[jpatokal]

One factor not discussed in the article is the differing attitude towards exports, piracy and copy protection. Historically, and even today, it's extremely difficult to legally view lots of Japanese content outside Japan, yet Japanese producers pursue copyright claims with rabid fervor. Japanese publishers for books and music were also extremely resistant to move to e-books, digital downloads or streaming.

For whatever reason, South Korean publishers were not as myopic, meaning their content could be more easily accessed -- at first technically illegally, but soon there was a groundswell of demand that led to large-scale legal rebroadcasting (TV stations showing Korean dramas etc) and that then led to today's juggernaut. Manga is just the latest example of Japan losing a market that really should have been theirs for the taking.

[reaperducer]

I don't think it's fair to call it myopic. That implies that one method is correct and the other is wrong. It's more of a cultural difference.

While South Korea has largely embraced the Western style of instant gratification hyper consumerism, Japan is more nuanced. And IMO, that's a good thing.

There is value in scarcity, and in context. It's OK if a publisher doesn't want its work distributed around the world for everyone to see. It's that publisher's property. Having to travel to Japan to see, read, or hear certain things is a good thing. If every thing and every experience was available everywhere, there would be no point in travel.

Having ramen in a hole-in-the-wall ramen shop beneath the train tracks in Japan is a different experience than having ramen in Japantown Los Angeles.

When my wife goes to Japan, she brings an small empty suitcase to ship home just for the books, magazines, and music she can't get here.

It's like artists who destroy their work after a show. Scarcity increases the object's value to some. And it's the artist's choice to do so, not the audience's.

I know this is an unpopular view, especially in tech circles, but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

[Quarrelsome]

> but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

Oh you do. Artists and general creatives often tumble into the trap of thinking they can control the spread of their work following public release. You cannot control the zeitgeist of a generation. If your work is popular than the moment you print it, its spread is out of your hands. IP, copyright and legal action are lossy mechanisms that work against the prevailing system. I'm not saying they don't have value (they very much do!) but when your product is consumer-grade content that don't have infrastructure you own baked into its operation you'll find your stuff being obtained illegally if you don't make it available legally and quickly.

I've seen break-dancers expect to be able to have exclusive rights to movement into perpetuity enforced by community-driven shaming tactics (doesn't work) and I've read enough scanlations to know that the Japanese approach to print manga is negligent of the ramifications of globalisation. When you publish, its gone. You have to be more prepared at publish time in the modern era.

[tauwauwau]

Just going to leave it here. Seems relevant

Planet Money: Joke Theft https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/06/710404524/epis...

[zyx321]

As Gabe Newell once said, piracy is a service problem. The only way to cut back on illegal copying is by making the legal way more convenient.

[Jasper_]

And yet when another company copies API documentation, HN calls for lynching their heads [0]. It seems the hacker crowd only has respect for copyright protections for work that they identify with. Protections for the eniineers and startups, but not the artists.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719380

[plorkyeran]

The end result of refusing to provide your manga in digital form is not that people only consume it in the form you intended. Somewhat the opposite, in fact. Instead you simply have people scanning everything that gets published and distributing it for you, with you having zero say in the resulting quality.

For niche self-published works sold at conventions the number of illegal downloads is often dramatically higher than the total number of physical copies that exist, and the people who experience your art in its intended form are a minority.

[deogeo]

> you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

According to the first sale doctrine, you do. If someone buys media in Japan, then brings them back to the US (i.e. imports them), and sells them, that's entirely legal, and there's nothing the copyright owner can do about it.

And looking beyond what the law currently is, to perhaps what it should be, copyright should remunerate creators for copies of their works, not allow them to impose censorship, which is exactly what limiting distribution this way is.

[klibertp]

> It's OK if a publisher doesn't want its work distributed around the world for everyone to see.

> And it's the artist's choice to do so, not the audience's.

There's a (not) very subtle contradiction in these two sentences.

In short: yay for authors' rights, forever and ever! but I probably couldn't care less about the leeches^W publishers.

The faster the publishing industry - perpetually stuck in the 15th century and trying way too hard to bring us all back to that time - is brought down in flames and replaced the better.

[Jasper_]

Did you misread the parent comment? One statement is positive towards publisher's rights, the other is positive towards authors rights.

[klibertp]

The first statement says the works of art belong to publishers ("...doesn't want its work..."), while the second implies that it's the authors who have full rights to their work ("...it's the artist's choice to do so..."). So, which is it?

[YeGoblynQueenne]

To be more precise, you may not have the right but you do have the opportunity, when it comes to manga and anime. I don't know how feriociously japanese publishers pursue copyright offenders overseas but there certainly is a great number of unofficial translations online most of which seem to be made by people in the US and Europe.

Of course, the translations (and the scans) are often a bit crap. But you can still get an idea of the original's quality.

