Dateline: April 25

Tonight’s Dateline on SBS has a story on Japan’s declining Anime industry and how it is fighting back -by producing porn.

In Japan, if it’s cute, it sells.

That’s why the anime industry, with its big-eyed heroes and heroines offering an intriguing mix of innocence and experience, is worth $2-billion a year.

But as Dateline’s Adrian Brown reports, the industry is facing three big threats: illegal downloading, which is hurting advertising sales; competition from Chinese and Korean animation companies; and the fact that anime’s traditional audience – Japanese children – is dwindling.

So to find new consumers, many companies are creating anime porn, just to survive.

But disturbingly, anime porn often depicts children in sexually explicit scenarios. There’s even RapeLay, an online game that lets players choose their victim’s age.

“I think it is damaging the [anime] market,” an owner of a studio that doesn’t produce porn tells Brown.

“It’s true that adult animations seem to be selling well,” says an industry analyst, “but they will also eventually face illegal downloading…so producing porn is only a short-term solution.”

Since it began in the mid sixties, anime has helped to define Japan as a cultural trend setter. But perhaps this iconic industry is facing its inevitable demise?

BIG MONKEY BUSINESS: Also on this episode of Dateline, a BBC Panorama story about the evils of palm oil, an ingredient found in scores of products including fish fingers, cosmetics and toiletries.

In the rainforests of Borneo, Panorama uncovers evidence of palm oil companies cutting down trees illegally and planting on protected land. This deforestation is contributing to global warming and destroying the habitat of man’s closest cousin, the critically endangered orang-utan.

It airs at 8:30pm tonight.