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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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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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Kaiju No. 8 the Game‘s simultaneous global launch on smartphones today serves as a test for Kaiju No. 8 anime rightsholder Toho and developer and publisher Akatsuki Games as anime games gain the attention of foreign investors.

Why it matters: Anime, media mix, and IP-based Japanese mobile games brought in ¥548 billion (US$3.57 billion) in revenue in 2023, according to a survey conducted by the Association of Japanese Animations.

• This figure accounts for one-quarter of Japan’s video game industry revenues and about one-third of revenues from all mobile games domestically.

Zoom in: Kaiju No. 8 the Game is a turn-based tactical role-playing game where the player creates teams of four characters to defeat colossal kaiju monsters.

• “The game recreates the intense battle scenes and interpersonal dynamics of the anime, while also adding original storylines and characters to expand the world of Kaiju No. 8,” the Akatsuki Games representative explained.

Catch up quick: Toho’s growing emphasis on its anime business is leading the film distributor to also invest in video games like Kaiju No. 8 the Game as a way to multiply the impact of its anime IP portfolio.

• “This project began when we were approached at the stage when Toho and Production I.G were moving forward with the anime adaptation,” an Akatsuki Games representative told Animenomics in a recent interview.

• Kaiju No. 8 first aired in 2024 with a significant marketing effort from Toho, from livestreams on X at the same time new episodes were released in Japan to integrated graphical elements on Crunchyroll.

• Kaiju No. 8’s second anime season began airing in July, helping preregistrations jump 60 percent in the two weeks leading to the game’s launch, from 1 million to 1.6 million.

Yes, but: Kaiju No. 8 the Game employs gacha mechanics as part of its gameplay, and there’s been growing concern in recent years with potential negative impacts of gacha games on young players.

• Several Japanese mobile game developers also point to last week’s end-of-service announcements by two long-running gacha games as a signal that the market for the gameplay format is in decline.

• Earlier this year, Akatsuki canceled an unrelated game with gacha mechanics just three months after launch, allegedly due to poor performance off of an expensive development budget.

The other side: “Monetization is an important element for ensuring that players can enjoy the game over the long term,” Kaiju No. 8 the Game’s developers explained. “At the same time, we believe it must be implemented with fairness and transparency.”

• “We are particularly mindful of the impact on younger players, focusing on intuitive systems and operations designed to avoid encouraging excessive reliance,” the development team added.

Go deeper: Read our full interview with the Kaiju No. 8 the Game development team at Akatsuki Games.

Kaiju No. 8 the Game is the first game that Akatsuki Games has developed for Toho and Production I.G. How did the partnership come about?

This project began when we were approached at the stage when Toho and Production I.G were moving forward with the anime adaptation. From the outset, we shared a common vision: to faithfully capture the appeal of the original work while creating new experiences unique to a game format.

Leveraging each party’s strengths and working in close collaboration, development is progressing toward the August 31 release.

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Webtoon Entertainment () announced a content deal with Disney last week, bringing around 100 new and existing Disney comics titles onto the Webtoon platform for vertically scrolling comics over the next four years.

Why it matters: One year after Webtoon Entertainment’s debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange, the digital comics company controlled by South Korean internet giant Naver is accelerating investment in Webtoon’s English-language edition to counter a decline in global readership.

• The company also announced separate content deals with San Diego-based comics publisher IDW Publishing and with Dark Horse Comics earlier this year.

By the numbers: English-language monthly active users on the Webtoon mobile app climbed 19 percent year-over-year for the second consecutive quarter, chief executive officer Junkoo Kim told shareholders on Tuesday.

• “We remain focused on driving app users, who are typically more engaged and present better monetization opportunities compared to web users,” the company said.

• Monthly active users across all Webtoon Entertainment platforms in South Korea, Japan, and other parts of the world, on the other hand, fell 7.6 percent year-over-year in the second quarter to 156.1 million.

Zoom in: While comics by independent creators remain Webtoon’s core business, the company sees content from established comics publishers as a way to draw readers to the platform, enticing new creators to join and further attract readers.