[cblades]

>There is value in scarcity

I'd argue that for easily digitized works, there's no such thing as scarcity.

Certainly publishers have the right to sue and limit legal distribution, but it does seem at least naive for them to believe they can control illegal distribution. Perhaps that's not the rationale; maybe it's a purely principled stance.

Nevertheless, their work will be spread digitally, and it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face to not have some legal form of distribution that the publisher can make money from.

[jimrhods23]

"I'd argue that for easily digitized works, there's no such thing as scarcity."

Since AI can't create great pieces of art or digital works in a short amount of time, there still is scarcity.

[nxrabl]

What you seem to be arguing for is the scarcity of artists, rather than of art.

[cblades]

I meant that for existing works of art that are easily digitized (not created, taken from a physical format to a digital one), there is no such thing as scarcity if the consumers don't strongly prefer the physical version to the digital version.

[pattisapu]

Speaking of scarcity, valuing it, and protecting it, it seems that physical media, like CDs for music are, or were, more popular in Japan than other places [1].

Is the situation in South Korea similar or different? I don't know enough about either; just thinking out loud.

[1] http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/japan-cd-sales/

[noobermin]

At the risk of sounding somewhat like I'm stereotyping, why is this? I never associated this with Japan in particular, but between losing out of loads of Japanese music I followed a few years ago and Nintendo basically invalidating everyone's Wii purchases it feels like it is ingrained in the corporate culture over there particularly for the large publishers.

Not that we have our own blemishes, DMCA, disregard for things like fair-use, parody and so on, etc. Heh, now that I think of it we have our own issues too.

[adventured]

I'd be very surprised if South Korea doesn't still view itself as an underdog, both economically and culturally. They were very poor until the early 1990s. As recently as the mid 1970s, they were still third world poor.

Japan was a mighty empire not so long ago, and then quickly rose again after the 1950s to have one of the most potent economies. In the late 1980s while Japan was viewed as taking over the world economically, South Korea was just beginning to stir (Japan's economic output per capita was about 6x that of South Korea in the late 1980s). All the way back to the early 1960s, Japan had 5x to 6x the output per capita of South Korea.

I think a country that perceives itself as an underdog always behaves very different from a country that regards being on top as their natural right (which was certainly Japan's attitude during their economic ascension decades). South Korea will surpass Japan's per capita economic output in the next dozen years, for the first time in over a century. It'll be quite the accomplishment.

[dba7dba]

I read this bit below 2 - 3 years ago online.

>> Annual profit/revenue (not quite sure) of Samsung Electronics (not Samsung overall, just Electronics) was greater than or equal to top 9 Japanese electronic firms combined, including Sony.

I think the comparison does not include Sony Films though? Not quite sure.

A lot of people look at the economic miracle of West Germany and Japan post WW2 with admiration. Amazing accomplishments for sure. But both nations already had well established education, technology, institutions, and etc that were already present at end of WW2. Sure, a lot of it had been destroyed/disrupted because of the war. But they were there.

South Korea on the other hand had none of that. S. Korea never had the core ingredients needed for economic recovery. In 1945, literacy rate in Korea was 22%. Korea as a whole was just barely joining the modern world around 1900, a lot of it due to the colonization by Japan.

It is an amazing achievement.

I think S. Korea also feels more threatened than others because it shares land/sea border with China, Russia, and Japan. China/Russia, 2 most powerful nations with non-democratically elected government...

EDIT: Before someone yells at me for putting down Japan and/or putting Korea on a pedestal, I am just stating a fact I read. For sure, Japan has had amazing achievement in the past.

[oblio]

Japan does need a bit of putting down. I've been to Japan and the Meiji Shrine had people with flags of Imperial Japan doing a photo session.

They're quite admirable as a people in most respects but that's just misguided. Especially since without US backing China would definitely want to have a word or two with them about those war criminals. And today's China is not China during the century of humiliation.

On the other hand South Korea did everything peacefully. They deserve their praise 120%. I just wish they'd be reunited with North Korea peacefully and with the resulting country following the South Korean model.

That would be a great counterbalance in the region to Chinese ambition.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

What, a whole country needs to be taken down a peg because a few idiots posed with imperial flags in a wartime srhine?

[mr_overalls]

I'm not going to support the gross generalization that an entire country needs to be humbled, BUT: the shrine is a flashpoint of Japanese ultra-nationalism, which is on the rise.

Common ultra-nationalist beliefs are fairly odious: e.g. Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers, the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and the killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 "Nanjing massacre" were exaggerated or fabricated.

[oblio]

Do you know the history of the shrine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Shrine

It's far from a "few idiots". The place is super controversial. A nice place, but super controversial, politically.

