Mangajin

Mangajin was an American magazine that described itself as "Japanese pop culture and language learning". The title is a pun on "manga", -Jin (person), and the Japanese pronunciation of "magazine". The magazine ran 70 issues from June 1990 to December 1997. It had articles about Japan and Japan-related media, but its prominent feature was the line-by-line and word-by-word annotated translations of various manga series, meant to teach Japanese to Westerners and to some extent, English to Japanese people. Regular columns also used manga-related examples. Manga used in this magazine included chapters of series otherwise not available in English in any other format, even today.

Covers for the magazine were typically drawn in the style of Japanese woodblock prints, as seen in the page image.

The magazine started before the anime and manga boom reached the West, at a time when Japan Takes Over the World was still a going concern, and was mostly geared towards business- and culture-related manga, with relatively little fan-oriented material. It also sold issues in Japan. The magazine died out when the contraction of the Japanese economy and the change in Western interest in Japan killed the magazine's audience.

The magazine also published some books, language-learning tapes, and CD-ROMs.

The magazine has vanished even from the web but the previous home page is still visible on archive.org.

Fan-friendly series (of the time--they predate modern manga fandom) that received chapters in Mangajin included The magazine also occasionally used Japanese versions of American cartoons such as The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes.
 * Galaxy Express 999
 * Oishinbo
 * Silent Service
 * Urusei Yatsura
 * What's Michael?


 * Haiku: Covered in issue 24.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: You can find scans of the first 30 issues if you know where to look. Good luck finding them in any other format.
 * Kimono Is Traditional: Used on the covers occasionally.
 * Too Good to Last: The magazine was very highly regarded at the time, but the market for it just died out.