The history of anime in the US is legally grey. TV recordings, copied VHS tapes, overseas tape trading, bootlegs, and fansubbing all have very important roles in establishing the market that now surrounds us in the States.
They say to never forget where you came from. It seems, however, that some in positions of influence and close to the West’s established business world of anime would rather people forget.
No matter what you think of piracy, there’s no denying that the current anime market wouldn’t exist at anywhere near the same level of success if it weren’t for the legally-grey efforts of college-aged nerds, trading VHS recordings of Western sci-fi TV shows over to Japan in exchange for VHS recordings of TV anime. Back then, there existed no established market. It was all tape traders in the big anime clubs and bootleg merchants in booths at sci-fi cons. Even the first fansubbed anime came through the clubs.
The first people to satisfy demand for anime did so in legally-grey ways because, at the time, there existed no infrastructure to bring anime over to the US officially. Indeed, it’d be nearly a decade before companies started actually licensing anime to publish in the US.
Today, there’s a robust industry surrounding anime in the US, as well as a more underground community of fansubbers and pirates, and constant debate rages between the legitimate side of the subculture and the side that embraces piracy.
In the midst of the conflict, however, many supporters of the legitimate side seem to have become willfully ignorant of the significant role piracy and fansubbing plays in the subculture’s past and present. Indeed, the assertion is often that there’s no good reason to pirate anime in the modern day.
It’s a very easy assertion to make from the US. We’ve had a robust market around anime for decades, served by multiple growing companies. Others around the world aren’t so lucky, and in order to watch anime, must resort to the modern-day equivalents of the same tape trading the old US anime clubs engaged in.
Nor are things perfect in the US. Licensing issues have caused many popular anime franchises to have partial or no presence in the US.
Most of PreCure is absent from the US.
For a long time, if you wanted to watch Evangelion officially, you had to buy an out-of-print DVD set that easily ran for $200. And with the Netflix acquisition of the license, that’s still the case if you want to own the show.
While there was hope for a moment, Tatsunoko’s renewal of the Macross contract with Harmony Gold just about sealed the fate of Macross 7, Zero, Frontier, and Delta never making it to the US.
It’s tempting to portray pirates as immoral anarchist cheapskates who just don’t want to pay for media, and certainly some of them are, but there are still plenty of manga scanlation sites that remove manga that have been picked up for official release, and scanlation teams that advocate for supporting those official releases once they appear. Just like in the 70s and 80s, piracy, in part, exists as a way to obtain media for which no official release exists.
Piracy is and has been a method of solving problems. Back in the 70s, it solved the problem of people wanting to watch anime but having no way to get it. Nowadays, it solves the problem of an anime being unavailable through official channels or the official release not being up to snuff.
The anime community would do well not to forget the renegade history of this subculture. The utility of piracy is far from exhausted, and its continued existence not only provides the world with anime and manga they otherwise couldn’t consume, but also keeps honest people honest, providing the industry competition in a world of exclusive licenses.