Online manga: where is it? Some would say it’s passed around via the Internet as scanlations. And that’s a problem.

That problem, though, is two-sided. The obvious first side is that scanlations are technically illegal. But the second — and more important — side is that legal alternatives to online manga distribution do not exist. Yes, you can say that there are experiments with online distribution (such as Viz’s online Signature Ikki magazine), but the fact remains that a universal and ubiquitous legal alternative for online distribution of every English-language manga published in the United States does not currently exist.

There are some subsequent problems as well, and I would like to take the opportunity of this post to go through them. I feel like these issues have not been addressed, particularly since no alternative to illegal distribution websites has been offered by the Coalition as of this writing.

The Problem of Terms: Scanlations, Scans, and RAWs

When people talk about the issues surrounding the illegal, global distribution of printed Japanese comics, they encapsulate the issues with the term “scanlations.” Instead of one issue, though, there are three issues at stake: scanlations, scans, and RAWs. The problem with the discourse surrounding online distribution of manga is that it’s a bi-national issue, though critics tend to come at it from one of the two perspectives. So, to break it down:

1. Japanese (and others) are uploading scans of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.
2. Americans (and others) are uploading scans of original English translations of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.
3. Americans (and others) are uploading fan-translated scans of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.

These are the three issues at stake, and they all account for different parts of the “scanlation” debate. To apply terms to each of the situations above, (1) is a RAW issue, (2) is a scan issue, and (3) is a scanlation issue. And to define these words for those unfamiliar with the terms:

- A “RAW” is a scan of the original Japanese comic, untranslated (the term “RAW” actually presupposed translation, hence the original untranslated print material being “unprocessed” by fans).
- A “scan” is basically the same thing as a RAW, but it is a scanned copy of officially translated material distributed by publishing companies outside of Japan (eg., Viz, Vertical, Dark Horse, etc.).
- A “scanlation” is a fan-produced translation of a RAW comic. A scanlation cannot be a translation of a scan, unless said scanlation is translated into a language other than the original scan’s language (eg., a French scanlation of Vertical’s production of Osamu Tezuka’s works, originally translated into English by Vertical, Inc.).

So, besides the issue of petulantly defining terms and situations, what’s the importance of drawing these distinctions? Well, to quote the first sentence of the Publishers Weekly article (above), “An international Coalition of Japanese and American-based manga publishers have joined together to combat what they call the ‘rampant and growing problem’ of scanlations, the practice of posting scanned and translated editions of Japanese comics online without permission of the copyright holders.” The article states that the Coalition will be addressing the issue of “scanlations,” but there are really two more ways to slice this phrasing:

1) Japanese publishers and English publishers are (or should be) more concerned about the illegal distribution of their own properties. That is, for Japanese publishers, they first and foremost do not want to see the illegal distribution of original Japanese language scans (ie., “RAWs”). For American publishers, they first and foremost do not want to see the illegal distribution of scans of their original English-language translations (namely, “scans”).

2) Less important — though still important — is that both Japanese and American publishers want to see a reduction in or end to the illegal distribution of scanlations.

Why make this distinction further? Well, if you have seen the argument about the illegal distribution of English-language fansubs or even the reverse importation of American DVDs into Japan, you’ll note that publishers want to make the most money possible. The most money, therefore, lies within the original products of these publishers. Japanese comic readers should read the original Japanese manga, so having these online negatively impacts the market in Japan. American comic readers should read the official English-language translation of the manga, so having these online also negatively impact the market in America. For scanlations, it’s a bit trickier: they obviously represent a direct opposition to official publications, but the draw to buying official publications is the physical material: “better” translations, “better” physical quality (image and book), etc. But, of course, “better” does not always happen: be it in the failure of companies to produce a better product (eg., the translation might actually suck) or be it in the personal aesthetic values of different fans (eg., some fans will argue that scanlations are better because they avoid localization with a more literal translation).

There have been some arguments that scanlations help the American side of the distribution industry because it helps introduce titles to fans. While this was true in the past, I personally will deny this to be true today: the fans that are reading manga online already seek out or are at least introduced to titles in respective online communities (forums, chatrooms, social networks, etc.). In the end, there are no numbers to support this assertion. Entirely separate from these numbers are the numbers that illustrate the effect of scans and RAWs on distribution companies, of which there are statistics (and you can hear about them in this episode of the ANNcast with guest Ed Chavez, from Vertical, Inc.).

