When thinking about the nature of anime and manga studies as a discreet subject area, it is certainly possible to raise a whole range of different questions. For example, in a chapter in the recent 2nd edition of the definitive essay collection Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, Mark McLelland highlights some of the unique challenges of “managing manga studies in the convergent classroom“. Similarly, in the latest version of the International Center for Japanese Studies report Japanese Studies Around the World (2024), Yoshikuni Igarashi presents an overview of “the state of manga studies in North America“. And, in the one of the leading journals in the broader Japanese Studies field, Ryotaro Mihara, in the provocatively-titled Decolonising anime studies: A prolegomenon makes the argument “that the field of Anglophone anime studies should itself be scrutinised in relation to how it canonises a specific ‘style of thought’ (as Said terms it) in understanding anime at the expense of anime itself”.
At the same time, even as we ask these kinds of questions about anime and manga studies, it is also crucial to ask other questions – that are not as much about general and abstract concepts as they are about the specific activities that we label “anime and manga studies”, primarily, teaching, and scholarly publications. Asking certain concrete questions lets us essentially operationalize the abstract concepts and treat “anime and manga studies” as something that can be not just defined, but itself studied.
One such question, perhaps one of the most straight-forward questions to ask about any new developing academic field, is simply how is new scholarship in the field actually published – in what formats, and by what publishers. Is the field dominated by just a small group of publishers? Or are publications dispersed among many? A prominent study that asks this question is The oligopoly of academic publishers in the Digital Era (PLoS, 2015). Critiques of the “oligopoly” are also frequent – one excellent example is the chapter by Paige Mann, Scholarship in a globalized world: The publishing ecosystem and alternatives to the Oligopoly, in the 2022 essay collection Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship (Rutgers University Press).
Anime and manga continue to grow in popularity and reach worldwide. And, in the process, anime and manga – and their audiences – can be the subject of certain particular and very specific kinds of publications that now exists alongside both scholarly monographs and articles on one hand and coverage in magazines, newspapers, and the online popular press on the other.
These publications take the form and format of research reports that treat anime first and foremost as an market and an industry, although some are increasingly focusing on specifically how audiences are approaching, consuming, and perceiving anime. These are generally produced by independent research companies, although some may be developed in cooperation with media outlets. Many are available free of charge, while others are accessible only through a subscription or as a one-off purchase. They can then both drive media conversation, and serve as important sources for actual scholarship. However, some, such as as those produced by Jefferies and Bernstein Research – and referenced in newspaper articles like Anime is Japan’s Next Global Champion (Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2024) and As Anime Streaming Market Booms, Netflix and Crunchyroll Dominate (Variety VIP+, March 17, 2025), are not available to outside/public users at all.
This is not a comprehensive listing of these kinds of reports, but it can serve to highlight the range of them, as well as several that have recently received significant attention.
“The findings in this global report on anime reflect data collected between October 2024 and March 2025 with 8,600 consumers across 10 countries (US, UK, Poland, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, China, Indonesia & Thailand)”
“This report provides fundamental information on the Japanese anime industry. Next to a general overview of the market, it includes detailed data on broadcasting, movies, streaming and videograms, as well as other segments, such as merchandising and cosplay.”
Statista reports are generally available for purchase at a cost of several hundred dollars, but may be accessible through both academic and public libraries.
“This report explores how anime fans watch shows, listen to music, play games, and create content as a means of deepening engagement with the franchises they love. It sets out to help entertainment companies and brands devise strategies for reaching younger consumers via anime.
Key data and insights in this report:
Anime fan penetration by age, Q4 2024, global
Anime fan and consumer average weekly hours spent performing consumer activities, Q4 2024, global
Types of anime fandom purchasing by anime fans, Q4 2024, global
A conceptual graphic of the different anime genre types
A conceptual graphic of the different types of anime fan creators”
Comparison of Otaku by Category (31 Categories) (Comparison by gender, age, occupation, annual income, marriage status, number of years for being otaku, annual consumption amount, hours spent per week on otaku activity, relationship between hours spent on otaku activities and consumption by value, daily hours spent online, most frequently watched VOD/video streaming, most frequently used social media, lifestyle/personal characteristics, and “oshi-katsu” status)
Relation between Otaku Activities and Annual Amount Spent (9 patterns)
“So what makes anime so distinct—and so magnetic? And where does the genre go from here?
To find out, Crunchyroll, the global anime brand, commissioned National Research Group (NRG), a leading global insights agency, to conduct a study exploring the values, identity markers, and fandom behaviors that set anime apart.
The results were striking. Among Gen Z, anime fandom now rivals that of major music stars and sports franchises, providing fans with a powerful sense of community and cultural connection. The message is clear: anime is no longer on the sidelines of pop culture. It’s leading the charge.
