Very interesting thread, but perhaps too simplistic? Pre-Miyazaki, there was a failed strike at Toei that fed many defections to Tezuka's Mushi Pro (which made Astro Boy, Japan'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

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'm not sure later strikes did much to improve the lives of animators in the trenches. The vitality of the anime industry wasn't fueled by the studios, but rather by the vitality of the manga industry. That'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'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'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