Weekend Beat: Cashing in on over-the-counter culture

BY TOMOHIRO OIKAWA THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

It's late afternoon, and a group of school children crowd into a bookstore, poring over popular manga, including "Naruto," "Nana" and "Vagabond." In Japan, the scene would be commonplace, but this is San Francisco.

Seiji Horibuchi's Viz Media is based in a former movie theater in San Francisco. Some of his staff like to "cosplay,"dress up as characters from manga. Takeshi Tokitsu/ The Asahi Shimbun

In the past 20 years, the market for manga has grown from next to nothing to an estimated 30 billion yen a year in the United States. Its popularity is due largely to one man, a Japanese bohemian of the 1960s and '70s whose love affair with American pop culture led him, in a roundabout way, to a better appreciation of his own.

Born in 1952, Seiji Horibuchi grew up in Tokushima Prefecture in Shikoku and went on to study law at Waseda University in the 1970s.

He became increasingly fascinated by the youth culture then sweeping the American West Coast, and in 1975, traveled to California to take a firsthand look on the pretext of going to grad school.

Abandoning his studies, he and some friends went off to the mountains and remained there for a year and a half, living in Mongolian-style tents and growing most of their own food.

With his 30th birthday looming, Horibuchi came down from the mountains. He based himself in San Francisco and tried to make a living exporting American pop culture to Japan. He designed and marketed T-shirts, sold jukeboxes, and became a writer purveying marketing and cultural information.

Then he was struck by a new idea.

"Wouldn't it be interesting," he thought, "to publish Japanese manga in the United States?"

In 1985, quite by chance, he was asked to show a visiting Japanese publisher around. This was Masahiro Aiga, then a managing director of the publishing firm Shogakukan and now the firm's president. Horibuchi took the opportunity to sound him out about bringing manga to America. True, there was a language barrier, he said, but America was a country that was open to anything.

The two men hit it off. Financed by Shogakukan, Horibuchi launched the San Francisco publishing firm Viz Communications in 1986 to sell manga in the United States.

Until then, Horibuchi had not been an avid manga fan. It was when he visited Japan in 1985 and came across "Domu" (A Child's Dream) by Katsuhiro Otomo that he began to take the comics more seriously.

"There was something so fresh and surprising about it," he said. "I'd always assumed American pop culture was better than Japan's, but actually Japanese manga are much more interesting than American comics. Their content is deeper."

In 1987, Viz sent Sanpei Shirato's "Kamui Gaiden" (Legend of Kamui) and other popular works to U.S. bookstores, but the response was lukewarm.

Part of the problem was distribution. Comic books are usually sold in the United States by specialist comic-book stores, and they are averse to taking on risky new products.

Added to that was the collapse of the so-called "manga bubble" in 1990. Heavy demand for manga had driven publishers to produce inferior comics that turned collectors off and pushed sales down. One publisher after another went out of business.

In 1992, Viz established a general book publishing department and began producing books on photography, design and other art-related subjects. Into this category Horibuchi began slipping manga--calling them "graphic novels" so they would be picked up by general-interest bookstores.

The ploy worked, although it was years before leading bookstores began setting up permanent "graphic novel" shelves for manga.

Viz got manga artists Ryoichi Ikegami and Akira Toriyama to do a promotional tour. Then Rumiko Takahashi's humorous manga came out and became a smash with U.S. audiences. "Our general sales had been stagnant until 1992, when all of a sudden everyone was talking about her 'Ranma 1/2,'" Horibuchi said.

Soon anime videos were sweeping the United States, and in 1998 the Pokemon juggernaut got rolling.

"It wasn't just anime. Everything connected to anime--including manga--started to sell," he said. "That's when Viz really got going. In 2002, we took a chance on an English version of the monthly Shonen Jump magazine. Then came Takahashi's 'Inu Yasha,' a big manga and anime hit. By this time, the dice were definitely rolling in our favor."

A 2004 merger created a new company, Viz Media, with Horibuchi as chairman. In 2005 came another new company, Viz Pictures, with Horibuchi doubling as president and CEO. Set up to market Japanese anime, Viz Pictures has been branching out into the marketing of Japanese films. Two movies, "Shimotsuma Monogatari" (Kamikaze Girls) and "Densha Otoko" (Train Man), have won favor with young Americans.

"We wanted to show that there's more to Japanese pop culture than manga," Horibuchi said.

Viz Media now employs about 160 people at its company headquarters in a former cinema in the San Francisco Bay area. Sales for 2006 came to 9 billion yen.

Lately Viz has been credited with helping to wean the United States from its macho culture of superheroes, offering the culture of kawaii (cuteness) as an alternative.

More recently, Viz has been turning its attention to the European and South American markets.

"Getting accepted in Europe was easier than in the U.S.," Horibuchi said. "In many European countries, moral rules regarding children seem rather looser than in the U.S. So we found a place for ourselves in Spain, Portugal, Sweden, France and then, late in the '90s, in Germany. England, for some reason, has been more difficult. In South America we've been expanding the business of licensing rights to use manga characters."

Horibuchi has been sought out by officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for his ideas about how to spread Japanese culture.

"If we're going to promote manga and anime, we're going to need a bit of a budget; we're going to have to exert ourselves a bit," he said.

Horibuchi is now working on a project to create a Japanese culture entertainment complex in San Francisco.

"It'll include a movie theater, bookstore, fashion outlets--a place where you can get a good taste of Japanese pop culture.

It's due to open next year in the fall.(IHT/Asahi: September 1,2007)