So, as I’ve introduced above, the scanlation debate is complex and definitely does not aid fans in understanding how the industry works (since there are practically no case studies publicized anywhere). But the debate really does have to be contended distinctly, because there are many issues at stake which without well-defined boundaries will confuse a lot of people. Ultimately, the problem with the Coalition will be competing companies and differing cultural modes of print consumption (eg., serialized compilations in Japan versus tankoubon-style paperbacks in the U.S.).

The Debate Over Numbers

OneManga.com was recently revealed to be in Google’s Top 1000 visited websites (via Google AdPlanner). You can check out the page on which OneManga is listed here (using April 2010 data).*

* You’ll notice that the page states OneManga.com does not use advertising, but I believe the page account for Google Ads (because OneManga.com does in fact use ads on practically every page of its website).

Google states that OneManga.com has achieved a 0.3% penetration rate. According to the “about” page, “You can see a list of the largest 1000 sites worldwide, based on Unique Visitors (users), as measured by Ad Planner. This list is updated monthly as new Ad Planner datasets are released. The list defines sites as top-level domains.” The key here is that Google is calculating the size of a website based on its community. But even more interestingly is that while OneManga draws in 4.2 million unique visitors monthly, it achieve 1.1 billion page views (which, if you go examine the page, is waaay larger than most of the sites in that range). The reason for this is that 1) with such a loyal audience (who go to the website primarily to read manga, 2) they achieve a higher visit duration compared to other websites, and therefore 3) we see many more pages visited per user (particularly because the majority of the OneManga website is constructed of pages upon pages of comics).

The key point of the Top 1000 ranking, therefore, is not that OneManga gets visited by a lot of people, but that it retains a highly devoted audience. While the reason can be debated (it is perhaps likely that the internal community continually attracts users, rather than the manga pages; or, perhaps a small handful of series gathers 80% of the traffic), the point is that this audience is loyal to OneManga.com and not manga per se.

The Seclusion of Illegal Online Fandoms

Early media fandoms operated covertly in terms of distribution: most limited the dissemination of media objects to internal distribution within the (usually moderated) community. For example, many media-related LiveJournal communities still function as moderated hierarchies, carefully controlling the selection and admission of new members to the community. Even checking out Baka-Updates Manga illustrates that a large number of translation communities for manga still rely on IRC or similar communication protocols to distribute their translations amongst acquaintances. At the Media in Transition 6 conference, Professor Carolina Acosta-Alzuru (University of Georgia) accounts for similar gated community practices amongst the foreign, online audiences of telenovelas, which — as must be noted — do not have an official, legal translator-distributor outside of Latin America (in converse to the manga and anime industries in the United States).

I predict that, just like the online telenovela audiences, scanlation teams and communities will — in the face of legal action — retreat away from prying eyes into further gated communities, allowing only internal (sometimes P2P-enabled) distribution. But it remains to be seen what stances and strategies the international Coalition will adopt, particularly if they primarily target large distribution websites (like OneManga) or also go after smaller communities (like smaller scanlation groups). The equation pretty much comes down to the relative opposition between exposure (how noteworthy each community is), resources (how many people and how much effort the Coalition will be able to expend on this endeavor), and fan activity (how well they can maneuver around old and new online spaces).

Therefore, scanlations will not end, particularly since a small number of fans still produce fan translations as celebratory fan activities (or just to practice their translation skills).

Marketing to Online Communities: From Grassroots to Forced Seeding

One of my points of research is into how ideas spread online. Over the past few years, one term has been co-opted to describe popular trends in content (usually video) online: viral. Viral came to be adopted after the concept of memetic spread (for Internet memes) became popular, borrowing from the word meme‘s roots in Richard Dawkin’s 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. If you follow the online marketing space, then, you might have come across viral marketing as a new trend in getting as many people as possible to watch (and hopefully share) your advertisement (or other piece of media).

The problem with virality, though, is that mapping how users share content within an online community (or across multiple communities) is pretty damn complicated. It requires figuring out what audiences reside where and who acts as the links between distinct communities. My mentor, Henry Jenkins, has described that form of sharing as “spreadability” (which you can read about in his white paper, If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace). Anyway, one point that is never really discussed among marketers operating in “viral marketing” is the process of injecting content into communities that might appreciate and then spread said content. Ironically (since we’re talking about online piracy), the marketers have co-opted another term to describe the process of community injection: seeding (from the seeding of P2P BitTorrent sharing). Unlike strange, popular Internet phenomena (like Susan Boyle) which spread organically among friends, colleagues, etc., raising hit counts as people honestly visit them, these marketers have to literally introduce their media forcefully to communities that have been targeted as potentially finding value in that media. The spread, therefore, is not necessarily organic, due to this seeding process.

