The Jimusho System (an interesting read)

[CAT5 9075]

An interesting read that gives you an idea how things work behind the scenes in Japanese entertainment

Each country or cultural region has a uniquely-structured industry responsible for producing, promoting, and distributing the products that make up what we consider “pop culture.” In the case of Japan, there is a single organizational category most responsible for the form and content of pop culture: the artist management company, called colloquially jimusho (“office.”) The jimusho wield a powerful cultural influence on all fields that require performers — television (variety and drama), advertising, music, modeling, gravia, and films.

continue reading here:

http://neojaponisme.com/2010/04/05/the-jimusho-system-part-one/

[Zeus 7997]

I'm forced to take this article with a grain of salt after noticing they took quite a few liberties with explaining the subject.

My first issue being with the fact that he takes an entire two paragraphs to basically say that no one knows if the Burning Keiretsu is real, and then goes on to make assumptions for the rest of the second part about what the Burning Keiretsu do and how they organize their business. He just literally wrote there's no source of information on them. Where is the author getting his facts from?

Many of the site’s allegations about the Burning Keiretsu, however, can be confirmed by looking at publishing rights transfers or cataloging the specific jimusho who use Burning’s official subsidiary Proceed to build their web pages.

Without numbers and quantitative data, this means nothing. He glosses over this until the next section, where he begins to take one or two examples to show that Burning indeed does exist...except he's saying that all official sources have never put Burning down on paper. So how does one come across this data? How is this data verified? He said that he found it on "JASRAC". I looked around on JASRAC and couldn't find a thing. This isn't to say that the author is making this up, but if you discover this data you need to record it in case it suddenly becomes "lost", and if you're talking about a company that doesn't want to be known you better include date and time of retrieval as well as a cache stored somewhere. Saying "I found this at some undisclosed time in the past" is shoddy reporting.

After I skipped to the end and found nothing resembling a bibliography or a list of sources, I stopped reading. He may have some valid points here and there about the general structure of the industry but with no sources I have no idea how much of this is accurate and to what degree.

I'm just posting this as a disclaimer before people go all "OMG LIKE CORPORATE MONOPOLY" all over this topic.