Survey Estimates Annual Damage from Free-Ride Manga Reading on Pirate Sites at ¥8.5 Trillion

The Yomiuri Shimbun

6:00 JST, October 31, 2025

Damage estimated at ¥8.5 trillion per year is caused by free-ride reading of Japanese manga and novels carried on pirate websites without permission, according to the first survey on the issue by ABJ (Authorized Books of Japan), the results of which were published Wednesday.

The estimated damage is equivalent to 12 times the size of Japan’s domestic manga market. ABJ, a Tokyo-based antipiracy organization made up of publishers and other communications businesses, intends to work through the Japanese government to push other countries and regions to crack down on pirate sites, as well as to boost its efforts to raise awareness among readers overseas.

ABJ consists of 100 member companies and organizations, including Kodansha Ltd., Shogakukan Inc. and LY Corp. The survey was conducted on 913 pirate sites that carry Japanese publications, such as manga and novels, to examine the number of times each was accessed from each country and the average time spent on the sites by users in June this year.

The survey found that there were 2.8 billion visits to those sites from 123 countries and regions, and that the visitors spent a cumulative 700 million hours on them. ABJ assumed that each user would take 30 minutes to read all the way through one tankobon paperback volume of manga, which would cost ¥500 to purchase, and calculated the damage from free-ride reading as ¥704.8 billion, equivalent to the cost of 1.4 billion tankobon volumes. Extended over a full year, this would amount to damages of ¥8.5 trillion. This is 12 times as much as the total volume of manga sales in Japan last year, which reached ¥704.3 billion, according to a study by the Research Institute for Publications.

By country, the greatest damage came from Indonesia at ¥92.3 billion, followed by Japan at ¥83.4 billion and the United States at ¥79.1 billion. The damage from those three countries amounts to one-third of the total.

In Asia and the United States, manga is popular among people across generations, which is seen as a factor that caused greater damage. While Japan is now cracking down on pirate sites, the survey revealed an increasing number of visits from Japan to sites based in countries with insufficient regulations.

“Free-ride reading is spreading all over the world, and it’s getting very serious,” said Atsushi Ito, the head of ABJ’s public relations division and an adviser at Shueisha Inc. “We’d like to expand our efforts to distribute legitimate editions in foreign languages and decrease the damage.”