“Our latest report, Anime, Ascendant, explores the recent rise of the genre and its capacity for further growth. Drawing on insights from a study of 1,012 anime viewers aged 13-54 across the US and Japan, and leveraging data from NRG’s Franchise IQ product—a weekly tracker that measures the health of franchises across a wide variety of entertainment categories—this report offers actionable guidance for those looking to tap into the anime wave.
In this paper, you’ll find:
Cultural Exchange: How anime is bridging the gap between Eastern and Western storytelling
Representation and Diversity: The growing demand for more inclusive and diverse characters in anime
Innovative Opportunities: New ways for studios and brands to engage with anime’s passionate fan base”
“To better understand just how vast anime culture has become, Polygon surveyed more than 4,000 Americans over the age of 18 about their anime consumption habits. Working with Vox Media’s Insights and Research team and market research group The Circus, our results show that not only is anime’s popularity growing significantly with each generation, but that — among younger audiences — it’s even surpassing cultural touchstones like the NFL.
So anime is big. But how big, and in what ways? Let’s dig in.”
[Vox Media also published a separate summary of this survey]
“The anime industry has recently been growing at a high rate, reaching a market size of 2,742.2 billion JPY in 2021. It is now truly a massive industry by any measure.
Dentsu conducted a survey in July 2022 on the topics of the popularity of anime in the US and the characteristics of anime consumption especially in Gen Z, targeting Americans aged 18 to 54″
These two additional documents are published specifically as industry analyst reports, and priced to be sold accordingly – at several thousand dollars.
“The anime market is forecasted to grow by USD 21.92 billion during 2024-2029, accelerating at a CAGR of 9.4% during the forecast period. The report on the anime market provides a holistic analysis, market size and forecast, trends, growth drivers, and challenges, as well as vendor analysis covering around 25 vendors.
The report offers an up-to-date analysis regarding the current market scenario, the latest trends and drivers, and the overall market environment. The market is driven by high speed internet expansion fuels surge in anime video game popularity, rising penetration of smartphones, and rising popularity of media shows and growth in spending on online shows and video.
The study was conducted using an objective combination of primary and secondary information including inputs from key participants in the industry. The report contains a comprehensive market size data, segment with regional analysis and vendor landscape in addition to an analysis of the key companies. Reports have historic and forecast data.”
The global anime market size was estimated at USD 34,256.2 million in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 60,272.2 million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 9.8% from 2025 to 2030. The market is primarily driven by the rise of social media platforms, which has fostered community building among fans, allowing for greater interaction and engagement.
Everybody loves an awards ceremony. And if movies can have the Oscars, Broadway theater can have the Tonys, and comics can have, uh, the Eisner Awards, why should manga feel left out! And, later this summer, the organizers of New York City’s Anime NYC convention will be holding a gala awards ceremony for the English-speaking manga community. The American Manga Awards was launched last year, and for 2025, the awards will be presented in seven different categories for titles, along with potentially several individuals selected for induction into a Manga Publishing Hall of Fame.
What is particularly noteworthy especially from the perspective of manga studies is who will actually be deciding on the winning titles. Yes, the judges are journalists, publishing and comics industry professionals, translators, and essentially, media personalities. But, one is very possibly currently the leading academic expert on Japanese comics currently working and teaching in the U.S., and another, a school librarian (and Queens College School of Library and Information Science adjunct professor), who just recently steered the publication of a guide to introducing manga in school settings for the American Association of School Librarians.
Dr. Shige (CJ) Suzuki is currently an associate professor in the department of modern languages and comparative literature at Baruch College (City University of New York). His latest publication is the chapter Comics at the intersection of womanhood and disability: Essay manga, affect, and community, in the essay collection Women’s Voices in Manga: Japanese Cultural and Historical Perspectives, and he also recently contributed a Gekiga, or Japanese alternative comics chapter to the new second edition of the textbook Introducing Japanese Popular Culture. In 2023, Prof. Suzuki co-authored the Bloomsbury Comics Studies monograph Manga: A Critical Guide – currently the major comprehensive overview of Japanese comics that is available in English. He speaks frequently at various academic conferences around the U.S. and in Japan, and is currently working on a full-length book on Japanese alternative comics.
Yes, the American Manga Awards are one single, specific, and unique event. But, nonetheless, I would like to think that the organizers’ decision to invite Prof. Suzuki to serve as one of the judges is a great example of how the contributions that scholars are making to the public reception of Japanese comics around the world is being recognized and acknowledged.
