Q: What is this place?
A: It’s a website for the scanlation group Hi Wa Mata Noboru. The name translates from Japanese as “The Sun Will Rise Again”. It’s named after the DOES song (It’s good. Go listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x-wx5DOL4s ). It’s also the title of chapter 94 of Gintama and it’s also the Japanese title of the Hemingway book “The Sun Also Rises”. Starting in February 2010, we’re dedicated to releasing good quality scanlations of series that aren’t being worked on that we really want to reach an English audience in good quality.

We’re a purely fan-based group, we do not have the licensing rights over the series we work on. But our aim is to spread Japanese works to a larger audience. We volunteer our time and energy to do so and this is entirely unpaid (We occasionally get donations but they’re way lower than the costs of buying the manga and keeping the website up). We hope people are understanding of that because without fan translation groups, many, MANY series would never get any sort of translations, or if they do they’re often many years after they come out in the source language (Tons of series, probably the vast majority, never get any sort of translation, fan-made or official). Because we’re not making money doing this, we do the best job we can with the resources we have as a hobby in our spare time in hopes what we produce brings joy into peoples’ lives.

Q: What projects do you guys do?
A: Right now were working on a number of series either monthly as they come out in Japan if we’re caught up or whenever we’re able to release them. Previously we were doing the Weekly Shounen Jump series Toriko and Gintama weekly, but both series have ended. Basically we’ll work on as many projects as we can handle without feeling like this hobby is taking over our lives. More info on the Projects page.
We hope you’ll support the authors and creators of the works we release by buying them when they’re available in a language you understand them or region where you can purchase them. I’ve tried to put links to where you can purchase the manga in Japanese or officially in English at the top of each series’ Downloads page.

Q: Can I join you guys?
Sure! New staff is always welcome. If you want to volunteer to help us with one of our progress, email me at Kewl0210@gmail.com. Just keep in mind I’m generally really busy and it may take a few days to get back to you (I’ll really try not to forget. Please send me a follow-up if I do.) Please let me know any prior experience you have, what you want to work on, and why you’re interested. We have guides to help people out if they want to start on a project, but most of our staff generally doesn’t have time to be full-on tutors so please make sure you know at least a little about the job you’re applying for beforehand.

Q: Will you pick up *insert some manga here*?
A: Sorry, no. We’re already doing too much at the moment, probably. And I generally have plans for something I’m going to do once one thing or another ends, or when my schedule frees up. Our staff isn’t huge and we usually have fewer people than we’d like working on each project because getting dedicated staff is difficult as is managing staff you already have on top of doing the actual scanlating work. We’re not trying to pick anything else up generally.

Q: Are there any projects you’ve done that aren’t on this site?
A: I (Kewl0210) have worked on a whole bunch of projects with other groups over the years. We’ve got lots of other staff that comes and goes over time, but I’ve been head of the group and translated and managed everything. Usually I’ll work with another group so I can just translate and not worry about the rest of the project, as a lot of the time, getting everything scanned and cleaned and typeset is a huge time sink. A few of the projects we’re doing or have finished were originally me working with another group, and we moved it to this group because it wasn’t getting finished.
I’ve run the anime fansub Anime-Destiny which subbed Konjiki no Gash Bell!!, Toriko, some of Bakuman, and Kingdom.
With various other groups, I’ve worked on scanlations of the manga Bakuman, Hunter x Hunter, REAL, Inumaru Dashi, Steel Ball Run, Konjiki no Gash!!, Billy Bat, Kingdom, Kokou no Hito, Enigma, Wolfsmund, Hito Hitori Futari, Spica, and a handful of One-Shots.
I highly recommend all those series. Check them out if you have time.
I recently added the one-shots and Konjiki no Gash!! manga volumes to our downloads page if you want to check those out.

Q: Does HWMN accept donations?
A: Thank you! Yes, we do. We do all of this for free (In fact we lose money getting raws) and we don’t believe in trying to make a business off of doing scanlations for the reason that the actual manga is not our own work, just the translation, cleaning, and typesetting. But we will accept donations if you want to express your thanks that way. There is a link on the front page, or you can just click here.

