of its annual revenue in France into French and European productions.

The bigger picture: Disney+ France’s partnership with ADN comes just one day after it signed a live sports broadcasting deal with sports television channel L'Équipe.

• “Without a steady flow of new tentpoles […] Disney+ needs content that brings viewers back weekly rather than only when the next big release drops,” streaming video consultant Marion Ranchet writes. “Live sports and simulcast anime both do that.”

Clippings: Japan weighs dissolution of Cool Japan Fund

Japan’s government is considering abolishing the public–private Cool Japan Fund as losses from investments that were intended to help export Japanese culture continue to mount, reaching ¥38.3 billion (US$239 million) in cumulative losses over 11 years as of March 2025. (Kyodo News)

• Cool Japan Fund made significant investments in anime, including funding a joint venture that operated an anime streaming service from 2013 to 2017 and giving bridge funding for MAPPA’s Chainsaw Man production.

• “While investing in anime streaming abroad seemed like the right strategic move on the surface, the initiative was launched just as platforms like Netflix were already successfully streaming anime globally,” anime critic Kiyoshi Tane writes in a recent column. “In retrospect, the framework seems almost self-defeating.”

Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs is convening the first meeting of a consortium of manga publishers and distributors this week to discuss the creation of a global digital manga platform and training for manga translators. (Agency for Cultural Affairs)

Anime retailer Benelic will open a Studio Ghibli-branded Donguri Republic pop-up store in the United States for the first time, months after its U.S. subsidiary opened a Shonen Jump pop-up store at the same location last year. (VIZ Media)

Mobile gaming company KLab is producing an anime film titled The Celebrity Secret using artificial intelligence to be released next year. The film is based on bestselling Kadokawa novel Why Is a Celebrity’s Bag So Small? (Gamebiz)

Japan’s Gunma Prefecture will establish a school for film, animation and video game creators, setting aside ¥147 million (US$918,000) for curriculum planning in order to meet the goal of opening in 2027. (The Mainichi)

81 Produce seeks to transform voice actor work with AI

“Considering the state of the voice acting industry, simply being good at delivering lines or having a nice voice is no longer enough to make a living.”

— Michiyoshi Minamisawa, 81 Produce president and chief executive officer

Context: In an impassioned presentation at the inaugural Japan–China International Animation Film Festival last month, Minamisawa, who leads Japan’s largest voice actor agency with over 400 talents on its roster, outlined a vision for transforming Japanese voice actors’ voice data into intellectual property that can earn licensing revenue.

Catch up quick: In December, 81 Produce formed a partnership with speech synthesis startup ElevenLabs that aims to deliver anime and other Japanese programs overseas in other languages, using Japanese actors’ voices, with the help of artificial intelligence.

What he’s saying: Minamisawa believes Japan’ s voice actor industry can coexist with generative AI technology by using it to ensure that talents receive a share of royalties from the increased demand for Japanese content.

• AI isn’t the first disruption to voice acting work, he noted, pointing to the trend of Japanese comedians and screen actors often being cast for voice work over voice actors about a decade ago.

• The number of active voice actors in Japan has also swelled to more than 10,000, creating more competition domestically, and allowing actors to license their voice data for use abroad with AI can help them find more work, Minamisawa argues.

1 chart to go: Some U.S. manga buyers also pirate them

One in four manga readers in the United States who have made a manga purchase in print or digitally in 2025 has also read pirated manga online, according to a survey by Tokyo-based MANGA Research Institute that was published earlier this year.

What’s happening: Institute representative director Takeshi Kikuchi, speaking about the survey’s findings to the Japan Electronic Publishing Association in April, said that these manga buyers typically use pirate websites like customers browsing a bookstore.

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In case you missed it: Toei (not to be confused with Toei Animation) announced an effort to develop the superhero media franchise Kamen Rider into anime projects, one year after the film production company established an anime IP department.

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Crunchyroll boosts production committee participation

Crunchyroll has become the most prolific investor in anime productions, participating in more production committees than any other company, Japanese or otherwise, in the last two years, according to an analysis of publicly available anime production data.

Why it matters: Committee participation gives Crunchyroll the ability to secure rights to anime titles for streaming without having to bid for licenses, plus it receives a share of anime production earnings.

By the numbers: In 2024 and 2025, Crunchyroll funded at least 87 productions of anime titles whose episodes are 30 minutes in length, according to a study published at Tokyo’s Comic Market 107 in December.

• That figure accounts for 21 percent of the 417 full-length anime titles newly aired on Japanese terrestrial and satellite television over that time period, the report’s author, anime columnist Fuyuki Kurohara, found.

• The number of Crunchyroll’s investments in the last two years overtook that of Japanese publisher Kadokawa, which participated in 82 committees and was also the most prolific investor in the 2022–2023 period.

Zoom in: Crunchyroll’s subsidiary in Japan, which makes the committee investments and receives the proceeds from their profits, earned ¥1.7 billion (US$10.6 million) in net profit over the last two years, according to a recent filing.

• Retained earnings in Crunchyroll’s Japanese business turned positive in 2024 and rose to ¥640 million (US$4 million) last year, accumulating profits that it can use to invest in subsequent new projects.

• This is a stark turnaround from 2021, the year Crunchyroll was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment, when the company’s Japanese businesses saw combined cumulative losses of ¥907 million (US$5.7 million).

Between the lines: Crunchyroll only led production committees in a pair of instances, in Meiji Gekken: 1874 (through subsidiary Crunchy Onigiri) and Tower of God Season 2, which means the company isn’t usually the one commissioning anime projects.

• Kadokawa and Sony Music Entertainment Japan unit Aniplex are still the top two companies commissioning new anime, coordinating a combined 24 percent of all production committees.

• “It’s mutually beneficial to get Crunchyroll distribution locked in early, but it’s not necessary for it to be a Crunchyroll-led project, particularly when their corporate cousin Aniplex […] is often also on the production team,” Miles Atherton, head of anime consultancy White Box Entertainment, explained in a column last year.

Anime planned for British-turned-Japanese kid lit series

An anime adaptation is being planned for Animal Detective Mia, a Japanese children’s novel series that has 350,000 copies in circulation and based on the British series Amy Wild, Animal Talker by Diana Kimpton, Animenomics has learned.

Why it matters: British children’s literature has long been a valuable source of stories for anime, such as Academy Award nominees Howl’s Moving Castle and When Marnie Was There and Studio Ponoc’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower.

The intrigue: Animal Detective Mia found more success abroad than in its home market, with Kimpton writing additional volumes specifically for the Japanese market.

• “This is the media mix in reverse,” says executive producer Jerome Mazandarani. “Not a Japanese property expanding outward, but a foreign property absorbed so completely that Japan became its primary creative engine.”

