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Answerman - Do Salarymen Really Read Manga?


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Beatdigga



Joined: 26 Oct 2003
Posts: 4352
Location: New York
PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 9:49 am Reply with quote
Stuff like this makes me wonder why E readers aren't more popular over there.

It's easier to read a manga off a smartphone or E reader than explain why the 30 year old is reading a comic book on the subway.
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Swissman



Joined: 11 May 2006
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 1:38 pm Reply with quote
Overall sales of manga magazines in Japan have decreased significatly over the last twenty years. I guess there must be not as many salarymen reading manga in public trains nowadays as it used to be in the eighties and early nineties; I've never seen many salarymen reading manga magazines at the same time in Tokyo's or Osaka's public transport, but I also never paid specifically attention to it.

About the distinction between shounen/shoujo vs. seinen/josei : Seinen and josei manga usually do not include furigana because its readership is usually quite literate, whereas shounen/shoujo's lower end of readership (agewise) is still in junior high school and has not mastered more difficult kanji and compound words yet; shounen and shoujo manga thus have furigana.
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danpmss



Joined: 30 May 2015
Posts: 762
PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 2:42 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
there are some major, major exceptions. One-Punch Man is seinen manga, as is Prison School, Ghost in the Shell, Planetes, Chobits, Tokyo Ghoul, Mushishi, Monster, Flowers of Evil, xxxHOLiC, Gantz, B Gata H Kei, Elfen Lied, Berserk, Akira and Blame!


Aku no Hana is a shounen manga, a very toned down one too, believe it or not.
The editor made the author change direction midway through the story specially because of that, since the kind of content at the time (volume 6) was pretty much almost at Oyasumi Punpun level (a.k.a. beyond shounen demographic) of themes and overall content.

His stories are much more seinen-like than shounen, of course, but still was a shounen manga regardless of that.

Hell, Shigurui was a shounen manga, my friends.
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horseradish



Joined: 27 Oct 2015
Posts: 574
Location: Bay Area
PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 6:32 pm Reply with quote
AyanamiRei wrote:
Speaking about salary men manga readers... what is the title of this very long-running manga telling the life of a salary man from his early work years to him conquering the president chair and beyond? (I watched an NHK report about it 7or8 years ago, but I never found it because I forgot the name afterwards)

I think that is the Kōsaku Shima series by Kenshi Hirokane.

Beatdigga wrote:
Stuff like this makes me wonder why E readers aren't more popular over there.

It's easier to read a manga off a smartphone or E reader than explain why the 30 year old is reading a comic book on the subway.

Not much of the manga I am interested in reading have e-book versions yet (not counting scanlations), so physical copies are the only legal way. Perhaps the same applies to the Japanese market.
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Aphasial
Exempt from Grammar Rules


Joined: 08 Aug 2010
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 6:54 pm Reply with quote
It's been my understanding over the years that anime is still more or less a niche thing in Japan, basically at the same level it is here. Although animated seriesies can still be relatively large hits in the US (like perhaps Archer), only a few truly become break-outs with massive popularity. The Simpsons (obviously), South Park, etc. And of course, anything that's not close to a major household name is basically a kid's show, or a kid's show being enjoyed ironically by a hipster. The broader population isn't aware of it.

But here's the other question: Between the tech industry, marching band nerds, cosplayers, theater, gamers and whatnot... I have a *lot* of geeky friends. Most of them are 18-34 and there's a broad cross section across the US... But I don't know anyone who reads (US) comics. Like, at all. (If they do, they don't talk about it on Facebook or any other social media service I'm linked to them with.)

With comics/manga/graphic novels being closer in form to animation stylistically, I'm surprised that in Japan, which has a much larger manga-reading population than the US, there's just as much of a resistance to animation being accepted by the general populace. If 25-50% of the US read comics on a regular basis, I'd expect animation based off those comics to have significant cultural weight and not be relegated to a few prime time shows and then overnight stuff only nerds talk about.
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noriah



Joined: 12 Apr 2015
Posts: 23
PostPosted: Sun Aug 28, 2016 2:56 am Reply with quote
Beatdigga wrote:
Stuff like this makes me wonder why E readers aren't more popular over there.

It's easier to read a manga off a smartphone or E reader than explain why the 30 year old is reading a comic book on the subway.

In addition to horseradish's point about titles you're interested in not being available, there's also the point of usability. There aren't that many apps with good controls/UI for comics.
The OverDrive app is horrible when it comes to comic ebooks. Blank pages mixed in with normal pages, no proper zoom in/pan or panel-by-panel options, no horizontal layout for spreads, ugh. And selection is limited for manga. I love it because I can use it for checking out normal ebooks from my local library, but I've given up reading manga on it. I like that the books are automatically returned at the end of the checkout period, and the relatively convenient renew option.

