Weaponized Fandom
The Western Anime Community’s 21st Century Imperialism
At the turn of the 20th century, Cecil Rhodes, 7th Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (which would later become South Africa), founder of De Beers Consolidated Mines, and architect of Apartheid, lamented in his will that:
the world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach, I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.
— Cecil Rhodes, Last Will and Testament (1902)
He lived from 1853 to 1902, a period which overlaps quite significantly with what we now understand to be the period of Imperialism. The core tenet of Imperialism is expansion as a permanent and supreme aim. It was a surprisingly novel political concept at the time because its true nature is not in fact political, but economic. It describes neither temporary looting, nor the lasting assimilation of conquest that marked Colonialism, but expansion for expansion’s sake, an expectation of eternal growth.
This was the period in history where the bourgeoisie achieved political emancipation, becoming a class in their own right. The overthrow of so many monarchies — establishing republics and democracies — nevertheless kept the proletariat suppressed at the bottom of the power pyramid. Little changed from their role as serfs in centuries past. Classes developed with the rise of the nation-state, which by definition requires a class divided society to function. The bourgeoisie became the ruling class, but left political decisions to the state, as they themselves were concerned with using their newly won freedom to pursue enriching themselves. Making money was the order of the day.
But in short order the ability to grow ran up against the limitations of the nation. When growth flagged, the bourgeoisie realized that the nation-state was unfit to further the growth of the capitalist economy. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the state won a decisive victory in the struggle for power, but the former did manage to half-successfully utilize the latter’s instruments of violence for economic purposes.
Definitions
Before we continue, we need some working definitions of the terminology introduced thus far, and that which is to come.
i) Nation-State
First, let us define the nation-state, and how it differs from its constituted parts, the nation and the state, and how the two are in direct conflict with one another.
Nation-state is an attempt to describe the merger of the nation and the state in the era prior to the birth of Imperialism.
Nations entered the scene of history and were emancipated when peoples had acquired a consciousness of themselves as cultural and historical entities, and of their territory as a permanent home, where history had left its visible traces, whose cultivation was the product of the common labor of their ancestors and whose future would depend upon the course of a common civilization. (p. 229)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968)
The concept of the Nation is therefore built on a foundation of shared cultural identity. Shared commonality is the root that concerns us. Now let’s contrast that with the State.
While consciousness of nationality is a comparatively recent development, the structure of the state was derived from centuries of monarchy and enlightened despotism […] the state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. (Arendt, p. 230)
The State is not concerned with shared nationality; its role is to enact its power over all, regardless of origin, both in protecting from and dishing out harm. Thus the two are in conflict. The nation-state is in conflict with itself by definition.
The people’s rising national consciousness interfered with [the state’s] functions. […] The state was forced to recognize only “nationals” as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community.
The conquest of the state by the nation was greatly facilitated by the downfall of the absolute monarchy and the subsequent new development of classes. […] The only remaining bond between the citizens of a nation-state without a monarch to symbolize their essential community, seemed to be national, that is, common origin. (Arendt, p. 230)
Why is this important? This is the cognitive rationale justifying Imperialism, wherein the dominant national culture becomes the de facto peoples of a country. These national people can then utilize the power of the State to commit the violent act of Imperialism. All non-nationals are potential targets.
The practical outcome of this contradiction was that from then on human rights were protected and enforced only as national rights and that the very institution of a state, whose supreme task was to protect and guarantee man his rights as man, as citizen and as national, lost its legal, rational appearance […]
Nationalism is essentially the expression of this perversion of the state into an instrument of the nation and the identification of the citizen with the member of the nation. The relationship between state and society was determined by the fact of class struggle, which had supplanted the former feudal order. Society was pervaded by liberal individualism which wrongly believed that the state ruled over mere individuals, when in reality it ruled over classes. (Arendt, p. 230-1)
What this means is that the resultant form of the nation-state was a prerequisite for Imperialism to be enacted, both in the use of State power, and the elevation of the Individual of whom the bourgeoisie type would be the ones committing Imperialist acts.
We need to keep this in mind when the hypotheses are presented, because though the nation-state itself isn’t directly addressed, it is this facet that permits the illustrated abuses to exist, enabling them to be carried out.
ii) Imperialism v. Colonialism
Next, let us define Imperialism and contrast it with its cousin, Colonialism.
Colonialism is when a nation-state seeks to expand its territory by establishing colonies that are populated by either settlers from the home nation or forcibly imported from others — as was the case of the American slave trade. The indigenous peoples are forced to acquiesce to colonial rule, and often sequestered into shrinkingly smaller ghettos if not outright exterminated — see the history of treatment of indigenous peoples of America or Australia.
The facet of Colonialism we’re most interested in is the relationship between the colonialists and the people they rule over. From Jürgen Osterhammel’s Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2005):
The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonized population, the colonizers are convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to rule. (Osterhammel, p. 16)
With Imperialism, we suffer an unfortunate misnomer of terminology. The root of Imperialism is imperial, “that which relates to an empire.” But Imperialism is not empire building and expansion is not conquest. Rather, imperialist businessmen were content to let their targets retain some political autonomy.
In contrast to true imperial structures, where the institutions of the mother country are in various ways integrated into the empire, it is characteristic of imperialism that national institutions remain separate from the colonial administration although they are allowed to exercise control. (Arendt, p. 131)
The reason was anything but benevolent. The imperialists understood from history that the nation-state is not capable of empire building.
They were perfectly aware that the march of the nation and its conquest of peoples, if allowed to follow its own inherent law, ends with the peoples’ rise to nationhood and the defeat of the conqueror. (Arendt, p. 134)
In other words, the imperialists knew that if national power was brought to bear on a level of conquest, the oppressed people would rise up and claim their independence through violent revolution. That is why they kept the power of the nation-state in check, exerting economic influence instead, and only calling on the state’s monopoly on violence to protect their investments, i.e. the extracted wealth they were stealing from the target. They knew that their hold would break if they squeezed too tightly.
Understanding this distinction, we can clearly see that imperialism isn’t a political force in itself, but a capitalist weapon that uses political machinery for enforcement. They use state violence to enforce their will. When those being exploited by invading imperialists fight back, the state suppresses their resistance with force, under the guise of keeping order, so that business can continue to operate.
What caused Imperialism in the first place? It was born out of an economic crisis that ought to be quite familiar today: inequality. The transformation of states from monarchies into democracies (or republics and so on) was accompanied by the transformation of serfs into the proletariat, the working class. The bourgeoisie exploited their labor and, thanks to the power of the industrial revolution, soon had an overproduction of capital. They owned so much money, that it became superfluous. Parasitical. There was no longer any productive investment to be found within national borders. But rather than share those profits with laborers (who were the ones doing the actual work and who that wealth truly belonged to), they turned from a system of production to a system of financial speculation on the stock market.
