Japan renews focus on anime, manga exports
Plus: Gov't to encourage loans to fund anime, film productions; 'Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc' leads global box office; LINE Manga seeks sports webtoon innovations; and more
This is your weekly Animenomics briefing, covering the business of anime and manga. Today is Wednesday, October 29, 2025.
In case you missed it: Sony Group won’t bid on the possible sale of Hollywood media studio Warner Bros. Discovery, chief executive officer Hiroki Totoki told the Nikkei.
“We want to build a solid base in our strengths of anime and games,” Totoki said.
Takaichi gov’t renews focus on Cool Japan policymaking
Japan’s new conservative government under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, elected to her post last week by fellow legislators in the National Diet, is signaling new emphasis on supporting the country’s entertainment content industry.
Why it matters: In Takaichi’s first policy speech before the legislature last week, she echoed former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s pro-stimulus fiscal policies, including an endorsement of the entertainment industry as an economic engine for the country.
What she’s saying: “[The government] will support the overseas expansion of digital-related industries, including the content industry,” Takaichi proclaimed, echoing Abe’s support for Cool Japan in policy speeches in 2013 and 2014.
“Prime ministers in between [Abe and Takaichi] seemed to limit themselves to mentioning ‘culture and tourism’,” manga industry consultant Takeshi Kikuchi observed in a blog post.
Zoom in: “When it comes to Cool Japan’s content policy, people often focus on export volume and economic impact, but I believe it extends beyond those things,” Kimi Onoda, a close ally of the prime minister and the appointed economic security minister, told Japanese media last week.
“Today, anime, manga, and games are major reasons why people learn Japanese,” the two-term upper chamber legislator said. “They serve as powerful tools that can lead people to understand Japanese culture and ways of thinking.”
Before entering politics, Onoda, who now also oversees the government’s intellectual property and artificial intelligence strategies, worked at a company that made female-oriented narrative games, known as otome games, and drama CDs with male voice actors.
In 2023, Onoda appeared in a video with manga artist and fellow legislator Ken Akamatsu where she listed Tsunezo Murotani’s Himiko, Kei Sugita’s Uta Koi, and Hidekazu Himaruya’s Hetalia: Axis Powers as influential manga titles in her life.
The bottom line: “Watching this [video], you can tell that their understanding of entertainment is completely on our side,” Kikuchi wrote in his blog post. “It really feels like times have changed.”
METI seeks to encourage debt financing in anime, films
A study group at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry is looking for ways to increase the availability of debt financing for the anime and film industries to fund productions and reduce reliance on production committees.
Why it matters: Compared to Japan, other entertainment exporting countries like France, South Korea, and the United States create more opportunities for companies to receive bank and government loans to fund costly projects.
Members of the METI study group on entertainment and creative industry policy believe increasing the pool of funding money available will ultimately allow more money to pass down to anime and film creators.
The details: An example scenario modeled by the study group sees debt financing fulfilling as much as 30 percent of total production cost, according to presentation materials from a recent meeting.
Of the remaining cost, 50 percent could be funded using equity financing—not unlike the production committee system—and 20 percent could be funded with government money.
The study group also believes that private companies would be willing to put up more capital to fund risky anime and film projects as the government increases support for high value productions with global potential.
Friction point: Debt financing in the United States and South Korea often involves a completion guarantee, which grants the guarantor the right to take over production if cost overruns put the project at a financial risk.
It’s unclear if anime and film creators in Japan would accept the risk of losing creative control of a project. Studios would need to improve how they manage production costs.
“Anime studios often fall into a common trap: they become overly deferential to their financial backers, failing to properly account for profits and secure sufficient investment for growth. Instead, they obsess over quality, leading to excessive overwork and ultimately operating at a loss,” Norihiko Saeki, who headed METI’s Cultural and Creative Industries Bureau until July of this year, summarized in a recent interview with a member of the study group.
The bigger picture: Facilitating new funding methods like private and government loans would also require Japan to develop expertise in content valuation to assess project risk.
