Essay -
On the relative popularity of manga and animation in Japan I have noticed that Western fans of animation and comics tend to have the impression that manga and animation are not mainstream in Japan. Despite the fact that Japan produces the vast majority of the content of both comics and animation in the world. This needs some correction.
Japan had a golden age of cinema during the 1950's and 1960's with many classic movies such as Kurosawa's, Mizoguchi's, Ozu's, Naruse's, Kinoshita and Kobayashi among other essential film directors. After the mid 1960's live action movies declined vertiginously in importance in Japanese culture. The main reason for that decline was the expansion of manga, which had its period of greatest expansion from 1965 to 1975. Its such a great expansion in the media that it is often called the "manga generation" the ones who grew up in the 1960's. Most artistic talent in Japan was allocated to manga leaving film in state of decadence although Japan still produces some great live action like Kamikaze Girls and Love Exposure, films heavily influenced by manga aesthetics.
The rise of manga was mainly caused by its practicality: Manga can be read anywhere and since most Japanese commute to work and school by train they read manga as a portable TV in the way to work. Manga historically was also associated with working class people versus European literature which is of a more high class culture.
Manga or comics in Japanese have a long history, with the development of modern comics in Japan in the late 19th century although manga art is said to he heavily influenced by earlier picture books from the early modern period. Manga steadily expanded in popularity from the late 19th century up to 1950's when it's sales began to explode, surpassing 1 billion units by the mid 1970's and continued to grow reaching 2.3 billion units in 1995, its all time peak. After 1995 manga sales began to decline and today are around 1.5 billion units, this decline was due to 3 reasons: the rise of the internet and videogames as alternative mediums and third due to the aging of Japan's population, as young people, specially college students are the biggest consumers of comics. Still, these statistics do not include amateur manga nor internet manga, two of the markets that grew a lot since 1995.
Manga by the mid 1990s had long surpassed any other medium in popularity with the possible exception of TV. Although certain prejudice regarding manga still remained in Japanese society among the older generations (born before the 1960's). Manga in Japan is like popular music (rock, jazz, hip hop and soul) in the Western World, a field that expanded vertiginously since WW2 and dominated youth culture during the post war decades and later expanded into general consumption by the whole population. Manga sales in Japan are about 500-550 billion yen about 8-9 times larger than Japanese live action film gross in an average year. The animation industry is around 220-250 billion yen in size but it's general reach is smaller than manga, its huge size is mostly thanks to the so called "aniotas".
While manga is perhaps the backbone of modern Japanese culture, the animation which is mostly adapted from manga tends to be relatively less popular. In Japan fans of animation specifically are called aniotas or animation otaku and they number around 4-5 million out of the 100 million adult populstion. While manga otaku outnumber then by a huge margin, the most popular anime among aniotas like PMMM or Bakemonogatari were watched by 2-3 million aniotas while the most popular mangas like Attack on Titan and One Piece are read by 20 million people. Still the fact that Attack on Titan annual sales increased from 5 million to 18 million following the release of the TV animation means that maybe aniotas might be larger as a group than its conventionally assumed. Also, of the top 10 highest grossing Japanese films of all time 5 are animated as 6 of the top 10 Japanese films in 2015. However, manga completely dominates novels in sales: the most popular mangas sell 5 times more than novels. So manga is relatively more popular in printed media compared to anime's hold in film or TV.
In the west manga is known mostly from its animated adaptations, which English speaking fans call "anime", a word that I myself despise due to it leading to extremely ignorant generalizations by illiterates in Japanese culture. Anime is more popular in the west relative to manga because it's more accessible since most westerners are used to watching TV but they do know how to read comic books. But most of the masterpieces of Japanese culture produced in recent decades are not animated of live action film but manga. Kurosawa and Ozu are more representative of 1950's Japanese culture rather than modern Japanese culture, specially because Japan changed enormously since 1950 thanks to explosive economic growth from 1950 to 1990: a film like Akira from 1988 with its extremely post modern aesthetics would be unimaginable to a Japanese man from 40 years before.
Of course, while manga as a medium is mainstream there are some of its genres and elements that satisfy a more niche audience. For instance. Manga like K-On! can be called Men's "Girl's Manga", because it combines aesthetic elements from manga aimed at tennager girls with Japanese adult male sensibilities, this genre of manga expanded vertiginously since the late 1980's when it was invented among amateur manga artists. Still this type of manga does not get into best seller lists unlike super blockbuster titles like Attack on Titan, One Piece and Assassination Classroom, which are more conventional manga featuring a teenager male as a main character and lots of melodrama. However, K-On! topped animation sales because hardcore animation nerds are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to buy it even though it's not that popular among mainstream audiences (although K-On! became popular among highschool girls which were not its target audience leading to a temporary boom of sales of musical instruments in the country).
The art style in that English speakers associate with " anime" is a very specific style of manga that developed in the late 1980's based on a mix of girl's manga aesthetics with the sharp lines of men's manga. In recent decades this style became increasingly popular and now it influenced even mainstream manga like Assassination Classroom, still among the top 10 best seller mangas in 2015 not a single one looks like "anime" except Food Wars, the closest to otaku manga style:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news...es-2015/.95913 Finally, Japanese society tends to be very conservative in regards to its habits. People with obsessive interests tend to suffer in that society in contrast to American society which is more accepting for example of individuals watching 20-40 movies a week. In Japan they would be regarded as crazy movie otakus. Brazilian society is a bit more like American society in that sense although in Brazil we suffer heavily from homophobia and machismo among other underdeveloped country's diseases.
One thing I admire about Japan is its incredibly rich popular culture, being a country with 40% of the US's population but produces 5-6 times more animation and 20 times more comics, besides huge volumes of live action film and videogames. In Brazil we have neither comics, animation, videogames nor film as well developed industries, most books popular in Brazil are imported as well although some Brazilian authors are popular fact is that Brazil's culture is infinitely less rich than Japan's even though Brazil is larger than Japan in population.