Weekly Shonen Jump is still the biggest magazine in Japan, but its print circulation is getting smaller and smaller.

For decades, the jewel in the crown of the manga magazine world has been Weekly Shonen Jump. However, these days the jewel isn’t shining nearly as brightly as it used to, with the latest statistics showing that publisher Shueisha’s anthology has crossed over a significant threshold.

The Japan Magazine Publishers Association has released circulation data for the first quarter of the Japanese business year (April to June). During that time, Weekly Shonen Jump’s average print circulation fell to 985,000 copies per week. Not only was that a 1.9-percent drop compared to the preceding three-month period, it’s the first time since 2008 for Weekly Shonen Jump’s circulation to slip below one million, and possibly even longer since that’s as far back as regularly publicized circulation for the magazine goes.

The magazine’s weekly circulation peaked in late 1994 at a towering 6.53 million copies, which is an all-time high not only for Weekly Shonen Jump itself but for any manga anthology in the industry. At the time, it was the home of both Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk, iconic hit series with extremely broad fan bases whose creators were pumping out new chapters every week. By 2017 circulation dipped under two million, though, and just under a decade later, it’s roughly half of that.

Weekly Shonen Jump’s is still, however, the biggest manga magazine in Japan, and by a large margin. Its closest rival is publisher Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine, which has an average circulation of 281,000 copies for the most recent period. Next comes Shueisha’s own Weekly Young Jump (aimed at older readers in the seinen demographic) at 214,000 and just behind it is Shogakukan’s Monthly CoroCoro Comic, with 213,333. Circulation for Shogakukan’s biggest weekly manga anthology, Weekly Shonen Sunday, is 120,000. Meanwhile, in the shojo manga demographic aimed at young girls, no magazine has a six-figure circulation, with Shueisha’s monthly Ribon’s 90,000 copies being the highest. Average circulation dropped for almost all of these publications in the most recent period, with the exceptions of Weekly Shonen Sunday, whose numbers were unchanged, and Monthly CoroCoro Comic, with an increase of 1.6 percent.

▼ Ribon

Weekly Shonen Jump also remains the highest-circulation print magazine, of any type, in Japan, but that status also means that Japan no longer has any magazines with a circulation of a million copies.

Weekly Shonen Jump’s dwindling circulation doesn’t mean that Shueisha, or the manga creators whose series the company serializes, are on the ropes, however. A big part of why demand for the print version of the anthology is dropping is because Japanese manga publishers and consumers alike have enthusiastically embraced digital distribution platforms. Circulation falling below one million isn’t so much a sign that people have lost interest in manga as it is that people are very interested in reading manga on their phones or other devices, and the convenience of being able to read manga digitally is undeniably a benefit to people living in neighborhoods where they don’t have easy access to a brick-and-mortar retailer or people who are too busy to make manga shopping runs on a weekly basis.

On the other hand, a strong digital shift has a negative effect on retailers who sell print manga, and while convenience stores and train station kiosks can rely on revenue from other products, the paper manga fading away is going to hit bookstores hard.

Some have also voiced concerns about whether digital publishing can make it harder for readers to discover new series. With a printed magazine, there’s a mindset that since you’ve paid for the issue, you may as well take a look at every series inside, even ones you haven’t heard of or read before, and doing so is as quick and easy as flipping a page. The vaster variety of titles within a digital manga app presents a greater threat of choice paralysis, where a reader is overwhelmed with options and so falls back on a familiar favorite rather than giving something new a shot, so manga’s increasingly digital future might require a bit more conscious effort on readers’ part to dive into a chapter of something they’ve never read before.

Source: Japan Magazine Publishers Association (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), TBS News Dig via Livedoor News, Yomiuri Shimbun
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