(25 Jun 2023) “Barefoot Gen,” which first appeared in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1973, was adopted by libraries across Japan and became a library staple along with other study-related manga and Osamu Tezuka’s works, according to Emiko Takahashi, director of the Japan Library Association.
School libraries began introducing manga in earnest in the 2000s. It is thought that teachers and librarians who grew up reading “Dragon Ball” and “Slam Dunk” — serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in the 1980s and 1990s — were a driving force behind the manga-in-school-libraries trend.
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