How Outsourcing and Overwork Have Put the Anime Industry in Crisis
An Interview with Terumi Nishii, Part 1
By Patrick Macias
Terumi Nishii is an animation director and character designer who has had a long career in Japan working on such hits as One Piece, Pokémon, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable
In April 2019, Terumi made headlines when she tweeted in English about difficult working conditions within the anime industry, flat out telling her audience of mostly foreigners, “No matter how much you like anime, it is not advisable to come to Japan and participate in anime work. Because the animation industry is usually overworked”.
In part 1 of my interview with Terumi, we zero in some of the biggest problems facing animators in Japan today with some possible solutions and rays of hope to be revealed in part 2. Enjoy…
What made you want to work in the anime industry?
Terumi Nishii: Actually, I originally wanted to be a manga artist. I was working with someone from the Shonen Jump editorial team to get my work published, but then I saw Evangelion and I decided I wanted to make anime instead. It just looked cooler.
What were the conditions like when you first entered the industry?
It was really fun. It was the best time in my career and in my life. I was in sort of a training program / test period in an anime studio called Cockpit. I could do the thing I loved and get some money for it. It wasn’t enough to live on — I was only getting paid 2800 yen a month (about US$25.00) — but I was only doing tracing of other people’s drawing. A few months later I was offered a job there for around 50000 yen a month (about US$450) doing phone operator work, sales, and some project managing.
How did your career develop from there?
I worked under Kagawa Hisashi, the animation director of Sailor Moon, for a while. Then I worked under the My Hero Academia character designer and animation director Yoshihiko Umakoshi for ten years. Next, I worked for director Kunihiko Ikuhara on Penguindrum (2011) and that’s when I started working more independently and getting bigger projects. Recently, I worked on the Netflix version of Saint Seiya, but it’s probably been JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure that has gotten me the most international attention.
What made you want to speak out recently about the negative side of the anime industry?
Around 2014, I was working on the Mushishi TV anime, but it was taken off the air because they didn’t meet the production schedule and had to take a whole season off to catch up. I felt really bad about that. Then I started looking around the industry and saw that things like that were happening more and more. Shows were not able to meet their deadlines. And that’s when I started to realize there was a problem.
JoJo’s began having similar issues as well, and around 2015–2016, it just felt like there weren’t enough people who could do the work sufficiently. The industry was getting into a situation where no one could even make storyboards correctly and the big studios could no longer find outside vendors who could do the work.
What do you think are the root causes of these staffing problems?
There’s a situation now where there are more and more anime shows than there used to be, and you are not allowed to reduce the quality, so there’s a lot of overwork. There didn’t used to be so much outsourcing in the industry before, but now there is lots of it. And that has increased the number of people who have to work on each project. In the past, it might take 2 months to complete a job, but these days you have double the number of people working to try and complete a project in 1 month.
So if you have a series that goes from a 12 episode season, to 24 episodes, and 36 episodes, and keeps continuing then it expands the number of people who are working on the project. It requires more management and just makes everything more complicated.
Instead of an anime project being made in one studio, it is outsourced to 10 different studios and everyone is working on multiple projects at the same time. And if you have to keep the quality high, while trying to shrink the timeline down to complete projects, then that just makes the job tougher and tougher. The project managers really can’t sleep. They are working hard 24/7.
You tweeted that “…with the increase of the number of works in recent years, some people have broken mind and body”. Do you have more specific examples?
Two of my sempai died in their 40s and I definitely think it was because of overwork. A lot of people have had aneurysms or heart attacks because of overwork. Lots of people working on projects have to be stopped because of doctor’s orders telling them they need to rest. I know someone who was working as a project line manager who had an issue with blood clot in his leg and couldn’t walk and had to take time off. There are cases where people die, and those often make the news, but there are a lot of cases that you don’t hear about where people are overworked and have to take a break for medical reasons.
Is the anime industry looking for any solutions to these problems?
Most people are resigned to the situation as it is now, and I don’t really see a lot of people trying to fix the situation. The studios actually only have a few employees and are outsourcing and using contractors for everything, so it’s a problem that can’t be fixed by just one company alone. Everybody has to do it together. Since everything is already outsourced and in the middle of all these projects, it’s really really hard to fix the problem.
20 years ago, the situation wasn’t like it is today. There wasn’t as much work so the industry was a little more picky about staffing. These days, there’s way too much work and there’s not enough people. So if you have some level of talent, then you can find a place in the industry somehow. That doesn’t mean you will make a lot of money or make a living, but you can participate.