• “Our content and format are a favorite among Gen Z, and we believe we’ll see more users and engagement as we continue to grow our creator ecosystem,” chief strategy officer Yongsoo Kim told Animenomics immediately following the company’s second quarter earnings announcement.

Zoom out: Webtoon Entertainment’s Japanese platform LINE Manga, operated by local subsidiary LINE Digital Frontier, has also used the same playbook of working with established publishers to great success.

• “LINE Manga tries to include all genres and serve all populations,” LINE Digital Frontier chief growth officer Sinbae Kim told Animenomics. “We are trying to be a player with broad coverage by utilizing non-exclusive manga content.”

• LINE Digital Frontier’s working relationship with Square Enix, among other manga publishers, recently enabled Webtoon to bring Fullmetal Alchemist to the global platform in the vertically scrolling format.

Friction point: Webtoon Entertainment’s challenge with brand awareness lies in the different names the company’s platforms use in different markets.

• In its home market in South Korea, the platform is known as Naver Webtoon. In Japan, it’s LINE Manga. In the rest of the world, the platform is simply Webtoon.

What we’re watching: In its major markets, Webtoon Entertainment is increasingly tapping into screen adaptations to raise brand awareness.

• Expanding beyond Korean television and film productions, Webtoon Entertainment’s North American IP business, recently rebranded as Webtoon Productions, are working with Hollywood studios tied to director Ron Howard, actress Margot Robbie, and others to produce English-language content.

• The company is also forming anime production committees and working with Japanese and South Korean studios on more than 20 projects based on its own IPs, including Teenage Mercenary and Dark Moon: The Blood Altar.

The bottom line: “We keep innovating our product, and our IP adaptation business is growing,” chief strategy officer Yongsoo Kim said. “With these key strategies, I believe Webtoon will keep growing even further and faster.”

Go deeper: Read the interview with Webtoon Entertainment chief strategy officer Yongsoo Kim and LINE Digital Frontier chief growth officer Sinbae Kim below.

The United States is counted as part of the Rest of World segment in Webtoon Entertainment financials. What kind of trajectory can we expect from the U.S., and what are the opportunities and challenges for growing this territory into a more prominent segment in Webtoon Entertainment’s business?

Yongsoo Kim, Webtoon Entertainment chief strategy officer: While we don’t break out U.S. results or growth projections within ROW, what I can share is that Webtoon is the global leader in our category, and we’re just beginning to penetrate a massive and growing addressable market opportunity. We’re dominant in Korea, have a strong foothold in Japan as the number one app across iOS and Google Play, and in the earliest stages of a massive market opportunity in North America. This past quarter, our English-language webcomic app’s monthly active users increased 19 percent for the second consecutive quarter, showing the power and potential of our global English platform.

Webtoon content and creators are everywhere, and our influence on pop culture has never been greater. We have hits on screens and bookshelves all over the world, and our content is on Netflix, Disney+, Crunchyroll, and more, fueling the global entertainment industry.

Our content and format are a favorite among Gen Z, and we believe we’ll see more users and engagement as we continue to grow our U.S. creator ecosystem. This year, we’ve started to diversify our content in the U.S., working with leading publishers and entertainment companies to bring fan-favorite franchises to Webtoon. Just today, we announced that we’re teaming up with Disney to bring iconic titles featuring Spider-Man, The Avengers, Star Wars, Alien, and more to our mobile vertical-scroll format. We’ll have a new, dedicated Disney section on Webtoon that will make it easier than ever for fans to enter their favorite Disney universes anytime, anywhere.

As part of our collaboration, we’re also teaming up to develop original series that explore new storylines from fan-favorite universes. All of this marks the first step in a collaboration that will bring around 100 Disney comic series to our global English platform over the next four years.

By creating the best platform for every kind of creator, offering some of the best IP in the world, and continually innovating to deepen engagement, we’re excited to continue growing our U.S. business.

