{
  "id": "manga",
  "title": "Manga",
  "lang": "en",
  "source_lang": "en",
  "summary": "Japanese comics and graphic narratives, with their own serialization, visual conventions, and publishing system, now a major global medium.",
  "category": "arts",
  "subcategory": "games-comics",
  "type": "concept",
  "aliases": [
    "Japanese comics",
    "Nihon manga"
  ],
  "generated_at": "2026-10-09",
  "model": "pro/claude-haiku-5-5",
  "url": "https://aiwiki.page/en/manga/",
  "translations": {
    "zh-Hans": {
      "url": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/manga/",
      "json": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/manga.json"
    }
  },
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "",
      "text": "Manga (漫画) are comics and graphic narratives created in Japan, primarily for Japanese readers and published mostly in Japanese. The term covers a medium with its own publishing system, visual grammar, and audience segmentation. Manga is usually serialized in weekly, monthly, or digital magazines and then collected into bound volumes, and its readership is commonly divided by age and gender. Its roots reach back to pictorial scrolls and woodblock-printed books of the premodern period, but the modern form took shape in the early twentieth century and was transformed after the Second World War. Its economic weight is substantial: Japan's domestic manga market was worth about ¥692.5 billion in 2025, and manga now influence anime, video games, and film worldwide.\n\nThis entry treats manga as a historical, artistic, industrial, and cultural phenomenon. It first traces the pre-modern and modern antecedents and the postwar transformation associated with Osamu Tezuka, then examines the formal conventions of the page, the editorial and production system, and the genre and demographic categories that organize the market. The later sections cover the shift from print to digital distribution, market data, international translation and reception, scholarship, and the legal, ethical, and technological controversies that surround the medium, including questions raised by generative artificial intelligence."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Definition and terminology",
      "text": "In Japanese, manga (漫画) is the general word for comics and cartoons. Inside Japan the term covers all comics, including translated foreign works, while outside Japan it usually refers specifically to comics created in Japan and published in the Japanese language. The English-language sense of \"manga\" is therefore narrower than the Japanese one, and the two uses are often confused in international discussion. The term is closely tied to the broader art of comics and sequential illustration, and it is generally treated as a subcategory of Japanese culture rather than as a distinct artistic medium.\n\nManga is commonly contrasted with several related forms. Chinese manhua (漫画, read manhua in Chinese) and Korean manhwa (만화) use the same characters or the same root word in their own languages, and the three terms are thus cognates. Scholars and publishers distinguish them mainly by national origin, language, and production conventions, but the boundaries are contested. Japanese comics have influenced Chinese and Korean creators since the early twentieth century, and many Korean and Chinese artists have adopted Japanese panel grammar, character design, and serialization practices, which makes stylistic classification difficult. Disputes also arise over works created by non-Japanese artists in a Japanese style, over Japanese-authored works first published in other countries, and over whether a work's identity depends on its country of origin, its language, or its visual style.\n\n\"Webtoon\" is a further category, originally a Korean term associated with a particular platform and now used more widely for comics designed to be read by vertical scrolling on screens. Webtoons are often grouped with manga because many digital manga also use vertical scrolling, but the format and the commercial model are not the same as those of print manga, and the categories overlap considerably. Some classification systems treat format as the defining feature, while others treat national origin as decisive, so the same work may be labelled differently depending on the source.\n\nThe written form of manga reflects the writing-system of Japanese. Text is normally written in a mixture of kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese), hiragana (the cursive syllabary used for grammatical elements and native words), and katakana (the angular syllabary often used for foreign loanwords, names, and many onomatopoeic sound effects). Printed manga often add small furigana readings beside difficult kanji, and Western numerals and Latin letters appear occasionally. Because this script was traditionally written in vertical columns, the order of reading in manga is typically from right to left and from top to bottom. Panels and speech balloons follow the same sequence, which is why translated editions published outside Japan are sometimes printed in the Western left-to-right order, a change that requires reversing or redrawing page layouts.\n\nWithin Japan, the reading direction is so conventional that it is rarely noted, and most titles are published in the traditional format. Some works are drawn specifically for left-to-right reading, and this has led to discussions among readers and creators about whether reading direction is part of what makes a comic \"manga.\" As with the other terminological questions above, there is no single agreed answer, and the definition in use depends largely on the context in which the term is applied."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Pre-modern antecedents",
      "text": "Animal caricatures in handscrolls\n\nThe most frequently cited precursor of modern manga is the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga, a set of four emakimono (illustrated handscrolls) that now belongs to Kōzan-ji, a temple in Kyoto. The four scrolls date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and are a notable example of art from the Fujiwara period. The scrolls are painted in ink alone. They contain no written text, and separate scenes are divided by short stretches of landscape. Their figures are anthropomorphic animals, mainly rabbits, frogs and monkeys, who behave like people. In one scene, frogs and monkeys haul an oxcart. Other scenes show animals bathing, preparing food and attending a Buddhist memorial service.\n\nThe purpose of the scrolls is unsettled. While there is no consensus on why they were produced, they are generally regarded as humorous works, perhaps satirizing religious and court rituals. Some interpreters read them as mockery of Buddhist clergy, a reading that the temple does not treat as settled. Their authorship is also uncertain. Some attribute the work to the artist and priest Toba Sojo (1053–1140), but there is no definitive proof. Stylistic evidence suggests that more than one artist was involved. Because the figures are caricatured and the scenes follow one another, the scrolls are often described as proto-manga. Some popular accounts go further and call them the oldest manga, a claim that depends on how the term is defined.\n\nEdo printing and Hokusai Manga\n\nDuring the Edo period (1603–1868), woodblock printing allowed illustrated books to be copied in large numbers at low cost. Picture books of the kusazōshi category, the broader family to which later gōkan belonged, reached urban readers through this printing technology. Among the most influential of these publications was Hokusai Manga by Katsushika Hokusai. The original work came out as a series of 15 volumes. Its first volume was conceived as a drawing manual for students, but the printed explanatory text soon disappeared and only drawings were kept. The subjects range widely. Scenes include craftsmen at work, sumo wrestlers in motion, waves curling mid-crash, ghosts, gags and gods.\n\nThe title is also a point of terminology. The word \"manga\" in this context predates modern Japanese comics and has a different meaning, closer to random sketches or whimsical drawings. The books were popular enough that they were reprinted many times, and the designs eventually had to be recut because the original blocks wore out. Their reach extended abroad. Lithographs of some of the sketches appeared in Philipp Franz von Siebold's Nippon, published in 1832. Flattened perspectives, emphasis on gesture and the depiction of motion in stillness are among the techniques that are credited with shaping European modern art.\n\nKibyōshi and censorship\n\nKibyōshi were illustrated books named after their yellow covers, and they were aimed at adult readers. They were picture books for adults. The first major example, Koikawa Harumachi's Kinkin sensei eiga no yume of 1775, borrowed the wit of fashion books and the graphic character of otogi-zōshi to retell the noh play Kantan as a story set in Edo. Their humor was often satirical. They were funny, with a bit of satire, and were entertainment for the Edo public.\n\nTheir satire brought them under state control. Regulations first introduced in 1722 were restated in 1790 as part of a wider reform package. The Kansei Reforms, which ran from 1787 to 1793, brought strict censorship and strict penalties. Authorities were especially concerned with books that imitated children's picture books. They targeted works that posed as children's picture books, such as kibyōshi, denouncing them as frivolous diversions. Punishment reached individual creators. Santō Kyōden was handcuffed for fifty days because of three sharebon he had written. Officials also concluded that all sorts of officially prohibited prints were still being published, which led to tighter control. The result was a shift in the genre. Gōkan, which followed kibyōshi, carried on the form, but its adult themes changed considerably in content and style after censorship. Later critics also undervalued the genre, a judgment shaped partly by its satirical tone and by the legacy of the Kansei censorship."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Modernization and early comic magazines",
