Every time
a story about working conditions in the anime industry comes out, the
conversation ends in the same place: animators earn little and something needs
to be done about it. Takeshi Natsuno, CEO of Kadokawa,
doesn't say that's a lie. He says that it is the wrong symptom to diagnose the
real problem, and that as long as the industry continues to look there, the
fundamental solution will never arrive.
The real
problem is not the salary, it is the structure
During a
discussion about the future of Japan's content industry in April, Natsuno was
blunt: Japan has too many small anime studios, and that's what's killing
the sector's profitability. Each small company comes with its own president,
its own executives, its own sales team, and its own management. Multiply that
by the number of studios that exist and the result is an industry where a huge
portion of the money goes to duplicate functions that could be shared.
To
illustrate the scale of the problem, Natsuno turned to an example from his own
industry. Kadokawa, being one of the largest publishers in Japan,
controls only 20% of the publishing market. The remaining 80% is
distributed among dozens of smaller competitors. If this fragmentation is
already a problem in the book industry, in anime, where margins are tighter and
production costs do not stop rising, the situation is considerably worse.
Natsuno's
specific proposal is the merger of companies. He gave a simple
example: if Kadokawa were to merge with seven other production studios, seven
presidents would no longer be needed immediately. Seven sales teams, seven
administrative departments, seven overhead structures that could become one
more efficient. It's not a new idea in other industries, but in the world of
anime, where studios are often very personal projects of their founders, it's
an uncomfortable conversation.
The CEO was
also clear about what he doesn't want: government subsidies.
His position is that public policies should create incentives for mergers to
occur voluntarily between private parties, not for the State to plug the gaps
with money. He mentioned models such as those of Hollywood studios and
companies such as EA, where the creative part and the business part are clearly
separated, allowing creators to focus on making content without worrying about
capital or commercial operation. That is the model that, in his vision, the
Japanese industry should aspire to.
The
background to all this is that profitability in anime is already
falling, according to Natsuno himself, which makes structural reform urgent
and not a theoretical exercise. Its stated ambition is for the anime industry
to have an economic weight comparable to the Japanese automotive sector, but
for that it must first stop operating as an ecosystem of micro-enterprises
competing with each other with limited resources.
Kadokawa
Corporation is
one of the giants of Japanese entertainment: publisher, anime producer, video
game developer, and global content distributor. Among its best-known properties
are franchises such as Sword Art Online, Re:Zero, KonoSuba,
and Oshi no Ko, as well as being the company behind Elden
Ring through its subsidiary FromSoftware. The fact that its CEO talks
about industrial consolidation is not a neutral position: Kadokawa would be one
of the main beneficiaries, and possibly the driving force, of any merger
process in the sector.
