I started this for a fairly simple reason: I wanted to share all the data I was finding and saving on manga sales, and my Excel spreadsheets just weren’t big enough. It was scattered across Oricon’s weekly charts, forum threads, screenshots, half-translated Japanese blogs and spreadsheets. The information existed, but it was scattered all over the place. So I started compiling it into a database for my own use. MangaCodex is what happened when that database got too big to keep on my laptop.
I'm not a market analyst. I'm a curious person with a database and too much free time. I say that up front because I think it matters: you won't find consultancy "insights," or a quarterly-report tone. You'll find numbers, organized as well as I've managed, and occasionally my take on what they mean.
Where the data comes from
Almost everything you see here comes from a handful of sources:
- Oricon, the weekly manga sales rankings in Japan. It's the de facto standard and the most complete source there is for physical volumes.
- Shoseki, a blog compiling daily and weekly bookstore rankings.
- SomeAnithing, the source for much of the anime disc (DVD/BD) sales data.
- Animetics for weekly light novel sales between 2009 and 2016.
- And a pile of Japanese blogs and scattered circulation figures.
None of these sources talk to each other. Part of the work behind MangaCodex is getting a 2011 Oricon figure and a 2019 blog post to agree that they're about the same work.
The problem: these sources are fragile
This is the real reason MangaCodex is an archive and not just a rankings site. These sources disappear. SomeAnithing stopped updating in 2023. Blogs I've relied on for years go down, change domains, or simply get deleted. When one of these sources goes dark, there's no warning: one day the link works, the next it returns a 404, and a slice of history that almost nobody had copied goes with it.
Manga and anime sales data gets treated as disposable — useful this week, forgotten the next. But taken together, across the years, it tells a story: what grew, what collapsed, how the market shifted, which works actually sold versus the ones that were merely loud. That story is worth keeping, and right now it lives in places that could vanish at any moment.
What you'll find in the Journal
This Journal is the part of MangaCodex where the numbers become readable. The plan is to publish something new every few days, mixing formats: looks back at a specific Oricon week, franchise profiles with all their media cross-referenced, longer analyses when the data supports them, and the occasional opinion piece when I feel like taking a side.
If you love data as much as I do, I hope you enjoy this site <3