The term webtoon is synonymous to vertically scrolling webcomics, and your company is listed in the U.S. as Webtoon Entertainment. Is having the name Webtoon Entertainment while the product itself is also called webtoon beneficial to you as a business?

Y.S. Kim: As you’ve noticed, we keep focusing on our new brand name Webtoon. That is our statement that we’re really focusing on our growth in the global market. In Korea, everyone knows Naver; in Japan, everyone knows LINE. But, in the global market, especially in the U.S., no one knows Naver or LINE. We need to let our users know what Webtoon is by focusing on our immersive new format for users to be able to enjoy the digital storytelling platform. We also showcase how webtoons provide differentiated content and how the webtoon creation process is different.

Yes, it’ll be tough—it won’t be easy because we aren’t leveraging the existing Naver or LINE name. In the U.S. market, we go by Webtoon because we want to make it an independent brand with a new platform for a new industry. Making Webtoon a listed company last year was a meaningful first step. The IPO itself is a statement that Webtoon represents a new category and a new industry for the digital storytelling era.

Sinbae Kim, LINE Digital Frontier chief growth officer: Frankly speaking, we don’t use the word “webtoon” in Japan. Each market—whether it’s Korea, Japan, or the U.S.—has a different view of comics. In Japan, manga is considered part of the main culture, and everyone enjoys reading manga. We don’t want readers to separate webtoons from manga; we want them to accept webtoons as part of manga. That’s why we intentionally aren’t using the Webtoon brand, except as a company name.

While we aren’t using the Webtoon name with our Japanese readers and users yet, we’re also watching how the market moves. In the future, we may follow the global brand, or we may maintain our Japanese brand as is.

In my early conversations with your team, they used the term webcomics. Does Webtoon prefer that we use the term webcomics over webtoon?

Y.S. Kim: We use Webtoon as our corporate brand and corporate name, and we consider webcomics as one of the different formats of digital storytelling. Our position is that Webtoon is the top player who pioneered the webcomics industry. That’s how we view webcomics in relation to Webtoon.

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Netflix has shifted its anime strategy from creating original content to acquiring more licensed content, forcing New York-based anime production management company Qubic Pictures to shift how it finances future international anime co-productions.

Why it matters: Netflix entered the Japanese market in 2015 and made its mark with exclusive and original anime content.

• As previously reported by Animenomics, anime production studios began re-evaluating their relationships with the streaming giant after it first reported subscriber losses in 2022.

What’s happening: “They’ll still do high-quality, high-budget productions, but I think they’re doing much less now in terms of the number of projects,” Qubic Pictures chief executive officer Justin Leach said about Netflix in an interview with Animenomics.

• Despite Netflix’s anime viewership growing 11.3 percent in hours watched in the first half of 2025, anime marketing agency White Box Entertainment found that this growth isn’t being driven by exclusive titles.

The intrigue: Leach, who has been a producer of two anime projects for Netflix, says he’s considering forming a production committee for an upcoming anime project to account for the shift in how the streaming giant spends money on anime.

• “It’s actually more profitable for producers now to make a committee than it is to directly finance an anime through a major platform because you can get residuals on a production committee,” Leach explained.

• Leach acknowledges criticism of production committees, which are often accused of preventing anime creators and studios from receiving the benefits of anime’s growing international revenues, but he admits the model also has its merits.

The bigger picture: In the decade since Netflix’s entry into Japan, the number of original anime productions have declined by one-third, according to an Animenomics analysis of Association of Japanese Animations anime production data.

• Of the more than 240 television anime series that aired in Japan last year, about 45 percent were adapted from manga, 10 points higher than the 2010s average, showing increasing entrenchment of manga adaptations in the anime industry.

Go deeper: Read about Leach’s experience working with animation producers outside Japan, plus part two of his full interview (for paying subscribers), below.

In your experience, how do animation producers outside Japan who want to work with Japanese studios see anime? Are they interested in anime because it brings in new audiences? Is it a medium that they want to try to work with? Is it just a source of IPs that could become big business?