• Mia’s publisher, Tokyo-based Poplar Publishing, has had other titles in its catalog, like The Klutzy Witch, Lonely Castle in the Mirror, and Love All Play, adapted into anime in recent years.

How it happened: Qatar-based filmmaker-turned-lawyer and investor Bruce Johnson acquired the series and film rights for Amy Wild from Usborne Publishing in London and character design rights for Mia from Poplar.

• Mazandarani assembled a creative team that produced a 30-second preview that was released to promote Mia’s 15th volume, the seventh original release in Japan.

The bigger picture: Demand for anime and manga is growing worldwide, especially among younger audiences, but the number of titles created for children is in decline as Japan’s population ages, creating a disconnect with the global market.

• Total anime programming minutes in daytime Japanese television, targeted for children and families, declined 40 percent between 2014 and 2024, according to the Association of Japanese Animations.

• Circulation of children’s manga magazines are also in decline in Japan, yet manga publishers in the United States are racing to find titles for middle grade readers.

Clippings: Activist investor asks Kadokawa to sack CEO

Hedge fund manager Oasis Management received the backing of American proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services in calling for the removal of Kadokawa chief executive officer Takeshi Natsuno. (The Nikkei)

• Writing on X, Dwango founder Nobuo Kawakami, who sits on Kadokawa’s board of directors, argued that Natsuno remains the person best suited to turn around poor financial performance in Kadokawa’s anime and publishing businesses.

Young women in China are snapping up gold accessories featuring anime character designs licensed from rightsholders, but demand is also fueling a market for products that aren’t officially licensed. (Kyodo News via The Mainichi)

Fuji Television launched a webtoon label in partnership with four Japanese webtoon studios, with plans to develop titles into multimedia projects involving music, events, and television programs. (Kai-You)

Japan’s Ministry of Finance is considering a revision of its coinage laws to allow for the issuance of circulating coins that bear engravings of anime and manga characters as a way to promote Japan’s national brand. (The Asahi Shimbun)

Bushiroad’s Takaaki Kidani, in a trip to China last October, observed that Japanese versions of the company’s trading cards sold better in coastal cities, whereas Chinese versions were more popular in inland cities. (Youyan Club)

Japan’s development aid agency is dispatching intellectual property law specialists to Indonesia, Vietnam, and eight other emerging markets countries to help craft legal frameworks for protecting Japanese content from piracy. (Nikkei Asia)

Reading manga in print improves memory recall time when compared to reading on digital devices, according to a new peer-reviewed study conducted by the University of Tokyo and manga publisher Coamix. (PLOS One, The Mainichi)

Slipping print manga sales drag down book distributors

Nippan Group Holdings, reeling from a ¥4 billion (US$25 million) operating loss from book distribution in the twelve months ending in March 2026, is weighing an exit from the book wholesale business, the Nikkei financial newspaper reports.

What they’re saying: “We feel a sense of crisis that we are facing a situation where we must consider withdrawing from the distribution business,” chief executive officer Takeru Togashi told local media during the company’s year-end earnings presentation.

Why it matters: Nippan is Japan’s second largest book wholesaler, and a withdrawal by the company would fundamentally reshape the country’s publishing industry.

Backgrounder: Nippan and the number one wholesaler, Tohan, together hold about 60 percent of the country’s book distribution business.

• The two companies play crucial logistical and financial roles in book publishing: transporting books to stores, arranging book placements in stores, and making advance payments before books are sold.

Where things stand: Nippan’s book distribution business is collapsing as the number of bookstores operating in Japan halved in the last 20 years, and manga distribution revenue shrunk by 17.5 percent year-over-year to ¥35.4 billion (US$221 million).

• As previously reported by Animenomics, the company last year already stopped selling magazines to convenience stores as manga magazines wane, and demand for print manga is also falling more broadly.

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In case you missed it: Tetsu Fujimura, the founder of film distributor Gaga who also served as executive producer on live-action adaptations of Ghost in the Shell and One Piece, listed all Hollywood films in development based on Japanese anime, manga, and video properties in a presentation at Cannes Film Market.

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CG anime studios gain AI tools in production software

Japan’s anime industry has yet to make full strides toward using artificial intelligence in animation production, but anime studios specializing in 3D computer graphics are finding it more and more difficult to ignore AI in their production software.

What we heard: “We anticipate that CG and AI will naturally become technologically integrated in the future,” DandeLion Animation Studio president Kazuhiro Nishikawa told attendees of an event organized by financial technology company Freee in April.

• “Precisely because [AI] is technology we can’t avoid, we feel it’s important for us to gain a deep understanding of it ourselves and to be able to control how we use it, determine where it’s appropriate to use it, and where it isn’t,” Nishikawa said, per CGWORLD magazine.

Where things stand: DandeLion and other Japanese anime studios working in 3D CG use production software made by the American software company Autodesk, which is quickly embedding AI tools in popular applications like 3ds Max and Maya.

• In March, Animenomics attended an Autodesk event in Tokyo, where company representatives demonstrated Flow Studio, an AI-based 3D animation software that Autodesk acquired in 2024, to anime industry workers.

Between the lines: Autodesk AI tools aren’t marketed as one-click solutions but “aim to smooth out the slow, frustrating, often invisible parts of the 3D workflow that eat up artists’ time”, as digital arts journalist Ian Dean reported earlier this year.

• While Flow Studio introduces generative AI capabilities to 3ds Max and Maya, the tools Animenomics observed are designed for conceptualization work rather than making a fully AI-generated work, allowing CG artists to retain creative control.

Yes, but: “The reality is that the anime industry has many visual artists, and as a result, there are many cautious or negative opinions toward AI,” Nishikawa admitted.

• Last year, Toei Animation was forced to amend an earnings results presentation after the inclusion of production materials for the Pretty Cure series on a slide about AI was misinterpreted as an indication that AI technology was used in production of the work.

• At the Autodesk event in March, Toei Animation CG section chief Naoki Sato, who was a guest presenter, reiterated that the studio doesn’t actively use AI in anime production.

What we’re watching: DandeLion’s upcoming adaptation of South Korean webtoon Eleceed uses Flow Studio for motion capture, which will be a test to see how Autodesk AI tools perform in anime production.

Shin-Ei Animation sources YouTube for IP development

Shin-Ei Animation is taking cues from anime audiences on YouTube in an effort to step up investment in anime projects as anime studios move to develop their own IPs to ensure they also receive financial benefits from anime’s growing global market.

Why it matters: Shin-Ei Animation is best known for its work on the legacy properties Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan, but merchandising rights for the two franchises are managed by other investors, leaving just a fraction of licensing royalties for the studio.

What’s happening: Interest in Atashin’chi, an anime series based on a comedy manga to which the studio owns merchandising rights, is growing as its YouTube channel has grown to more than 1.7 million subscribers.

