著者

永田 大輔 松永 伸太朗

出版者

日本メディア学会

雑誌

マス・コミュニケーション研究 (ISSN:13411306)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.95, pp.183-201, 2019-07-31 (Released:2019-10-25)

参考文献数

16

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In the 1970s and 1980s, the animation industry in Japan saw the emergenceof distinctive consumers, called “anime fans.” This brought quantitative andqualitative changes in products in the animation market. The aim of this paperis to reveal how animators dealt with this change and how they reformed theirworking culture. The authors have shown that the working culture underpinnedmarket movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Historically, animators preferred working as freelancers on a piece-ratesystem rather than as regular workers on a fixed salary. This was due to theirmeritocratic occupational norm. However, the number of animation programsincreased during the anime-boom period, and animators were forced to cooperatewith a much broader workforce to produce many programs suitable for thediverse demands of fans. This limited animators’ discretion. In this study, theauthors wanted to understand how it was possible for the animation industry tocontinue supplying the workforce necessary to adapt to market changes duringthis time. For this purpose, the authors analyzed texts in animation magazines fromthe perspective of the labor process theory, which explains the relationshipbetween workstyles and the transformation of markets. One of the key conceptsof this approach is workers’ shared norms. The authors also employedethnomethodology, which elicits vivid insights regarding such norms, to analyzeround-table talks and interviews with animators working at animation magazines. While animators understood the quantitative expansion of the animationmarket as limiting their discretion, there was a disparity in how they copedwith the situation. The older generation recognized their skills in detail andrelied on networks built by longtime co-working. The younger generationaccepted the new situation and found their occupational value in the new workingenvironment through the occupational image of “the artisan.” This imagereflected the new occupational competence and made the formation of peercommunities of young animators possible. This industrial transformation sustainedthe supply of a broad workforce, which drew on various expressions duringthe anime-boom period.