“It’s frustrating to hear that Cool Japan has failed when none of the money made it to us.” Anime director Kenji Kamiyama weighs in on the good and the bad of the current industry
Kenji Kamiyama, director of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, recently talked about conditions in the anime industry.
Ahead of ANIAFF 2026 (The Aichi-Nagoya International Animation Film Festival), anime director Kenji Kamiyama, whose works are scheduled to be screened as the event’s highlight, was interviewed by Futaman about his thoughts on the domestic anime industry and its prospects going forward.
Despite the market generating record-high global revenue in recent years, anime has been facing growing issues related to labor shortages, ballooning production costs, and profits not reaching actual creators sufficiently. This has led to a so-called “profitless boom” and a rising number of anime studio closures, despite the medium’s growing popularity.
Amidst these circumstances, it was announced earlier this year that the Cool Japan Fund, which had been launched in 2013 to financially support and promote Japanese culture globally, is due to be dissolved, with headlines emphasizing its failure and massive losses amounting to $340 million. At the same time, Japan’s content industry (including anime) continues to be treated as a core growth industry by the current administration.
When asked about how he sees this situation, Kamiyama says that from an investor’s perspective, anime probably still looks like a blue ocean, “but for the people on the front lines who actually have to take responsibility, that’s not necessarily the case.” By this, he appears to be suggesting that while investors still see huge potential for anime to keep growing, in reality, actual creators in charge of productions are faced with constraints that suggest otherwise.
Still, he goes on to say that if investors were to turn their backs on the industry, creators would lose the very opportunity to make anime in the first place. “Of course it’s frustrating to hear people say that Cool Japan has failed when none of that money really made its way down to us. But in some respects, it may be something we just have to accept.” He added that producing anime and films inevitably requires considerable funding and manpower, but that the primary concern for creators is creative work itself, rather than improving the conditions surrounding the industry as a whole.
As an aside, while the Cool Japan Fund tends to be most strongly associated with pop culture such as anime, manga, and games, only 30% of its investments actually went into the content industry. A recent analys of the initiative also showed that within this 30%, investments tended to be heavily skewed towards distribution rather than production itself. Not only that, but anime-related investments had a high recovery rate, meaning they were successful business-wise, unlike live-action mediums, for example.
When asked whether established creators such as himself could use their influence to improve working conditions for younger talent, Kamiyama suggested that this was already happening to some extent. However, he cautioned against assuming that giving creators greater control over the industry would necessarily make it more prosperous. “It’s strange, but there’s definitely something to the idea that good creators sometimes only emerge when they’re working under certain constraints,” he said. On the other hand, Kamiyama stressed that this should not mean expecting creators to endure poverty for the sake of their work. He would like everyone in the industry to be financially comfortable and believes there is still room to improve the current situation.
Looking at the industry as a whole, Kamiyama also offered a somewhat positive assessment of Japan’s anime industry, describing it as still relatively prosperous. “The fact that individual creators have increasingly been able to take their time making commercial works is, in a sense, thanks to the industry as a whole having produced such a large volume of anime, to the point where it has been stretched thin by labor shortages.”
Amber V
Articles: 1651Related Posts
