Why Japan Is on the Precipice of a Content Boom
For the past year and a half, Netflix’s Minyoung Kim, the Asia-based executive commonly credited with building the company’s winning strategy in Korea, hasn’t been spending much time in Seoul. Instead, the content vp who famously greenlit Squid Game has been living full-time in Tokyo, laying the groundwork for Netflix’s next bold bet in the international content space: Japanese entertainment, which the company believes could be poised for a major revitalization.
“You know, not long ago there wasn’t much interest in Korean culture, but thanks to the strength of our pop entertainment, we were able to earn that curiosity from people around the world,” Kim says during an interview at Netflix’s offices in central Tokyo. “Japan right now is almost the opposite. There has never been more global curiosity and love for Japanese culture — and with that interest, there is so much potential for Japan’s entertainment industry to regain momentum.”
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The growing global embrace of all things Japanese was in evidence the weekend of Dec. 8 at the U.S. theatrical box office, where 82-year-old anime legend Hayao Miyazaki’s 12th feature film, The Boy and the Heron, earned $12.8 million, the best North American opening of his career. The same weekend, Godzilla Minus One, Toho Studios’ 37th film in the 70-year Godzilla franchise, climbed to $25.3 million in its second weekend, setting an all-time record for the most earned in North American theaters by a live-action Japanese film.
Netflix and its mapjor streaming peers, Kim suggests, have identified a tantalizing proposition in contemporary Japan: a large, upper-income market that still has significant room for greater subscription video uptake and a creative sector that has been under-leveraged on a global basis for years — particularly when it comes to live-action entertainment.
Kim adds: “The other players, outside of Japan, are also smelling the opportunity, and they’re all trying to come into Japan. As long as that is done in a way that does not cause too much of a bubble, I think it actually will be a very healthy stimulus that energizes the whole Japanese industry.”
For much of the latter half of the 20th century, Japan’s television industry was the regional creative and commercial leader, with its classic TV dramas distributed extensively throughout Asia. Japanese dramas from the 1970s and 1980s served as one of the templates for the innovative television drama industry that would later emerge in South Korea. But beginning sometime in the 1990s and early 2000s — during Japan’s so-called lost decade of economic malaise — the country’s once-vaunted commercial TV industry began to lose some of its energy and innovative spirit. So, while Hollywood underwent the platinum age of prestige TV and Korean drama continually improved and eventually conquered the world, production values and storytelling templates in Japan mostly stayed the same.
Japan’s total subscription video market is currently worth $4.6 billion in annual revenue, according to estimates from regional consultancy Media Partners Asia. Meanwhile, only 44 percent of households in Japan have at least one subscription video service, compared to a penetration rate of 86 percent in the United States. According to Media Partners Asia forecasts, Japan’s total SVOD revenue will continue growing by roughly 5 percent a year for the next half-decade.
“Japan is far and away the largest accessible SVOD pie still out there, after China,” says Vivek Couto, executive director and co-founder of Media Partners Asia. “It’s already a big business and remains a lucrative opportunity.”
The boom times for Japanese anime have been underway for some time. In 2021, the global market for Japanese anime expanded 13 percent to an all-time high of $20 billion (2.74 trillion yen), according to the Association of Japanese Animations. (The organization’s report covering 2022 will be released later in December, and industry players are expecting another year of robust growth.) That same year, Netflix said half of its subscribers worldwide watched at least some anime content on the platform, while 90 percent of subscribers in Japan watched titles in the category.
But the live-action series space is the area of Japanese entertainment where the surging investment from big foreign streamers is changing production standards most — and where insiders say there is the biggest potential for a reinvigorating shake-up.
“Overall, when we look at the pie across SVOD services [in Japan], anime tends to be a baseline must-have for customer retention and engagement, but it’s live-action that is over-indexing when it comes to user acquisition,” says Dhivya T, lead analyst at Media Partners Asia.
Over the past 12 months, Netflix has significantly ramped up its output of Japanese live-action releases — revenge drama Burn the House Down, sumo wrestling drama Sanctuary, and romance series First Love and Let’s Get Divorced, along with original films like the manga adaptations Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead and upcoming City Hunter — while also achieving its biggest international Japanese live-action hit with the second season of the dystopian thriller Alice in Borderland, which quickly became the most watched Japanese show ever on Netflix (including anime titles). The company’s English-language adaptation of the iconic Japanese manga One Piece — led by U.S. producers working in consultation on cultural matters with Netflix’s Tokyo team — reached No. 1 in 86 countries, surpassing the Netflix debut record previously set by Stranger Things and Wednesday.
Netflix is closing out 2023 with two of its largest Japanese titles of the year: Yu Yu Hakusho, a big-budget series adaptation of the legendary supernatural manga of the same name, which was released in the 1990s but still commands a significant international cult following; and Pokémon Concierge, a stop-motion animation series revolving around a tropical resort for Pokémon characters — which Netflix is hyping as a cuddly comfort-watch for all ages.
By the end of 2023, Netflix says it expects Japanese fare to be the third-most-viewed non-English content category, after Korean and Spanish, respectively.
Yu Yu Hakusho is particularly indicative of Netflix’s bullishness on the opportunity that could come with leveling up Japanese live-action. Despite the original title’s enormous popularity, most within Japan’s film and TV industry had always considered the manga unadaptable because of its many fantastical elements, mind-bending creature characters and seemingly unfilmable action sequences. But Netflix spent five years creating Yu Yu Hakusho’s first five-episode season — two years in development, 10 months shooting and over two years in post-production — working with eight visual effects companies around the world, most notably multi-award winner Scanline VFX (known for its work on everything from Game of Thrones to Marvel tentpoles), which employed cutting-edge volumetric capture technology to map the actors’ facial performances onto the elaborate creatures their characters morph into and out of throughout the story. The series stars popular pop star turned actor Takumi Kitamura as the manga’s iconic cool-kid protagonist, Yusuke, a high school delinquent turned undercover investigator of the supernatural.
