Thoughts on Manga Awards

There are many manga awards both in Japan and outside it, one could say they have different functions. Be it an award to a particular series for its quality or innovation or for some other achievement maybe its cultural impact and so on. There are, however, distinguishing factors between awards, for example lets take the Manga Taisho and The Japan Media Arts Festival awards. The former is an award aimed exclusively at manga organised by bookstores, hence the selection process and judging is done by book store employees. In the latter, we have an awards festival organised by a governmental body of the Japanese state which encompasses many other mediums such as anime, films and the likes. Each criteria has judging panel made of critics and they are the ones that select the winners in their respective categories. Hence, we have different type of awards and I want in this post to think about these different arrangements for awards and give my thoughts on the shortcomings of them. 

Manga Taisho

Image from Manga Taisho Official website

Latest Award results - 

2020 Winner - Blue Period.

First of the Manga Taisho has as I have previously said has a close connection with bookstores employees. I say bookstore employees but I am referring specifically to the people in charge of the manga section in bookstores. The problem for me here lies in the fact that bookstores employees have an underlying economic interest that might influence their decision. Of course, this comes from the fact that they are in essence manga marketers and hence they value accessibility and the marketing potential of series more so than perhaps an unique story, artstyle or any ingenuity they bring to the medium. 

Another thing that goes alongside with this commercial interest is that the Manga Taisho is highly commercialised since it is directly tied to bookstores, the winner and even nominees are promoted in bookstores and subsequently they receive a lot of marketing from it. Therefore, the bookstore's direct involvement in this award gives it a heavier commercial focus than perhaps any other award. That is not necessarily a bad thing but it does however mean that the series nominated and awarded are more often than not usually to series with a potential for marketing more so than any other quality. 

Tsugi Ni Kuru Manga Award

Image from Tsugi Ni Kuru Manga Award official website

Latest Award results

Comics Winner - Undead Unluck               -                 Web Manga Winner - The Dangers in My Heart

There are other awards like the Tsugi Ni Kuru manga award held by niconico every year since a few years ago. It is an award driven by voting by niconico and Social Network Services that can interlink accounts with niconico.  It is a much simpler award in general, the series are nominated by voting through SNS and the ones with most votes are nominated for another round of voting. In this round of voting, people vote for a total of three selected series from two categories web manga and comics. The winner is of course the one with the highest amount of votes. 

It a simple award driven by the popular vote. Of course, because it is driven by popular votes, popular series have a natural advantage over other series. In addition to this, the use of SNS also adds another factor that gives a favour to series with a large SNS following. These are essentially the same fault because this sort of award driven by popularity albeit democratic it forgoes a principle of equal footing as series with niche themes or in less popular magazines and the likes are naturally disadvantaged. I tag awards like this as popularity contests because it does not market the award as a selection of great series but instead it is an attempt to highlight upcoming popular series. It is less commercially focused as Manga Taisho but both will naturally skew towards more popular works for the different reasons I have highlighted. 

Kono Manga ga Sugoi  /  The Best Manga 2021 - Kono Manga ga Yome

Image from Amazon jp

Image from Official Freestyle website

Latest Award results 

Kono Manga ga Sugoi - 1st Chainsawman

Kono Manga ga Yome - 1st Les Voyages du Prince Takeoka

These are not awards in any sense of the word but list created yearly. These lists are made in Kono Manga ga Sugoi's case through the selection of book store employees and judges. Yome differs from Sugoi in that it excludes book store sellers and only uses judges to make its selections. Hence, these lists can often exclude a great deal of series since it has a limited scope of what the people handling the selection process have read. 

In addition, these magazines are made for a purpose, to recommend manga but also to sell and therefore sometimes they fall back into popular titles especially for the top positions. This is more so an issue in Kono Manga ga Sugoi since Yome is a niche magazine. This is even a bigger issue in my eyes since book store employees play a part in selection which like with the Manga Taisho is a problem because of their economic ties with the list. Sugoi has a deep presence and the top ranking series are promoted heavily in book stores so it is a publicity and commercially driven process and the presence of book store employees solidifies that. I believe this sort of 'award' does not give like with Tsugi Kuru Manga, a unbiased view on the series and it more often than not skews towards more commercially successful series at least in the higher positions like the top three that are more visible. 

Japan Media Arts Festival 

Image from Doodle Arts

An awards festival that includes many other categories alongside manga such as animation. The difference here is that this is an event organised by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan, a state agency under the MEXT. It is therefore an awards festival organised not for profit but to promote culture and cultural development. This is an yearly festival since 1997 and its opens itself for submissions for a period of usually a couple of months. After the submission period is over, there is a judging process with the winners announced at the start of the festival. The judges are manga critics and they are chosen by the organising body, and they are listed and for every medium. All awarded series and even the ones that did not quite make receive comments by the judges in English, Chinese, Korean or Japanese. 

This award feels a lot more open than others and because it is done through submissions by authors/publishers it avoids certain issues around manga critics. One of the problems with Manga Critics is as Kentarou Takekuma acknowledge there is a limit to the amount of manga one can read and magazines with rankings like Kono Manga ga Yome that are shaped by critics sometimes have this issue. The format of the Japan Media Arts Festival Manga awards circumvents this issue through its submittal process which gives technically every series a equal ground as the judges have to go through all of them. Alongside this is the fact that this is the most an award can be exempt from any bias or any particular interest since it a cultural award by an organ of the state that does not have to play to any economic interests. Hence, this award is by far the the most perfect in my eyes and likewise it is seen by many as the most prestigious one. 

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