I let my Netflix, Crunchyroll, and HIDIVE subscriptions expire at the beginning of the year and spent the next six months mostly watching live-action Jdrama on Rakuten Viki, Tubi, and Jme TV.

The result of this little experiment? Far and away, anime remains my preferred medium for scripted entertainment. So I dropped Jme TV and won't renew Viki. Netflix stays on hiatus until its anime catalog refreshes.

It's not just me.

As Miles Atherton reports on Anime News Network, according to recent data released by Netflix, in terms of total hours viewed, anime not only overperforms in its category overall but makes up almost 80 percent of all Japanese language content viewed.

Starting with deep wells of proven source material, the inherent constraints of anime production sufficiently discipline the process (no anime studio has the resources to crank out a $200 million CGI flop) so that when everything comes together, a watchable work of art is the result on a reasonably regular basis.

Good stories told well.

To start with, this isn't about production values. HD video technology has largely leveled the playing field in that regard. Rather, the underlying problems come down to how the stories are structured, paced, and told.

Many hour-long Jdrama episodes should be thirty minutes shorter. (So should most movies.) I usually skip anime compilation films but doing the opposite works better. Editing Demon Slayer: Mugen Train into seven episodes improved on the movie. When it comes to single arc stories, a runtime longer than that just drags everything out.

The extended Yor arc in the second season of Spy x Family could have been easily compiled into a two-hour movie. But it works better in a five-episode format. And, frankly, I would have rather seen Code White handled the same way, creating a complete second season instead of a single cour.

A half-hour live-action show like Kamen Rider: Zero-One is thirty episodes too long. Past a certain point, filling the available time results in mindless repetition. I made it to the end of Kamen Rider: Kuuga solely on the strength of Joe Odagiri's performance and a fine supporting cast that created a great Scooby Gang.

Incidentally, comparing Kamen Rider: Kuuga (2001) and Kamen Rider: Zero-One (2020) illustrates how extraordinarily far budget CGI has progressed in the past two decades.

Yet despite the superior production values of the latter, the acting and dialogue elevate the former, even with its near-fatal plot holes and running a full two seasons (that's one season too many).

When Hollywood is running on all cylinders, it gets episodic television exactly right, with standalone episodes loosely linked by season-long dramatic arcs running in the background. So Fuyuhiko Takahori has the cause and effect backwards. The common point of failure is stretching a single story over more episodes than are needed to tell it.

There are writers who have mastered the formula. 99.9 Criminal Lawyer and Unnatural both run standalone episodes against background narrative arcs that pay off reasonably well. Three Star Bar in Nishi Ogikubo tells a complete story in six half-hour standalone episodes and completes a satisfying series-long arc.

But more often than not, you feel like you're stuck on a hamster wheel, spinning around and around and going nowhere. Anime is not immune to the problem. Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen spend too long on the hamster wheel (a rut the battle shonen genre easily falls into) while Frieren jumps off before overstaying its welcome.

This is why I prefer the slice-of-life genre. Challenges are taken on episode by episode, with an emphasis on the character arcs. In Komi Can't Communicate, Komi struggling toward her goal and Tadano simply being a genuinely good person (harder to depict than it sounds) make the story compelling.

Likewise, in the plot-heavy My Happy Marriage (Cinderella in early 20th century Japan), I find myself more interested in Miyo's self-actualization (that tired term actually applies here) than the tangled web of political machinations.

Interesting characters create interesting stories, not the other way around. In Jdrama romances especially, the realization too often dawns that, aside from the sturm und drang of the romance itself, these are really boring people. That and a smattering of common sense would fix most of their issues.

Both the abstract nature of anime as an artistic medium and the physical constraints of the production process make it easier to align the story to the viewing time in ways that are both more concrete and rewarding to the viewer.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, japanese culture, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, jdrama, jme, netflix, streaming, tubi, viki

Earlier this year, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about the international rise of Japan's domestic entertainment industry.

Aside from anime, which continues to see dramatic increases in supply and demand, I remain skeptical that we are "on the precipice of a [live-action] content boom" from Japanese production houses. Rakuten Viki is a good yardstick and it continues to rely heavily on South Korea, China, and Southeast Asia for content.

Not Japan (despite Viki being a Japanese company). However, I do agree that despite the plodding evolution of the market,

the live-action series space is the area of Japanese entertainment where the surging investment from big foreign streamers is changing production standards most and where insiders say there is the biggest potential for a reinvigorating shake-up.

"Big foreign streamers" pretty much means Netflix. And maybe Jme TV, if it ever gets its act together.

Netflix has a strong presence in Japan and has been increasing the number of licensed and in-house productions it is sending east across the Pacific. Among subscription services, Netflix has the third biggest anime catalog in the North American market after Crunchyroll and Hidive and is getting competitive in live-action as well.

Although the live-action Japanese language catalogs at Netflix and Viki are about the same (adding in anime doubles the size for Netflix), Netflix has a wider range of curated content and an equally affordable entry point. And for now, Netflix is acquiring Japanese content for its North American catalog at a decidedly faster pace than Viki.

So little new Japanese content is showing up on Viki that I wonder if it decided to focus on Kdrama rather than compete with Netflix and NHK Cosmomedia. NHK Cosmomedia dumped all its premium streaming eggs into the Jme TV basket and is very likely staking a claim on every live-action series produced domestically.

I'm not convinced that effort is going to pay off. To start with, unlike Viki and Netflix, NHK Cosmomedia localizes very little of its catalog. Which brings us back to Netflix and Samurai vs Ninja and Tubi (that licenses Samurai vs Ninja content) as the only sure bets for localized live-action Japanese television going forward.

Though as I have pointed out previously, I can't pretend this is a great loss, as live-action Japanese television melodrama is a genre that has slowly but surely lost much of my interest.