I bring up seeding, though, because it identifies one key component of the online manga fandom (also applying to other media fandoms online) that the Coalition will have to leverage (and perhaps exploit) when they decide to introduce a new legal alternative to online manga distribution: spreading content through communities. The undisclosed problem being that the manga readers the Coalition assumes to exist are actually just part of the community of each respective illegal manga website. Rym and Scott, in a recent GeekNights episode, purported that manga fans do not exist in the capacity that publishers think they do. Instead, there are teenagers without disposable incomes that utilize sites like OneManga but are extracting more value than just the manga. The manga buying audience, though, does not exist on these websites. They argue, therefore, that closing down scanlation websites will do nothing to help the American industry.

I am tempted to agree with the GeekNights hosts, but lets assume that the Coalition does introduce a new online distribution system: how are they going to find an audience for it? Or, more pressing, how are they going to find an audience for each particular licensed title, so that each can be monetized? Because while the system itself might attract some viewers, each title will have to fend for itself in the online ecosystem. At the moment, OneManga (as I hinted at above) creates an ecosystem where fans become acclimated to titles through a specific community, be it OneManga or another online forum. In order to create a fiscally successful distribution system, the Coalition will have to learn and be able to seed these titles to the correct communities (as well as set up a system that accounts for a potentially non-monetizable user base, aka. kids without credit cards). Otherwise, it will ultimately fail.

Years of Waiting: Where’s the Crunchyroll for Manga?

And then there’s one final point: how come nobody tried the whole Coalition thing five years ago? Crunchyroll started to craft a business model to capitalize on fans’ online modes of anime consumption back in mid-2006, but we still haven’t seen one distribution system that aggregates thousands of manga streams around a centralized community (à la Crunchyroll). The interesting bit is the potential for OneManga to become the next Crunchyroll, following the same historical progression of illegal-to-legal distribution website. A hypothetical, but: What if OneManga received enough venture funding to go legit by partnering with Japanese companies? And how does such a hypothetical reshape our understanding of the space that OneManga inhabits as an illegal site but also a hotbed for media fans in a thriving online community?

Then, too, what if we see ventures like OpenManga directly competing with any effort that the Coalition puts forth? (Of course, there’s also the subsequent question of how OpenManga will also drive its own community.)

A Conclusion of Open-Ended Questions

So, where do we go from here? Unfortunately, we just have to sit tight and wait it out. Not many (if any) publishers have made official statements regarding their involvement in the Coalition, strategies for tackling scanlation/scan/RAW websites, or announcements about further solutions to legal online manga distribution. But at the very least, I hope these issues have been fleshed out at least a little to provide some insight into the multifaceted problem with the problem of online manga.

Cross-posted from the Convergence Culture Consortium.

The Japanese popular culture industry, especially for anime and manga, is an interesting case study for global fandom, but also for global industry. The comics, television, and film industry for animated popular culture in Japan has its own history, structure, and approaches, but over the past five decades, as it has reached millions of new, international viewers, new industries have risen to cater to these fans. Still, with the rise of the Internet and the economic troubles that most industries have gone through over the past decade, both the domestic and international manga and anime industries have been hurting for money, even with a surfeit of fans.

The anime and manga industry is especially volatile, because its domestic and international audiences have utilized the Internet to spread and consume the media at the expense of industrial and commercial models that cannot keep up with the audiences’ changing tastes, modes of consumption, and cultural behaviors of media consumption (sharing with friends, international online distribution, the culture of collectors versus mere viewers, etc.). The industries, both in Japan and elsewhere, must change: however, the success that anime and manga brought a decade ago have influenced the producers of these media to stick with old models that are no longer fully applicable to the current fan cultures that drive the markets.

Today, I want to discuss two very recent issues of the manga and anime industries — in Japan and in America — publicizing comments to fans in a way that might be seen by many as “giving up”: without adapting to technological, cultural, and commercial changes, the industries representatives have voiced concerns to fans by pleading with them to stop behaving as they current are — mostly by using the Internet to circumvent commercial models for their media consumption — and to think ethically about how these behaviors are affecting the respective industries.

