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...