Daiwashobo Publishing Co. Ltd.
Founded: 1961
CEO: Satoru Owa
Titles per year: 140
Since its inception, Daiwashobo has had a mission to inspire and empower readers. Editors do not specialize and instead can pitch titles on any topic, with limitations: no sexual content, no hate speech, no unproven medical advice, and there must be a reason to publish beyond commercial gain.
Daiwashobo focuses on nonfiction—self-improvement, parenting, lifestyle, health and wellness, architecture, illustrated books, and educational manga. Recent titles include a new work by Ichiro Kishimi, a philosopher, psychologist, and professor, and coauthor of viral TikTok hit The Courage to Be Disliked (published in Japan by Diamond Inc., and in the U.S. by Atria). The new book, with the working English title From Despair to Hope, is structured as a conversation in which three students discuss Kishimi’s lectures.
Books that have already successfully crossed over to the U.S. market include How to Hold Animals (Scribner) by former aquarium keeper Toshimitsu Matsuhashi. In 2026, the publisher is looking forward to U.S. releases including Danshari
by Hideko Yamashita (Tuttle); the author’s position as a Japanese decluttering guru predates Marie Kondo’s, as a 2025 New York Times profile noted.
In terms of potential acquisitions from U.S. publishers, Daiwashobo is especially drawn to books in fields where it sees America as being ahead of Japan, such as psychology titles for a general readership. The publisher values books that offer clear, practical insights for navigating a changing world, giving readers guidance and inspiration for the future.
Gakken Inc.
Founded: 1946
Representative director and president: Tatsuya Nanjo
Titles per year: 1,000
Gakken’s core publishing business is in educational titles, an outgrowth of the science magazines the company published before after-school cram classes became widespread in Japan. At their peak, the now-discontinued magazines sold 6.7 million copies per month, says representative director and president Tatsuya Nanjo.
Today, parent company Gakken Group runs its own cram schools, with other ventures including healthcare services. In addition to medical and nursing texts, the publishing arm creates textbooks for elementary and junior high schools, study guides and workbooks, educational toys and learning kits, sheet music, and more.
Gakken is looking to European markets as a home for its educational manga, and has partnered with French publishers such as Bayard. The Gakken Group has subsidiaries in China and Vietnam, and Gakken Inc. has an active licensing department that has sold more than 1,000 licenses for reference and picture books.
The publisher also has its own educational line in English, Play Smart. This line’s titles, some 50 to date, are prepared by a team in Japan and intended for international distribution. About 90% of these titles are sold in the U.S., with the remaining 10% in Southeast Asia; popular titles include PlaySmart Early Learning and PlaySmart Wipe-Clean Workbook.
Hayakawa Publishing Corp.
Founded: 1945
Publisher, chairman, and CEO: Hiroshi Hayakawa
President and COO: Atsushi Hayakawa
Titles per year: 250
Kiyoshi Hayakawa started his company as a way to pursue his passion for theater and began by publishing his heroes, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. A few years later, he expanded into classic crime novels (Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming) followed by science fiction (Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein). The company began publishing nonfiction and European literary fiction in the 1960s.
In 1966, Hiroshi Hayakawa, Kiyoshi’s son, went to New York City for a year to study English at Columbia University. His father sent him on daily errands to the offices of publishers and agents, immersing Hiroshi, who had wanted to become a diplomat, in the book world. Kiyoshi’s plan paid off, and then some: in 2022, Hiroshi, by then the company’s president, received the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award for his work bringing international authors to Japan.
About 70%–80% of Hayakwa books are translated, among them titles by bestselling literary authors like Sally Rooney and multiple Booker Prize winners. “Hayakawa is not a big company,” Hiroshi notes. “We can’t just follow trends; we need to concentrate on authors with longevity.” Kazuo Ishiguro came to Hayakawa after his previous publishers downsized their foreign rights departments. The publisher also maintains ties with Haruki Murakami, who does translation work for the company.