Shueisha, a major publisher in Japan who print manga magazines and also co-own Viz (one of the top manga publishers in the United States), last week printed a letter to fans in Weekly Shonen Jump, a weekly manga magazine and one of the most popular in Japan. You can see the message (in the original Japanese) by clicking on the image below (in the bottom right), or read the translation:

To all our readers,

There are now many people unjustly posting copies of manga on the internet. These unjust copies are inconsistent with mangakas’ feelings. They are also distorting the authors’ intentions of “I want the work to be read this way”. The actions of posting these unjust copies on the net, into which the mangakas have poured their hearts, are not only hurting mangakas in real life but are also against the law, even if done in a light-hearted manner. Every time we discover such “unjust copies”, we talk to the mangaka and consider every possible countermeasure. But the number of inconsiderate people is great, and at present we cannot deal with all of them. We have a request for all our readers. The unjust internet copies are deeply hurting the manga culture, mangakas’ rights, and even mangakas’ souls. Please understand once again that all of that is against the law. Also, the mangakas and Shueisha will severely deal with any unjust copies found on the internet. We ask that our readers please continue to support us.

- Weekly Shounen Jump editorial department (translation via Devang Haven)

This is a critical development in the manga industry, not because the publishers are finally making a statement about the state of fan piracy, but also that the message comes from one of THE important players in the Japanese industry.

Now, there is some context behind this message: although here in America, a lot of talk goes around about the negative impact of scanlations (scanned and translated manga, by fans), this message is calling out specifically to a Japanese audience: fans in Japan who are uploading RAW scans of manga magazine pages to the Internet (that is, scans of the original pages: a direct copy of the book, circulated online away from the commercial market).

Now, the uploading of RAW scans in Japan is an obvious act of piracy, and direct piracy like this does hurt the industry. An interview with Ed Chavez (Vertical, Inc., a publisher of translated manga in America) explicates that copying of the primary source affects sales and loses audience members. And in response to Shueisha’s plea, a number of websites that hosted RAW manga are now closed or redirect to Shueisha’s homepage.

The issue with a message to Japanese fans is how international audiences should react to this call for fan ethics. A number of English-language sites carry RAW manga scans, for fan translators to distribute scanlations to English-speaking audiences. Although these scanlations still affect the market, they are not scans of the official translations published by companies in North America: therefore, they occupy a slightly different space. If we think philosophically about scanlations, then, English-language-only scans of manga available in Japan but not yet in America operate in a strange space: they can’t be read by Japanese fans who are looking for free Japanese-language manga, but they help spread the word about titles not currently available in English-speaking countries (at the same time, though, the consumption of scanlations may still affect the purchasing of these official copies once they are released, because some fans will have already read the scans and will not want to buy the official publication).

Will Shueisha’s plea work? Sales of manga in Japan have been on a steady decline for a few years now, due in part to piracy, but also to new modes of media consumption, for example through cell phones. All in all, it appears that the most important part of this issue is that Shueisha, as a major publisher, has the capacity to send cease-and-desist notices to websites that are sharing their original content for free (an illegal activity). These endeavors may help the Japanese industry’s woes with declining sales, but I would venture a guess that it will not affect overseas fan economies.

If we jump across the Pacific to America, another rhetorical development took place, this time via a message published by the president of an imported Japanese animation production studio.

Anime News Network reports:

Eric P. Sherman, President and CEO of the anime dubbing company Bang Zoom! Entertainment, has posted an editorial on the AnimeTV blog on Saturday, urging fans to buy anime instead of watching it via fan-subbed videos.

Bang Zoom! is a North American distributor (voice dubbing, subtitling, production, etc.) of Japanese animation television series, movies, and the like. Sherman, in his blog post entitled “Anime – R.I.P.,” writes in bold, “Anime is going to die.” He reiterates what many critics have been saying for years — “If people don’t resist the urge to get their fix illegally, the entire industry is about to fizzle out.” — but readers, both fans and those in the industry, realize that his words are about a decade too late.

The issue, of course, is that Sherman argues, “Japan is already suffering and struggling to bring out quality titles. They can’t rely on everything being picked up by US distributors anymore.” The problem with his argument is two-fold: 1) the Japanese domestic market is the key contributor to the financial success of Japanese animation, not a reliance on foreign distributors, and 2) the Japanese domestic market has been deteriorating as much as the redistribution market abroad (Adrian Brown, of SBS Dateline Australia gives a good rundown of the Japanese industry’s problems in this video segment).