[jpatokal]

The Rising Sun flag remains the flag of the Japanese Navy to this day, and is appropriate to fly on any occasion where you'd fly a Navy flag.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_Flag

[oblio]

The flag had the sun centered...

[mikekchar]

Manga publishers and Japanese music publishers (uh... essentially Sony) are actually very different. To be fair, quite a long time ago manga publishers were actually incredibly lenient/naive about managing their copyright. I'm not sure I should admit this publicly, but I used to do translation for a scanlation group (we only did things that were out of print even in Japan... taking the moral, if not legal high road ;-) ). Publishers at that time generally left you alone and didn't really care about scanlators because they thought that there wasn't a market in the west.

This probably sounds unbelievable, but I actually talked my group into seeing if we could license the manga we were scanlating. I figured that since it was all obscure stuff (even in Japan) it wouldn't cost that much. So we contacted them and they were very interested. They sent us over a price sheet for various manga and I couldn't believe the cost. They were charging about $1000 per volume with no royalties! And that was for current stuff (at the time -- round about 2000).

You may have heard of Viz (publisher of translated manga). I can't remember exactly, but I believe even Inu Yasha was priced around that point (and I couldn't believe that Viz didn't have an exclusive deal). But basically, all at once I realised that Viz was built by essentially getting all the manga for free and publishing it!

Around about 2005, the manga publishers started to realise that they were being insane. Especially for manga that made it to anime, they began to aggressively get exclusive deals for the translation rights. Then they started to send out notices to groups (mostly fansubs, but I heard some scanlation groups got letters) to ask them to stop.

As for our group, we couldn't convince them to go to a digital platform. They were still really wary about it and didn't understand the technology. We didn't want to go to print because... Ummm... we had no money and were only doing it for fun. So we let it slide. They never contacted us again although they clearly new we were violating their copyright. They just didn't care, I think.

In my mind, anyway, that's how the manga/anime scene was built in the west originally anyway. It was powered by scanlation groups and fansubs. It was already super popular by the time the publishers realised that they had a market in the west -- and then they cashed in.

It's hard to say what Japanese publishers should do. I agree that they should have moved to digital a lot earlier. However, even saying that, we scanlated a web manga from an author we liked. It was incredibly unknown in Japan even though the author had a successful anime. Nobody in Japan was interested in a free web comic at the time. Bizarre, but true.

As for South Korea, I think they realise that they have to do things differently in order to break into the market. However, I'll predict that the situation will repeat itself. As soon as they have the kind of market share they want, they will start to close the doors. It's just the way these business guys think.

[Macha]

> This probably sounds unbelievable, but I actually talked my group into seeing if we could license the manga we were scanlating. I figured that since it was all obscure stuff (even in Japan) it wouldn't cost that much. So we contacted them and they were very interested. They sent us over a price sheet for various manga and I couldn't believe the cost. They were charging about $1000 per volume with no royalties! And that was for current stuff (at the time -- round about 2000).

This is basically how Crunchyroll got started. They only removed the pirated content after they got the Naruto license.

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-11-17/tv-tokyo-to...

[esyir]

Probably changed by this point in time. Most manga can be found available online in digital format now. Admittedly, I'm a dead-tree loyalist here.

[FreeFull]

Nowadays, the manga publisher Shuiesha (known for the Weekly Shōnen Jump) has an official website where can view the last few chapters of each of their manga, translated into English.

[cirno9]

Manga is very widespread in the West, so much so that it seems to even eclipse Western comics. It has a big piracy scene that the industry doesn't seem to be doing much to resist. Anime has been exported for as long as it's been around, a major anime boom started in the US in the late 90s, and now you can legally stream practically every anime series at the same time as it's airing in Japan (or after it's finished if it's on Netflix). Anime streaming grew out of pirate streaming until Crunchyroll went legit, and even before that there were tons of series released on DVD and fansubbed on the internet. Practically nothing is or has been done about piracy. Foreign revenue for the anime industry has been growing by leaps and bounds and has never been higher. (https://aja.gr.jp/english/japan-anime-data)

So it's not true that Japanese media is poorly distributed outside Japan, that copyright enforcement is too strict, and that Korea has been eating Japan's lunch. Very few people even know about webtoons compared to manga; r/webtoons has 2K subscribers, r/manhwa has 5.5K, while r/manga and r/anime both have a million. Korea's animation industry is practically non-existent compared to Japan's, and their game industry isn't much better. Kpop is more internationally successful than Jpop, but that's also because Jpop just doesn't appeal to Westerners. I believe Kdramas were at some point more successful and widespread in the West, but I'm not sure what the situation is today. There are now many Jdramas on Crunchyroll and Netflix.

I'd take anything the Western media says about Japan with a big pile of salt, because they've long been pushing various doom-and-gloom narratives about a struggling Japan. Chinese animation was supposed to have upstaged the anime industry by now, according to the media.