The Japanimator Manifesto

(Sugawara et al, blog, 2014).
             Five Things That Need To Change!.
             1. No more criminally low pay rates for animators! They should receive at least the 780JPY per hour minimum wage.
             2. Animators should be awarded financial incentives for long working hours when deadlines are tight.
             3. Animators should be able to recuperate after working to tight deadlines without becoming bankrupt!.
             4. Healthier working hours.
             5. More support for novice animators.
             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE4hrBpT0tg&feature=youtu.be .
             With almost sixty animation studios based in Tokyo alone, (Wikipedia, blog, 2013) competition is high when it comes to securing a production contract. And if it wasn't competitive enough domestically, many companies choose to outsource their animation productions to countries like Taiwan, India and China which often cuts the production expenses by more than half. (Schilling, blog, 2012) This highly competitive environment means that companies will often offer to produce animations at a ridiculously low budget to secure the contract meaning they have very little money to spare for employee wages. For this reason the Japanese animation industry is much poorer than its American counterpart. For example, in 2002 many Japanese animated films had a budget as low as $1million, paling in comparison to American features that often had budgets reaching ten to twenty times that amount. (Leach at al, blog, 2002) These contrasting budgets are reflected clearly in the drastic difference between the annual income of animators working in American and those working in Japan. For example the average yearly income for a novice animator in America in 2005 was $31000 whereas in Japan many animators where earning as little as $8500. (Anime News Network et al, blog, 2005) .
             In 2015 wages are not much better in Japan. Smaller animation companies still pay an average of only $300 a month to their animators. Even larger studios offer monthly pay of only $1000 (Ashcraft et al, blog, 2015) which is still too low a salary to support anyone living in Tokyo where the lowest living cost is around $830 without taking travel expenses into account.