      "text": "The modern comic strip in Japan grew out of Western visual satire that reached the country in the 1860s. In 1862, British artist Charles Wirgman launched The Japan Punch, introducing single-panel editorial cartoons. Wirgman's magazine was written in English for foreign residents, and it borrowed its satirical style from London's Punch. Its drawings were called ponchi-e, and that term remained the common word for political cartoons for decades. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the import of Western caricature accelerated, and the word manga was adopted to translate the Western idea of caricature. The term began to refer to various forms of cartooning in the 1890s and did not become a common word until the 1910s.\n\nThe shift from single-panel satire to multi-panel storytelling came through newspapers. Imaizumi Ippyō, a political cartoonist for Jiji Shinpō, was probably the first cartoonist to use \"manga\" in the narrower sense of caricature, and he later applied the word to his broader comic work. He also translated American comic strips, and these were, in fact, the first multipanel comics to be referred to as \"manga\" in Japan. The longest-running pre-1945 example was the Japanese version of the American strip Bringing Up Father, and several early examples of such manga read left to right. In the Taishō period, the Asahi Shimbun adopted this kind of material. Its editor-in-chief had been following the comic for years and eventually decided it would make a good edition to the paper. The boys' adventure strip Shō-chan no bōken then ran in the Asahi Graph from January 1923 and was later moved to the newspaper's morning edition.\n\nHumor magazines became the main outlet for early Japanese cartoonists. Kitazawa Rakuten, who is often regarded as the first professional cartoonist, launched his own publication, Tokyo Puck, modeled on the American Puck magazine, in 1905, and political satire was its staple. Other titles, such as Osaka Puck and later Manga Kingdom and Manga no Kuni, followed in the same vein. In the Taishō era, comic magazines went beyond satire on current events and became popular cultural entertainment. Kitazawa's 1928 comic Tonda Haneko Jō featured a tomboyish girl as its protagonist, and it is regarded as a precursor of later shōjo manga. In the 1930s, the nansensu (\"nonsense\") humor genre became popular, and the New Manga Group, formed in 1932, took the lead in introducing the pen to cartoon drawing and pursuing pure humor.\n\nChildren's magazines were the most important commercial driver of comic content before the war. Shōnen Sekai, published by Hakubunkan, was one of the first Japanese shōnen magazines, founded in 1895, but it did not carry manga. The first shōnen magazine to publish manga was Shōnen Pakku, first published in 1907. Kodansha's Shōnen Club followed in November 1914 as a monthly boys' magazine, and it began to focus more on creating manga content by the 1930s. Its sister title Shōjo Club was founded in 1923 for girls. Yōnen Club, a children's magazine from Kodansha launched in January 1926, peaked at about 950,000 copies in January 1931, and Shōnen magazines enjoyed significant popularity during the 1920s and 1930s. Circulation of Shōnen Club reached 750,000 copies in 1935.\n\nThe outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 changed the field. Cartoonists began to debate the role of manga in wartime mobilization, and the discourse asserted that manga is important as a powerful agent of wartime propaganda. Creators were pressured to produce material that boosted morale at home. A notable example is Tagawa Suihō's Norakuro, a military-themed comic whose subject matter typically comprised military heroism to boost the morale of citizens at home. Other series were pushed toward military realism, and some cartoonists collaborated with the war effort while others withdrew from public life. Sales and content of children's magazines declined as paper and resources became scarce. Yōnen Club was discontinued in March 1943 after its content and sales had shrunk. Before the wartime controls fully took hold, the government had also tightened censorship and restrictions on creative freedom. By the time of the Second World War, comics had become an instrument of state propaganda, and their earlier satirical and humorous traditions had largely been suppressed."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Postwar transformation and Osamu Tezuka",
      "text": "Rental-book market and postwar revival\n\nRental shops (kashihonya) predated the war, but after 1945 they grew quickly by lending books and magazines for a small fee without requiring a deposit. This business peaked throughout Japan from 1955 to 1964. Estimates of scale vary, but one account puts the number of shops at at least 20,000 rental bookshops throughout Japan at the mid-1950s peak. Kashihon manga, comics printed specifically for this channel, first appeared in 1953, amid economic austerity and food shortages, quickly establishing themselves as a hugely popular product. Because Japan's fixed-price rules limited discounting of new books, shops relied on the zokkibon system, in which new books were sold at an extremely low price in the used book market.\n\nMany rental titles were original, book-length works by young artists, and because these books needed to be read and re-read by many people, many kashihon were published as hardcover books. Critics dismissed much of this output as vulgar, yet it expanded the range of the manga market and tackled subject matter that magazines for boys and girls did not address. The rental segment faded as incomes rose and children's magazines became popular, which reduced the need to rent. Weekly comics for boys began to appear in 1959, when the postwar baby boomers were 5th or 6th graders in elementary school.\n\nNew Treasure Island and Tezuka's cinematic methods\n\nTezuka's breakthrough was New Treasure Island (Shin Takarajima), published in 1947, with a story by Sakai Shichima and art by Tezuka. It sold over 400,000 copies in Japan. Its significance lay mainly in its layouts. Earlier manga had relied on monotonous panel layouts, whereas this book used dynamic arrangements inspired by film. Tezuka employed film techniques such as zoom, wide-angle, and overhead shots, and he connected scenes through storyboarding. He also combined montage-like shot logic with the panel system and split and reconstructed the same story moment from multiple perspectives, which widened the narrative possibilities of the page.\n\nScholars have qualified the familiar account. Takeuchi Osamu and Kure Tomofusa point out that Shishido Sakō had used a three-tier layout in Speed Boy in the 1930s Kure Tomofusa's critique of the notion that New Treasure Island was the first to use a three tiered panel layout. Nicholas Theisen notes that Takeuchi instead asks what the nature of the cinematic expression was, rather than who was first. Other researchers argue that Sakai's background as a storyboard artist for animation explains much of the book's layout better than Tezuka's film viewing does Sakai's background as a storyboard artist for animated films is a far better explanation. Commentators also link the book's visuals to American comics, which once you factor in the influence of American comics, it becomes clear that the two went together. Even so, the debate over priority does not challenge Tezuka's standing: critics never call into question Tezuka's status as the major post-war manga artist.\n\nThe rise of story manga\n\nWithin the rental and magazine markets, a parallel movement sought more serious, adult-oriented narratives. In 1957, cartoonist Tatsumi Yoshihiro coined the term gekiga (dramatic pictures) to signal a departure from ordinary manga. The term was later associated with the magazine Garo, whose early identity rested on political and artistic seriousness that drew from Marxist thought, modern Japanese history, and experimental narrative and visual techniques. The magazine drew on the rental-market talent pool; supported through the income from Shirato's serial publications in big-name magazines, Garo absorbed the best authors of kashihon rental-manga culture, which was dying out. Early contributors included Shigeru Mizuki, Yoshiharu Tsuge and Seiichi Hayashi. Shirato's long serial Kamui-den depicted the class structure of the Edo period (1600-1868) with an enormous plot, showing how the story manga tradition expanded the subjects comics could address.\n\nTelevision anime and the Tezuka adaptations\n\nTezuka's manga Astro Boy was serialized in the boys' magazine Shōnen from April 1952 until March 1968. An earlier television adaptation, Mighty Atom (1959), was short-lived and condensed the science fiction elements, and Tezuka was dissatisfied with how far it departed from the original. That dissatisfaction helped drive the later production. In 1961 Tezuka founded Mushi Production and first adapted \"Astro Boy\" into an anime, which began airing on television from New Year's Day 1963. The series is the first popular animated Japanese television series that embodied the aesthetic that later became familiar worldwide as anime. It lasted for four seasons, with a total of 193 episodes, and at its height it was watched by 40% of the Japanese population who had access to a TV. The production relied on limited animation that moved with fewer drawings, and the commercial model that made weekly broadcasts possible. Its overseas reach followed quickly, as the same year, it was bought by US network NBC, becoming the first Japanese anime to be broadcast overseas. Tezuka's television work thus joined manga and animation into a single commercial system, and its low budgets later fed concerns about labor conditions in the industry."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Magazine serialization and the publishing system",
      "text": "Manga usually reaches readers in serial form before it appears as a book. Anthology magazines, issued weekly or monthly, carry many unrelated series at once, and each series typically advances by one installment per issue. Chapters are often first published in a weekly or monthly magazine, then collected into tankōbon volumes, each containing several chapters. This two-stage model lets a publisher run dozens of titles in parallel, test them against readers, and decide later which ones merit a bound edition. The magazine is the main site of that competition, and the anthology magazine is therefore the central institution of the Japanese industry.\n\nWeekly cycles, reader rankings, and editorial pressure\n\nWeekly serialization is demanding. An artist and assistants must produce roughly 18 to 20 pages every week, a pace that leaves little room for revision. Popularity has traditionally been measured by readers. In the Weekly Shōnen Jump system, a sample of surveys is counted by editors to rank all series from most to least popular. The results are reflected in the magazine's table of contents, or ToC, where series that rank higher are the ones most voted for in reader surveys. For decades, the magazine relied on weekly popularity surveys to determine which series would continue and which would end. A poor showing is especially dangerous for new series, since appearing consistently low in the rankings dramatically increases the risk of cancellation.\n\nEditors occupy a powerful position in this system. In the magazine era, editors exercised strong authority over authors, and editorial judgment developed through long collaboration with creators. Commentators have also argued that the best editors do not follow metrics mechanically. One analysis of Weekly Shōnen Jump holds that its success depends on balancing reader metrics against the instincts and know-how of its human team. Editorial roles in story development are discussed further in the production section.