Jan. 23 (Bloomberg) — Doe-eyed girls with melon-sized
breasts, slasher samurai, resilient teenage heroines wielding
magical powers and adventurous ninja boys: Japans manga
artists know how to hook an audience.
More than 35,000 groups of amateurs sold their versions
on Dec. 28-31 at the worlds biggest comic market, in Tokyo
International Exhibition Center, or Tokyo Big Sight. The
biannual event, known in Japan as a comiket, drew a crowd of
more than 500,000. Producers of doujinshi, or lookalike copies
of established manga characters, rubbed shoulders with Japans
top three manga publishers, Shueisha, Shogakuan and Kodansha,
as potential copyright violations are rarely contested.
While manga magazines and books sold 1.26 billion copies
of 70,000 titles in 2006, domestic sales have been falling for
12 years. The comikets are the perfect place to discover a new
artist with the potential for a global mega-hit like the
shonen manga for boys named “Naruto or the shojo manga for
girls called “Fruits Basket.
If popular in Japan, a manga character can jump quickly
from magazine to book, and then into a TV anime series,
spawning toys, games, stationery and other branded goods. Some
even get their own movies or TV dramas.
“Fruits Basket, a series about orphaned schoolgirl
Tohuro Honda, who is saved from living in a tent by a family
of therianthropic zodiac animals, has sold more than 18
million copies in Japan and 2 million in the U.S., according
to publishers. It was made into a smash-hit anime TV series.
Manga readers in Japan range from children to seniors. In
major bookstores, teenagers and adults cruise shelves lined
with thousands of choices. In Tokyos Akihabara district,
geeky young men known as “otaku flock to manga outlets,
some specializing in provocative genre.
Mobile Manga
Commuter trains were once packed with boys, young men and
even businessmen reading cheap manga magazines, some as thick
as a phone book. Now, the titles have been replaced by more
compact comic books and the new trend is to view the comic
strips via mobile phone. Manga mobile sales reached about 8.2
billion yen in the year ended March 2007, according to a
survey by Impress Group. Traditionally, women read manga in
the privacy of their home.
Japanese manga artists commonly work without the
protection of a copyright, but face few restrictions on their
imagery. Local publishers have their own rating system,
proving that censorship is a culturally relative term. What
would be considered nearly pornographic in the U.S. is
available to children in Japan.
“Well probably continue as weve done so far, said
Masakazu Kubo, executive producer at Shogakukan and the Tokyo
Anime Center and the Japanese marketing guru behind Pokemon.
“We dont want to put restrictions on creativity. Its not in
the Japanese culture to create rules for manga artists.
Sex Guide
Some established artists want tougher regulations,
particularly on pornography.
“We should make the law on copyrights more strict,
especially with internet and mobile phones, and sexual manga
with more controls, said Mimei Sakamoto, a ladies comic
manga artist, who broke into the business 20 years ago at the
age of 22 with pornographic manga. She has since turned her
series into how-to guides on sex and hygiene for young women.
Her “Textbook for Sex sold 80,000 copies and her “Beauty
Book sold more than 100,000.
“I had a difficult childhood, Sakamoto said. “No
money, parents quarrelling all the time, fat, not pretty, and
often depressed. But I was able to change myself and so I draw
manga stories to inspire young women who dont have
confidence.
Authors like Sakamoto are helping bring the cartoons to a
bigger audience abroad. A three-book set on Roman history that
took her seven years to draw will be translated into Italian.
She also collaborated with New York-based lawyer and
cartoonist Charles Danziger on a book in English called
“Harvey %26amp; Etsukos Manga Guide to Japan which was released
in November.
Manga Mix
“Its about an American cartoon character and a Japanese
manga cat who share adventures in Japan, said Danziger.
Glenn Kardy, head of Tokyo-based Japanime Co., the books
publisher, said, “Its probably the first of its kind where a
cartoon and manga character mix on the same pages.
North American manga sales doubled to $200 million
between 2003 and 2006 and probably rose 10 percent in 2007,
according to Milton Griepp, chief executive officer of
ICv2.com, which provides information on the industry. Thats
about half the value of the non-manga comic market, according
to data from Diamond Comics, the worlds biggest comic
distributor.
Even so, manga has yet to reach its popularity in
countries such as Italy and France, the top markets outside
Japan, where sales are seven times larger than in the U.S.
To gain a bigger slice of the U.S. market, where most
buyers are teenagers, manga publishers need to target adults.
“If Americans can understand the Matrix movies, then maybe
they can enjoy science fiction, suspense or horror manga,
said Shogakukans Kubo.
“Fruits Basket heroine Tohuro gained popularity as an
outsider, trying to fit in — a rice ball in a basket of
fruit. Japans manga publishers are scouring the aisles of
comikets to find authors who can help do the same for the
genre overseas.
“Its better if manga is a common international
culture, said Kubo, who is also a professor at the Beijing
Film Academy. “One manga artist can change the world.
(Lucy Birmingham is a critic for Bloomberg News. The
opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer on this story:
Lucy Birmingham in Tokyo at
