From our other sites
The story
A school reading survey conducted this June by the Japan School Library Association found that the share of elementary school students who read zero books in a month — the “non-reading rate” — topped 10% for the first time in 25 years. Manga was included in the survey for the first time this year, and about 30% of elementary students said they don’t read that either. On 5ch threads, the results sparked debate over where to draw the line on what counts as “reading” — manga, online articles — with many commenters also linking the long hours kids spend consuming information on smartphones to a decline in reading comprehension.
The 2026 school reading survey found that the share of children who read zero books in a month (the “non-reading rate”) topped 10% among elementary school students for the first time in 25 years. The non-reading rate for manga, surveyed for the first time, came in at nearly 30%.
[Chart] We asked elementary, middle, and high schoolers: which is easier to read, paper books or e-books?
The survey was conducted this June by the Japan School Library Association. A total of 10,061 students from 4th grade through 12th grade at 123 schools nationwide responded.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
But it's a problem if they still don't read as adults.
You think so?
Grown adults standing around reading manga for free in convenience stores is pretty embarrassing too, you know.
People who didn't read as kids don't read as adults either.
It's mostly middle-aged people watching anime these days — kids aren't.
They're glued to their smartphones instead.
Kids today can't even handle a 20-minute anime episode.
Too long for them.
It's the microwave-meal era of cooking, too.
Educational manga seems fairly popular, though —
probably because it gives you the feeling you've actually studied.
Old game walkthrough sites keep disappearing, and today's guides are all videos, which is a pain to reference.
The era of 'the internet will sort it out' is over.
Buying paper or digital — both are just old guys like the ones here.
Kids don't buy either.
Nope, they don't.
It's basically all YouTube.
I can't believe they're not reading such exciting books.
Legendary problem product — people bought it thinking it was a strategy guide, but it was nothing like one, and the publisher got flooded with angry phone calls.
Then in a shady move, they only put out a proper strategy guide with the second volume.
https://static.mercdn.net/item/detail/orig/photos/m57838732196_1.jpg
https://auctions.afimg.jp/q1104292286/ya/image/q1104292286.2.jpg
Young people barely watch YouTube anymore.
The average viewer is around 60 — it's super-aged content at this point.
So what ARE kids watching these days?
Short-form videos are so thin on content they're basically worthless to watch.
No way, really?
Aren't young people watching HikakinTV, Hajime Shacho, Fischer's, Tokai On Air and cracking up laughing? (popular Japanese YouTubers)
if you're browsing the internet you're still reading all sorts of things,
so kids probably encounter more text than they would have back in the TV-watching era.
Text on the internet comes in such small fragments that reading only that seems likely to tank long-form reading comprehension.
A lot of online articles these days are written by AI anyway, so it'll make people even dumber.
Even calling it 'text on the internet' is generous — most people only read the headlines.
And the outlets writing it include stuff that used to get mocked, like weekly tabloids and evening papers, plus low-quality, seemingly AI-written web media,
all cranking out articles like they own the place. The quality just keeps dropping.
Unlike 5ch, the idiots on Twitter/X can't read long text, lol.
That doesn't count as reading.
It's just tweeting.
Blue-check users post way more text in a single post
than what even gets called a 'wall of text' on 5ch,
but you've only ever used anonymous forums
so you probably don't know that.
What's actually scary is people like this genuinely believing 5ch counts as 'proper reading.'
Fiction in general is too dumb to bother reading.
It's not the book itself that's highbrow — it's the person who reads it, understands it, and gains knowledge, sensitivity, and imagination from it who becomes a cultured person.
My parent was exactly this type and seemed to only read nonfiction.
Like with stage theater, maybe it'll end up with more and more people making it and fewer and fewer people watching it.
Seeing bald or gray-haired old men
casually reading digital comics in public like it's nothing
makes me wonder if adults these days have just gotten this childish.
Right,
same as how kamishibai (picture-card storytelling) became boring once manga caught on back in the day.
Still, manga gets adapted into anime, but it never goes the other way.
honestly, that's probably most people, lol.
I don't read books at all either, but I read a ton of economic news and sports articles on my phone —
stuff like Toyo Keizai, or Number for sports.
I think I spend more time reading text than watching video, honestly.
I think that's fine for adults,
but I really want elementary through high schoolers to read a lot of books and build up their reading comprehension.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The non-reading rate survey is conducted annually by the Japan School Library Association, and the core news here is that the rate topped 10% among elementary schoolers for the first time in 25 years. This time, manga was surveyed separately from book reading for the first time, and the finding that roughly 30% of elementary students said they don’t read manga either was reported as a new discovery. The thread split over where to draw the line — whether manga or online articles should count as “reading” — with some arguing kids actually spend plenty of time reading text via online news and social media, while others countered that reading only fragmented snippets of text is exactly what’s eroding long-form reading comprehension. One point readers can easily misread is that the non-reading rate measures “the share who read zero books in a month” — it’s not a survey denying that time spent reading online or reading manga has increased. It also wasn’t mentioned in the thread that, since the manga non-reading rate was included for the first time this round, there’s no past data to compare it against.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Elementary Schoolers’ ‘Zero Reading’ Tops 10% for First Time in 25 Years, Manga Hoped to Help but Nearly 30% Still ‘Don’t Read’.”
Leave a Reply