Today, Hayakawa is looking for ways to expand existing IP. One example is manga based on Agatha Christie novels. As the go-to publisher of science fiction in Japan, Hayakawa is well aware of fandoms and the high margins on merchandise items. Its Hayakawa Factory brand sells T-shirts, hoodies, notebooks, mugs, and other merch. Tie-ins to George Orwell, William Gibson, Stanislaw Lem, and Chuck Palahniuk are popular, but the biggest sales are of Christie and Sherlock Holmes items—in Japan, classic crime lovers are even more obsessive than SF fans.
Kadokawa Corp.
Founded: 1934 (as Kadokawa Shoten, a publishing company; Kadokawa Corp. formed in 2014)
CEO: Takeshi Natsuno
Titles per year: 6,000
With its own anime, film, and game production studios in addition to publishing, Kadokawa has built a network of 20 subsidiaries and affiliates outside Japan, says chief global officer Takashi Sensui, which allows for smooth international dissemination of its titles.
Thirty years ago, Kadokawa’s manga business was fairly small, says Daijo Kudo, chief anime officer. The company saw an opportunity in light novels, which are fast to produce and often originate in fan fiction. (Today Kadokawa owns one fan fiction site, Kakuyomu, and runs writing contests there.) Kadokawa tests audience response to light novels and progresses the most promising ones to manga, audiobooks, anime, and then games.
In 2016, Kadokawa partnered with Hachette on manga publisher Yen Press; its popular series include Ryoko Kui’s Delicious in Dungeon, Mokumokuren’s The Summer Hikaru Died, and Sumiko Arai’s The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy at All.
Another successful property, Bungo Stray Dogs by Kafka Asagiri and Sango Harukawa, is supernatural detective series with characters based on Western authors (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald) and Japanese literary heroes. Osamu Dazai’s decades-old No Longer Human experienced a sales surge in the U.S. when TikTokkers discovered Dazai via the Bungo Stray Dogs anime, which, like the manga, features a character named for the author.
Beyond Japanese-originating work, Kadokawa sees potential in nonfiction out of the U.S. that summarizes cutting-edge research in fields such as neuroscience, AI, and health for general readers. In fiction, the company is always on the lookout for titles with potential for screen adaptation, and works from authors with significant long-term potential; whodunits are particularly popular in the Japanese market, more so than thrillers.
Kawade Shobo Shinsha Ltd. Publishers
Founded: 1886
President: Masaru Onodera
Titles per year: 500
Kawade Shobo Shinsha publishes Japanese and international literature and nonfiction. Korean literature, including works by Han Kang, features prominently on its translated fiction list, while translated nonfiction includes such titles as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens; readers have also responded to Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin and China’s Yan Lianke. “The only method for success is picking something that could never be written by a Japanese author,” says Kazutoshi Shimada, the publisher’s translated fiction manager.
While overall sales of translated fiction are down, says company president Masaru Onodera, “the core translation fans are still buying it.” From U.S. publishers, Kawade Shobo is interested in contemporary literature with original ideas and literary works incorporating elements of science fiction, mystery, and horror; works dealing with feminism, gender, and queer themes; popular science; and history books with universal themes.
The company is unafraid to take risks, Onodera notes, and the strategy pays off: in 1987, a collection of modern tanka poetry, Machi Tawara’s Salad Anniversary, sold more than three million copies and sparked a tanka-writing trend among young people in Japan. The publisher also heralded the modern cat-book craze with Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat and was early to cash in on coloring books for adults.
Kawade Shobo also publishes Bungei, one of the literary journals whose work is submitted for the Akutagawa Prize. Bungei is unusual in that it doesn’t differentiate between literary and entertainment fiction—it published Akira Otani’s thriller The Night of Baba Yaga alongside traditional literary fiction. This approach has brought to its pages many of the boundary-pushing writers of recent decades, such as Rin Usami, author of Akutagawa winner Idol, Burning (HarperVia), and Yu Miri, whose Tokyo Ueno Station, which Riverhead published in the U.S., won the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Fiction.
Kodansha Ltd.
Founded: 1909
President and CEO: Yoshinobu Noma
Titles per year: 3,800
Family-owned Kodansha is a heavy hitter with a long list of popular manga series, including Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Sailor Moon, and Attack on Titan. Another longtime favorite is Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s 1981 memoir Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window.