\n\nTankōbon and the second revenue stream\n\nChapters that have run in magazines are compiled into the tankōbon, a term meaning a standalone book. Each volume gathers several chapters into one paperback, and it creates income separate from the magazine itself. Many readers wait for the volumes rather than reading the chapters weekly, making collected editions a critical secondary revenue stream. The economics can shape editorial decisions as well. Publishers may let a series continue despite moderate weekly rankings when its volume sales remain strong. Not every genre follows this path. Many seinen and josei manga are published in wide-ban editions after magazine serialization and are never released in the tankōbon format common in shōnen and shōjo manga.\n\nMajor publishers and their magazine lines\n\nThe industry is commonly described as being dominated by the big three publishers, Shueisha, Kodansha, and Shogakukan. Shueisha's Jump line of magazines houses major franchises such as One Piece and Dragon Ball. Its portfolio also includes Young Jump for seinen readers and Margaret for shōjo readers. Kodansha publishes the weekly shōnen magazine Weekly Shōnen Magazine, which has appeared every Wednesday since March 1959. Its seinen titles include Afternoon, home to Vinland Saga and Blame!, and its shōjo magazine Nakayoshi is home to Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura. Shogakukan manages the Shōnen Sunday line and is known for long-running detective and sports series.\n\nSmaller houses fill specialized niches. Hakusensha was founded by Shueisha in 1973 and is now a separate company, though it remains part of the Hitotsubashi Group alongside Shueisha and Shogakukan. Its shōjo magazine Hana to Yume is among its best-known titles. Sources differ on rankings within the big three. One analysis describes Shueisha as the largest manga publisher in Japan by revenue, while another calls Kodansha the second-largest manga publisher and the one with the broadest portfolio.\n\nStructural effects and the shift to digital\n\nThe magazine-and-volume system concentrates influence in a few brands, because a magazine's reputation attracts writers and its readership sustains the volume business. Digital platforms have begun to loosen this concentration. Jump+ was well placed to exploit this shift, drawing directly on the editorial expertise of Weekly Jump. Compared with the weekly print model, serialization schedules on digital platforms are more flexible, reader responses appear almost immediately through comments and online metrics, and international readership is far more visible. Print circulation, meanwhile, has been under pressure. The circulation of Weekly Shōnen Magazine has dropped in every quarter since records were first collected in April–June 2008."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Genres and demographic categories",
      "text": "Demographic categories\n\nJapanese publishers sort most manga by the reader they hope to reach. The four core categories are shōnen (boys), shōjo (girls), seinen (adult men), and josei (adult women). Japanese publishing slots manga into one of four main demographic categories based on the target reader. Age bands are approximate and vary between references. One guide places shōnen readers predominantly from ages 12 to 18, while another gives school-age boys, typically around ages 9–18.\n\nKodomo, the children's category, is more loosely defined. One reference describes it as for little kids or young children, under about 8, and lists works such as Doraemon among its historical examples. Seinen is generally placed at roughly between 18-40, and its content tends toward more mature themes than Shonen, often displaying more graphic depictions of violence. Josei, which emerged as an editorial category in the 1980s and is sometimes called \"ladies' comics,\" is aimed at adult women, but its boundary with shōjo is often tenuous; while the two were initially divergent categories, many manga works exhibit narrative and stylistic traits associated with both.\n\nDemographics also determine where a series runs. Shōjo titles appear in magazines such as Ribon, Nakayoshi, and Margaret, while josei titles run in Feel Young, Office You, and Cocohana. The same creator may adjust style for different readerships; one guide notes that Naoki Urasawa writes very differently when his story runs in Big Comic Spirits (seinen) than in Shōnen Sunday (shōnen).\n\nGenres and how they cross demographics\n\nGenre is a separate classification from demographic. A shōnen and a seinen can both be sci-fi, both be romance, both be horror. Editorial guides often pair the two, such as shōnen + sport; shōjo + fantasy + romance; seinen + thriller + science fiction; josei + slice of life + romance. Sports and action-adventure are closely associated with shōnen magazines, romance with shōjo and josei, and slice-of-life with josei and many other demographics. Horror and mecha (giant robot) stories appear across the seinen and shōnen lines, and the gender-bender subgenre, which focuses on upsetting traditional gender and sexual norms, cuts across romance and comedy.\n\nReaders do not follow the labels closely. An adult man can read Sailor Moon. A teenage girl can love Berserk. Scholars and editors therefore describe the categories as a statement of publishing intent rather than a measure of who actually reads a title. The real readership never perfectly matches the intended readership.\n\nLabels in practice and critical debate\n\nLibraries and retailers use these terms as search and shelving aids. The Ohio State University library guide notes that the terms can be used to find Japanese and other foreign language manga in WorldCat and university catalogs. Because demographics shape the magazine it's serialized in, the art style, the pacing, and the kinds of conflicts the story stages, they affect both the market and the content.\n\nCritics argue that the labels reinforce gender stereotypes. One analysis says that shonen and seine genre, which traditionally cater to men and boys, and shojo, which broadly appeals to women and girls, and that the male-oriented titles under-represent female characters in the often action-themed stories. Commentators have also pointed to the way shōjo romance often involves physical beautification as a character's transformation. A 2023 study of Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto concluded that because it is a product of both the Shonen genre and Japanese patriarchy, the series funnels problematic sexist components in its female characterizations. A UN review of Japan's implementation of CEDAW also expressed concern that forms of media, including manga, anime and video games could potentially encourage gender-based or sexual orientation-based violence.\n\nCritics also object to the double standard in labeling itself. Fan critics note that media aimed at women is often dismissed as \"for girls,\" while media targeted at or starring men is \"for everyone\". Defenders of the category system answer that demographics are guides rather than limits, and that children can enjoy shojo, seinen, and josei manga if story and themes appeal to them.\n\nNiche genres and shifting readership\n\nSome categories sit outside the four-way system. Gekiga, for example, is focusing on serious topics geared toward mature audiences, while dōjinshi are manga publication by amateurs. Silver and golden categories target older readers.\n\nReadership also moves over time. Readers often age while staying with the same title, and series may be moved to a different magazine to reach an older or different audience. Because a demographic reflects the publisher's intended reader at the time of serialization, a title that outgrows its original readers may shift to a magazine with a different label."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Visual grammar and page design",
      "text": "The basic unit of manga's visual grammar is the panel, called koma. The layout follows the logic of Japanese script, so the eye travels from upper right to lower left. Neat grids make the route unambiguous, whereas irregular or overlapping layouts rely on the flow of action and speech balloons to pull the eye. The white space separating frames, the gutter, also helps mark the boundaries of each beat.\n\nPanel size is itself a pacing device. Large frames usually hold action or pivotal moments and hold the eye longer, while bigger panels mean action scenes, and smaller panels mean more talking. A full-page or double-page spread can therefore slow a story at a dramatic moment, while a dense cluster of small frames compresses time during dialogue-heavy exchanges.\n\nSpeech balloons (fukidashi) carry information beyond the words they contain. The stem of a balloon indicates its speaker. Balloon borders change in pattern and style to reflect the tone and mood of the dialogue, such as an explosion-shaped bubble for shouting. Thought balloons replace the solid pointer with a string of small circles, and whispered lines occasionally adopt this dotted outline. Balloons placed outside a frame can signal an off-screen speaker.\n\nSound words are a central part of the visual texture. Japanese sound words are commonly grouped into three families: giseigo mimic the sounds of people and animals, giongo imitate other sounds such as water, snaps, and pops, and gitaigo represent emotions and visual events. Estimates put the number of sound words in Japanese at around 1,200. Effects are often set into the illustration itself rather than kept in separate boxes, and sound words are usually written in katakana, though they may also appear in hiragana and kanji. Gitaigo in particular can show a state of mind or a gesture, so a stare or a smirk becomes a word drawn beside the face.\n\nShading and texture in printed manga have historically relied on transparent adhesive sheets with a distinctive pattern, typically dots or hatching, which are cut out and overlapped on the panel to add detail that would be slow to draw by hand. Physical tone sheets are increasingly being replaced by computer-generated equivalents. Tone can also do expressive work: a patterned backdrop behind one or two characters during an important scene conveys their emotions rather than showing the surroundings, roughly like a close-up with a shallow depth of field. Line weight is varied by many artists, with heavier contours for foreground figures and finer strokes for background detail. Ruled lines laid across a background signal direction in action sequences. Motion lines are typically drawn close to the character and indicate the direction of movement. Converging lines can emphasize focus, as if the camera were quickly dollying toward the subject.\n\nCharacter design favors simplified, expressive faces, and eyes are often enlarged. Comic moments often trigger a break in proportion. Characters suddenly shift to simplified, exaggerated designs, known as chibi or super-deformed, and these shifts function as emotional punctuation for embarrassment, frustration, or comedic shock. Related symbols include sweat drops, visible sighs, and wing-ding eyes. The vocabulary has travelled beyond Japan: Western animation studios began implementing anime-derived stylizations such as exaggerated facial expressions and super-deformed versions of characters."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Production process and creative labor",
