Manga readers would probably have had friends ask this common question – “where can I read manga online?” – more than a handful of times. The good news is that, at least if the title was officially published by Shueisha, there’s now an official direction to point them to. That direction is towards Manga Million, which the publisher describes as offering “a collection of one million pages of Shueisha manga in over 100 languages”. This is also done in conjunction with the publisher’s 100th anniversary.
According to the announcement, Manga Million features about 400 manga titles, including the big-name ones like One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Oshi No Ko, and Spy X Family, among a long list of others. The publisher notes that almost 300 titles are “being translated for the first time, including 50 titles receiving multilingual translations”. Naturally, English is among them, but other languages include Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, French, Turkish, Tagalog, Korean, and Polish, among others.
It’s very much worth noting that Shueisha describes the platform as “a new digital platform available for a limited time that provides readers worldwide with free access to manga with no registration required”. So while there are no strings attached to reading manga on the platform for now, that may change somewhere down the line. Unfortunately, the company does not mention when that change is set to happen, so you should probably take full advantage of this while it’s available.
Something else to note is that while Shueisha boasts translations being available in a large number of languages, the way this is done can be taken either way, depending on your stance on the whole translation discourse on social media. SoraNews24 reports that the publisher has contracted Japan-based Flitto, an “AI-powered translation service” company, for translating One Piece on Manga Million into several dozen languages.
For what it’s worth, reading through the first chapter of Sakamoto Days on the platform, it’s pretty easy to see where the AI translation comes in. Some of the translated sound effects are pretty obvious giveaways, as well as the choice of slang words being used for “kill”.
Also, at the end of the chapter, you’ll see a prompt showing you where you can buy the manga, but this unfortunately directs to Viz Media which, while affiliated with Shueisha, operates out of the US. For Malaysians looking to get physical copies, this doesn’t provide an easy alternative to existing options like Kinokuniya.
(Source: Manga Million, PR Newswire, SoraNews24)