In terms of American redistribution, FUNimation Entertainment currently leads the market in DVD releases (both dubbed and subbed), with Crunchyroll picking up the majority of what titles are left, releasing them subtitled online in their video portal. However, to repeat, the American licensors only provide a reasonable (though still small) fee to Japanese companies to distribution their intellectual property. Basically, the Japanese producers are taking what money they can get (especially money they can use to make up for domestic piracy losses), instead of letting reasonably accessible money slip by while foreign fans share subtitled anime online. Justin Sevakis, of Anime News Network, breaks down the process below:

The cost of producing TV anime has tripled in the last decade. The Japanese DVD market is also maturing, and R1 imports back into Japan for a third of the price (or less) of R2 are a growing problem for them. Hence, if they’re going to part with their intellectual property, it has to be worth at least the amount they’re likely to lose in reverse-imports, plus the production burden relative to whatever value they’ve attached to the R1 market in relation to the rest of the world.

When an anime is licensed, is the fee paid to the Japanese companies in the form of a one-time XX dollar payment, or in the form of XX dollars or XX percent profit off of each DVD that is sold?

Sort of a combination of both. Let me preface this by saying that the following isn’t just how anime works, but pretty much every motion picture and TV license.

First, there is an up-front change of money, known as the “license fee” or “minimum guarantee”. In the case of TV or OAV, this is usually a per-episode amount (though a licensor may insist on dividing longer series up in specified chunks of episodes). There’s also likely a charge for materials duplication (as cloning master tapes is expensive).

The releasing company then produces whatever DVD product and sells it (and may also have other rights like theatrical, TV, etc…). A certain percentage of those grosses are separated into a separate fund. That fund is used for the following:
1. Recouping any production costs. This includes dubbing, DVD authoring, replication and manufacturing, etc…
Once that’s all recouped, THEN…
2. Recouping the minimum guarantee. As the “minimum guarantee” implies that this is the guaranteed amount of revenue the licensor will make from the deal, funds are withheld until that amount is actually reached.
AFTER THAT POINT…
3. That percentage is paid as royalties to the licensor.

Now, that’s a lot of money to make back before the licensor sees any residuals. You’re probably wondering how many titles actually result in residuals being paid, and the answer is “not many”. The minimum guarantee is there so that even if the release tanks, the licensor will have made enough money to call it a day, but OTOH won’t lose out if it’s an unexpected success. Likewise, since the label takes the majority of the risk, they get to keep the lion’s share of the profits, should the release do well.

This is how the vast majority of deals are structured, and this system has been around in the entertainment industry for as long as anyone can remember. There are some exceptions, and the minimum guarantee and back-end percentages (“points”) vary substantially. Also, sometimes production expenses are recouped before separation into royalty percentages.

Justin Sevakis, Anime News Network (via ANN Forums)

All in all, the ultimate problem facing American distributors is that the cultural modes of anime consumption in America is changing once again: instead of needing a general and mediated flow of access to Japanese animation (which was achieved via voice-dubbed distribution), fans now want 1) immediate access to content to keep up with fellow fans, with whom they discuss shows online regularly and at a quick pace; and 2) subtitled anime, because hardcore fans have lashed out about authenticity of dubbed productions, through which many American redistribution directors have taken upon themselves to “redirect” in terms of voice acting (ie., it is a novel production, recontextualized for foreign fans). Instead of needing a moderator to introduce Japanese cultural concepts, terms, etc., most contemporary fans understand (at least the basics) of Japanese lifestyles, language, and behavior.

Therefore, it seems to me that Sherman’s plea for fans to “not pirate anime” is moot, at least at the end of this decade. He states, “Do the right thing. Plain and simple. Because if you don’t, I can guarantee you that this time next year, Bang Zoom won’t be bringing you anymore English language versions of it.” However, it seems that in relation to American fans’ modes of consuming anime, English-language dubs are no longer necessary. Instead, the model provided by Crunchyroll — immediate licensing of popular series, subtitled, and only set to stream online — caters to the largest general American anime audience. Dubbed anime in America might slowly fizzle out, but that business model will be replaced by another company that can better respond to fans’ behaviors.

