Japanese popular culture has developed through the close collaboration between official producers and amateur fan creators, in manga, anime, music, games, toys and more. Is this reliance on fan productivity, for example in crowd-sourcing music for Hatsune Miku videogames, a new form of labor exploitation? Or does this collaborative creativity offer new, and progressive, approaches to thinking about the economics of work in a digital age? This talk draws on findings from Condry's recent book "The Soul of Anime," based on fieldwork in Tokyo anime studios and fan conventions.

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