Resources: Starting a Club {Kubo and Tanaka in front of Bldg. 54}

Some advice on how to start an anime club

People often write us to ask for advice on how to start an anime club.

I'm afraid that our club is now so old that no one really remembers how we started it. Those who might remember, sadly enough, have scrambled their brain-cells by watching too much ancient anime and are now only able to communicate in a fractured pidgin Nihongo. Consider yourself warned.

Finding clubs in your area

If you haven't done so already, take a look at the Anime Web Turnpike. In particular, their geographic guide to anime clubs in the United States and anime clubs outside the US may help you find a club near you. Local clubs may have good local advice, and may agree to swap tapes or DVDs with you, giving you access to yet more anime. And access to anime is what clubs are all about.

Convincing parents, teachers, etc., that an anime club is worthwhile

If you're high school students looking to start a club, you may find this Parents' guide to anime helpful when arguing that there are anime which can be shown on campus without inundating the school administration with calls from irate parents ranting about the school showing violent animated Japanese pornography. Some of the links in the section Anime as a key to culture on our Resources page and the books listed on our Books page may help convince your school's faculty that an interest in anime might serve an educational purpose. In particular, see Gilles Poitras' Teacher's companion to The anime companion.

Club activities

In addition to showing anime, our club has had fun with the following activities:

Group discounts at local cons (with the more dedicated going to non-local cons as well).
A cosplay contest is a great thing to do at Halloween.
Cosplay workshops: get together and share ideas, techniques, and sewing machines.
Karaoke events using subtitled OP and ED film clips and other anime music.
Group expeditions to local Japanese restaurants and/or bookstores.
Inviting speakers on anime-related topics: animation, comics, film, popular culture, or Japanese culture.
A club newsletter.

We've also tried to have an anime music video contest and a club "eye catch" contest (an eye-catch is the quick bit of animation that pops up around commercials in anime episodes, we sometimes use them for the beginning and ending of intermissions), but MIT students seem to be too busy to spend a lot of time editing videos or creating animations. Your club may have more success with this than we have. Other groups have produced parody dubs of anime works, and some clubs do their own sub-titling.

Financing acquisitions

Building an extensive anime library requires a fair amount of money, it also requires a good deal of patience --- we have been building our library since 1991.

We have financed our club operations in the following ways:

University (and perhaps high-school) clubs may be able to get funding as student activities.
University (and perhaps high-school) clubs may fall under the "educational, non-profit" umbrella of their parent institution, letting you reward contributions with a letter that will permit the contributor to take the value of their contribution as a tax-deduction.
We charge a small membership fee. This fee goes to defraying the costs of running the club (buying anime for the library, paying for poster-paper and art-supplies for the people in charge of the club's promotional art).
Since our showings are at dinner time, one of us takes pizza orders and gets pizza and soda which we sell at a small profit. We get about a quarter of our funding this way.
We have a (clean) bottle that we put on the front desk for people to drop pennies (and only pennies!) into. A quart bottle holds about $17 in pennies, and is almost enough to buy an anime DVD. Remember what I said about patience? After a semester those pennies really add up. It's silly, but it works.

Getting permission to show anime

If your club grows larger than a handful of friends, your showings become public exhibitions, and you should get permission to show the anime you are screening. This way you don't have to pretend you're distracted when the "FBI Warning" comes onto the screen. Most companies recognize the promotional opportunity that club showings represent, and are happy to give permission for you to show the material they have licensed.

These days, getting permission has gotten pretty easy since most companies have email addresses for fan relations, and these people can usually at least put you in contact with the person who can authorize a showing. Some companies even have web-forms you can fill out to get showing permissions!

Gilles Poitras maintains a page that will help you find out how to get screening permissions.

High school clubs

Is the club just a gathering place for people who like anime to come to meetings and talk? If this is the case, you might not have a big membership depending on your classmates. For an anime club to be successful, it generally needs actual anime, owned either by the club or officers/members, that can be accessed by other members in some way. Either that, or you're going to need a bunch of hard-core fans who like just talking about anime.

High school clubs are a little tricky, since they generally have more rules to work with and probably want meetings to be sometime during school hours (usually lunch) so everyone has the chance to attend. Some clubs have short showings once or twice a month during lunch (about two episodes) somewhere like a club supervisor's room. The anime can come from the officers' collections, though one has to be careful what is shown since many high schools are conservative and may even refuse DragonBall for its violence. One way around that is to have a few parties during some holidays at various officers/members' houses.

If you can hold meetings outside of school time, that's great, since showings can be longer. If your club is allowed to own anime and keep a library, even better.

It's usually good to have a low (or even no) membership fee, since that brings in more people. Club dues are only needed if you're going to do stuff that takes more than pocket money to accomplish as a club.

Helpful resources

A good place to start is Gilles Poitras's book, Anime essentials: every thing a fan needs to know (Stone Bridge Press, 2001). Anime essentials is a handbook of US and Canadian otaku culture, and contains a chapter with pointers on how to start your own anime club.

The following links appear to have good advice.

Jeff's Anime Club Information page This page gives good advice on how to get permission to show films, and includes contact information for many domestic anime companies.
The Harvard Anime Society's page of advice. Excellent advice from a past club president.