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Manga in Japanese Magazines Tops 100,000 Pages Monthly
posted on by Evan Miller
Utilizing a catalog of the latest data on the history of printed periodicals, newspapers, and magazines in Japan, a self-proclaimed “info addict” has published some figures about serialized manga in Japan on a blog. The figures reveal that, in 2007, the amount of manga published in magazines each month exceeds 100,000 pages.
The numbers for the study were compiled using the General Magazine and Newspaper Catalog, published by the Media Research Center in May 2007. Each magazine in Japan has a listing in the catalog that says how many pages each magazine contains on average. To figure out how much manga is published in a month, average page numbers were multiplied by the number of times a magazine is published each month (for example, four times a month for weekly magazines*). Typically, 85 percent of a manga magazine contains actual manga, so the pages per month were multiplied by 0.85 to reach the final number for pages per month for each manga magazine.
The compiled data indicates that Japan's magazines carry approximately 102,411 pages of manga every month. The blog author acknowledges that the pages counted in the total were limited to manga magazines, which means manga that appear in periodicals with a different focus could raise the total number of pages published to even higher levels.
Currently, a total of 266 manga magazines are published in Japan. From this total, 14 magazines are released on a weekly basis, 21 are biweekly, 188 are monthly, 40 are bimonthly and three are published under a different schedule. Typically, weekly magazines such as Weekly Shonen Jump and Weekly Shonen Sunday have the biggest circulation. Publication totals from other years are printed in the graph below.
| Year | Number of Manga Magazines published: | Total # of Magazines |
Total pages of manga per month: |
||||
| Weekly | Bi-weekly | Monthly | Bi-monthly | Other | |||
| 1982 | 11 | 19 | 108 | 6 | 16 | 160 | 44,329 |
| 1992 | 13 | 20 | 161 | 19 | 11 | 224 | 71,861 |
| 2002 | 14 | 21 | 193 | 37 | 5 | 270 | 97,688 |
| 2007 | 14 | 21 | 188 | 40 | 3 | 266 | 102,411 |
According to these numbers, the amount of manga in circulation in 2007 is two and a half times what it was in 1982. The increase in page totals has remained steady, but there are signs that growth may continue at a slower pace when compared to figures from previous years.
Source: Golgo 31
*Although there are 52 weeks in a year, the majority of the weekly manga magazines publish about 48 magazines per year. This practice is a result of Japanese national holidays when the magazines are either not published or “combined” to form a “two-week issue.” Therefore, multiplying the page numbers for weekly magazines by four usually results in an accurate count of pages published per month.
Images © Kubotite, © Kōtarō Isaka, Megumi Ōsuga
