When piracy becomes promotion; how unauthorized copying made Japanese animation profitable in the United States.

• Author: Jenkins, Henry

THE GLOBAL SALES of Japan's animation industry reached an astonishing $80 billion in 2004, 10 times what they were a decade before. It has won this worldwide success in part because Japanese media companies paid little attention to the kinds of grassroots activities--call it piracy, unauthorized duplication and circulation, or simply file-sharing--that American media companies seem so determined to shut down. Much of the risk of entering Western markets and many of the costs of experimentation and promotion were borne by dedicated consumers.

Japanese animation was exported to the Western market as early as the 1960s, when Astro Boy, Gigantor, and Speed Racer made it into local syndication. By the late '60s, however, Action for Children's Television and other groups had used threats of boycotts and federal regulations to rein in programs they saw as inappropriate for American children. Japanese cartoons increasingly targeted adolescents and adults and often dealt with mature themes. Consequently, the American markets for these cartoons dried up in the early '70s, and discouraged distributors dumped their cartoons on Japanese-language cable channels.

With the rise of videotape recorders, American fans could copy shows off those channels and share them with their friends. Soon they were sending American shows such as Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica to Japanese fans and American GIs in exchange for Japanese programs such as Getter Robo. These tapes toured a circuit of science fiction conventions in the late '70s and early '80s, often shown without translation. In a format much like a radio broadcast of an opera, someone would stand up at the beginning and tell the plot, often drawing on what he or she remembered from another recital of the plot at another screening. Japanese companies were vaguely aware of such screenings but didn't try to stop them. They didn't have permission from their mother companies to charge these fans or provide the material, but they wanted to see how much interest the shows attracted.

By the late '80s, student organizations were building extensive libraries of both legal and pirated material. The early '90s saw the emergence of "fansubbing," the amateur translation and subtitling of Japanese anime. Time-synchronized VHS and S-VHS systems allowed fansubbers to dub tapes while retaining accurate alignment of text and image. The high costs of the earliest machines meant that fansubbing would remain a collective effort...