      "text": "Serialized manga is usually credited to a single mangaka, but most pages are made by a small team. The mangaka generally controls the core creative decisions: story, characters, composition, emotional beats, and the most important parts of the final artwork. Labor-intensive work is handed to assistants, who may draw backgrounds, fill large black areas, apply screentones and effect lines, rule perspective guides, or ink pages over the lead artist's rough pencils. Faces and key scene composition are often kept by the mangaka. In larger studios the division can be narrow: one assistant may draw only backgrounds, and another may draw specific characters.\n\nScreentones show why this division mattered. For much of the twentieth century, magazine printing was essentially black and white, so grey tones had to be created by hand. Assistants applied adhesive sheets printed with halftone dots, cutting and burnishing each piece onto inked pages. This was slow, repetitive work, and it became a standard assistant task. Digital tools now reproduce the same effects, but the workload has not disappeared, and assistants remain central to many studios.\n\nThe production calendar is the main source of pressure. A weekly series may need a complete chapter every seven days, while a monthly series gets more time but usually more pages. Magazine dates and printing schedules are fixed, so one late chapter can delay the whole chain of editing, production, and printing. Editors negotiate with printers for short extensions where possible. The strain falls on both the mangaka, who must keep the story and drawings moving, and the assistants, whose tasks depend on the lead artist's pages arriving on time.\n\nEditors are a second key part of the system, and their role is more active in Japan than in many Western comics industries. Japanese editors are described as responsible for finding and nurturing talent, overseeing story development, and steering a series through serialization and book publication. Their work typically includes commenting on storylines, pacing, and layout, checking that a series meets the magazine's standards, and enforcing deadlines. Some editors also contribute ideas and, in certain cases, help write the story, which has raised questions about their creative contribution. The relationship with a mangaka is usually long-term, and the degree of author autonomy varies: an established creator with strong sales may have considerable freedom, while a newer artist may receive more direct editorial guidance.\n\nContracts and copyright in Japan work differently from the American and European models. Japanese scholars have noted that mangaka usually keep the copyright in their work, because the Japanese Copyright Act has no work-for-hire doctrine, so per-page payments do not transfer ownership. A publisher can acquire copyright only by employing the creator, which is costly, and publishers instead tend to exert influence through the editorial relationship and the author's contract. Assistants raise a more complicated question: because their drawings may be essential to a finished page, their contribution might be treated as a joint creative share. Some analysts argue that publishers therefore prefer to engage assistants in ways that keep any claims with the company, although assistants are generally regarded as executing the main artist's vision rather than as authors. The topic of copyright is discussed further in the copyright section of this entry.\n\nThe production system has made high page output possible. A studio built around a lead artist, several assistants, an editor, and a fixed serialization calendar can sustain a long-running series with consistent visual style, even when individual assistants change. At the same time, the reliance on speed and specialization concentrates pressure on a few people, and the division of credit between mangaka and assistants remains uneven in both legal and practical terms."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Media mix and adaptation",
      "text": "Manga are usually developed within the media mix (media mix), a strategy for spreading one property across print, animation, merchandise, video games and live events. Rights are divided among several parties, so an adaptation often involves more than one owner. Anime are commonly financed by a production committee of companies that each invest and then recover their money through merchandise and licensing income. Original manga art requires publisher agreements, while anime character designs necessitate production committee contracts. Publishers therefore control the source artwork and the committee controls the animated version, which is why copyright notices on goods often name both.\n\nAdaptations are also treated as advertising for the source. A columnist for anime news site Anime News Network argues that even the announcement of a series generates press coverage and increased awareness of the manga or light novel series, and bookshops give the source prominent displays. The same column notes that individual anime don't even turn a profit by themselves, so the wider benefit to members of the committee, particularly publishers, is what justifies the production.\n\nThe strongest sales effects are often reported for long-running shōnen titles. For Demon Slayer, a chart circulated on social media after the 2019 television broadcast showed the cumulative print run rising from 5 million with 13 volumes to 20 M with 17 volumes. For Yukinobu Tatsu's Dan Da Dan, Otakukan reported that the manga's sales have doubled, reaching 8 million units sold in the past three months, from about 4 million before the anime aired.\n\nSome adaptations have become better known than their sources. Commentators describe Demon Slayer as a relatively modest hit before its anime adaptation premiered, and the studio's version elevated the series to the status of a global cultural phenomenon. The 2020 film Mugen Train added to this, being a huge hit at the box office. Claims that particular anime surpass their originals are matters of critical judgement rather than measurable sales, and fan lists of such cases have been criticised on those grounds.\n\nRevenue from adaptations depends on contract terms. According to a report by the business magazine Toyo Keizai, production committees pay publishers a fixed royalty fee averaging ¥200,000 (US$1,250) to ¥400,000 (US$2,500) per episode. Royalties for merchandise, streaming and games are not fixed and will increase as more sales are generated. Merchandising contracts typically call for licensors to pay a 15–20 percent royalty to publishers, but in some scenarios that share has increased to as much as 30–35 percent for high-value properties. The same report found that IP-related revenue had reached 27 percent of all sales at Shueisha and 16 percent at Kodansha. An unnamed studio executive quoted in the report described such terms as an \"exploitation contract.\"\n\nCreators receive a separate share. Japanese commentary often puts a manga artist's royalty on collected volumes at around 10% of the base price, and reprints of existing volumes can be a major source of income after an adaptation. The author's share of merchandise income, however, depends on the contract, and multiple rights holders are involved, such as publishers, production committees, animation companies, and product manufacturers.\n\nManga-based games are a long-standing part of the media mix. Fighting games such as Dragon Ball FighterZ (2018) and the Naruto Ultimate Ninja series are among the widely known examples, and many popular series have received several licensed titles. Manga conventions such as panel-based staging, speed lines and dramatic close-ups have also shaped the presentation of cutscenes and visuals in Japanese games, although the extent of this influence on game design is debated in game studies. Live-action versions form the last major branch, from the 2006 Death Note film to Netflix's live-action One Piece series, which premiered in 2023."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Digital shift and platforms",
      "text": "Digital distribution has become the largest segment of the Japanese manga trade. According to figures from the Research Institute for Publications, digital manga reached about 76.1 percent of domestic sales in 2025, and the market figure includes subscription services but excludes web advertising revenue (The digital manga market value increased 2.9% year-on-year, now amounting to 527.3 billion yen). The shift is uneven, however. Growth in the first half of 2025 was recorded at 4.6 percent, while in the second half annual growth was just 1.5 percent, which suggests the channel may be nearing saturation in Japan.\n\nMuch of the mobile market is organized around aggregator apps rather than individual publishers' sites. Piccoma, a Japanese service run by a subsidiary of the South Korean company Kakao, turned out to be the highest selling manga app by value in Japan in 2021 for the second successive year. The app had launched in 2016 and, by 2021, pulled in more revenue than any other non-gaming app except TikTok and YouTube, according to Sensor Tower estimates. A Korea Creative Content Agency white paper put Korean companies, including Kakao and Naver, at more than 70 percent of the Japanese digital manga market in 2021. Domestic platforms such as LINE Manga and Shueisha's Shonen Jump+ are also prominent in the same market.\n\nThe vertical-scroll format is the other major shift. Instead of a grid of pages read right to left, the reader scrolls through a single continuous strip, so there's no page-turn moment and no directional reading convention. The format is usually associated with webtoons, which emerged in South Korea in the early 2000s when portal sites began hosting comics for mobile viewers. A printed manga page can hold five or six interlocking panels with overlapping action, whereas a webtoon typically gives each beat its own panel and relies on the gutter space between panels for pacing. Japanese publishers have adopted the format too; Shueisha's MangaPlus, for example, offers vertical-scroll mode, and the boundary between webtoons and manga is increasingly blurred.\n\nDigital platforms have also introduced payment models that differ from the print volume. Piccoma's best-known mechanism is the \"Wait Until Free\" system: users can purchase individual episodes as rentals, or access select content for free through the app's \"Wait Until Free\" model, which unlocks episodes after a 23-hour waiting period. Its earlier model divided works into short installments; one account from the platform's early years describes readers paying as little as 50 yen (50 cents) to read the next story, which contrasts with the traditional practice of offering a free first volume to entice purchases. Because a single episode is typically only about 10 to 20 pages, the platform can release many serializations, and commentators have linked this to a production model in which planning and writing are handled separately from close editor-artist collaboration. Such models change serialization itself: the reader's payment is tied to the desire to 'read what happens next', which encourages cliffhangers and frequent episode releases rather than the volume-based pacing of print.\n\nSmartphones have made these services central to how readers encounter manga, particularly in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Mobile reading apps, storefronts and subscription services have reduced dependence on physical distribution, and vertical-scroll works suit short reading sessions on a phone. Market analysts consistently identify this mobile-first habit as a driver of growth, although the decline in Japan's digital growth rate in 2025 indicates that the expansion of digital reading in the domestic market has begun to slow."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Market size and recent trends",