Do you think the quality of anime getting worse?
Yes, it is.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity
Patrick Macias is the editor in chief of Otaku USA magazine. He is also the original story author of the anime series URAHARA.
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Terumi Nishii on Twitter (English): nishiiterumi1
Terumi Nishii on Patreon: www.patreon.com/NISHII_Terumi
"I wanted to erase Evangelion" - About Yuko Miyamura's infamous relationship with the Evangelion franchise and it's creator Hideaki Anno
Despite the praise and love the creator and director of the classic “Neon Genesis Evangelion” Hideaki Anno and his creation may receive from many fans. The same adoration cannot be said for the voice actress of the ever iconic Asuka Langley Soryu, Yuko Miyamura.
[the op’s deleted so the rest of the article is gone but someone reposted it on reddit]
Although Hideaki Anno has always been known for being a tough director, not much can compare to Yuko Miyamura’s experience doing her voice for Asuka Langley Soryu. Most specifically during her time working on the final instalment of the series “The End of Evangelion”.
Once all of the lines for the film were recorded, Anno was dissatisfied with her performance and summoned Miyamura to the studio to revise her final line. Seeing as the scene was between both Asuka and Shinji, Megumi Ogata was brought to the studio as well (despite it was only Miyamura’s line Anno had problems with).
In the original script Asuka’s finale line was “Anta nankani korosareru nowa mappira yo!” which can be translated to “I’d hate to be killed by a bastard like you!” But no matter what Miyamura tried, Anno remained unsatisfied with her, leaving both Miyamura and Ogata at a complete loss as to what needed to be done.
Anno then had Ogata straddle and choke Miyamura just as Shinji did to Asuka during the final scene in the film. It was so rough that Miyamura had difficulty speaking for the rest of the day. In Miyamura’s 2005 Anime Yawa interview she told the story of what Anno said to her after the choking idea failed.
“‘At last Anno asked me ‘Miyamura, just imagine you are sleeping in your bed and a stranger sneaks into your room. He can rape you anytime as you are asleep but he doesn’t. Instead, he masturbates looking at you, when you wake up and know what he did to you. What do you think you would say?’ I had been thinking he was a strange* man, but at that moment I felt disgusting. So I told him that I thought ‘Disgusting.’ And then he sighed and said, ‘I thought as much.’”
*It is worth noting that when she describes Anno as “strange”, the translation is a bit off and can also be interpreted as “odd”, “freaky” or “creepy”.
The conversation between the two is what lead Anno to change the final line in the film to the iconic “kimochi warui”.
After finishing her work on Evangelion, between the stress of her sex scandal, having a stalker because of her voicing Asuka and many scary incidents with fans Miyamura moved to Australia. She’s then proceeding to do most of her voice work from studios there.
Prior to the Rebuild films release and with no Asuka in the first film “Rebuild of Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone” there were many fan speculations all across the web and betting pools as to what new voice actress would take over as Asuka as no one expected Miyamura to return.
In Miyamura’s 2010 SMASH interview when asked about her experiences voice acting and if she ever regretted anything, she admitted “At one point in time, I thought to myself that I would never act as Asuka again” and “For a very long time I wanted to erase Evangelion”. When asked if the series was truly that hard to work on, she very clearly expressed that “it was very hard”.
Two years ago she was a guest at Saboten Con in Phoenix Arizona, and in a panel with some other guests they were all asked something to the effect of what was the lowest point in your career, and she went to explain in detail this scene and the situation with Anno being a slave driver, and being genuinely afraid of what vulgar and abhorrent things were happening to her, and the situation she, and potentially the rest of the cast was in if they were to proceed with, I’ll be generous and call it “method-acting”. The entire ballroom fell completely silent no one could say a word, and honestly what could you possibly say to bring up the spirits of a crowd in that instance. People were walking on eggshells around her the entire rest of the convention being as polite and respectful as humanly possible, and there was a heavy drop-off in Eva related questions as a result of that.
I didnt need this to hate Anno and Evangelion, i had plenty of reasons already, but if this is the that puts it over the edge for you, thats more than enough for me. This man does not deserve any of the hype, or respect, or admiration that he gets for his own self-admitted grandest failure.
I wonder what kind of symbolism they’re trying to get at
“There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool. If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice.” -Kazuya Tsurumaki, assistant director/art director on Neon Genesis Evangelion
The repeated evocations of Zeus’s law of kindness toward strangers are surely intended to be read in light of the Trump administration’s shockingly inhospitable attitude toward immigrants and foreigners in the United States.
