[The growth of the Japanese anime figurine industry and its influence on the West.]{.underline}

While brainstorming the topic of our group, we all thought of how the anime industry seemed to have experienced a significant boom during the Covid-19 pandemic. People who expressed absolutely no interest or had any knowledge before suddenly became huge fans. Availability of all sorts of merchandise became widespread, and social media engagement skyrocketed. This piqued the interest of our group and led us to look for a concrete way to properly measure this unprecedented growth and map out the evolution of the otaku landscape. Our immediate thought was to somehow measure the more widespread sale and distribution of anime merchandise, with figurines as our focus. As one of anime's strengths is its ability to expand through different media and merchandising¹. We chose figurines as our main product as we believe it is something that truly shows engagement with the medium.

However, it quickly became apparent that finding solid, usable data on this subject would be near impossible as not many companies freely give out their statistics. Although we did manage to find some tangible evidence to support our impression of massive growth.

The growth of popularity measured through conventions.

A first good way, we thought, to measure the popularity of otaku culture and figurines specifically, is through Anime conventions. For the longest time, these were the only places where Western fans could get their hands on anime merchandise and they still are the main vendors of items like figurines. While not a perfect metric, the number of attendants to these events still shows a reasonably representative number of engagements. When we looked at this data for three of the biggest Anime conventions outside of Japan (Animecon Netherlands, Japan Expo France and Anime Expo US), a steady rise in attendance can be observed for each and every one of them, with Japan Expo exhibiting the most impressive increase in visitors, going from 2400 people in 1999 to a staggering 252 510 people in 2019².

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  **Convention**             **Date**             **Attendance**

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     Animecon              1999 (first)                 208

                               2006                    3.750

                               2019                   16.000

    Japan Expo             1999 (first)                2.400

                               2006                   56.000

                               2019                   252.510

  Anime Expo (US)          1992 (first)                1.750

                               2006                   40.647

                               2019                   115.000

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Table 1: Convention Attendance

Figure 1: Convention Attendance

We can also observe a rise in the number of conventions. When looking at Europe, there was only one big convention in 1995 in Spain. Today there are 10 big conventions all over the continent and many smaller ones as well. 

Due to the pandemic following the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, all conventions had to be scrapped for as long as their specific country was imposing restrictions on social gatherings. This is why no data is available for any conventions past this year and we hit our first dead end. However, The fact remains that anime culture still grew significantly during and after the Covid-19 pandemic and people continued to discover or continue to consume the media and buy merchandise.

The continued, and growing enthusiasm for the media.

When people perceive something repetitively in their environment, even subconsciously, that "something" starts to gain more meaning and therefore it becomes more attractive (Cazaku, 2013³), in a kind of snowball effect for interest. Over the past decades, many anime products made their way into Western markets and stylistically influenced Western writers and artists. (Cazaku 2013) As a result, the structure and style of anime became imprinted in the public mind and people could more easily recognize Japanese media and appreciate it.

With rising appreciation came rising demand, which was met. Anime can be found on all the mainstream streaming platforms. During the Covid-19 induced lockdowns, these platforms saw peeks in subscribing and viewership including for anime. New anime-dedicated social-media pages also immerged which was met by a hungry public.

The growth in popularity at first saw specialized stores being created to sell merchandise. Said merchandise can now also be found in local supermarkets.

This rise in popularity had a big impact on the economic growth of Japan, resulting in the country funding the media in various ways to maintain this growth. ⁴

One of these ways is through the project "Cool Japan"⁵, a massive campaign by the Japanese government to promote Japan's cultural products.

Merchandising sales.

In 2022 the merchandising share was the biggest in the overall revenue from the anime market with 31%, showing a big demand for anime-derived products such as figurines⁶ and predictions see this only growing.

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Figure 3 Source: www.grandviewresearch.com

For a more specific look at figurine sales, not many companies are willing to give out their numbers to the public, as we stated in our introduction. Luckily enough one of Japan\'s biggest figurine-producing companies, Bandai Namco, has records of their yearly reports, going back as far as 2006, freely available on the internet⁷.

In the yearly reports, a growth is clearly noticeable that both the merchandising of toys (a.k.a. Figurines) and in the regional sales. Comparing the sales by region of Bandai Namco there is a 7,8% increase for the Western market. The merchandising of Toys grew by 6,6%.

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Figure 5: Sales by region of Bandai Namco 2022

2022

Figure 4: sales by region of Bandai Namco 2013

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2022

Figure 7: Segment Sales of Bandai Namco of 2022

Figure 6: Segment Sales of Bandai Namco of 2013

Conclusion

In conclusion, the feeling our group had about the growing interest in Anime was founded. As merchandising of anime-derived products makes out 31% of the industry's revenue, and that the industry in and of itself keeps on growing, it is logical to see a growth of anime figure sales and production. Though not many concrete sources could be found on the figurine market, all the available ones confirmed this.