Abstract
Video-sharing sites like YouTube and streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, along with unlawful platforms such as Anitube, are environments of consumption enabled by increasing transnational consumption that are pushing for transformations in the Japanese animation industry. Among these platforms, the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation is known to rely on the integration of consumers’ practices and the needs of the animation industry in a changing and challenging era of transnational content flows. In this paper, I focus on the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation, a major player in the contemporary media mix, and its pushing forward of the creation of an environment that integrates two different stances on cultural content: one which represents the industry’s needs regarding cultural content as intellectual property, and another that represents consumers’ practices and which regards content as a common or free resource for enabling participation in digital networks. I argue that rather than the production of content, it is the production of value through the management of fictional worlds and user’s participation in media platforms that lies at the core of the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation’s self-proclaimed ‘ecosystem’. This case represents the transformations in the Japanese content industry to survive the increasing transnationalisation of consumption and production.
Highlights
Emergency Measures and the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation’s Two-Sided PositionOn 13 April 2018, the Japanese media reported that the Japanese government, at a panel held at the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters, decided to take ‘emergency measures’1 asking Internet providers to voluntarily block access to the piracy websites Mangamura, Anitube, and Miomio
I have shown how the business model pursued by the coalition between Kadokawa and Dwango has at its base the industrial practices and structure that characterises the Japanese animation industry and the network of fan and amateur culture upon which Niconico built its platform for participation
We can regard the practices of the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation as an attempt to formalise and commodify the environment that has linked these two models in practice
Summary
On 13 April 2018, the Japanese media reported that the Japanese government, at a panel held at the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters, decided to take ‘emergency measures’ asking Internet providers to voluntarily block access to the piracy websites Mangamura, Anitube, and Miomio. Niconico is a popular site in Japan, similar to YouTube, and closely related to Japanese anime and manga amateur and fan culture, where users are able to upload material that many have copyright issues. This gave Niconico a reputation of being ‘a den of illegal videos’ This paper analyses the way in which Kadokawa Dwango Corporation addressed these transformations, responding to international trends as well as deeply domestic issues, such as the complicated relationship between the Japanese content industry, its long-running horizontal structure, and the networks of participation shaped by consumers, such as those in fan and amateur cultures. Research on the subject, I based my analysis on the fieldwork and interviews I conducted between 2014 and 2015 in Japan, as part of my Ph.D. research on the Japanese animation content industry and its amateur and fan culture (Hernández 2016)
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