The Japanese Animation and Home Video Game Industries

Abstract

The animation and home video game industries represent two of the most widely-known contemporary Japanese cultural industries. Both industries share similar characteristics with high turnover ratio and locational concentration in Tokyo. However, they differ markedly in their detailed location patterns, labor markets, and inter-firm relationships. The distribution of animation firms is more concentrated on the national scale in Tokyo and in the western suburbs of Tokyo on the local scale than that of game ones. Workers in the game industry are employed through public advertisements, whether recruiting new graduates or mid-career staff, and they often move one firm to another because there is occasional serious deterioration in human relationships. Conversely, in the animation industry there is little apparent deterioration in human relationships. Most job leavers of the animation become freelancers, establish their own firms or leave the industry entirely. Game firms have fewer inter-firm relationships and less flexibility to alter their business partners than animation firms.These differences stem from their peculiar distribution systems-the existence of the legal oligopolistic TV flagship stations of in the animation industry and platform holders in the game industry -and production processes- waterfall process in the former and revised process in the latter-, which not only influence each other at an industry level but also the behaviors of their individual component firms.