ICHIYA’s POP Eye – Manga

　Pop star, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s “Moshi Moshi Nippon” is an NHK international TV show, which is available with the internet, has my corner “ICHIYA’s POP EYE”. It introduces Japanese cool things every time. Let me introduce some of them. 
  Today’s topic is Manga!
  Have you ever read Japanese manga? Japanese cartoon “manga” is now also popular overseas .
  In Japan, 64% of the published books are manga. 20% of the sales of all publications are manga. I think, at most, only 1% of respective sales in other countries are manga.

  There are all kinds of genre in manga. Sports , SF, Hero, gag, love romance, school life, economy, history, politics, food, science .
  Many people use manga to study. Actually I learned science almost exclusively through manga when I was a child.
  There are also manga magazine genre. For children, for young boys, for young girls, for adults, for adult ladies, etc.
  You can see many adults eagerly reading manga on the train in Japan . This can not be seen in other countries..It is a characteristic of Japan that both adults and children enjoy manga so much. The line between adults’ culture and children’s culture is ambiguous in Japan. Japanese adults might be childish.
  Many people draw manga. A manga festival, the so called "Comic Market" is held twice a year, and many amateur cartoonists exhibit and sell their works.Every time, 500,000 people participate in the event. Through this event of just a few days , total sales reach up to 500 million dollars. This is a scale of 1/ 3 of the revenue of the Japanese film industry .Manga culture is basically supported by the existence of many creators and fans.
  Japanese people read books from right to left. We open books with our right hand.It is the same with Manga, they are opened with the right hand. In most countries, books are opened with the left hand. Then, until several years ago, mangas outside Japan were opened with the left hand just like usual western books you read. So publishers had to re-print them the opposite way, in order to prepare them for export.
  This sounds more trivial than it actually is. It also influenced the content of the actual manga, for example, the original heroes shoot guns with their right hand, but the exported heroes were left handers.
  However, recently, manga fans in the western world tend to want to read manga in the Japanese way, so the western mangas are being printed so that you can read with your right hand. This may be the first phenomenon in the history of western civilization that oppositely printed materials appear on the shelves of book stores except for books for Arabic people.
  Let’s enjoy manga!