A publishing industry report published in early April 2026 by journalist and researcher Iida Ichishi in President Online has set off alarms across Japan’s media world. The data, pulled from the Japan School Library Association’s annual school reading surveys, reveals something that would have seemed unthinkable just a generation ago: Japanese teenagers are abandoning manga at a historic rate, and the industry sustaining one of Japan’s most iconic cultural exports is essentially running on borrowed time.
The headline number is brutal. At the peak of manga magazines’ popularity in the 1980s, middle and junior high school students read around 10 magazines per month. By 2025, that number had dropped to just 1. And the share of students who don’t read a single manga magazine has now reached 77.7%.
More than three out of four Japanese teenagers aren’t picking up a manga magazine at all.
Looking specifically at Jump, Japan’s most iconic manga magazine for young readers, the numbers for high school boys fell from nearly 500 regular readers in a 1996 survey to just 54 in 2019. Among young girls, the drop was from roughly 200 to 32. And the broader trend holds even beyond magazines.
In 2023, physical manga readership rates among elementary schoolers (grades 4–6), middle schoolers, and high schoolers were 68%, 60%, and 49% respectively, a nearly 20-point decline across all three groups compared to 1985.
This isn’t a sudden blip. It’s been building for decades, and it’s finally hitting a critical mass.
Short videos are eating the audience that manga raised
The reasons behind this shift are part economic, part cultural, and increasingly, part neurological.
On the economic side, Japan’s digital manga ecosystem simply wasn’t designed with kids in mind. While the industry has successfully pivoted to digital apps, those platforms run on adult spending, expensive in-app purchases and subscription models that leave younger readers with no affordable way in. Elementary schoolers stick to physical manga for kids, but once they age out of those titles, there’s no clear bridge to the digital platforms that now dominate the market.
But the bigger issue goes beyond pricing. A generation raised on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels has developed a completely different relationship with content, passive, instant, and over in seconds. Manga requires the exact opposite: active reading, navigating a page spatially, and sustaining focus across dozens or hundreds of chapters.
Research has documented the effects of short video addiction on adolescents’ development, with studies pointing to measurable shifts in attention patterns and reduced capacity for engaging with longer-form content.
A Kadokawa manga editor framed it plainly in a social media post that went viral in Japan. Manga has its own visual “etiquette”, a specific set of rules around reading direction, panel flow, and following dialogue across a scene. For younger generations who haven’t grown up with those rules, manga is increasingly perceived as difficult and confusing, and it’s losing ground to short videos and anime as the primary entertainment format for kids.
Japan is aware enough of the problem to have started legislating around it. In 2025, the city of Toyoake in Aichi Prefecture enacted the country’s first municipal ordinance with smartphone use guidelines, covering 69,000 residents including minors.
It recommends capping recreational screen time at two hours per day, with bedtime cutoffs for children and teenagers. The mayor cited concerned parents whose kids had become so addicted to their devices they were avoiding school and outdoor activities altogether.
That same year, Tokyo opened Japan’s first outpatient clinic specializing in what’s been dubbed “smartphone dementia”, a condition involving forgetfulness and cognitive fog caused by prolonged exposure to overwhelming amounts of digital content, with the clinic estimating between 10 and 20 million people in Japan could be at risk.
Record revenue, no future readers
Here’s the irony at the center of all this: while teenagers are walking away, the manga industry is making more money than ever.
The manga market hit ¥704.3 billion (around $4.47 billion USD) in 2024, with digital now accounting for 76.1% of the entire market, fueled almost entirely by adult spending. Publishers are chasing the wallets of millennials who grew up on Shonen Jump and are now in their 30s and 40s, willing to pay premium prices for digital access to their favorites. The problem is what happens when that audience ages out.
Iida makes the point directly: manga readership declines with age, with the non-reading rate climbing from 40–50% among teenagers to 70% among people in their 40s. If today’s kids and teenagers aren’t brought into manga readership now, the adult audience currently sustaining the industry will eventually disappear with nothing behind it.
That vulnerability was exposed in 2024, when the conclusion of massive franchises like My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Oshi no Ko revealed just how dependent the industry is on a handful of blockbuster titles to carry overall engagement. When those pillars fall, the industry needs a new generation of readers invested enough to follow what comes next. Right now, that generation is scrolling instead.
Some industry voices stay optimistic. An editor at Square Enix’s Gan Gan Joker label pointed to data showing around 61% of people ages 10–20 have read comics at some point, arguing the appetite is still there, it’s more a question of access and habit than fundamental disinterest. Others in the industry note that the “death of manga” has been a recurring panic in Japan for decades, and that what looks like a crisis may simply be a medium in transition.
That’s a fair argument. But it gets harder to make when the data shows a generation that isn’t just choosing not to read manga, but is increasingly struggling to read it at all, losing the visual literacy that made manga a universal language in Japan for generations. The otaku community has survived piracy, recessions, and the death of physical media. A generation that never develops the patience to follow a panel, though? That’s a different kind of threat.
Do you think manga is facing a real crisis or just reinventing itself? Let us know what you think in the comments!