More broadly, the film’s morality rejects the domination- and strength-based masculinity of the Greek kings, an echo of contemporary MAGA machismo that often takes Greek and Roman civilization as a warped inspiration, as fundamentally counterproductive. Multiple characters, most notably Menelaus, repeatedly ask who will raise Ithaca’s armies in order to fend off the coming sea people, but of course it turns out that the sea people are Ithaca’s armies: The raising of an army of Greeks by their warrior-kings is the very cause of the problem, not the solution.
Nolan does not, however, reject civilization itself. Nolan has his critiques for this society, to be sure: Penelope points out the inherent unfairness that despite having ruled Ithaca for 20 years, as a woman she cannot be its official ruler and is instead pressured to find a husband, while Nolan inserts a critique of wealth by having the rich and contemptible suitor Antinous use his wealth to avoid the Trojan War at the cost of the poor and genuine Sinon.
However, civilization itself is represented as a positive good, the decline of which is a catastrophe. The war and the suitors disrupt a society on Ithaca that is presented as largely wholesome and good, while Odysseus himself is quick to represent writing and song as arts that preserve wisdom by preserving the memory of past mistakes. The result is a fundamentally conservative, almost Burkean critique: Whatever structural problems society has, its catastrophic collapse comes not from those structural issues but from the violation of long-standing norms of behavior. Odysseus’s horse breached not only Troy’s gates, but also Chesterton’s fence.
Nolan’s The Odyssey, like the original poem, is self-conscious of its role in culture, opening with a bard beginning to sing the story of Odysseus in his own hall. Nolan thus levies a conservative critique of the current moment by using Homer’s story to position himself as speaking for Western civilization and the Western literary canon itself.
The film declares that far from being the thing to save Western civilization, the machismo that delights in cruelty to outsiders and strangers, which prizes the ruthlessness and stoic emotionlessness of Agamemnon or the savage cunning of Odysseus himself, is the very thing causing a contemporary civilizational collapse, by rupturing the bonds between men. We are the sea people, who, with our inhumanity and rapacious greed, have become the barbarians at our own gates.
Odysseus at the End of Civilization
Nolan’s film confronts the betrayal of the West’s own values.
Nolan’s film confronts the betrayal of the West’s own values.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey became a target in online culture wars long before it was released. Much ado was made concerning its historical accuracy, largely from far-right posters on X.
Homer’s Odyssey is one of the most retold and reworked stories in literature, whether it’s set in outer space or Dublin in 1904. Nolan’s version is much more of a remix than a cover, using the set pieces and themes of the 8th-century B.C. oral poem to frame a critique of very modern reactionary movements in politics and culture and to warn that the destruction of norms of civility—especially toward immigrants, foreigners, and strangers—risks a broader cultural collapse.
If the film’s pre-release critics, enraged over Nolan’s decision to adopt a diverse cast, had waited for the release, they could have instead been angry over its themes, which position the film as speaking for the norms and civility of the Western civilization those critics claim to prize, but which violently rejects their xenophobia and dominance-oriented machismo.
“Historical accuracy” is a difficult framework for Homer. Homer’s poem itself is a mélange of historical elements scattered over the nearly four and a half centuries from when its events were to have taken place to its final composition. Homer freely mixes elements of the late Bronze Age with elements of his own time in the early Archaic and purely fantastical elements, creating a kind of free-floating timelessness.
Nolan likely likewise evades strict accuracy. While the film engages with the idea of the late Bronze Age collapse, a wave of site destructions and imperial destabilizations that occurred from c. 1220 to c. 1170 B.C., it is very much also a film about now, and Nolan has opted for a visual style that aims for fantastical timelessness.
While a handful of the props are authentic to the Bronze Age, most notably some of the weapons on the walls of Odysseus’s palace, most of the visual elements are designed for their visual impression, not for accuracy. Like the original poem, much of the narrative is told in flashbacks, fitting for the recollections of an Odysseus still very much processing his trauma. Agamemnon’s huge hulking black armor, for instance, has relatively little to do with historic Greek armor from any period, but it expresses his character in the film: an almost entirely faceless, frequently voiceless force of destruction that propels our main character toward the committing of what the film presents as a civilization-destroying original sin.
