Will Japan’s Manga industry ever really change?

Manga is one of Japan's best known exports, but it's surprisingly hard to make money here.

Today we dig into exactly why this is. We sit down with Sho Ishiwatari, founder of Mantra, who explains how is company is trying to expand the global market by streamlining the translation and global marketing processes.

We also talk about why manga is so much harder than books for AI to understand and a few ways Japanese universities are trying to develop and inspire the next generation of Japanese founders.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.

Show Notes

The surprisingly complex manga translation process The real problem with fan-translated manga How to think about getting a 10x( or 100x!) improvement How the University of Tokyo supports startups and what other schools can learn from them Why translating manga is so different from translating novels The downside using contextual hinting wit AI/ML How to expand the global manga market What every Japanese university should be doing to encourage startups

Links from the Founder

Everything you ever wanted to know about Mantra Connect with Sho on LinkedIn Friend him on Facebook Follow him on Twitter @mantra_ja (Japanese) Sho's published academic research on machine translation of manga

Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Manga and Anime have been two of Japan's most visible and influential exports. Japanese manga has earned its own section in US bookstores. And in the movie industry today, many of the world's most successful directors and cinematographers cite Japanese manga and anime artists as some of their biggest inspirations and influences. But surprisingly, despite manga's global popularity and influence, the global market is pretty small. There's not a lot of money in manga. A And today, we're going to dig into that. We're going to sit down and talk with Sho Ishiwatari, CEO of Mantra. And we're going to find out if a startup can disrupt or even survive in the manga industry. Mantra has created an AI that can translate manga. But, as is the case with so many startup stories, the journey is far more interesting than the destination. You see, before the AI could translate manga, Sho when the team had to teach it to understand manga. Not just read the words but understand the context and the layers of implied meaning. Sho and I talk about the nature of human understanding, how Japanese universities can better inspire the next generation of startup founders, and AI's role in helping people understand each other. But you know, Sho tells that story much better than I can. So let's get right to the interview.

Interview Tim: So we're sitting here with Sho Ishiwatari of Mantra, who's bringing Japanese manga to the world. So thanks for sitting down with us, Sho. Sho: Yeah, thank you for having me, Tim. Tim: In the introduction, I give a really high-level description of what you guys do. But can you explain what Mantra is? Sho: Yeah, sure. So what we are doing is to deliver comics, deliver manga, across language barriers. So we are building two products. The first one is a manga translation tool that is based on our machine translation technology. And another product we're making is Langagku, which is a language learning tool based on manga. Tim: That's two really different lines of business. Sho: Yeah. Tim: Let's dive into both separately later on. But the core tool, do you just translate Japanese into English or do you support other languages as well? Sho: We currently support for language peers, Japanese to English, and English to Japanese, and Japanese to Chinese, and Chinese to Japanese. Tim: Well, that's interesting. So far, most of your business has been Japanese to other languages. But do you also have companies bringing in English or Chinese language manga to Japan? Sho: So previously, almost all the Japanese comics read in Japan are made from Japan. But recently, there are more and more comic platform also in Japan, for example, from Korea or from China. They are having more and more content that have super high quality, so there are several contents coming in from outside Japan. Tim: So tell me about your customers. You mentioned that you're working with publishers and creators, but walk me through your use case. How would a publisher use this tool? Sho: Basically, Mantra Engine, it works on browser. Before Mantra Engine, people has to use Photoshop and Excel and Adobe Acrobat to create the translated manga. And there are several people are involved in the project, like translator, checker, and then designer, who put the characters on the images. So the process will be very complicated and you need to connect to others by using email and send the files to everyone who are involved in the project, which takes time. And the translation and design, all the process done manually. But in our product, they can do that on the browser, the same tool for everyone. And also, it is partially automatically done by AI. You put the image into the tool, it automatically translate that. So it helps people do each process as well as the communication between those different people. Tim: So it is AI translation but it's not completely AI, there's a post translation editing step too, right? Sho: Sure. Sure. You're right. Tim: So from a publishers point of view, what do they gain in terms of like how much faster is this process in the real world, or how much less expensive is the process compared to traditional way? What are the publishers gaining by using Mantra? Sho: One of our clients who is not a publisher but they're translation company of not only the comics, but also other media. But what they say is that they can accelerate the translation speed, whole process by 200%. Tim: So cutting the translation time in half. Sho: Yeah. Tim: And does that result in cutting the costs in half as well? Sho: I think so. Because they're hiring people, so I don't think that that's easy, but basically it should be. Tim: All right. Well, in the ballpark anyway, like customers often won't share those details. Sho: Yeah. And it works on browser. So previously, the translation had to be done by the professional translators. Because if you want to publish in different languages at the same time, you have to share your unpublished data to translators before you publish, like, one week before or two weeks before that. But the thing is there are so many fan translators who want to translate but they are not professional translators. So what Mantra Engine enabled was that you can share that to not only the professional translators but also to the fan translators. Tim: Have publishers been taking that up? Because I know there's far more fan translated manga out there than there are officially translated. So, have publishers been using that feature in Mantra? Sho: Yeah, one of the publishers, yeah, we are working with fan translators. And we let the fan translators use Mantra Engine. Tim: But if you're looking at an overall 50% reduction in price and time, that's really impressive. That's always been the promise of automation of any kind, right? Sho: Yeah, you're right. But we are not satisfied with this result, you know. It should be like 10 times faster or 100 times faster. Tim: How do you get to that number? So, I mean, in startups, we talk about the 10x a lot. It's a really good goal. And actually, you know, 50% is really impressive, honestly. But let's say we're going for that 90% reduction, right, what's the bottleneck? What do you have to change to make that happen? Sho: That's an interesting question. Yeah, we are thinking about that. And it's not an easy question. But as I had mentioned, there are three people who are involved in a single project — translator, checker, and then designer. So even if each process can be accelerated, but if you are working with other person, you need to wait for something. You need to wait until others finish, after which you can begin checking for designing. That is one of the bottleneck. Tim: So changing the workflow to allow these processes to happen in parallel to some degree. Sho: Yeah. And another idea is that if people can do multiple process, so let's say if a translator can also do the design part. Tim: Yeah. I mean, it's a different skill set, right? Sho: Yeah. But if we can assist the process, we can let the translators to do the design very easily. Tim: That's true. The more advanced AI becomes, the more likely it is you'll be able to do that. Well, I want to dig really deeply into the technology and the markets in a minute. But right now, I want to talk a little about you. And let's back up a bit. So, you founded Mantra when you were doing your post doc at the University of Tokyo, right? Sho: Yeah. Tim: Was this part of ongoing research you were doing? Was it a brand new idea that you and your co-founder had? How did you get rolling with this? Sho: The thing began when I was doing the last year of our PhD. I and my co-founder, we were talking about the idea of Mantra. We were trying to make prototype and we were finding customers. We've already decided to make a company then but we haven't made the company. We just did that as a side project. Tim: Why this particular area? Was it just you both were very interested in manga or was it directly connected with your research? Why this particular niche? Sho: Both, both. One strong motivation for me is to involve in entertainment area. I wanted to use artificial intelligence technologies to accelerate the cultural exchange. Very important culture of Japan should be manga or anime or video games. And also, I was doing research on machine translation. And my co-founder, he was very good at doing image processing and comics, consists of text and image, so we can make it.