DMP's Sasahara Speaks Out
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on December 12, 2006 Sign up now!
by Kai-Ming Cha, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 12/12/2006
It's easy to see why Hikaru Sasahara, president and publisher of Digital Manga Publishing, was recently named the eighth most powerful person in manga publishing by Icv2.com, the comics and pop culture trade news Web site. DMP and its affiliate companies offer products and services that reach into almost every aspect of the manga/anime business.
Sasahara spoke with PWCW about the beginnings of DMP and how he's managed to develop the company into a one-stop shop for Asian pop culture. DMP is credited with being an early publisher of yaoi, contributing to the genre's growth in the American market. Sasahara's companies—among them Akadot online news and retail, Pop Japan Travel and the online instruction site, Manga Academy—offer a variety of related services, while publishing a different, edgier brand of manga in a market dominated by formulaic shojo titles aimed at teen girls.
PW Comics Week: Is DMP a Japanese company?
Hikaru Sasahara: We're an American company. I founded it in 1996. We're marking the 10th anniversary this year.
PWCW: Do you have any special plans to mark the anniversary?
HS: I'm thinking about—if the budget allows—taking the whole gang to Japan. That's about 20 people. Some [of the staff] have never been before. I want to let everyone see how crazy the country is.
PWCW: You were born in Japan?
HS: I was born and raised in Japan. I came here in 1973. My family ran a small anime studio—this is when my dad was still alive. He would tell me about the glory time of Disney. I told my dad, "I'm going to go to America and learn from Disney and help your business." So I came here, but I didn't go home. There were so many things happening here. In the 1960s, Japan was still poor and not very exciting. There was no music, no fashion. The fashion was coming from America. I thought, "I gotta go."
PWCW: What was your vision for DMP when the company started?
HS: Over the last 10 years, it's never changed. To build a relatively small company that is unique. We want to be fast moving, avant-garde, crazy and different from well-established companies like Viz and Tokyopop. That's exactly what we've been doing, and that's why Icv2.com named DMP one of the 10 most powerful manga companies in the U.S. We're independent and doing well. I don't want to label the company as the best in terms of revenue generated or how many titles published in a year, but we've been doing so many things that no other company is doing.
PWCW: DMP is more than a book publishing company. Tell us about the travel service.
HS: On TV I saw so many Americans dressed for cosplay and going to the Anime Expo [convention]. So, I started Pop Japan Travel, a tour [for American fans] taking anime, manga and game fans from the U.S. to Japan. We let them go through the alleys of Tokyo and shop for manga, anime and game goods. We set up meetings with well-known anime studios that they wouldn't be able to get into. My family in Tokyo still runs a small animation studio, so I have close connections with some studios. [The fans get to] talk to creators, sometimes have dinner with them, get their autographs. I've been running this business for over three years and every time [the tour] sells out. No other company in publishing offers fans a pop culture tour. There's so much interest, but no access to Japan. It's unique.
PWCW: Tell us about your early support for yaoi, or boys' love, and the rest of your publishing list.
HS: I didn't even know there was a genre called boys' love until an old man, the president of [Japanese publisher] Tokuma Shoten, told me, "It's like homosexual manga." He told me it was the most lucrative genre. It's had over 30 years of business in Japan. I thought anything going on over five to 10 years has got to be something. The otaku mentality is the same all over the world. They eat the same kind of junk food, they like the same TV, they play the same video games and read the same manga. So if something is happening in Japan, I figured it could be the same in the U.S.
Only the Ring Finger Knows [an early yaoi series] sold instantly, almost 12,000 units with almost no promotion. I figured, oh, man, this is something. I grabbed another five titles in the boys' love genre without even checking their marketability. All [sold] tremendously well. Some people told me "If you tap into homosexual manga, you are almost labeling your company as a porn company. I don't care. I'm careful not to release manga with anything too explicit in the sexual scenes. They're all relatively soft porn titles. But after publishing three years, we had a big debate within the company and started 801 Media, a hardcore yaoi manga publisher. [These titles are] not going into bookstores—just to online stores, specialty stores and comic book stores.
I'm very appreciative that Tokuma Shoten introduced me to boys' love. Almost all of our titles are from this publisher. We have over 65 titles now, and we'll probably have 80-100 titles in 2007. We just dominate the market. We have illustration books in this genre and [prose] novels. We were the first company to introduce yaoi [prose] novels to the U.S. We published three or four this year. We'll publish 20 to 30 next year. And we're cranking out original manga—Vampire Hunter D, based on the prose novel, and it's selling so well. We're not copublishing it with Dark Horse [which publishes the prose novel]. We copublished [the manga title] Trigun with Dark Horse and sold 70,000 units when it first rolled out three years ago. Vampire Hunter D will probably outsell it. It will be released in France, Spain, Italy and Germany all at the same time.
PWCW: Through an affiliated company, Akadot, which offers an online trade news service and an online Asian-pop retail outlet, DMP is not only importing books but also trying to build a cultural understanding of Japanese pop culture.
HS: Our company is small and to compete, we have to do something unique. [Unusual nonfiction manga] like the Project X Cup Noodle and the 7-Eleven convenience store manga publications. Titles that help brand our company. We took properties from Kodansha—the Edumanga series [biographies of famous figures like Thomas Edison and Anne Frank]. A lot of parents think comics make kids stupid. We want to turn that concept around.
PWCW: You had an early deal to package manga for Penguin that was canceled. How has mainstream book publishing influenced the direction of manga in this country?
HS: The Penguin deal didn't go through, but I still feel we got some benefit from dealing with such a big publisher. The interest of traditional book publishers has definitely changed the direction of manga publishing and made it a more mainstream industry. It's not just Penguin, but Random House, Harper Collins. They are all tapped into manga now. Manga isn't just a passing business. It's amazing to see [that] all the Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstore chains have such big manga sections. It's unbelievable.
When I first started licensing manga, I had the wrong concept. I thought only the big [Japanese manga] companies had the good titles. My company was only 10 people back then, and [big companies] size you up by looking at the number of people on your staff or the amount of capital you have. So I started looking into small and medium-size companies and they treated me better. They have strong titles and they were in the same situation as I was. So we help each other. I made a lot of good synergies publishing co-labeled manga. Now we're working with three or four medium-size Japanese publishers. We put their logo on each book along with ours—like with Dark Horse. They're very happy.
PWCW: Where do you see the manga market going in the future?
HS: People are saying the market is saturated and see it going down. I think they're wrong. Young people in Japan and the U.S.—their thinking is so similar. Going to Japan from America is easier. I had to work for four years to make enough money to come to America. Now, you can work part-time and make enough money for a $600 roundtrip ticket. Manga will keep expanding and growing.