Sound familiar? This was in the mid 1800s, even before the market crash of 1929. This thing keeps happening over and over when the capitalist owners refuse to share wealth with the actual producers of it and instead hoard it for themselves. But I digress.
Since the capitalists ran out of places to invest domestically, they turned to the wider world, looking to see where they could use that money to make even more money, following the edict of permanent growth. This is how Imperialism was born.
In Britain, one of these targets was the Cape Colony. This future South Africa was ripe with resources for extracting, like the aforementioned De Beers which specialized in diamonds and held market share as high as 90% in the 1980s, though since then has become more fragmented.
Yet foreign investment alone does not constitute Imperialism. Another factor is required, a human factor. Where the money went, so followed the people hoping to get a piece of it for themselves.
Expansion then was an escape not only for superfluous capital. More important, it protected its owners against the menacing prospect of remaining entirely superfluous and parasitical. It saved the bourgeoisie from the consequences of maldistribution and revitalized its concept of ownership at a time when wealth could no longer be used as a factor in production within the national framework and had come into conflict with the production ideal of the community as a whole.
Older than the superfluous wealth was another byproduct of capitalist production: the human debris that every crisis, following invariably upon each period of industrial growth, eliminated permanently from producing society. Men who had become permanently idle were as superfluous to the community as the owners of superfluous wealth. That they were an actual menace to society had been recognized throughout the nineteenth century and their export had helped to populate the dominions of Canada and Australia as well as the United States. The new fact in the imperialist era is that these two superfluous forces, superfluous capital and superfluous working power, joined hands and left the country together. (Arendt, p. 150)
Imperialism requires the export of both capital and labor. Capitalists refused to invest at home because they couldn’t turn a profit there anymore, and at the same time couldn’t bear for foreigners to get a share. The answer, then, was to use this capital to invest in extracting resources from outside the nation-state using their own peoples’ labor.
This was realized in the Cape Colony, where gold and diamond extraction was performed using British money by British hands, protected by the might of the British military, on a land that was not Britain. You can read more about the result of this effort on your own time, suffice to say that the native population were not the ones profiting from the extraction of their own resources. The eventual result was decades of Apartheid.
Though Imperialism and Colonialism differ in many ways, the relationship between the oppressors and the oppressed is at heart the same: an outside power comes in to exploit for their own gain, stealing resources, be it land, minerals, or even people.
It has been a long journey reaching this point. One more item must needs be explained before the hypothesis of this piece is stated.
We need to understand the bourgeoisie individual and where they derive power from, and for that we turn to Thomas Hobbes. His depiction of Man in Leviathan is the clearest we have in understanding what makes the bourgeoisie tick.
The political structure of Man, to Hobbes, is a function of society, and judged according to his value, the price put on the cost of wielding his power. Therefore, the fundamental nature of Man is an unquenchable thirst for power. In nature:
all men are equal; for the equality of men is based on the fact that each has by nature enough power to kill another. Weakness can be compensated for by guile. Their equality as potential murderers places all men in the same insecurity, from which arises the need for a state. The raison d’être of the state is the need for some security of the individual, who feels himself menaced by all his fellow men. (Arendt, p. 140)
This was the conception of the bourgeoisie society that arose from the ashes of fallen monarchies. The sole reason for the existence of the state, in this conceptualization, is to hold a monopoly on violence. Individuals are forbidden from killing, that power an exclusive right of the state.
[It] is based on a delegation of power, and not of rights. It acquires a monopoly on killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being killed. Security is provided by the law, which is a direct emanation from the power monopoly of the state. […] In regard to the law of the state — that is, the accumulated power of society as monopolized by the state — there is no question of right and wrong, but only of absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois society.
Deprived of political rights, the individual, to whom public and official life manifests itself in the guise of necessity, acquires a new and increased interest in his private life and his personal fate. Excluded from participation in the management of public affairs that involve all citizens, the individual loses his rightful place in society and his natural connection with his fellow men. He can now judge his individual private life only by comparing it with that of others, and his relations with his fellow men inside society take the form of competition. (Arendt, p. 141)
In this new world, where political power was left to the state, the bourgeoisie class had nothing left to concern themselves with but the accumulation of wealth. In order to judge one’s place in society, if they were living the ‘right’ life, it then must needs be in comparison and competition with one another. Money is power, might makes right, therefore, the more money one owned, the more ‘right’ they were.
Out of this Imperialism was born, “this process of never ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of a never ending accumulation of capital.” (Arendt, p. 143) The bourgeoisie class is therefore defined by an endless accumulation of capital, in simpler language, the owning or more and more stuff.
Hypothesis
I’ve long been critical of the anime industry’s abuses vis-à-vis capitalism, both by the production committees in Japan and the licensing companies in the United States and elsewhere. But that isn’t particularity novel, they share many of the same criticisms that can be leveled at any industry — low wages, wage theft, long hours, unreported overtime, anti union activities, etcetera. The nature of capitalism makes it so. Absolutely worth criticizing, worth dismantling, but not unique in any respect. Many of those problems are best addressed at a higher lever that impacts every industry, in every country across the world, for labor is a global movement. Collective action, new laws, and such that you can read in this other piece of mine.
Today, however, I would like to raise a different critique, one that, while still not unique to the animation industry, is somewhat narrower in scope to media companies in particular. It involves, as you can suss out, the nature of Imperialism in the 21st century, and how fandom is utilized as a weapon to shield companies against facing responsibility for those imperialist actions.
The primer above provided a brief description of what Imperialism is, and what it is not. To recap, Imperialism is capitalists using their accumulated wealth to exploit the resources of a nation outside their home nation, and the use of their own people to extract these resources. Both are required, the application of superfluous capital and superfluous labor, but without settlement and displacement of native peoples, for that would fall under Colonialism’s umbrella.
My hypothesis is two parts. First, that certain aspects of the western anime industry are Imperialist in nature, primarily concerning the relationship between western companies and the workers in Japan whose labor is exploited. For this hypothesis, these workers’ creations— animation — is the resource extracted, analogous to the gold and diamonds of the Cape Colony.
Second, this Imperialist doctrine, alongside other typologies of capitalist abuse, are obscured and defended against criticism by the fandom that coalesces around the subculture. These fandom defenders include both ordinary individuals whose only relationship to the companies is as a consumer, and those individuals hired by the company specifically to represent it through public relations and social media. The latter is used as a shield to defend the company against its abuses towards both workers and consumers — though only the first will be addressed in depth— and as a weapon to perpetuate the abuse under the guise of love of anime.