While Kodansha is well known for its manga bestsellers, it’s also home to Gunzo, one of the literary magazines whose stories are considered for the Akutagawa Prize. The publisher’s fiction roster includes experimental authors such as Yoko Tawada and Mieko Kanai, both of whom have been published in the U.S. by New Directions, and Kodansha International, an imprint formerly run from Tokyo that published English-language editions of such luminariess as Haruki Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, and Ryu Murakami.
Since the imprint closed in 2011, Kodansha’s English-language publishing has been centered in New York at Kodansha USA, home to many of the company’s biggest manga hits. Yet even with the existence of Kodansha USA and K Manga, the publisher’s online manga reading platform, Kodansha licenses out a large portion of its titles internationally. On the domestic front, Kodansha stays much more involved through direct investment in projects, employing in-house anime producers who act as liaisons with external production companies.
In November 2025, Kodansha announced the launch of Kodansha Studios, headed by Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao (Nomadland, Hamnet). The studio will connect international filmmakers with Kodansha manga creators, developing and packaging premium adaptations of the mangakas’ work.
On the children’s books side, the Kodansha rights team has been introducing the works of Sachiko Kashiwaba, whose novel The Village Beyond the Mist served as an inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. In the U.S., Restless Books’ Yonder imprint has published English translations of that title and two others by Kashiwaba.
Kodansha has editorial departments dedicated to literary fiction and popular fiction; the latter added to the cat-book craze with Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles (Berkley) and to the J-crime genre with Keigo Higashino’s crime novels. The publisher is also trying its hand at romantasy—a genre that has thus far met with minimal success in Japan—via a romantasy manga. The first volume of Serenade of Spring Thunder by Nikki Asada published in September; the hope is for the manga format to serve as a gateway for Japanese readers while the romantasy plotline helps the IP find an audience abroad.
NHK Publishing
Founded: 1931
President: Takayuki Eguchi
Titles per year: 600
Japan’s public broadcasting company has had its own publishing arm since its earliest days. NHK Publishing got its start with textbooks accompanying educational programs, and in the 1960s began publishing unrelated nonfiction as well as fiction.
The NHK audience is keen to see novels that reflect current affairs and strike a balance between literary and entertainment fiction. Social cohesion is a topic of particular interest, and the publisher found success with Shichiri Nakayama’s crime novel In the Wake, set in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the impacted region.
Taiga dramas, or year-long historical epics often featuring samurai, are also popular with viewers. NHK has been airing these since the 1960s and routinely publishes novelizations of the series it broadcasts. Book club–style fiction and slice-of-life dramas featuring ordinary women’s lives are other crowd pleasers. The publisher has a project in the works with Asako Yuzuki, author of the international bestseller Butter (published in Japan by Shinchosha and in the U.S. by Ecco), about daily life and motherhood during the pandemic, viewed through the lens of food she ate while stuck at home.
NHK publishes other big names, too. A collection of writings by the doyenne of Japanese feminism, Chizuko Ueno, has been an unexpected hit, and has sold very well in an unexpected place—China.
Nikkei Business Publications
Founded: 1969
President and CEO: Tetsuya Iguchi
Titles per year: 500
Nikkei Inc., which since 2015 has owned the Financial Times, began in 1876 as a newspaper tracking market prices. Its subsidiary Nikkei Business Publications, established in 1969, publishes across a range of nonfiction subjects: economics, management, and business; technical and medical books; and practical titles for daily life. Potential book acquisitions from the U.S. cover similar ground: business, management, economics, technology, self-help, social issues, and liberal arts.
Many titles shed light on individual companies or executives, some of whom are famously secretive: Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai; Shoichiro Toyoda, who led Toyota’s U.S. expansion; and Nippon Steel, which finalized its acquisition of U.S. Steel in 2025. The publisher aims to cover creative mavericks who stand in contrast to the stereotypically risk-averse, by-the-book Japanese executives, says Tetsuya Iguchi, president and CEO. “Nikkei BP has a staff of several hundred journalists writing across platforms,” Iguchi notes. “Making use of their expertise and networks, they also write and edit our books.”