Q: Why don’t you release X project in X speed with X quality/raw source?
A: The answer to this is always lack of time required and lack of staff. Generally speaking any volunteer project has the issue of not having enough staff or free time to do everything they’d like to do and so the staff have to make choices based on what’s possible given our resources. It would be great if we could release higher and higher quality versions of the series we work on as better raws (digital raws/magazine raws/volume raws/collector’s edition volume raws) become available in Japanese. But all of these require a huge time investment from all staff involved and they still require project management. Also even if the translation and typesetting are re-used for a new version, you still need to at least redo all the redraws and placing of text as well as new translations and typesetting for any extras.

Project management involves making sure everyone has something to do, has the tools available to them to do it, and making sure they’re working on it. That means reminding people (but trying not to annoy or insult them), making sure people communicate, finding people to fill in when someone can’t work, recruiting enough people to do all the jobs, keeping people motivated, etc. And often that means deciding to give up on people not doing their jobs, not doing them well enough or somehow disrupting the process in a way that demotivates everyone else and thus makes the project fall apart. In order to do a project longer than a few volumes, you need long-term commitment from a lot of people. And since this is a volunteer project, people can only give up their time and energy when they feel motivated enough to work on something and when they feel that the time/energy required isn’t biting in to the rest of their lives. Also realize that these projects are done over the internet with people living in different locations (often vastly different timezones) so as we’re not meeting in person, often getting people to communicate is very difficult.

Most people would rather work on something new and generally they want people to read it. So trying to be someone working on the “slow but higher quality version” often doesn’t work out in the real world for those reasons and others listed above involving motivation and management. Similarly the opposite can also be true, where people can ONLY work on something long-term and do short bursts of a lot of work rather than doing something every week/month as a series comes out. So in those cases the ONLY releases are whatever the highest quality we can get is and projects get released at on irregular schedule whenever they get done.

Remember if you’re doing something as soon as it comes out in Japan, you need to make sure you have a reliable source for the raw scans of the series and also you need to arrange your life so you’re never doing something on that particular day (sometimes you don’t know the exact day or it’s not consistently the same day of the week/month/year), which can be very difficult and often disrupting to the rest of one’s life. And the ENTIRE STAFF needs to do this. It also makes managing it very difficult purely for the reason that in the real world, things don’t go that smoothly. People don’t show up on the day they need to work, people stop showing up all together, people say they’ll do something but don’t do it, and any number of other things that makes a project grind to a halt, fall behind, and end up with everyone feeling demotivated and no longer wanting to work on it. (Personally, a lot of the time I spend an unhealthy amount of time working on these sorts of projects because I have to manage so many and don’t want them to fall apart. Believe me, the stress isn’t good for you.)

For the most part people can’t prioritize working on an unpaid volunteer project over things like family/school/job/social obligations. In fact there are so many reasons projects can go badly and fall apart that generally speaking when any project does go well and gets finished with good quality for an extended period of time, that’s the EXCEPTION to the rule, rather than the rule. We do the best we can but there are a ton of reasons why doing everything we or the fans want is not possible.

Q: How do you feel regarding sniping (A group scanlating a series another group is already doing regularly)?
I really dislike it and I think it’s harmful to the community. On top of being a waste of resources when there are NEAR INFINITE series that aren’t scanlated or have official translations, it causes groups to rush and compete with each other which makes this hobby a lot more stressful and makes people quit. Most people only read whatever comes out first and folks who are scanlating don’t want to have to rush to finish something so people will read it. Please discourage this if you see it. The people working hard dedicating their free time to helping others be able to enjoy something they wouldn’t otherwise will thank you. If a group wants to do another PART of the manga the other group isn’t doing or you want to re-scanlate something they already finished, that’s fine, that’s not sniping. If the current active group is way behind and your group wants to do the next story arc or something, I would discuss it with the currently active group first. Generally speaking you should contact a group that’s already working on a project and volunteer to work with them if possible. There might be a few other exceptions (like if two groups started at about the same time), but just doing a series another group is doing in good quality soon after it comes out in the source language just because you feel like it isn’t one. I wrote about this in more detail some time ago here.