A gallery of 1 item.
A typical manga volume of around 200 pages can be purchased for 400 to 500 yen (roughly £2–£2.50). In comparison, a bande dessinée volume may cost 1,500 to 2,000 yen for roughly 50 pages. Manga volumes use lightweight soft covers and inexpensive paper: easy to hold and easy to read while lying down. Meanwhile, bande dessinée volumes, alongside many UK and US graphic novels, are produced with glossy, durable paper that showcases full-colour printing, often bound in hard covers intended to be kept for many years, like an art book of Turner or Francis Bacon.
As everyday items sold at accessible prices, manga nevertheless make up a sizeable industry. Annual sales of manga – print and magazine formats alone – reach around 700 billion yen (£3.5 billion). Today, digital formats account for nearly half of the total sales volume of manga, yet print volumes continue to be produced in large numbers. New volumes of widely read series such as Detective Conan and ONE PIECE each reach distributions of over one million and three million copies respectively. With more than 10,000 manga titles published annually in Japan, it becomes easier to imagine just how comprehensively manga is woven into the fabric of daily life.
A gallery of 1 item.
A proliferation of character merchandise
Another distinctive feature of the manga industry is that it extends far beyond publishing. Manga inspires anime, live-action films, television dramas, and stage productions, but it also gives rise to an enormous range of merchandise depicting the characters in the stories. These items – stationery, clothing, food packaging, and more – are everyday things that people use in daily life. Importantly, many of these goods are purchased and used by people who may never have read the original manga in which the characters appear.
This abundance of character merchandise may stem from the fact that Japanese manga fans consider the characters – who should be merely elements of the story – to be as important as the story itself, or even more so. Many readers create their own stories – sometimes combining characters from multiple manga works – to craft new narratives in the form of manga or prose fiction. A popular example of this is Boy’s Love (also known as BL and formerly called ‘yaoi’), in which fans create romantic pairings between male characters from popular manga series.
A gallery of 1 item.
Manga in public spaces
From the mid-1990s, Japanese comics or manga began gaining broad popularity across Europe and North America. Anime adaptations of titles such as DRAGON BALL and Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon played a key role in this shift. The growing enthusiasm abroad also led to a reassessment within Japan. Manga, previously enjoyed mainly by dedicated readers, and often dismissed as a minor cultural form, came to be seen in a new light.
From the 2000s onward, the Japanese government began to actively promote manga as one of Japan’s important cultural assets. Similarly in academia, manga was increasingly recognized as a field of study. In recent years, The National Art Centre, Tokyo has staged two major manga exhibitions (a solo exhibition for Araki Hirohiko in 2018 and CLAMP showcasing the work of four female manga artists in 2024), marking a symbolic turning point in the position of manga as an art form in Japan.
In this context, manga-like visual language began to appear widely in public spaces. Characters from well-known manga series were used in government campaigns, while posters in train stations conveying public rules or etiquette were designed in manga format. The recent Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai also embraced well-known manga and anime characters – such as Atom from Astro Boy and Gundam from Mobile Suit Gundam – as some of its most visible faces. In many ways, it became a ‘manga expo.’
Through these developments, Japan has come to be recognised – both internally and internationally – as ‘the country of manga’.
A gallery of 1 item.
Where to start with reading manga: Itō Yū’s top picks
Black Jack by Tezuka Osamu
Any discussion of postwar manga would be incomplete without including Tezuka Osamu. Making his debut as a manga artist in 1946, and remaining active until his death in 1989, Tezuka is said to have drawn some 50,000 pages over the course of his career. I’d like to highlight Black Jack, a series centred on an outlaw surgeon, created by an author who himself held a medical license. The myriad issues concerning the human body and mind are condensed into self-contained, entertaining stories – it is nothing short of masterful.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Miyazaki Hayao
Animation director Miyazaki Hayao, widely known for My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke, is also an accomplished manga artist. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, later adapted for the cinema, was originally conceived as a manga, and remained unfinished at the time of the film’s release. In the manga’s complete edition, the work depicts themes such as the coexistence of humans and nature, and human society as a political entity, in a far more profound manner than the animation.
Giga Town: The Guide to Manga Iconography by Kōno Fumiyo
Kōno Fumiyo is widely known for In This Corner of the World, a work depicting the atomic bombing that was later adapted into theatrical anime. Alongside this, she has continued to create manga across a wide range of themes. She is a remarkably experimental creator, treating the possibilities of manga expression itself as a central theme by changing medium or inventing entirely new visual techniques for each project. Giga Town is an introductory manga about manga expression, in which anthropomorphised animals from the 12th – 13th century ‘Handscrolls of Frolicking Animals (Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga)’ explain more than 100 manga-specific symbols, known as manpu.
As bonus recommendations, I introduce two books that offer deeper insight into manga culture in Japan. By understanding the broader cultural landscape, including its history, industrial structure, and global expansion, you can appreciate individual manga works on a much more profound level.
The exhibition catalogue for the 2019 exhibition Manga at British Museum
The large-scale Manga exhibition held at the British Museum in 2019 made a strong impression not only on those working within manga, but also on museum professionals around the world. Hosted by such an established historical museum, the exhibition comprehensively introduced the context of manga culture with clarity and care.
What’s Manga? An introduction to Japanese comics
What’s Manga? is a book that compiles the permanent exhibitions at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, one of my workplaces. It is a visual book explaining the characteristics of manga through eight themes, conceived as answers to frequently asked questions from overseas visitors less familiar with Japanese manga culture.
About the author
Itō Yū was born in 1974 and now works as Specially Appointed Professor at Kyoto Seika University International Manga Research Center. His areas of expertise are manga studies and folklore. His current research themes in manga studies include ‘manga exhibitions’ and ‘educational manga.’ He has curated numerous manga exhibitions in Japan and abroad, many in connection with the Kyoto International Manga Museum, which he has been involved with since its founding. These exhibitions include Shifting the Everyday Slightly (Palazzo Ducale, Lucca, Italy, 2014); Manga Hokusai Manga: Approaching the Master’s Compendium from the Perspective of Contemporary Comics (the Japan Cultural Institute in Rome, Italy, 2017); and Manga and War 2 (Kyoto International Manga Museum, 2025), among others.