Nikkei BP is also the Japanese-language home of international bestsellers like Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (Flatiron), both million-copy sellers in Japan, as well as Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (Penguin Life).
Perhaps unexpectedly, the business publisher’s list also includes fiction. Like many Japanese newspapers, Nikkei includes daily serializations of novels by major authors, and Nikkei BP later publishes the complete books. One example is Kikuko Tsumura’s There Is No Such Thing as an Easy Job (Bloomsbury later published the English translation), about a burned-out woman who takes a series of temp assignments in search of the perfect, no-stress gig.
Poplar Publishing Co. Ltd.
Founded: 1947
President: Hiroki Kato
Titles per year: 400
Established as a children’s publisher, Poplar has released numerous successful series for kids, including Zorori, Tyrannosaurus, and Butt Detective. After some 60 years in business, Poplar expanded into publishing titles aimed at adults.
Today, the adult list features lighter nonfiction divided into short chapters (seen as ideal for commuting) as well as fiction.
Poplar frequently publishes books that explore social issues and mental health while delivering an uplifting message, aiming to hit the sweet spot between entertainment and literary fiction. A forthcoming example, Days at the Wakeatte Inn, publishes in Japan in February and is by Satoshi Yagisawa, author of the Morisaki Bookshop series (published by Shogakukan in Japan and Harper Perennial in the U.S.).
Poplar was an early adopter of the cozy trend, with U.S. successes including Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking for Is in the Library (Hanover Square). The publisher’s strong background in children’s books, and the fact that it has no strict division between its adult and children’s editorial departments, has helped it experiment with illustrated fiction for adults, a new phenomenon in Japanese publishing. Aoyama’s Round and Round Amusement Park, which published in 2025, is a collection of interconnected stories with color photography by Tatsuya Tanaka, who has four million followers on Instagram. Other notable Poplar titles include Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lonely Castle in the Mirror (Erewhon), which won the Japanese Booksellers’ Award in 2018.
Shinchosha Publishing Co. Ltd.
Founded: 1896
CEO: Takanobu Sato
Titles per year: 1,100
Shinchosha founder Giryo Sato’s attention to detail is part of company lore: Sato insisted on proofreading all the books himself, and today, the fourth-generation family-owned company takes pride in its large proofreading department.
Shinchosha has published some of the biggest names in Japanese literature: Kobo Abe, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, and Haruki Murakami (most recently, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, published in the U.S. by Knopf). Recent international bestsellers include Asako Yuzuki’s Butter (Ecco) and Sonoko Machida’s The Convenience Store by the Sea (Putnam). Several Akutagawa Prize winners originated with Shinchō, the monthly literary magazine the publisher launched in 1904, including Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo (Summit) and Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole (New Directions).
One surprise hit was Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure (Counterpoint), based on the true story of an early-20th-century courtesan strike. It sold in 15 territories and was her first book to be translated into English.
The publisher has had a commitment to translations into Japanese since the publication of its 57-volume world literature series (1927–1932). In 1998, it launched translation imprint Shincho Crest, which has published Andrey Kurkov, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ocean Vuong, and many others.
Manga is a relatively new venture for Shinchosha, which entered that market in 2001. Popular series include Kousuke Oono’s The Way of the Househusband, whose English translation, published by Viz, won a 2020 Eisner Award. The publisher also has an interest in IP development; Akiyuki Nosaka’s Grave of the Fireflies, which the company published in the 1960s, was adapted as a 1988 anime produced by Studio Ghibli. Netflix began streaming the film in 2024.
Other company ventures include art magazines, such as Kogei Seika, a biannual publication focused on crafts, architecture, and artisanship. An art gallery, Soko, a vast industrial space stands alongside Shinchosha’s offices and hosts arts and crafts exhibitions.
Shogakukan Inc.
Founded: 1922
Representative director and president: Nobuhiro Oga
Titles per year: 3,000
Shogakukan is part of the Hitotsubashi Group, a set of more or less interconnected companies, or keiretsu, with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. The Hitotsubashi Group—as of 2025 the world’s eight largest publisher, according to industry consultant Rüdiger Wischenbart, with $2.25 billion in revenue—includes Shueisha, which started out as Shogakukan’s entertainment division, and several other publishing companies.
