Just because anime is popular doesn’t mean that it’s proliferating. As Japan sinks deeper into a recession, even its seemingly stable animation industry has started to feel the curse of the economic plague. Even worse, we, anime fans, may have blood on our hands.

Yasuo Yamaguchi, executive director of the Association of Japanese Animators, in an interview with CNN, that the current industry scenario has, for the record, never looked so terrible since the end of the second world war. The revenues coming from advertising have dropped though it was just three years ago that the industry has reached the peak of its profits to about $2 billion a year.

At this rate, we may never get to see new heroes and villains being born because the creators would be too afraid to invest in a new story and new set of characters. Their entry- level animator jobs were also taken over by outsourced hands from the Philippines and South Korea. And the fact that fans can just download from the internet instead of actually buying original anime merchandise, like manga and video animations, doesn’t help their plight one bit.

This is evident when Yamaguchi also added, “The spread of free Internet downloading is having a deadly effect.”

The world population is getting younger and it should have been good news to the animation industry because this means more following. But, as it turns out, it only got new watchers, not buyers. P2P sharing sites and torrent downloads had spiked in activity since more and more people have learned how to exploit them. And although people who are sharing the “good stuff” always remind the downloaders of the online piracy credo, “If you can buy it, buy it, and then share it,” the freeloaders are just too happy to be leeching without impunity.

One could actually argue that the real cause of the recession should be the one to be blamed, not the free downloaders. However, in our current situation, the recession is already a given, and determining its root would require a long and arduous, not to mention loathsome analysis which we should leave to the experts. We, simple and fun- loving anime enthusiasts that we are, are presented with a chance to stop something that aggravates the situation because, in the first place, we are the problem. Maybe a little less downloads per week to a gradual stop? It’s just like quitting smoking.

Japanese animators stick to the traditional method of animation, unlike in other countries where advanced technology has made it easier to make the drawings move. And one can only imagine the hardships they have to go through to keep their grip and stroke steady so they can continue to draw for hours in a given business day. Now imagine those hands failing to continue because the animator is too hungry to go on.

But don’t worry yourself too much. Right now, the big animation studios like Toei are still secure. It’s only the small production houses who are going down, anyway. They’re also asking the government for a helping hand to keep their own hands on their pencils and their pencils on the sketch pads. Oh yeah! Remember the famous car company in the US, General Motors? They were really big, too, you know? And they have also asked for financial aid from their government. Now they are bankrupt.

So the next time you actually browse the net in search of the latest manga release or the latest anime episode, and before you actually decide to embrace piracy for the nth time, think of it as adding an even darker hue to the already bleak future of anime. You will find that it will all be too easy to press the “download” button, and so difficult to do the right thing.