I was amused by this exchange from this interview with the CEO of Digital Manga Publishing, publishers of a whole heap of yaoi and, uh, very little else. Except Bambi and her Pink Gun. But anyway:
- Ginger Mayerson: Do you feel there’s a contraction in the manga market in Japan? Is it shrinking?
- Hikaru Sasahara: Yes, in the past couple of years it’s been going down because the kids are spending more money on cell phones, games and stuff. The manga is going down. I think three years ago it used to be a six billion dollar business, but now I think it’s about less than four billion.
- GM: Ew. That’s a third.
- HS: A year, but it’s still big.
- GM: But it’s booming here.
- HS: I can see that Japan is going down, but the U.S. is going up. Based on the fact that I see merging of the culture between U.S. and Japan, I can see that manga is going to be really big.
- GM: It’s big already here.
- HS: Not compared to-
- GM: Marvel and DC?
- HS: No, just manga in Japan. The whole revenue in America is only a little over two hundred million, compared to four billion in Japan. So it could grow that big in the future, I think, so I’m very excited. People are telling me that the market is being saturated here, and I have to tell them that they don’t understand.
Picture Poetry 
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