Greatest comic-reading nation

Manga comics make up a staggering 40% of all printed material sold in Japan.  Thirteen weekly magazines by the largest publishers, together with 10 biweeklies and about 20 monthlies, represent the core of this industry. Throughout the 1990's, yearly sales of manga reached an average of 600 billion yen (£3.83 billion, U$5.5 billion), with roughly 60% spent in manga magazines and 40% in manga paperbacks.

People of all ages read manga and many of them are directly targeted to adults, containing violent or sexually explicit stories. At any given time at least 10 of these magazines reach sales of 1 million or more copies per issue. If we consider that Japan's population is of about 120 million inhabitants, the country reaches a per capita expenditure of 2,000 Yen per annum.