Is Japan really experiencing a manga readership decline? Survey of 3,000 finds only 6.7% of manga readers have dropped the medium over five years
Comici recently published the results of its 2026 Manga Awareness Survey.
Comici, a Japanese company that runs digital manga services, recently published the results of its Manga Awareness Survey for the year 2026 (as reported by Kai-You). Among other data, the survey examines whether the much talked about “manga readership decline” has truly been accelerating as much as it is made out to be.
Polling 3,000 Japanese men and women aged 15 to 69, the survey asked respondents about how often they read manga, which formats they use, how their reading habits have changed over the past five years, and how they discover new manga.
According to the findings, 51.5% (1,544) of respondents were manga readers. The survey counts anyone who had read physical manga volumes, physical manga magazines, manga e-books, or manga on apps or websites within the past year as a “manga reader.” The remaining 48.5% had not read any manga in the past year. However, among them, around two-thirds of respondents said they had not read manga five years ago either, implying that they were not manga readers to begin with, rather than people who’d turned away from the medium.
By contrast, only 6.7% of all respondents said they had reduced their manga consumption compared to five years ago and subsequently stopped reading manga altogether. As Kai-You notes, it is worth mentioning that the 6.7% figure is not based on a comparison with a survey conducted among the same respondents five years ago. It’s simply based on respondents’ recollections of their own manga-reading habits five years prior, so it should not be interpreted as explicitly meaning that “Japan’s manga readership has declined by 6.7% over the past five years.”
When it comes to formats, it’s well-known that digital manga has gradually been dominating print mediums, but the survey showed that physical manga volumes are still a lot more read than physical magazines. A total of 34.4% of respondents had read print comic volumes in the past year, while 34.1% had read manga through apps or websites, suggesting the two formats were almost equally popular. E-books came in at 28.8%, while print manga magazines were at 17.6%.
Among the 1,544 manga readers, 48.1% said they read manga in both physical and digital formats. Meanwhile, 30.0% used digital formats exclusively, while 22.0% read only print manga.
Amber V
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