Fandom weaponized, as the title states, with those holding the most love in effect wielding the most powerful weapons. Affection itself is the weapon. As Hobbes put it, ordinary individuals are deprived of true social power, and turn to comparing their lives with others — the expression through fandom. The ones with the most love are the most ardent defenders, because their identity is formed around consumption, and the Hobbesian need to compare oneself with others.
We’ll explore these two hypotheses through a half dozen case studies, first determining whether the abuses depicted therein can be defined as Imperialism — or are another flavor of exploitation — and second, understanding how fandom is utilized as an emotional weapon.
Part 1: Anime Licensing Companies — 21st Century Imperialists
Case A) Harmony Gold & Macross: The Rewriting of Robotech
Many readers are likely to be familiar with the mess that is Macross licensing. That in itself is a travesty brought about by the failings of capitalism. Harmony Gold’s role only made the situation worse, and is grounds for the company to be eradicated with all haste, ideally with appropriate damages brought against the individuals responsible. However, what this hypothesis addresses isn’t the legal clusterfuck, but the ramifications behind the transformation of Macross into Robotech.
Harmony Gold didn’t simply localize Macross for release outside Japan. Instead, they felt it necessary to tear apart the work that others had done and remake it into Robotech. They were originally only going to release on home video, because airing in syndication on television required a minimum of 65 episodes, one every weekday for 13 weeks. But Macross was only 36 episodes long.
Cue the entry of Carl Macek. He came up with the idea to combine Macross with Southern Cross and MOSPEADA as they were visually and tonally similar. The result was Robotech, an 85 episode Frankensteinian Monster of three unrelated properties.
There were a whole host of shenanigans that went into creating the final result, but I’d like to take a minute to think about this fact. Because of the business requirements of television networks in the 80s, three projects were shredded and mulched into one. Any and all creative decisions of the original team (Japanese) were rendered irrelevant before the power of network executives (White American Men). This happened because of an arbitrary broadcast policy.
In doing so, the team at Harmony Gold renamed characters, making them Whiter in the process (Hikaru Ichijyo to Rick Hunter, Misa Hayase to Lisa Hayes, Hayao Kakizaki to Ben Dixon, and so on). Not only were their names changes, their ethnicities were made White as well. What is curious to note is that the names of the Zentradi were changed much less dramatically (Britai to Breetai, Exsedol to Exedore, Boddole Zer to Dozel). It appears that the writers of Robotech subconsciously believed that audiences were more accepting of the aliens having ‘ethnic’ names, but not the human heroes.
Additionally, the entire musical score of the original was thrown out in favor of a brand new one, which wasn’t even complete until 26 episodes in. Audio replacement is covered extensively in Case B, so we’ll pass over it for the moment. The same rationale applies in both cases — he who owns the broadcast rights makes the monies.
The success of Robotech hinged on it being one of the first anime to arrive on American shores, and its lengthy story stood in contrast to the domestic cartoons which were generally stand alone episodes where continuity didn’t play a significant role. It read as more mature than watching Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck obliterate the living daylights out of each other. Fun, but not particularly story-driven.
The author of this piece on io9 states that calling Carl Macek a butcher is “the dumbest thing ever,” claiming that Macross had no chance whatsoever coming to America at that time. That opinion is vile. The claim is completely beside the point when it comes to the Imperialist nature of the action taken. Whether Macross could succeed on its own or not is irrelevant, because transforming the work committed abuses against the original workers, depriving them of profiting from the fruits of their own labor, replacing them with a bunch of Westerners who would profit in their stead.
Was the American television audience in the 80s too racist to accept Macross as it was? Probably. Heck, even today the general American audience is hella racist. America itself is racist and has been since its birth. At the same time, nearly 800,000 people reported Japanese ancestry in the 1980 US Census. The potential for some of them to be named Hikaru or Misa is high; why were they deprived the chance to see a hero sharing their name when there were already many White characters named Rick and Lisa? It’s racism, the structural racism that so many people find it hard to recognize because it doesn’t wear a white hood or shout slurs. The racism that red-lined entire neighborhoods to deny home ownership to Black Americans. The racism that even today reimagines with White faces when making the jump to Hollywood.
If a television show featuring non-white people couldn’t succeed in 80s America without whitewashing, then what? That racist truth doesn’t justify abusing the original creators and tearing apart their creations just because it was assumed the audience wouldn’t accept it as is. Whitewashing doesn’t suddenly become acceptable if it results in profit.
That writer’s argument is set solely on the basis of commercial success, completely ignoring the human rights of the people who made Macross. It sadly echoes the words of so many writers who make no mention of the workers and the conditions under which they labor and how that labor is exploited by Imperialist capital. They narrow the lens of viability to “how much money does it make?” A sad commentary on what Capitalism does to art, granting only that art which can find commercial success the right to exist, the validity of creation.
He also posits that Robotech and only Robotech was the opener of the gate. That puts a massive amount of weight on a single cultural artifact, effectively arguing that no other property could possibly succeed, the same failed logic that claims that if the inventor of a technology died in a freak time-travel accident, their creation would never come about forever and ever, ignoring the rest of the human population. It’s a odd hero narrative that believes that acts of genius come from individuals so gifted that their disappearance would deprive us of their creation for all time. If Einstein never developed the General Theory of Relativity, then someone else would have. Perhaps years later, but it still would have happened eventually. “One chance, or it’s gone forever,” isn’t a real thing.
Was the transformation of Macross into Robotech Imperialist? Harmony Gold licensed the properties with western capital, then used western labor to alter the original into a form that they would profit from more so than if it remained as is. Superfluous capital, superfluous labor, yes, Harmony Gold’s creation of Robotech is indeed Imperialist.
Case B) Saban & Digimon Adventure: Abusing Audio for Political Profit
In contrast to Harmony Gold, which even newcomers to the world of anime have probably heard something about, the abuse enacted by Saban is less known these days. The company still exists, but maintains a lower profile than in the past.
Haim Saban formed Saban Productions in 1980, and it has since undergone numerous name and structure changes. For the purpose of this essay, the entity shall be called Saban to maintain simplicity.
Unusual for licensing companies, Saban was created with the explicit goal of producing music.
When popular American shows of the era such as Starsky and Hutch or Dallas were broadcast overseas, the foreign networks needed new title songs and credits music. With his partner, an Israeli composer and musician named Shuki Levy, Saban offered to create theme music and provide it to TV networks for free. The catch: Saban and Levy would keep the rights to the music, which they later packaged into hit singles and albums. Within seven years, Saban’s company had 15 gold and platinum records and $10 million in annual revenue.
