You can't fully appreciate the nature and scope of Japanese cultural output by looking at only anime/manga, and equally significantly you can't appreciate the cultural output of anime/manga just by looking at a few subsections of it. I've basically talked about this before in a different thread, but frankly most people just don't appreciate
how much stuff there is, and how heterogeneous it is.
Let's illustrate this by taking a look at the wikipedia article for "
List of manga magazines". Now obviously the first thing to note is that there's a heck of a lot of them, even if you sort by "year of last issue" and only count the ones that are blank and thus (probably) still in circulation, there's a heck of a lot. But even more interestingly, if you sort by
publisher, I counted 49 (probably off by a few because I did a manual count)
distinct publishers. At least a few of those are out of business, but there are
easily 30 distinct publishers of manga magazines
still active today.
In my opinion, this is an unimaginable ecosystem for the publication of comics for those of us in the west. Becoming a successful mangaka is not easy, but it's nonetheless a job with
enough demand that a really rather astounding number of people actually get to do it, and huge numbers of people who attempt it spin off into a multitude of related fields (character design, anime, illustration work, graphic design, video game art...!) and equally a huge number of people get involved in amateur projects - doujinshi being what we are most familiar with, but here too there are numerous variations, and some artists even go pro or semi-pro off the kind of conventions and art markets that were originally spawned around doujinshi.
This is an enormous cultural enterprise, and fascinatingly, it is highly driven by individual interests. Obviously pro mangaka are enmeshed in the editorial culture of the magazine they work with, and many mangaka work almost exclusively on adaptations or spin-offs of other works as part of multi-media franchises (and often seem totally happy and often highly enthusiastic about these serializations, typically as fans of the original work - the Spice and Wolf manga and the Railgun manga spinoff come to mind), but a huge number of manga serializations are, essentially, crowdsourced until they start serialization.
What can we even say about such a vast, complex field? How can we speak about "manga" when we can barely keep track of the fraction of series we like, and probably
couldn't even say what the titles are of the three most popular manga in the biggest shoujo magazine?
(for the record, according to wikipedia this is (likely)
Ciao magazine with around 500k issues in circulation circa 2016, where wikipedia notes
5 currently running series out of
18, and I'm not even going to try to figure out which of these three are the most popular - probably Youkai Watch is one of them but anyway)
As a different example, one of my favourite manga, Asahinagu, started serialization in 2011, has reached 32 volumes and had a live-action movie adaptation. The most recent scanlation effort (and there
is no official English version) has barely gotten halfway through volume 2. I know only one other person other than me who reads it, and unless you stalk my posts, I bet most people don't even know it exists. And why would you?
In a sense, the vague talk by me and guderian2nd in the first two posts of this thread about ~current manga culture~ was vague not because it is difficult to identify the current signs of "the history of manga", but because today, "the history of manga" is nearly equivalent to "the history of japan". At the vast scale of this enterprise, conceptualizing manga as somehow more approachable, more accessible, more easy to analyse than, say, the field of literature strikes me as fundamentally mistaken. Because at the end of the day, anybody can draw manga. Some boy drew an entire manga (oneshot, I believe)
on his smartphone.
In the face of that, I think our analysis of Japan, and Japanese culture, and the culture of manga requires some humility, and also either some specificity or a much wider understanding of current manga than I think anybody on this forum - even me, who reads both widely
and in Japanese - is really capable of.
EDIT: turns out there are actually more than 18 series serialized in
Ciao magazine because not all of them run in every issue lol. Also the Youkai Watch manga in
Ciao isn't the primary serialization but a spin-off, so I'm totally in the dark about relative popularity
