Manga sales were down in 2010, but Japan’s ubiquitous graphic novels are still as widely read as ever. There may well be more manga readers than ever before with manga coffee shops and internet cafes offering tens of thousands of titles, free browsing at used book mega chain Bookoff, a giant market for used manga now thoroughly incorporated into the Yahoo! Auctions economy, and titles passed from friend to friend. While there are fewer true blockbusters than in the Golden Age of Shonen Jump hits between 1985 and 1995, current sales champion One Piece has sold over 200 million copies in Japan alone and new volumes break 2 million within a week of hitting bookstores. With a legion of talented artists and a diverse manga buying public, the industry looks in good shape to reconsolidate even as Japanese publishing continues to contract, tapping the otaku niche, but offering a range of different titles as well.

The following is not necessarily a “best list”, but rather presents some highlights of 2010 that speak to different directions in contemporary manga.

Berserk and Sangatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion)

For years, manga digests have been mixing titles with shonen/seinen (boy/youth) and shojo/josei (girl/lady) market appeal to win as broad a readership as possible. Seldom, however, have there been two series with such different styles as Miura Kentarou’s Berserk and Umino Chika’s Sangatsu no Lion hitting the heights of manga craftsmanship while running together in what is effectively a second-tier seinen monthly: Hakusensha’s Young Animal.

Prior to recent releases, Berserk had taken a decade-long sojourn through aimless plot arcs and endlessly proliferating characters including tween witches and swordswomen who do little but repeat the thematic role played by heroine Casca earlier in the series. The new arcs, referred to as “The Kingdom of the Falcon” and “Fantasia,” are a refreshing break. The stories show creatures of nightmare and imagination assaulting the often realistically depicted Renaissance-inspired world of the manga, ripping empires apart and providing a drama that has long been absent from the series. The result is like something out of Paradise Lost or at least a return to the same 1980s graphic imagery that seeded Miura’s fantasy debut as well as the Warhammer art of John Blanche and the best of heavy metal album covers. Miura also seems to channel artwork contemporary to his story world such as Hieronymus Bosch’s famed “Triptych of Garden of Earthly Delights”, just as he had drawn on high Renaissance battlefield visions like Albrecht Altdorfer’s “The Battle of Alexander at Issus” in the more military-minded early chapters. In bringing Berserk back to the often aberrant but always gripping fantasyscapes that characterized the opening chapters of the series, Miura is also taking the series to a new level of artistry.

John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London, or Tokyo” and Sangatsu no Lion’s vision of urban alienation certainly does little to refute that. Umino Chika’s strong follow up to her hit Hachimitsu to Clover (Honey and Clover) ostensibly belongs in the professional shogi (“Japanese chess”) micro genre. The series, however, is a diverse one and also works as a nuanced psychological portrait of young protagonist Kiriyama Rei, a child prodigy of the game whose difficult adolescence has brought oscillating success and a feeling that his human connections are being swallowed up by the pressures of the tournament scene as well as the metropolis around him. Throughout, author Umino sets Sangatsu no Lion apart with poignant depictions of Tokyo. The night skies or water of the city’s canals, soaring above or looming below, are consistently used as visual cues for Kiriyama’s emotional state. From the point of view of foreign readers, the focus on the world of the game and emotional lives of the players rather than the minutiae of strategy makes Sangatsu no Lion refreshingly accessible and prevents the typical shonen manga pattern of ever escalating competition with antagonists and rivals from squeezing out character development. It also skirts the premier shojo pitfall — endlessly repeated affective moments — in favor of a more serious look at how people build networks of friends and households, sustaining relationships that offer an oasis from relentless demands to achieve. In essence, both Berserk and Sangatsu no Lion show the continued vitality of the manga mainstream.

Mabui (Soul) and Suna no Tsurugi (The Sword of Sand)

While they are not new releases, the 2010 publication of Okinawan manga artist Higa Susumu’s stories of war and postwar Mabui (“soul” in the Okinawan dialect) and Suna no Tsurugi in complied volumes is part of a larger trend whereby more ambitious, difficult, or experimental manga are being rereleased for collectors or new generations of readers.