      "text": "Domestic sales in 2025\n\nJapan's domestic manga market shrank in 2025 after several years of growth. The All Japan Magazine and Book Publishers and Editors Association (AJPEA), through its Research Institute for Publications, put the year's value at ¥692.5 billion, down 1.7 percent from 704.3 billion yen in 2024, which represented an all-time high for the manga industry. Even after the decline, the 2025 total remains above the level reached in 2020, when the market grew 23% from 498.0 billion yen in 2019 to 612.6 billion yen.\n\nPrint decline and digital growth\n\nThe two segments moved in opposite directions. Print sales fell sharply: printed compiled volumes shrank by 14.4% to 126 billion yen, while the manga magazine market fell by 12.7% to 39.2 billion yen. Together, print manga totaled 165.2 billion yen, a reduction from 2024's 192.1 billion yen. Digital sales, by contrast, increased 2.9% year-on-year to 527.3 billion yen, and digital titles took a 76.1 percent share of total sales, exceeding three-quarters of the manga market for the first time.\n\nDigital growth was also slowing during the year. According to the same research body's data, digital manga sales grew at an annual rate of 4.6 percent in the first six months, but that growth rate slumped to just 1.5 percent in the second half. Analysts have read this as a sign that digital growth can no longer fully offset the print decline.\n\nDiscrepancies between reports\n\nPublished figures differ in ways that mostly come from rounding, base periods and denominators rather than from different underlying data:\n\n- Size of the decline. Most reports give 1.7 percent, but one report states that domestic manga sales fell almost 2 percent in 2025 to ¥693 billion. The \"almost 2 percent\" figure appears to be a rounded version of the same 1.7 percent, since both reports cite the same ¥693 billion value.\n- Length of the streak. Headlines variously describe the drop as the first in seven years, eight years, or since 2017. The difference lies in whether one counts consecutive growth years or measures from the 2017 level. One account notes seven consecutive years of growth and surpassing ¥700 billion for the first time in 2024.\n- Denominators for digital share. The 76.1 percent figure refers only to manga. Across the whole publishing industry, digital publications currently take up 37.6% of the market share. Manga and magazines together account for 44.8 percent of total publishing sales.\n- Scope of the digital value. The AJPEA figure includes manga subscription services, but does not include web advertising revenue, so comparisons with other digital estimates depend on what each one counts.\n- Third-party estimates. Market research firms report different shares. One puts digital at 72.7% of Japanese turnover, while another reports that digital comics accounted for 87.8% of the overall e-book market in fiscal 2025. These use different base markets and definitions.\n\nPublication volume and per-title sales\n\nThe number of titles kept rising even as revenue fell. Publishers released more than 16,000 new manga volumes last year, which is 6.5 percent more releases than in 2024, the largest annual increase since around 2008. Kadokawa illustrated the gap in its own results: its new releases rose by more than 13 percent, but total sales from print and digital manga fell by about 10 percent. The company described the situation by saying that the scale of sales per title has shrunk.\n\nAnalysts attribute part of the drop to the end of several major series. Popular titles like My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Oshi no Ko ended publication in 2024, and the market struggled in the absence of successors with the same scale of buzz. The result is a market that publishes more volumes while each volume, on average, sells less."
    },
    {
      "heading": "International translation and reception",
      "text": "Licensed expansion abroad\n\nManga's overseas spread rests mainly on licensing. Japanese companies grant foreign firms the right to translate, print and sell titles. Rights to most manga sold in the United States come from Japanese licensors, and imprints such as Viz Media and Yen Press import and distribute the popular volumes there. Sales in the United States have grown sharply as conventions and anime streaming services exposed audiences to Japanese pop culture. Shogakukan launched its own digital manga and light novel platform in the United States, the last of the four major Japanese manga publishers to do so. In October 2025, Kadokawa partnered with an international publisher to widen overseas distribution of its digital manga and light novels.\n\nIn Asia, licensed distribution has spread beyond Japan and South Korea into India, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Japan's content industry as a whole earns overseas receipts exceeding USD 4.7 billion annually in recent fiscal years, with manga licensing and anime among the core contributors. In Europe, France has become one of the larger markets for translated manga, though European publishing is shaped by its own long-standing bande dessinée tradition.\n\nFan translation, scanlation and legal disputes\n\nScanlation, the scanning and translation of comics by fans, has a history that predates the internet. Fans began translating and scanning manga in the 1970s, and later posted their work online at a time when manga was difficult to find outside Japan. In the late 1990s, hosting on free services and IRC channels allowed these groups to form. Many of them observed an informal rule: once a series was officially licensed, the scanlations were withdrawn. Most scanlation groups upheld an unspoken agreement with publishers that when a series was officially licensed, they would police themselves.\n\nOver time, the practice moved to large aggregator sites. Publishers argued that these for-profit aggregators hosted thousands of pirated editions and offered them free to readers. The scanlation aggregator One Manga entered the list of the world's 1,000 most-visited websites and drew 4.2 million unique visitors a month. In 2010, the 36-member Japanese Digital Comic Association joined with U.S. publishers including Viz Media, Tokyopop and Yen Press and threatened legal action against about thirty sites. The largest aggregators, MangaFox and One Manga, removed hundreds of titles and shut down completely in July 2010. Litigation followed in Japan as well. In December 2011, seven prominent novelists and manga artists sued two companies in the Tokyo District Court, claiming they were making and selling illicit digital copies of their works. The defendants' lawyers argued about the scope of personal-copy exemptions, and the plaintiffs' side stated that taking orders for copies is a violation (Article 30 of the Copyright Law permits individuals to copy literary works for personal use, but businesses taking orders for such copies violate reproduction rights). Later, four major publishers jointly filed a suit in New York against four websites.\n\nMarket estimates and their reliability\n\nGlobal market figures differ widely, and the differences reflect definitions as much as data. For 2025, Grand View Research estimates USD 10.2 billion, IMARC gives USD 17.7 billion, Polaris Market Research gives USD 16.30 billion, SNS Insider gives USD 13.95 billion, and Mordor Intelligence gives USD 19.35 billion. For 2026, one review puts the range between $10.9 billion (Global Market Insights) and $23.12 billion (Mordor Intelligence), with most estimates in the $12-19 billion range, a spread that reflects differing methodology on what counts as 'manga revenue'. Regional shares are also inconsistent. Grand View puts Asia Pacific at 84.0% of revenue in 2025, while Polaris says North America dominated the global market with more than 38.5% of revenue share in 2025.\n\nSource material is uneven as well. Some firms develop their estimates through triangulation of publisher and platform activity, country-level demand indicators, licensing dynamics, and reported company positions, and some exclude adjacent illustrated-content categories where comparable manga revenue cannot be isolated. Domestic Japanese figures also vary by year and source. A Japanese figure of ¥704.3 billion in one market report appears to match the 2024 total, which ICv2 estimated at ¥704 billion ($4.65 billion) in 2024, not the 2025 figure. Because most of these reports are commercial products with undisclosed methods, their totals are best treated as rough indicators of scale and growth rather than as precise measures.\n\nCross-cultural influence\n\nManga's influence extends beyond its own sales. Its page-level grammar, including panel rhythm, speed lines, expressive faces and cinematic framing, has been widely adopted by Western comics creators, and English-language \"original manga\" written by non-Japanese authors has emerged as a result. Japanese animation has likewise shaped Western television and film aesthetics. In East Asia, the webtoon and manhwa industries of South Korea and the manhua scene of China have drawn on manga's serialization habits and visual vocabulary, even as they developed distinct formats. Publishers in the West have also had to decide whether to keep manga's right-to-left page order or mirror pages for local readers, a decision that became a visible debate in translation practice."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Scholarship, criticism, and museums",
