Crisis in Japan: Young people no longer read manga because it is too expensive

It sounds like a bad joke, but the manga industry is on the verge of losing its most important audience. While publishers boast record-breaking global profits, a recent report by researcher Ichishi Iida has just sounded all the alarms in Japan. It turns out that Japanese children and teenagers are abandoning comic book reading en masse. And the reason is Sadder than you might imagine: print magazines have gone out of style and digital platforms are too expensive for a student's pocket.

The death of paper and the money barrier

If we travel back in time to the glorious eighties, the average Japanese teenager devoured about ten manga magazines a month. It was a weekly religion. Today, the landscape is a graveyard. By 2025, 77.7% of middle school students confessed that they don't touch a single magazine a month. Physical volumes also took a brutal hit, with a drop of nearly twenty percent in readers across all student ages since 1985. The younger otaku community simply stopped going to physical stores, and school libraries can no longer hook them with the smell of ink.

One would think that all that audience migrated to their phones, but there lies the giant trap. Barely 49% of high schoolers read on screens, and the reason is purely economic. Digital manga apps in Japan are meticulously designed to squeeze the credit cards of adults. Monthly subscriptions and microtransactions make it impossible for a child with an allowance to follow a story weekly. Japan failed flatly in creating a cheap and accessible ecosystem for the youth, showing a brutal blindness compared to Korean webtoons that did understand how to reach this generation.

The collapse of the shonen giants

The numbers don't lie and they have already started to take a heavy toll. While children's magazines like Corocoro Comics managed to maintain a decent audience over the years, the true titans of the teenage demographic are bleeding. The Weekly Shonen Jump itself, the cradle of the greatest heroes in history, saw its number of middle school readers plummet to just one-tenth of what it used to be in its golden years. In fact, the Japanese domestic market shrank for the first time in eight years during 2025, exposing the reality that relying exclusively on nostalgic adults is not a sustainable life plan.

If major publishers don't get their act together to launch digital services that don't charge an arm and a leg for a couple of chapters, they run the risk of extinguishing the next generation of readers. The generational handover is broken and companies urgently need to democratize access to manga before screens run empty of Japanese stories.