Eromanga in the Twenty-First Century

In the eight years since the original publication of this book, eromanga has continued to be drawn, published and read. For this expanded edition, I considered adding to each of the original chapters, but the situation had changed too drastically between 2006 and 2014. Things had changed on social, systematic, economic and industrial levels. I came to the decision to keep additions and corrections to the original chapters to the bare minimum, while presenting this new chapter as an update on those drastic changes. In the original publication, to preserve the balance between the history and content of eromanga, I did not devote significant space to the regulation of expression, but this cannot be overlooked in the new environment. In discussing things after 2006, I will also need to fill in some information about what happened before. The issues are complex and dynamic, involving much political and emotional speculation, and to top it all off I was personally involved in some of the events relayed here. Presenting a full picture of the situation in the new millennium could fill another book, but I will try to be concise.

Deterioration of the Market and Restructuring of the Industry

There was a time when people said that, because erotic entertainment is a market rooted in basic human desire, a cheap and easy pleasure, “Eroticism can weather bad economic conditions.” This has by now been revealed to be a myth. Since the peak of the eromanga bubble in the 1990s, the market has been in a long-term decline that continues to this day. The decline is not unrelated to the general slump in the publishing world as a whole, and one could probably see it as a small episode in the broader economic malaise that plagued the Heisei Period (1989-2019), punctuated by the Lehman Shock. The slump in the eromanga industry cannot, however, be explained based on these factors alone. The special position occupied by eromanga has made the impact of the economic recession more severe.

Let us begin with a look at the current state of the eromanga industry. These are not exact figures, but, in terms of trade paperbacks, about 50 distinct titles are published every month. This amounts to about 600 a year, or roughly half of the number published annually during the eromanga bubble in the 1990s.