Very interesting thread, but perhaps too simplistic? Pre-Miyazaki, there was a failed strike at Toei that fed many defections to Tezuka& #39;s Mushi Pro (which made Astro Boy, Japan& #39;s first TV anime.) And I think the modern US industry is far more unionized than the Japanese one. 1/x https://twitter.com/julie_neuhouser/status/1263660628431892485">https://twitter.com/julie_neu...

Add to that a long history of failed protests in the Japanese entertainment industry. One of the most famous happened at Toho in 1948; among those behind barricades was a young Akira Kurosawa. The US military sent tanks to the studio lot to break it. 2/x

I& #39;m not sure later strikes did much to improve the lives of animators in the trenches. The vitality of the anime industry wasn& #39;t fueled by the studios, but rather by the vitality of the manga industry. That& #39;s the critical difference as compared to US. 3/x

When I say "manga," I actually gekiga, the gritty, dark, graphic novels that fueled the student movement even more than protest rock did. "Kamui-den" and "Ashita no Joe" were literally read in place of Marx by a generation of protesters. US had nothing remotely comparable. 4/x

"Migite ni Jyanaru, Hidarite ni Magajin," (Asahi Journal in our right hands, Shonen Magazine in our left) was a literal rallying cry for radicals of the era, and you can& #39;t really understand the rise of manga OR anime without that lens of the student protest movement. 5/x

When the movement imploded around 1971, many of its participants couldn& #39;t get "normal" jobs and filtered in to the publishing, broadcast, and animation industry instead, which fueled the creation of even edgier content over the course of that decade. 6/x

None of this happened in US. Japan had century+ of adult-oriented illustrated entertainment under its belt by the sixties (think woodblock prints of the Edo era.) We had the Comics Code, Disney kids fare; manga took anime in a totally different direction. 7/end