Beneath Every Global Hit Lies a Vast, Fertile Graveyard of “Trash Manga”

Late one night, I was idly scrolling through YouTube recommendations when an old manga appeared.

Kyoshiro 2030.

Created by Masaya Tokuhiro, it is a science-fiction manga set in 2030 after a nuclear war.

It depicts an authoritarian society, genetic selection, the segregation of men and women, child abuse, sexual violence, and mass murder. At the same time, it regularly throws in the dirty jokes and absurd comedy for which Tokuhiro is known.

On paper, it sounds like relentlessly bleak dystopian science fiction. Then, without warning, a ridiculous sex joke arrives. It often feels like a comedy manga, even though the story itself is extremely dark.

This manga ran in a mainstream commercial magazine—and lasted for twenty volumes.

Then another recommendation appeared: God Sider.

I remember reading that one as a child too. I have forgotten almost all the details of the plot, but I vividly remember an occult battle manga full of gods and demons that was exceptionally erotic and grotesque.

That made me think.

Today, the works known around the world as Japanese manga are enormous hits such as One Piece and Demon Slayer.

But perhaps the real strength of Japanese manga lies in the vast base beneath those successes.

The Rest of the World Sees Only the Survivors

Naturally, the Japanese manga best known overseas are successful titles such as One Piece, Naruto, Dragon Ball, and Demon Slayer.

But an unbelievable number of other manga lie beneath them.

Series that ended after a few volumes. Series that lost their way halfway through. Series canceled because they never became popular. Series that make you wonder, “Why did an editor ever approve this?”

And then there are extremely unconventional works such as Kyoshiro 2030 that somehow continue for twenty volumes.

Japan once had a huge number of manga magazines: magazines for boys, young men, and girls, as well as minor publications most people had never heard of.

All those magazines needed an enormous supply of work.

Inevitably, some manga made it into print that left people asking:

“Who is this even for?”

Yet even those manga had readers.

I suppose I was one of them.

One Piece Did Not Simply Fall from the Sky

Here is an interesting fact.

When he was young, One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda worked as an assistant to Masaya Tokuhiro.

In other words, even the artist behind what would become a global phenomenon did not begin by creating One Piece entirely on his own.

There was a time when he helped produce a senior artist’s manuscripts and learned the craft of manga in that artist’s studio.

That feels symbolic in the context of this story.

The broad base of Japanese manga is not merely a matter of there being countless titles that failed to sell.

The creators themselves are connected.

A young artist works as an assistant in an established artist’s studio. There, the assistant learns the craft and eventually creates an original series. From that process, the next hit emerges.

It is a vast ecosystem that includes not only manga, but also artists, assistants, editors, and readers.

That is why studying One Piece alone will never enable anyone to recreate One Piece.

Beneath it lie decades of experiments and failures.

An aspiring artist submits a manuscript. It is rejected. They draw another. They earn a serialization. If it fails to attract readers, it is canceled. Then another newcomer arrives.

Every so often, that cycle produces a monstrous talent.

Perhaps the true strength of Japanese manga was the system itself: trying on a massive scale, failing on a massive scale, and training the next generation in the process.

Taking the Top of a Pyramid Does Not Recreate the Pyramid

Viewed from overseas, Japanese manga can look like an endless parade of successes.

That is understandable. There is little reason to translate and export a manga that failed to sell even in Japan.

The result is the impression that Japan simply keeps producing masterpiece after masterpiece.

The reality is that Japan produces an enormous amount of manga—and an enormous amount of it fails.

You cannot recreate a pyramid by taking only its peak.

You need the vast pile of stones beneath it.

And carved into many of those stones are phrases such as:

“Complete in three volumes.”

“End of Part One.”

“Look forward to the author’s next work.”

This is not unique to manga.

Mature cultures produce a great deal of bad work.

The same is true of film, music, and games. When people create in large numbers, they fail in large numbers. Yet that abundance also produces new forms of expression and mutation-like hits.

The ability to produce huge quantities of trash manga is itself evidence of the depth of manga culture.

Of course, this system can be brutal for creators.

Someone may spend years drawing, finally earn a serialized run, and then lose it when readers fail to respond. Each individual failure carries a piece of someone’s life.

Even so, Japanese manga as we know it could not have emerged without that immense accumulation of trial and error.

One Piece and Demon Slayer are not the whole of Japanese manga.

The canceled series, the ones we somehow read to the bitter end, and the ones that left us remembering little but the creator’s peculiar madness—they all belong to Japanese manga culture.

And late-night YouTube sometimes digs those works out of the graveyard.

“You remember this, don’t you?” it seems to say.

I wish it would stop.

I had forgotten all about them, but the instant I see a title, thirty-year-old memories come rushing back. Before I know it, I am searching for the manga again.

Masterpieces remain in history. Trash manga remains in your brain.

What makes Japanese manga culture so formidable may be the extraordinary depth of that second category.