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The American Manga Awards announced its 35 nominees across seven categories, ahead of the 2025 ceremony scheduled to take place on Aug 21 at the Japan Society in Manhattan.

This year’s ceremony is being held in conjunction with Anime NYC, which is expected to attract over 100,000 fans to the Jacob K. Javits Center from Aug 21-24, 2025.

Titles such as JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run, Ashita no Joe, and The Apothecary Diaries are among this year’s nominees, which span seven categories: Best New Manga, Best Continuing Series, Best One-Shot Manga, Best New Edition of Classic Manga, Best Translation, Best Lettering, and Best Publication Design.

The award aims to recognize and honor manga creators, stories, and the publishing professionals who bring them to readers in the US & Canada.

Here is the full list of the nominees:

Best New Manga

Hikaru in the Light! Volume 1 by Mai Matsuda (Scholastic Graphix / Azuki) Dragon...

The nominees are officially in for the second annual American Manga Awards! The 2025 edition will reveal its winners during Anime NYC—which will be held August 21-24 at the Javits Center in New York City—and you can see everyone who is up for the honors as voting registration opens. Before we get to the nominees, this year’s recipient of the Manga Publishing Hall of Fame Award is Studio Proteus. The manga translation and publishing team helped pave the way for manga’s notoriety in North America, including releases like Blade of the Immortal , Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , Ghost in the Shell and more. Here are the 2025 American Manga Awards nominees: Best New Manga Hikaru in the Light! Volume 1 by Mai Matsuda Scholastic Graphix / Azuki Dragon and Chameleon Volume 1 by Ryo Ishiyama Square /Enix Manga & Books The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy...

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fans have something special to look forward to starting in September. The popular manga series is known for producing gorgeous artwork by Hirohiko Araki that looks like it belongs in an art museum, and now, it's about to achieve just that in one particular museum in Northern California.

JoJo's increasingly mainstream popularity will see the franchise be on display at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco this year. In an official press release, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announced a new "Art of Manga" exhibit that will run from Sept. 27, 2025, to Jan. 25, 2026. The press release goes on to reveal that the exhibit will feature official artwork from several popular manga artists, including Eiichiro Oda (One Piece), Rumiko Takahashi (Inuyasha) and of course, Hirohiko Araki. Moreover, the exhibit is making history by being the first in America to explore the various manga art...

America is getting its first major exhibition to "explore manga as an art form" later this year. Art of Manga is set to bring original drawings and more from a number of renowned artists to the de Young museum in San Francisco, CA. The event will be held from September 27, 2025 to January 25, 2026. Some of the featured artists include: Fujio Akatatsuka ( Osomatsu-kun ) Hirohiko Araki ( JoJo's Bizarre Adventure ) Tetsuya Chiba ( Ashita no Joe ) Eiichiro Oda ( One Piece ) Gengoroh Tagame ( My Brother's Husband ) Rumiko Takahashi ( Urusei Yatsura ) Keiichi Tanaami ( artist/designer ) Jiro Taniguchi ( The Summit of the Gods ) Kazumi Yamashita ( The Life of Genius Professor Yanagizawa ) Mari Yamazaki ( Thermae Romae ) Fumi Yoshinaga ( Ooku: The Inner Chambers ) Original art by Fujio Akatatsuka Original art by Eiichiro Oda Related: Cyborg 009 Celebrates 60th Anniversary with Upcoming Exhibition According to The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the exhibit will feature over 700 drawings by influential manga authors,...

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announced on Jan 27, 2025, its plans to launch Art of Manga, the largest comprehensive exhibition of manga art ever held in the Americas, at the de Young Museum.

The showcase, running Sep 27, 2025, to Jan 25, 2026 will display over 700 original drawings by iconic Japanese artists, including One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure author Hirohiko Araki, and Inuyasha artist Rumiko Takahashi.

Organized in collaboration with major publishers Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha, and others, the exhibition aims to position manga as a globally influential art form.

It marks the first U.S. museum effort to curate manga beyond pop culture conventions, spanning decades of artistic innovation.

“Captivating millions around the world with dynamic graphic narratives, manga is one of the most significant visual mediums of our time,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “San Francisco has long been...

Fumi Yoshinaga painstakingly worked on the publishing of his first-order manga “Ooku”, serialized in 19 volumes by Melody Manga of Hakusensha from 2004 till 2020. The author won numerous prizes, including the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize (2009) and the Shogakukan Manga Award (2011); furthermore, his manga inspired six live adaptations, comprising two movies and four series. Rika Nakase adapted this mysterious and intriguing story to the screen, and Studio Deen, under Takayuki Saito‘s supervision, produced the series’ animation.

Where to watch

During the last year of Ietsugu Tokugawa’s Shogunate (1716), Iunoshin Mizuno, the son of a poor Hatamoto, resolves to serve into the Ooku of Edo Castle. Thus, he will be able to remit part of his salary to his family, but more importantly, he will not be compelled to see Nobu, the heiress of a rich seller of medicinal herbs, every day, knowing that they have no hope of starting a relationship. Not...

The Japanese entertainment industry has seen its biggest success with Shogun featuring Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai, and Cosmo Jarvis. The series has been getting love from all over the world, and it has opened a new path for Japanese entertainment, which earlier was confined to the limits of anime TV series and movies.

Hiroyuki Sanada as Yoshi Toranaga in Shogun | Credit: FX

Shogun has won multiple awards and is on its way to becoming one of the greatest TV shows ever. It is based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell, and it follows a deep political game from Japan’s Edo period. The show has ignited anticipation in the minds of fans who are now eagerly waiting for the second season of the series.

