Manga (Gillian)

Is this an obvious topic to write about? Well yes, maybe. But let’s be realistic here: When it comes to modern Japanese culture, manga is one of the first things that people think about. Manga has become so big, both in Japan and around the world, that it would be impossible to write a series of articles about what makes Japan cool, without talking about manga somewhere along the line. Manga is, after all, one of the main reasons why so many of us foreigners decide to study Japanese in the first place.

Manga as we know it dates back from the period after World War II, with the likes of Astro Boy and Sazae-san being among the first popular modern manga. Both of these manga set up stylistic innovations that give manga its unique flavour, as it were. Astro Boy utilised a cinematographic drawing technique, where the live action plays out almost in slow motion, and there are many rapid zooms from distance to head shots. Sazae-san was something like the original Shojo (girl manga), with a main focus on daily life and character experience which is now common in Shojo comics.

Over subsequent years new developments in the manga-writing world, such as the increase in female artists starting with the Year 24 Group (“Year 24” referring to the 24^th year of the Showa period; the year when many of these artists were born, which was 1949), and the relaxation of censorship in Japan in the early 1990’s, has helped manga spread into a wider variety of genres. Nowadays manga are separated into two main groups – the previously mentioned Shojo manga for girls, and Shonen manga for boys. Shonen manga can be subsequently divided into the boy comics, Shonen, the young-man comics, Seinen, and the more sexually overt manga, also aimed at young men, Seijin. Within these subsets there exists manga for pretty much every genre under the sun, including action/adventure, historical drama, romance, comedy, mystery, horror, science fiction and fantasy, sports and games, sexuality, business/commerce, and others. Finding a manga series that you like, therefore, should be easy.

But why is manga so cool? Why has manga managed to become such an enormous industry in Japan (generating sales of over 400 billion yen per year), and in recent years a fairly note-worthy industry in other parts of the world (sales in America and Canada totalled 175 million dollars in 2008, if Wikipedia is to be believed), especially when we consider the market for western comic books; a dwindling market if ever there was one?

To answer this question, let’s consider how the manga culture works in Japan. A new manga is typically first seen as an approximately 20-page story in a manga magazine – a large volume resembling a telephone book with a much more colourful cover, released weekly, monthly or bi-monthly – along with many other manga stories of a similar genre.

A display of manga magazines, which are regularly seen in manga stores, book stores and convenience stores.

A lot of these manga are one-shots, so there will be one story and that will be it, but for longer-running series’ each story is something like a “chapter”, and if a series is successful enough, after a while the existing chapters will be collected and re-released in a series of books, called tankobon, and these books are what makes up most of the sold goods in the manga stores that exist in every Japanese town with a decent population of young people. With every new five or six chapters released in the magazines, a new tankobon will be published.

A standard aisle in a manga store. These stores are normally well-lit and spacious, with plenty of shelf-room to display the hundreds of different manga series currently available.

Along with buying the manga and reading it at home or school (under one’s desk or behind a larger and more academic-looking tome), manga can also be read in the popular manga cafés, or mangakissa (“kissa” is short for “kissaten”; the Japanese word for “café”), which operate as something like a casual reading-room where you can choose a manga from their sizeable library, buy a coffee, sit at a table or on a lounge and read the manga at your leisure. Many devout fans stay at manga cafes overnight.

Some pictures of the inside of manga cafes.

As well as the mainstream manga market, there also exists a market for smaller, independently-published comic books, known as doujinshi. Doujinshi are often original stories, but many are parodies of more mainstream manga stories, or contain the characters of more mainstream manga stories, much like the more western concept of fanfiction. But while fanfiction is a medium is generally read online and generates next to no revenue, Comiket, the largest comic book convention in the world, with over 500,000 people attending twice annually over a period of three days, is devoted to doujinshi. Doujinshi sales add up to around 300 billion yen per year.

Comiket in action. Notice the size of the room and the sheer volume of people. 

So manga is clearly a highly encouraged part of modern Japanese life, and this, I think, is why manga is so cool right now.