We at the Department of Alchemy (aka. Alex) would like to thank everyone who decided to come out for our/my panels this weekend at Anime Expo 2009. All two of our panels (as well as the two academic panels in which the Department participated) were thoroughly attended! The Problem with Otaku (photographed above) purportedly held more con-goers than the Crunchyroll panel in the previous one-hour time slot! Sorry that the panel had to be cut off; the presentation held a bit too much information. Also, after being featured in AnimeEXPOSURE (Anime Expo’s official newsletter) on Friday as a highlighted panel to attend, Without Watching the Anime: Opening & Ending Themes featured a full panel room, with a line extending around the bend in the hallway! Rumor has it that about two dozen people were even turned away, since as we neared about 400 members in the audience the fire code seemed about to be breached (though we still had a good number of people lining the back wall and even sitting on the floor in front). Unfortunately, our camera equipment wasn’t working during the panel, so we couldn’t nab a cool snapshot.

For those who attended the OP/ED panel, the list of videos shown is listed below. Thanks again for coming to see us! Remember, we’ll be speaking again at Otakon in two weeks! Check out our three panels:

1) Without Watching the Anime: Opening and Ending Themes – Sunday at 10:15 am in Panel 3
2) The Impact of Evangelion – Saturday at 9:00 am in Panel 1
3) Anime & Manga Studies – Saturday at 11:30 am in Panel 1

So, on to that list:

- Astro Boy 1963, English & Japanese versions [opening]
- Space Battleship Yamato, Japanese [opening]
- Mazinger Z, Japanese & English [opening]
- Big O, Japanese [opening]
- Serial Experiments Lain, Japanese [opening]
- Cutie Honey 1973, Japanese [opening]
- Cutie Honey: Flash, Japanese [opening]
- RE: Cutie Honey, Japanese [opening]
- Honey & Clover, Japanese [ending]
- Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, Japanese [opening]
- Lucky Star, Japanese [ending, episode 14]
- Neon Genesis Evangelion, Japanese [opening & opening during end of episode 26]
- Daicon 4, Japanese
- The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Japanese [opening & dancing to the opening in Akihabara]
- NANA, Japanese [ad promoting opening/ending music]
- Cowboy Bebop, English [opening]
- Gurren Lagann, Japanese [opening, episode 4 & 24]
- Macross: Do You Remember Love, Japanese [ending]
- One Piece, Japanese & English [opening]
- Honey & Clover, Japanese [opening]
- Nodame Cantabile, Japanese [opening]
- Eden of the East, Japanese [closing & opening]

But then off again to Anime Expo!

Sorry for the aberrant hiatus, everyone. Been really busy in the past few weeks with:

- Open Video Conference, where I spoke about the anime fandom’s balancing act of video culture and copyright law
- Web Ecology Project: We released a white paper full of quantitative analysis about how ideas move in the discourse regarding the Iranian Election on Twitter
- Hanging out in NYC with the crew from my Kyoto study abroad group (KCJS)

I really want/need to write articles this week, so I’ll try to get a lot of content up soon. But I have a lot on my plate right now, specifically fandom research in California and drawing up grant proposals for fandom research in Boston and Tokyo.

Good news is that come Thursday I’ll be in Los Angeles, speaking at Anime Expo. I have four panels lined up, which are:

Anime and Manga in Academia
Saturday, July 04, 2009 6:00pm to 6:50pm – LP 2
Whether you have just begun studying anime and manga seriously or are already well into your studies, this panel will guide you on the path from fan to established Japanese popular culture scholar.

Introduction to Anime/Manga Studies
Friday, July 03, 2009 10:30am to 11:20am – LP 3
Ever wanted to write a school paper on religion in Naruto? Read a book on Neon Genesis Evangelion? Or even get a college degree in otaku studies? Come meet the members of the Anime/Manga Research Circle!

The Problem with Otaku
Sunday, July 05, 2009 12:00pm to 12:50pm LP 2
From 1980s science fiction geeks, the concept of otaku has wholly transformed in Japan and America. We’ll examine the history and controversies of the most crucial part of the anime fandom: the fans.

Without Watching the Anime: Opening & Ending Themes
Friday, July 03, 2009 6:00pm to 6:50pm LP 3
When we watch anime, we tend to ignore what begins and ends series. But these small clips matter too! We’ll discuss history and music, and show some of the most influential OPs & EDs out there.