• Shin-Ei Animation plans to increase product development for Atashin’chi and other properties, with an additional focus on overseas markets, chief executive officer Michihiko Umezawa told the Keizaikai business magazine.

The intrigue: Shin-Ei Animation is creating merchandise for Pui Pui Molcar and Milky Subway: The Galactic Limited Express, two projects by independent animators in which the studio has invested as production committee lead, and selling them online.

• Pui Pui Molcar was created by stop-motion animator Tomoki Misato, whose undergraduate and graduate works have been featured and won awards at film festivals.

• Milky Subway: The Galactic Limited Express originated as the university graduation project of CG animator Yohei Kameyama, which accumulated 6.8 million views on YouTube by the time of Milky Subway’s release last year.

• A subsequent film compilation of Milky Subway released earlier this year has now earned more than ¥550 million (US$3.4 million) in the domestic box office.

The bottom line: “The number of productions across the entire market has increased significantly. Currently, there are more television broadcast slots, but with video streaming platforms such as YouTube, it feels like this has accelerated even further in the last two or three years,” Umezawa said.

Clippings: Manga inventory planning using RFID grows

Anime retailer Animate plans to implement an inventory tracking system for manga and books using radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags across all stores by 2029 in an effort to boost in-store sales. (The Bunka News)

• Zoom in: A field experiment conducted by book distributor Nippan at a Tokyo bookstore last year—in coordination with RFID technology firm PubteX—found that RFID tag use resulted in improved in-store manga sales, buoying hopes that digital transformation can help reverse Japan’s declining print manga sales.

• PubteX, formed in 2022 by paper conglomerate Marubeni and three of Japan’s largest manga publishers, has been urging manga publishers to adopt its RFID standard, and now about 75 percent of all manga volumes sent to bookstores are affixed with RFID tags.

Publishing giant Shueisha has acquired a public relations subsidiary from Arch, an anime production planning and promotion company co-founded by anime producer Nao Hirasawa, to help promote its manga titles on social media. (Branc)

Naruto: Shippuden received the most amount of overseas music royalty payments of any Japanese entertainment property last year, the eighth time it has done so, according to data from the musical copyright collection society JASRAC. (Nippon.com)

The Pokémon Company recorded its highest ever revenue (up 29 percent year-over-year), operating profit (up 43 percent), and net profit (up 71 percent) in the fiscal year ending in February as trading card, video game, and licensing sales surge. (Gamebiz)

South Korea’s webtoon platforms are pivoting into short-form animation to stave off declines in active users, but questions remain on whether the new content format will convert users into paying subscribers. (DigitalToday)

Anti-piracy group hardens stance on AI model training

“Regarding AI training […] we believe that, in many current service operations, the acts of reproduction carried out during the training process themselves may constitute copyright infringement.”

— Content Overseas Distribution Association

Context: Anti-piracy trade group CODA, in a rebuke of generative AI services, argues that current applications of AI-based image and video generation involving Japanese entertainment content constitute “use for enjoyment purposes”, a violation of current Japanese copyright law, which only permits training not for personal enjoyment uses.

What they’re saying: “AI businesses have a responsibility to establish mechanisms to prevent problems before they occur, including by implementing filters at the output stage for copyrighted works for which prior authorization has not been obtained,” the group asserts.

• Changes to Japan’s copyright law, enacted in 2019, allowed ingestion and analysis of copyrighted materials for AI learning without needing to acquire consent from copyright holders, with limits.

• CODA, whose members include Japanese entertainment rightsholders, however, believes this provision creates a loophole in which overseas generative AI services create outputs that replicate the visuals of Japanese entertainment properties.

Reality check: CODA doesn’t have regulatory powers as a private entity, but it takes action against copyright infringement cases with government support.

Magazine that popularized essay manga ends print run

Da Vinci, the literary magazine that popularized the essay manga genre in Japan in the 2000s, will end its print run this October after 32 years of publication, publishing giant Kadokawa said last week.

Why it matters: In additional to featuring general fiction, Da Vinci actively introduced manga and light novels to the general public, serializing works like the novelization of Makoto Shinkai’s breakout anime film 5 Centimeters Per Second.

Catch up quick: Da Vinci began publication in 1994 and came into the portfolio of Kadokawa in 2011 when the publishing conglomerate acquired its original publisher, Media Factory.

• Da Vinci became known for essay manga in the 2000s when Saori Oguri’s My Darling Is a Foreigner, which was serialized in the magazine, became a domestic bestseller.

• The magazine, with its monthly circulation of 100,000 copies and 70 percent female readership, wields significant influence as it has a much wider reach than other literary magazines.

The bigger picture: Kadokawa’s move to end Da Vinci’s print run comes amid worse-than-expected financial performance in the fiscal year ending in March 2026, with the publishing segment seeing a 51.6 percent drop in operating profit year-over-year.

• Kadokawa will continue to operate the Da Vinci Web portal, which sees a monthly average of 45 million pageviews.

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In case you missed it: Los Angeles’s Anime Expo will host a symposium on Japan’s content industry in collaboration with PopPowerProject, a community of private sector experts seeking to promote development of Japanese content abroad.

• On a personal note: I will once again attend Anime Expo this year. If you are also planning to attend and would like to meet, please reach out on LinkedIn or over email.

📧 Email Richardson Handjaja

Iran war raises costs of raw materials in manga printing

Japan’s manga industry is bracing for the economic impact of war between the United States and Iran as fewer petroleum shipments drive up the price of naphtha, a key raw material in printing, to its highest level in four years.

Why it matters: Printed manga volumes often have glossy dust jackets made using a polypropylene film, a derivative plastic product from naphtha, and ink used in printing those covers also contains solvents made using naphtha.

• As of last year, the average price of a manga volume was 24 percent higher than in 2020, according to data compiled by the Research Institute for Publications, and rising printing costs are expected to push prices higher.

Zoom in: Nearly half of Japan’s pulp and paper manufacturers and about 38 percent of publishing and printing companies use naphtha as raw material, according to a survey conducted last month by credit reporting agency Teikoku Databank.

• Consumer product manufacturers are now looking for ways to save cost, with Japan’s largest snack maker earlier this month moving to temporarily stop color printing on plastic snack packaging.

• Manga artist Chika Ishikawa told followers on social media platform X last month that Ichijinsha, a subsidiary of publisher Kodansha, is ending one of her serialized works early—at two volumes total rather than three—due to rising printing costs.

• Rising cost of raw materials is also putting pressure on small and medium printers that support Japan’s dōjinshi market, The Tokyo Shimbun reports, raising concerns that it could result in a decline in self-publishing.

Rewind: This isn’t the first time that the effects of an oil crisis have been felt in Japan’s manga industry.

• In the mid-1970s, oil-exporting Arab countries targeted Japan and several other countries with an embargo that resulted in publishers making significant cuts in the number of pages in manga magazines as the cost of raw materials increased.