Andy Kroll, The Billionaire Creator of the Power Rangers Has Invested Millions in Hillary Clinton. So What Does He Want? (2016)
As a result, when they obtained the rights to shows like Power Rangers, Digimon Adventure, and early distributions of Dragon Ball Z, they didn’t just redub the dialogue, but stripped out all audio entirely, replacing music with tracks they themselves created, and therefore owned the licenses to. That meant that every performance would earn them money.
Money that did not go to the creators of the original audio. Because their contributions were erased.
In stripping out the Japanese music, it meant that they did not have to pay to license that particular portion of the property because it would never be heard outside Japan. More importantly, in doing that, it meant they they did not have to pay the people who created the original music.
Think about that for a moment. Saban stripped out the music from Digimon Adventure specifically because they did not want to have to pay the musicians, performers, techs, and whoever else worked to create those tracks. They didn’t want to share the potential profit, so they removed these contributors entirely. Butter-fly, the original OP for the first season of Digimon Adventure, Wada Koji’s debut single, was unceremoniously ripped out of the show and replaced with Digimon are the Champions, with Saban holding the license and therefore earning the profits every time it was played. This was done not just for the opening theme, but for the entire soundtrack, not just for Digimon Adventure, but for the initial airing of Dragon Ball Z, and other shows that Saban licensed.
All that potential for the Japanese composers to earn recognition abroad, to make money from their albums being sold to fans, erased, so that Saban would be the ones to profit instead. Saban got the gold and platinum records and $10 million in revenue, rather than the original composers & performers.
So, let’s return to our hypothesis. Imperialism requires the use of capital and labor to extract resources with the profit denied to the creators of that resource. In licensing Digimon Adventure, Saban used western capital to take ownership of the show, created by Japanese animators, composers, and other related positions. Some of these contributions were removed and replaced with western labor, the musicians in employ of Saban. There’s capital, there’s labor, therefore we can conclude that Saban’s practice of removing the original audio and replacing it with their own can indeed be defined as Imperialism.
A & B Supplemental) Egyptian Manipulation?
In the course of my research, I stumbled across a strange similarity between Harmony Gold and Saban, beyond their anime licenses. I already shared the origins of Saban as founded by Haim Saban in 1980. Around the same time Harmony Gold was created by Frank Agrama. Both were born in Egypt, both founded media companies, and both have used the wealth created by such to meddle in politics, abusing all along the way.
Frank Agrama got his start in media by selling broadcast rights from Paramount Pictures to the Italian Company Mediaset, founded by none other than Silvio Berlusconi. Yes, that Berlusconi; Prime Minister, billionaire, tax fraudster, and child fucker.
In fact, the very case in which Berlusconi was convicted involved Agrama and Harmony Gold. Any support of them prior to the case, in effect, was support for these crimes.
Robotech money aided Berlusconi having sex with underage prostitutes at his bunga-bunga parties.
This is a fact that you better not forget, especially if you ever show any interest in Robotech. Not only did its creation abuse the original creators of Macross, but the profits fueled additional abuses at the hands of the media moguls who held ownership.
We‘ll continue by enumerating what Saban has done with all the money he’s made; influenced American politics by becoming a power broker to the DNC. He was born in Egypt, yet holds joint Israeli & American citizenship, and uses these connections to influence the leaders of the world to advance his own aims. An example of the abuse:
He also became known for his hard-nosed approach to business, with the Screen Actors Guild briefly ordering its members not to work for him because of his company’s alleged “economic exploitation of children” — many of the shows Saban produced used child actors — and failure to pay adequate wages and health benefits. (Kroll)
Read the entirety of Kroll’s article to see the many ways in which Saban’s used his money to exert influence, but the core of the matter only reinforces proof that this is indeed Imperialism, in that he’s made his money exploiting the creators of Digimon Adventure and other shows, and furthermore, used the profits that their labor generated to meddle with world politics for his own gain.
These two men have extended their harm beyond the anime realm, using the profits they’ve pilfered through a rentier capitalism that is little more than veiled usury to hurt other people for their own economic and political gain. We cannot consume this media and pretend that doing so doesn’t impact the lives of others, cannot claim that it is simple escapism, because the act of making it is abusive. We have to understand and address these issues because to fail to do so is to tacitly give our support for the abuse, to say that our need for entertainment outweighs the human rights of not only those who were abused in the production process, but those who were harmed when the capitalists wielded their accumulated capital elsewhere.
Addendum: In a curious-but-not-unexpected addition to the tale, Agrama’s daughter Jehan, current President and CEO of Harmony Gold, is under investigation (as of October 20, 2017) for her own alleged tax fraud, nearly a million dollars worth. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Case C) Crunchyroll & Urahara: Crunchyroll Expo Exclusion
This case was in fact the impetus for assembling this essay; the catalyst seeing screenshots of Urahara Episode Seven (7) which depicted a poster of Crunchyroll Expo within the show itself.
In 2015, Crunchyroll announced a joint venture with Sumitomo to expand their business beyond the mere licensing of titles for a western audience, and begin to fund productions themselves. They would join production committees with other companies, provide funding, and instantly be granted foreign distribution rights.
Since the announcement, Crunchyroll has invested in more than 70 titles. A partial list is as follows: Masamune-kun’s Revenge, Minami Kamakura High School Girls Cycling Club, Kemono Friends, Love Tyrant, A Centaur’s Life, Classroom of the Elite, Restaurant to Another World, The Reflection, Dies Irae, Recovery of an MMO Junkie, and, of course, Urahara.
In summer of 2017, Crunchyroll also put on their own convention, Crunchyroll Expo. It is an outlier to see a company put on an anime convention itself, and troubling in terms of what it means for access to others. Since it’s the company’s convention, they could theoretically bar all competitors from attending, creating a space where only their own products are allowed. This potential monopoly should be instantly alarming to everybody. It is already alarming that some feature pieces that run on their news section are limited to titles from their catalog at the time of publication. This echoes concerns of other media companies who both produce content and report on said content; see every major media company from Disney to Fox to Comcast. How can a company ethically report on themselves? We already see this moral failing in these Crunchyroll feature pieces, which pretend as if all non CR titles do not exist. An arbitrary disqualifying metric that elevates the metatext of “does CR hold the license or not?” above the text of the title’s actual content.
Back to Urahara, which for this case will serve as representative for all titles in which Crunchyroll sits on the committee. In this instance, the original work was a webcomic, written by Crunchyroll employee Patrick Macias, which was optioned for animation. In having their own employees involved in production, CR instantly got the license without having to bid for it, which in itself presents additional ethical issues.
But what concerns this essay is the question of whether or not it is Imperialist. To determine, we turn to our two criteria, capital and labor. In joining production committees, Crunchyroll is investing western capital. In having their own employees sitting on the committees, and in some cases working in lead roles as in Urahara, they are supplying western labor. Capital is present, labor is present, therefore Crunchyroll is indeed Imperialist, for those titles in which they sit on the production committee or otherwise supply people.