For a lot of the producers, their children love anime. COVID was a big opportunity for people to learn about anime. Some people who hadn’t watched it before were looking for something new to watch, and they stumbled across anime. Some of them have also become new fans.

Some of them can’t ignore the trends that are happening in the industry. If you go to a convention now, you can see how big and how popular anime is. Some producers have been around for a long time, and I feel like Hollywood’s going through a bit of a crisis in finding the type of content that appeals to everyone right now. Sometimes that content is very different than what they normally have produced before. More traditional companies like Disney haven’t really made much anime. This is very different from their core brand, but that’s what everyone is asking for right now.

I feel like the recent surge in popularity of anime across the world is forcing a lot of people to ask questions like “What is this all about?” “Why do people like this so much?” “We have to be a part of this.” It’s one of those trends that can’t be ignored, and I think everyone’s trying to figure out the best way to embrace it and make it part of the new type of content that’s being created out there—shows like Blue Eye Samurai or Castlevania.

There’s also the anime-adjacent category that’s becoming popular, which is finding an audience generally leaning towards adult animation. Arcane and Spider-Verse are examples. I’m not sure what’s causing the change exactly, but it seems to be that's what the younger generation really, really want right now. I feel lucky because that’s what I’ve been doing most of my life, but I also have a lot of friends who work in the western animation industry, and they’ve been having a lot of trouble right now because of this correction that's happening. It’s been tough for a lot of people.

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New York-based Qubic Pictures is pioneering new models of international anime co-productions, bringing Japanese studios’ production processes to the forefront of high-value productions like Star Wars: Visions and Leviathan.

Why it matters: Anime studios have long done animation service work for foreign clients, and the entry of global streaming video platforms into Japan—beginning with Netflix in 2015—prompted renewed interest in co-productions.

• Qubic Pictures, a production management company was founded in 2018 and with multiple Netflix titles under its belt, has played a key role in ensuring the voices of anime studios and creators are heard in its co-productions.

What they’re saying: “Japan has this amazing history of making animation for decades, and they have a very well-established system,” chief executive officer Justin Leach told Animenomics in an interview. “We try to embrace all of that and make something that’s authentic and faithful to Japanese animation.”

• “What we’re hoping is that if we can find the right formula and the right way to work together, we can expand the viewership of anime to a wider audience.” Leach explained.

Zoom in: Leach sees his company as an apparatus that can attach to any Japanese anime studio and facilitate communication with producers abroad.

• Qubic Pictures provided Disney-owned Lucasfilm with cultural assistance and consulting when working with anime studios in Japan for the first and upcoming third season of Star Wars: Visions.

What’s next: “Lately, we have been trying a side-by-side approach: we respect the creators, we respect how Japan works, and we trust the way that they like to work,” Leach said in reference to his company’s latest project for Netflix, Leviathan, based on Scott Westerfeld’s award-winning young adult science fiction novel.

• Qubic Pictures also has an upcoming project that brings in both western and Japanese talents to create a story together, Leach teased.

Go deeper: Read about Leach’s impressions of working with animator Shinya Ohira in the third season of Star Wars: Visions, plus part one of his full interview (for paying subscribers), below.

You were recently at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, where you screened Shinya Ohira’s Black from Star Wars: Visions. How was the reception among the audience?

One of the things that makes that short stand out is the team of people that worked on it. They are considered legendary if you follow sakuga or are really into Japanese animation. For the people who were familiar with those animators, it was such a joy for them to see it. In the audience, I saw people who were gasping in disbelief.

There was sort of a palpable feeling after the screening completed at the opening ceremony where people were just processing and needed time to think about what they just saw. I think it had a very impactful premiere, and I was really happy to be able to witness that.

I know you have a strong personal interest in not just Star Wars, but also in Japanese animation. For you personally, what was special about Ohira’s work as an exhibition of Japanese animation at Annecy?

