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Seminars on Academic Research of Manga and Anime Part 9
10th January 2006
Uniqueness of Manga Market in Post-war Japan
Nakano Haruyuki
 
Theory of Manga Industry and 4 Hypotheses
 Seminars on Academic Research of Manga and Anime have traced a history of 10,000 years. In the final seminar, I will talk about the period from 1945 to the present, which is my field of specialization. It is surprising that Japan is the only country in the world where so much manga is read. I wrote a book called Theory of Manga Industry after I wrote about the life of Tezuka Osamu in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump and discussed why so much manga is read in Japan with the people of the editorial department. Over 6,000,000 copies of Weekly Shonen Jump were published at that time. Readership had expanded from primary school students to salary men in their forties, and the variety of works had also expanded as a result. The people in the editorial department said, 'The readership of Jump has expanded to 40 year olds so we also need works suitable for 40 year olds.' However, there were many children around me who had become bored of Jump. Whilst the children had lost interest, the editorial department were chasing after adult readers in their forties. A year after we had talked about the necessity of paying attention to younger readers, Weekly Shonen Jump suddenly stopped selling and publication figures fell from 6,000,000 to 2,700,000 in a short time.
 The history of manga shows that a sudden drop in sales is quite common. A significant example of this is the case of illustrated stories which can be said to be the origin of comics. Illustrated stories were very popular until around 1951 and featured as the main part of every magazine. Komatsuzaki Shigeru and Yamakawa Soji were especially popular. But the sales reached a peak in 1952 and then suddenly dropped.
 Thus I began to think that if I analyzed what was happening in the market, I would be able to discover the reasons why the Japanese read so much manga.
 Some people say that the Japanese like manga so much because Tezuka Osamu's works were so good, and manga is not read very much in other countries because Tezuka was not there. But can we attribute the cause to the presence of a single person? Surely we should think about all kinds of factors and ask ourselves whether Japan would have been different if Tezuka had not existed. I developed the theory of manga industry as an attempt to prove that we would have a better understanding if we sought our answers in the market. At present, manga critiques are dominated by theories of representation, and it is still a lonely battle for theories of industry, but I am trying to discover the uniqueness of Japanese manga from the point of view of the market.
 I put forward a number of hypotheses to begin with. The first hypothesis is that manga developed due to the first-rate editors who joined general publishing companies to work on literature and news but ended up being assigned to manga departments. As they edited manga, they became more enthusiastic and tried to make manga into something that would not be inferior to literature or news. There was a magazine called Manga Sunday published by Jitsugyo no Nihonsha before Matsutani, who now works for Tezuka Productions, had joined the company. Manga Sunday was a manga magazine, but had a great deal of variety. It included photogravures which were not of nudes. It also published an interview of Maruyama Akihiro (Miwa Akihiro at present) entitled 'Yearning to be a notary public' and a novel called 'Shusse Sanba Garasu' (Three Crows on the Road to Success). Of course, it also included the most important work of manga for adults by Tezuka called 'Ningendomo Atsumare!' (Rally Up Mankind!), and, above all, the manga of the great Tominaga Ichiro who has a manga gallery named after him. What the people who were assigned to manga departments tried to do was to produce this kind of magazine. When Shonen Sunday was first published, it was also in the form of a weekly magazine bound in saddle stitch with color photogravures of Nagashima, Kaneda, Oh (professional base ball players), Asashio Taro, Tochinishiki (sumo wrestlers) and so on, and not women. The wedding of the crown prince took place at around this time, so the wedding photographs were also included. A market existed, or rather was created, for these magazines.
 So I think the range of readership of manga magazines extended from children to adults because there was such unusual feature in the Japanese market structure.
 The second hypothesis is about the question of uniqueness of Japanese manga. If Japanese manga is such an exclusive culture, one might think that it will not be accepted outside the country. However, today Japanese manga is read abroad, supported by the universal needs of teenage readers. Girls' mangas have become a great hit in Germany and there is a great number of girls' mangas included in the publications of Tokyopop in America. I suggest that young men's magazines and girls' comics began to sell because there were no such products abroad that met the needs of young people, particularly of girls.
 The third hypothesis is that major publishing companies at the core of the Japanese manga industry in fact have never created new manga representations themselves. They have merely imported authors and works from other markets which had already recognized the potential of the works.
