ABSTRACT
The rapid ascendancy of the weekly manga magazine industry during the 1960s encouraged the development of a sphere of noncommercial and amateur manga production. Artists who were excluded from recruitment or who did not want to work for the new manga magazines developed other ways of distributing their manga. It was the launch of the manga magazine industry which provided the initial impetus for the gradual bifurcation of 'mainstream' manga and 'underground' (uragawa, angura) manga, into professional manga and amateur manga. Non-commercial manga produced in the 1960s to mid-1970s was ignored by the publishing industry and the government until the late 1980s, when it began to receive belated critical attention and the interest of large publishers. While 'underground' manga of this earlier period was promoted and partially re-integrated into 'mainstream' manga, during the 1990s the contemporary amateur manga medium was simultaneously ostracized and repressed.