The only ones I can think of that have good comics usability off the top of my head are:

Manga Box
which had a nice niche of titles that I hadn't heard of before, but seems to have stopped allowing reading in my region/English, seems they switched to JP only)

WebToon
which has good titles but is Korean focused. These are on the better end of webcomics, so the quality is on the better end of amateur on average, with some outliers of higher quality. Because anyone can submit, there are more odd sorts of titles(I like it for a change of pace), and the comics are designed for vertical scrolling because the app is focused at phone users, and has good-decent load times and interface. I really like the feature of saving offline so I can read in the room that can't get wifi in my house.

hoopla (also does movies, music, television, and audiobooks/ebooks)
recently discovered this app, uses my local library to offer 8 checkouts a month. Mostly American comics, pretty decent selection of Image comics, among others. UI is passable, but not as good as the other two. Also allows download for offline use, automatically returns and deletes files.

Overall, I prefer dead tree format for manga a lot of the time. It doesn't give me eyestrain, and zooming in and looking at the details is less effort than fiddly pinch controls. Title discovery is easier physically, since I just go to a shelf and flip through the pages to see if it suits me. Ebooks often involve reading reviews and the like, and I don't really end up trying nearly as many titles I don't already know about, as I did when I just browsed shelves. I also like looking at them on my shelves, which while a silly luxury, does prompt me to reread my old favorites.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 28, 2016 12:55 pm Reply with quote
I remember reading in Death Note 13: How to Read Tsugumi Ohba explaining that the series would've taken a different direction if it was published in a seinen magazine. That is, because it was in a shonen magazine, he went with the cat-and-mouse chase between Light and the Wammy's House detectives, whereas if it was greenlit for a seinen magazine instead, Death Note would've been more about the social impact of the notebook.

rizuchan wrote:
Actually, I was under the impression that harem romance were almost entirely seinen? Of course, I think a lot of the magazines for boys in that age group are a little ambiguous and/or have a lot of crossover appeal, but Shounen Jump titles, for example, all seem the follow the "girls are icky" route by having almost if not all male characters and any romance is limited to blushing girls with crushes on the MC.


I don't really see that many shonen with a "girls are icky" mentality. More commonly, I see mentalities like "girls are weird and mysterious" like with Naruto or Nisekoi (which, by the way, is a harem comedy in a shonen magazine) or a simple "girls exist" like with Fullmetal Alchemist and One Piece.

MarshalBanana wrote:
That may cause some people to get rather mad. I often hear Tokyo Ghoul criticised as a "Seinen wannabe", so to point out that it actually is a Seinen is not going to go down well.


Tokyo Ghoul is popular. It's going to get this sort of criticism.

Jonny Mendes wrote:

in reality almost all harem romance is shonen.

Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero
Hayate the Combat Butler
Heaven's Lost Property
High School DxD
Highschool of the Dead
Hundred
Is This a Zombie?
Love Hina
Maken-ki!
Rosario + Vampire
So, I Can't Play H!
Strawberry 100%
To Love-Ru Darkness

Just to give some examples. All this are in shonen magazines.


A lot of these also have incredibly high amounts of fanservice. While I'm sure all of them are also competently written (you don't become popular without appealing writing), they do tap into a teenage boy's immature sexual desires (namely to go straight to sex without any relationship and as wish fulfillment) and incomplete sexual knowledge (as evidenced in their being about boob shots and panty shots and the characters never getting anywhere close to sex, asif even discussing charactersa having sex being a taboo subject).

Weekly Shonen Jump also just got Love Rush!, which looks to be their counterpart to Monster Musume.

Zunda-mochi wrote:
Because if it's in Japan, Josei DOES sell and women DO read a lot of it, BUT you don't see many women reading them on the TRAIN due to public embarrassment (this is despite that a few times I have seen women read their favorite josei with a book cover too) VS how the men do with their Shonen Jumps and Young Magazines in full plain view.


Hmm, here in the United States, I see a lot of women (usually middle-aged) reading romance novels when in public transportation, especially if it's long-distance, like trains, planes, or Greyhound buses.

Beatdigga wrote:
Stuff like this makes me wonder why E readers aren't more popular over there.

It's easier to read a manga off a smartphone or E reader than explain why the 30 year old is reading a comic book on the subway.


