The Sony Buyout of Kadkowa Moves Forward
That headline either means nothing at all to you, or it makes you sick to your stomach. I can’t think of a worse custodian for Kadakowa unless it’s Disney.
It’s hard to come up with an anime studio with a richer history than Kadokawa. Yes, Ghibli is more beloved but when you compare the body of work… Well, you can’t compare the body of work because they are on two entirely different planes of existence.
Putting the studio that created Your Name and Girl Who Leapt Through time on the Sony bland wagon is heartbreaking.
Americans first became aware of the name Haruki Kadokawa during the 1990s when Streamline Video began amazing Generation X with what was possible to do with animation. We began to see that that name and associate it with high quality OAVs like Neo-Tokyo and Silent Mobius, (and if you want to watch either of those today you are going to have to Yo-Ho-Ho it).
We began looking for things that Kadokawa had done that weren’t being released through Streamline and found titles like Dagger of Kamui and The Heroic Legend of Arslan.
The biggest problem that Kadokawa has had over the years is Haruki Kadokawa himself. Rather than go into a lot of tedious details, I’ll just say he would fit in with the Hollywood lifestyle super good.
“While Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump and Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine dominate anime and manga news in the West, Kadokawa Publishing is no slouch. Established in the months following the end of World War II, according to the official Kadokawa Group website, it set out “to revitalize Japanese culture through publishing.” Naturally, with manga being Japan’s huge contribution to global culture, it wasn’t long before the company made manga a cornerstone of its development. Since then, Kadokawa has become one of the world’s biggest publishers and producers of manga and anime content.”
“Indeed, Kadokawa has shined especially for its monopoly on the prolific isekai genre, expressed through several media, beginning from the light novels that then produce successful manga and, more importantly, anime adaptations. The company also publishes successful manga, such as Delicious in Dungeon, recently adapted into a hit anime. Kadokawa is home to some of the most cherished and iconic manga and anime titles, including Re:Zero, Sword Art Online…”
Sony is effectively going to have a monopoly on anime if this goes through. Funamatioin being rolled into CrunchyRoll gives Sony an effective monopoly on distribution. (And the last time I mentioned this obvious fact someone had to Well Akshually me because of the anime on Netflix, Hulu and MAX whoever else that Sony has licensed their content to).
Given how big Kadokawa’s anime is Sony will have a gignatic chunk of production as well.
And given how Woke Sony has been going lately, fans are rightly concerned about what this means for Anime.
That said, the employees at Kadokawa are hoping this sale will go through because they are currently stuck the Japanese version of the pointy headed boss.
Providing personal insight into this positive sentiment, an unidentified Kadokawa employee explained to Yahoo! News Japan (as machine translated by DeepL), “As a publicly traded company, acquisitions are bound to occur, and the atmosphere was positive, saying, ‘If it’s Sony, why not?’”
“The atmosphere is positive,” he added. “We have no resistance to being acquired, and it becomes a topic of conversation when people ask us who we would like to be acquired.”
“There are a certain number of employees who are dissatisfied with the current administration of company President [Takeshi] Natsuno, who does not even hold a press conference when personal information is leaked due to a cyber attack,” they added, making reference to the ransomware attack that struck the company earlier this year. “They are hoping that if Sony acquires the company, the first thing Sony will do is cut President Natsuno.”
To make a long story short, Natusuno is pro-censorship and pro-Woke and yes, Japanese urbanites like to be seen as Woke. The mind virus has invaded Tokyo. The newsies were practically crying the night Harris lost.
Sadly, Kadokawa’s hopes for better leadership are likely to be dashed. Sony is after all the company that poured $400 million into Concord.
