Trading Card Culture in Japan Beyond Pokémon
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
The Pokémon card auction that took place in Yokohama in November 2022 produced a result that made international news.
A single card — the Illustrator Pikachu card, produced in 1998 as a prize for a colouring contest and issued to approximately forty winners — sold for 5.275 million US dollars. One card. For approximately 5.3 million dollars.
The international coverage of this auction focused almost exclusively on the price — the specific sensational number that made for an obvious headline. What the coverage did not address was the specific cultural context that produced this market: the specific Japanese trading card culture that gave the Pokémon card its origin, its specific design values, and its specific place in the history of a trading card game tradition that is considerably older than Pokémon and considerably broader than any single franchise.
The History: Magic and the Japanese Market
The trading card game (TCG) as a commercial format was invented in the United States — Magic: The Gathering, designed by Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993, established the specific format that all subsequent TCGs have followed: a collectible card set with varying rarity, a game system using the cards, and a competitive play community.
Magic: The Gathering arrived in Japan in 1994, and the Japanese reception was enthusiastic in ways that the American developers had not fully anticipated. Japan’s specific combination of card game culture (the hanafuda and karuta traditions), figure and collectible culture, and the specific enthusiasm for systematic collection that characterises Japanese consumer behaviour in various domains produced a market that quickly became one of Magic’s largest internationally.
The Japanese Magic: The Gathering community developed specific contributions to the game’s competitive metagame — specific deck strategies and specific card evaluations that originated in the Japanese competitive scene and were subsequently adopted internationally. The Japanese Magic community’s analytical approach to the game’s competitive dimension has been influential throughout the game’s international history.
Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Japanese Creation
Yu-Gi-Oh! Official Card Game — based on the manga by Kazuki Takahashi and published by Konami beginning in 1999 — is the most significant specifically Japanese origin TCG and one of the most played card games in the world.
Yu-Gi-Oh!’s specific design philosophy differs from Magic: The Gathering in several important ways: the game uses a resource system (the life points that both players begin with) rather than a mana system, the specific card effects are more literally game-text (effects are stated explicitly rather than requiring rules-layer interpretation), and the competitive metagame evolves at a significantly faster pace than Magic’s, with new card sets fundamentally reshaping the competitive landscape multiple times per year.
The competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! community in Japan is substantial — the official tournament series (OTS) organised by Konami provides a competitive infrastructure from local store tournaments through the World Championship that is one of the largest competitive card game events annually.
Weiss Schwarz: The Anime TCG
Weiss Schwarz — published by Bushiroad beginning in 2007 — is the specifically otaku-market trading card game: a game in which the cards feature art from specific anime, manga, and game franchises, allowing players to build decks around specific franchises that they love.
The game system is specifically designed for the franchise-crossover format: each franchise’s card set is designed to be played exclusively (a pure deck from a single franchise) or in combination with other franchises through specific deck-building rules. The visual design of the cards — featuring specific characters from specific series in high-quality illustration — is as significant a commercial driver as the game system.
The Weiss Schwarz market demonstrates the specific commercial logic of the anime merchandise intersection: the person who is deeply invested in a specific anime franchise will purchase Weiss Schwarz cards featuring that franchise both to play the game and as collectibles representing their investment in the franchise. The game functions simultaneously as a competitive TCG and as a licensed merchandise category.
The Broader Culture: Card Games in Daily Life
Beyond the specific TCG categories, Japan has a broader card game culture that includes traditional Japanese games (karuta, hanafuda), imported Western card games (poker, various family card games), and the specific culture of board game cafés where various card and board games are available for play.
The collector market for TCG cards — the secondary market for specific valuable cards from various games — is one of the most significant components of the Japanese second-hand goods market. Card shops (kādo shoppu) that buy and sell individual cards at market prices are present in every major Japanese shopping district, and the secondary market valuation of specific cards is tracked with the same seriousness as other collector markets.
The Japanese TCG collector’s specific orientation: the emphasis on condition (card condition is graded extremely precisely, with any visible wear significantly impacting value), the orientation toward both play value and collectible value (the best Japanese collectors play with their cards in competitive settings while simultaneously maintaining the overall collection’s value), and the specific community around competitive play that sustains ongoing engagement with the game beyond the initial collecting phase.
— Yoshi 🃏 Central Japan, 2026
Webtoons vs. Manga: How Korean Comics Are Changing the Game
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
Something has been happening in the world of sequential art storytelling over the past decade that I think requires honest acknowledgment from someone who writes primarily about Japanese manga.
