Manga studies (マンガ研究, manga kenkyū) is an interdisciplinary academic field that emerged in Japan in the late 1980s and 1990s and gained an English-language institutional presence in the 2000s. It draws on art history, comics studies, media theory, and sociology, and now has its own journals, conferences, and university programmes both in Japan and internationally.
Origins in Japan
The field's institutional origins in Japan are usually traced to Eiji Otsuka's writing in the 1980s, Fusanosuke Natsume's manga criticism in the 1990s, and the founding of the Japan Society for Studies in Cartoons and Comics (JSSCC) in 2001. Kyoto Seika University opened a Faculty of Manga in 2006, the first such faculty in a Japanese university. The Kyoto International Manga Museum, opened the same year in collaboration with Kyoto City, holds approximately 300,000 manga volumes and is the world's largest manga research collection.
English-language manga studies
Frederik L. Schodt's Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983) was the first substantial English-language treatment of manga as a subject. Subsequent academic work — including Susan Napier's Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke (2001), Patrick W. Galbraith's writing on otaku culture, Marc Steinberg's Anime's Media Mix (2012), and Thomas Lamarre's The Anime Machine (2009) — established manga and anime studies as recognised areas of academic inquiry.
Current institutional presence
Manga studies now appears in university curricula across multiple disciplines: art history, comparative literature, media studies, Asian studies, and gender studies. Dedicated programmes exist at Kyoto Seika University, Yokohama National University, and the University of Tokyo in Japan, and at institutions including the University of Michigan, McGill University, and the University of East Anglia internationally. The International Journal of Comic Art, the journal Mechademia, and the European Journal of Asian Studies regularly publish manga-studies work.