Higa’s Mabui was first published in the aftermath of the rape and brutalization of an Okinawan 12 year-old by three US servicemen in 1995. The 1945 Battle of Okinawa had been taken up by a number of manga artists including Higa himself in the Suna no Tsurugi stories, but serious looks at Okinawa’s postwar experience are rare. Here Okinawan Higa deals with the subject matter with notable sensitivity, looking critically at the American presence without lapsing into simple anti-Americanism.

Individual shorts are deftly plotted, never relying on melodrama or stock narratives. The series examines different angles of intersection between Okianwans and the bases that dominate the most populous parts of the island. In a work with clear political relevance, this approach risks coming off as overly didactic, but Higa never lets his characters slip into stereotype, balancing character development with fascinating and sometimes disturbing snapshots of postwar Okinawa.

The coverage goes beyond the usual talking points: Who are the thousands of landlords who have reaped billions in base rents since the 1970s? How do locals see the clash of their beautiful beaches and the concrete of the bases that nonetheless roots a major employer in one of Japan’s most economically depressed regions? One theme frequently approached in Higa’s narratives is the warmth of the relationships between individual Americans and Okinawans contrasted with the operational callousness of the military organization as helicopters are carelessly landed on farmers’ fields and homes requisitioned, seemingly at random, in the first postwar years.

In both Mabui and the war-focused Suna no Tsurugi, Higa uses a pared-down art style reminiscent of North American “art house” graphic novels. The absence of typical manga conventions is effective. Many readers have been numbed to “normal” manga violence. Just about every atrocity imaginable has been turned into a commodity. When Higa’s simply drawn everyday is interrupted by violence, however, the effect can be paralyzing. Coming at a time of heightened debate over the American base presence and the place of Okinawa in the Japanese state, the rereleases of Higa’s manga show the relevance of the manga medium to discussion of issues often sketched over by TV talk or twisted by the often crass alarmism of weekly magazines and mass market non-fiction.

Thermae Romae and Saint Young Men

The sight of foreigners fawning over ordinary Japanese things is an annoyingly common TV trope, but it remains that there are many things (ramen and the world of “b-rate gourmet,” hot springs, saké) that not only continue to stoke domestic passions but are fetishized by visitors and foreign residents of all kinds as well. There are also the difficult to describe but not infrequently unforgettable charms of shotengai (urban shopping arcades), game centers, summer festivals, and rural vistas. Two current manga hits, bathhouse time travel epic Thermae Romae and Saint Young Men, which follows Jesus and Buddha as they do their best to take it easy in the contemporary freeter mode, bring unusual outsiders into contact with the charms of everyday Japan.

In Yamazaki Mari’s Thermae Romae, Lucius, a Roman bath house master who undergoes periodic and inexplicable time slips, encounters the most jimi (rustic) that Japan has to offer and blends in the ludicrous and plainly self-deprecating. The Roman’s dazed encounters with ramune (a type of soda and ultimate nostalgia icon) and onsen tamago (hard boiled eggs cooked in the hot springs themselves) are both a fun tour through Japanese bathing culture and a constant source of effective visual gags. For readers sick of the normal gladiators and political machinations, Thermae Romae presents a very well-researched look at the Roman baths — how they were built and how they were enjoyed — to serve as a counterpoint to the temporal jaunts into present day Japan. The essays which punctuate the manga chapters alternate between details of Roman bath culture and stories such as the author’s accompanying of a dozen Italian seniors on a contemporary Japanese hot springs tour.

Saint Young Men follows the adventures of divine slackers Jesus and Buddha, taking a well deserved break from the holy. Scenes of school girls mistaking Jesus for Johnny Depp set the tone, and the series continues as a silly and laid back paean to everyday routine. As decline narratives proliferate inside and outside Japan, these two series offer a charming look at the rich patchwork of plebian culture that Japan can still count on.

Seraphim

Seraphim is a collaboration between two auteurs known more for their anime work. The series features art by the late Kon Satoshi of Perfect Blue and Paprika fame and a story plan by Oshii Mamoru, best known for Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell. While it never reaches the level of their famous anime films, Seraphim, released in a compiled volume for the first time in 2010, is a visually inventive, often striking manga that echoes Otomo Katsuhiro’s 1980s work on Akira while showcasing Kon’s dynamic and original visual sense. It also serves as a memorial to Kon who died in August and includes a series of essays and interviews.

