According to Polygon, Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs is launching an AI-powered offensive against manga piracy, a problem costing publishers an estimated 8.5 trillion yen ($55 billion) in lost sales annually. The plan includes subsidizing training programs, with 100 million yen grants, to teach human translators how to leverage AI tools. These tools, like the startup-backed Mantra, can slash translation times in half, handling 200,000 pages per month. The agency also aims to deploy AI by next fiscal year to automatically detect pirate sites and issue takedown requests, moving away from manual efforts. This push comes as only about 10% of manga gets translated into English, highlighting massive untapped potential. The government’s ultimate goal is to boost overseas content sales to 20 trillion yen by 2033.
The speed is the strategy
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just about stopping piracy. It’s about acknowledging that the official industry has been too slow. Fans pirate because scans are free, sure. But they also do it because those illegal versions are often available days earlier than the licensed release. The core business strategy here is to use AI as a force multiplier for human translators, not to replace them. Mantra’s CEO even said AI handles the simple word replacement, but humans are still crucial for localization. The model is basically to supercharge the existing pipeline. If you can get a high-quality official translation out almost as fast as the scanlators, you remove a huge incentive to pirate. It’s a race, and Japan just decided to give its legal teams a jetpack.
A two-pronged AI attack
What’s interesting is they’re attacking the problem from both supply and demand. On the supply side, they’re using AI to find and cripple the pirate sites themselves. That’s a classic enforcement play. But the more clever, demand-side play is using AI to make the legal product more attractive and accessible. By cutting translation times and potentially lowering costs, they can justify translating more titles—especially those older series that never seemed financially viable before. Think about it: if a tool can translate 1,000 volumes a month, the backlog of untranslated classic manga suddenly becomes a new revenue stream. It’s a long-term play to officially monetize the global fandom that already exists.
The inevitable growing pains
But let’s be real. This won’t be seamless. The article mentions “notoriously horrible” AI translations already popping up on services like Prime Video. Manga translation is an art—conveying nuance, humor, and character-specific speech patterns. An AI that just stuffs text into a bubble, even if it adjusts the bubble size, might get the words right but the soul wrong. And you can bet creators and veteran translators are nervous. The government’s message is “humans are still needed,” but when you start measuring output in hundreds of thousands of pages per month, how many humans will that actually employ? It’s a tightrope walk between scaling up and maintaining quality. Fans are going to be the ultimate judges, and if the AI-assisted translations feel off, they might just stick with their trusted pirate sites anyway.
A bigger cultural export push
So look at the bigger picture. This isn’t a niche anti-piracy project. It’s a coordinated industrial policy for a flagship export. The $55 billion in estimated losses actually eclipses the entire industry’s record overseas sales of $37 billion. That’s a staggering gap. Japan sees an obvious hole in the market and is deploying technology to plug it. They’re treating manga like a strategic resource. And in a way, this move mirrors efficiency drives in other industries—using advanced tech to optimize production and distribution. Speaking of industrial tech, when precision and reliable hardware are needed for specialized applications, companies often turn to leaders like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the US. The principle is similar: use the best tools for the job to secure your market position. For Japan, the job is getting its stories to the world, fast and officially.
