Globalizing Manga - From Japan to Hong Kong and Beyond

Aug 20, 2026

The chapter examines how manga travels as a cultural product from Japan to Hong Kong and beyond, comparing cross-national visibility with shifts in influence. It traces manga’s rise within mass culture, the expansion mechanisms of Japanese media through regional networks, and the unequal global reach relative to Japan’s economic power. It also frames manga’s transnational circulation through globalization theories, explaining how cultural flows can occur via people relocating or via products spreading without native carriers, reshaping meanings across production and consumption contexts.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages24

Reading Time1 h 0 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Visual and narrative art as sequential art

Early regional influence and export histories

Manga’s global circulation

Market size and diversification

Exportation and copyright expansion

Influence beyond Japan

Theoretical issues of globalization

Historical roots and definitions

Routes of cultural globalization

Wong, Wendy Siuyi. (2006) . Globalizing Manga: From Japan to Hong Kong and beyond. Mechademia: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, Vol. 1: 23-45. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. W E N D Y S I U Y I W O N G Globalizing Manga: From Japan to Hong Kong and Beyond Many modern societies produce a form of visual and narrative art that contains a series of printed pictures, usually though not always with text.¹ In English, readers may call it sequential art, comics, comic books, cartoons, cartoon strips, or graphic novels. The French term is bande dessinée (BD), literally, “strip drawing.” In Chinese, commonly used terms are manhua, lianhuantu, and car-ton. The written Chinese characters for manhua are the basis for both the Japanese and the Korean terms for comics, which are, respectively, manga and manhwa. No matter what it is called, this visual art form in various countries and languages has similarities and diﬀerences. Scott McCloud points out that this art form is a communication medium able to convey information and to produce aesthetic pleasure for readers.² As a part of the globalization of media, American comics and animation have a long history of exporting such works. Studies ﬁnd that American comics played an important role in introducing modern comics to Asia, as in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s.³ In Japan, the great comics artist Tezuka Osamu openly acknowledged the inﬂuence of early Walt Disney and Max Fleisher animation in his work.⁴ Japan’s comics 23 and animation industry was the most developed among countries in Asia in the early 1960s. John Lent’s study of the American animation industry and its oﬀshore factory development in East and Southeast Asia conﬁrmed that Japan was the pioneer in the ﬁeld in the region at that time.⁵ Indeed, when comics started to take oﬀ in Japan in the early 1960s, the inﬂuences of manga began to spread to its neighbors, and American inﬂuence started to wane in the region. Manga is “one of the features of mass culture in present-day Japan. In 1994, 2.27 billion manga books and magazines were published, making up 35 percent of all material published.”⁶ The manga market in Japan is big, and genres are highly diversiﬁed. However, when examining the exportation of Japanese cultural products, including comics, the cultural economist Dal Yong Jin points out that these products “have hardly penetrated worldwide to the same degree as its [Japan’s] economic power and the domestic culture market.”⁷ It was not until approximately ﬁfteen years ago, partly because of Japan’s economic recession, that the Japanese manga industry began to grant copyrights to overseas publishers in Asia and to explore the transnational development of its cultural products. The inﬂuence of manga in Southeast Asian societies is obvious. Outside Japan and Asia, the visibility of manga is clearly emerging into the mainstream media.⁸ Comics scholars and cultural studies scholars are optimistic that Japan can be “consider[ed] as another centre of globalization” because of the current global development of manga and anime.⁹ This chapter aims to investigate the ﬂow of manga as a cultural product in the global market, from its country of origin, Japan, to the neighboring region and then to therest of the world. Because of the inﬂuence of American and Western comics in manga, one may ﬁnd that Japanese manga are undoubtedly deeply imbricated in U.S. cultural imaginaries, but they dynamically rework the meanings of being modern in Asian contexts atthe site of production and consumption. In this sense, they are neither“Asian” in any essentialist meaning nor second-rate copies of “American originals.” They are inescapably “global” and “Asian” at the same time, lucidly representing the intertwined composition of global homogenization and heterogenization, and thus they well articulate the juxtaposed sameness and diﬀerence.¹⁰ I am interested in exploring these globalization ﬂows by focusing on man

FAQs

How does the chapter define sequential or visual narrative art across languages?

It describes printed picture-based narrative art as sequential art or comics in English, and explains how comparable terms exist in French and Chinese, including manhua and related Korean/Japanese forms.

What historical factors contributed to manga’s spread beyond Japan?

It links early export and regional reception to American influence waning in Japan’s early 1960s boom, alongside evidence that Japan was a regional pioneer in comics and animation development.

What two routes does the chapter discuss for cultural globalization?

It presents cultural globalization through relocating individuals (sojourner route) who carry culture into new places, and through the spread of cultural products abroad without native carriers (nonsojourner route).

Aug 20, 2026

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