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Labels: anime, business, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, netflix, samurai vs ninja, streaming, television, tubi, viki

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors, or do global searches for "Japan" and "Japanese."

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Bakuman (2013) presents an unflinching account about what it takes to become a manga artist. The process has largely gone digital in the last decade and emanga outsell paperbacks but the merciless challenges of the creative process haven't changed. Check out Sleeper Hit (2016) on Viki for a more modern take from the publisher's perspective. Also see my longer review.
• Daughter of Lupin (2019) is a live-action spin-off of the popular anime action comedy. Like Marilyn Munster on The Munsters, Hana is the only normal person in her odd family. She's a librarian engaged to a police officer from a family of police officers, which causes no end of comedic problems when her crime family gets framed for a series of crimes they didn't actually commit.
• Lupin the Third (1971–2023) Along with six television series, there are at least fifty Lupin the Third movies at the latest count. Tubi has about three dozen of them.
• Pinwheel Hamakichi's Spell (1992) A disgraced Edo period police officer, banished from the capital for accepting a bribe, returns five years later to search for his daughter. Still respected as a detective, he is prevailed upon to solve crimes in an unofficial capacity, and makes ends meet by selling pinwheel toys from a roadside stand.
• Shadow Warriors (1980) Sonny Chiba reassembled the cast and crew from Shogun's Samurai (1978) to play ninja leader Hattori Hanzo (like Yagyu Jubei, a documented historical figure). By day, he's the layabout owner of an Edo bathhouse (if you're looking for gratuitous nudity, look no further). By night, he and his ninjas fix the nasty problems the shogunate wants swept under the rug.
• Steamboy (2004) is about a boy named Edward Steam. Yes, the whole thing is that obvious. This steampunk adventure takes place in Victorian England and includes a big nod to George Stephenson, the "Father of the British Steam Railways." If nothing else, the constant whirring, hissing, clanking, and grinding of gears will be a visual delight for any gearhead. Also see my longer review.
• Summer Days With Coo (2007) Coo is a kappa, a mythological water-dwelling reptile with a penchant for cucumbers and sumo wrestling. The story asks what happens when a fairy tale character ends up in modern suburban Japan and meets a boy named Koichi. Based on the novels by Masao Kogure.
• Toradora (2008) As both a plot device and a well-used anime trope, perhaps no anime series exemplifies the tsundere character type better than Ryuji Takasu and Taiga Aisaka in Toradora. This high school romantic comedy works on every level and ends on exactly the right note. Tubi has English dubbed and Spanish subtitled versions as well. Also see my longer review.
• Uzumasa Limelight (2014) looks at the samurai action genre through the eyes of an aging stuntman who has difficulty getting cast in new productions after spending his entire career on a weekly historical drama like Abarenbo Shogun, that was on air from 1978 to 2008.

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Japanese language links

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, jdrama, streaming, television reviews, tubi

In a previous post, I discussed what has become a perennial problem in the entertainment business: spending too much time on too little plot.

One example I offered for efficient scriptwriting is Three Star Bar in Nishi Ogikubo, that tells a satisfying tale in six half-hour largely standalone episodes.

Gamera Rebirth also does a good job in six forty-five minute episodes, integrating a backstory with the complexity of The X-Files without dragging the audience through all the nitty gritty details.

It then queues up a sequel (a single scene following the credit scroll) without resorting to a cliffhanger ending.

But perhaps the epitome of a tightly written teledrama is Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation. In all of twenty-five minutes, we get a beginning, middle, and end, a (somewhat predictable) twist halfway through, and a conclusion that provides the promised payoff with another clever (and foreshadowed) twist.

Followed by a brief coda that ties it back to the One Piece universe.

This may be a bit of a spoiler, but Monsters takes a cue from the "management by walking around" governing style on display in samurai action classics such as Abarenbo Shogun and Mito Komon, that has a high government official mingling among the common folk into order to ferret out the bad guys.

It's an approach favored as well by Emperor Shouryuu in the Twelve Kingdoms.

This little gem was penned by One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda. Granted, if you're not familiar with One Piece, you may wonder what a French swordsman, a samurai, and a dragon are doing in a town straight out of the American West. But you quickly stop wondering because the narrative can carry that weight.

I don't follow One Piece closely and wasn't aware of the connection before watching the show. And yet despite the odd anachronisms, it was still one of the most entertaining movies I've seen in quite a while.

Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, jdrama, netflix, thinking about writing, viki

Why do western audiences like anime? One reason is precisely because anime doesn't pander to western audiences. Or rather, anime in general does not make a concerted effort to appeal to modern audiences outside Japan.

The Critical Drinker deserves the credit for turning that expression into a pejorative. To be sure, any trending social and political movement will inevitably show up in Japanese popular culture (often using the same English terminology). But in almost every case, it is an ephemeral surf that leaves the deeper societal currents undisturbed.

Dating back at least 2500 years, Confucianism is the common cultural cornerstone of the Sinosphere. In particular, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam share a worldview with deep roots in Confucianism. Especially in South Korea, that worldview "shapes the moral system, the way of life, social relations between old and young, high culture, and much of the legal system."

It's easy to spot an almost identical postmodern veneer around the developed world and assume that all such societies are essentially the same. But no matter how contemporary a society may appear on the surface, the bedrock culture remains. If only for the sake of verisimilitude, it must constitute an inextricable part of any story being told in that context.

The payoff is that understanding and respecting the immutable nature of the culture makes for a reliable source of tension and conflict and narrative depth.

Challenging traditional values is one thing. Eliminating them entirely is quite another. That's what China did during the Cultural Revolution. The result was the wholesale destruction of an entire generation. It comes as no surprise that those very same communists are now hawking the ancient cultural heritage and Confucian teachings they once vilified.

China learned the hard way the value of Chesterton's Fence.