Ohira-san is someone that I’ve always looked up to as a creator. I worked on Kill Bill when I was at Production I.G many years ago and got to see some of his work there. He also worked on Innocence, another film that I worked on. I remember thinking to myself, “Who is this person? His work looks so different than everybody else’s.” He’s on this other plane of existence in terms of animation, creation, and the way that he uses expressive movement. It’s often very rough and not clean and refined, yet it evokes this feeling or emotion.

I’ll never forget the moment when David Production said, “We’re considering Shinya Ohira for this project.” I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been a longtime fan.” I think he’s one of the national treasures of animation. I think most animators recognize this, and his work is truly exceptional. It was such an honor to be able to work with him and see the team that he assembled and all these legendary animators that I’ve been a fan of for a long time.

Did he say anything about being at Annecy and what it was like interacting with other animators?

Fans would come up to him all the time and say, “I love your work. I’m a huge fan.” I think it was an opportunity for him to meet some of those people that admire his work.

Even though Annecy is not a festival where people think of anime, it’s a very important one for animation. Masaaki Yuasa spent a lot of time there—he was there this year. There is a lot of Japanese presence, so Japan is a part of the community. From my experience, Annecy is the world’s best animation festival that brings all the animation lovers together in this magical city, so I think it’s really important for creators in Japan to participate and engage with the community at Annecy. Hopefully, they’ll return and start to develop a reputation within the festival like Yuasa-san has.

For Ohira-san, I think it was probably just a great way for him to see how his work is seen outside Japan and the type of impact it has on other people. I think he was able to experience that there.

Shinya Ohira’s Black will be exhibited for a second time at Anime NYC this month ahead of its October debut with Star Wars: Visions Volume 3.

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A common refrain among manga readers in the United States is that the print format is still preferable over digital releases for reading, but this hasn’t prevented multiple new manga apps by major Japanese publishers and distributors from sprouting in the country in the last few years.

Why it matters: Manga reading behavior in the U.S. stands in contrast to behavior in Japan, where digital manga sales have surpassed print sales for years.

Driving the story: Japanese mobile phone network operator NTT Docomo, which launched Manga Mirai in the U.S. in March, recognizes this gap between the two manga markets.

• What they’re saying: “We believe that both digital and non-digital formats have their own merits, and that fans should feel free to enjoy them both as they see fit,” NTT Docomo representatives told Animenomics in an interview.

The bigger picture: As I wrote in ICv2 earlier this year, digital manga’s growth in Japan is slowing, and the manga industry must look elsewhere for growth. Publishers and distributors are now hedging the future by expanding their digital footprint abroad.

Zoom in: For NTT Docomo, growth doesn’t simply come from creating a typical digital manga platform. It’s also capitalizing on the latest trends in the medium.

• “As vertical formats continue to gain popularity—especially among mobile-first users—it is essential for us to cater to new readership demographics,” NTT Docomo said about its inclusion of both vertical comics (webtoons) and horizontal comics (manga) on the same platform.

Go deeper: Read our full interview with NTT Docomo about its Manga Mirai platform below.

NTT Docomo is better known as a mobile phone network operator and not commonly known outside Japan. What is the motivation for your entry into the international digital manga market with Manga Mirai?

NTT Docomo has a long-standing foundation in Japan’s telecommunications sector, built upon a strong customer base and advanced technology. In addition to this, we have amassed extensive experience and achievements in the content business. Leveraging these strengths, our primary motivation for entering the global digital manga market—particularly in the United States—is to serve as the bridge that connects Japan’s rich manga culture with global fans and the brilliant creators who bring these manga to life. We see this a new opportunity for business growth.

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Colorful Stage! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing achieved a milestone in April when the anime film opened in theaters in the United States. It earned nearly US$1 million more on its opening weekend in the U.S. than it did in Japan three months earlier—US$2.83 million versus ¥307 million (US$1.98 million).

The film also sold as many tickets on opening weekend in the U.S. as it did in Japan, according to an estimate by anime marketing agency White Box Entertainment.

Colorful Stage! The Movie’s eponymous main character, the virtual idol Hatsune Miku, has long had broad appeal outside Japan as the mascot character of the Vocaloid singing synthesizer software, created by Sapporo-based Crypton Future Media.