      "text": "Academic study\n\nManga is studied across several disciplines. Japanese studies approaches it through language, social history, and the reception of popular culture. Media studies examines its distribution and its relationship with animation, while art history and comics studies focus on page design, line, and narrative sequence. The English-language literature began taking shape in the 1980s, when writers such as Frederik Schodt introduced manga to Western readers and framed it as a serious subject. Scholarly work is spread across university departments rather than gathered into a single discipline, which partly explains why manga research has developed unevenly across countries.\n\nFormal debates\n\nA central critical question concerns how much the medium's formal innovations owe to specific creators. Osamu Tezuka is usually credited with importing film-derived devices such as varied panel sizes, close-ups, and implied camera movement into comics. Some critics treat these methods as a decisive break from earlier picture traditions. Others stress continuity with prewar illustration, caricature, and film practice, and argue that the story of a single inventor simplifies a more gradual process. Later decades raised parallel questions about genre-specific visual codes, such as the stylization of shōjo art and the density of action layouts in shōnen works, and whether these conventions should be read as formal progress or as market-driven repetition.\n\nMuseums and libraries\n\nThe Kyoto International Manga Museum is the most prominent institution devoted to the medium. It was founded as a joint project of Kyoto City and Kyoto Seika University to collect, preserve, and exhibit manga materials and to research manga culture. It concurrently performs library functions and museum functions, which distinguishes it from conventional museums. Its holdings include approximately 300,000 items as of 2016, of which about 50,000 volumes are open to visitors for reading, while the rest is kept in closed stacks for research. Edo-period woodblock prints, prewar magazines, and postwar rental books form part of the archive, alongside foreign works. The museum has reported annual attendance of roughly 300,000, with foreign visitors making up about one in ten.\n\nNational institutions also hold manga, though through different mechanisms. The National Diet Library's Tokyo Main Library holds novels and comics (manga), and the library's legal deposit system has covered online publications since 2013, when the NDL began comprehensive collection of free and Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free online publications. Because deposit rules depend on the format and on DRM status, digital-only titles can enter the national collection in ways that differ from printed volumes.\n\nCultural policy and soft power\n\nManga has become part of Japan's official cultural diplomacy. Cool Japan has been described as a form of soft power, meaning influence exercised through attraction rather than coercion. The government's organizational steps are dated differently across sources: one account says the policy began in 2010 with the establishment of the Office of Cool Japan, while another dates the METI-led campaign to 2012. A 2025 report describes a further target in which by 2033, the country wants to quadruple the amount of content it sells in overseas markets each year, with anime, manga, and video games as the main categories.\n\nCritics question the model. Iwabuchi Koichi argues that such efforts are one-way projections of culture, which may undercut the aims of soft power as the concept is usually defined. Others note that internationally popular works may not express ideas and attitudes that align with the Japanese government's conservative political values, so the policy's stated goals and the actual content of exported comics do not always match."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Censorship, content regulation, and ethics",
      "text": "Legal framework and industry self-regulation\n\nManga are governed in Japan by general obscenity law rather than by a comics-specific code. Japanese manga, like all other publications, are governed by Article 175 of the Penal Code that prohibits \"indecency\". The law has been enforced against comics: in 2004 manga artist Suwa Yūji and the publisher Shobunkan were both successfully prosecuted under the article for extreme depictions of sexual violence in the manga Misshitsu (Honey Room).\n\nMost day-to-day control, however, comes from the industry itself. Since the late 1980s, following a moral panic over the serial killing of four infant girls by an avid manga collector, manga and anime content has increasingly been governed by a code of industry self-regulation. Publishers asked creators to monitor their own work, and the Publishing Ethics Committee recommended that mature titles be labelled. The labels were a risky venture, as after the labels were introduced, many retailers stopped stocking adult material. Retail pressure matters because manga are sold widely: manga are sold in convenience stores, train stations and newsstands as well as bookstores, so children have had ready access to them, and retailers have therefore been sensitive to legal risk.\n\nThe Tokyo ordinance and the \"non-existent youth\" dispute\n\nLocal governments can also act. Municipalities in Japan have the power to pass local ordinances, and these have been used to restrict distribution of material deemed \"harmful to youth.\" The most prominent case is Tokyo. In February 2010 the metropolitan government proposed restricting sexually provocative depictions of fictional characters who appear to be under 18, a category it called \"non-existent youths.\" The government submitted an earlier version of the bill in March, but the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly rejected that version in June.\n\nA revised ordinance passed in December 2010. It made it illegal to sell or rent manga or anime depicting \"extreme\" sex acts, including rape and incest, to readers under the age of 18, and it banned images of characters that appear to be underage and are engaging in sexual acts. The rules were narrower in some respects: the bill only applies to drawings and animation, not to photography or film of real children. Enforcement relied on referral: a publisher with more than six works declared harmful in a 12-month period can be referred to the relevant self-regulatory body, and if it breaches the criteria again within six months, the Governor can publicly identify the offender. Industry compliance was due by April 1, 2011, and retailers had to comply with the age restrictions, for instance by moving works into adult-only sections, beginning July 1, 2011.\n\nSupporters argued that youth exposure to sexualized content required action; Capital University Tokyo Professor Maeda Masaaki testified before the assembly, emphasizing empirical concerns over youth exposure to sexualized content. Opponents were broad. Prominent manga artists, retailers and a coalition of the 10 major publishers criticized the ordinance as a limit on freedom of expression. One prominent manga author who also writes boys' love fiction claimed that the wording of the bill was so vague that her own classic and popular manga could fall under its regulations. Critics also warned that the ordinance enabled subjective censorship that threatened artistic creativity and Japan's cultural export industry. The effects reached digital distribution as well: in October 2011, J-Comi added a pay service for erotic manga, including a title which was banned under the revised ordinance.\n\nGender and ethnic representation\n\nCritics have argued that the industry's structure reproduces stereotypes. The production and marketing of manga along gendered lines stipulates who the readership of a genre is expected to be, which in effect reinforces gender stereotypes and tropes. Specific criticisms focus on shōnen manga. Manga and comics have a reputation for portraying females in sexualized and traditionally female-dominated roles such as being a mother, homemaker, or victim. Feminist critic Susan Napier criticises the depiction of women and girls in manga as representing negative stereotypes, and a 2013 study of four twenty-first-century shōnen series found continued problems in how female characters were drawn.\n\nEthnic representation has been criticized less systematically but no less sharply. Certain commentators argue that hypersexualisation of female characters in Japanese anime and manga has exacerbated western fetishisation of Asian women. A reading of the 1990s series Salaryman Kintarō presents its American character as a ruthless, cold, and manipulative American woman, characteristics that are presented as undesirable and foreign.\n\nThese concerns also reached international bodies. A report from the United Nations claimed that manga, anime, and video games produced in Japan promote gender stereotypes and violence against women and children. Japanese politician Taro Yamada argued that the report's claims are unfounded and infringe on freedom of expression. Responses from creators and critics have taken several forms. Some argue that mangaka have an ethical duty to challenge social norms and subvert gender essentialism. Others point to works that subvert conventions: a study of the shōnen series Noragami, written by a female author duo, describes resistance to gendered power dynamics and parody of traditional gender roles.\n\nViolence and real-world behavior\n\nConcern that depicted violence influences real-world conduct has recurred since the 1980s, often in response to particular crimes. Conservative critics have long targeted manga for its content, while Western press reports have portrayed Japan's regulation as lax. Scholars have pointed out that manga representations have always been contested in Japan, with many groups lobbying for restrictions on content. Kinsella (2000) documented how the political regulation movement had largely been internalized within the manga publishing industry, leading to self-censorship before formal restrictions.\n\nThe empirical question itself remained disputed in the ordinance debate. Opponents argued that there was a lack of peer-reviewed evidence demonstrating that exposure to stylized, non-photographic depictions increased real-world offenses. Supporters instead tied media exposure to broader concerns, citing rising societal issues like juvenile delinquency linked to media influence in their rationale. The debate thus rested on contested interpretations of causation, and it has shaped both regulatory policy and the self-regulatory practices of publishers."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Copyright, piracy, and intellectual property",
