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>fat ugly women are the biggest consumers
Torishima was right (just like he was right about Demon Slayer being a kuso manga).
>Question 2: In 1984, when Dragon Ball was launched, the population of boys aged 5 to 15 in Japan represented 8.22% of the total population. Today, in 2024 (40 years later), it’s only 4.2%. So the number of young boys (shonen in Japanese) has halved in 40 years. Given that, there are fewer and fewer shonen manga.
>How can shonen manga reinvent itself in the face of this shrinking readership?

>Torishima: It’s true that the demographic problem is a concern for the entire Japanese publishing industry. That said, there will always be children. We must continue to support those children who have stuck with us until now.
>The problem is that Shonen Jump and the rest of the professional magazines no longer make manga for children. And because of that, I think the future of manga is grim. There are more and more ways to read manga online, except access is limited for children, since they don’t have smartphones or credit cards.

>What’s more, when we read digital manga, the algorithm ensures we only read the same type of work. So we’ve reached a point where all manga have the same price, the same artistic direction, the same taste: we end up with nothing but Starbucks manga or McDonald’s manga.
>Japanese manga has lost sight of the idea of creating stories with an individual artistic identity. And I think that at Shueisha, if there are magazine editors who see the data but ignore it, and disobey the editorial direction that people like me set in the past, then the situation becomes very risky.

The conclusion of Dragon Ball Z in 1996 reportedly caused significant apprehension within Japan's media industry. Key stakeholders expressed concerns that the absence of the highly successful franchise would lead to severe and prolonged economic repercussions for both their companies and the nation. Major corporations, such as Bandai and Toei Animation, were particularly reliant on Dragon Ball's profitability.

Despite this, Akira Toriyama, the series' creator, chose not to continue the main storyline. Consequently, Toei Animation proceeded to produce Dragon Ball GT, albeit with only limited involvement from Toriyama himself, to not cause economic problems in Japan according to Kazuhiko Torishima and Toyotaro in Japan Expo 2025.

>Torishima: I didn’t take part in Dragon Ball GT, so I can’t give my opinion. DBGT came out when Dragon Ball ended. Still, many stakeholders were involved in Dragon Ball, such as TV networks, Bandai Namco, and various other partner companies, and we had reached a point where if Dragon Ball hadn’t continued even just a bit longer, we would have had economic problems. The easiest thing would have been to ask Akira Toriyama to continue his manga, but he had just finished it, so there was no chance he would agree to continue even a little more. The only thing we could ask of him was to create the characters and give us a simple storyline. As a result, DBGT came about because a team was told: “Here, deal with this yourselves.”