Chainsmoker Cat studio chief: anime's low-pay era is over
Motoki Tanaka, who runs the studio behind Chainsmoker Cat, says pay and hours have improved enough to call the industry's low-wage era finished, while conceding the exceptions are still there.
The head of one of Japan's busier animation studios thinks the worst of the industry's pay problem is behind it. Motoki Tanaka, founder and chief executive of Bibury Animation Studios and known professionally as Tensho, posted on X that conditions for animators and production coordinators have improved considerably over the past few years, with salaries that are both higher and paid on time.
Tanaka went further than a studio boss usually does on the record: "the era when low pay was the norm and overtime was a given in the anime industry is over", he wrote, as reported by Automaton West on 18 September. Overtime and overnight stays are down, he said, and the old stigma of animation being an embarrassing job, or a job for otaku, is fading now that the industry is treated as an important part of Japan's cultural identity.
He was careful to leave room around the claim. Animation is still not an easy job, he said, and cases of low or delayed pay and of overtime do still exist. His argument is about the direction of travel rather than a finished repair job.
What the claim is measured against
Japan's animation workforce has been the subject of unusually blunt reporting for the past few years. Oricon News reported in July 2023 that veteran artists were the main beneficiaries of the global anime boom while newcomers were paid roughly 50,000 yen a month, about 350 dollars, and encouraged to practise their craft in their free time rather than take a part-time job. In March 2024 an animator posted a first month's pay slip worth about 132 dollars, with another describing three days to finish in-between animation for around 103 dollars.
International pressure arrived in 2025, when a United Nations human rights committee report found that more than 30 percent of animators working freelance or as independent contractors were exposed to long hours and unfair subcontracting relationships, and that contracts often failed to protect their intellectual property.
Who is saying it
Bibury Animation Studios is the studio behind Chainsmoker Cat and The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You, whose second season it produced in 2025. Tanaka's studio also animated the Quintessential Quintuplets film and Grisaia: Phantom Trigger, which gives him more standing on production economics than the average executive posting about working conditions.
Our opinion
A chief executive saying the industry pays better is not evidence that it does, and the honest read of this is that the person with the least incentive to overstate the problem is confirming the problem existed. Tanaka is describing his own studio's conditions, not a national audit, and the numbers he is arguing against were never in dispute. The welcome part is that the claim is falsifiable in a way most industry optimism is not: pay floors, published rate cards and contracts that hand animators their intellectual property are all things a studio can simply show.
What makes the statement more useful than a press release is the concession attached to it. A chief executive who says the low-pay era is over and then admits low and late pay still happens is describing a two-tier industry, with the studios that have restructured standing next to the subcontractors that have not. The 2025 UN finding, that the problems cluster among freelancers and independent contractors, points at the same split. If the improvement is real, the next few years will show it up in the part of the workforce that has no salary to be paid on time.