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Japan domestic streaming leader acquires anime studio

Streaming service U-NEXT, Japan’s domestic subscription video-on-demand leader, is acquiring Osaka-based anime studio GoHands from founder Ringo Kishimoto, who formed the studio in 2008 with former members of anime studio Satelight.

Why it matters: U-NEXT is moving to accelerate the growth of in-house productions as licensing costs for broadcast content increase, and it looks to tap into GoHands’s production know-how to make localization of foreign content more efficient.

Catch up quick: As previously reported by Animenomics, U-NEXT operates an e-book publishing business, which the company wants to tap into as a source of new content.

• The acquisition is the latest in a series of deals made by content rightsholders to acquire anime studios in order to secure production lines for their own IPs.

• U-NEXT faces stiff competition at home from Netflix, and chief executive officer Yasuhide Uno has sought to work with more Japanese content companies in an effort to break Netflix’s hold on the streaming market.

By the numbers: Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but balance sheet numbers released by U-NEXT show that GoHands has been profitable for the last three fiscal years.

• In the twelve months ending in July 2025, it reported ¥1.9 million (US$12,000) in operating profit against ¥464 million (US$2.9 million) in revenue.

Clippings: Itochu invests in character licensing agency

San Francisco-based Octas, a character licensing agency, has received an investment from Itochu as the trading conglomerate seeks to expand global access to Japanese anime and character merchandise. (Bloomberg)

Anime planning firm Twin Engine is forming a joint venture with financial services giant SBI Holdings to develop new anime properties for the global market. (Press release)

Nippon Television has named Kenichi Yoda, an executive who led concert, exhibition, and stage productions at the broadcaster as the new president of Studio Ghibli as the storied anime studio invests in experiential entertainment. (Oricon News)

Late manga artist Kazuo Koike’s copyright management company, which holds the rights to works like Lone Wolf and Cub, has been granted permission by Tokyo District Court to begin bankruptcy proceedings. (Tokyo Shoko Research)

TV Tokyo will release new screen and video game works based on Naruto for anime’s 25th anniversary in 2027. Overseas rights sales for Naruto and its sequel pushed the broadcaster’s anime revenues to a record high in the recent fiscal year. (Otaku Lab)

More than 200 web novels serialized on the Shōsetsuka ni Narō platform have now been adapted into anime, and operators of the service are launching a new partner program to increase support for authors receiving publisher inquiries. (Press release)

1 chart to go: Betting on Crunchyroll anime awards falls

Anime fans around the world cast 43 percent more votes in this year’s edition of the Crunchyroll anime awards than last year, but betting markets related to the event saw significantly less activity compared to 2025.

By the numbers: Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, reported an estimated US$240,000 in trading volume related to this year’s anime awards, a sharp decline from an estimated US$1.6 million in trading volume last year.

• Crunchyroll saw the highest engagement in voting activity in markets like Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, and the United States, but three of these countries now ban prediction markets like Polymarket, and India is likely to follow within weeks.

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“You cannot rely solely on your own comic IPs to make a living. You need another income source—like working as a designer for clients—with comic creation squeezed in on the side,” said Edwin Fernando Tranggono, a Surabaya-based graphic designer, describing the harsh reality of living as a comic artist in Indonesia.

Tranggono, who goes by the pen name Edwin Te, told Animenomics that a childhood dream of becoming a comic artist has driven him to create his own comics since 2020, with titles like Elang Hitam and Naraka.

“The Indonesian comics scene is still pretty small in terms of who’s actually out there making things happen, but it’s definitely on the rise,” he said. “Just look at all the pre-orders piling up for new releases, not to mention the events that have started cropping up for local creators.”

Tranggono’s success speaks for itself. Elang Hitam will represent Indonesia at the Asian Contents & Film Market in Busan, South Korea, later this year after securing a win at Yogyakarta’s JAFF Content Market in November. It’s significant progress from ten years ago, when the scene for locally produced comics received little recognition.

Indonesia’s comics market is brimming with potential. Physical sales of local comics jumped 35 percent in 2024 compared to the previous year, according to data from AKSI, the Indonesian Comic Association.

Despite these improvements, Indonesian comics hold just 10 percent of the domestic market, says AKSI secretary general Rizqi Mosmarth, a brutal reality as Japanese manga continue to dominate and grow stronger among local readers. Indonesia’s youth make up roughly half of the population, and data from Ken Research reveals that more than 30 million of them actively consume manga content. On social media platforms, manga-related content regularly pulls in millions of views.

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In case you missed it: New York City will see not one but two anime business events this year, with Crunchyroll announcing plans to hold an invitation-only summit on the sidelines of New York Comic Con in October, just weeks after Anime NYC’s own anime licensing summit that was announced earlier this month.

• Our thought bubble: I myself had been planning to attend New York Comic Con this year, so I’m eager to see how Crunchyroll’s increased presence will add to the event.

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Anime production committee discourse finds traction

Growing scrutiny of the anime industry’s production committee model by regulators and news media is leading to increased interest over anime studios that are building alternative business models to retain ownership over their works.

Why it matters: Public interest in anime production reached a new high last month when SusHi Tech Tokyo, Asia’s largest startup event so far this year, hosted a panel with executives from anime studios Production I.G, CoMix Wave Films, and MAPPA.

How it happened: MAPPA president and chief executive officer Manabu Otsuka is a regular subject in Japanese media interviews about anime’s business model thanks to the studio choosing to be the sole financier of the Chainsaw Man anime series.

• Production I.G has invested in the anime titles it creates since the 1980s, allowing the studio to no longer be entirely dependent on production committee contracts, and CoMix Wave Films has been able to earn overseas revenue from Makoto Shinkai’s original anime films.

Zoom out: Studio Chizu, the studio behind Mamoru Hosoda’s anime films, employs a newer business model called a limited liability partnership, which Japan introduced in 2005, to manage ownership of its titles.

• Studio Chizu president and chief executive officer Yuichiro Saito, in an interview with the Nikkei financial newspaper, says an LLP established jointly with Nippon Television Network and Kadokawa acts as the sole rights manager for the studio’s entire catalog of works.

• “By having the LLP handle exhibitions, film concerts, as well as negotiations with streaming platforms, we are now able to manage the value of our works over long-term spans of 50 or even 70 years, thereby enabling us to steadily build and accumulate our brand equity,” Saito told the Nikkei.

Reality check: As previously reported by Animenomics, Japan’s government likely won’t strictly regulate how anime production committees operate, especially since many in the anime industry still see benefits in committees.

• However, statements by studio executives like Studio Chizu’s Saito and CoMix Wave Films chairman Noritaka Kawaguchi highlight a need for the anime industry to look beyond the proliferation of production committees that are established to create short-term anime projects.