What is the stereotype of Japanese animation? Inevitably, and even now too frequently, it is still “Japanese pornographic animation” – the phrasing Susan Napier used for the title of her chapter as far back as 2000, in the essay collection Word and Image in Japanese Cinema.
Thinking about this “locally situated transcultural media form” (using the term Jaqueline Berndt suggests in the introduction to the new Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime) and the structures that are built around it can involve many approaches and methods. And a particularly interesting approach is the one that Aurélie Petit takes in the new paper The hentai streaming platform wars – just recently published in the journal Porn Studies.
As we close out 2024 and move into 2025, content providers everywhere online, from Vox to A.V. Club to Anime News Network are publishing year-end summary articles and Best-Of lists. (…and worst-of lists). Here at animemangastudies.com, I do not have either hopes or ambitions to compete with those kinds of content providers – but you know what, maybe I can also take a bit of time to point out just some of the highlights of 2024 when it comes to – anime and manga studies!
Granted, many of the year’s highlights will be based on the full list of English-language scholarly publications on anime/manga that appeared throughout the year. But even a cursory look at this list can bring up some really interesting
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From what I can tell, 2024 saw the publication of at least 6 scholarly monographs that discuss different aspects of Japanese animation and comics either primarily or at least extensively alongside other related topics:
In The Flesh of Animation: Bodily Sensations in Film and Digital Media, Sandra Annett (Wilfried Laurier University) explores the ways that animation can specifically “provoke” or evoke different sensory experiences – using examples from anime such as Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo – as well as a variety of American, European, Korean, and other animated films.
The history of anime fans outside Japan can be traced to at least the 1980’s, if not earlier. Now that this history is established, the conditions are in place for scholarship that engages with the history critically. And one such recent engagement is the essay by Aurélie Petit (Concordia University) that examines the discussions that took place in early anime fan communities, and argues that these discussions have played a major role in shaping how anime fans interact between themselves and with the “external” world, and to some extent how the idea, concept, and image of the “anime fan” is now defined.
When it first launched in 2020, the open-access Journal of Anime and Manga Studies represented a major new development in the establishment of anime and manga studies as a defined academic field. Since the launch, it clearly thrived, with each new issue a range of new authors, and covering a diverse array of topics under the general umbrella of Japanese animation and comics. JAMS’ latest volume (2023) was formally released on December 3, and its eight articles once again do a great job of representing some of the most innovative scholarly writing on anime/manga that is currently available in English. And – all of it is free to read!
The issue opens with a letter from the JAMS editor-in-chief, summarizing the year’s developments and activities for the journal, the most prominent among them the Mechademia/JAMS track of scholarly presentations held as a part of the year’s Anime Expo convention. The letter also highlights the continuing upward trends in the journal’s readership, to over 2,000 pageviews per month at the conclusion of 2023, as well as the journal’s top five most read articles – the leader by far is A Survey of the Story Elements of Isekai Manga (volume 2) – currently, the 4th-ranking result in Google Scholar for a search for the term “isekai”, and the first result that is an actual peer-reviewed article.
The volume’s main section opens with Inclusive Media Mix: Shaping Communication through A Silent Voice. In this essay, Yuta Kaminishi (Habib Institute for Asian Studies, University of Idaho) expands the concept of the “Japanese media mix” that Marc Steinberg proposes and applies it to activities of different types – and involving different participants – than those that Steinberg envisions.
How do we categorize different kinds of Japanese comics? What categories or labels do we use? For that matter, who even decides what categories or labels we even have access to? These questions are provocative, but as it turns out, they are not rhetorical. Outside Japan, and particularly in the U.S., there are actually specific organizations that are tasked with assigning labels to different kinds of published materials, and probably the most important organization of this type is the Library of Congress. Unless you are somehow involved with the Library of Congress classification system in your work, or have studied it in a library/information science graduate program, the activity of the Library of Congress that are you probably most familiar with is the system of terms to organize entries in library catalogs both by subject and by genre.
Since November 2022, “manga” has been included on the approved Library of Congress list of terms as both a subject heading (for materials about manga) and a genre term – for actual manga titles. And, as it turns out, last year, the Metadata and Cataloging Committee of the American Library Association Graphic Novels and Comics Round Table presented a proposal to the Library of Congress endorsing the establishment of several specific terms that would apply to “manga subgenres”. In particular, the Committee endorsed four broad terms, with these potential recommended descriptions:
shonen: “Manga emphasizing action and adventure, often with slapstick humor, a journey featuring personal growth, heroes with spiky hairstyles ,and themes of friendship, determination, and teamwork.”
shojo: “Manga emphasizing personal feelings and emotions, often centered on relationships, with a distinctive artistic style featuring lithe characters and big eyes, decorative panel dividers and layered panels.”
