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In 1995, former Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa began serializing a column of his opinions, not in a newspaper or newsmagazine, but in the manga magazine Big Comic Spirits. A respected seventy-five year old politician and thinker, Miyazawa probably rarely reads comics, but the reason he chose a manga magazine to air his views is clear. Big Comic Spirits is read by nearly 1.4 million young salarymen and potential voters each week. In today's Japan, manga magazines are one of the most effective ways to reach a mass audience and influence public opinion.Japan is the first nation in the world to accord "comic books"—originally a "humorous" form of entertainment mainly for young people—nearly the same social status as novels and films. Indeed, Japan is awash in manga. According to the Research Institute for Publications, of all the books and magazines sold in Japan in 1995, manga comprised nearly 40 percent of the total. Such industry statistics are indeed impressive, even frightening, but they hardly represent the entire picture or the true number of manga being read in Japan. There were 2.3 billion manga books and magazines produced in 1995, and nearly 1.9 billion actually sold, or over 15 for every man, woman, and child in Japan.