Genda stumbles in North America arcade revitalization

Genda is on a quest to rejuvenate North America’s arcade gaming corners with claw machines containing anime prizes, but it faces logistical problems that reflect the challenges Japan’s anime merchandise distributors face in the sprawling territory.

Why it matters: Outside Japan, anime media consumption leads all other spending like merchandise and events, and rightsholders are racing to build infrastructure to reduce reliance on content revenue and increase merchandise availability overseas.

• As previously reported by Animenomics, Genda is turning the more than 13,000 arcade gaming sites it has acquired in North America since 2024 into merchandise distribution points for anime like Naruto and My Hero Academia.

Catch up quick: Genda management noticed in November that sales were starting to decline despite originally tripling early last year as the company started adding claw machines with anime merchandise as prizes.

• Genda had asked merchandisers at National Entertainment Network, an operator of unmanned arcade game corners it purchased in 2024, to make daily store visits and bank deposits, which is the operating model used at Player One Amusement Group, an operator of manned arcade centers acquired the following year.

• The company, however, didn’t account for the difference between NEN’s 10,000 unmanned corners and Player One’s 110 manned sites, leading to prize shortages as NEN merchandisers struggled to restock all their assigned locations.

What happened: “NEN’s approximately 200 field merchandisers were overwhelmed by the high-hurdle task of visiting four to five locations daily while also making bank runs, despite the fact that distances between stores in North America are unlike Japan and require one to two hours of driving,” Genda told investors in March.

Where things stand: Earlier this year, Genda introduced an internal software called Kiddleton Force to reduce manual cash counting and to help merchandisers better plan routes and anticipate prize replenishment needs.

• Already, the app’s introduction is “leading to a recovery in the frequency of store visits by our staff”, the company followed up with investors this week.

What’s next: Genda plans to increase procurement of Japanese anime and character merchandise to between 60 and 70 percent of the total procurement cost in its North American business, triple the level seen two fiscal years ago.

Clippings: Crunchyroll surpasses 21 million subscribers

Anime streaming service Crunchyroll surpassed 21 million paying subscribers as of the end of March, a 24 percent increase compared to the same time last year. (Sony Corporate Strategy Presentation)

A Sony data team has been responsible for increasing the marketing efficiency of the company’s films, like Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, and uncovering latent fans whose family members might be interested in the titles. (Nikkei Asia)

Pachinko machine maker Fujishoji established a subsidiary to invest in new anime productions as Japan’s gambling machine makers increasingly rely on collaborations with anime properties to draw new players. (Otaku Lab)

Kinokuniya Book Stores of America’s sales of English-language manga are now four times 2019 levels, Kinokuniya executive vice president Keijiro Mori told attendees of a seminar in Tokyo last month. (The Bunka News)

Pirate webtoon website closures led to double-digit jumps in the average daily new installs of leading South Korean webtoon platforms Naver Webtoon, Kakao Page, and Ridibooks. (The Chosun Biz)

Anime remains popular in China amid ongoing diplomatic tensions between Beijing and Tokyo as Chinese consumers flocked to anime stores and events over the May Day holiday period. (The Yomiuri Shimbun)

Toho takes control of IP promotion across all markets

“We have transitioned from a passive licensing-only model to a proactive structure where we manage promotions ourselves to enhance IP value. For titles with confirmed release dates, we begin marketing more than six months in advance, aiming to maintain constant engagement with fans even between major releases.”

— Hiroyasu Matsuoka, Toho president and chief executive officer

Context: Matsuoka, answering questions after Toho’s year-end earnings presentation last month, detailed the evolution of the operations of its Los Angeles subsidiary while also addressing developments since its GKIDS acquisition.

• “The M&A of GKIDS was a significant achievement,” he lauded. “Their prestige in the anime world is unparalleled, and their integration into our group has allowed us to handle original IP-based anime and motion picture productions like Kokuho, which was previously out of reach.”

What’s next: “We intend to expand this model to Asia and Europe,” Matsuoka said, pointing to the expansion of Toho Entertainment Asia in Singapore and new efforts to replicate the North American model in Europe through its Anime Limited acquisition.

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In case you missed it: Anime NYC, the New York City anime convention that spun off from New York Comic Con in 2017, is entering the anime business conference scene this year by hosting the entertainment-focused X Tracks Licensing Summit.

• The one-day, invitation-only conference is part of a series of summits founded in 2022 by former Hollywood reporter and brand licensing industry veteran Steven Ekstract.

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Fashion trade show makes space for anime, IP apparel

Fashion World Tokyo, Japan’s twice-yearly trade show for fashion manufacturers and designers, plans to carve out a section of its show floor space for exhibitors of apparel and accessories collaborating with anime and entertainment IPs.

Why it matters: A surging ‘oshikatsu’ economy at home and the growing popularity of anime abroad has turned clothing, which is often seen as a walking billboard, into new opportunities for rightsholders to build brand awareness.

What they’re saying: “For IP holders, this presents an opportunity to anticipate new collaborations and value creation through synergies with the fashion sector,” Fashion World Tokyo organizers told The Bunka News newspaper. “We hope that content holders will utilize this space as a venue for forging new connections.”

Backgrounder: Fashion World Tokyo is Japan’s largest fashion trade show for apparel, footwear, and fashion accessory makers and draws approximately 800 exhibitors and 20,000 attendees.

• The upcoming autumn show in October will dedicate space for about a dozen exhibitors in the Brands and Designers Expo area to highlight current trends in IP-based fashion.

• Its spring edition in April 2027 will further expand the IP × Fashion Zone footprint to a planned total of 17 exhibitors.

Zoom out: Anime collaborations with fashion and cosmetics brands have increased significantly in recent years, according to the Association of Japanese Animations.

• “Currently, for Generation Z and Millennials, fashion and makeup are considered important means of expressing individuality, and combining them with anime and video game characters and worldviews can make the wearers’ likes more visible,” wrote the authors of AJA’s annual anime industry report.

Anime rightsholders shift to direct merchandising deals

Japan’s anime rightsholders are making more direct merchandising deals with foreign licensees today, reclaiming control of the licensing process and bypassing agents that have long represented anime properties abroad.

Why it matters: Japanese rightsholders have long relied on licensing agents in the United States to educate buyers about anime, but anime’s global surge in popularity in recent years means buyers no longer need the introduction.

What’s happening: Television broadcasters, some of the biggest anime rightsholders, face a shrinking domestic market and are redirecting their sales teams from program sales to international rights management, licensing consultant Roger Berman writes in a column for CharaBiz.com.

• As previously reported by Animenomics, Japan’s television stations hold the rights to many legacy anime properties, and they are also investing in new titles to drive growth.

• Commercial television stations seeking to grow their anime and IP businesses are increasingly featuring profiling current team members of those departments on recruitment pages in order to attract new graduates.