C Supplemental) Follow the Money
Let’s take a quick glance at the sources of Crunchyroll’s capital. Their first seed of venture capital funding ($4 million) came from Venrock, which invests the capital of the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers initially got their wealth through the petroleum industry, namely Standard Oil. They were one of the largest companies in the world at the start of the 20th century, broken up after an expose by journalist Ida Tarbell revealed the numerous ways in which Standard Oil was rigging prices and preying on competition to become a monopoly. An unintended side effect of Standard Oil breaking up was that Rockefeller became ever richer. Rockefeller also owned the mine where the Ludlow Massacre took place when striking workers clashed with the National Guard, resulting in around two dozen deaths, including the immolation of women and children trapped inside a burning tent.
These early sins of the Rockefellers led to the foundation of several protections we take for granted today, such as anti-trust laws, the eight hour work day, and bans on child labor. But they also issued in the birth of the modern concept of Public Relations, in the personage of Ivy Lee, brought in by Rockefeller to combat the negative attention the mine strike and subsequent massacre generated. Remember this, as it’ll be important when we explore the second part of the hypothesis.
In 2013, the Chernin Group acquired majority stake in Crunchyroll (for an estimated $100 million), and currently holds CR jointly with AT&T through the subsidiary Otter Media. Ellation is the umbrella that covers their video services, under which CR falls. In 2017, this resulted in a layoff that affected many of the core staff and changed the atmosphere inside the company, which began as an illegal streaming service that became authorized.
The Chernin Group is headed by Peter Chernin, who was second in command to Rupert Murdoch when he worked at News Corporation, parent company of FOX. Apparently he and Roger Ailes “gleefully boasted about pushing Lachlan [Murdoch] out of the business.” Today we know about the numerous instances of sexual assault Ailes committed during his many years at FOX. What did Chernin know of this, or of the phone hacking scandal that saw Murdoch dragged before Parliament to testify? It is difficult to know all the details, as opacity is the friend of Capitalists and abusers alike, but suffice to say it should concern anyone that the money they spend on anime not end up aiding in covering up the sins of the powerful.
Anyone who opines that ‘this is how business is done’ in regards to raising capital fails to support their own position by revealing that these abuses aren’t one-offs, but baked into the system itself. The problem is so endemic and deep-seated that no other conclusion can be drawn other than the system itself is abusive. It cannot be repaired, because it’s a feature, not a bug. Calling certain Capitalists ‘good ones’ because they supply the stuff you personally like fails to see past the superficial facets that anyone can easily see into the core tenets of structural inequality.
Once again, it is a moral failing to consume media without taking into account the flow of money and power around production, and how this is used to harm the vulnerable ones at the bottom of the totem pole. We cannot set this aside when we consume media any more than we can set aside the conditions of the factories where our clothes and phones are made, the conditions of the companies that get those goods from the factories to our doors.
Case D) Dubbing Deprivation
This case connects directly to Case B, with Saban’s replacement of all original audio with their own to retain profit. In a larger sense, it is endemic to the industry as a whole, and impacts every company that engages in dubbing in some form. Today, though music replacement rarely happens anymore, few people understand how dubbing dialogue has much the same impact in depriving the original performers of their deserved earnings.
For better or worse, actors have representation that many other professions do not, in the form of agencies and guilds and unions and such. These aren’t perfect, and the potential for these organizations to exploit their members themselves remains, yet at the same time they are able to wield collective power against corporate entities to fight for better compensation for the labor provided.
Most vocal performers have agents (individual or organizational) that aid in getting them higher wages. PA Works released a chart verifying that within the context of Shirobako.
It accidentally illustrated a point that I don’t believe they were trying to make; that organized representation can aid in raising wages for the workers represented, in this case the vocal performers.
What this means is that licensing costs have to take this in to account as well. A large portion of the cost goes to the vocal performers because their contracts are written to ensure them proper compensation for performances, similar to music performances. When a song plays on the radio, the performer earns a royalty dependent on how their contracts are written.
Licensing vocal tracks can be costly. We saw above how Harmony Gold and Saban mitigated this by simply not using them, turning to their own performers so that they would be the ones to profit instead. We saw another example with the initial releases of Persona 4 The Animation only having English audio. We can speculate over the reasoning — Japanese companies wanting more than Sentai Filmworks was willing to pay, or worries about Japanese fans reverse importing at a lower price point than domestic releases — but regardless of the reason, the result was that the Japanese performers were cut out of making money from those releases. Subsequent releases restored the Japanese audio, but we’ll probably never know the true reasons behind it, again, because of the opacity that plays a role in protecting abusers. But remember, the reasoning matters little, the result is what impacts people. What matters are the lost wages.
Earlier this year, we saw the Life is Strange prequel Before the Storm affected by a SAG strike that was initially responded to by replacing the original performers with ones that weren’t unionized. Terms were eventually reached, but that process is a time-tested one known as strikebreaking. Unionized workers are replaced with others, called scabs, who do the work so the company doesn’t have to meet the demands of the labor union.
In Japan, labor unions are enshrined into law and is it illegal for an employer to refuse to negotiate with them per Article 7. However it is difficult to prove that hires during a strike are scabs so enforcement presents an ongoing challenge. Yet in America there are no such protections. By extension, this applies to works from Japan licensed for US release.
English dubs are, in effect, a type of scabbing, even though no strikes are taking place. The original Japanese performer is replaced with the English speaking one. Any performances, like television broadcasts for instance, play the English audio instead of the Japanese audio so the English performers are the ones earning royalties (if their contracts are written that way), rather than the Japanese performers.
Western capital investment in licensing shows and producing English dubs, western labor of the English performers themselves, are dubs in themselves Imperialist? If the English is the only audio available, and therefore the only ones making money, then yes. If both languages are available, then no.
This one rides the line. Producing English dubs is Imperialist if the Japanese performers are entirely replaced by others, as in the case of the initial release of Persona 4 The Animation. If both are available, the original laborers have not been supplanted by superfluous outside labor and in those cases is not. This is more noticeable for game releases, as it is more common to have a single language option, whereas the majority of anime releases contain both.
Part 1 Conclusion) Replacements for Profits
In these four cases, Imperialism is proven to exist. Notably, they share a common thread; Japanese creators replaced by Westerners, most of the time specifically so the western companies will earn the royalty profits. By stripping out certain contributors, particularly in terms of audio — be it music or vocals — western owners profit by replacing it with creations that they more wholly own. The most important thing to note from these case studies is that these acts deprive those removed contributors of monies that they would have earned if their parts weren’t removed. That’s what Imperialism does; outsiders go into a country and extract resources for their own profit, depriving the locals of the possibility to earn for themselves.
