I feel bad that I'm late reporting this, but I attended an event, "Remembering Yoshinori (Iko) Kanada", on August 30th. I regard him as one of the greatest anime animators in the short history of our industry--just look at his credits.

The event was planned even before the memorial service was over. It was headed by Mr. Takashi Namiki, the president of OH! Productions, and the arrangements were made through Anido, an anime organization also headed by Mr. Namiki. Working out such an event takes time, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and Anido went ahead and made the official announcement even though the timing was really premature. Early on, there was some debate about who should be holding this memorial event, and I believe Anido and Ghibili (Madhouse to a certain extent) were in a little conflict over the matter. Ghibli settled for being in charge of the PR, while Anido organized the event itself. Madhouse provided the event staff. The public hall in the Suginami Ward was selected as the venue. The committee consisted of old friends and colleagues of Kanada-san, who were all great directors and animators in their own right, and the impressive list of committee members grew longer as the days progressed.

One of the committee members at Madhouse brought in an application form for the tickets. The venue was rather small, so the maximum number of people it could hold was 1200, and the committee wanted each production house to secure the number of admission tickets they needed before opening availability up to the public. The confusion started as soon as the application forms circulated within the production houses--as it turned out, not every company received the form, and the people were calling each other, frantically to find an open slot somewhere. One such distress call I received was from one of the directors at Madhouse. He was able to secure his own ticket, but his wife (who worked at Gonzo) claimed that no such notice was posted for the staff. I later heard that Gonzo only requested 10 tickets, most likely just for management. Anyway, I managed to secure another ticket for him, thanks to Namiki-san's generosity. The Ghibli staff also had very limited access to the tickets from what I heard, so I passed on a ticket I secured for a friend who couldn't attend. It almost felt like a huge concert was coming to town.

A typhoon was headed towards Tokyo, so the weather on the day of the event was gray and drizzly. Fortunately, the Suginami Ward Public Hall is only about a five-minute walk from my place. There were already hundreds of people already waiting outside when I got there. I saw a news crew interviewing some of the big name directors. The main group that ran the operation consisted of animator/directors from the old Studio No.1, Studio Z, and Studio Z5. I doubt younger fans have even heard of these outfits, but they were the studios made famous by Kanada-san and a group of animators that admired his work. I initially thought they were too distressed to pull off an organized event successfully, but much to my surprise, they did a spectacular job of presenting Kanada-san's work and life without being overly depressing, though the opening piano song (the ED song from "Zambot 3") performed by one of Z5 animators moved many to tears. As we watched Kanada-san's amazing work flash by on the screen, we were all reminded why we're in this business. To many, he was the very reason why they became animators, and we felt strangely energized and optimistic as we left the building after the event.

Rest in peace, Kanada-san. You will not be forgotten.

A friend alerted me to an article at Anime News Network that talks about animators' salaries in Japan because my name was mentioned in the article, along with that of my sempai, Osamu Yamasaki-san. I just skimmed through the forum discussions as well, curious to see what people thought about it. I was pleasantly surprised to see people were concerned enough to even debate the issue, considering that it is irrelevant to what workers in the U.S. animation industry are earning. I thank all the anime fans who are genuinely worried about us, but please rest assured that your anime DVDs are not being made in some kind of forced child-labor sweatshop. We chose to be in this position with our own will--bad salary and working conditions included--but it has, and will continue to improve, as our work gains wider audiences worldwide. Such improvements don't happen overnight, though, and perhaps some people are more impatient than others to see immediate change.

I'm not disputing the statistics in their entirety, which I hope I was clear enough in my earlier blog entries. The survey showed that some do make only 70,000 yen (~$800 US) per month. That's probably true, and I'm sincerely sorry to hear that, but there are many more out there who do earn decent wages despite being in non-management positions. I do dispute the claims that the industry in general pays that low. The pay scale of the management positions indicated in the article naturally differ depending on a show's budget and the skills of the artist, so please regard it as the basic industry standard, but not necessarily a fixed amount applied equally to everyone (and please note that the amount is per episode).

I'm assuming the issue here is the salary of the young in-betweeners. Because of the nature of their position, it is close to slave labor, and I don't deny that all. Do bear in mind that I actually went through that myself for years, but like I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, this position is an equivalent to entry level restaurant job within this industry, and unfortunately it is not regarded as a position that requires a the level of skill to command a higher salary. You may not like the idea, but that's just a reality that needs to be faced, and it's not meant to be a long-term position to begin with. There are assistant animators overseas that can produce far more and at a lower rate, so I still think that the Japanese in-betweeners have the potential to earn more if they really want to choose that position as their life-time career. We all know that the pie is so small--and getting smaller as we speak--and someone asking for a bigger share will surely result in starving someone else. But, we all knew from the very beginning that this job won't bring us millions except to a select few. We all figured out how to climb our way out of impoverished situations, and so it will be for the young artists who are facing this very issue right now. I still think we are thousand times better off than those who want to break into the business of acting, singing, or fine arts, where the competition for work is extremely high. A good majority of the inbetweeners are basically spoonfed, and are not in a situation where they need to go out on their own and audition for every gig.

The bottom line is, most of us chose to be in this job, and won't trade it for whatever fine salaries less enjoyable work has to offer. I don't think anime will ever be a million-dollar job no matter how much the pay scale improves, so we'll just accept that as a fact of life and go back to doing the fun stuff.