Nolan signals that he intends to depart from the strict text of the Odyssey early in the film, notably altering the recognition device between Odysseus and Penelope that serves as the ultimate climax of the poem. Odysseus’s stay on Phaeacia, where he meets Nausicaa and Alcinous, is also gone, its narrative elements instead transferred to conversations between Odysseus and Calypso. Characters are altered or merged, most notably with the film’s Sinon, a character from Virgil’s Aeneid rather than Homer, who takes on the role of Odysseus’s ill-fated companion Elpenor from the Odyssey.
Apocalypse shadows the story. Throughout the film, characters ominously mention rumors of the sea people, raiders from the sea whose identity remains vague until late in the film. Alongside this, both Odysseus and Penelope openly ask if their civilization is “collapsing”; the film ends with Odysseus commenting to Penelope that future generations would need bards to keep their stories because they would no longer be able to write.
This is rooted in a real historical question. The ancient Greeks offered a range of dates for the fall of Troy, most famously Eratosthenes’s date of 1184 B.C., which accords with the archaeological evidence for the destruction of a settlement layer at Hissarlik in western Anatolia, part of the broader late Bronze Age collapse that also consumes the Mycenaean palaces of Bronze Age Greece.
As these site destructions rippled eastward (they seem to have started in Greece), they created waves of armed raiders or refugees, referred to in Egyptian records as the “sea peoples.” Scholars now generally assess that the collapse began as climatic shifts caused political instability in the highly centralized palace economies of the region as more fragile states on the periphery began to collapse. This disrupted trade flows and created conflict and refugee flows that brought down the larger states in a domino collapse that eventually consumed much of the eastern Mediterranean littoral.
This was probably the closest any large region has ever come to a true “end of civilization” event, although the destructions were hardly universal even within the eastern Mediterranean. Greek civilization in this period did collapse so badly that writing was lost. When Greek writing reemerged in the 8th century B.C., it did so with a new alphabet based on Phoenician letters, the Greek alphabet and literary tradition with which we are now familiar.
The idea of the Trojan War marking the beginning of an end to an era was hardly alien to the ancient Greeks. Although the Greeks of Homer’s day (Homer wrote in the mid-8th century B.C.) had only an extremely vague cultural memory of the late Bronze Age and no real knowledge of its collapse, they did understand the warriors who fought at Troy and their children as the last generations of an age of heroes, before the world settled down into their own contemporary, far less fantastical age. There is a sense of tragedy and loss in the Nostoi, the returns of the heroes of Troy, who occupy a dying world in Greek mythology.
Nolan’s preoccupation with this theme, however, is distinctly modern. While scholars generally attribute the historical late Bronze Age collapse to a range of factors including climatic disruption, endemic warfare, economic interdependence, and large-scale refugee flows, Nolan’s vision is instead focused on moral failing.
As Odysseus himself reveals to Penelope in a moment of unvarnished soul-baring, the sea people are not some foreign threat, but rather the Greeks themselves (which is, as best scholars can tell, also an accurate statement about the historical sea peoples), the product of their violation of the norms of civilized behavior in the destruction of Troy, embodied in the sacrilegious deceit of the Trojan horse itself. The audience thus discovers that the trauma that Odysseus has been suffering for the whole film is his sense that he is ultimately responsible for the original sin, the first violation that has brought the collapse of civilization.
This civilization-ending sin is expressed through the motif of cruelty to strangers, invoked in the film as “Zeus’s law,” the Greek concept of xenia, or hospitality, in which a host has a responsibility to feed and protect a guest, and guests have matching responsibilities to their hosts. The suitors, in both abusing Penelope’s hospitality and equally abusing beggars and strangers who come to the palace as guests, violate xenia in both directions at once, but they are hardly the only ones. The violation of xenia and its consequences is one of the central preoccupations of Homer’s Odyssey, but whereas Homer treats this violation of xenia largely as an individual sin, Nolan transforms it into a civilizational one.
It is cruelty to strangers that marks out the inhuman monsters—the cyclops, the Laestrygonians, and Circe—that Odysseus encounters in his travels. Yet these inhuman acts are paralleled in the narrative by the Greeks’ own cruelty to strangers, expressed by the suitors’ sadistic treatment of guests in Odysseus’s palace, Odysseus’s own men’s greedy raiding, and of course the brutal sack of Troy. Circe’s claim that the Greeks’ human shape is a false form, that their real form is that of pigs ruled by their greed and appetites, seems self-serving at first, until Odysseus at the conclusion of the film recounts the horrors of the fall of Troy and the audience sees that Circe was fundamentally correct.