On Dec. 13, Netflix held the red-carpet premiere for Yu Yu Hakusho at Tokyo’s Ariake Arena, with over 5,000 screaming fans in attendance. It was Netflix’s largest promotional event for an Asian original to date — and one of its biggest premieres for a single title ever.
Of course, none of this was cheap. Netflix hasn’t released budgets for Yu Yu Hakusho or Alice in Borderland, but local industry insiders speculate that the shows are easily the most expensive Japanese-language series ever made on a per-episode basis. And Netflix is candid that it doesn’t expect all of its Japanese investments to yield immediate success.
“Japan is the Asian country we’ve been in the longest — we opened our Tokyo office eight years ago — but I think it’s the market where we have had to learn the most, and where we’re still learning the most,” says Kim. “And in terms of our live-action strategy, it actually feels like we’re still relatively new, compared to where we are in Korea and India,” she adds.
Netflix likes to say that it doesn’t impose its production approach on foreign content industries, but rather finds compromise modes of dealmaking, development and production that take into account prevailing local practices. In Tokyo, however, the company undoubtedly has had to bend far further to the Japanese way of doing things than elsewhere, adapting to local realities such as the strong control manga creators often retain over their IP even after licensing agreements and the outsized industry power of Japan’s notoriously fickle talent agencies.
In Japan, 70 percent of primetime linear programming is made up of reality and variety shows. The U.S. streamers have had some success in these categories in Japan — Netflix notched wins with Terrace House, Love Village, Last Man Standing and a Tokyo-set season of Queer Eye; Prime Video produced popular local seasons of The Bachelor — but they haven’t capitalized on the category anywhere near to the extent to which it already dominates traditional TV in the country.
“In most countries, the scripted area is much more impactful, whereas unscripted is more like comfort food — you need some in your slate, but it’s not the driver,” notes Kim. “In Japan, we’ve learned that unscripted is just as impactful as scripted — even on Netflix.” At an unscripted showcase event held in Seoul in August, Netflix said it had a slate of 15 reality shows in the works for Japan.
Disney+, for its part, has been somewhat choosy and cost-conscious in its pursuit of Japanese live-action originals during its relatively short stint in the market — the direct-to-consumer service launched in Japan only in mid-2020 — but the House of Mouse has scored early hits with the horror thriller series Gannibal and the feature sports documentary Shohei Ohtani: Beyond the Dream. The company has an expanded Japanese slate coming to the service in 2024, led by FX’s epic period series Shogun; and it will release 10 new anime originals over the coming two years via a partnership with local publishing house Kodansha. Amazon Prime Video has yet to unveil its titles for next year, but sources at the company say it will be its largest Japan slate to date. And Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max will take subscribers back into Tokyo’s neon-lit back alleys with a second season of the big-budget drama thriller Tokyo Vice, launching early next year.
“Nothing changes overnight in Japan, but it feels like we’re on the precipice of major change,” says Gaku Narita, Disney’s executive director of original content. “With all the investment and best practices that are coming in — including ours at Disney — we’re seeing the local audience build up an appetite for more and more premium content, which is creating an opportunity for an industry transformation.”
Japan’s domestic TV networks, most of which have relatively healthy balance sheets, already have begun responding to the challenges presented by the outside stimulus — with both their in-house productions and infrastructure investments. Local streaming platform U-Next, meanwhile, has seen steady growth through a diverse content strategy spanning Japanese and international movies, TV series, anime, e-books, live sports, and even adult content. The company is the third-largest premium SVOD service in Japan by revenue (behind Amazon and Netflix — see chart below). It has an exclusive rights deal with Warner Brothers Discovery for HBO content and plans to boost its in-house originals output over the coming year. Leading legacy network TBS Television is a major shareholder.
Until very recently, the production costs for a one-hour, primetime drama series in Japan usually ran about $200,000 to $275,000 (30 million to 40 million yen) per episode. In July, Tokyo’s TBS began airing a thriller series titled Vivant, which cost well over $1 million per episode and wowed local viewers with its production values and location shooting in Mongolia.
Whether Japan’s supply of talent and production facilities can keep up with the growing demand from global streamers and local linear networks is the biggest bottleneck the industry now faces.
Says Kaata Sakamoto, Netflix’s head of Japan content: “Everyone is reaching out to the same cast and crew; and shooting stages are a very limited resource, so that’s definitely a challenge.”
TBS’ subsidiary production banner The Seven, which produced Netflix’s Alice in Borderland and Yu Yu Hakusho via a collaboration agreement, opened in December a new 80,000-square-meter soundstage, built for $136 million. The facility’s backers say it will help alleviate a chronic shortage of studio space while capitalizing on international platforms’ surging demand for premium local content. Japan’s other major networks are said to be targeting similar upgrades.
“We’re beginning to see more and more producers, writers, directors and even actors slip out of the old system” of lower production values and into the new era, says Akira Morii, who leads development and production at The Seven and has collaborated with Netflix as the lead producer on its early hit The Naked Director, as well as Alice in Borderland and Yu Yu Hakusho. “Maybe we’re not going to see the next Akira Kurosawa appear on the scene just yet — he was a singular genius — but we’re at a stage in our film and TV industry where creators feel inspired and more empowered to create the ambitious content they envision.”
This story first appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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