Miku’s success as an anime, however, bodes well for the future of CyberAgent, one of Japan’s top digital advertising companies and the leader of the production committee that funded the film’s production.

As previously reported by Animenomics, CyberAgent last year formed an anime and IP business division in an effort to diversify away from advertising.

In the past year, the number of stories reported by this newsletter about CyberAgent demonstrates the company’s rapid progress in the anime industry, including acquiring a visual novel development studio, recruiting a veteran producer to lead a new anime studio subsidiary, and relaunching its San Francisco-based marketing subsidiary.

After Colorful Stage! The Movie, CyberAgent successfully aired an original anime series, Apocalypse Hotel, in April. It will also debut next week a highly-anticipated adaptation of critically-acclaimed manga The Summer Hikaru Died, licensed from publishing giant Kadokawa.

In light of these developments, Animenomics interviewed CyberAgent to learn more about its IP strategy.

CyberAgent recently reported very favorable earnings results for the Media & IP business. Sales in 2Q 2025 are up 14.4 percent year-over-year, and four of the last five quarters have reported an operating profit. What role does CyberAgent’s anime investments play in this loss-to-profit turnaround?

At CyberAgent, we are planning to build a system that will maximize the potential of the anime industry—which is projected to exceed ¥9 trillion yen (US$60 billion) in market size by 20301—and to seamlessly establish and monetize IPs from their source.

We are also working on developing a multifaceted strategy centered around anime by maximizing synergies with CyberAgent’s peripheral businesses, such as through the investment in and production of anime and through merchandise planning and sales.

Although we’ve just taken our first step into the anime industry, we expect it to become one of our company’s major future earnings. We are also hoping to contribute to the overall development of the anime industry as a whole.

In the last several years, CyberAgent has started investing in anime productions as the lead manager or co-lead manager. There are major adaptations like The Summer Hikaru Died and original IPs like Apocalypse Hotel. How does CyberAgent identify IPs that are good candidates for anime?

Since we are still in the early stages of establishing our anime division, our hope is to be involved in something that can really contribute to developing the anime industry further while working together with other industry players.

CyberAgent has an affiliate company, Cygames, that has been very successful with its Umamusume: Pretty Derby IP in both gaming and anime. What lessons have you been able to gain from that success that CyberAgent can apply in the future?

While prioritizing user satisfaction, we spare no effort or expense in making a high quality end product. When localizing anime and IP, we ensure that we maintain the property’s unique worldview, and to localize it appropriately for each respective country it’s released in. Although we haven’t been involved with many localization projects yet, we plan on continuing to accumulate knowledge and building on what we know.

CyberAgent has been building up its anime production capabilities with units like Animation AI Lab, Tokyo Anime Artifacts, and CA Soa.2 At the same time, there is concern that there isn’t enough human resources to keep producing more anime. What approaches is CyberAgent taking to address this concern?

In the anime production process, there are a number of problems such as an overreliance on overseas contractors and long working hours. At CyberAgent, we are determined to solve these problems in a way that only CyberAgent can—such as with the help of technology—and to create an environment where creators can continue to produce unique and wonderful works of art.

Earlier this year, CyberAgent America was relaunched with a focus on global anime marketing, partnering with companies like X Corp. Japan and MyAnimeList. What kind of challenges with anime marketing today are you trying to tackle?

Through international partnerships with various media and online platforms, CyberAgent intends to take on the challenge of formulating a comprehensive global marketing strategy. We also aim to promote each property in a way specific to each region without compromising the anime’s unique branding and worldview, which we believe is one of its biggest strengths.

In March, CyberAgent launched the English-language version of ANIME FREAKS, a website that reports anime news. However, around the world, many of the youngest anime fans now receive news directly from social media. Why is it important for CyberAgent to still create a direct-to-consumer website for anime news reports? What role does ANIME FREAKS play among the existing fan-operated English-language outlets that report on anime?