Seraphim originally ran in flagship anime magazine Animage between 1994 and 1995. Oshii’s favorite symbols (birds, basset hounds, biblical references) are sprinkled liberally throughout but never quite come together like they do in his best film works. The story centers on the World Health Organization’s attempts to unravel the mystery of birds multiplying as humans are afflicted with “Angel Disease,” warping their forms into the “seraphim” of the title. The manga is unfinished and the plot is lacking in momentum and even coherence, but Kon’s artwork is more than enough to recommend the whole. The future director’s attempts to replicate cinematic lighting are often breathtaking and seem to foreshadow his screen ambitions. Even before the release of the first Ghost in the Shell film, Kon put to page Oshii’s vision of continental Asian cityscapes hovering between squalor and futurist exuberance. Kon will be missed as a filmmaker, but a string of 2010 rereleases will give many fans a chance to discover his manga work for the first time.

Imomushi (Caterpillar)

Novelist Edogawa Rampo and manga horror master Maruo Suehiro are a natural pairing. In late 2009 (cheating a bit on the 2010 theme here), Maruo produced Imomushi, his second Edogawa adaption. The story tracks a veteran, left a quadruple amputee, deaf and dumb, by a Russo-Japanese War shell, as he returns from the front to his horrified wife. The pair are thrown into a vortex of mental anguish, sadism, and masochism. This is obviously not easy material, but Maruo has developed his own take on the Taisho erotic-grotesque milieu in which Edogawa thrived. Most manga adaptations of literature seek to simplify. Maruo, however, adds something of his own. The sex scenes between the tragic pair are twisted enough to allow Mauro to maintain his reputation for the daringly transgressive, but here the artist doubles down with a form of artistic animism: insects, weeds, blades of grass, snaking vines, the environment is alive with a creeping power that mirrors the traumas and strange energies of the characters. This is Maruo’s art at its best, serving out visual horrors and doses of the morbidly fascinating while never sacrificing fidelity to Edogawa’s original. Whether he is working in his own gruesome worlds or adapting the classics of strange fiction, Maruo continues to be the master of manga grotesque.

Taboo Nihon Zankokushi (“Taboo” Cruel History of Japan)

I am neither of the target audience for josei (women’s) manga, nor am I a particularly ardent follower. One series that has grabbed my attention, however, is Bunkasha’s Manga Grimm Dowa (Manga Grimm Fairytales). The series began as a line of manga adaptations of the “real” bloody and explicit originals behind fairytale classics sanitized by Christian puritanism and Disneyfication. Running out of gore soaked Sleeping Beauties and Big Bad Wolves, the series has since sought other tales of cruelty — everything from serial killers, to Edo torture, to the racier classics of the European canon — and has made them into manga with varying degrees of success. Ichikawa Miu’s recent installment Taboo Nihon Zankokushi is not the most visually inventive, but it has considerable thematic strengths and reads like a contemporary manga take on the postwar Nihon Zankoku Monogatari (Cruel Stories of Japan) project. There, noted anthropologists and cultural critics outlined the starvation, torture, exploitation, and other horrors that characterized much of Japanese historical experience and in doing so sought to overturn the sanitized and banal boosterism of wartime propaganda versions of the past. In the manga, Ichikawa does the same for a Japanese past now often subject to the lame framing of TV trivia or yaoi-bait samurai boys.

Taboo Nihon Zankokushi looks at the historical suffering of the Ainu people, wartime violence, the forced internment of leprosy sufferers, and most interestingly, the seldom discussed sanka. This is a name given by Japanese folklorists and anthropologists to a group of nomadic mountain people who resisted the registration, compulsory education, and conscription that came with Japanese modernity.

2010 has seen the release of a number of interesting non-fiction titles on how Japanese culture and national cohesion are not “natural” in their 20th century forms but rather were created as part of the Meiji modernization. Even what is considered to be Japanese body language was selected from among countless regional and class variants, codified, and taught to the population, effectively becoming the new “normal.” Amid a rush of writing about other possibilities in Japan’s past, Ichikawa’s look at the sanka is, for manga, a fascinating link with what have typically been pigeonholed as academic debates. The manga, complete with explanatory essays, probes the history of this group and the social and political forces that snuffed them out of existence, often with considerable violence.

Happy New Year! What’s more exciting for 2011 than a few remaining lookbacks at 2010.