Granted, aside from a handful of trending topics and popular political slogans, most people would have a hard time identifying what those cultural values are. But they do recognize their absence. Like a living organism deprived of a necessary nutrient, though its absence may go unnoticed at first, its loss will inevitably exact a toll.

Regardless of the genre, anime is deeply rooted in Japanese culture. Even when seemingly lost in translation, it shores up the story being told. From the hierarchal language to the education system, to food, fashion, architecture, and a myriad of other customs that are centuries old and very much alive.

A great example of this is Dragon Pilot, that starts at a modern JSDF air force base, and then tosses dragons, miko (Shinto shrine maidens), and ancient religious rites into the mix. Dragon Pilot introduces the shrine maidens in the last third of the story, while Otaku Elf takes place entirely in the shrine maiden genre.

The Japanese title for the latter is Edomae Elf and Elda has been hanging around Takamimi Shrine since the dawn of the Edo period. More recently in the early twentieth century, the Taisho period has become the go-to setting for Japan's fantasy steam punk era, as in My Happy Marriage and Demon Slayer.
In an interview posted on Anime News Network, My Happy Marriage director Takehiro Kubota was asked if he was concerned about how viewers outside Japan would enjoy and interpret the anime.

"Not really," was his reassuring answer.

In fact, I never imagined that it would be seen so widely in so many different countries, so I was grateful when I heard that it had been watched by so many people overseas and had such a positive response. Perhaps due to Miyo's uniquely Japanese character? It's somewhat hard to express the nuance, but Miyo is a quite modest person who clearly doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve. I found it very interesting that her character was accepted in other cultures where being able to assert one's own opinion is a highly valued character trait.

A big part of what draws western audiences to anime is precisely because it is not made for western audiences. The aesthetics of anime create an additional level of remove that paradoxically makes reality all the more real. So as it turns out, then, I do like the isekai genre very much, because watching anime takes me on a voyage to another world.

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Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, culture, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, politics, streaming, thinking about writing

In my previous post on the subject, as an explanation for why Jdrama trails so far behind anime in the international marketplace, I theorized that Jdrama has difficulty syncing the amount of story available with the amount of time available over the typical run of a television series.

I will now try applying Occam's razor to the question, which broadly holds that the simplest theory is usually the best.

Sturgeon's law states that 90 percent of everything is crap. Statisticians call this phenomenon the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. In this case, 20 percent of the entertainment produced represents the 80 percent of the entertainment that's worth watching. The obvious solution, it would seem, is to just produce that 20 percent to start with.

The problem, as screenwriter William Goldman famously described Hollywood, is that "Nobody knows anything." The smartest people in the room can rarely predict what that 20 percent will be ahead of time.

Even when the majority of consumers of a product agree about what is objectively good, that consensus is not necessarily synonymous with what they all like or what they are all willing to pay for. Once you start dividing the entertainment pie into mediums, audiences, and genres, the slices that appeal to any one person are going to end up being pretty thin.

When it comes to anime, I generally avoid isekai and anything that involves people getting trapped inside video games. Battle shonen like Jujutsu Kaisen test my patience too. In other words, I steer clear of many of the most popular genres (though I did enjoy Reborn as a Vending Machine and Chainsaw Man, that flipped a bunch of worn out formulas on their heads).

And yet, even taking those genres off the table, there are enough titles left over every season that I still have to whittle down the list of new shows I want to watch. With distributors like Crunchyroll and Netflix buying everything that the anime industry puts out, the pie keeps growing and growing and those thin genre slices start getting pretty big all on their own.

As Miles Atherton points out, the anime pie is now so large that, with the exception of children's television, more anime series are produced every year than all of the animated television programs in the rest of the world combined.

The expanding audience encourages distributors to buy more content, and anime producers in Japan to make more content, and more talent to enter the field, which increases the odds that the audience will find something to keep them watching. It's the virtuous circle of art and commerce that rewards more with more. Also known as the Matthew effect.

Kdrama is now in the same place.

At this rate, unless a major player like Netflix begins buying content like crazy, I don't see Jdrama expanding outside a few streaming niches.

If Edo period dramas are your thing, Samurai vs Ninja has a whole website just for you. Rakuten Viki focuses on romance, but even Viki (a Japanese company) acquires ten times as much Kdrama as Jdrama. Jme TV is the only active player licensing content across the board. But it localizes almost nothing in its catalog, which places a hard cap on future growth.

In the meantime, anime keeps going from strength to strength if only on the strength of numbers alone.

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Labels: anime, business, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, jdrama, jme, kdrama, samurai vs ninja, technology, viki

I gave up on Jme TV, NHK Cosmomedia's streaming replacement for TV Japan. They're charging the same $25/month they did for the cable channel, an amount completely out of whack with comparable streaming services. Jme offered to grandfather the VOD service for $15/month, which is no less absurd, especially given the size of its catalog.

In many cases, push the price point low enough and you can stop thinking about the sunk costs. Kocowa, for example, South Korea's equivalent of TV Japan, offers its basic plan for $7/month. But the Jme TV website and app are so poorly designed that I'd be unlikely to stick around at any price greater than zero.

Speaking of which, NHK really ought to host a version of the Jme Select channel on NHK World Japan, along with the Asadora. If nothing else, it'd be a great publicity move. TV Japan used to be the only game in town for live-action Japanese content. Used to be. That built-in audience is long gone by now.

NHK World Japan, TV Japan's public service sibling, has something worthwhile to offer most days (especially during the sumo tournaments). NHK posts its flagship domestic newscasts online. Japan's commercial news networks stream their television feeds on YouTube. NHK's hourly radio broadcasts are also online.

And it's all free.

Back in February (the offer has since expired), I couldn't resist Rakuten Viki's 30 percent off sale and got the annual basic plan for $3.50/month. Even with its emphasis on romance and Kdrama, Viki has a decent enough collection of contemporary Jdrama that there simply isn't a downside.