Our goal is to deliver anime information quickly by publishing articles simultaneously both in Japan and abroad. We will also publish original articles, such as reports on the impact of Japanese anime on overseas fans and covering anime conventions across the world. Furthermore, CA America will publish columns utilizing quantitative data from social media and anime review sites, and from qualitative data such as user comments. In addition to our website, ANIME FREAKS will post actively on social media. We hope to provide information from a variety of angles that only ANIME FREAKS can offer.

CyberAgent also plans to create other language versions of ANIME FREAKS in Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Thai, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Do these reflect what CyberAgent believes are the emerging markets for the anime industry around the world?

The popularity of different series varies by country.

ANIME FREAKS is a news media outlet that aims to both provide the latest news in the world of anime and manga as well as opportunities for anime fans from around the world to discover new series. To this end, we plan to expand supported languages.

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Tonari Animation CEO talks anime funding, training, AI

Tonari Animation is a 2D digital animation studio headquartered in the United States, has a branch office in Japan, and has a staff of animators located around the world. Animenomics met with CEO Jarrett Martin to discuss the company’s operations and current trends in the anime industry in this two-part interview.

Read part one of the interview

Richardson Handjaja: A report in a Japanese business magazine a few months ago said that there’s a de facto tier system in the anime industry where large studios have the ability to charge higher prices than smaller specialty studios. Do you see those challenges as a subcontractor?

Jarrett Martin: As a subcontractor, we’re usually just entitled to the animation budget, not the production budget. We’re also not entitled to any kind of profit sharing. If you’re the primary contractor, you get the animation budget and the production budget, and, as far as I'm aware, you get some residuals off of the intellectual property and any sales that happen later.

A studio that has the entirety of the budget can determine how they want to allocate their resources. Most studios will allocate around the same budget proportion to animation, then that animation budget will be passed down the line to subcontractors. I don’t think the pay rates per cut differ that much between the primary studio and subcontracting studios. The animators are making around the same amount of money in either case.

The only time they aren’t making as much money is when the subcontractor is a budget option, and Tonari Animation is not a budget option studio. We are on par with all other Japanese anime studios in price, but there are studios in Southeast Asia that will charge one quarter to one-tenth the price, and they become the budget option studios. In their cases, they’re making way, way, way less.

Handjaja: Obviously, with Southeast Asia being a lower labor cost region, they have the ability to charge lower prices. Many people who are interested in the anime industry come from some of those regions—developing countries that are non-U.S., non-Europe—where these kinds of wages could be a step up from their local incomes.

Martin: Yes, that’s right.

Handjaja: Do you see a lot of applicants from those countries and regions?

Martin: I can tell you the breakdown of our animation staff at Tonari Animation. We have about 40 people in the U.S., 40 people in Southeast Asia, and then there are around 100 people that are like the only person in their country that’s working in anime. And it’s scattered among 32 different countries.

There’s a lot of interest from every country on Earth by artists who work in Japanese anime. It’s just how they acquired the anime is going to be a different story, but basically everyone’s seen the same shows growing up. I know that animators in Africa likely got bootleg low resolution DVDs or something, and that's how they watched anime. Or bootleg VHS releases and stuff like that. But the impact is still the same. They still fell in love with anime.

Handjaja: I used to live in Malaysia myself and saw a lot of those bootleg anime DVDs, which are obviously not real licensed products. They were either rips of fan subs or illegal copies of authorized subs.

Martin: Exactly.

Handjaja: You’ve said in the past that you provide experiences for people to become a director, do some storyboard work, or even handle episode direction. How do you create those opportunities, especially for foreigners and non Japanese people?

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Tonari Animation CEO: Foreign animators a boon for anime industry

Tonari Animation is a 2D digital animation studio headquartered in the United States, has a branch office in Japan, and has a staff of animators located around the world. Animenomics met with CEO Jarrett Martin to discuss the company’s operations and current trends in the anime industry in this two-part interview.

Richardson Handjaja: Thanks for taking the time to talk with Animenomics. I want to start by asking how you got started in the anime industry because I understand you’re an animator. I’d also love to hear more about how you decided to create Tonari Animation.

