The Japanese government gave zero pesos to the animators of your favorite series

Knowing that Japanese illustrators earn a pittance for creating your favorite series is an open secret, but official figures have just made matters worse. This Monday, within the anime industry, the Japanese government left all otakus outraged by revealing that of all the millions of yen distributed to help the entertainment world in 2024, absolutely zero cents reached the pockets of the actual animators.

Millions of yen for the men in suits

Official documents from Japan's Ministry of Economy showed that the government gave away nearly 42.5 million dollars to boost entertainment projects during the past year. Most of that money went to live-action films, while anime only managed to scrape together 12.6 percent of that entire millionaire budget. The real problem isn't the amount, but whose hands all that public money ended up in.

Zero cents for the true artists

The most outrageous part of the report is reading how that money was spent. Almost the entire budget was used to pay for advertising, help export series to other countries, and finance massive marketing campaigns. When auditors looked for how much cash was directly handed to the artists, writers, and animators who lose sleep drawing the episodes, the number was exactly 0.0 percent.

The trap of Japanese bureaucracy

The government itself knows they are messing up and admitted they need to find new ways to pay the artists. Experts monitoring the industry explained that the system is completely broken and harms the most vulnerable for three main reasons:

• Excessive paperwork: Illustrators work too many hours and don't have time to fill out the long, boring forms required by the government.
• Profit for the rich: Giant corporations with offices full of accountants are the only ones that manage to complete the paperwork in time to collect these massive checks.
• Bankrupt studios: While the country gets rich exporting merchandise and selling series abroad, small studios are going broke due to a lack of real financial support.

Seeing that politicians prefer to give millions to sales executives instead of helping artists who can barely afford to eat, do you think the quality of animation in Japan will decline if small studios continue to close their doors?