The rest of my potential schedule looks like this:

Thursday
- Digital Manga Publishing Industry Panel & eManga Demonstration (will miss due to plane arrival)
- Kouga Guest Panel (may miss due to plane arrival)
- Morikawa Guest Panel (may miss due to plane arrival)
- Morning Musume Guest Panel
- Imaishi & Nishigori Guest Panel
- Right Stuf & Nozomi Entertainment Industry Panel
- eigoMANGA Industry Panel
- Japan’s Hottest Doujin Videogames
- Gainax Focus Panel
- The Making of Gurren Lagann Documentary

Friday
- Introduction to Anime/Manga Studies
- Mizushima & Kuroda Guest Panel
- Gundam: The 30 Year Anniversary
- Manga as High Art
- VIZ Media Anime & Manga Panel
- Evangelion 1.0.1 Panel (won’t have time to see the movie due to…)
- Without Watching the Anime: OPs & EDs

Saturday
- The Indecent Otaku Comedy Hour
- Nightow & Nishimura Guest Panel
- Digital Distribution of Anime & Manga
- FUNimation Industry Panel
- Anime & Manga in Academia

Sunday
- Directors Panel [or] Breaking Into Anime Journalism [or] Convention Feedback Session
- Crunchyroll Panel [or] SPJA Board of Directors Panel
- The Problem with Otaku
- Production I.G.
- Closing Ceremonies

Also, I’m still scheduled to speak on a number of panels at Otakon, so if you’re not available to fly out to California this week, I’ll see you in Baltimore!

Been pretty busy this week (as evidenced by the lack of updates). Right now, I’m done in New York, prepping for the Open Video Conference, being held at NYU Law.

I’ll be presenting a talk on Saturday at 5:00 pm called “Online Video Culture: The Case of Fansubs, Anime Music Videos, and Copyright.” What I’m “supposed” to talk about:

The first fansubs (episodes of Japanese animation subtitled by fans, for fans) and AMVs (anime music videos, in which Japanese animation is timed to music) were produced in the United States in the 1980s in fans’ homes on VCR players. Twenty years later, these pieces of videography have proliferated across the Internet, creating an online video culture that has clashed with commercial forces as new issues of distribution and copyright have arisen. Alex Leavitt, a researcher of anime & manga studies and an analyst on the YouTomb project, will discuss the involvement of these fan groups with “illegal” production and file sharing; the videos’ ramifications on copyright law and discussions of free use; and the cultural flow of these fan-produced videos in contention with the new commercial and legal models of streaming sites (Crunchyroll, FUNimation, & Hulu) and sharing hubs (YouTube & Nico Nico Douga).

If you’re interested in awesome talks and interesting people, check out the Open Video Conference website starting on Friday at 10:00 am, because all of the talks will be streaming online for your viewing pleasure. Also, if you can’t take the time out this weekend, all of the talks will be recorded and made available to the world. Check out all the details here.

TED.com officially announced today a project that will crowdsource translations of every TED video in more than forty of the world’s most-vocalized languages. The splash page is viewable here.

The video above is a Japanese translation of Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ demo of Photosynth, one of the more interesting yet much shorter videos available at the TED website. As you can see, the subtitles work pretty well and the timing is for the most part up to par. The only petulant remarks I can make about meticulous details would be: 1) there’s no furigana… but that only applies to Japanese anyway, and 2) the subtitles cover up the images when the projector is shown… but that’s unavoidable, and it’s not that important a matter.

The important issue to take away from TED’s audacious project is something that Ethan Zuckerman summed up quite nicely on Twitter: “TED’s approach to translating video is a first step towards translating the web.” He links to an article of his own that gives a brief background to TED’s translation project. Of course, my stance on the issue of social translation is that fansubs in the anime community have been doing it for years, so it’s not necessarily something “new.” At the same time, however, the social element has never really been an active component of fansubbing. But there was an attempt, one that might have had huge repercussions for the anime industry.

When I attended Otakon in the summer of 2008, I decided off the cuff to drop in on Crunchyroll‘s industry panel, held on Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm in Workshop 1. There’s a lot of information that was passed around at Otakon 2008 in regards to fansubbing and translation — the Fansubs and Industry panel probably the most discussed (note: you can watch the panel via that link to Anime News Network) — but Vu Nguyen announced that Crunchyroll had plans to release tools for the creation of community-driven subtitles.

Keep in mind, the announcement took place before Crunchyroll went “legal.” At the time, the website still hosted anime and Asian dramas that may or may not have been licensed. Putting that aside, though, Crunchyroll provided fans a platform on which to watch subtitled anime and a community through which dialogue could take place about that anime.

