We want our lives to burn out while they are still pure white
Roaring at the days that just seem to pass by
We want to run across the pitch-dark road
Ah, we want to be madly engrossed and put our feelings across
So that we can live in the present called the status quo
And that is why
Even if we disappear
Surely, nothing will change
The bustling streets, people coming and going
The changing seasons, these things will keep repeating
Image Source
Hey, just a quick PSA. You can just scroll down past this to read the chapter, but please come back to read this once you finish. Or you can just read it first, whatever.
As a lot of you know, they aired an OVA of Gintama at the Jump Festa Anime Tour a couple weeks ago. It’s of the Lake Touya Hermit story in chapter 312 plus some anime-only stuff. Anyhow, everyone who went to that was given a pamphlet that had some quotes from the voice actors and also one from Sorachi-sensei:
https://twitter.com/habisan/status/535046458748047361
That says:
“People forced me to write a final episode for the anime (the movie), so now I dunno how the hell they could be talking about something like reviving it, but if the manga volume sales revive now, too, I think we can forget all about that. I’m looking forward to it.”
There’s a lot of people online who post things like “When is the anime hiatus gonna end?” or “I’m waiting for the anime to come back so I’m not reading the manga” or “I can’t wait to see this Takasugi fight in the anime” that I’ve seen in the past few months, which all seems really weird to me given the “Final Chapter” in the title of the movie and the fact that the TV anime ended almost 2 years ago.
So, basically what I’m saying is if you want to support the return of an anime, what you’d have to do is buy the manga in Japanese, where they show up on the Oricon and the Japanese publishers take notice of it.
So in case anyone wants to do that, I figured I’d post it here. Amazon.co.jp has international shipping and it has English versions of its pages.
There are also English sites like Yes Asia:
http://www.yesasia.com/us/en/home.html
And Kinokuniya:
http://www.kinokuniya.com
I usually use honto.co.jp, which ship internationally and pretty fast/cheaply, but the site is all in Japanese:
http://honto.jp/netstore.html
This site has some good guides and recommendations for buying stuff in Japanese and how to get them shipped to you internationally (Including a guide to using honto.com if you want to do that, which he says is the cheapest/fastest):
The title in Japanese is 銀魂 so you can do a search for that or some sites might have it in romaji.
Every week a company called Oricon publishes the top 50 best selling manga books of the past week:
https://mangahelpers.com/forum/showthread.php/50703-Weekly-Oricon-Comic-Rankings/page128
Usually Gintama only ranks for a few weeks when a new volume comes out. Though occasionally when a series gets really popular several volumes are on the top 50 at once, like Nanatsu no Taizai is now.
And Oricon also posts the best selling manga books by year and the best selling by series each year at the beginning of the new year.
To give you some perspective, this is how Gintama’s sales of total books as a series have gone in the past few years:
2009: 4,733,511
2010: 3,978,439
2011: 4,415,491
2012: 2,850,072
2013: 2,864,734
First half of 2014: 1,424,484
Sources:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-12-04/2009-top-selling-manga-in-japan-by-series
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-11-30/top-selling-manga-in-japan-by-series/2010
http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=370525
http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=526586
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-12-01/top-selling-manga-in-japan-by-series/2013
http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1193297
So, if you want to support a new anime being made, the way you’d do it is buy purchasing the manga in Japanese where the publishers notice it and help bring those numbers up a bit more to where they were when anime seasons were starting. Even a little would help. If people pass this information around Twitter and tumblr and Usenet or whatever kids are using these days, it might make more of an impact. It would certainly make an impact if a lot of people who weren’t buying the manga at all suddenly started buying it. If your problem is it’s in Japanese, well there are plenty of translations available on here and Batoto and all that sorta thing. The artwork generally looks better on a physical volume page than it does when we were scanlating from scans of Shounen Jump magazine. And they have digital versions available, too, that you can view on PCs and that sorta thing (I dunno if the versions for mobile devices work on foreign devices, but I’ve personally downloaded digital versions you can read on PC). Personally I don’t mind if the anime comes back or not because I really like the manga, but I just felt as I translator I should point some of these things out. And I’ve bought the whole series plus doubles of a few to replace ones I debound and scanned. So maybe, if you can afford it, give a little back to the gorilla who’s given you sooo sooo much. So much material to write lewd fan fiction about.
Gintama 520
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