      "text": "Copyright framework and publisher enforcement\n\nJapanese law generally leaves manga copyright with the creator. In Japan, the creators of comics (Mangaka) keep their copyright, which researchers describe as an arrangement that departs from prevailing copyright thinking, since it keeps rights out of the hands of commercial intermediaries. In practice, publishers carry most of the day-to-day enforcement. Shueisha, for example, runs a takedown operation in which staff submit removal requests to site operators when they find titles on piracy sites, and a contractor helps check those sites repeatedly to locate the URLs involved. The company reportedly submits up to about 120,000 requests a month to websites, server operators and other parties, and files about 10 criminal complaints a year.\n\nLegislative responses have also tightened. The 2020 revision of the Copyright Act was primarily focused on measures against the rampant online piracy of manga. Its two main pillars were \"measures against linking sites\" and \"strengthening regulations on illegal downloading.\" Rights holders had also lobbied for downloading of pirated material to be made illegal, as the Japan Cartoonists Association and a publishing public-relations body argued in favour of that change to protect young artists.\n\nUnauthorized distribution and scanlation\n\nPiracy takes several forms. Scanlations, in which fans scan, translate and post chapters for free, are the most visible. Their legal status is clear even though enforcement is uneven: technically, they are illegal because they distribute copyrighted content without permission. Companies have mostly turned a blind eye to the works, in part because of their usefulness for testing the market. Publishers' tolerance is conditional. Once money enters the equation, through cutting into sales or fans selling their translations, copyrights are strongly enforced. Publishers' stance changed over time: initially, many publishers turned a blind eye, recognizing scanlations' role in building international fan bases, but as digital distribution became more prevalent, the stance hardened. In 2010, the Digital Comic Association, whose members include Kodansha, Shogakukan and Shueisha, asked U.S. and European operators of websites to stop offering unauthorized scanned images of Japanese manga and threatened to take them to court if they did not comply. The largest English aggregators, MangaFox and OneManga, pulled hundreds of manga titles and closed down completely in July 2010.\n\nLarge-scale site operators have drawn court action. Mangamura, which gained up to 100 million views a month when it was active, was sued in 2022 by Shogakukan, Shueisha and Kadokawa, who sought ¥1.9 billion at the Tokyo District Court, a figure representing estimated damages from piracy of 441 volumes from 17 manga. In April 2024 the court ordered the operator of the now-defunct site to pay ¥1.7 billion in compensation to three major Japanese publishers.\n\nLoss estimates from the anti-piracy group Authorized Books of Japan (ABJ) are large but inconsistent across reports. For 2023, the group put losses at 381.8 billion yen (approximately $3.5 billion), a decline from 506.9 billion yen lost in 2022. Its earlier peak was approximately 1.19 trillion yen in 2021, during the pandemic. A later survey of 913 sites found about 2.8 billion visits from users in 123 countries and regions, with total viewing time reaching around 700 million hours. Its damage figure, 704.8 billion yen, was calculated on the assumption that users finish reading a 500-yen comic book in 30 minutes, which would translate to roughly 8.5 trillion yen a year. Critics have objected to this method. TorrentFreak notes that the calculation relies on the classic and controversial \"lost sale\" fallacy. Other industry figures are higher still: an Orange Inc. executive has estimated losses of \"close to 6 trillion Japanese yen (≈USD$40 billion) last year alone\". ABJ itself has yet to confirm the total damage from copyright infringements because manga titles are also illegally shared on video streaming websites and other platforms.\n\nLegal and commercial responses\n\nEnforcement has shifted from individual sites toward infrastructure. In 2024 ABJ counted 1,332 manga pirate sites pulling in more than a billion annual visits, and Shueisha's response was not limited to takedown notices. Its U.S. DMCA subpoena called for a seizure of Cloudflare data, which the company treated as a route to identifying the operators behind the sites. The approach contributed to the closure of Mangajikan, which vanished overnight in June 2025. Similar applications targeted Google and Hurricane Electric to identify alleged infringers, and the linked site Mangabank went offline with a message saying it was closed due to \"server maintenance costs.\" Shueisha has also pursued individuals, filing a subpoena specifically targeting leakers of Weekly Shōnen Jump titles who are active on X.\n\nEnforcement remains difficult. ABJ reported that at the start of 2024, piracy rates were still around 80% higher than they were in 2020, with 1,176 pirate sites still offering publishing content in various languages. Publishers cite the overseas locations of the largest pirate sites and the apparent reluctance of local authorities to intervene in any meaningful way as obstacles, and view Cloudflare as a benefit to many pirate manga sites but a hindrance to their investigations. The commercial counter-argument concerns supply: an Orange executive has said that \"most of the manga the fans read, they're reading the pirated version,\" so expanding licensed translation is seen as essential.\n\nFair use, fan creativity and derivative works\n\nJapan's Copyright Act does not contain a general fair-use clause like that of the United States; it relies on enumerated exceptions, which leaves many fan practices in a grey zone. Even so, a legal analysis notes that under either law, fan translations would be considered copyright infringement, even if they were distributed without expectation of payment. Doujinshi, which are fan-made comics based on existing works, present a different case. The most common violations in this area include the creation of doujinshi and scanlation, yet market participants have often seen them as beneficial: doujinshi makes the original manga more popular, expands the market and increases competition, while scanlation opens the possibility of publishing manga abroad and popularizes it in other countries.\n\nResearchers have framed the tension as a gap between official rhetoric and practice. One study examines the gap between the public discourse favoured by right holders and politicians for strict copyright enforcement and industry practice where infringement is tolerated and sometimes even facilitated by the same right holders. Unresolved questions include where the boundary lies between quotation, parody, fan translation and derivative creation in a digital environment, and how far rights holders' loss estimates should count viewers who would never have bought the work."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Generative AI and open questions",
      "text": "Japanese creators have tested generative AI mainly as a drafting and efficiency tool rather than as a replacement for finished art. A Kyodo report described artists trying the technology for rough illustration drafts and plot suggestions, while worrying that the results might not sell and that the training data could infringe copyright. An early experiment dates to 2020, when a team at Keio University led by Satoshi Kurihara produced an AI-aided comic in the style of Osamu Tezuka, though humans drew nearly all of it. In 2023, a new 32-page chapter of Tezuka's Black Jack was made by people and AI together and published in Weekly Shōnen Champion to mark the series' 50th anniversary. That same year, the AI startup founder Takahiro Anno demonstrated a close-to-automated process in which he produced 16 pages in about a week, regenerating faulty areas such as hands and having the inking handled automatically.\n\nOpposition from publishers hardened after OpenAI's Sora 2 video generator produced anime-style clips that resembled well-known characters. Japan's government asked OpenAI in October 2025 to refrain from infringing copyright in Japanese cultural products. The Content Overseas Distribution Association, whose members include Studio Ghibli and Square Enix, submitted a written request in late October asking OpenAI to stop using their works for training. On 31 October 2025, the Japan Cartoonists Association, the Association of Japanese Animations and 17 publishers, among them Kodansha, Shogakukan, Kadokawa and Shueisha, issued a joint statement. Some reports give 30 October as the date for the earlier letter, so the exact chronology varies by source.\n\nThe central legal dispute concerns consent. The publishers criticised OpenAI's opt-out approach, under which rights holders must ask for removal after their works have been used, and argued that Japanese copyright generally requires prior permission. The joint statement set three demands: authorisation from rights holders at both the training and publishing stages, transparency about training data sources, and fair compensation when works are used. The signatories stated that they do not reject generative AI as such, but object to the use of copyrighted works without clear permission or transparency. Opinion is divided on the status of machine-made output. An expert quoted by AFP judged that copyright infringement is unlikely when an image is generated from simple text prompts with little human creative input. Manga artist and politician Ken Akamatsu has been among the figures calling for new guidelines on AI-generated art. Whether AI-assisted pages qualify for protection, and whether training on copyrighted manga counts as infringement, remain contested.\n\nLabour concerns focus on assistants, who traditionally paint backgrounds and carry out much of the finishing work under the author's direction. Commentators warned that junior artists who paint backgrounds are especially exposed to displacement. Anno's demonstration prompted questions about whether assistants would lose work and whether the apprenticeship tradition would weaken. Kurihara acknowledged that replacing assistants could not be ruled out. Other creators see a supporting role: the veteran artist Madoka Kobayashi described AI as a companion that offers rough ideas which she then reworks. The pressure is not limited to manga. A Nagoya anime studio reported that AI cut in-between frame work from one to two weeks to four to five hours. Netflix's Japanese animated short that used AI-generated backgrounds was criticised for not hiring human animators.\n\nSeveral questions remain open. It is unclear whether the studio model built around author-led teams of assistants will persist, shift toward smaller teams using AI tools, or fragment further. Readers' tolerance for partly machine-made work, the standards publishers will set for disclosure, and the way copyright law will treat training data and derivative output are all still unsettled. Each of these questions depends on decisions by courts, legislators and industry bodies that had not reached final form at the time of writing."