While fans wait for the second season of Shogun, they can delve into Ooku: The Inner Chambers, which follows a similar theme as Shogun. The anime...

The official website of Manga Taisho awards revealed a list of 10 manga titles that have been nominated for the 17th edition of the awards on Jan 23, 2024.

These 10 titles were decided after the first round of voting, in which 102 members of the executive committee had picked 257 titles that they would recommend to others.

Only those manga titles which released in 2023 and have eight volumes or less were eligible to be considered for the awards.

The winner from the nominated titles will be chosen after the second round of voting. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in April this year.

The nominees for Manga Taisho 2024 includes:

Kanda Gokura-cho Shokunin-Banashi by Akihito Sakaue

Kimi To Uchu O Aruku Tame Ni by Inuhiko Doronoda

You and I are Polar Opposites by Kocha Agasawa

Tamaki to Amane by Fumi Yoshinaga

Diamond no Kozai by Ohashi Hirai

Tenmaku no Jadugal: A Witch’s Life...

One of the biggest anime and pop culture newspapers in Japan has crowned the most popular manga of the last 15 years, ranking the top five titles while 'shortlisting' 10 others.

Comic Natalie -- a massive Japanese media company on par with the likes of The Mainichi Shimbun and The Asahi Shimbun -- celebrated its 15th anniversary by holding a vote for the most popular manga of the last 15 years. As the prominent site reveals, Comic Natalie has published 120,000 news articles, boasting millions of followers across its social media accounts with tens of millions of monthly page views. The rules for the rankings state that while the manga could have started at any time, it must have ended between July 1, 2008, and the competition deadline of June 30, 2023. Multiple votes for the same work by the same user were not allowed, and manga one-shots were likewise not valid. The full list can be viewed below.

Netflix has announced new series “Ooku: The Inner Chambers,” the first anime adaptation of a hit Japanese manga by Yoshinaga Fumi.

At the ongoing Anime Japan convention in Tokyo, the streamer also unveiled “Yakitori: Soldiers of Misfortune,” another anime series, adapted from a military sci-fi novel by Carlo Zen and set to upload in May.

Directed by Abe Noriyuki and produced by Studio Deen, “Ooku” is inspired by tales emerging from the Ooku women’s quarters within Edo Castle and imagines that gender roles are reversed. After a plague threatens the male population women take up positions of authority. The new (female) Shogun Yoshimune enquires into why the women adopt male names when taking power and starts to unravel other mysteries within the inner sanctum. The original manga was published by Hakusensha / Melody.

The adaptation, which also involves Takasugi Rika for screenplay and composition and Sato Yoko for character design,...

Kaoru Mori’s A Bride’s Story… Stripp’d

If you wander around a second hand book shop and start leafing through old history textbooks you will rapidly notice that history used to be nothing but stories about men with beards and top hats. Looking back on this state of affairs, we can now see that one of the reasons for this is that people naturally tend to gravitate towards stories that interest them on a personal level. Because of this, bearded men wound up writing books about other bearded men to the point where history became nothing but a collection of stories about bearded men (with or without top hats). This pattern did not change until the demographics of university education began to change and an influx of non-white, non-male students created a generation of non-white, non-male historians who reached professional maturity in the 1960s.

Given that human nature...

Okay, so here’s the thing…

I started in on the sixth volume of Ooku: The Inner Chambers without bothering to re-read either the previous volumes in the series or my thoughts on those five books. As a result, I spent most of my reading time trying to remember who the various characters were and what their struggles were supposed to signify. I know that this makes me sound like a bit of a scatterbrain but Volume 6 does not feature any self-contained story lines, instead it concludes storylines from the previous volumes and lays the foundation for a storyline that will (hopefully) feature in Volume 7 if and when Viz Media get round to translating it. Given that characters in Ooku frequently change names and physical appearances with the passage of time and the somewhat interstitial nature of this volume’s narrative, I think that my disorientation is at least understandable,...

One of the benefits of flying overseas on an international airline, at least for a movie geek, is that the in-flight movies are recent movies from all over the world. This past holiday season, I visited family and was spoiled by Singapore Airline's in-flight entertainment system* with a bevy of new Asian films that I know won't be released in the United States for a while. Better yet, I had 22 hours each way to watch them. So I watched plenty. When you're already there and you write about film, why not write about it?

This is my own In-Flight Asian Film Festival, listed in the order of my preference. All movies are 2010 releases in their native countries, unless otherwise noted.

Read through by clicking next, or click on a movie title to read that review directly.

Do Not Miss:

Thirteen Assassins

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen...

Back in December, it was announced that a new film adaptation of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku manga was in the works and that it would star Kou Shibasaki and Arashi’s Kazunari Ninomiya in the two lead roles. Then in February, a new batch of co-stars was announced including Maki Horikita, Hiroshi Tamaki, Sadao Abe, and Tadayoshi Okura (of Kanjani8).

Today it was revealed that the cast will also include Kuranosuke Sasaki, Emi Wakui, Mitsuko Baisho, Muga Takewaki, and Aoi Nakamura, among others.

The film is set in an alternate an alternate version of Japan in which a disease has drastically decreased the male population, turning the nation into a matriarchal society in which young men are treated as a precious commodity never to be risked in sports or war. Within the story, gender roles and names are typically reversed. Ninomiya stars as a commoner named Mizuno who enters the...