It’s no secret that folks who go into the anime industry don’t expect to strike it rich. Still, one would hope to pull a living wage from a career that demands so much.
Recently, anime studio P.A. Works (Shirobako, Angel Beats!) published a new job listing. According to the post, the studio is looking for animators for the upcoming Spring 2018 broadcast season.
According to the post, the position is hourly, with a work day that runs from 10:00AM to 7:00PM (with a one-hour lunch break), with weekends and holidays off. The kicker here, though, comes from the wage. The position only pays 770 yen per hour ($6.81 USD). All things held constant, this amounts to an average weekly pay of 43,120 yen ($381.20 USD), and 2,242,240 yen per year ($19,822.44 USD).
In comparison, the United States has a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, and Canadian minimum wages start at $10.85 CAD ($8.45) per hour.
In Japan, animation is considered a “black industry”, which is a term given to careers that pay unfairly low wages for long hours. In some cases, salaries can dip as low as a million yen ($8,804.99 USD) per year.
On a more extreme level, we’ve seen numerous calls for fans to open their wallets to fund affordable animator housing, and studios have begun listing affordable dorms as perks for signing on to their organization.
Source: Ota-suke