Though given the glacial pace at which Viki acquires new Japanese content, I'll probably subscribe every other year. That's one reason why I think Viki should do a deal with NHK to license more of their material. (It is very telling that Rakuten Viki, a Japanese company, is dominated by Korean and Chinese content.)

Tubi is probably the best FAST (free advertising supported streaming television) streaming service currently available.

As Jordan Minor puts it, "Tubi fearlessly gets down and dirty by adding whatever cheap, old, and just plain weird stuff it can find to make sure you can always look forward to a novel viewing experience." In other words, Tubi's Japanese content consists of everything from art house to grindhouse to anime, along with quirky travelogues and documentaries.

Tubi has few contemporary Jdramas series, such as Daughter of Lupin and Special Security Squad and romances like A Girl and Three Sweethearts. Plus many more older period dramas and Sonny Chiba actioners. At least two dozen subbed or dubbed Godzilla and kaiju films, four Kamen Rider series, and a sizable selection from the Ultraman franchise.

My only big gripe with Tubi is the absence of language and country filters that would make it easier to find live-action Japanese content. Tubi has three anime channels and two Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama.

Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja, which has an impressive collection of action-oriented television movies and series from the 1970s up to the present. Content can be viewed online and there are apps for Android and Apple (but not Roku). The cost of a streaming subscription is $7.99/month.

Netflix's affordable ad-supported tier provides access to an eclectic collection of anime-inspired adaptations (One Piece and City Hunter being two of the latest), live-action dramas, and reality TV. Netflix licenses and produces new Japanese content on a regular basis.

With its worldwide reach, Netflix is emerging as one of the best sources of modern Japanese movies and television outside Japan. Netflix also provides subtitles in English and Japanese for many of its Japanese and non-Japanese titles.

The focus here is on live-action television, but you could spend a good portion of your life working through the free anime catalogs at Tubi and Retrocrush alone. Then for under $20/month total, you could add to that Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, and Netflix, and you'd need another lifetime.

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Labels: anime, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, netflix, nhk, samurai vs ninja, streaming, tubi, viki

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from using third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors or do global searches for "Japan" and "Japanese."

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Blue Thermal (2022) follows Tamaki Tsuru as she learns to fly gliders in the college soaring club. The movie makes the common mistake of cramming in too many plot points from the manga, and relies on angst as an excuse for doing really dumb stuff, but the unique subject matter kept me interested.
• Cats of Japan (2020) is a cute travel documentary about cats lounging around and being cool. The kind of show to watch when you just want to kick back and relax.
• Detective Dobu (1991) is an Edo period Columbo, whose slovenly and bumbling ways disguise his keen mind and relentless drive to catch the criminal (although Columbo never drank as much as Dobu does, if at all). The series covers the same material as the earlier made-for-television movies, also on Tubi.
• Crisis: Special Security Squad (2017) Shun Oguri heads a secret team of specialists tackling threats the regular cops can't handle. In both good and bad ways, it's pretty much by-the-numbers for the genre.
• The Great War of Archimedes (2019) The first six minutes documents the sinking of the battleship Yamato. The rest of the movie is a political drama (that feels like a stage play) about how Admiral Yamamoto tried to scuttle the project in favor of building more carriers. Also see my longer review.
• Kamen Rider Zero-One (2020) This comedy action series in the long-running Kamen Rider franchise could be a Terminator prequel. Enjoyable in small doses as practically every episode is the same and not all that different. It gets old fast if you don't pace yourself.
• The Life of Bangaku (2002) is an Edo period action comedy starring acclaimed actor Koji Yakusho as an expert swordsman who is simply too honest and principled for his own good. Directed by Kon Ichikawa.
• Shogun's Samurai (1978) was broadcast in Japan as The Yagyuu Conspiracy. Sonny Chiba stars as the historical figure Yagyuu Jubei. Together with his brother and father, Yagyuu carries out a palace coup in order to install Iemitsu as the third Tokugawa shogun, and then has to deal with the violent blowback.
• Zankuro (2001) Ken Watanabe is a retainer of the shogun during the Edo period. Despite his position in the low aristocracy, his bad habits and his mother's spendthrift ways constantly outstrip his stipend, leaving him to moonlight as a bodyguard or executioner or detective, whatever it takes to make ends meet.

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Tubi in Japanese (2)
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Japanese language links

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese, japanese tv, jdrama, streaming, technology, television reviews, tubi

This list of Japanese language resources is not intended to be definitive. These are simply the sites I access the most.

My main online dictionary is Weblio. I also reference Eijirou and Word Bank.

Along with the Random House Dictionary from my WordPerfect days (it's an ancient TSR that runs in vDOS), my favorite English language dictionary is Word Hippo.

NHK World Japan is NHK's English language service. The live feed can be viewed online, along with an extensive VOD library and OTA in some areas (9.4 in Northern Utah). There are apps for most streaming platforms.

Good Morning Japan, News at Noon, News 7, and International Report, NHK's four domestic news programs, are available on the NHK World Premium website. The site also includes recent episodes of Today's Close-Up, A Small Journey, and A Hundred Views of Nature.

The previous 24 hours of NHK Radio newscasts can be streamed online.

YouTube hosts a large number of commercial network news feeds from Japan, including the always delightful Weather News (hosted coverage begins at 5:00 AM JST).

For now, my primary sources for anime and Jdrama are Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Tubi. Many of the Japanese historical dramas on Tubi are distributed by Samurai vs Ninja. I purchase emanga at BookWalker.

A Japanese tutoring YouTube channel I watch on a regular basis is Kaname Naito.

