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Echoing the recent coverage of the troubles facing the anime industry, here are translated excerpts of blogs written by Japanese anime industry insiders. Several are taken from a fascinating website called Off the Record Animation Industry Gossip (subtitle: "Read this if you're thinking of becoming an animator! This is the true face of the anime industry! Do you think you can survive?") Bear in mind that as these blogs are anonymous, there is no way to verify the veracity of the claims. But they are a fascinating counterpoint to the "soft power"/"Japan cool"/"otaku utopia" rhetoric often espoused by foreign journalists.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has therefore decided to give a few young leaders who are conspicuously active in the field of fashion the title “Trend Communicator of Japanese Pop Culture,” commissioning them to conduct PR and other activities, and asking them to extend as much cooperation as possible for cultural projects to be carried out by Japanese embassies abroad and the Japan Foundation.

Ms. Shizuka Fujioka: advisor of “CONOMi,” a well-known shop that sells school-uniform-type clothes

As I mentioned, people tend to forget that manga struggled for decades to get a foothold, but what really put manga over was anime. When anime - SAILOR MOON, DRAGONBALL Z and YU-GI-OH, mainly, with NARUTO firming up the rear - got regular spots on American TV, in syndication and on basic cable channels like Cartoon Network, they created fans, the fans sought out the manga, and because stores began giving manga its own section, it became easy to for those fans to check out other manga, word spread, sales rose, and "suddenly" manga was cool, and being read by lots of people, especially teenagers, who had never even thought of opening an American comic. That's what propelled manga. Prior to that, Viz and other manga publishers had followed the traditional route - dump their product in the American comics stream and hope for the best - and made only a little inroad. Manga's content hadn't changed, but the manga experience had. So any foreigners eyeing the American comics market, seeing manga's success, and figuring this means American comics readers are now hungry for foreign material are in for painful, especially financially painful, disappointment. (American publishers who make the same leap of faith will too.) All manga proves is that you can crack the American market, now that it's likely. And you'd better be in it for the long haul.

In Boston recently, a journalist asked me: Is Japan really doing anything with its "soft power," or is it just a lot of talk

With a few notable exceptions, the explosion of interest in Japan's pop cultural exports has been ignited by foreigners' passions and sustained by Internet accessibility. The phenomenon is largely demand-driven, a product of quality content being sought and consumed by overseas fans, academics and artists. Japanese pop culture is being pulled into foreign markets far more than it is being pushed.

(www.animemasterpieces.com), a venture that combines anime screenings with lectures, seminars and study guides.

A recent comment by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao decrying the lack of Chinese anime has incited a flurry of online support, with Chinese net users vigorously denouncing Japanese anime. The Premier started the fracas by publically lamenting the current poverty of Chinese visual culture: “There are times when I watch TV anime with my grandchild, but they’re always foreign works like Ultraman and so on, and few are domestically produced. We should be cultivating a domestic anime industry.”