It frustrates me that the industry have to rely on fans / foreign distributors / bootleg to get an audience out of Japan. Leaves so much money on the table.
I would be more than happy to pay Eiichiro Oda and his team for an english .pdf of the latest One Piece delivered to my inbox the second it comes out.
There's not a ton of money in the Anime industry. Especially over-seas, since translation is a very labor intensive and largely manual process.
There's also not a guaranteed audience for an anime. They have to rely on fans of the existing works (typically light novels) to view the (often drastically different) animes. I've seen a few of my favorite series get dropped due to being too niche.
Subbed translations at least previously were not usually very labor intensive if you didn't try to do heavy localization or typesetting everything (I remember someone translating every single book name in some bookcase). Fansubs managed to do pretty good job with just about 1MD worth of effort per episode (~20x length of the episode, extremely small amount compared to work required to actually produce the original episode). Old fansubs did need quite a bit more, but improved processes, tools & computers (just encoding & uploading used to pretty slow step) also improved the overall speed. No clue what how much CR & co need these days.
Of course, dubbing is very different case, but that's usually only done for DVD/Blu-ray releases. No clue if it's really worth to do it though, but my viewpoint is probably too biased.
As for dubbing, there are instances where animes are “simultaneous dubbed” for international release. A recent example is Shield Hero.
How even did you arrive at that deduction?
There's a ton of untapped market potential in anime and manga, especially overseas. Japanese pop culture is probably second in worldwide popularity after America's.
And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.
2-3 decades ago it was a relatively small handful of fans who contributed their time and effort for free, and worked against legal prohibitions, to provide anime fansubs and manga scanlations throughout the 1990s and 2000s, until the anime fandom grew to the millions today, with adaptations, inspirations (Matrix, Kill Bill etc.), cosplayers, conventions, and even pornstars jumping in.
This is a unique case where an industry was practically established by piracy!
Many of those fans still rely on unofficial translations, reviews and torrents to get their fix, and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)
Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture. There are still tons of anime, manga and video games with lots of worldwide fans but they've never been officially ported outside Japan.
That's just wishful thinking. There are decades of effort tapping into that potential with mildly success.
> And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.
Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids. Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.
> and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)
Not enough. Market-localisation is too expensive to justify the risk of pampering a handful fans.
The whole japanese Pop-culture is divided in a very small number of big franchises, which make the gross of the money, and a very big number of very niche-productions which hardly make enough money to even survive. The big franchises can take the risk of going overseas, and they do that for a long time now. But the small companys don't have the money, often not even the knowledge for it.
On the other side, even with the niche-produtions we now have a rather good situation today. We now have many semi-official english localisations in timly manner for anime and games. It's just not the whole market, and not for the whole world, and manga is still very much a dead fish. But that's simply beacuse it's a different market.
> Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture.
You also only see the fraction of the big picture which you are part in, not the complete big picture.
This is patently false. There are lots and lots anime for adults and there are so many adult fans nowadays. To be honest this statement alone would probably disqualify you from giving any opinion worth considering in this discussion.
That's just pessimistic thinking.
Relying on foreign distributors, especially when you need to translate, seems to make perfect sense to me. Should Oda provide translations into English, French, German, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese? All of those are part of the "audience outside of Japan".
Written Chinese is a very large market and likely a good investment, though a significant percentage of the well off also speak English or Japanese.
After that it’s more questionable. Translation is not cheap, but US films are often translated for smaller markets.
Anime/manga does do pretty well outside of Japan, compared to the cultural output of so many other nations (how many Czech movies have you watched lately?), but it'll as popular as you seem to wish it would be.
...it'll never be as popular...
[1] https://www.viz.com/shonenjump/chapters/one-piece
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_One_Piece_chapters_(80...
That's interesting. Is there any in-depth source on how the anime industry operates?
[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2005-11-02/animator's-...
[2] https://80.lv/articles/how-much-do-japanese-animators-make/