Two possibilities: 1) The mobile market evolved in a different way in Japan than elsewhere, and the country itself was slow to incorporate mobile device usage common in other countries, or 2) The publishing business does not like the E-reader business for one reason or another.

I think it's the latter, considering publishers like Shueisha have their own dedicated digital magazines with their own series separate from all of their print magazines.

Aphasial wrote:
It's been my understanding over the years that anime is still more or less a niche thing in Japan, basically at the same level it is here. Although animated seriesies can still be relatively large hits in the US (like perhaps Archer), only a few truly become break-outs with massive popularity. The Simpsons (obviously), South Park, etc. And of course, anything that's not close to a major household name is basically a kid's show, or a kid's show being enjoyed ironically by a hipster. The broader population isn't aware of it.

But here's the other question: Between the tech industry, marching band nerds, cosplayers, theater, gamers and whatnot... I have a *lot* of geeky friends. Most of them are 18-34 and there's a broad cross section across the US... But I don't know anyone who reads (US) comics. Like, at all. (If they do, they don't talk about it on Facebook or any other social media service I'm linked to them with.)


Hey now, I have been enjoying plenty of western animation with kids as the intended demographic (or part of the intended denographic) without the purpose of it being ironic. I don't think all of those people enjoying shows like Gravity Falls or Steven Universe are watching it without liking them just because they want to look ironic.

As for American comic books, I've asked about it in the past, and the reason behind that is the Comic Book Crash of 1996. Around that time, comic book collection (as in to keep and perhaps sell later at a higher value) was becoming trendy, and publishers responded by flooding the market with comic books designed solely to appeal to collectors, such as issues with multiple covers and launching tons of new series under the idea they're Issue #1s. Problem is that these were aimed at collectors who collected for the sake of collecting, and the stories inside, for the most part, werent very good. Because there were so many of them, the collectors editions weren't very valuable either. The result is that most of the collectors left, and because the stories were confusing, boring, incoherent, or otherwise poorly-written, not to mention they jumped way up in price, most of the readers left too. American comic books are back to caring very much about the writing, but the damage had been done. American comic books, with the exception of a few standout series like Archie, The Walking Dead, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, have become a niche, albeit a pretty dedicated and surprisingly mature one.
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Zin5ki



Joined: 06 Jan 2008
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 28, 2016 2:34 pm Reply with quote
leafy sea dragon wrote:
Two possibilities: 1) The mobile market evolved in a different way in Japan than elsewhere, and the country itself was slow to incorporate mobile device usage common in other countries, or 2) The publishing business does not like the E-reader business for one reason or another.

I think it's the latter, considering publishers like Shueisha have their own dedicated digital magazines with their own series separate from all of their print magazines

Would the former not be important as well? The uniquely Japanese industry of Galapagos phones would suggest that Japan's relationship with mobile devices is unique in a way that prevents or hinders many standard products' market penetration. Come to think of it, this may itself have caused the Japanese publishers' unsanguine attitudes towards E-readers, plausibly leading to a vicious cycle for the platform.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 28, 2016 4:11 pm Reply with quote
Zin5ki wrote:
leafy sea dragon wrote:
Two possibilities: 1) The mobile market evolved in a different way in Japan than elsewhere, and the country itself was slow to incorporate mobile device usage common in other countries, or 2) The publishing business does not like the E-reader business for one reason or another.

I think it's the latter, considering publishers like Shueisha have their own dedicated digital magazines with their own series separate from all of their print magazines

Would the former not be important as well? The uniquely Japanese industry of Galapagos phones would suggest that Japan's relationship with mobile devices is unique in a way that prevents or hinders many standard products' market penetration. Come to think of it, this may itself have caused the Japanese publishers' unsanguine attitudes towards E-readers, plausibly leading to a vicious cycle for the platform.


You're right, it may be a combination of both (and possibly other factors I hadn't thought of). However, digital literature publication now exists on a wide scale in Japan, and the success of purely digital manga like One-Punch Man and Watamote prove that there is great demand for them. That's why I think the problem isn't as much cultural (I would've said that as recently as two years ago, but not anymore) as it is business.
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Stuart Smith



Joined: 13 Jan 2013
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 28, 2016 7:32 pm Reply with quote
[quote="Aphasial"]It's been my understanding over the years that anime is still more or less a niche thing in Japan, basically at the same level it is here./quote]

