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For some reason I don't know, the Japanese entertainment industry is quite against globalization. I don't know if it's the fear of losing control over their product (through digital copies) or an archaic mindset. They have a lot of products that are demanded all over the world and they are letting those opportunities to go to waste. Only very recently I have seen some movement in this regard, like the portal created by Shueisha Inc. to publish mangas online.

I think is just a result of a nationalistic mindset and xenophobia. I don't think it's rational.

Either protecting your culture against foreign influences (the Japanese way) or pursing profit above all else (the US way) are rational or irrational per se, they just represent different value systems.

Another data point supporting this - it took till 2020 for Studio Ghibli’s back catalogue to appear on a mainstream streaming service for western consumers. They definitely faced the innovators’ dilemma of not wanting to cannibalise the DVD sales gravy train.

Better late than never I guess.

>>> For some reason I don't know, the Japanese entertainment industry is quite against globalization.

Alternative explanation: Most companies aren't global because it's too difficult to be.

That requires to translate/dub the product to other languages. To support multiple currency and payment systems. To have local stock for physical products. To adjust to each country's taxes, regulations and export controls. To market locally to the target audience.

It's very remarkable with tech companies. They try to corner the US market and get billions in funding, before they try to expend to the rest of the world.

This is very important, very unappreciated point, to which I'd add that there's a legitimate fear that, within the organization, as your business infrastructure increases in size to handle international sales, your core business of making the product is a smaller part of the organization. The whole idea of "make great products" gets diffused in a situation like this: you now have sales-driven input coming in from a much wider market, with more competing directions. The core product team has to address a lot more stakeholders, and the domestic market that built them doesn't carry as much sway.

I worked for a company that turned down an offer by Walmart to become a top-tier vendor for them. We recognized we couldn't do it in our current form, and would need to rebuild ourselves from the ground up to handle the challenge. Many businesses took the opportunity: Vlassic Pickles most famously became a company 10x as large, but it was a completely different company afterwards, which the president noted was not without certain costs (basically, the family business destroyed, and replaced by being a part of the Walmart supercomplex). Many other companies tried to do the same thing and failed, effectively destroying the business in the process.

[Heh... Walmart as the Gom Jabbar of retail. "They tried and failed?" "They tried and died."]

Most of the comments here see this as entrenched interests trying to hold back the tide, but there are many businesses that don't survive the transition, and many more internal cultures that don't. It's a legitimate business choice to remain focussed on a domestic market one understands rather than gamble on international expansion.

Interesting point. I guess US print and media companies get globalization nearly for free because everyone wants to speak English.

There's a lot of people who want to speak Japanese though. Issues getting money into the country?

Not just entertainment or global expansion - lots of companies are hesitant to promote even domestic sales.

There are widespread psychological safety/emotional security issues that effectively sets whole corporates in “deprecated / not accepting new orders” state. Everything is for existing volume customers only, local or foreign.

I’m guessing it has to do with salaries and pension plans; average income is steadily declining, and Japanese retirement plans are long said to go bust at some point. One headcount less when “it” happens should it happen is extra couple bucks to you, one mishaps on your resume is couple grands leaving your hands. Briefcases full of cash from guys you’ve never met is nothing, even if you are told it could save the corporate.

> Example: The them to Demon Slayer: LiSA - Gurenge (紅蓮華), searching brings up "officially" a short edited version, a practice version, and a live version but not the full song version.

Official Gurenge MV is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZBSjwVWaKQ

Previously, it was available, but is heavily geo-restricted.

Also nowadays almost everything is on streaming: Apple Music, YouTube Music, Spotify, etc. But with everything Japan, it's geo-restricted.

From Spain appears as "This video is only available to Music Premium members" :'(

Also, I remember the JASRAC to be very vigilant and strict...

Same error in the UK

Sony are the archetypal media savvy consumer products company in Japan, but they completely blew it with their rigid vertically integrated strategy. They tried to control the media production end with Sony Pictures and Sony Music, controlled the media format with Mini Disc and control the end user device with the players and Hi-Fi systems.

