Anime and manga might be popular in the United States, but its prevalence in Japan is far more reaching since it is where it is all created. So when you read what the top-selling media franchises in Japan, the results are most likely different than what you would expect to see in the West.
While the top-selling manga franchises were more limited to shonen, when including other forms of media like anime Blu-ray and DVDs, film, music CDs, and novels, the final list is far more diverse.
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According to a list posted by Oricon in Japan, the top-selling franchises of 2017 are listed as such:
- One Piece
- your name.
- The IDOlM@STER
- Touken Ranbu
- Attack on Titan
- Tokyo Ghoul
- Love Live!
- Yuri!!! On Ice
- Kingdom
- Detective Conan
Ranking in the top five are Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, Makoto Shinkai’s your name. (which is the fourth-highest grossing film in Japan, and the top-grossing anime film worldwide), Bandai Namco’s The Idolmaster series, Nitroplus’ free-to-play card game Touken Ranbu, and Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan.
As for how the authors themselves feel about the results, the creator of One Piece Eiichiro Oda responded gracefully and humorously to finding out about his ranking in manga sales with “I love being number one. I won’t forget the feeling of gratitude. I’ll make every effort to make One Piece the best manga in terms of both records and people’s memory!! Thank you so much!!”
Some of the more surprising franchises that did not make the top ten include: My Hero Academia, Sword Art Online, Mobile Suit Gundam, Godzilla, Kamen Rider, Star Wars, and Pokemon. Those franchises might have been able to crack Japan’s top 30, but not the top ten. Although most of the franchises listed here came especially close and were in the top 20.
Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has been collected into 87 volumes, with a few chapters yet to be included. It has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best selling manga series worldwide with 430 million copies sold worldwide.
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