Tokyo start-up looks to crowdfund manga translation

Seemingly at a loss as to how to cost-effectively translate and market its popular manga literature overseas, one Tokyo startup is betting on crowd-sourced funding as the answer.

Yohei Sadoshima, the co-founder of start-up literary agency Cork Inc, has already been successful in raising enough money to produce an anime of hit Manga creation "Ochibi-san", by top manga artist Moyoco Anno, through the IndieGoGo crowdfunding site. Now he has said crowdfunding could also help in marketing manga for overseas.

“In the past, big publishers such as Kodansha refused to translate even great manga like Space Brothers [until recently] and Vagabond. I want crowdsourcing to step in where major publishers have failed,” he said at a recent media event in Tokyo. He himself once headed Japanese publisher Kodansha’s translation department.

Overseas sales of Japanese manga are thought to be still relatively poor, mainly owing to widespread pirating of manga especially in Asia. North American manga sales are less than half of what they were during the market’s peak in 2007, when sales reached $210m, according to nerd culture trade magazine ICv2. There has been a slight rebound in profits and sales according to the latest figures, but returns remain low.

With poor expectation for profits, the big manga publishers shy away from marketing abroad. Critics in the industry also say poor translations, slow to follow from the Japanese original, also affect sales. A Cork spokeswoman said the agency always synchronises any Japanese releases of their clients’ work with translations in numerous languages.

As an Japanese creative agency with an expanding client base of top manga and literary talent, “Cork now plans to go global pushing not just Japanese manga but novelists work as well,” Sadoshima said.

He claimed his agency's new approach is reaping benefits, with three manga title deals brokered with Hollywood film makers, although details are still under wraps. 

Crowdfunding has been enlisted by others in the industry, with a recent bid to secure affordable housing for its downtrodden animators, many of whom earn less than £7,000 a year. But a plan by non-profit organisation Animator Supporters to build a dormitory using funds raised through an IndieGoGo campaign has been halted since failing to reach its one million yen (£7,350) target.