Related links

Weblio
Eijirou
Word Bank
Word Hippo

NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
News from Japan
NHK Radio News

Crunchyroll
Tubi
Netflix
Samurai vs Ninja

BookWalker (Japanese)
BookWalker (English)
Kindle Store
Yes Asia

Labels: anime, bookwalker, crunchyroll, ebooks, hidive, japanese, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, kindle, language, netflix, nhk, nhk world, samurai vs ninja

Rakuten Viki is offering a limited-time 30 percent off sale on all Viki Pass plans. That works out to $3.50/month for the annual basic plan. The code for monthly plans is LUNARNEWYEAR30. The code for annual plans is YEAROFTHEDRAGON30.

This offer must be redeemed by February 22, 2024.

Labels: japanese tv, jdrama, streaming, television, viki

Returning to the story about the international rise of Japan's domestic entertainment industry in The Hollywood Reporter, the article also touches upon the unique way IP rights are handled in Japan, which I think deserves additional attention. It is an example of what has come to be referred to in Japanese business lingo as the "Galápagos syndrome."
The term was coined to describe Japan's homegrown 3G mobile phones, that emerged "like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands, fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins." And now refers to the development of goods "in relative isolation from the rest of the world because of a focus on the local market."

That "focus on the local market" is key.

I think the same metaphor can be applied to popular culture in Japan. It's what made anime both familiar to kids who grew up watching cartoons such as Jonny Quest and Spider-Man and also so unique. But like those 3G mobile phones, other forms of entertainment, especially live-action television, have evolved completely out of sync with Hollywood expectations.

One reason for this is that Japan's economy is large enough to comfortably sustain both the production and consumption side of the equation. Add to that Japan's isolationist past during the Edo period, which even today is not seen as a bad thing. A Japanese business with an established home market needs a compelling reason to look elsewhere.

And then there's the unique way IP rights are handled in Japan.

The Writers Guild of America made a lot of noise about the rights of content creators during its extended strike. In Japan, with nothing like the bargaining power of the WGA, writers retain rights to their own IPs in ways that WGA members can only dream of.

At the same time, an aspiring mangaka can only dream of making the guaranteed minimums that a working screenwriter is paid in Hollywood. A mangaka with a syndicated series won't earn a living wage unless and until that series is successful enough to justify the publication of a tankoubon edition. Until then, it is sink or swim.

Netflix likes to say that it doesn't impose its production approach on foreign content industries, but rather finds compromise modes of dealmaking, development and production that take into account prevailing local practices. In Tokyo, however, the company undoubtedly has had to bend far further to the Japanese way of doing things than elsewhere, adapting to local realities such as the strong control manga creators often retain over their IP even after licensing agreements and the outsized industry power of Japan's notoriously fickle talent agencies.

Those notoriously fickle talent agencies resemble the old Hollywood studio system that ruled the roost until 1948, when it succumbed to an antitrust ruling by the Supreme Court.

Like the Hollywood studio system, Japan's talent agencies take it upon themselves to recruit new talent and sort the wheat from the chaff. They have traditionally exerted enormous control over all aspects of the domestic entertainment industry, including dictating which of their stars will be cast in a show. As Mark Schilling analogizes the system,

Talent agencies control their talent much in the way the feudal lords controlled the samurai in their clans, supporting their livelihoods in return for absolute fealty.

Unsurprisingly, as the ugly demise of the biggest and baddest talent agency of them all, Johnny & Associates, made clear, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And yet despite the horrible publicity, the influence of the talent agency system on the live-action side of television production in Japan remains undiminished.

The constraints under which Jdrama is produced is another example of the Galápagos syndrome, a big reason I remain dubious about Jdrama finding the same kind of overseas market as manga and anime and Kdrama.

Manga publishers perform a similar function, soliciting content from across the country and vigorously testing that content in the first-run print syndication market. But they do so at an arm's length. Your audition is a PDF file or an over-the transom manuscript. Moreover, there are dozens of self-publishing platforms (doujinshi) and numerous online options.

As noted above, starting out, even the majors (Shueisha, Kodansha, Shogakukan) won't pay you enough to live on, but they let more feet in the door. I like to compare the system to Minor League Baseball. Every mangaka starts out down in the Rookie leagues and aspires to make it to Triple-A and then to the Majors (also known as Weekly Shonen Jump).

If and when that happens, like an up and coming baseball star, the mangaka rises to the top with a proven track record. Unhampered by the talent agency system, there is nothing holding back a mangaka's publisher from actively exploring all of the available licensing opportunities, both at home and abroad.

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Whither TV Japan
Japan's phantom content boom

Labels: japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, manga, netflix, streaming

The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting story about the international rise of Japan's domestic entertainment industry. Anime is a given and Kdrama is all the rage these days, but the market for made-in-Japan live-action productions (produced in Japan or based on Japanese content) is seeing (we're told) a renaissance. Japan is "on the precipice of a content boom."
"There has never been more global curiosity and love for Japanese culture, and with that interest, there is so much potential for Japan's entertainment industry to regain momentum," says Netflix's Minyoung Kim, who was based in South Korea and now works out of Tokyo.

The live-action remake of One Piece is a recent example. Netflix hopes to duplicate that success with a big-budget live-action adaptation of another manga and anime classic, Yu Yu Hakusho.

One telling statistic is that live-action productions in Japan have typically been budgeted at around $250,000/episode. To put that in context, what an episode of Star Trek cost sixty years ago. Comparable Hollywood budgets start at ten times that amount. So spending only five times as much is bargain basement.

Thus it comes as no surprise that

the live-action series space is the area of Japanese entertainment where the surging investment from big foreign streamers is changing production standards most and where insiders say there is the biggest potential for a reinvigorating shake-up.

Of course, the potential will always be there. For now, though, the appeal of Jdrama outside Asia remains so low that any improvement at all in the overall numbers can end up looking far more impressive than it actually is. Frankly, I'm not convinced that what the The Hollywood Reporter is describing will amount to a positive long-term trend in content acquisition.

