The Development of the Manga Market

A market for manga is discovered

It is difficult to define exactly when the market for manga was formed, but the foundation for the manga publishing market that would blossom after WWII had already been in place during the Taisho period (1912–26). During this period, it was discovered that manga could constitute its own market, and several things were established that serve as the basis for manga publishing today, including the system for delivering a constant supply of manga to readers through children’s magazines, efforts to reuse content by republishing manga in books, and a double market structure consisting of a legitimate publishing market and an outside publishing market that allowed for a variety of experimental approaches to be taken in manga, led by the publication of akahon manga (manga books released by publishing companies involved in inexpensive entertainment documents called akahon, or “red books,” which were distributed to street stalls, toy stores, and general stores in addition to bookstores).

“Magazine culture” that transcends magazine culture

The weekly manga magazines that emerged after WWII not only gave rise to numerous masterpieces, they also made it clear to the world that manga constituted a publishing genre with its own huge market, as seen in the record-breaking numbers of magazines in circulation and the fierce competition that ensued between major publishers over the number of copies sold. On the other hand, with their thick booklet format consisting almost entirely of manga and disproportionately low prices compared to their production costs, these magazines established a manga-specific magazine publishing style and gave shape to a unique “magazine culture” that transcended the framework of existing magazine media.

Overly particularized “special interest magazines”

Postwar manga magazines differed significantly from other magazine publications in that they developed extraordinarily particularized genre subdivisions. These divisions were not restricted to gender, as in shōnen (boys’) magazines and shōjo (girls’) magazines, they also extended to age: magazines for seinen (young men) and “young ladies” (young women); hobbies: games, gambling, and fishing; specific forms of expression such as yonkoma (four-panel) manga; as well as explicit manga for adults and specific sexual preferences, such as BL (“Boys’ Love”; manga depicting homoerotic male relationships, marketed a women) and yuri (“Lily”; depicting lesbian relationships). In this way, publishers were able to expand the market base for manga publications by imagining/creating their target reader groups to near-absurd levels of specificity.

The structure for converting manga in magazines into books

Along with magazines, manga books (trade paperbacks called “comics” in Japanese) have been an essential part of the Japanese manga market’s development from the postwar era to the present. The emergence of new manga book formats opened up a path for works of manga that previously would have been read once and discarded, left to disappear with the passage of time, to continue living on “commercially” for future generations. At the same time, sales of these books created a structure in the industry that compensated for the deficits created by their parent magazines, thereby laying the groundwork for launching of all sorts of other manga magazines. Publishers also began planning magazine serials with the manga book publishing schedule in mind, which served to greatly extend the length of works of serial manga.

Manga as the “flowers” of a bookstore

The fact that the manga section is now one of the busiest sections in a bookstore, with trending manga books stacked high on display platforms, speaks volumes about how manga is an indispensable product genre in the publishing industry as a whole. However, manga did not enjoy a privileged position in the industry from the beginning—we can see in its history traces of the manga medium carving out a “place” for itself in the publishing industry through conflicts with traditional publishing culture and the cultural values of the bookstore industry.

A mechanism for expression that generates “print media”

With the progression of digital publishing and technologies today, the scope of the conventional paper-based manga market has decreased year on year. However, the field of digital contents, including manga apps and the eBook industry, has so far continued to grow. Additionally, even in the midst of these trends linked to the print media market, the number of comic books published every year has been on the rise. One leading example of the trajectory manga follow today is Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku (Ichijinsha, 2014), which was first released on Pixiv (a Japanese online community for illustrators), then published as a standalone book, then turned into a multimedia franchise.
The expansion of the manga market, putting aside manga’s appeal as a form of expression and work of art, has been accomplished by a certain “indiscrimination” peculiar to the medium, in that manga has accepted the market needs of each decade and new efforts in the industry without being selective.