However, those subtitles were usually in English. In fact, most subtitles of anime roaming the Net are translated in English, though a good number have been written in other languages, such as French and Spanish (I’m not quite sure the balance of statistics between languages or how many languages are frequently used as goals for translation). Clearly language is a barrier to the wide dissemination of anime to potential fans around the world. Another limitation to translation is the structure of the fansub community. Basically, it takes the form of a team of translators and producers, working together toward a final result, coordinated by a central figurehead.

Social translation solves these two impediments on some level. First, there’s a better chance that more languages will be translated. A problem, of course, is that the translator needs to be bilingual (Japanese and X for anime, or English and Y for the TED talks). Second, tools are provided to take down the infrastructure of translation teams, instead putting the power into the hands of an individual.

I spoke with Vu after the Crunchyroll panel to go over a few details of the project. He first explained that the tools were easy to use. A user relied on the time codes of the English fansub to translate from Japanese to his (probably native) language. One issue that arises here is that the translator could be using the English fansubs to translate, instead of the original Japanese voice overs, but ultimately this is probably unavoidable. Still, it provides a somewhat accurate translation in a language that would otherwise probably not ever be translated. Vu also noted that the translations would be checked by some staff (he didn’t have many details, as the project was still in development) to ensure a certain level of accuracy (mainly to avoid the Nico Nico Douga effect of random text in place of actual subtitles).

I had meant to follow up with Vu in an interview for Youtomb, but then I shipped off to Japan last fall. I sent him an email to inquire further about the project, about which I could find no information this spring. He replied back in April:

As for the community subtitling project, we did launch it at some point for user uploaded content. I agree that it is one of the more ambitious projects. But Crunchyroll made a transition to fully licensed, so all of the content online has a licensing agreement in place and our challenge has been in getting the content holders to agree to allow fans to contribute subtitles. There’s IP issues (to which I think we have a good solution), quality issues (which I think content holders need to overcome), and security concerns (for new, yet to be aired content, there’s almost no way we can provide fans any work to translate prior to the air date, so we can’t use fans for simulcasts). We’re still chipping away at this, but I’m not sure how close we are to accomplishing it, and I’m hesitant to discuss too many details… until we make more progression on our side.

So, it seems that Crunchyroll is still in the process of creating some sort of social translation community around their already thriving membership. I wonder if TED’s project will further propel the CR ambitions further.

And I really hope it develops into something similar. If you didn’t read through the TED blog’s announcement, it details that each video translation will have an accompanying text transcript, in which a viewer can click on a sentence and immediately be brought to that spot in the video. If the fansub community or a CR social translation project were to pursue a similar initiative, this would have epic benefits for the anime research community. The availability of transcripts would be akin to throwing it back old school to the early days of American anime clubs, where a member would stand up at the front of the room and read a translation of the script as the Japanese-language animation played in the background. However, such a project takes that extinct practice and revamps it, providing researchers not only with a transcript but also the accompanying video, with which they can easily do a text search on the page and be transported to X point in the video clip, to examine the art relative to the speech. Of course, such a project begs all sorts of questions, particularly video hosting: is it possible to keep a database of videos that could be accessed while bypassing numerous legal and financial barriers?

The question, though, is certainly not one of fansubbing as a practice. At the recent Media in Transition conference at MIT, a Thursday night panel was hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program’s colloquium series called Global Media (the podcast can be listened to here). Most of the panelists agreed that, all over the world, fansubbing is thriving in genres from Bollywood to American bootlegs to tella novellas (to such an extent that it probably can’t be stopped). It seemed that the panelists were more concerned protecting local works and saw more benefits in the circulation of their works than in the loss of monetary content. For Japanese animation, this might mean that Japan should be focusing on their home turf. But we can’t ignore that companies in the US have been set up to distribute anime, which is the main factor that complicates the Japanese market and its profits.

Ultimately, there are only benefits for TED, who own their own videos because it is their personal content. They do not have to deal with complications with copyright or monetization. As far as the anime industry, it’s a completely different set of matters. As Vu stated, simulcasts are out of the question for fan-curated translations, and getting around questions of intellectual property is going to require some deep thought.

We’ll have to wait and see where this ends up. But if you’re interested in continuing the conversation, I’ll be at the Open Video Conference in New York on June 19 and 20 to give a talk about the the history and culture of Japanese animation in the US and its past/future implications. Come check it out, especially for the other talks (which are obviously going to be way more interesting than mine).