What else is important to note is that in reality, most of these contributors wouldn’t have earned additional profit themselves anyway. Under the capitalist model, the companies that own the rights make that profit, not the workers themselves. If they were wage earners or salaried, they were already paid for their contributions and generally don’t earn additional profit from sales. This is an important abuse to overturn as well, one much larger than this industry in particular. That the most common contributions removed, audio, often do earn royalties for additional performances adds to the strength of the conclusion that their contributions in particular were targeted for removal so the acquiring company could keep more profit to itself.
Rentier Capitalism was mentioned in Case B, and it really describes pretty much all Capitalism. A rentier earns money not through productive work, but through ownership. The common instance is a landlord renting property they own to renters. They make money simply by owning, not by creating anything. Agrama and Saban didn’t create, they licensed. They earned money from owning money, not doing anything but controlling capital. Meanwhile the actual creators earned little, and were deprived from profiting from the fruits of their own labor.
Part 2: Fandom — Love & Obsession Turned to Weaponized Abuse
I’ve enumerated four cases, explaining how each is a form of Imperialism by showing that each contained the requisite capital and labor necessary to define the cases as such.
Let’s return to the second part of the hypothesis. To restate; these Imperialist abuses, alongside other forms of capitalist exploitation, are shielded by fandom, which has been weaponized to defend against critique. In effect, fandom is a weapon wielded to harness the power of the emotional fondness fans feel towards the media they consume, a toxic, abusive love. It acts in accordance with Hobbes’ conjecture, that in the face of powerlessness as a citizen, individuals turn to comparisons with others to feel some control. Fandom is a manifestation of that, most conspicuously in the form of who buys the most fan stuff, less conspicuous but more widespread in the form of who expresses the most love. Those fans who are the most outspoken, those who express their love the most, are subconsciously determined to be better fans, even when people try not to let that be the case.
We’ll explore two particular forms this can take. The first is the employ of Public Relations for the specific purpose of shielding the company, the second is the less direct but no less important barrier formed by ordinary fans of their own volition. It is this second one, the fire of passion often stoked by the first, that weaponizes adoration and transmutes it into abuse that most fail to recognize.
Case E) Social Media Managers; The Vanguard of Emotional Manipulation
Recall now the conditions under which the field of Public Relations was birthed. As stated in Case C, the Rockefellers used this idea to deflect the face that nearly two dozen people, most of them women and children, were murdered during a strike at a mine that they owned.
Today, the Rockefellers are known for their philanthropy. This is entirely by design. After the massacre, John Rockefeller Jr. followed a strategy developed by Ive Lee to burnish the family image, which involved personally meeting with families of the murdered victims, inspecting working conditions, and giving generously to charitable causes. Because of this, people view the Rockefellers in a generally positive light, despite how rich and powerful they are.
By making a show of caring, the public is easily swayed into excusing the excess of Capitalists as long as they do something ‘good’ as well. This allows Capitalists to operate as they always do, donating money whenever a snafu occurs, and never addressing the root inequality that leads to abuse in the first place. As long as some visible ‘good’ is done, hidden abuse is forgiven. Think about all the times when someone promises to donate money in the face of personal scandal.
Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s all about image.
This public relations ideology extends naturally to companies trying to protect their image, and does so even more effectively because companies are not individuals. If someone does a naughty, they can be jettisoned while the company remains. If they do enough bad that firings don’t work, they simple change names and go about their merry way.
Because companies aren’t human, they don’t have a heart or soul or personality — they physically can’t — and this emptiness works in their favor. A company is not a human, is not ‘real’, but is a concept, an organization that contains individuals but is not one itself. Nintendo is Nintendo, even though not a single human working there at the beginning works there now (because that was 1889). A company transcends the limits of humanity, which includes getting away with crimes like aiding in the Holocaust. After all, Bayer, Siemens, and Chase Bank all still exist. United Fruit Company was directly responsible for the coup d-etat in Guatamala in 1954 and still exist today as Chiquita Brands. So they are able to evolve over time, and their appearance is in the eye of the beholder.
Public Relations is undertaken by individuals employed as such under a variety of titles, using words like communications, relations, advertising, marketing, and public affairs. In the modern era, Social Media Managers are often the first line of response between companies and consumers, due to the real-time nature of that communication vector.
In addition to Ive Lee, a leading figure in the creation of Public Relations was Edward Bernays, who believed that propaganda was not just useful during wartime, but could be used in times of peace to control the domestic masses. He believed that people deserved to be manipulated by a few intelligent men. His work was directly cited by the Nazi regime, with praise coming from Goebbels, who used it to create the Fuhrer cult image around Hitler, among other uses.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. (p. 37)
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)
Public Relations is propaganda, pure and simple. It exists to manipulate you.
When they claim to be ‘your friend’, social media people engage in a form of abusive emotional manipulation. They feign familiarity to get close to you and control you so their employer can make money off you. In a media industry, this is blurred to an additional degree by preying on the love of the work to make the manipulation ever harder to detect.
Companies know this when hiring, and part of the position is to be a voice that people look to, a mega fan who wears their heart on their sleeve, where sharing their love of the media is as natural as breathing. Companies want people like this working for them because they are an uncritical proponent of mass consumption without regard to the conditions of production. No company would hire someone who would tell their followers not to consume the offerings of a company because the laborers were treated poorly. Most ignore the issue entirely, and those that do address it in some form usually say that conditions will improve is only more people would buy the products, injecting more money into the industry.
This is a bald-faced lie.
Just think about it for one minute. Does buying more burgers increase the wages of fast food workers? Does buying more shirts increase the wages of garment workers in Bangladeshi clothing factories? Does buying more Blu-Ray movies increase the wages of workers pressing the discs?
No. No. And no.
More money into the industry has absolutely zero positive impact on working conditions in themselves. Here is why: a company’s increased revenue could be allocated to workers, but nothing exists that says that it must. It’s optional. A company can choose to share profits with workers, but it is not obligated to.
This is baked into the definition of corporations within capitalism itself. This isn’t a problem unique to the anime industry, but impacts the entire business world. A corporation isn’t legally obligated to increase profits to shareholders, but they do so anyway because a free market ideology has had the business world in its grip since the 1970s.
Why would the anime industry be any different? A false equivalence is drawn between the production companies and artists selling illustrations themselves. Here’s the difference; who owns the means of production? An illustrator selling their drawings owns their own labor. They employ themselves, and sell the fruits of their labor themselves. When you buy a picture from Artist’s Alley, the money goes directly to the human who produced it.