    }
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    "world-war-ii",
    "copyright"
  ],
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    },
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      "title": "Sh%C5%8Dnen Sekai",
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    },
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      "title": "Shōnen manga",
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    },
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    },
    {
      "title": "ICv2: Manga Week: Japan Manga Market Struggles as Digital Sales Stall",
      "url": "https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/61720/manga-week-japan-manga-market-struggles-digital-sales-stall"
    },
    {
      "title": "Japan's Manga Market Contracts as Print Collapse Outpaces Digital Gains - The New Publishing Standard",
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    },
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    },
    {
      "title": "Scanlation",
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    },
    {
      "title": "Manga publishers join forces to fight scanlation sites [Updated]",
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    },
    {
      "title": "MANGA AND ANIME IN TROUBLE: SCANLATIONS, MARKETING DIFFICULTIES AND NEW LAWS ABOUT SEX AND MINORS",
      "url": "https://factsanddetails.com/japan/cat20/sub135/item1774.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Four Major Manga Publishers File Lawsuit Against Piracy Sites in New York - ComicBook.com",
      "url": "https://comicbook.com/anime/news/japan-manga-publishers-lawsuit-piracy-free-website-new-york-city/"
    },
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    },
    {
      "title": "Manga Market Size To Exceed $73.01 Billion By 2035",
      "url": "https://www.snsinsider.com/press-release/global-manga-market"
    },
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      "title": "2025 Manga Ranking Trends: Top Sellers & Rising Stars ...",
      "url": "https://www.accio.com/business/manga-ranking-2025-trend"
    },
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    },
    {
      "title": "Scanlation site shuts down following legal threat from manga publishers",
      "url": "https://www.cbr.com/scanlation-site-shuts-down-following-legal-threat-from-manga-publishers/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Outline - 京都国際マンガミュージアム",
      "url": "https://kyotomm.jp/en/summary/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Kyoto International Manga Museum",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_International_Manga_Museum"
    },
    {
      "title": "Collections",
      "url": "https://www.ndl.go.jp/en/use/collections"
    },
    {
      "title": "E-Legal Deposit System for Online Publications",
      "url": "https://www.ndl.go.jp/en/collect/online"
    },
    {
      "title": "Cool Japan",
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    },
    {
      "title": "(PDF) Cool Japan: Japan’s Alternative Initiative to Soft Power",
      "url": "https://www.academia.edu/41608423/Cool_Japan_Japan_s_Alternative_Initiative_to_Soft_Power"
    },
    {
      "title": "From Doraemon to Diplomacy: The Role of Manga and Anime in Japanese Soft Power",
      "url": "https://utsynergyjournal.org/2025/04/09/from-doraemon-to-diplomacy-the-role-of-manga-and-anime-in-japanese-soft-power/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Anime, Manga Power Japan’s Strategy for Soft Power Influence - Bloomberg",
      "url": "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-21/anime-manga-power-japan-s-strategy-for-soft-power-influence"
    },
    {
      "title": "Japan’s Quest for “Soft Power”: Attraction and Limitation",
      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225378303_Japan's_Quest_for_Soft_Power_Attraction_and_Limitation"
    },
    {
      "title": "Kyoto International Manga Museum, a Comprehensive Cultural Facility for Manga in Kyoto",
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    },
    {
      "title": "The Soft Power of Cool: Japanese Foreign Policy in the 21st century",
      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325651959_The_Soft_Power_of_Cool_Japanese_Foreign_Policy_in_the_21st_century"
    },
    {
      "title": "thought-policing-or-the-protection-of-youth-debate-in-japan ...",
      "url": "https://scispace.com/pdf/thought-policing-or-the-protection-of-youth-debate-in-japan-2tiqv92383.pdf"
    },
    {
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      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314119222_Regulation_of_Manga_Content_in_Japan_History_Culture_and_Community_in_Japan"
    },
    {
      "title": "(PDF) Protecting your eyes : censorship and moral standards of decency in Japan and the United States as reflected in children's media",
      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/37995870_Protecting_your_eyes_censorship_and_moral_standards_of_decency_in_Japan_and_the_United_States_as_reflected_in_children's_media"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths — Grokipedia",
      "url": "https://grokipedia.com/page/Tokyo_Metropolitan_Ordinance_Regarding_the_Healthy_Development_of_Youths"
    },
    {
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      "url": "https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-11-15/tokyo-to-resubmit-bill-on-sexual-depictions-of-youths"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tokyo Assembly Votes to Restrict Sexually Charged Comics - ABC News",
      "url": "https://abcnews.com/International/tokyo-assembly-votes-restrict-sexually-charged-comics/story?id=12410880"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Metropolitan_Ordinance_Regarding_the_Healthy_Development_of_Youths"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tokyo enacts restrictions on manga, anime",
      "url": "https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/tokyo-enacts-restrictions-on-manga-anime-1.931114"
    },
    {
      "title": "J-Comi",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-Comi"
    },
    {
      "title": "Ethical Gender Representation in Manga",
      "url": "https://www.scribd.com/document/470678648/Gender-Roles-in-Japanese-Manga-Ethical-Considerations-for-Mangaka"
    },
    {
      "title": "A Multimodal Analysis of Shonen Manga",
      "url": "https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=mej"
    },
    {
      "title": "Straddling the Line: How Female Authors are Pushing the Boundaries of Gender Representation in Japanese Shōnen Manga",
      "url": "https://newvoices.org.au/volume-10/straddling-the-line-how-female-authors-are-pushing-the-boundaries-of-gender-representation-in-japanese-shonen-manga/"
    },
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      "title": "Manga Politics: Gender Norms in Japanese Artistry - Politics and Rights Review",
      "url": "https://politicsrights.com/manga-politics-gender-norms-in-japanese-artistry/"
    },
    {
      "title": "New UN Report Claims Manga & Anime Promote Gender Stereotypes, Violence Against Women, Children - Animehunch",
      "url": "https://animehunch.com/un-states-manga-anime-promotes-gender-stereotypes-violence-against-women-children/"
    },
    {
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    },
    {
      "title": "Manga Piracy Crisis Worsens Since Closure Of Mangamura Site",
      "url": "https://www.onsist.com/blog/manga-piracy-crisis-worsens-since-closure-of-mangamura-site/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sophisticated Manga Spoiler Websites: Explaining Copyright Infringement Cases",
      "url": "https://monolith.law/en/general-corporate/comics-copyright"
    },
    {
      "title": "Are Fansubs and Scanlations Piracy? - Japan Powered",
      "url": "https://www.japanpowered.com/anime-articles/are-fansubs-and-scanlations-piracy"
    },
    {
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    },
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      "title": "Mangamura",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangamura"
    },
    {
      "title": "Manga piracy website operator ordered to pay ¥1.7 billion to publishers - The Japan Times",
      "url": "https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/04/18/japan/crime-legal/manga-mura-copyright-ruling/"
    },
    {
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      "url": "https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64601511/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Japan manga industry loses ¥8.5-trillion a year to online piracy—study - Manila Standard",
      "url": "https://manilastandard.net/news/special-feature/314666069/japan-manga-industry-loses-%C2%A58-5-trillion-a-year-to-online-piracy-study.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "Rampant U.S. Piracy is a Multibillion-Dollar Concern for Japanese Manga Publishers * TorrentFreak",
      "url": "https://torrentfreak.com/rampant-u-s-piracy-is-a-multibillion-dollar-concern-for-japanese-manga-publishers/"
    },
    {
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    },
    {
      "title": "One Piece's Official Publisher Shuts Down Massive Piracy Site Worth 185 Million Visits in May",
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    },
    {
      "title": "Your Favorite Free Manga Website Just Got Shut Down — Here's Why That's Actually Great News",
      "url": "https://www.cbr.com/mangajikan-free-manga-website-shut-down-great-news/"
    },
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    },
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      "url": "https://screenrant.com/manga-piracy-lawsuit-japan-united-states-twitter/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Shueisha DMCA Subpoena Targets Two Dozen Manga Piracy Sites * TorrentFreak",
      "url": "https://torrentfreak.com/shueisha-dmca-subpoena-targets-two-dozen-manga-piracy-sites-240517/"
    },
    {
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    },
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      "url": "https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275443594_Between_Fan_Culture_and_Copyright_Infringement_Manga_Scanlation"
    },
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      "title": "Japan Faced Staggering $12.5 Billion Loss Due to Manga Piracy in 2023 - Lexology",
      "url": "https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=30200c84-d9de-4c57-85c7-68f448d589d9"
    },
    {
      "title": "Piracy Costs Japan’s Manga and Publishing Industry an Estimated $51 Billion Every Year",
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    },
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    },
    {
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      "url": "https://screenrant.com/manga-piracy-viz-media-shonen-jump-legal-battle/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Japanese artists explore using generative AI for creating new manga",
      "url": "https://newsonjapan.com/article/138024.php"
    },
    {
      "title": "This is Japan’s first AI-generated manga comic. But is it art?",
      "url": "https://www.cnn.com/style/article/japan-first-ai-generated-manga-art-intl-hnk"
    },
    {
      "title": "AI in Manga: Transforming Japanese Comics",
      "url": "https://culture.org/art-and-culture/literature/ai-in-manga/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Could AI replace manga artist assistants? AI startup founder shows “16-page manga completed without drawing,” sparking discussion about loss of human jobs - AUTOMATON WEST",
      "url": "https://automaton-media.com/en/news/20230926-21837/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Machine Magic or art Menace? Japan’s first aI Manga",
      "url": "https://www.pressreader.com/philippines/the-freeman/20230323/281676849155189"
    },
    {
      "title": "www.malaymail.com",
      "url": "https://www.malaymail.com/amp/news/life/2023/03/06/machine-magic-or-art-menace-japans-first-ai-manga/58197"
    },
    {
      "title": "Japanese Studios Ask OpenAI to Stop Using Anime for AI Training",
      "url": "https://www.medianama.com/2025/11/223-japanese-studios-openai-anime-manga-ai-training/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Japanese Publishers Accuse OpenAI's Sora2 of Copyright Theft",
      "url": "https://respawn.outlookindia.com/amp/story/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/japanese-anime-industry-slams-sora-2-ai-for-copyright-issue"
    },
    {
      "title": "Anime and manga giants warn OpenAI over AI copyright breach",
      "url": "https://www.thedailystar.net/tech-startup/news/anime-and-manga-giants-warn-openai-over-ai-copyright-breach-4026866"
    },
    {
      "title": "Japan’s top anime and manga publishers issue joint statement on Gen AI",
      "url": "https://essential-japan.com/news/japans-top-anime-and-manga-publishers-issue-joint-statement-on-gen-ai/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Studio Ghibli Demands That OpenAI Stop Ripping Off Its Work",
      "url": "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/studio-ghibli-openai-stop-ripping-work"
    },
    {
      "title": "Major Japanese Publishers Unite Against Open AI's Sora AI For Copyright Misuse",
      "url": "https://otakumantra.com/major-japanese-publishers-unite-against-open-ais-sora-ai-for-copyright-misuse/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Studio Ghibli-backed group urge OpenAI to halt AI training on their content",
      "url": "https://gulfnews.com/technology/media/studio-ghibli-backed-group-urge-openai-to-halt-ai-training-on-their-content-1.500332787"
    },
    {
      "title": "New Report Reveals How Anime & Manga Industry Is Using Generative AI",
      "url": "https://m.imdb.com/news/ni65015631"
    }
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}