Friction point: Rightsholders are increasingly unhappy with agents that prioritize only profitable titles while neglecting emerging ones, creating an opening for agents that have the resources and time to treat anime properties with care.

• “Even if an IP has yet to achieve significant commercial success, the rightsholder believes in its future potential and is committed to nurturing its overseas licensing business over the course of many years,” Berman wrote.

• Last week, Kodansha signed Reemsborko as an agent to represent the upcoming The Ghost in the Shell series outside Asia, significantly expanding the UK-based agency’s reach after representing anime properties in Europe for years.

Clippings: Itochu launches Opanchu Usagi anime series

Trading conglomerate Itochu, through its anime production joint venture with Sky Perfect JSAT, will produce an anime based on the illustrated character Opanchu Usagi, whose popularity in on par with Chiikawa. (Nikkei Asia)

• “Characters that look somewhat pathetic or imperfect, like Opanchu Usagi, appeal to people in the age of social media,” said Hikaru Inadome, who leads iRightsport, the Itochu subsidiary responsible for growing its character merchandise business abroad.

Manga and Japanese literature are driving an increase in the share of Japanese as a source language for translation in major publishing markets across Europe. (ThinkPub)

• Japanese is the second most popular source language in France’s book market, accounting for 20 percent of all translations, and in Germany it overtook French as the third most popular original language.

Kakao-owned Piccoma will launch short, animated episodes on its webtoon digital reading platform in Japan later this month, drawing backlash from Japanese artists who publish works on the service. (K-Comics Beat)

LINE Digital Frontier established a webtoon studio joint venture with Kadokawa and South Korean webtoon studio Redice Studio, best known for Solo Leveling, to produce webtoons based on Kadokawa light novel titles. (Press release)

Merchandise mystery boxes are unpopular in Japan, according to a survey of more than 35,000 consumers, with nine in ten respondents indicating that they dislike or hate the retail strategy. (Toyo Keizai Online)

Aspiring manga artists can now submit manuscripts for review by Kadokawa manga editors using a new online submission portal that’s available in English and Japanese. (Press release)

Studio chairman advocates for fewer anime productions

“I believe the view that the anime industry is facing a labor shortage is mistaken.”

— Noritaka Kawaguchi, CoMix Wave Films chairman and former chief executive officer

Context: Kawaguchi, speaking with the Nikkei financial newspaper, argues that the anime industry’s perceived labor challenges are rooted in overproduction from the growing number of orders from anime production committees.

• What he’s saying: “No one can possibly watch every single television anime series, yet the number of titles continues to grow. Even animators who lack the necessary skills are forced to work on the front lines, causing quality to decline. We should reduce the number of titles and focus on improving the quality of each individual work,” he said.

• Yes, but: Kawaguchi doesn’t necessarily see anime production committees as bad actors. “On the contrary, it’s a system that offers significant benefits to studios, as the investing companies provide various forms of support.”

Cosmetics firm releases an AI anime ad, then retracts it

A Japanese cosmetics company has been forced to withdraw an advertising campaign for a line of moisturizers that involved a short anime made using artificial intelligence technology after observers noted its resemblance to Sailor Moon anime designs.

Why it matters: Generative AI use is growing in Japan’s advertising industry, and the country’s legacy companies are turning to the technology to help revive their brands.

Catch up quick: Utena, a 99-year-old cosmetics manufacturer, started its campaign last week in the Tokyo and Osaka area train stations, pointing viewers to the AI-made anime advertisement on the company’s YouTube channel.

• In a since-deleted press release, Utena said the moisturizer brand’s consumers are mostly seniors aged 60s and 70s, and the “deliberately unusual” anime campaign was meant to attract younger consumers.

What we heard: “All I can think of is that it’s making a mockery of anime,” voice actor Ayano Fukumiya wrote on X after seeing the advertisement. “I’m really worried that this kind of thing will spread and people will start thinking, ‘This is okay.’”

How it happened: The short anime, also removed from YouTube, was created using technology built by CrestLab, an NTT Docomo-backed startup that’s making software to help anime studios incorporate AI into the production process.

• Production planning was led by marketing technology firm Digital Garage, and AI creative studio Kidoku handled artistic design.

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Sports teams, events, and brands are increasingly tapping into anime’s global surge in order to find new audiences and customers, and Adidas has become the latest athletic brand to market new products by tapping into anime-style imagery.

Why it matters: Anime media has outsized influence on social media, and for legacy brands in the sporting industry, using anime visuals can help grow engagement from younger audiences on social media platforms.

Where things stand: Sports has long been a popular genre in anime and manga, and professional athletes have also become outspoken about their love for the Japanese works.

• Research commissioned by anime streaming service Crunchyroll and published last year found that anime’s fan following exceeds that of many sports leagues, especially in younger generations.

• Viewership data published by Netflix also show that sports anime in their catalog, like Haikyu!! and Captain Tsubasa, have audiences that rival live-action sports programming.

Zoom in: Adidas tapped Hong Kong actor-turned-fashion-entrepreneur Edison Chen to help launch the Mundial apparel and footwear collection this weekend with anime-style imagery featuring Brazilian footballer Raphinha and Colombia’s Luis Díaz.

• Adidas and Chen have been releasing new apparel and footwear designed by his fashion brand Clot over the last two years, including a Chinese New Year-themed collection earlier this year that also used anime-style assets.

• “Anime has been something I’ve been drawn to since I was a kid,” Chen told Animenomics. “In anime, you can portray elaborate scenes and ideas that don’t exist in real life.”

How it happened: Animation for the Mundial campaign was directed by California- based digital artist Annie Choi, who caught Chen’s attention after she created short-form animation using anime aesthetics for several luxury fashion houses.

• Choi, who uploads her anime-style works to Instagram and draws more than 600,000 followers, has been recognized by fashion industry media outlet The Business of Fashion for “her ability to fuse high-end branding with dreamlike narratives”.

• “She’s very innovative in the way she uses her animation style, quick transitions, transformation moments,” Chen said of Choi. “Being able to have her translate my ideas, and incorporate the football players into that world, was really fun.”

The bigger picture: For Adidas and other legacy brands, independently made anime-style videos have become a viable alternative over licensing anime properties directly from Japanese rightsholders.

• Anime is increasingly being defined by consumers outside Japan to encompass more than animated content made in Japan, according to a consumer survey by advertising giant Dentsu that was published last year.

• When anime viewers in ten countries were asked how they define ‘anime’, about 36 percent of said that they would include Japanese-inspired animated content produced outside Japan in the definition, compared to 37 percent who said that it only includes animated works made in Japan.

Go deeper: Read our interview with Clot founder and creative director Edison Chen.

You’ve collaborated with Adidas for a few years through traditional campaigns, but this year is the first time that you’re highlighting anime as part of your narrative. Why has your approach changed?