One example the group studied is BNP Paribas, a French bank that has accumulated expertise in the content valuation since 1917 and now provides financial support to more than half of France’s film productions.
Japan has provided localization and expansion support for anime projects with global appeal like Demon Slayer: To the Hashira Training, but such budgets are much smaller than comparable government programs in South Korea.
Clippings: ‘Chainsaw Man’ ranks atop global box office
Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc was the world’s top box office earner last weekend, taking in US$36 million in global box office ticket sales as the film opened in the Americas and in Europe. Cumulative global earnings now stand at US$108 million. (Screen Daily)
The intrigue: Premium theatrical screenings like IMAX, Premium Large Format, and 3D screenings accounted for 63 percent of the film’s earnings in its weekend North American debut.
Speech synthesis startup ElevenLabs has won the endorsement of Attack on Titan voice actor Yuki Kaji as it adopts a technology security framework that authenticates voices that are replicated using artificial intelligence technology. (Press release)
Why it matters: ElevenLabs, which aims to create an AI dubbing service in Japan, is also endorsing the Japan Actors Union’s campaign against unauthorized use of AI with voice actor voices, which could win over skeptical union members.
Publishing giant Shogakukan has established an intellectual property rights office in the manga publishing division that oversees the Big Comic line of manga magazines, which has serialized titles like Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and Trillion Game that were later adapted into anime. (Shinbunka Online)
Chinese animated films are finding new fans among Japan’s nearly 1 million Chinese residents, thanks to cinema deals brokered by Tokyo-based film distributor Facewhite, which was founded by a veteran of China’s digital comics market. (Nikkei Asia)
Franco-Belgian comics and their influences on and from Japanese manga will be on exhibit at the Tokyo Bande Dessinée Festival this weekend on the campus of the Lycée Français International de Tokyo, a French international high school. (Cinra)
LINE Manga builds support for sports webtoon creators
“The ingenuity of creators in their expressions is truly amazing. What matters is simply whether creators want to draw sports in a webtoon. Our role is to build the network that delivers their works to the world. If they say, ‘I want more movement,’ or ‘I want sound,’ we can make that happen because it’s digital. Creators produce works that far surpass any expression techniques we could ever conceive.”
— Masamine Takahashi, LINE Digital Frontier chief executive officer
Context: Takahashi, whose company operates the LINE Manga service, told Oricon News in a recent interview that he is “not at all worried” about artists’ ability to draw sports manga’s dynamic character movements in webtoons’ vertically scrolling format.
Zoom out: Sports is one of manga’s biggest genres in Japan, and Takahashi is betting that his company will be able to produce iconic sports titles like traditional manga publishers have.
Earlier this month, LINE Digital Frontier was a sponsor of Tokyo’s Toray Pan Pacific Open tennis tournament, the first time the company has sponsored a sports event.
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Japanese politics today. Great if you’re an anime fan. Kind of fucked if you’re a professional Japanese woman, and doubly fucked if you are a gaijin living and working in Japan. Especially if you come from a country she doesn’t fetishize. You know? The poor ones.
Totoki's comment about Sony focusing on anime and games rather than pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery is really strategic. Sony already owns Crunchyroll and significant anime IP through Aniplex - doubling down on those strengths makes more sense than trying to absorb WBD's complex legacy media businesses. The timing aligns perfectly with Takaichi's Cool Japan revival and METI's debt financing initiative. The debt financing proposal is particularly interesting - the 30/50/20 model (debt/equity/government) could genuinely transform anime production economics if studios can accept completion guarantees and improve cost managment. France's BNP Paribas model since 1917 shows this can work long-term. What's encouraging is that Economic Security Minister Kimi Onoda actually understands otome games and manga culture from the inside, not just as policy abstractions. That kind of authentic understanding at the cabinet level could lead to much better policy implementation than previous Cool Japan initiatives. Chainsaw Man hitting $108M globally with 63% from premium formats also validates the theatrical anime strategy.