Boys love: “Romance manga with beautiful, androgynous male leads, featuring exclusive mutual attraction and a plot driven by emotion and psychological obstacles. For comics about realistic gay experiences, see Gay comics.”
Yuri: “Manga depicting the homosocial, spiritual bonds and relationships between adolescent girls, often with a floral motif of lilies. For comics about the lesbian experience, see Lesbian comics.”
Just as the idea of a scholarly monograph or a peer-reviewed journal article on anime is long past being anything unusual or controversial, so is the idea of a college class on Japanese animation or Japanese comics. These kinds of classes are now offered at many different kinds of colleges/universities – and how they are structured can be different. Some are just general surveys, while others use Japanese animation and Japanese comics as starting points to explore other related topics. A good example of the “general survey” approach is The Fantastical World of Japanese Anime at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). The course description is straight-forward – “This course introduces students to this unique subculture and introduces an academic approach to viewing the anime art form”. A similar approach is in Manga and Anime, at City College of San Francisco – “An examination and analysis of Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime), and the role they play in Japanese culture as artistic forms of expression, an industry, and as representations of history and contemporary social conditions.”
But, again, these are just some possible approaches. Compare them to Japanese Anime and the Idea of the Posthuman (Dartmouth College), Anime as Human/Animal Hybrids – an Iowa State University honors program seminar (“The goal of this class is to unravel compelling inquiries about what it means to be human, animal, or monstrous within literary settings that blur the lines between these categories”), and Anime – Visual Interplay Between Japan and the World (Carnegie Mellon University – “This course explores Japanese animes appeal to the international viewers today, centering around cultural analyses of anime such as the Studio Ghibli production and Cyberpunk”).
A more comprehensive list is as follows, though this is still probably not complete. Of course, many more classes may include some discussion of anime/manga without them being the major subjects. And, as always, if you know about a class that you think should be included in this list – are taking one, have heard about one – or are teaching one – by all means, let me know, and I will gladly add it!
Anime and Manga on Campus Update: Japanese Animation and Japanese Comics Classes at U.S. Colleges, Spring 2024
Carnegie Mellon University Visual Interplay Between Japan and the World Japanese Studies
Who are the participants in “Japanese popular culture studies”? Not in the abstract sense, but more concretely – if Japanese popular culture studies is an academic area or field or discipline, do those who are involved in it identify themselves as “professors of Japanese popular culture studies”? For that matter, is such a thing as a “department of Japanese popular culture studies” or a “professor of Japanese popular culture studies” even possible or feasible?
In fact, if we actually do take a closer look at what academic departments scholars who write on anime, manga, and other related topics are actually based in, the patterns that emerge are essentially predictable Thus, when we look at the departments that the authors of the articles in the first seven issues of Mechademia: Second Arc are affiliated with, some of the ones we see include Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Education, Film Studies, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Law, and Musicology. Similarly, the department affiliations of the authors of some of the major recent books on anime/manga include Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Film and Media Studies, and Film and Television.
What can a professor who is interested in anime/manga as a research subject do to advertise this? One way is to simply mention a book project they are working on, as Prof. Jinying Li (Modern Culture and Media, Brown University) does.
She recently completed her first book, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming)
And even if a professor is not actively working on a book, they can mention anime/manga among the subjects, topics, and themes that they are actively pursuing!
His research interests include biblical allusions in literature, missiology, Korean popular culture (e.g. K-pop and K-dramas), and Japanese anime/manga”.
But, a professor announcing what their interests is one thing. A university actively looking to hire a professor who specializes in a particular area is something very different. And, in what I believe is the first time for something like this, a major university has specifically announced that it is seeking to fill the position of Assistant Professor in Japanese contemporary literature and culture – “with interdisciplinary research and teaching interests in manga and animé”. The person who is hired for this position will be expected to teach both undergraduate and graduate courses, including at least one with a specific emphasis on anime/manga, as well as contribute to the development of the collection of original and translated manga in Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
Requirements for the position include a PhD in “Japanese literature or a related field” – completed by August 2024 – and a good demonstration of what a position can require instead of a “PhD in anime” is the call for a specialization in an area such as “visual narrative media such as manga and animé” or “history of popular media”. The hiring committee will begin screening applications for the position next week (November 1), but screening will continue without any kind of hard deadline, presumably until the position has been filled.
So, what does something like this mean? First of all, it means that next year, there will be at least one new professor at a major U.S. university who is almost definitely interested in both teaching about and researching Japanese animation and comics. This also shows that we are seeing the beginnings of an active process to bring professors. And with this, “studying anime and manga” – an activity and just what you do takes another step in the direction of “anime and manga studies” – a defined area with its own structures, goals, boundaries, aims, and rules.
