€8.6 billion
This is the loss due to piracy, according to the manga industry in 2021. A figure multiplied by 4.8 in one year, according to Authorized Books of Japan, which brings together publishers. Despite the closure in 2019 of Mangamura, the largest pirate site in Japan, then that of Manga Bank in 2021, explains the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, there are more than 900 sites on which there are pirated manga to read on screen or to download. . In January, Nikkei Asia revealed that manga and anime giants will join an international anti-piracy organization that brings together cultural players from thirteen countries.
At the service of Ukrainian refugees
About 1,300 Ukrainians have taken refuge in Japan since the beginning of the war launched by Russia. Most had never visited the country and did not speak a word of Japanese. To help them preserve their health, mangaka Riki Kusaka, known for her work Help Man! (the story of a nurse who helps elderly people), imagined a series of drawn cards naming different parts of the body and symptoms (backache, cough, nausea, etc.) in Japanese and Ukrainian. “It’s useful, medical terms are very technical”welcomes Kostiantyn Ovsiannikov, a Ukrainian professor living in Japan, who helped the mangaka. “I didn’t want the refugees to be isolated or bothered by the language barrier”told Riki Kusaka to the newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
Translation Challenges
Anime adapted from manga are “incomprehensible without adequate dubbing”notes the Argentine newspaper Huarpe. However, the Spanish of Spain is not always very clear for the inhabitants of Latin America, where the idiom of the former colonists has evolved. If Colombians, Panamanians or Argentines can chat in the same language, some words and formulations are different. According to the daily, anime producers have taken these distinctions into account and are working to adapt Japanese idiomatic expressions to each country while reducing delays. The actors have also become more professional and now dub the dialogues in the different Latin American variants of Spanish.
Theme hotels
The manga industry is trying to diversify its sources of income. In December 2021, publishing house Shogakukan opened the Book Hotel in Jimbocho, Tokyo’s bookstore district. Books and manga albums are everywhere in this 12-story hotel, reports the economic newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun, from the reception to the rooms through the corridors. Dot, a company specializing in the management of themed hotels, manages an establishment in the Japanese capital offering 5,000 manga, and plans to open around fifteen hotels throughout the country within the next five years. In 2020, the Kadokawa publishing house had opened the EJ Anime Hotel in Tokorozawa, with a decoration and a restaurant menu inspired by the works it publishes.
An original version
How about reading manga in Japanese? In an article published at the end of 2021, The Guardian explained the popularity of Japanese and Korean courses in the UK. Japanese is the fastest growing language in the country, and more British students are now learning Japanese than Italian, according to a report cited by the newspaper. An interest that follows the growing popularity of East Asian cultures in Europe, with in particular the worldwide craze for J-pop, K-pop and anime. In fact, many of these students have started to learn Japanese or Korean “to have fun”notes a Japanese teacher living in the north of England.
Incredible collections
“The Omnibus Collector” is followed by nearly 62,000 people on YouTube and has accumulated nearly 5 million views. On his channel, this young American shares reading tips and tells how he builds and organizes his collection of manga and comics. In May, he released a video in which he shows the 3,800 volumes of his collection, which includes each issue of the American version of the magazine. Shonen Jump. Riley – that’s her real name – can buy up to 300 books a month, and her apartment is a maze of shelves. In France, the youtubeur “Manga Indigo” also shares videos on his collection, which already exceeded 7,000 volumes in December 2020.
Two French in Tokyo
Cartoonist Toan Tran and screenwriter Samuel van der Veen (Seldon) won the Grail in 2021: the publication of their manga Imago in Japanese online magazine Shonen Jump+. How did they do it? They won the Magic International Manga Contest, a competition organized in Monaco for five years by Shibuya Productions (a company that works in video games and animated films) and the Japanese publishing house Shueisha. The jury (with the editors of Weekly Shonen Jump and of Shonen Jump+) won the award for the short detective story of Toan and Seldon, who flew to Japan for a month, where they met mangakas and publishers.