Webtoons — the Korean-origin digital comic format that is read vertically on smartphone screens, one continuous scroll rather than the discrete pages of print manga — have become one of the most-read comic formats in the world. Naver Webtoon, the dominant webtoon platform, reports over 180 million monthly active users across its various international versions. The combined global readership of the major webtoon platforms may now exceed the combined global readership of all manga.
This is a significant development. And because this is a blog that takes Japanese popular culture seriously, I want to address it honestly rather than ignoring it in favour of purely celebrating manga.
What Webtoons Are
Webtoons are digital comics produced specifically for vertical scroll reading on smartphones. The format’s specific characteristics:
The vertical strip format. Rather than the horizontal page layout of print manga or print comics, webtoon panels are arranged in a continuous vertical strip. Reading involves scrolling down rather than turning pages. The panel shape tends toward the horizontal (wide rather than tall) to suit the smartphone screen’s aspect ratio.
The colour standard. Most webtoons are produced in full colour — a significant departure from manga’s default black and white. The colour production is typically digital, and the specific colour aesthetic of webtoons (the slightly desaturated, soft-focus colouring that has become characteristic of the format) is visually distinctive.
The update schedule. Webtoons are typically updated weekly with a single episode of varying length — the equivalent of a manga chapter. The update is delivered directly to users through the platform app, with notification of new episodes.
The free-with-wait model. The dominant monetisation model: recent episodes are available for free after a waiting period (typically one week), but can be accessed immediately for a small fee (coin purchase). Earlier episodes are available for free with unlimited access.
The Platform Differences: Naver vs. Kakao vs. Tapas
Naver Webtoon (LINE Webtoon internationally) — the dominant platform, with the largest creator community and the largest reader base. Naver’s specific discover mechanism — allowing amateur creators to post and build readership with the best-performing amateur works being offered professional contracts — is one of the most significant differences from the manga industry’s more gatekept entry process.
Kakao Webtoon (formerly Daum Webtoon) — the second major Korean platform, with a somewhat different genre mix and different algorithmic recommendation approach.
The international expansion: both major platforms have significant international presence, with dedicated apps and original content programs for non-Korean markets. The English-language webtoon market — developed through Naver Webtoon’s English version — has produced original English-language webtoons that are created by non-Korean creators specifically for the platform.
The Impact on Manga
The rise of the webtoon format has affected the manga industry in several specific ways that are worth acknowledging.
The smartphone reading competition. Manga has been adapting to smartphone reading — the major manga apps (Shōnen Jump+, Manga UP!, Comic Days) all provide smartphone-optimised reading — but the vertical scroll format of webtoons is arguably better suited to the smartphone interface than the horizontal page layout of traditional manga.
The colour competition. The webtoon’s colour standard creates a specific aesthetic expectation that black-and-white manga does not meet for readers who encounter webtoons first. Various manga platforms have been experimenting with colour digital exclusives — colour manga that is not simply the colourised version of black-and-white originals but is designed for colour presentation.
The story adaptation competition. Korean webtoons are being adapted into Korean dramas (kdramas) with extraordinary frequency and commercial success — the specific webtoon-to-kdrama pipeline has produced multiple internationally successful shows. This pipeline creates a virtuous cycle for webtoon platforms that the manga industry is attempting to replicate through anime adaptation, though the specific economics differ.
What Manga Has That Webtoons Don’t
The competition is not simply displacement — manga has specific qualities that the webtoon format does not replicate.
The specific compositional freedom of the print page — the ability to use panel size, panel shape, panel arrangement, and negative space as expressive tools across a full page composition — produces effects that the vertical strip cannot. The double-page spread of manga — the specific use of two facing pages as a single compositional canvas for a dramatic image — is one of the most powerful visual tools in the medium and has no equivalent in the vertical strip format.
The black-and-white aesthetic — which I have written about as a limitation relative to colour webtoons — is also, for specific aesthetic purposes, a strength. The specific expressiveness of manga’s black-and-white graphic language — the specific way ink lines carry information about surface, light, and movement — is a specific aesthetic that colour can obscure as easily as it can enhance.
The manga tradition’s depth — the specific accumulated craft knowledge of seventy years of manga production, the specific visual vocabulary that generations of readers and creators have developed together — is a genuine asset that the webtoon format, two decades old at most in its current form, has not yet accumulated.
The honest assessment: the webtoon and the manga are not converging into a single format. They are genuinely different forms, each with specific advantages, developing in parallel for audiences who may read both, or who may find that one form suits their specific reading context and preference better than the other.
— Yoshi 📱 Central Japan, 2026
