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The effect of young children on their parents’ anime-viewing habits: evidence from Japanese microdata

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Abstract

Anime is now considered an accepted form of animation and is considered to represent Japanese contemporary culture worldwide. There are many fans of anime and manga, creating a community known as otaku world. However, Japanese anime and manga have gained popularity in Western countries as well as in Japan. This paper attempts to ascertain the determinants of watching anime in Japan based on individual-level data from Japan. Despite the growth in the number of adult anime fans, children are still more likely to watch anime than adults are. Hence, this study investigates how adults are influenced by the presence of their children. After controlling for individual characteristics, it was found that people are more likely to watch anime when they have children aged less than 12 years who have not yet entered junior high school. Such an effect is larger for parents who belong to an older generation where people are less likely to prefer anime. This implies that the externality coming from children results in parents watching anime. The findings of this study show that externalities from surrounding people play a critical role in enlarging the market of modern cultural goods representing “Cool Japan.”

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Notes

  1. Takashi Murakami, an influential Japanese artist, has adopted anime-style characters in his artworks, including paintings and plastic figures.

  2. There are a large number of works that examine the demand for cinema in the field of cultural economics (e.g., Cameron 1986, 1988, 1990, 1999; Fernándeź and Baños 1997; Cuadrado and Frasquet 1999; MacMillan and Smith 2001; Dewenter and Westermann 2005; Yamamura 2008, 2009).

  3. Asai (2011) attempted to analyze demand for popular music in Japan, which is also considered as Japanese contemporary culture.

  4. Family members not only influence consumption behavior but also views about political issues. Within a family, daughters have been observed to influence their father’s political attitudes (Fernandez et al. 2004; Washington 2008; Oswald and Powdthavee 2010).

  5. Even if watching anime does not influence parents’ utility levels, parents naturally glance at anime when children are watching it in the living room.

  6. Data for this secondary analysis, “Japanese General Social Surveys (JGSS), Ichiro Tanioka,” were provided by the Social Science Japan Data Archive, Information Center for Social Science Research on Japan, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo.

  7. In the original dataset, annual earnings were grouped into 19 categories, and it was assumed that everyone in each category earned the midpoint value. For the top category of “23 million yen and above,” it is assumed that everybody earned 23 million yen. Approximately 1 % of observations fell in this category; therefore, the problem of top-coding should not be an issue here.

  8. A Japanese prefecture is equivalent to a state in the USA or a province in Canada. There are 47 prefectures in Japan.

  9. To consider such spatial correlation in line with this assumption, the Stata cluster command was used and z-statistics were calculated using robust standard errors.

  10. Manga is different from anime in that consumers cannot read and enjoy manga with others. Hence, the externality for manga is thought to be smaller than for anime.

  11. Professor Kentaro Takemura is a creator and critic of manga at the Kyoto Seika University. He has been reported to have an ambivalent reaction to the fact that manga is now officially recognized by the Japanese government (Takekuma 2004, 67–70).

  12. “Manga and anime museums have sprung up across Japan since the 1990s” (Daily Yomiuri 2011).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the insightful comments of two anonymous referees, which have improved this article considerably. I am responsible for all remaining errors.

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  1. Department of Economics, Seinan Gakuin University, 6-2-92 Nishijin, Sawara-ku, Fukuoka, 814-8511, Japan

    Eiji Yamamura

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Yamamura, E. The effect of young children on their parents’ anime-viewing habits: evidence from Japanese microdata. J Cult Econ 38, 331–349 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-013-9213-y

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