After getting its start publishing educational magazines for children, Shogakukan soon branched out into other areas. The entertainment division that became Shueisha was one. Another venture, Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions, handles IP and rights for publishers within the Hitotsubashi Group, and together, the subsidiaries own Viz Media.
In 1986, Masahiro Oga, then CEO of Shogakukan (and father of current CEO Nobuhiro Oga) funded the startup Viz Media Communications. At that time, U.S. publishers were uninterested in licensing manga, so the investment was seen as more of an experiment. Once the genre took off in the 1990s, Shueisha joined the venture. Shogakukan and Shueisha consider Viz Media an independent company outside Japan, and license content to U.S.-based imprints of its major competitors, including Kodansha USA and Yen Press.
As a publisher, Shoguakukan is known for long-running IP such as Doraemon and Detective Conan. A cross-media business department considers potential visual adaptations—the Detective Conan franchise, for instance, includes 28 movies—as well as merchandise and more.
While 80% of Shogakukan’s sales come from manga, the publisher has also had success with cozy fiction—Satoshi Yagisawa’s Morisaki Bookshop series (Harper Perennial) and Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books (HarperVia), to name two—and is looking to expand into other genres.
Shueisha Inc.
Founded: 1926
Representative director and president: Hideaki Hayashi
Titles per year: 8,700
After getting its start in 1925 as the entertainment division of Shogakukan, Shueisha split off the following year and incorporated as Shueisha Inc., in 1947. Today, it’s a manga giant—with bestselling series Demon Slayer, One Piece, and many others— and maintains a strong presence in the U.S. through its association with Viz Media.
Shueisha is less well-known as a publisher of prose, but in addition to publishing genre fiction, its literary magazine Subaru regularly submits nominees for the Akutagawa Prize. A sister magazine, Shosetsu Subaru, focuses on genre fiction and has launched authors including Keigo Higashino, Natsuo Kirino, and Riku Onda. Meanwhile, the publisher’s Cobalt imprint publishes light novels.
The publisher’s backlist comprises some 7,000 titles, most of which have not been translated. To mark its centenary this year, Shueisha is planning on publishing English translations of 100 titles from its backlist, spanning all genres. The first group of titles will launch in late 2026, with the remaining books scheduled over the coming years. The U.S. publishing partner will be e-book distribution company Media Do International, which owns NetGalley, and the books will be available in Kinokuniya and other major bookstores around the world.
U-Next Co. Ltd.
Launched: 2007 (as video distribution service GyaO Next; the company has existed in its current form since 2017)
Representative director and president: Tenshin Tsutsumi
Titles per year: 45
U-Next is Japan’s major homegrown streaming platform. It recently started producing its own content: the 2025 adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills marked its first success.
A key company focus is its all-in-one entertainment app, which includes movies, manga, and e-books. In 2019, Michael Staley, who previously ran an original e-book imprint for Amazon Japan, came on board to head up the U-Next publishing program. The company’s e-books, mostly short stories, were originally envisioned as a free perk for subscribers and a way for authors to reach a broader audience of entertainment consumers. Five years after its launch, U-Next Publishing grew to include three publishing lines: original fiction hardcovers and trade paperbacks; mass market, character-driven genre fiction; and what the company calls 100-minute novellas—the length of an average movie—which sell for ¥900 (about $6).
U-Next Publishing has attracted numerous Akutagawa Prize winners, including Hitomi Kanehara, Hiroko Oyamada, Li Kotomi, and Junko Takase; Staley believes it’s because U-Next gives authors the freedom to try new genres. For instance, Takase, known for realistic fiction, contributed Sprouting, set in a world in which everyone goes bald.
U-Next Publishing aims for titles with a cinematic quality, character-led narratives, and strong elevator pitches. Some of the authors work simultaneously as screenwriters; building up original content that could be adapted for film or TV was U-Next’s strategy from the start. In the future, the company hopes to develop projects with author and producer working in tandem. For now, U-Next Publishing is concentrating on international rights. Staley, drawing on his experience working for Kodansha International, is commissioning English translations in order to broaden the publisher’s reach.
