This study proposes a method for understanding the activity of players in the Japanese anime industry using social network analysis. The author first identifies members of production committees for anime programs that aired between the summer of 2020 and the spring of 2022. Then, the author analyzes production committee members by computing the degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality of each company by season. Using this enables us to track the chronological trends of each specific company. The author also creates a new metric, the Anime Business Impact Index, to compensate for the limitations of the centrality measures. This metric can be used to effectively examine trends concerning players in Japan’s anime industry.

This study focuses on Cassette JUNE, the very first commercial shōnen-ai project with adult male anime seiyuus (voice actors) casted as prominent characters. Cassette JUNE was established in the 1980s at the intersection of the “second anime boom,” “second seiyuu boom,” and “yaoi boom.” The initiative inherited anime fans’ love of voice and seiyuus to create a unique listening experience in the terrain of female-oriented culture. This article will investigate the cassettes “Tsudumi-ga-huchi” and “Ai-no-kusabi,” as well as the listeners’ respective opinions at the time. This essay explores what kind of listening experience Cassette JUNE provided, as well as how the creators’ performance interacted with the listeners’ experience, in order to create a foundation for future research into how this auditory content intertwined with the visual components of anime. This article argues that Cassette JUNE, unlike the conventional shōnen-ai manga and novels, provided listeners with an auditory pleasure simulating the pleasure evoked by tactile sensations through its arrangement to deliver an adult male seiyuu’s voice directly to the ears of the listener. Furthermore, this article proposes that Cassette JUNE enabled listeners to initiate discussions over their auditory pleasure by offering a communication channel for reflective comments.