Piracy of online manga surges as individuals trapped at home during the pandemic
In Japan, New Year’s season is typically a fairly festive time. There are end-of-the-year parties and start-of-the-year parties, along with late Christmas parties. Many individuals often get around a week off from work straddling New Year’s Day, which they use either to fly back to their hometowns to spend time with relatives or both within Japan and overseas for leisure trips.
This year, however, not a lot of that was going on. People were encouraged to stay home with coronavirus infection numbers rising, and obviously many of them kept themselves amused by reading pirated manga online.
The internet’s 10 largest manga piracy websites were accessed by users in Japan some 200 million times during December 2020, according to a report by the Japanese publishing industry group ABJ (Authorized Books of Japan). That’s almost three times the January 2020 figure, which was about 72 million.
An ABJ representative said that if it had been bought instead, the organization estimated the overall cost of the content illegally viewed by Japanese users in December would have been 41.4 billion yen somewhere in the neighborhood. “The increased amount of time people spend during the pandemic at home is probably a factor,”
While widespread anime and manga piracy in overseas fan communities has long been an open secret, it has not historically been a high-profile problem in Japan, particularly for manga. Although anime prices in Japan tend to be higher than officially licensed overseas DVDs or Blu-rays, manga is a reasonably low-cost hobby in Japan, where weekly anthologies and collected volumes are often priced at or below 500 yen, and used volumes can be purchased for as little as 100 yen in second-hand shops. But as advancements in technology make it easier for pirates to set up sites, and even easier for tempted and curious people to find them, it seems that a growing number are finding the appeal of having something too powerful to resist for nothing, even as it upsets and frustrates the original creators of the art.
Source: Japan Today
