The statistics about manga industry are impressive. About one third of all the paper used for printing in Japan is used for comics magazines and books. In 1995, the circulation of manga magazines surpassed 2 billion, and the total earnings for printed manga alone surpassed 600 billion yen - $6 billion (ARTE). But the bulk of the profit is made through TV-series, animation movies (anime) and licensed goods. Some sources put the total earnings of the Japanese character-merchandising industry at $15 billion for 1995 - on par with Korean giant Hyundai's revenues (TESORO, p.35). Combined with the videogames industry, the total earnings of Japanese "pop culture" industry may exceed $30 billion, and much more if hardware for video viewing and computer games is added.Admittedly, the Japanese manga and anime industry is not quite on par with Disney and Hollywood. The Japanese all-time animation hit, Princess Mononoke, which reached 12 million viewers and earned more than 17 billion yen ($131 million) (AMAHA) during the summer of 1997 is dwarfed by the many billions earned by Titanic to date. Japan matches neither the $4 billion in surplus from the trade of movies between the US and the rest of the world nor the total spending for movie-viewing by the American ($18,4 billion in 1992 against only $5 billion for the Japanese) (TURNER). Nevertheless, for the first time, American giant producers of comics, animation and TV-series are confronted worldwide by foreign competitors. Although the taking-over of MCA studios by Matsushita in 1991 ended in a failure four years later, three Japanese multimedia companies now rank among the world's top ten (TURNER).This is doubly significant, since the competition in "soft" industry is not only a matter of big money. To export comics is also to export ideology and values system. Hence the stubborn opposition raised by France against the extension of the rules of the free-trade to cultural goods in the name of "l'exception culturelle", or the total ban on Japanese manga enforced by the Korean government until very recently.The significance of manga began attracting attention during the 80s. Comics and anime gained official recognition in Japan. In 1983, Otomo Katsuhiro - the father of Akira - became the first manga artist (mangaka) ever to be awarded the prestigious Science Fiction Grand Prix (SCHILLING, p.173). In 1985, manga appeared in textbooks for high schools; but since 1975, the all-times hit Berusaiyu no Bara, or Beru-bara for short - an historical romance about the French queen Marie-Antoinette which was serialized in "Margaret" in 1972-1973 -was already selected as supplementary text by teachers all over Japan. In 1990, the National Museum of Arts mounted an exhibition of the work of Tezuka Osamu (1926-1989), the founding father of the postwar manga-art, nicknamed Manga no kamisama (the "God of Manga"). In 1995, Studio Ghibli's Pompoko was awarded a Special Award at the Japan Academy Award, the first time for an animation film (idem, p.144).Even the academic world began to take comics seriously. In recent years, papers about manga appeared in Japan Forum, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Popular Culture and Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. Two workshops were devoted exclusively to it at the Congress of International Association of Asian Studies in Hawai, in 1996.This paper explains how the manga industry broke with the parochial tradition of Japanese culture and rose as the world's No. 2 exporter of cultural goods. It puts emphasis upon the penetration of Japanese comics on the American and Western markets, because an enlightening paper already analyzed how "Doraemon (came) to Asia" (SHIRAISHI). It weights the significance of this phenomenon, by answering the question: did manga succeeded by raising new ideological and aesthetical values, or simply by parroting Disney? Otomo Katsuhiro's Akira is of special significance for answering this question, because - as Mark Schilling writes: "No other Japanese manga even approaches Akira's international success, though many have exceeded it in the domestic market" (p.174). Thus, the third part of this paper is devoted to Akira.