When you buy anime discs, however, or a subscription from a streaming service, the artists producing the animation don’t own the means of production. They don’t own the fruits of their labor, they only own their own labor, which they sell to the company. When an animator earns however much for drawing a cut, they earn that wage regardless of how well the show performs. Most are freelancers paid per drawing, rather than earning an hourly wage or fixed salary, but the result is the same; they still don’t own the means of production themselves, that is owned by the company employing them. Same for the fruits of their labor; the anime is owned by the companies.
This criticism can be made of any industry within the capitalist system. But what is particular to anime and other media producers is how fandom is used to defend it. It is rare to see defenders of McDonalds or Walmart from a fan perspective, but very common in an industry that creates products that touch people emotionally. People may have preferences in grocery stores, but do you see fans? Walmart fans?
Which, on a related point, stop celebrating memes posted by companies like Arby’s. They do this specifically because they know it will elicit positive reaction, hoping to turn that into sales, while paying minimum wage or even lower, thanks to rampant wage theft. Minimum wage is a company’s way of saying, “If I could legally pay you less, I would.”
Public Relations is propaganda. Social media managers manipulate and control people. This not only sells the product, but also defends the company against criticism of all kinds, including those that result from Imperialism.
Now Sequestered On Crunchyroll
Let’s revisit a point raised in Case C for a moment. Crunchyroll posted a tweet on Gen Urobuchi’s birthday, with a few images from projects he’s been involved with.
Notice something? Every single one of those are available in the CR catalog, even if Urobuchi’s role was minor. Meanwhile, works where he held a significant role, like Phantom of Inferno or Saya no Uta, are missing.
Why is this the case? It is because those aren’t available in CR’s catalog, and to them, might as well not exist. This erasure is present in both their social media feeds as well as the feature pieces on their website. The social media team at CR is engaging is emotional manipulation. They are using the birthday of a creator to instill affection in their followers, with the aim of them continuing to give CR money.
They want you to love the company, to spend money on the company, and they exploit the workers who create the contents of their catalog to do it. They elevate the company above all. There are actually fans of Crunchyroll, can you believe that? Fans of a company. Where the role of the company has been elevated above the actual human workers. Can you imagine fans of ExxonMobil? Or of General Electric? Media companies pull it off because of what their products are. It is the active curation of an identity as fan, where consumption itself is lauded, where consumption is the ultimate good, where thousands of people thank the licensing company for releases, while simultaneously remaining silent towards the actual human workers who labored to create the animated work. Case F illustrates examples of this behavior.
It is clear from reading the tone of the tweets that CR puts out that their intent is to create adherents of ‘Crunchyroll Anime’, specifically to the titles that they control. Everything is appended with ‘on Crunchyroll’, making the fact that it is on CR more important than the work itself. The fact that this particular company holds the license is the most important piece of data. Watching ‘on Crunchyroll’ has become a fan thing in itself, regardless of the particular work. The work matters little, as long as it is ‘on Crunchyroll’. There are fans who only watch ‘on Crunchyroll’, who actually are in favor of a monopoly because it would mean everything is available in one location, ‘on Crunchyroll’. They raised a stink when HiDive and Netflix came in to the scene and snapped up titles, specifically because they were locked behind paywalls and late release dates. Little mention was made of the breakup of a looming monopoly, and pretty much nobody cared that neither case changes anything for the plight of workers, some even naively believing that it would make things better, ignoring the fact that these are all corporations fighting over who gets to own what. The ordinary worker doesn’t care who the owner is, when all owners treat them the same, when the concept of ownership itself is the central cause of the problems. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
‘On Crunchyroll’ elevates the metatext of ‘who holds the license’ above every other facet of the work. That is the most important because that’s how they make money. To recognize the existence of other shows runs the risk of potential viewers scurrying away to watch it, leaving the enclosed Crunchyroll Ecosystem. It’s just like Facebook; they want people to spend their entire internet lives inside the closed ecosystem because they make money that way. That’s why combining entertainment and news about that entertainment is dangerous and unethical when captured by a single system. How can a company be trusted to give unbiased news about themselves? It’s sadly common; how can ABC News report ethically on Disney, how can NBC News report on Comcast? The news section may still report on the full subculture, but so did the features section, once upon a time. The Fall 2017 season was chock full of pieces on Recovery of an MMO Junkie because, surprise surprise, that’s a title that CR sits on the production committee of, as noted in Case C. Would so many articles have been written about it if this were not the case, if another company acquired the license?
The fact that not every article and tweet does this doesn’t disprove the intention to create a closed ecosystem, merely that doing so successfully is thankfully next to impossible.
The Disappearance of Actual Human Workers
Look at this tweet from Sentai Filmworks.
Made in Abyss was nominated for an award, and the social team choose to congratulate, not original creator Akihito Tsukushi, not director Masayuki Kojima, not scriptwriter Hideyuki Kurata, not even the production studio Kinema Citrus, but Riko and Reg, characters in the show.
Fictional characters.
Somehow, fictional characters were more deserving of congratulations than the people who actually produced Made in Abyss. Why? The reason doesn’t really matter, what does is the result: erasure of the creators. Imperialism.
Social media managers are the shields and swords, protecting their employers from having to suffer repercussions or take responsibility for their abuse, be it Imperialist in nature or not.
Case F) Ordinary Fans; The Foot Soldiers
The emotional manipulators of public relations are blessedly few. What isn’t though, are the hordes of ordinary fans, whose sheer volume leads to abuse of a different flavor. An abuse that stems from desire.
It is that same desire that Rhodes expressed, the desire to possess all, with no regard to what that does to others, how it fuels the fires of an exploitative system. “As long as there is demand,” goes the mantra, the demanders thusly transformed into the reason, the excuse.
You watch a show, you fall in love with it, but that only makes it harder to criticize the conditions under which it was produced because you now have emotional investment in it. Not to mention the absolute bonkers feeble-minded assumption that to love something is to support it unconditionally, and any criticism is akin to scorching the earth. Far too many people are trapped in black-or-white mindsets. Far too many believe that spending money is the ultimate expression of fandom.
Something (hiragana) is better than nothing (katakana)
One way in which fans self sabotage is the scarcity illusion. In the early days of the western anime fandom, fans were lucky to get anything whatsoever, and that has metastasized into supporting anything that is released, regardless of quality or production conditions. Far too many retain a mindset of, “something is better than nothing,” and that includes a number of high profile individuals who have been in the industry for a long time —that tenure part of the reason why this line of thinking persists in their minds. The old dog fails to learn new tricks.
This is prevalent in anime, and also in game localization. The breakdown of Persona 5’s release is one of the best primers around as to the scope and facets of the issue. One particular justification it doesn’t list, however, is the argument, “be thankful for any release,” which shows up again and again.
