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via sankaku
Tamiki Wakaki, a top Shonen Sunday mangaka, has voiced his concerns that the Japanese manga industry is in long-term decline, and that authors not writing in the four staple genres of ero, parody, bishonen, and bishoujo can no longer expect to support themselves commercially.

The mangaka himself, 若木民喜 / Tamiki Wakaki, active for a decade and widely published in Shonen Sunday, is best known for his popular “Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai,” unsurprisingly a romantic comedy serialised in Shonen Sunday.

He is pessimistic about the manga industry he sees as being in long-term decline, with the future of the industry in doubt over the coming decades thanks to a limited influx of new talent:

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“Manga magazines are boring, so they attract no fresh blood. Competition subsequently slackens. New artists are tried vigorously, but none are able to be serialised for long.

As a result experienced authors are called in out of necessity, but though their books may sell the magazines themselves become dull – this attracts even less new blood, and so the cycle continues.

In the past new artists were a dime a dozen, but now no matter how hard you search they are scarcer and must be nurtured carefully. Especially now in the era of lower birth rates, nobody can fail to notice this, the new artists are gradually decreasing in number. Both the mangaka who can sell a million copies and their fanbases are aging…

It’s going to be especially difficult to make a living for the kind of authors who can’t pen ero/parody/bishonen/bishoujo manga (in fact it is right now).”

It seems the four genres featured now cover the bulk of recent titles, not that they were lacking in popularity to begin with.

However, Mahoromatic creator Bow Ditama does hold out some hope for those poor wretches uninterested in endlessly drawing pantsu manga:

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“Certainly, if you can’t draw cute girls it is going to be hard. But no mangaka are dying of starvation. Even if you can’t draw girls, you can still earn a living on subculture magazines and ‘deep’ manga magazines, and you can also work as an assistant to a pro.

It seems online assistants or whatever are quite in demand too [these are assistants who work remotely and submit manuscripts to their master electronically, rather than being physically present in the traditional manner].”

Their voices join the many others who have begun voicing their doubts as to the direction the Japanese visual culture industry is taking, with both anime and manga shying away from risky projects in favour of courting niche audiences or publishing staid works in highly rigid genres.

Is such an industry capable of producing the next Evangelion or Ghost in the Shell?

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via sankaku
apan’s manga industry faces great peril, with a significant drop in overall sales and a precipitous drop in sales for manga magazines suggesting that change may be required sooner rather than later if the industry is arrest its decline.

Weekly Shonen jump is a case in point – Shueisha’s flagship magazine sold 6 million copies each week in 1995, which has more than halved to 2.8 million now. Analysis suggests much the same pattern across other magazines in the industry.

Below are the decline in 2009 sales versus those of a year earlier:
Shonen, etc:
Weekly Shonen Jump 2,807,000 0.7%
Weekly Shonen Magazine 1,633,000 -6.9%
Korokoro Comic 937,000 6.0%
Monthly Shonen Magazine 902,000 -4.7%
Weekly Shonen Sunday 765,000 11.7%

Seinen, etc:
Young Magazine 843,000 -10.0%
Weekly Young Magazine 838,000 -10.4%
Big Comic Original 785,000 -5.3%

However, the traditional pattern in the manga industry is for the work to be developed and published in a magazine, and then for the real money to be made in publishing the manga in compiled volumes (“tankobon”).

Poor sales for magazines might be shrugged off, but even tankobon sales have been suffering, though not with the same substantial drop in circulation exhibited by manga magazines.

Below you can see magazine (red) vs tankobon (blue) sales, with volumes sold in units of 100 million above, and sales in units of 100 million yen below (approximately $1,000,000):

manga-tankobon-vs-magazines.jpg

One industry researcher reports that “the industry is becoming polarised between the mass market and the otaku-centric,” a fair characterisation in the eyes of many.

Not all companies in the industry face such a bleak outlook however. Kadokawa has carefully cultivated niche audiences of otaku, enjoying huge success with a “character business” based approach, as opposed to pure publishing.

Their CEO certainly agrees, though he stresses that good characters only stem from quality works:

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“As we were selling our magazines, so the characters began to sell as a result. But characters don’t take precedence. First the content of the work itself has to be good.”

Kadokawa seem to have taken this business model to its logical extreme in any case.

However, one major shortcoming with this entire viewpoint does become apparent – despite what major publishers would like to believe, Japan’s visual culture industry continues to evolve, and much activity now takes place outside the auspices of the traditional manga/anime combine.

Thus it seems possible that just as traditional CD-based music sales have suffered from the advent of the Internet, so has traditional manga begun to suffer from the rapid changes wrought upon the visual culture industry over the last decade, none of which offer any particular reason to continue buying thick volumes of manga every week.

The very notion that the health of a medium can be measured by the number of blockbusters it produces is itself increasingly obsolete – in music, books and other media, markets are increasingly centred on the so-called “long tail,” with modern distribution allowing vast numbers of niche titles to be economically supported where before only a few very popular titles could ever find commercial success.

Having low or high sales is thus not a measure of how “good” a title is, but instead merely reflects the size of the particular niche a product serves.

Most people have probably lamented their favourite work not appearing in some sales chart, instead marvelling at how bad the top-sellers can be – the future of content industries are increasingly seen to be many of these relatively obscure titles appealing to obscure fanbases, rather than a few hugely popular franchises winning all.

Of course, mass appeal still seems essential in actually developing the market into something which can be differentiated, and the lack of recent franchises with truly broad appeal is a matter of concern.

Just how the production and distribution of anime, manga and games ultimately copes with the erosion of the mass-market blockbuster in favour of a hundred niche titles remains to be seen…