A lot of people liken manga to western comic books, but personally, I don’t believe that is the case at all. Manga are very much their own entity, but if we want to consider western phenomena that are similar to manga, the medium with the best likeness to manga is television series’. Popular American television series’, like Glee, Bones, Gossip Girl and NCIS, are popular for a number of reasons (good writing, good acting, good direction, and other phrases with the word “good” in them). But what makes them exciting within a society, as it were, is how new episodes get released every week, so fans have the opportunity to talk about new developments that have happened in the show, and speculate about what is going to happen next. It is a similar case with manga. New chapters for the manga are released quite frequently (as opposed to new books in a book series, which come out once every few years if one is lucky), and in between the chapters fans can talk about the stories and think about which direction the stories look likely to turn. Also, when a season of a television show is finished it becomes available on DVD (if it’s popular enough), so fans can buy the DVDs and relive the old memories, just like buying the tankobon of a manga series.

While it is possible to argue that manga are like comic books, because both are graphic novel media and involve artists and writers, and new chapters/comic books are released each week or month, I disagree entirely with this sentiment. Manga is a huge industry in Japan. It is unlikely that you will find a Japanese person between the ages of 10 and 30 that has not read at least one manga in their lives. Manga stores are everywhere, and manga reading is encouraged by mainstream media and seen as cool (which is after all what this article is about). Comic books, on the other hand, are very much a subculture, even in the countries from where they originated. There are a lot of young people in Western countries who have not read a mainstream comic book before, and stores that sell comic books are difficult to find, as they are mainly small shops located in downtown parts of major cities. Manga, on the other hand, often has entire floors devoted to it in large department stores. Comic books are also extremely limited in genre, focusing almost entirely on superhero stories. Manga naturally has these stories as well, but not everybody is a superhero fan and manga is able to cater for the people who don’t like superhero stories as well, while comic books are not. This explains why the comic book market is drastically dwindling in Western countries, while manga translated into English and other languages is starting to seriously thrive in these other countries.

One other thing that makes manga cool is that it often becomes the basis for small- and big-screen entertainment. Anime, Dorama and many popular Japanese live-action movies are based on manga, and one thing that is particularly interesting about this is that the chosen on-screen medium for representing the original manga can depend largely on what kind of manga it is. Shonen manga, such as Pokemon, Dragonball Z, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece and Digimon, have also become popular anime series’ in Japan and other countries. I myself remember waking up every morning and watching Pokemon before school. Seinen manga and Seijin manga, as well as Shojo manga aimed at young girls like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, also become anime if they are fortunate enough to be adapted for the screen. Shojo manga for older girls, however, tend to become Dorama as well or instead. Dorama is the Japanese way of pronouncing the word “Drama”, and in Japanese this word refers to a short TV series of around 10-15 episodes of one hour each, typically involving some kind of love story and/or self-actualisation for the main characters, and almost always starring famous Japanese heartthrobs like Jun Matsumoto, Kazuya Kamenashi and Shun Oguri. Popular Dorama to have been released in recent years include Kimi wa Petto, Hana yori Dango and Hanazakari no Kimitachi e, all of which come from popular Shojo manga. Some of the really popular manga in any genre, like Death Note and Prince of Tennis, are made into live-action movies as well. It is fairly clear why different manga are adapted for different types of on-screen media. Shonen manga often has some kind of magical theme, and is often aimed at children, so anime is both cheaper and more appealing to the eyes of children than Dorama. Shojo manga tend to focus on the relationships between characters and the human emotions between them, and Dorama is a more realistic-seeming medium for depicting human emotions. Live-action movies, being among the most expensive media, are only made using manga series that are popular enough to guarantee substantial revenue. Whichever medium is chosen, the on-screen versions are another way of becoming immersed in the manga stories, which in turn adds to its coolness.

There are so many outlets with which to fuel an interest in manga in Japan, it is no wonder that it has become as cool as it has. The influence that manga has brought to other countries is particularly note-worthy. Before manga became a big subculture in western countries, for example, the number of young people choosing to study Japanese was minute compared to the number of people choosing to study languages like French and Spanish. Now, however, the number of students studying Japanese is increasing dramatically in a number of western countries. And if you were to ask a Japanese language learner what motivated them to start learning Japanese, nine times out of ten, their answer will involve the word “manga”. I can pretty much guarantee that.

So, if you believe that manga is the coolest thing about Japan, I would say that there are plenty of very, very good reasons why your choice is valid. With manga being so varied, so immersive, and so FUN, there is no doubt that manga is definitely one of the coolest things about Japan.