But today, there is so much, often released within days if not hours in the case of anime, so the “shut up and be grateful,” argument falls apart like cotton candy in the ocean. It utilizes multiple emotional manipulations, such as trying to guilt people into thinking that raising issues will result in loss of access, denial of the existence of issues, downplaying the magnitude, or deflecting into an off topic aside.
The Disappearance of Actual Human Workers (Endless Erasure)
As raised in Case E, one of the worst aspects of western fandom is how the elevation of licensing companies coincides with the erasure of creators. What is meant by this? Let the following selection of tweets illustrate.
As can be plainly seen, these tweets are full of people showing off their purchases, making mention of the licensing companies, but rarely the production studios, let alone the actual human creators that made them. Western fandom is rife with this, fans having complete ignorance of the people who make the things they like. Once upon a time this could have been attributed to the lack of direct access. But today, in the day of worldwide internet access, this justification no longer holds water. It’s a curious artifact of the 90s, when a few white dudes knew a factoid or two, leading them to think they were some kind of authorities, and ended up spreading misinformation to the degree of actually causing more harm.
This is dangerous because the obfuscation of creators makes it easier for them to be abused by the capitalist system without defenders. It would stand to reason that if people like a thing, they ought to care about the lives of the people who made the thing. But that information is obscured and sinks beneath notice when companies are elevated in their place. It would take mere minutes to do the barest research and thank the actual artists for their work, rather than the rentier corporations raking in profits.
Fans have been accultured to elevate companies over creators. In order to bring about the necessary changes to end the abuses of creators at the hands of companies, fans need to be deprogrammed and educated to support flesh and blood humans. It’s not even that hard, contributors are literally listed in the credits of every episode of anime and the copyright pages of every volume of manga. They’re literally right there, there is no excuse for not knowing who the workers are.
One particular action by a subset of fans is narrow and particular to anime; what title to use when speaking of a project. As these are translated works, there is usually an English title to accompany the Japanese title. For some reason, a small number of vocal ignoramuses crop up cyclically to bleat nonsense about how anyone using the Japanese title must obviously be a pirate. I usually refrain from trying to assume I can know the reasons that stem from someone’s mind, but in this case it is clear and directly tied to Imperialism. It stems from a combination of a Jingoism that positions the western world at the center of the universe, and an Authoritarianism that states that only the official is ‘allowed.’ Both are gross, perpetuating a minor strain of structural racism and a majorly disturbing power centralization in the licensing companies. The person making this argument is issuing an edict declaring the company to be the Authority, and will broach no deviation. These are the kind of people that, quite frankly, would be happily beating dissenters in the streets of an Authoritarian Regime. The way this connects to Imperialism is that it elevates the localized title to a higher position than the original, saying that viewers in the western world must only ever consume the derivative product, never the original, likely never even thinking about how more — though still tragically little — money makes its way back to workers by importing the original over a localized copy.
Fandom provides the demand that supply whets. As long as there are fans demanding content without regard to worker conditions, supply will be produced to meet it. Fans provide the economic justification to continue exploitation, because it is their money that companies seek. Any criticism of the companies is seen by fans as a threat to the flow of demanded content. They fear losing access to content they crave, and lash out against the criticism in response. The demand for entertainment outweighs the rights of workers.
Critically, fandom supplies a shared identity that in modern times has taken the place of nationalism. Fans of the same media feel a kinship not too different from the kinship felt between citizens of the same nation. Subsequently, they can be thought of as a group, as a mob, as the masses.
The rise of the mob out of the capitalist organization was observed early, and its growth carefully and anxiously noted by all great historians of the nineteenth century. […] This feeling of kinship […] recalls those fundamental psychological traits of the new type of Western man that Hobbes outlined three hundred years ago. […] The very fact that the “original sin” of “original accumulation of capital” would need additional sins to keep the system going was far more effective in persuading the bourgeoisie to shake off the restraints of Western tradition than either its philosopher or its underworld. (Arendt, p. 155–6)
Keep on consuming, because for Capitalism to survive, it must commit the same exploitation over and over again, with consumers as participants, as the driving machinery.
Part 2 Conclusion) Willing Weapons?
In these two cases, fandom is demonstrated to easily metastasize into a weapon that is wielded as an agent of Imperialism. The two facets, managers and minions, work in unintended concert to grow the industry without that translating into improvements in workers’ rights. The growth also adds additional angles for Imperialism to take root, so long as fans continue to uncritically consume.
Final Conclusion
In presenting six case studies, I believe I have provided plenty of evidence to show that there are numerous instances of Imperialism present in the anime industry, committed by licensing companies and defended by the weaponizing of fandom.
But so what? Why bother asking the question in the first place?
Imperialism is the second of three parts in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The third speaks to Totalitarianism itself. She demonstrates the historical forces that lead to the creation of totalitarian regimes. Imperialism, as driven by Capitalism, led to the rise of such in Europe, precipitating the advancement of both World Wars.
Imperialism impacts not just the countries being exploited, but the nation-states doing it. Imperialism harms at home and abroad, exacerbating inequality, which begets Totalitarianism. At the same time the nations of Europe were exploiting countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, their own people were driven into a nationalist fury, angry that they were poor, with propaganda pointing the finger at minorities and other outsiders rather than the Capitalist forces who were truly to blame. All the capital and labor sent to exploit in other countries were at the same time depriving the people of the home nations.
A never-ending accumulation of property must be based on a never-ending accumulation of power. The philosophical correlative of the inherent instability of a community founded on power is the image of an endless process of history which, in order to be consistent with the constant growth of power, inexorably catches up with individuals, peoples, and finally all of mankind. (Arendt, p. 143)
We’re entering this cycle once again, and it is likely to play out the same way it did in the 1890s and the 1930s. It may seem extreme and absurd to draw a link between the western anime industry and the growing threat of another World War, another genocide, but all the signs point to it happening once again.
When companies undertake Imperialist actions, they further exacerbate inequality by extracting wealth from their targets for their own profit. The actions taken by western companies illustrated in Part 1 deprive contributors from making money from their contributions, which go to the companies instead, who replaced those workers with their own, funding the process with western capital. This entire essay — boiled down to its essence — is saying:
Companies are taking advantage of workers in a particular manner, this hurts them and needs to stop.
It is unacceptable for these abuses to continue, because in addition to the direct harm of pilfered wages, the resulting inequality has historically led to devastating consequences. We need to take every step imaginable to prevent tragedy from occurring once again.
The third stanza in this song of humanity’s inhumanity is starting to rhyme.
I leave you with Walter Benjamin’s IX Thesis on the Philosophy of History:
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
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