Manga and anime from Japan are increasingly popular overseas, with Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" receiving an Academy Award earlier this year. In their birthplace, however, manga seem past their glory days when loyal readers eagerly awaited the next installment from their favorite authors, such as giants like Osamu Tezuka or Tetsuya Shiba.
While the market for comics is still huge, pulling in revenues of 523 billion yen in 2002, total sales have been declining for seven years. Manga magazines have been particularly hard hit -- sales of the popular weekly Shonen Jump have dwindled to only half their peak of 6.5 million in 1994.
Why are sales falling? The history of manga is inextricably intertwined with the baby boomer generation, according to the experts at Tsukuru magazine (6/03). The first manga magazines were founded in 1959, when they were children. But the golden age of manga, presided over by the weekly shonen Magazine, arrived when they entered college -- it is said that demonstrators in the student movement of the late 1960s carried Shonen Magazine in their right hand, and the now-defunct leftwing intellectual Asahi Journal in their left. When they graduated to adulthood in the 1970s, magazines with more adult content became popular as well, turning the manga divisions at the top three publishers -- Kodansha, Shogakukan, and Shueisha -- into cash cows.