The official-as-these-things-get Kanji of the Year for 2010, unveiled on December 12 with about as much fanfare as you would expect, was 暑, “hot”. Hypothermia Hyperthermia deaths in summer and production troubles at farms and fisheries, widely interpreted as a playable demo of global warming’s effects… Chilean miners trapped underground where it’s, uh, hot… the heat of Hayabusa‘s re-entry, and the burning courage to face the future it inspired… all of these things, it seems, inspired the people’s choice.

Only five per cent of the vote was required for 暑’s victory, but this was still more than twice the percentage scored by the closest runner-up, 中, as in 中国, China, but also as in 中途半端, “half-baked, incomplete,” as in Hatoyama Yukio’s prime ministership (as one voter apparently put it).

The top 20 is pretty bleak overall: heat, nationalism, war, uncertainty… oh, and 嵐, “Arashi,” as in the boy band (although one voter graciously offered to share some glory with KARA), which made it to number 8 with 1.39%. (Since less than 300,000 votes are cast in all, any fanbase could probably put their group on top if they were sufficiently dedicated. Unfortunately for AKB48, their name contains no kanji.)

The Kanji Kentei Kabal are not the only ones who can choose a character of the year, of course. Japanese government members seized the opportunity for messaging: 行 (“go,” “perform”) from the Prime Minister, 拓 (“open,” but often in a high-level metaphorical sense, like 拓 (“open”, but often in the metaphorical sense e.g. 拓殖, “colonize”) from Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito, and the surprisingly frank 滞 (“stagnate”) from Finance Minister Kaieda Banri. Meanwhile, Defence Minister Kitazawa Toshimi chose 島 (“island”), referencing in his statement the many controversies and incidents that flared up in 2010 over islands and sovereignty over them.

In the private sector, @nifty’s Word of the Year 2010 [pdf] was also 暑, but as they break their results down by prefecture one can see that, for example, Arashi have a lot of fans in Shiga, and people in Saitama are suffering. At their press conference, idol Yūki Maomi declared that her kanji of the year was 体, body, ingeniously deconcretizing the alienating metaphors of time-as-object and year-as-chapter by recentering the discourse on the individual as actualized through immediate, physical perception and expression.

In closing, allow me to announce Néojaponisme’s Kanji of the Year for 2010:

Momme. A unit of weight (and, by extension, of currency), last fixed at 3.75 grams by the Meiji government in 1891. A character born in Japan as a compressed version of 文メ, the word itself an abbreviation for ichi-mon sen no mekata (“weight of a one-mon coin”). A word used in the modern age only to quantify pearls and silk.

And now, as one of the five kanji removed from the jōyō list in 2010, a concept that schoolchildren will no longer be required even to feign familiarity with, let alone write.

… Nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
traditia sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, momme, ave atque vale.

2010 was a pivotal year for the Democratic Party of Japan — but not necessarily a productive or successful one. To get a sense of the Kan administration, we threw a few questions to resident Japanese political analyst Tobias Harris of Observing Japan.

1. Has the Kan administration been a failure? Would you blame the problems of his administration on unavoidable structural reasons or tactical political errors?

It would be hard not to call the Kan government a failure. As for the reasons, it’s a little bit structural and a little bit tactical — and there’s a considerable degree of interaction between the two. For example, the central challenge for the Japanese government today is overcoming deflation, or perhaps more accurately the profound economic insecurity that has produced persistent deflation. Deflation is hard for any government to overcome; as we’re seeing, it’s nearly impossible for a government that never regained its ability to use conventional monetary policy tools and that dug itself into a deep hole fiscally after its earlier bout with deflation. But as long as the economy is deflationary, any growth strategy is bound to be stillborn and efforts to fix the government’s finances through tax increases will be counterproductive.

But that being said, the Kan government — and, of course, the Hatoyama government before it — has barely hinted at new policies for fighting deflation (threatening to amend the Bank of Japan law to get the bank to act more aggressively) and beyond that, a realistic vision for the Japanese economy. How can Japan have enough growth so as to be able to provide for its aging population over the coming decades? A broader economic vision may be an essential step for curing deflation, in that the government needs to convince Japanese citizens that the government will be able to provide some modicum of economic security. Absent that, the Japanese people are wise to curtail their consumption.

