Two Chapters from Why Is Manga So Interesting: Its Expression and Grammar(Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: Sono hyōgen to bunpō, 1997) Natsume Fusanosuke (bio) Translated by Jon Holt (bio) and Teppei Fukuda (bio) Chapter One: The Riddle of the Rise of Japanese Manga WHY DO ADULTS IN JAPAN READ MANGA? When I am riding on the subway, I might be reading a manga magazine, but no one next to me would think it odd. However, for Americans and Europeans, it would probably be a shocking sight for them to see. In the West, if we leave out the kind of artistic works that a small section of super-fans might support, for the most part comics are nothing more than juvenile reading materials produced for children. It would seem that adults in the West then must feel a kind of resistance to comics, because they cannot understand why Japanese adults would spend so much time and effort to read such things. A long time ago, Japanese comics too were thought to be childish rubbish. It was only about twenty years ago [in the late 1970s], when we reached a point where adults could publicly and proudly read manga in front of others. In the late 1960s, when I was a college student, you saw news headlines like "university students read manga." It was from that point on that, more and more, adults (young adults [seinen]) began picking up manga. This fact neither should surprise us nor should we think that we Japanese people are immature for reading them. If that is true, it is understandable that Westerners might give us some dubious looks, but we should consider it from the other angle: namely, Japanese manga has now reached a point where it can sustain adult readers. After all, why is it that no one gets shocked at the large number of adults in the West going to see movies? Just like films in the West, manga for Japanese adults is something people enjoy reading and no one thinks it weird that they do it. A lot of movies of course are just for kids or plainly middle-brow entertainment, but even among all those movies, there are also films that are superior works of art. The same is true for Japanese manga. Now that I think about it from this angle, it should be straight forward enough, but it might be that people do not understand how cultures vary from one to another. It might be that Westerners simply cannot imagine how Japanese adults—even white-collar workers (sararīman)—could possibly find in their manga magazines the kind of joys, the tragedies, and the victories enough to get them to invest their emotions in and be moved by such stories. [End Page 181] How many other countries in the world have grown so large that they could have comics develop into a such a mainstay in culture for their masses? These days, only Japan has done this. It is true that there are other markets where this is currently happening, like we see similar growth (and influence from the Japanese manga market) in places like Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan. Even so, they have not reached the Japanese level. They are still in the phase in which we see pirated copies of Japanese manga publications widely sold, but there is also an ongoing effort of real publishers to work with Japanese companies—and those legitimate overseas publishers are growing in number every day. You also see in those places cartoonists developing—and these artists clearly have been influenced by Japanese manga. LOW COSTS KEEP JAPANESE MANGA MARKET GROWING These days [in the 1990s], manga occupies roughly 40% of all of Japan's published material. Furthermore, manga sales account for as much as 22% of all publisher sales (chart 1). It is because manga is so cheap that it still only accounts for that much of all publishing sales. What I find really interesting is the following graph (chart 2), where we can see the comparative sales from the past ten years of how boys' comics, girls' comics, and young men's (seinen) comics fare against each...
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Jan 1, 2024
Alice Klein 
Open Access