Jarrett Martin: I started off as a YouTuber, and my YouTube channel’s focus was teaching people about how to make anime. Even though I hadn’t been in the industry yet, I studied it on my own through friends I met online and through what I gathered on the Internet. There really wasn’t a resource for English-speaking animators at the time to learn how to get into the anime industry, so my goal for the channel was to get me into the industry by teaching people about it. I had to be very careful that I was teaching it properly, so it gave me a lot of motivation to really know what I was talking about. I’ve since pulled a lot of those videos down. Now that I’ve been in the industry for five years, I found that the information was okay, but I know I can do better, so now I’m rebuilding all that stuff.

Striving for Animation was the online group where I met my mentors that taught me about how to make anime. It started off as a Skype group that would meet daily and draw together and study art. That group was founded and advertised entirely on 4chan. On 4chan, there’s an art thread called /ic/, which is Artwork and Critique. This guy named Chi was advertising it when I was first in college and really getting into animation. I was posting my artwork on /ic/ because I just didn’t have any good artists around me to critique my work. I got a lot of good feedback, and that’s where I found Striving for Animation. A few people from that group actually got into the anime industry through the traditional route—learn Japanese, get an art degree, go to Japan, go to senmon gakko [vocational college], start at a studio as a doga-man [in-between animator], and then work your way up to key animation. He followed that route, was successful, and taught me and other people in the group.

After that, I pushed for the group to grow because there are way more people that need this information, so I advocated for the group to go to Discord. After the Discord server got too big, we realized that we needed videos because we were teaching the same thing over and over every time a new person comes in, so we made this YouTube channel to catalog what were teaching. It ended up blowing up, and that’s when I started Sakuga Foundry, which was an online forum for artists who wanted to get into animation. They would have a place where we could store resources and have professionals talking to people that are interested.

This huge community spawned a client base, naturally, and we started getting clients coming into the Discord server. I had a bunch of artists in my circle that were interested in getting into anime, so I wanted to make a studio and put the opportunity in my own hands, instead of hoping a studio will hire me someday, and then also help provide opportunities for other artists. I think I’ve gotten a lot of criticism by some members of that community that have since left. They think that artists shouldn’t be trying to make a business, that artists should work for a company and not be too capitalistic. But I think if there isn’t anyone doing what I’m doing, then there are going to be a lot of artists that are going to miss out on opportunities to get into the anime industry. I know now how hard it is for Japanese studios to hire foreigners, so having an anime company that specializes in hiring foreigners I think is a boon to the industry, not a negative.

Handjaja: Do you see any hesitancy from the Japanese side when hiring a company that’s run by a foreigner as a subcontractor?

Martin: Absolutely not. It’s actually the exact opposite. Basically, they’re all excited and happy. We’ve been given gifts from every major studio that’s in our client base. We’ve been very welcomed because the industry needs people.

Handjaja: That’s good to hear. From what I’ve seen, many of the overseas subcontractor studios are obviously run by foreigners, but there aren’t many studios in Japan that are run by non-Japanese people.

Martin: There are actually three—Sola Digital, Tonari Animation, and D’Art Shtajio. Sola, as far as I’m aware, is based in Tokyo and Los Angeles. D’Art Shtajio is strictly Tokyo, and then Tonari Animation is U.S. company with a Japanese branch.

Handjaja: Did you simultaneously set up in the U.S. and in Japan at the same time, or did you start in the U.S. first before branching out into Japan?

Martin: When I started Tonari Animation, I thought coming to Japan was kind of impossible. It was kind of a dream. I started Tonari Animation right when the pandemic started. Japan shut down, and there was no chance of actually coming here and setting up, so I just set up remotely instead. The entire company was founded on this cloud system. Everyone’s working asynchronously in different time zones. They can work from home anywhere in the world. It was always a goal of mine to eventually get to Japan and open a physical office, which I’ve since done, but it wasn’t easy.

Handjaja: Were there any the regulatory challenges that you had to face by being a studio in the cloud?

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