Japan taps AI to combat manga and anime piracy abroad, amidst stagnant domestic market

With a view to boosting its flagging domestic anime and manga market, Japan is employing artificial intelligence (AI) to help crack-down on illegal online piracy, especially overseas.

The aim of the crackdown is to “recover revenue from one of its most valuable cultural exports,” as it is estimated that Japan loses a mammoth $54.9 billion to counterfeit anime.

As Japan continues to be behind the eight ball, much of their success paradoxically depends on gaining new viewers overseas as well. This is precisely why AI will get the assignment to help repress phony AI hosting.

Imagine if you had to employ a human to trawl the dark reaches of the web to haul out the dodgy platforms hosting Jujutsu Kaisen. And that’s one example. With sites such as My Anime List hosting over 25,000 titles, the sheer range of output is colossal.

AI steps in

With this in mind, the Agency for Cultural Affairs has allocated $643 million to develop AI systems for piracy detection. They already ran successful trials in 2024 domestically, with a more advanced version following suit soon for international duplicity.

Anime piracy is notably high in Southeast Asia, the US, and even Japan, with Indonesia leading at 12.8% of pirate site usage.

And it’s a precarious balance for Japan, especially when the government is aiming to quadruple anime and manga sales by the year 2033, targeting $130 billion.

To put things into perspective, this figure would double the annual car export revenue, showing just how vital anime is to Japan’s cultural identity and economic standing.

Growth clashes with history

Critics are noting the irony of tackling bootlegs, especially when you factor in that Comiket, an anime convention established in Tokyo in 1975, back then actively encouraged consumption of the artform through the black market.

“Japan is not a very litigious society and I don’t think the publishers knew what to do when this became a bigger problem,” Roland Kelts, a visiting professor of media and cultural studies at Tokyo’s Waseda University, told This Week In Asia.

Previous examples of strict crackdowns include the Mangamura operator, which was fined $11 million in April 2024 for hosting 17 titles of major publishers, including Shogakukan, Kadokawa, and Shueisha.

Additionally, the example of Cloudflare, which had to pay just over $3 million to the publishers of household titles One Piece and Attack on Titan, is also notable.

Chigusa Ogino, an adviser to Tuttle-Mori, Japan’s leading international literary and media agency, said “I have come to see the whole world as being full of pirates while we are a tiny island of original works.”

In October, Tokyo asked OpenAI to protect Japanese anime and manga, which it described as “irreplaceable treasures,” from Sora 2, the firm’s latest text-to-video model.

Unlock more exclusive Cybernews content on YouTube.