Streamers like Netflix and Amazon, in a Red Queen race to to fill the bottomless pits of their catalogs, are simply grabbing the low-hanging fruit. But take note of what they are not doing—namely licensing shows already in production for Japan's domestic broadcast television audience.

Cultural mismatches between the tastes of the domestic audience and the overseas audience may be impossible to overcome at scale. Kdrama, like anime, was a fit right out of the box, and so could iteratively build on that foundation. More supply equaled more demand. Except there has never been any organic demand for live-action Japanese television in the first place.

As a case in point, variety and infotainment shows make up the majority of the broadcast schedule in Japan. Yet other than sifting through the catalogs and picking and choosing odd and interesting titles here and there, nobody has figured out how to "capitalize on the category anywhere near to the extent to which it already dominates traditional TV in the country."

Add to that the gatekeeping function of Japan's powerful talent agencies. Outside the news divisions, practically any human being appearing on Japanese television has been vetted, approved, and booked by a talent agency. Their primary interest is the domestic market and the advertising revenue it generates. Markets outside Asia are not an immediate concern.

Which is why I expect this "boom" to eventually regress to the mean. Japan may well become home to thriving overseas production facilities, but as cogs in the Hollywood offshoring and outsourcing machine, not deep wells of backlist material just waiting to be localized for North American distribution.

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Labels: anime, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, netflix, streaming, television

NHK Cosmomedia has done a good job establishing NHK World Japan as its free overseas streaming and VOD service. It uses the TV Japan brand for its cable and satellite channel in North American and NHK World Premium outside North America.

Were I the marketing consultant for NHK Cosmomedia, I'd go with TV Japan as the brand for all linear TV programming. NHK World Japan would continue as the free service and the subscription streaming services would inherit the NHK World Premium brand.

Or it could follow the herd and call it Plus. And, in fact, NHK's domestic streaming service (geoblocked outside of Japan) is called NHKプラス (NHK+).

Along with the recent removal of geo-blocking from NHK's flagship news programs (branded as NHK World Premium content), the noticeably improved video quality also hints at a possible integration between NHK World Japan and NHK World Premium.

NHK World Japan had always compressed the heck out of its video feeds. So while relatively still images delivered the full HD quality, any motion (such as during a sumo tournament) resulted in on-screen pixelation and artifacting.

But watching the November 2023 sumo tournament, I couldn't help noticing how much the video quality had improved. We're talking leaps and bounds. Almost no image distortion at all. Crystal clear HD even with full motion.

Raising the bar like this may be a first step to a tiered unification of NHK's online services. Another clue is that two of NHK's domestic satellite channels, BS1 and BS Premium, merged into NHK BS on December 1, 2023.

Going forward, content consolidation will become the name of the game as NHK faces an aging and literally shrinking audience, with the population of Japan predicted to drop another 10 million by the end of the decade.

Once upon a time, I subscribed to TV Japan. Were money no object, I still would, but it is only available on cable and DirecTV and is insanely expensive to boot.

The actual TV Japan subscription by itself still costs the same $25/month it has for decades. That price is dear enough, and doesn't include the ever growing mountain of taxes and fees Xfinity piles on top of even its "Limited Basic" tier.

South Korea's closest counterpart to TV Japan is the streaming service Kocowa, a joint venture between the top three Korean broadcast networks. A basic (ad-free) subscription to Kocowa runs $70/year.

That's about how much TV Japan costs a month on Xfinity. Cost alone is a big reason why live Japanese content has little chance of achieving the same market success outside Japan as anime or Kdrama.

Labels: dish, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, tv japan

With dLibrary Japan offline until April 2024 (at the latest), it's once again time to reshuffle my Japanese language streaming choices. Tubi and NHK World Japan are free, so no decisions to make there.

Viki goes into watch and drop rotation. No complaints about the service itself. To start with, it's eminently affordable. It's a content mismatch. The Japanese content focuses on BL and romance. Frankly, when it comes to romance, Jdrama simply doesn't measure up to manga and anime.

I prefer police procedurals, low-stakes slice of life dramas, and documentaries, which Japanese television writers are much better at pulling off.

Viki has a few in that category, just not that many. But speaking of which, I see that Viki has licensed 99.9 Criminal Lawyer. It's a well done execution of the reliable formula that pits an eccentric defense lawyer against his uptight boss (a corporate lawyer because it pays much better).

And while I'm at it, I'll again point out that Viki has Sleeper Hit, a fun, insightful, and even philosophical examination of the manga publishing world and the hard-nosed business of selling art.

In any case, as with pretty much every streaming service that doesn't focus specifically on Japan, Viki's Jdrama offerings take a back seat to its Kdrama series (true of Tubi and Netflix too). But if that is what you're looking for, Viki is one of the better overall sources for Asian content.

Unfortunately, take away dLibrary Japan and Viki and there aren't that many viable Jdrama alternatives left. When TV Japan was alive on traditional cable, it added up to eighty (!) bucks a month for a single channel on Xfinity. Not an option when I cap my monthly streaming budget at twenty dollars.

Tubi has a few Jdrama series and (subbed) Japanese movies worth watching. It sure doesn't make them easy to find. But a little effort will occasionally turn up genuine classics, campy tokusatsu series (featuring primitive CG effects and guys in rubber suits), and recent releases like Blue Thermal.

At least for now, that leaves Netflix as far and away the best of the remaining Hobson's choices.

Anime, by comparison, offers an embarrassment of riches. Thanks to Sony's acquisition of Funimation and Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll rules the anime streaming world. You could watch Crunchyroll all day long and not make a dent in the huge backlist before getting swamped by dozens of new titles.

The annual subscription option makes Crunchyroll an even better deal. On price alone, HIDIVE is the most affordable anime streaming service but is so much smaller that it's hard to justify an annual subscription anymore.