Of course, to convince the public that the future is secure, the government may have to go deeper in debt, which may further produce greater insecurity.

Meanwhile, the Kan government’s handling of the Senkaku incident grievously damaged its public approval. As in other policy areas, the Kan government reacted first, and then figured out what it hoped to achieve as it tried to resolve the dispute. In the final analysis Japan may well have won the showdown in that China badly overreached, alienating its neighbors and reinforcing the impression that has formed over the past year that it is anxious to flex its muscles in Asia. But Japanese public opinion usually does not consider foreign policy matters in this manner: it hurt the government because the government looked incompetent. I would argue that Hatoyama was punished over Futenma for the same reason.

2. What has the DPJ actually accomplished policy-wise since taking over? Did they succeed in taking power from the bureaucrats?

It’s a fairly short list. Arguably it has been most successful in foreign and security policy, Futenma notwithstanding. The DPJ has focused on building better bilateral relations with the region’s other middle powers (South Korea, Australia, India, etc.). It is in the process of showing that it is possible for a Japanese government to take security policy seriously without “rearming” or revising the constitution. It has had its share of foreign policy failures, of course: Futenma, the TPP debacle (which may yet yield fruit if raising the issue began a process of building an intellectual consensus in favor of trade liberalization), the Senkaku affair.

Domestically, it is harder to identify successes. Yes, it managed to include some of its campaign promises in the budget, which only goes to show just how pedestrian those promises were. Tax reform? A new Japanese-style welfare state? Decentralization? It is hard to say that the DPJ has made forward progress on any of these issues. As far as the policymaking process is concerned, the DPJ has succeeded in shifting power to the cabinet. The problem, of course, is that it was never good enough for the DPJ to shift power to political leaders in the executive. As I’ve stressed, the DPJ’s leaders have been singularly incapable of using power. The DPJ has failed not because of opposition from the bureaucracy or the LDP or the media, although these factors may be of secondary importance, but because of its own deficiencies: its inexperience, its ideas deficit, and its weak leaders.

3. What do you expect to happen for the DPJ in 2011?

I’m reluctant to make any firm predictions, particularly because at the moment the newspapers are filled (yet again) with talk of party splits and realignment and grand coalitions, but I suspect that the next election will produce a grand coalition. I have a hard time seeing how the DPJ will rebuild its public approval. But, at the same time, the LDP has not managed to capitalize on the DPJ’s unpopularity. While it has recently passed the DPJ in the polls, one would expect that an opposition party facing a ruling party as hapless at the DPJ would hold a commanding lead. We’re not seeing that. Your Party will no doubt build on earlier successes in the next election, which only raises the likelihood of the next election’s resulting in a hung parliament. At that point, I expect that pressure will build for the two biggest parties to form a national unity government to tackle some of the particularly pressing economic problems — tax reform and social security reform, for example — and then perhaps call another election.

In other words, the DPJ’s victory last year was only the first step on the long road to a new model of Japanese governance.

Popular culture may be imploding in Japan, but this has been good news for the otaku. With not much competition from the trend-minded consumer habits of normal human beings, the otaku have become the most influential player in the market. The few cultural breakthroughs of the last few years have come from this long-standing subculture’s deep psychological need to interact with people in mediated ways, from obsessing over idol collectives, making songs powered by vocaloids, collecting toys, anonymously writing online about their newest favorite anime featuring little girls, and following every moment of Cooking Idol Main.

To get a better sense of what is going on lately in otaku culture, Marxy of Néojaponisme sat down with Patrick Macias — editor of Otaku USA and author of such books as Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo — and Matt Alt — author of Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide and Ninja Attack!: True Tales of Assassins, Samurai, and Outlaws — in a cold basement, warmed only by the glow of an old kotatsu.

Listen to the hour-long discussion on the past, present, and future of otaku culture and what it means for us non-otaku.

Download: On Otaku: Marxy x Patrick Macias x Matt Altt
General Néojaponisme Podcast RSS Feed: .rss

Related Articles:
• Matt Alt translation of seminal 1980s article “What Kind of Otaku Are You”
• Matt Alt translation of seminal 1980s article “Can Otaku Love Like Normal People”
• Podcast with Patrick Macias on Japanese style and fashion: Harajuku Requiem
• Podcast with Patrick Macias on Japanese recessionary culture: The Tonkatsu Tapes

Up until this year, Japan’s still-massive music industry looked like it would continue to avoid the fate of its overseas counterparts, which have almost all been shaken to the core by declining record sales. Even though the Japanese industry has mostly failed to export its products abroad at rates commensurate with anime and video games or generate any new and innovative models of pop stardom, its bottom line has not taken a haircut on par with the ones taken by its American and European brethren.

