Artists in today’s day and age of entertainment, from cartoon TV shows and stunning anime movies like Your Name, all the way to video games and creating comics on Webtoon, are extremely integral to much of the content we consume and interact with on a daily basis. They bring color to fictional worlds and have characters come to life seemingly effortlessly.
And yet not everything is all sunshine and rainbows for these talented individuals, especially with anime artists. There is a long-running history of financial abuse of these professional artists. This article aims to bring these financial issues in the anime industry to light and propose possible solutions to help these artists get paid what they’re worth.
Rent and Salary
The average salary of a professional animator and anime artist ranges depending on where in the world you look. To keep things simple, Japan will be compared with the United States of America.
Rent varies depending on where you look. In the US, they price by state. In Japan, they price by prefecture.
The darker the square, the more expensive the rent is
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In the US, the average rent price is $982.48, however the range is anywhere from $725 (West Virginia) up to $1,617 (Hawaii) a month.
Tokyo is so expensive because it is where most anime studios are located
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In Japan, the range given for rent prices across all prefectures is anywhere between ¥50,000 and ¥70,000 a month, equivocating to $470 to $650. Tokyo remains the most expensive place in Japan to rent, with the cost for a private apartment costing around ¥150,000. That’s $1,400!
So with these prices in mind, how much do animators earn?
According to Indeed, the average wage of an animator in the United States is about $18.11 an hour, totaling about $3520 a month. However, these numbers vary from company to company, and from state to state. Animators with stable employment have little trouble being able to afford rent in any state they chose.
By comparison, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
However, Japanese anime artists aren’t fairing as well. The average wage of an anime artist in Japan is ¥2117.61 an hour, which translates into $18.40 at the current JPY/USD exchange rate (Feb 25, '22). This means that the average monthly earnings for these artists are around ¥36254.92, or $314.95. This is not enough to pay even on the lower end of the average rent rate.
By comparison, the average minimum wage for Japan is between ¥714 to ¥932 an hour, varying by prefecture (about $6.21 to $8.11).
However, there are two other issues with the anime industry above the need for rent:
Overworking and outsourcing
Outsourcing Anime
Studios outsourcing scenes to Chinese or Indian artists is actually fairly common in the industry, as an individual Japanese studio may not be able to produce every scene in a timely fashion. However, this means that Japanese studios don’t hire as many artists because of this, because hiring artists directly is more costly than simply outsourcing. To put simply, outsourcing scenes is a way for Japanese studios to “save money” and have less employees on payroll.
Karoshi - Death from Overwork
Karoshi was a term made in 1970 to describe the numerous deaths caused by work-related stresses and pressures. Sadly, karoshi is still quite common in Japan today.
This stems from workplace culture, actually. Commonly in Japanese culture, one does not wish to be seen as selfish when they take time off, so they work if they can. This is also why it’s common for those sick to wear masks, as they don’t want to or simply can’t take time off from their job, lest it be from the pressure of their boss’s talking bad about them or scolding them for not coming in, or from the office being short staffed. Whatever the case may be, a good majority of Japanese people don’t want to ruin the group harmony of their work space.
Overworking happens in every industry, from the simple office jobs all the way to the anime industry. Often artists pass away from overworking themselves, hardly taking time off to see their family and to enjoy holidays in favor of drawing another few panels.
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Kazunori Mizuno is one such case of alleged karoshi. He died on March 19th 2017, at the age of 52, and was well known for working on Bleach, Akira, and Naruto, among other anime’s. He supposedly wasn’t feeling good and went to “take a nap” while he was still at Pierrot Animation Studios, during which he passed away. Those mourning his death often brought up the working conditions within the anime industry, and how it may have led to his untimely passing.
Can Things Change?
For overworking...
...there is a small glimmer of hope. The Japanese government has been taking steps to change the work culture of the country, as younger workers wish to take more time off but cower in fear of their older, more “traditional” bosses, who don’t. While the work culture shift will take much more time than we may like it to, it is still happening in some capacity.
For outsourcing...
...there is little to be done about it. Outsourcing is up to the individual studio, and it’s not up to us to say if they should and when they should. However, anime companies shouldn’t use outsourcing as an excuse to run a smaller company, as this will only contribute to the overwork culture still in place.
For the pay of the individual animator...
...it is hard to say what can be done.
Some of the solutions, like directly paying them through sites like Patreon, require steps to be taken on the animator’s side, which appear unlikely to happen. For this to be a reality, individual animators would have to spend time marketing themselves outside of their work, and with creating anime being such a demanding job there is doubt that they would even have the time to do such a thing, if they are even willing to try in the first place.
Furthermore, we cannot simply go to the studio and demand higher pay, as they are not obligated to do as we tell them to do. For which case, the government or other highly influential officials would have to step in and force these studios to start paying their animators better rates.
Anime streaming services are not to be completely trusted, either, especially following CrunchyRoll's highly controversial funding and hosting of High Guardian Spice, which is the most poorly rated """anime""" on their website.
At this rate, we can only hope that working conditions within the anime industry improve as fans continue to show support through buying DVD episodes of their favorite anime movies and TV shows.
Credits:
Created with an image by willianfujii - "anime girl tan"