There's over a hundred shows that come out every year so the mainstream ones are mainstream and the niche ones are niche. Adaptions usually followed a similar rule. Outside rare exceptions, all the mainstream manga will be adapted into mainstream anime, while all the niche titles will be given late-night slots. Anime has plenty of cultural weight in Japan and beyond, such as most of the mascots for the 2020 Olympics are anime characters. I'm not sure how you're getting the idea that anime is only late night stuff in Japan

-Stuart Smith
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Somewhere



Joined: 27 Sep 2013
Posts: 361
PostPosted: Mon Aug 29, 2016 3:17 pm Reply with quote
Nitpick/update on relative circulation numbers for you, Justin:
Young Magazine's circulation is just under 1/5 of Weekly Shounen Jump. For April-June of this year, Young Magazine's circulation was 415k while WSJ's 2,168k. (source)
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Agent355



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PostPosted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 1:12 am Reply with quote
Zunda-mochi wrote:
Hoppy800 wrote:
Yipe, Josei doesn't sell at all period. Women need to read more Josei manga.


Are you talking about the US or Japan?
Because if it's in Japan, Josei DOES sell and women DO read a lot of it, BUT you don't see many women reading them on the TRAIN due to public embarrassment (this is despite that a few times I have seen women read their favorite josei with a book cover too) VS how the men do with their Shonen Jumps and Young Magazines in full plain view.

And honestly, despite that Josei is a little more better than Shojo, it STILL has the annoying themes of romance shoehorned into almost all the genres, even if they could do without it.

I think Hoppy800 is referring to the fact that josei magazine sales numbers are much lower than shonen, seinen, and shojo magazine sales numbers in Japan. Unfortunately, it's considered the least popular manga demographic based on pure sales figures alone, which doesn't mean no one reads it or that there aren't popular breakout hits with multiple media adaptations (NANA comes to mind, although its magazine, Cookie, is sometimes considered shojo or "boderline" josei. Still, two live action movies and 2 seasons of anime, not to mention all the music, is good for shojo, too!).


AyanamiRei wrote:

Also, a well-known seinen category of manga: the "animal" manga. Be it about (deceased) dogs, cats, other cats, more cats, a dinosaur... All those manga are labelled as either "kodomo/kids" or shôjô (mainly for the cats titles) in France.
I doubt Chii has something attractive to little kids...

My 8-year-old niece loved the Chi's Sweet Home manga so much she wanted to watch the anime even though it isn't dubbed (which is hard for a kid)!
peno wrote:
There is a question that popped in my head, I wonder how many Josei manga, which mostly include Shounen-Ai, is bought by women and how many is bought by gay men. In west, most of the Shounen-Ai titles are aimed on gay men, but in Japan, they are mostly aimed at women, so, does Japanese gay men even buy Shounen-Ai titles?

First of all, I believe that shounen-ai and yaoi titles are considered subgenres distinct from the general josei (or shojo) descriptor, despite being aimed at the same demographic. Most titles referred to as josei focus on female protagonists pursuing straight relationships. If you check out Renta!, the English version of the Japanese manga rental site (on which you can legally rent out manga to read online), you'll find another big subcategory of shojo/josei: Ladies' Comics, which include a lot of romance novel style plots, and an incredible number of actual Harlequin romance novel titles that were translated into Japanese, adapted as manga, and then re-translated (translated back?) to English. I couldn't find a good link for Renta's US/English site on my old phone, but I did find an interview with its English checker: Justin Hoare (it's about 2 years old, though).

Second of all, shonen Ai/Boy's Love/Yaoi manga published in the West are absolutely primarily aimed at teen girls and women, at least in terms of a marketing target, just like they are in Japan, not gay men.
Kadmos1 wrote:
AnimeAngel327, MonMusu is actually based off an adult web comic, so that should give you an idea of its demographic.

What was the original webcomic that inspired MonMosu?

Seinen manga is fascinating to me for the sheer number of obscure types of manga that would (probably) never be published here. Are there still whole magazines devoted to particular hobbies and sports like golf?
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Polycell



Joined: 16 Jan 2012
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 3:00 pm Reply with quote
Joe Carpenter wrote:
So, about Gantz, I've noticed in my Dark Horse volumes that female pubic hair can be seen, is this something Dark Horse added? Because I thought that was not allowed in Japanese media or does that only apply to pornography? (as much nudity as there is in Gantz it's still not quite full on hentai)
To pick up on this: the law applies explicitly to the genitals; pubic hair is always allowed(at least these days). Plenty of manga authors get creative with just how little they censor(eg, a thin black bar across the edge of the head), but even the goody two-shoes still draw the details before censoring them.

Except anime or eroges. Those are drawn to look good under a mosaic and can easily look like utter shit when it's not there.
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