Japanese Manga HIROMI TANAKA Meiji University, Japan Manga or Japanese comics and their animated version, anime, are some of the most popular forms of contemporary entertainment media in Japan and increasingly beyond. Sales of manga in Japan, including both print and digital forms, amounted to 445 billion yen (about US$ 3,998 million) in 2016 (AJPEA/Te Research Institute for Publications, 2017). Abroad, translation of manga into English began in the late 1980s. Anime became popular frst, but manga, on which a lot of anime was based, became known to West- ern audiences in the late 1980s. Since then the manga fandom expanded, furthered by the use of the internet. Today, license sales outside Japan have reached 11 billion yen (about US$ 988 million) for print sales and about 20 billion yen (about US$ 1,797 million) for anime (Digital Contents Association, 2015). Tese sales exclude illegal cir- culation, particularly on the internet, which the Japanese government and manga artists are well aware of. Tis, ironically, confrms the popularity of manga abroad. While illegally circulated contents are those originally published in Japan, manga today are created elsewhere by non-Japanese artists too. Tere are at least two reasons manga are important for gender and media scholars. First, they represent a signifcant form of contemporary entertainment media which is popular and gendered in terms of production, text, and audience. Tey are consumed widely, their infuence is hard to ignore, and there are a number of gender and sexual- ity issues regarding manga that call for scholarly attention. As discussed below, manga includes a variety of genres and representations that are structurally gendered. Second, the fact that manga are gendered does not necessarily mean that they are closed from any possibility of innovation and intervention. Scholars have, in fact, identifed not only gender-conforming but also gender-upsetting elements in sociocultural phenom- ena regarding manga. Tis makes manga an interesting research object for gender and media scholars who are engaged with feminist questions and exploring the possibility of change in the media. Research about manga started to develop in the 1980s into a growing, interdisci- plinary feld in which both academics and nonacademics are engaged in examining manga from various perspectives including the perspective of gender. Manga scholars have so far traced the history, unique visual styles, genres, and transnational difusion of manga and their popularity. Many studies do not include any gender analysis at their core, but some gender scholars have shown concern about gendered dimensions of manga and their cultural implications. Scholars generally agree that manga in their contemporary form emerged in the mid-20th century in the early post-World War II era, although some scholars stress the cultural continuity of manga in earlier periods: before Japan’s modernization in the Te International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. Karen Ross (Editor-in-Chief), Ingrid Bachmann, Valentina Cardo, Sujata Moorti, and Marco Scarcelli (Associate Editors). © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781119429128.iegmc161