Odysseus himself then brings the theme full circle, realizing to Penelope when they at last reunite that the Greeks themselves were the sea people, that in their barbarous sack of Troy they broke the rightful bonds between men, which has haunted Odysseus for the entire film. Odysseus in turn foresees that the contagious effects of these actions will spread until the whole of their own civilization collapses.
Nolan thus presents a vision of civilizational collapse motivated by the collapse of social norms of hospitality, kindness, and mercy. While Odysseus by the film’s end puts much of the blame for this breach on himself and goes into exile as a kind of expiation of his guilt, the film as a whole finds other figures to blame as well. The most notable is Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, who appears as a nearly silent, almost elemental force of menace in the film, the true author of civilization’s collapse.
This is a critique framed in terms of an ancient collapse that is nevertheless deeply embedded in the present. The repeated evocations of Zeus’s law of kindness toward strangers are surely intended to be read in light of the Trump administration’s shockingly inhospitable attitude toward immigrants and foreigners in the United States.
More broadly, the film’s morality rejects the domination- and strength-based masculinity of the Greek kings, an echo of contemporary MAGA machismo that often takes Greek and Roman civilization as a warped inspiration, as fundamentally counterproductive. Multiple characters, most notably Menelaus, repeatedly ask who will raise Ithaca’s armies in order to fend off the coming sea people, but of course it turns out that the sea people are Ithaca’s armies: The raising of an army of Greeks by their warrior-kings is the very cause of the problem, not the solution.
Nolan does not, however, reject civilization itself. Nolan has his critiques for this society, to be sure: Penelope points out the inherent unfairness that despite having ruled Ithaca for 20 years, as a woman she cannot be its official ruler and is instead pressured to find a husband, while Nolan inserts a critique of wealth by having the rich and contemptible suitor Antinous use his wealth to avoid the Trojan War at the cost of the poor and genuine Sinon.
However, civilization itself is represented as a positive good, the decline of which is a catastrophe. The war and the suitors disrupt a society on Ithaca that is presented as largely wholesome and good, while Odysseus himself is quick to represent writing and song as arts that preserve wisdom by preserving the memory of past mistakes. The result is a fundamentally conservative, almost Burkean critique: Whatever structural problems society has, its catastrophic collapse comes not from those structural issues but from the violation of long-standing norms of behavior. Odysseus’s horse breached not only Troy’s gates, but also Chesterton’s fence.
Nolan’s The Odyssey, like the original poem, is self-conscious of its role in culture, opening with a bard beginning to sing the story of Odysseus in his own hall. Nolan thus levies a conservative critique of the current moment by using Homer’s story to position himself as speaking for Western civilization and the Western literary canon itself.
The film declares that far from being the thing to save Western civilization, the machismo that delights in cruelty to outsiders and strangers, which prizes the ruthlessness and stoic emotionlessness of Agamemnon or the savage cunning of Odysseus himself, is the very thing causing a contemporary civilizational collapse, by rupturing the bonds between men. We are the sea people, who, with our inhumanity and rapacious greed, have become the barbarians at our own gates.
"I only hate Nazi (Zionist) Jews. If you're not that. we're cool."
My brother in Christ-killing, Nazis are National Socialists, committed to extending social supports to all members of the Aryan Race within Greater Germany as violently reclaimed by Adolf Hitler beginning in 1938. Zionist Jews are the opposite of Aryan, and thus can never be Nazis. You are talking about Jewish fascists enacting a specific form of far-right Israel jingoism, sometimes known as Kahanists. Moreover, we are not cool.
Saw something that disturbed me. Someone advocating that people over 65 shouldn't be allowed to vote. 65. To be clear it's also terrible when people talk about stopping people who are 80+ or whatever from voting. That's still terrible. But still. 65.
Netanyahu talking shit about the Iran nuclear deal in congress at the invite of Republicans is not the worst thing ever done but I still find it remarkably insulting.
"i know this show was made for children but i enjoy it too." > awesome and cool. watch whatever you want forever.
"i know it LOOKS like it was made for children but its SECRETLY for us. calling it a kids show is an insult cause kids could never understand these THEMES and EMOTIONS. we're the TRUE fans." > i dont think i trust your opinions. you seem lame as fuck.
I'm going to fix everything in the next three hours everyone wish me luck. if i dont then probably ill dig a hole and lie down in it for a bit in the rain/sun/whatever outside looks like these days