Anime has been something I’ve been drawn to since I was a kid. I’ve always been interested in ways of communicating that feel beyond this world. In anime, you can portray elaborate scenes and ideas that don’t exist in real life. Lately, I’ve been on more of a spiritual journey, thinking about what exists beyond the physical realm. Working with anime allowed me to extend that thinking creatively.

Collaborating with Annie Choi felt natural. I’ve followed her work for years, and this project finally felt like the right moment to come together. Every time I work with Adidas, we try not to make it about only my vision. It’s about the product, the story, and the community around it. Even bringing in players like Raphinha and Luis Díaz through animation felt like a dream. It might not be “real” in a traditional sense, but it feels real to me.

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In case you missed it: CyberAgent publicly announced a television anime adaptation of Takeru Hokazono’s sword action manga and social media darling Kagurabachi, two years after Toyo Keizai reported that the company had won a joint bid with Shochiku for the anime production rights from publisher Shueisha.

• Cypic, the anime studio that CyberAgent acquired from its mobile gaming affiliate Cygames, is the main animation contractor for the series, signaling the company’s commitment in developing flagship IPs internally amid a pivot to anime.

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Kadokawa doubles down on U.S. manga store expansion

Kadokawa has formed a new subsidiary to oversee its manga retail operations in the United States, two and a half years after the publisher launched a marketing push in North America and began opening a chain of Manga Spot stores.

Why it matters: Kadokawa’s push into retail in North America and other parts of the world demonstrates the publisher’s growing desire to create opportunities to more directly connect with manga readers and other customers.

• In the United States, manga publishers especially rely heavily on brick-and-mortar retail stores to convert curious customers into buying ones.

The details: Kadokawa Retail Ventures will be led by Kurt Hassler, who leads manga publisher Yen Press (in which Kadokawa is part owner) and who helped now-defunct retailers Borders and Waldenbooks build expansive manga selections in the 2000s.

• Since 2022, Hassler has also been president of Kadokawa World Entertainment, Kadokawa’s North American holding company, to lead publisher’s overall strategy in the region.

• In a podcast with comics industry consultant Atom Freeman last year, Hassler outlined his vision of turning Manga Spot as a retail destination for the manga-reading demographic.

• “We’re investing a lot in it, but I think it’s worth investing in because the biggest problem most publishers have is that we don’t get enough face time with the customer,” Hassler told Freeman.

Zoom in: Kadokawa has opened ten Manga Spot stores to date in a wide range of cities, from metropolitan areas like New York and Chicago to more remote hubs like Grove City, Penn., and Ketchikan, Alaska, where manga has less retail presence.

• Hassler admits that the goal is to turn Manga Spot into a more widespread chain of stores, but “if there’s a comic shop nearby, I’m really not looking to compete with that. I want to go where there’s less competition.”

The intrigue: Hassler sees shopping malls as opportunities for Manga Spot locations despite continuing struggles in the U.S. shopping mall business.

• “If a [specialty retailer and longtime anime merchandise distributor] Hot Topic can survive [in shopping malls], why can a Manga Spot not?” Hassler argues.

Broadcasters opt for short anime amid crowded TV slots

Japan’s television broadcasters are making significant investments in anime as anime’s overseas market continues to grow, but challenges in programming and production are forcing them to shift of some of that money toward development of short anime.

Reality check: Broadcasters are constrained by the number of available programming slots on their networks and don’t have enough available airtime in a given week for all the anime being produced today.

What’s happening: To overcome these constraints, Japan’s commercial broadcasters are investing in short anime projects—some as short as 90 seconds per episode—with characters that have strong merchandising opportunities.

• Since last year, TV Asahi has been airing an anime based on the emotional support emperor penguin character Koupenchan, whose merchandise market was estimated at ¥5 billion (US$31 million) before the COVID-19 pandemic.

• TV Asahi also enlisted its subsidiary anime studio Shin-Ei Animation, of Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan fame, to help plan short anime projects for the characters Sirotan and Pop Pap Polters, both airing later this year.

• Broadcasting group TBS has created a short anime workgroup within its anime department, developing anime for characters like the cat Nmeneko and the San-X teddy bear icon Rilakkuma, plus a new stop-motion series titled Candy Caries.

Zoom in: TV Tokyo, long considered a pioneer in anime broadcasting, will experiment with an anthology approach, airing multiple short anime titles in one 30-minute time slot.

• “Creating a 30-minute narrative anime can take three or four years before it’s even broadcast, and it’s expensive and risky to produce, but short anime can be created in one to two years from the initial idea, and they’re much easier to experiment with through trial and error“, TV Tokyo anime department deputy director Nariomi Ishii told The Tsukuru culture magazine.

Clippings: ‘Gundam’ film raises Guns N’ Roses profile

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway’s second film has caused streams of hit song “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by hard rock band Guns N’ Roses to quadruple in Japan since the film’s release in January, thanks to its usage as the film’s ending theme. (The Nikkei)

• Bandai Namco Filmworks was pessimistic that the band’s record label Universal Music would agree to the proposal, but Demon Slayer’s successes have convinced some artists that collaborations with anime could bring in new fans.

Pony Canyon wrote down ¥6.3 billion (US$39 million) in the value of its anime assets, signaling that the Fuji Media-owned production company might have abandoned a number of anime projects in development. (Otaku Lab)

• Pony Canyon posted its third straight quarterly operating loss in the three months ended in December 2025, and revenue was down 21 percent over the previous year, primarily due to a lack of hit anime titles.

Secondhand retailer BookOff opened its 50th overseas location this month, its 22nd in the United States, as demand for anime media and merchandise continues to grow in North America. (The Reuse Economic Journal)

An athlete management agency signed an intellectual property agreement with the Captain Tsubasa protagonist Tsubasa Ozora, giving the agency the ability to represent the character in licensing and community engagement efforts. (The Asahi Shimbun)

Japan’s Ministry of Justice convened a study group to draft guidelines for restricting the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence technology to recreate faces and voices of voice actors and singers. (The Yomiuri Shimbun)

Aichi Prefecture’s Ghibli Park will exhibit new artwork from director Hayao Miyazaki starting in July as the 85-year-old animator continues to work since the completion of his last film in 2023. (The Mainichi)

Japan seeks to avoid heavy-handed regulation in anime

“As a nation, we have to be mindful of one thing: this [entertainment] industry has reached its current stature not because of support from the state or public institutions, but because of the efforts of the creators who produce the content and the fans who cherish it. The challenge lies in how we can support and boost this industry—providing encouragement without interfering or getting in the way—a delicate balancing act that the government has rarely managed to execute successfully in the past.”