Physical record sales have been declining for years, and growth within the digital market finally petered out earlier in 2010. In fact, sales of digital products are down 5% quarter-to-quarter from 2009. There are still viable mass-market stars of the girl-pop, “pretty boys,” and nerd-exploitation-pop varieties, but fewer and fewer of them can actually attain any meaningful level of popularity. And the markets for niche material — classical, jazz, blues, rap, metal, etc. — are steadily collapsing. To be sure, file-sharing — the great disruptor of music revenues worldwide — has played a part in the industry’s contraction. Yet the baseline assumption that music is something free which comes from a digital tap hasn’t taken a strong hold in Japan despite being so prevalent in the West and other parts of Asia.

So digital distribution has arrived through establishment channels, leading to digital products like the Chaku-Uta Full download. ¥350 gets you a single song, packed to the brim with Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. This prevents you from sharing it with your friends, but also prevents you from, say, taking a song you bought on your phone and playing it on your PC.

People continue to buy these Chaku-Uta Full by the truckload despite their inherent inflexibility. Their sales comprised about ¥12 billion of the ¥21 billion worth of digital music products sold in the third fiscal quarter of 2010. But the genius of the format is that the act of paying for a Chaku-Uta is completely abstracted. The charge for the song appears on your wireless bill, and it’s not even a single line-item. You’re sold the right to download the song for ¥200 and another ¥150 for the bandwidth required to transfer it to your phone. The upshot: There’s very little chance here for the final cash-register moment of reflection, the realization that you could probably buy your boyfriend a nice lunch or something for the price of an ultimately-not-so-great Koda Kumi CD. So songs become an impulse buy lumped into a mysterious phone bill, and the industry collects a massive margin (we estimate around ¥200 per track). It’s a heck of a cash cow, but the widespread consensus within the industry is that its age is at a close and there is no clear candidate to replace it.

The issue is the widespread adoption of smartphones. When your phone is a computer and your data plan is unlimited, you move from a closed consumption environment to an open one. And from the perspective of the Japanese music industry, the track record of monetizing music within such environments looks bone-chilling. In the US and Europe, the iOS and Android App Stores have set users’ expectations with regard to how they’ll pay for digital content, as well as opened up the market for a variety of new sellers, enriching Apple and other new players at the expense of major labels. The alternatives are even worse: Cloud-based applications like Rdio or MOG have so far provided payouts in the range of a tenth of a cent per track downloaded.

If that all sounds like a hopeless situation for content owners, observers should take care not to discount the reasons why they’ve been able to avoid catastrophe so far. Big firms remain willing to use powerful strong-arm tactics to protect their interests. For instance, Sony Music Entertainment alone has basically been able to keep iTunes from really reaching critical mass in Japan all by itself by flat-out refusing to allow its music onto the platform. The same sort of thing could keep the smartphone-distribution market from collapse (or rationalization, depending on one’s point of view). The industry could very well figure out a way to create some viable smartphone-enabled Chaku-Uta variant by sheer force of numbers.

But they would have to do it in unfamiliar territory. In Japan, when cell phone makers were writing music software for mobile devices, they worked together with the major labels through every step of the process. They were therefore able to create digital music products and payment schemes that suited their needs, not necessarily consumers’. This dynamic is reversed on more open smartphone OSes, which generally aim to provide functionality and freedom to end users and transact through credit cards (rather than, say, series of deliberately-obtuse line items on a wireless bill). Maintaining the security of DRM in a completely open OS environment like Android, for example, is a technical concern. But more important is the battle of ideas. The threshold of freedom Japanese consumers have over the use of their devices is moving. People are demanding — and getting — more for less.

It is fair to say that this is not a situation the establishment industry apparatus is prepared for. In all likelihood it will figure out a way to maintain its hold on music in Japan, but 2010 was the last year anybody could say so for sure.

Sources:
McClure’s Asia Music News: (1, 2)