 The fourth hypothesis is about the over expansion of the manga related market. If the manga market expands too much, it is bound to shrink eventually, and there is also danger of loss of creativity for the manga artist. Publication numbers began to fall in the mid 1990s, around 1992 for young men's magazines and 1995 for boys' magazines, and the figures continue to drop. I think the reason for the market contraction can be found in the rapid growth of the 1980s. The enormous development of the manga magazine market, as represented by the publication of 6,000,000 copies of Shonen Jump in the 1980s, was in fact a cause of the market contraction.
 I think that most of you can remember buying Shonen Sunday and exchanging it with a friend who bought Shonen Magazine so that you could read both. In the heyday of Shonen Jump from the end of 1980s to the beginning of 1990s, everyone in a class had Shonen Jump. This was indeed a state of market saturation and there was no way that the sales could expand beyond this point. Thus, it was this state of saturation that had actually led to market contraction.
 On the other hand, those who created manga, that is to say the manga authors, were unable to draw what they wanted and lost their sense of creativity. When the manga related market developed as an industry, popular works could no longer end halfway. This was because more and more animations and related products were created. In the case of 'Dragon Ball' by Toriyama Akira, for example, Bandai produced a game called 'Dragon Ball' which sold 1,000,000. Parts II and III followed and became bestselling software with sales going up to 900,000. There was no question of discontinuing the original manga. Thus in many cases, serialization of manga works cannot be stopped while they are popular, and by the time they eventually come to an end they are pretty worthless.
 I began to work on the theory of manga industry to analyze the manga market on the basis of the above 4 hypotheses. We can say that the manga market reached an industrial scale not in 1959 when Shonen Sunday and Shonen Magazine appeared, but a little later around 1963.
 This is because 'Tetsuwan Atomu' (Astro Boy), the first feature animation on television in Japan, was broadcast on 1st January 1963. This was a great turning point in which manga and television merged and commercial marketing began. In the meanwhile, manga became a major industry in the publishing sector around 1966 when Shonen Magazine achieved the 1,000,000 mark. A year later in 1967, Annual Publication Index began to give total numbers of manga publications as an independent category. Until then, there were statistics for children's books but not for manga. Therefore, when we are working with statistical material, we come to the conclusion that it was around this time that manga market reached an industrial scale. Thus, I think we can start by looking at the situation from around the mid 1960s.
 So let us begin from there. First of all, manga related market has a multi-faceted and complex structure. In other words, there was not just one market. Let us look at the aspect of production to start with. Tokyo cultural region and Kansai cultural region existed separately until 1950s. This distinction broke down in the mid 1960s. This was due to the collapse of the Kansai cultural region after the introduction of the bullet train which enabled one to travel between Tokyo and Osaka in 3 and a half hours. The introduction of the business express Kodama just before that enabled one to travel between Tokyo and Osaka in one day. I went on the business express Kodama when I was a first year student in primary school and it was indeed an incredible experience. The distinction gradually broke down at around that time and the introduction of the bullet train made it difficult for the two cultural regions to exist independently. Previously, half of the television programs were produced in Osaka and the other half in Tokyo. A classic television series called 'Tenamonya Sandogasa' was broadcast during the peak viewing time in Tokyo. But today, the only programs produced in Osaka which are broadcast in Tokyo are 'Shinkonsan irasshai!' (Welcome Newlyweds!) and a few variety shows with audience participation. Even television dramas which are said to be produced by Kansai Television are shot in Tokyo. Nevertheless, the fact that two cultural regions existed had a great influence not only on the pre-manga market but also on the subsequent manga market.
 Tokyo cultural region and Osaka cultural region originated in the Edo period. Tokyo (Edo) was the seat of the government and an information center. There was stock market in Osaka and information naturally gathered there. One could not do business in the rice market, for example, without direct information about the rice crop situation of the whole of Japan. News of Ako Roshi's raid in Edo reached Osaka in three days, and a jyoruri (puppet theater) performance on the incident was already produced just a few days later. That was how powerful Osaka was as an information center. All kinds of products came to Osaka, so all sorts of information about the place of production, consumer trends in each region, and so on also came to Osaka. Tokyo was the political center, but since Osaka was the center of immediate economic information, it could also send out information. Osaka was based on the silver standard at the time of the Meiji Restoration, so it suffered a great deal when the system changed to the gold standard. Godai Tomoatsu, however, suggested that Osaka should concentrate on industry and a Manchester of the East was created in Osaka. In this way, until about 1956, Kansai had always been a distinct cultural region. There were also many publishing companies in Osaka. Incidentally, Kansai is said to be half of Tokyo in terms of GDP, population, and so on. This is because after around 1955, commerce, industry and politics were all unipolarly concentrated in Tokyo.


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