I've been following Princess Principal and Girls und Panzer on HIDIVE. Both franchises have moved to the theatrical model. This wouldn't be a problem if they were releasing standalone movies but they're actually serials. What we end up with are regular series produced at a glacial pace.

I'll wait until a season is over before watching it. I'm very much on board with the old Netflix approach of releasing a whole series at once. Even on Crunchyroll, I watch a season behind the current schedule. The added benefit is that makes it easier to figure out which series are worth the time.

While waiting for titles to accumulate, HIDIVE joins Viki in the watch and drop category. Once I run out of live-action content on Tubi, I'll shift to Viki and then to Netflix. Netflix uniquely provides Japanese subtitles for much of its Japanese content, a very valuable language learning resource.

Related links

NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
Crunchyroll
HIDIVE
Netflix
Rakuten Viki
Tubi

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, dlibjapan, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, manga, netflix, nhk, nhk world, sony, streaming, technology, tubi, tv japan

When I first started streaming with Netflix, I hoped it would continue to build its library of live-action Japanese content. Alas, Netflix is the latest service to discover that there simply isn't a big audience for localized Jdrama in North America.

Or, for that matter, anywhere else, which is why anime makes up 80 percent of Japan's broadcast television overseas exports.

So while Netflix has been busily licensing anime movies and series, and producing anime content for its Netflix Originals catalog, it hasn't added any new live-action scripted Japanese programming. That means dLibrary Japan has the VOD market mostly to itself.

Over the past year, dLibrary Japan has taken that responsibility seriously, evolving from a usable but clunky beta site into a fully functioning streaming provider.

At the end of May, dLibrary Japan revamped the website, making much needed modifications to the Continue Watching list and significantly improving content discovery. The only critical thing left on the to-do list is to move the new features over to the app.

A few bugs remain. The "remember me" login checkbox doesn't remember me for very long. And to get picky, "details" is spelled wrong on the website.

There is still no way to search the website but they've added scads of genre categories and subcategories, making it easy to narrow down selections. You can always search the catalog using the app.

One of the new categories is subtitled content. Though it has less than two dozen titles, five of them are NHK Taiga dramas. At fifty or so episodes each, these historical epics alone might be worth a subscription if you haven't seen them before.

dLibrary Japan is mostly Japanese-only (you can navigate the site in English or Japanese), and is acquiring that Japanese-only content at a brisk clip, adding several new series or seasons a week. I'm looking forward to seeing how the site will grow in the future.

dLibrary Japan is supported on most browsers. There are apps for Android smartphones and tablets, Apple iPhone and iPad, Apple TV, and Roku.

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Labels: dlibjapan, japanese tv, jdrama, nhk world, streaming, technology, tv japan

Long after politicians stopped worrying about Japan as an economic threat (and started worrying about China instead), Japanese popular culture is gaining an increasing mind share around the world, including in China. And yet getting access to Japanese live-action entertainment remains an uphill climb in North America.

Unlike anime, its own genre category on streaming sites such as Hulu, Tubi, and Netflix, Jdrama hasn't found a significant audience outside of Asia. Netflix has ten times as many Korean live-action dramas as Japanese live-actions dramas. DirecTV offers just three Japanese channels and over a dozen Korean channels.

Demographics has a lot to do with this. Korean-Americans (1.8 million) outnumber Japanese-Americans (1.4 million). Korean immigration peaked in the 1980s while Japanese immigration peaked at the end of the 19th century. The large home market for Japanese studios also lessens the need to compete abroad with Hollywood.

Japanese dramas and "unscripted" content (news, talk, and reality shows) are more popular across Asia, where Fuji TV distributes through Alibaba. Hulu/Japan is wholly owned by Nippon TV (the highest-rated network in Japan) and reaches 19 Asian markets.

The Big Three (Crunchyroll, Funimation, HIDIVE) keep their anime offerings up-to-date, and simulcast new series every season. But when it comes to live-action titles, "new" means released in the last decade. Over the past year, Crunchyroll has aggressively pruned its live-action catalog (once the largest) to two dozen titles.

Netflix is the only streaming service actively increasing the number of localized non-anime listings. Alas, little of the content on its Japanese service (like all of the Tora-san movies) is available in North America, where most of the live-action series are "Netflix Originals" rather than content from the domestic networks.

As a result, the only legal way to stay up-to-date with Jdrama has been TV Japan (via Comcast and DirecTV) and Nippon TV (via DirecTV). TV Japan carries a curated selection of shows from NHK and the commercial networks, scheduling episodes soon after being broadcast and some within a few hours. News is carried live.

It can do this because, aside from Cool Japan, sumo, and one nightly news program, TV Japan (and Nippon TV) localize almost none of the content. In language acquisition terms, TV Japan and Nippon TV are "immersive." You experience the content the same way you would in Japan (unfortunately sans most of the domestic commercials).

dLibrary Japan now offers that experience as a streaming option. (And now Rakuten Viki is is competing at the same price point with an emphasis on Jdrama based on manga and anime.)

If you are serious about learning Japanese, a necessary step is immersing yourself in a wide variety of Japanese programming (including Radio Japan). If culture is your primary interest, NHK World is an accessible guide (and includes news and sumo). It's free, mostly in English, and along with streaming, broadcasts OTA in many markets.

NHK World even carries the occasional scripted show, like Home Sweet Tokyo, an amusing educational sitcom about an Englishman who moves to Tokyo with his family to live with his widowed father-in-law.

You can (and should) watch a lot of subtitled anime. But for a true immersion experience and access to a largest catalog of live-action Japanese television available to audiences in North America, the only legal streaming solution is dLibrary Japan from NHK Cosmomedia (which also distributes TV Japan and NHK World).

