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Interview: Gilles Poitras

Surely, my argument will fall flat with the "fansubs are killing the industry" crowd. But I'd rather not do two years in prison for spending a ridiculous amount of money on anime.

I noticed in Japan that being a female foreigner in a porn shop often meant that the male Japanese patrons would quickly evacuate.

But a lot of small assumptions about religion...things that are not exactly wrong but aren't quite right. A lot of people have a hard time wrapping their brains around the idea that there is no concept of one supreme god, and that's just the way it is.
The nature of religion as a very private thing in Japan...not in the sense of "it's not anybody's business," but in the sense that it's just what people do themselves. They don't go to the temple every week, or the shrine every week; they might walk by and stop and pray for a bit, make a small offering, light some incense, and then they'll go on.

Yamaga also mentioned that they don't have any English speakers working at Gainax but that they used to, which was surprising since foreign interest in becoming a Japanese animator is probably way up.

Whenever I get asked that question when I'm speaking, I point out two things. One: I hope you're not going to get busted for this, but if you get busted for any prostitution-related crime, or any drug-related crime, you cannot work in Japan. You cannot go to school in Japan, you cannot move to Japan, those are the two things that will keep you from getting a visa. Whereas, you get busted for almost anything, you can't get into Canada. [Laughs] There's always some kid in the back who hears about the drug conviction thing who you go, yeah, he's going to change his life.

In Japan, digital piracy is a criminal law, here its only a civil law. This needs to change.

Anime is on such shaky ground right now I have no idea what will happen to it. We're talking about international relations, huge untapped markets, quantity of a quality item, the Animation Ghetto, and pirates. And so many fans don't realize their significance in this delicate time.

I do caution folks to take any interview with a grain of salt as the speaker may be operating on faulty memory tho' I try to be accurate.

I remember being in a book-off store, the one in the Radio Kaitan building in Akihabara,

...if we could get the NHK live-action Taiga dramas on PBS,

yes, what's intriguing to me about religion in Japan isn't the basic "we don't believe in a single monotheistic God" thing, other religions don't do that; its how casual/private it is, not on a regular basis.

There's one thing that could dramatically improve their situations, and the Japanese situation, and that is a change of law on copyright enforcement. Illegal downloads are decimating the market. I mean, I was a huge supporter of fansubs back in the VHS days because fansubs were a great way to promote titles and bring in new fans. Nowadays it really erodes the market, and one of the ways it erodes is not that people aren't buying the shows when they come out in the US-- and many are not buying.

Is there a specific change you'd make to copyright law?

I'd make it a criminal offense. Right now it's a civil offense, and it can cost an American company hundreds of thousands of dollars to shut an operation down and try to get restitution. In Japan it's a criminal offense; if you find somebody distributing something you report it to the police and the police will shut it down.