Everyone I’ve known here who works in film, anime, manga, etc. work ridiculous hours with shit work-life balance. I’m sure that’s not true of everyone, but especially the smaller studios. It is something that needs to be addressed and, to its credit, the government has imposed more penalties on crazy work hours and upped enforcement, but it’s hard to catch the people who aren’t reporting their actual hours even if there are now penalties on the employees themselves as well for not doing so. There need to be some big, systemic changes in a lot of those areas here because it is also, in part, a culture issue.

identifying anime and video games as core industries in its revised Cool Japan strategy.

I’ll be impressed if the ‘Cool Japan’ program is proven to be more than primarily for domestic consumption to say “look! we’re doing something!”

This whole headline stinks of trickle-down economics.