When it first debuted, dLibrary Japan was full of promise but little substance. Its catalog was threadbare and it had none of the major apps. But at the end of September 2019, dLibrary Japan gave its home page a much needed makeover and announced that "New programs will be available every week from October!"

It has followed through with that promise. Along with the Google Play and Apple TV apps, dLibrary Japan added Roku support at the end of January 2020. Now they're getting serious.

At $9.99/month, dLibrary Japan is a dollar more than Netflix's lowest cost tier and two dollars more than Crunchyroll, both of which have bigger catalogs (by orders of magnitude), so I count it as a "premium" provider.

But let's compare and contrast the streaming services. I paid $42.00 (total) a month for TV Japan from Dish. When TV Japan left Dish for Comcast and DirecTV, the cost for the most basic international package including TV Japan almost doubled. That's when I cut the cord. Here's what I'm paying now.

Netflix	$6.99/month	$83.88/year
Crunchyroll	$7.99/month	$79.99/year
HIDIVE	$4.99/month	$47.99/year
dLibrary Japan	$9.99/month	$119.88/year
NHK World	free

The yearly total comes to $34.64/month ($37.95 month-to-month). A ginormous amount of content for six bucks less than what I paid for TV Japan on Dish, and a third the price of the full Japanese package (TV Japan, Nippon TV, NECO movie channel) from DirecTV. That's the big difference that streaming can make.

Related links

dLibrary Japan (user experience)
dLibrary Japan (content)
dLibrary Japan
dLibrary Japan Roku app
NHK World Roku app
Nippon TV and NECO

Labels: crunchyroll, demographics, directv, dlibjapan, funimation, hidive, japanese tv, jdrama, k-drama, netflix, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, nippon tv, streaming, tv japan, viki

Especially during the high-demand time slots, HIDIVE struggles the most of my "big three," even failing to launch the app. Though if the app does load successfully, there usually aren't any problems playing a video.

Netflix always launches in a jiffy. Except quite randomly (more often on weekends), navigating the app or playing a video slows to a herky-jerky crawl. Then a reboot later, it runs fine. Hard to say what's going on, though Netflix could stand to pare back on the bells and whistles, like the auto-play previews (which can now be turned off).

Speaking of HIDIVE, there are many similarities between the "pop-down" windows for the Netflix and HIDIVE online catalogs, though the Netflix interface is slicker and more feature packed. The Netflix play screen stays clean when paused, something I wish HIDIVE would copy. Netflix and HIDIVE even append localization credits similarly.

I prefer to watch the credits, so on the Netflix website, go to Account > Playback Settings and uncheck the Autoplay box. Unfortunately, this setting doesn't discriminate between the original show credits and the localization credits (that can go on and on). So it's nice to still be able to skip past them.

With such a massive amount of content, discovery on Netflix is a mixed bag. Compared to the terrifically useful genre list on the DVD site, the streaming genre list is a skeleton outline. There is an "anime" category and a "Kdrama" category but not a "Jdrama" category. Spanish is the only language category.

Netflix indexes the whole site so keyword searches are powerful, though often to the point of being useless without more selectivity. Searching "Japanese" returns everything containing that keyword. More importantly, searching "Japanese" displays links to the relevant Japanese-language categories at the top of the results page.


I just wish these subcategories could be accessed from the pull-down genre list in each global category. But a quite neat feature of the Netflix search engine is that it stores the metadata for titles not in its catalog and often returns hits that are pretty close matches to the genre and subject matter of the title not found.

If you want to search the Netflix catalog without signing onto Netflix, third-party sites such as Flixable and Reelgood are worth a look.

Like Crunchyroll, Netflix renders its own subtitles, which are more readable and customizable (Japanese is an option) than the default hardware-based closed captions. And the good old DVD-style (or Crunchyroll-style) queue is still there on the website. Go to Account > My Profile > Order in My List and select Manual Ordering.

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Labels: japanese, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, netflix, roku, streaming, technology, television

Netflix has around 200 Japanese language titles (and counting), mostly anime, some live-action, along with additional content related to Japan in terms of subject matter, setting, or cast.

Although investors blanch at Netflix's content acquisition burn rate, as a subscriber, I certainly appreciate how often new Japanese content shows up in the catalog.

Crunchyroll in particular acquires so much content every season that you have to study the descriptions and early reviews to see which ones you want to follow. Netflix, on the other hand, adds a new Japanese title every week or so. Its curated approach makes me curious to see what caught its attention.

Though I'll still head over to ANN and Crunchyroll to check out the reviews. One unfortunate turn taken by Netflix was nixing user reviews, a prime factor in what makes Crunchyroll a stand-out site.

(User reviews on Crunchyroll were removed back in July 2024 in order to "reduce harmful content" and "prevent misinformation." But mostly, I suspect, because the moderating costs were a big resource sink. If you want anime reviews, you can always head over to ANN and MAL.)

While Netflix has fewer anime titles than Hidive, it is actively acquiring live-action content too. Jme has the most live-action titles, though very few of them are localized. Rakuten Viki is still the best source for localized Jdrama.

By establishing "comprehensive business alliances" with studios like Production I.G and BONES, Netflix avoids carriage and licensing disputes while giving its partners greater creative control than broadcasting regulations in Japan allow. Just as importantly, it can localize the content everywhere it does business.

Notes Kotaro Yoshikawa, VP of distribution and licensing at TMS Entertainment, another one of Netflix's Japanese production partners, "Netflix is producing dubbed versions in several languages and subtitles in more than 20 languages, with a release to around 200 countries in one go, which we couldn't do."

One of those countries is, of course, Japan, meaning that Japanese language titles on Netflix often include Japanese closed captions. It's a feature offered by no other similar service, not even TV Japan or NHK World. This unique language learning resource alone places Netflix in a category of its own.

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Labels: anime, business, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jdrama, jme, netflix, nhk world, samurai vs ninja, streaming, television, tv japan