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A Brief Chat with Digital Manga Publishing CEO Hikaru Sasahara

By AnimeEv 1 year, 10 months ago

« Back to the Anime Expo 2010 Feature Center

The recent fluctuations in the economy have brought about a torrent of speculation regarding the health of the American manga market. How will the industry in general fare under these conditions? How exactly do digital distribution models, online comic resources, and scanlators change the playing field? We practically expect to see SDCC turn into something out of Apocalypse Now this year…

Recently, Digital Manga Publishing announced a new and innovative plan to include and possibly remunerate amateur manga translation groups. We caught up with Hikaru Sasahara for a quick chat right before Anime Expo to get his take on things.

Please describe your background for us, sir!

Born into a family that runs a small anime studio in Tokyo. Came to America and started a few of my own businesses, including a restaurant, game software agent, and currently Digital Manga.

When did you settle in LA? What made you think “this is the place!”?

Back in 1973. Blue sky and a lot of sunshine.

And how did you come to be one of the biggest and most respected BL publishers in North America?

Thought it would be good to establish something that (allows) a small company to compete with large publishers.

And now jumping right in: the recent announcement that you’d be crowd-sourcing for scanlators to possibly do paid work for a digital download site has sent waves of excitement and speculation through the fan community. Would you like to explain more about this plan?

Under the current licensing system, only a handful of manga titles come to America. That makes many manga fans frustrated so I want to change that. But to do it, all 3 parties must come to agree. The 3 parties are: manga publishers in Japan, translator/letterer groups (could be scanlators) and the managing company.

How amenable were the Japanese licensors to this idea?

We got some publishers and content providers in place that verbally agreed to come forward.

Was the original intent of this plan to occlude the long-winded licensing process?

If we continue to go with the current system, the manga industry in the US may die due to a huge lack of content. So I am trying to save the industry and to grow.

It’s an oft-heard complaint that Japanese licensors are inflexible with regard to digital distribution models. Do you find this to be the case?’

Yes.

Can you explain the remuneration plan for scanlators? Is it a done deal for everybody, or dependent upon performance metrics?

This is a real business and no longer a hobby or fun site so anyone who participates in it needs to be qualified.

Do you only have verbal contracts with the content providers, as per the news reported on the web? Do you worry about people reneging on you?

That is the current status and eventually every sector would sign the agreement.

Is the plan for you to start with BL and then move out to other genres?

Yes. I would like to establish a yaoi kingdom or stronghold with more than 1000 titles. Once we got the traffic, we’d then gradually start branching out.

Let’s move on. DMP has a lot of divisions and sub-companies. How do you orchestrate them all?

Every division has the same or similar focus – Japanese pop culture. So they all come together well and make synergy.

Do you feel that the overall economic climate has had a negative effect on DMP? Have you been cutting back or experiencing negative trends?

Absolutely. We are not so special the we don’t get hit. Because of that, we try to come up with new and viable ideas.

How do you choose a project when you’re looking at potential licenses? What goes into the process and what are some of the deciding factors?

All we think is “money” when it comes to business.

Many people speak blindly about the intricacies of the licensing process. Could you delineate it for us?

It’s actually not so complicated and that why I have been able to do it myself.

You are to pay an advanced royalty upfront to a publisher about 8~12 months before you see the return on investments. Royalty varies depending on a title or with different publishers but typically 8% of SRP. The amount becomes quite big if you try to publish multiple titles every month and you bump into severe cash-flow problems.

What are the big plans for AX this year? What’s the next step for DMP, June, 801, et al?

We go big on digital distribution. The above scanlator project is also a really big project for us as no one has ever done it, but it’s good for everyone so we’ll do it.

Final question. Favorite Beatle?

I don’t care too much about the members but love their music so much, especially the ones composed by John Lennon.