The problem with this is the other media companies - movie studios and record companies - saw them as competition. That means they wouldn't touch any of Sony's media formats or distribution platforms with a barge pole. This massive strategic foot gun has crippled their medial initiatives for decades. The media companies are nice businesses, I shed no tears for Sony, but they could never do what Apple did and cut ground breaking deals with all the major labels and studios.

>>> That means they wouldn't touch any of Sony's media formats or distribution platforms with a barge pole.

Sony made and pushed Blu Ray, which is the dominant media of the past decade.

The founders of the Blu-Ray Disc Association were: Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung Electronics and Sony.

The studios did try to push HD DVD but it failed in the market, they only went to Blu-Ray when they had no other choice. So yes that's a case where you could argue Sony 'won', but it was a lot more than just Sony and not at all comparable to the situation with say Mini-Disc which was a purely Sony technology.

Sony also helped develop Compact Disc and 3.5 inch floppy. Sony didn't develop Compact Casette, but forced Phillips to make it an open standard.

It's not like anyone used those things in the 80s and 90s. \s

My point was that Sony entering the film and music industries, which happened in 1991, soured their relationships with the other studios and labels. Compact tapes predate that by several decades and CD and 3.5” discs both do by 9 years. Clearly Sony had no problems getting their media formats adopted before that strategy shift. After that they had to fight tooth and nail.

> I don't know why this is.

Strong aversion to anything digital. Even nowadays the number of ebooks in Japanese is ridiculously small compared to how easy it is to find most books online in English (through Amazon or other book stores). And that's despite Japan owning the Kobo platform (through Rakuten).

> Example: The theme to Demon Slayer: LiSA - Gurenge (紅蓮華), searching brings up "officially" a short edited version, a practice version, and a live version but not the hit full song version.

The first hit for me is the full version on the 'LiSA Official YouTube' channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IkopJwRDKU

That link is not available here in Japan. It says “This video is unavailable”

The article begins by setting up language/display barrier but looking at MiniDisc players of that era (which did in fact have displays and often a second one on a remote) all of them used English menus. And judging by sales the Japanese consumers were fine with that.

Also, in 2001 Sony introduced USB connectors on their portable MD lineup so they didn't miss the train by much (by Japanese standards).

> Also, in 2001 Sony introduced USB connectors on their portable MD lineup so they didn't miss the train by much (by Japanese standards).

It was still ridiculously tedious to transfer songs to a Sony device with USB. They did not support MP3 initially so you had to convert everything into their own proprietary format. Completely useless piece of hardware.

And from what I learned from my DJ friends, who wanted to record their sets, it was impossible to get it out digitally. The only way out was analog.

Yup! They were completely going amok trying to control everything.

I had a number of Sony digital music players like the NM-MS10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NW-MS10.jpg

Their main drawbacks you're required to convert all the MP3 into Atrac3 using their atrocious software. It is hard to imagine now, but iTunes was a few generations ahead of anything else in speed and ease of use.

They were a few generations ahead of other extremely locked down devises. They were terrible when compared to devices that just allowed you to copy files to them.

I used MP3 feature phones before I got an iPod and the music library system of the iPod was miles ahead of manually managing my music. Having new songs and album art automatically sync onto the iPod, having play counts sync back, having smart playlists update, it all exposed what a garbage system manual file management was and made me yearn for the future we were promised with the meta-data driven file system of BeOS

Yeah gonna have to disagree strongly with that. iTunes abstracted away the need to manually manage music files. Very few non-nerds actually wanted to do that.

Jamming iPhone-related features into iTunes bloated it up, but in the beginning iTunes was a pretty great piece of media-management software.

If I type 日本女歌手紅蓮華 into google it gets me videos. I’d I type 紅蓮華 into Apple Music it gives me the song you mention as well as the artist LiSA.

I’ve never searched for anything like it before, and I’m from Danish.

A lot of Japanese music is available on Apple Music and iTunes