According to international news channel CNN, not even Japan’s burgeoning “soft culture” industry has been spared from global economic woes.

In a recent interview by the cable news giant with the Executive Director of the Association of Japanese Animators Yamaguchi Yasuo, Yamaguchi stated that alongside the Japanese economy’s worst slump since post-WWII, file-sharing and internet piracy has also had its negative effects felt within the animation industry.

In an effort to combat this, a large percentage of the most labor-intensive segments of the industry — such as in-betweening (hand-drawing animated cells that are shot between key animation sequences) for weekly animated tv shows, have been outsourced to Korea and the Philippines due to lower labor expenditures. This is an interesting development as in-betweening for American and European animated tv series used to be exported to Japan to cut costs.

One of the largest outsourcing corporations for Japanese animation production based in Manila is the Philippine subsidiary of Toei Douga, Toei Animation Philippines. Toei Animation Philippines appears to be doing well, and is in fact actively encouraging the growth of the Philippine animation industry through it support of the Animation Council of the Philippines.