— Kimi Onoda, Japanese minister of state for economic security

Context: Onoda, who worked adjacent to the anime industry before entering politics, reiterated to attendees of the Niconico Chokaigi festival of Internet culture over the weekend that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is cautiously considering how it much regulatory pressure it should put on the anime industry and the rest of the entertainment sector.

• What she’s saying: “We can’t really say how the production committee system for anime should be done or what the industry should do,” Onoda explained, but she believes work needs to be done to standardize production processes in the interest of improving development of human resources.

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In case you missed it: Bandai Namco Filmworks and Legendary Pictures’ production of a live-action Gundam film has begun in Queensland, Australia.

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Bandai Namco partners with Plott on short anime IPs

Bandai Namco Entertainment last month unveiled its first attempt at launching a new entertainment property using short anime, nearly one and a half years after investing in Tokyo-based Plott, a startup that produces short anime for YouTube.

Why it matters: Tengutosen depicts sword-wielding characters battling demons and will test whether short anime designed for vertical screens can reproduce the energy and commercial prospects of anime that are based on boys’ action manga.

Catch up quick: Short anime titles made by Plott have drawn a combined 12 million subscribers and 15 billion views on YouTube, thanks to their popularity among Japan’s Generation Z audiences.

Zoom in: While Plott has focused on developing its titles solely for YouTube until now, the partnership with Bandai Namco Entertainment aims to expand Tengutosen beyond the screen after it debuts in July.

• “In particular, we hope to leverage [Bandai Namco’s] strengths in merchandise development, such as Gashapon capsule toys and Ichiban Kuji lotteries,” Plott line producer Kosuke Hori said in an interview.

• Hori says short anime rarely displays raw emotional expression, but Tengutosen’s production team is designing backstories and other story elements that will develop as the series progresses.

The bigger picture: YouTube is enabling animators and studios around the world to experiment with new video formats and increase audience participation, the company said in a recent trends report.

• Tengutosen’s format as a short anime is forcing the creative team to devise ways to make its action-based storytelling more appealing, focusing on the appeal of the swords themselves.

• “Short anime tend to have fewer frames that can be drawn compared to television anime, so it’s difficult to express action that relies on the number of frames,” Hori explained.

Yoyogi Animation evolves into talent incubator group

Yoyogi Animation Academy, one of Japan’s oldest training schools for animators and voice actors, and three startups managing Japanese entertainment talent have joined forces to create an integrated talent incubation company.

The intrigue: Although the establishments adopted Yoyogi Animation’s legacy name, the collective is instead led by Utaite, a startup managing 2.5-dimensional talent that has raised at least ¥12.6 billion (US$79 million) since 2022.

• Utaite founder and chief executive officer Masashi Kurata, 35, will serve as chief executive officer of the combined Yoyogi Animation Group.

Why it matters: The scale of the integration signals an ambition to combine training infrastructure with IP creation and talent management to replicate the model of South Korean talent agencies in Japan, says entertainment industry analyst Taisuke Murata.

Backgrounder: Yoyogi Animation Academy has graduated some of Japan’s top voice actors, like Takahiro Sakurai and Nana Mizuki, and it collaborated with former AKB48 idol Rino Sashihara to produce =LOVE, an idol group popular among Generation Z.

• Utaite and Voising, one of the two other startups, manage 2.5-dimensional performers that use anime-style digital avatars online while also appearing physically at live events and concerts.

• Asobi God, the last partner, is an artist management startup founded by a music video director and a song composer.

What we’re watching: Because Yoyogi Animation has the largest voice actor pipeline in the anime industry, any effort to direct the school’s talent toward Utaite and Voising could threaten the existence of anime voice actor agencies like Aoni Production and 81 Produce.

Clippings: Bushiroad secures ¥10b for IP development

Trading card maker Bushiroad secured four five-year bank loans totaling ¥10 billion (US$63 million) to boost efforts to develop new and existing intellectual properties, accelerate overseas expansion, and double sales revenue. (Gamebiz)

IG Port posted record operating profit in the three months ended in February as the anime production group’s opening of a retail store and distribution channel in China led to an ¥813 million (US$5.1 million) jump in merchandise sales. (Otaku Lab)

Gaming studio Cygames will sponsor the Kentucky Derby thoroughbred horse race in Louisville, Ky. for the second year in a row as the company’s Umamusume: Pretty Derby mobile game continues to make waves in North America. (Press release)

The Cool Japan Fund is partnering with financial services giant SBI Holdings to form a ¥12.5 billion (US$78.5 million) venture capital fund and invest in startups specializing in anime, manga, music, video games, and other entertainment media. (The Nikkei)

Sony Group and Honda Motor have abandoned the joint development of an electric vehicle that two years ago was announced to feature an integration with Crunchyroll’s anime streaming library. (Reuters)

Japanese voice actors are helping lead private sector efforts to prevent unauthorized use of voices actors by artificial intelligence technologies by certifying original voices of actors as anime’s growth increases their popularity. (Kyodo News via The Mainichi)

Portland, Ore.-based Fakku, the largest English-language publisher of pornographic manga, faces increasing scrutiny from payment processors over content that may be deemed thematically controversial, pushing it to explore alternative payment methods like cryptocurrency. (Fakku! News)

Media Do CEO bets on print manga and books overseas

“Translation is important, but ultimately, the sole deciding factor is whether it can be distributed in print.”

— Yasushi Fujita, Media Do president and chief executive officer

Context: Speaking last week at Media Do’s earnings results presentation for the fiscal year that ended in February, Fujita argues that overseas expansion efforts by Japan’s publishing industry are dependent on its ability to leverage print books, which have high market share and higher unit prices in the global book market, entirely opposite from the domestic market where e-books have been the primary growth category.

Rewind: Media Do, which built its business as an e-book distributor, last month completed acquisition of Los Angeles-based manga and light novel publisher Seven Seas Entertainment, which derives 83 percent of its sales from print books.

• The move drew significant attention in Japan, and over 400 people attended a briefing last month where Fujita and Seven Seas chief executive officer Jason DeAngelis answered questions from institutional investors and industry analysts.

By the numbers: Due to historically weak currency exchange levels for the yen, the average price of a single print manga volume in the United States is now more than three times its price in Japan and about two times for digital manga.

• Book pricing practices also differ between the two markets, with print and digital manga being sold at the same price point in Japan, whereas print manga are listed nearly twice the price of digital manga in the United States.

What they’re saying: “As the [U.S.] market matures, product formats are diversifying, with a broader range of book specifications and price points,” Media Do told investors and analysts.

• “While US$13 mass-market paperbacks were previously the mainstay, the market is now ready to maximize content value,” it added. “For instance, US$60 deluxe editions are being released as collector’s items, tailored to the specific content and the passion of the fans.”

• “This culture of accepting high-priced products for collectors is seen not only in the U.S. but also in Canada and Europe. Therefore, we believe that further market expansion and improved profitability will continue,” the company concluded.

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