Behind the Scenes: The Anime Bento Articles
Added 2018-10-02 14:28:43 +0000 UTCTitles:
Publication Dates: 9/1/2018 - 9/24/2018
Author: Samantha Ferreira
A bit of background.
When you work in the anime industry, you have to be ready for a few surprises, both good and bad. We basically work within a situation that I’ve described as a sugar high, as we ping-pong between truly manic highs and utterly devastating lows, with very few moments that resemble a calm middle ground.
One day, we’ll be breathlessly reporting on an inspiring case where hundreds of fans came together to re-animate an episode of Sailor Moon. The next, we’ll be taking a stone-faced tone, as we relay a story about one of manga’s most beloved authors being arrested for purchasing child pornography. The next day, the highs will be back, as we talk up Conan O’Brien starting a mock feud with Detective Conan, or the charming way Sega-Sammy’s baseball team uses Sakura Wars as a rallying cry.
And so on. You kind of get used to this state of constant flux, and learn to roll with a lot of punches. Still, nothing really could have really prepared me for this story,
I first picked up on the Anime Bento story in May, shortly after Anime Boston. Katy Castillo from Yatta-Tachi reached out with the story, giving some background on the matter. On hearing the situation, I began to explore pretty much every avenue I had available. Anime Bento’s website had some red flags from the get-go, with a long-expired countdown timer to the next box. Their Twitter account was similarly “off”, having posted no updates since October 2017 at the time... and that was a Retweet of a Crunchyroll post.
Then I found their Facebook page. Every single story bombarded with angry customers who were claiming that they hadn’t received their products since March, January, and in some cases September 2017. All the while, the page owners showed no response, as the account published timed posts on the regular. And each of these posts was bombarded with five, ten, sometimes twenty complaints, all from different people!
Checking review site CrateJoy showed a similar result, with the service holding a piddling 2.5 stars, and dozens of angry reviews that alleged non-receipt (or worse).
With this in mind, my mind was made up - I had to report on this.
Doing Some Fieldwork
I began my info-gathering phase in two segments. On one hand, I reached out to Anime Bento - I sent emails to their one available contact address, with an inquiry for a further response and comment.
On the second, I just started reaching out to people on Anime Bento’s Facebook page. I sent every member an sending out close to 40 inquiries to individuals, inquiring whether they would be interested in commenting on their experiences with Anime Bento.
I received twenty-eight responses within two hours.
And, from there, we talked… and talked, and talked. We discussed their experiences with Anime Bento, when things went wrong, and what they wanted to see from Anime Bento as a company. By the end of the investigation, five people ultimately asked to go on-record. Others, meanwhile, would become secondary sources, folks who didn’t want to go on-record, but were happy to share their experiences, and corroborate certain details when possible.
By this, I mean that, in some cases, they were able to verify stories of the primary sources they had a relationship with, or they could validate that certain communiques were real by providing duplicates, etc. Basically, they were the rock stars behind the curtain, who would ensure that we could be 1,000% accurate in publishing this piece.
But anyway! As these conversations were going, we ended up waiting on Anime Bento for comment… and waiting… and waiting. Not a peep came from the company.
Then came the weekend of A-Kon. Castillo reached out to confirm that Anime Bento was running a booth at the convention, and actively signing up new customers.
And, to be honest, at that point, I was kind of fed up with them. I ended up going full “Rhode Island Girl” on social media, firing off a patronizing, snarky, and fully unprofessional tweet in an attempt to get some response from them.
This was risky, and it was a reckless choice, because it could have easily jeopardized the investigation that I had been running. But, at the same time, it worked.
To a point.
I heard nothing from them for another month, to the point where I started sending out repeated inquiries to their public-facing email, as well as several more social media call-outs. All the while, things continued to escalate on their public fronts.
At this point, I was fully unaware of what was going on behind the scenes, so I kept pushing for responses, and chronicling everything that went down. The article, which was slated for a July release, kept getting pushed back, as I talked with my sources… it was about this time that I heard the now-infamous “phone call” story from Katie, which I was able to fully corroborate with at least one source.
Anime Bento Responds… Then Stops Responding
After more than three months and numerous callouts, Anime Bento finally got back to us, in a short email from “Michael.” He promised a follow-up, so I extended the courtesy to hold publication until I heard back.
They never got back to me, even after follow-up.
But, at that point, I pretty much had what I needed. I published the story to The Herald after adding our final blurb about this, and ran with the story as it was. I talked with numerous folks whom I was still working with for the piece, all of whom were thankful to see someone, anyone giving a voice to the complaints that they had been shouting at Anime Bento since early this year. And, well, I was happy to do just that.
At the time, though, I had no clue that this was far from over.
This Isn’t Over
On September 4, Castillo reached out again, this time with the story from a colleague of the Anime Bento founders. The source, who asked to remain 100% anonymous, told a story of a rare moment of cooperation between cutthroat forces within the Texas anime con world. They painted a picture of a landscape where backstabbing was the norm, table space was traded for table space, and ventures deemed “not worth it” were dropped at a moment’s notice. Most damning, though, was that they included photos, confirming identity, relationships, and more as validation.
I immediately reached out, asking for further comment. The source shared a Facebook post with Castillo and I from Anime Bento member Mark del Bosque, which showed him asking to do “menial work” for table space. The post featured an exchange from a “Mi Chael”, in which del Bosque was bluntly asked “who puked all over your pages that you need a scrubbing,” to which del Bosque responded “There was a mess and it needs cleaning.”
It was chilling, and 100% verifiable. We have the receipts.
This, sadly, ended up getting back-burnered for about two weeks, because my day job was just entering crunch for a major company-wide project. This meant that 80 hour work weeks were the norm, and I just could barely move after the day (Super sorry, everyone! This is why we had no movement here.)
The actual story, meanwhile, took just shy of a week to research, verify, write, edit, and typeset for publication, after which it was immediately sent out into the wild.
I had sent out an inquiry to Anime Bento but, as you can expect, they never responded.
For now, the story seems to be somewhat settled, as we wait for the next major development. However, I have been keeping my eye on Anime Bento more often, lately.
Total Workload
From soup to nuts, I’ve spent close to 150 hours researching the two Anime Bento stories. The interviews and conversations from the initial story, as well as piecing things together, took just shy of 125 hours, if my math is correct. The follow-up took just over 25, from initial contact to publication.
This is, without a doubt, the most in-depth article I’ve had the pleasure of writing over my eighteen year career. At times, it was frantic, chaotic, and straight-up frustrating as I tried to get comments from Anime Bento on the initial story. Still, knowing that I did something good for people, that I was able to give a voice to so many who were being outright ignored in the anime world, is pretty amazing.
A quick apology, to everybody for taking so long on this! The piece was originally supposed to ship on Sunday, but we ended up running long due to this just being a massive set of stories to unpack.
