Keidanren, the Japanese business association, is muscling in on the manga business, with an enthusiastic report suggesting that manga should become a cornerstone of Japanese economic policy, and that Japan should aim to quadruple its manga exports within ten years.

Pundit and scholar Roland Kelts has already pointed out that this could be less of a case of the Japanese waking up to manga (to which they are already awake), but of a generation of public officials who have grown up in the 1990s, and hence lack any of their predecessors’ qualms about pop culture – long-term readers all of Slam Dunk and Demon Slayer.

Bolstered by… something, manga sales in the US have gone up 171% in the last year, quite possibly as a result of the ease of access offered by online sales, and an increased acceptance of e-books after a two-year pandemic. A cynic might suggest that the US comics market was less manga’s to win than it was DC’s and Marvel’s to lose, and that manga are flourishing in an environment short on much interesting competition, irrelevant to many Zennials.

I am more sceptical about the nature of this four-fold expansion, which has all the bold, nation-building gumption of one of Chairman Mao’s grand national projects. It’s true enough that there are a few areas of the world that have yet to be saturated with manga and anime, and there might be a little bit of a push there. But it’s also true that, as reported in this column (NEO #215), the translation business is almost at breaking point. Streamers are snatching so many translators, and squeezing so tightly on margins, that there already aren’t enough to go around. And funnily enough, a lot of people don’t like to put in the hours on a four-year degree just to earn McDonald’s money.

So, who’s going to do it? One could suggest that a bunch of this expansion will have to creatively frack away at what’s already been done, such as, for example, using the English language as a “pivot” and translating the English version of the Doraemon manga into Swahili or Polish. Or you could look at the ominous website of Mantra, a Japanese start-up offering machine-translated manga services using artificial intelligence.

And yes, we are back to another of our age’s recurring topics – the rise of AI, which we’ve already seen poking at the jobs of animators (NEO #227) and voice actors (NEO #229). Translators, too…? You’d better hope that readers are safe from digital competition…

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #231, 2023.