Why The Climber Took Seventeen Years to Reach English

I finished the first three omnibus volumes of The Climber last week, and somewhere in the third one - Buntaro Mori halfway up a rock face, alone, the way he always is - I caught myself thinking about something that had nothing to do with the story. The series ran in Japan from 2007 to 2011.¹ The English edition started showing up on shelves in April 2025.² That's a seventeen-year gap. For a beloved, award-winning seinen title by one of the most acclaimed artists in the medium, that delay is worth sitting with, because the reason it happened tells you almost everything about how Japanese comics actually move around the world.

Here's the assumption most readers carry, and it's wrong: that the lag between a Japanese release and an English one is mostly about translation - that the work is slow, the queue is long, and niche titles simply wait their turn behind the big hits. Translation is real labor, but it is not the bottleneck. A skilled team can localize a volume in weeks. The seventeen-year gap on The Climber has nothing to do with how hard the Japanese was to render into English. It has to do with money, risk, and the structure of the market you happen to be reading in. Let me take those in order.

The bet no one wanted to make in 2011

When The Climber finished its run in 2011, the single factor that determines whether a manga gets licensed abroad - the author's demonstrated commercial pull in the target market - did not yet exist for Shinichi Sakamoto. He was a tremendously skilled artist with essentially no Western name recognition. A North American publisher evaluating The Climber that year was looking at a seventeen-volume seinen mountaineering drama, in a demographic that has always sold thinner in English than shonen, by a creator nobody outside Japan had heard of. In cold acquisition terms, that is a frightening thing to license.

It's worth remembering when that decision would have been made, because the timing makes the caution look a lot more rational. The years immediately following The Climber's Japanese run were the worst stretch the English manga business has ever had. ICv2's annual figures showed manga sales in the US dropping 17% in 2008 and another 20% in 2009.³ The carnage that followed was not subtle: Broccoli Books folded in 2008; Central Park Media declared bankruptcy in 2009 after nearly two decades; in 2010, DC shut its CMX imprint, VIZ - one of the two largest publishers in the market - laid off roughly 40% of its staff, and small houses like Go! Comi and Aurora quietly disappeared.⁴ In 2011, the year The Climber could first have been picked up, Tokyopop itself - the company that had arguably built the American manga market - shut down its US publishing operation entirely.⁵ No one was hunting for a seventeen-volume niche seinen backlist in that environment. They were trying to survive.

What changed is Sakamoto. Over the following decade he produced Innocent and then #DRCL Midnight Children, and those titles built his reputation among English-language readers. By the time #DRCL was drawing Western attention, "the new Sakamoto" had become a name that moved units - and once a creator has proven pull, their backlist becomes a dramatically safer bet. The older work that was unlicensable in 2011 turns attractive precisely because the artist spent the intervening years becoming famous.

This is not a hunch about how editors think. It's the documented logic of the trade, and it runs in both directions. The standard advice given to creators trying to sell into Japan describes the identical mechanic: Japanese publishers are risk-averse and far more likely to license a property that has already proven itself in another market, so creators are told to build domestic success first and use sales figures and engagement metrics as proof of concept to de-risk the deal.⁶ Proven demand is the currency of licensing everywhere. Everyone in this business is waiting for someone else to demonstrate the audience is real before they spend the money.

The consequence is a genuinely strange pattern that I don't think most readers consciously notice: English audiences routinely meet a creator's catalog in reverse order of when it was made. Readers came to Sakamoto through his later, splashier work, and only then did the industry judge it safe to hand them the thing he made first. The chronology of discovery runs backward against the chronology of the career - and that's not a quirk, it's the predictable output of how licensing risk is priced.

Why French readers got there first

Now the part that surprised me most when I went looking. The Climber existed in French well before it existed in English; the series has a far longer European tail than its 2025 English debut suggests.

The lazy explanation would be that French is somehow "closer" to Japanese, or that French localizers are faster. That's nonsense - translation difficulty is not the variable. The variable is market structure: how large, how mature, and how risk-tolerant a given country's manga business is. And on that axis, France is one of the most remarkable manga markets on Earth.

France is consistently ranked the second-largest manga market in the world, behind only Japan.⁷ The numbers are startling next to population. France has roughly 67 million people to the United States' 330 million, yet French manga sales sit in the same broad range as American ones depending on the year and metric - meaning that per capita, France isn't merely ahead of the US, it laps it.⁸ One widely cited finding: about one in two comics sold in France is a manga, which makes French readers the heaviest manga buyers in the world after the Japanese themselves.⁹ France also hosts the Angouleme festival and a dense, decades-old web of established manga publishers.⁷

Depth like that changes the math on every acquisition. In a market where manga is a normal, mainstream, half-the-comics-shelf product, with a readership that buys deep into back-catalogs rather than only chasing the anime of the moment, a niche seinen title like The Climber is simply a less scary bet. The audience for serious adult mountaineering drama with extraordinary art is large enough and reliable enough in France that someone licenses it years before the same calculation pencils out in English. The American market, huge and fast-growing as it is, has historically been shaped around a narrower core - younger readers, shonen action, whatever the current adaptation is driving people toward - which makes it, in the relevant sense, shallower on the long tail. A seinen backlist title is exactly the kind of book a hits-driven market gets to last.

So the reframe is this: how fast you get a translated manga has almost nothing to do with the distance between your language and Japanese, and almost everything to do with how large and how confident your local manga industry is. A smaller country with a deeper, more manga-mature reading culture and lower acquisition friction beats a larger country with a more conservative, hit-chasing one. Population is not the variable. Market structure is.

In defense of the cautious

It would be easy to read all of this as an indictment - publishers are timid, they strand great art for decades, they should license everything good and trust the fans. But the caution is more defensible than it looks.

Licensing a manga is not free. Publishers pay an advance against royalties - money handed over up front that is only recouped if the book sells - on top of the real costs of translating, lettering, printing, and distributing every volume.¹⁰ And the downside isn't hypothetical: when a manga publisher fails, its licenses revert and unfinished series simply stop, sometimes stranding readers mid-story for years. That is precisely what the 2008-2011 collapse did to readers across dozens of titles - when Tokyopop lost its Kodansha licenses, popular series like Rave Master and Initial D were left unfinished and the existing volumes went out of print.¹¹ For a fan, the nightmare was never slow licensing. It was a beloved series getting axed at volume nine because the numbers stopped working.

Seen that way, waiting for a creator to prove their audience before committing to a seventeen-volume backlist isn't cowardice - it's the discipline that lets the series actually get finished once it's begun. The same risk-aversion that delayed The Climber for seventeen years is the reason I can be reasonably confident I'll get all seventeen volumes now that it's started, instead of being abandoned on a cliff face somewhere around volume twelve.

That doesn't make the system optimal. Plenty of genuinely great work never crosses over at all, because its creator never produced the breakout that retroactively made the catalog bankable. There are surely dozens of Climbers sitting untranslated right now, waiting on a Western reputation their authors may never earn. That's a real loss - but a loss that falls out of a rational process rather than a broken one, which is a far harder problem to fix than mere incompetence would be.

What the wait is actually telling you

Put it together and the picture is clean. When you find yourself reading a beloved manga a decade and a half after its Japanese debut, you are not looking at a translation backlog. You are looking at the end state of a chain of risk calculations: a publisher waited until the author was famous enough to de-risk the backlist, in a market that took years to mature into a place where a niche seinen title makes financial sense, after surviving an industry collapse that made everyone gun-shy in the first place.

The lag is not an accident, and it is not about how hard the words are to translate. It is a map of where demand was proven, when, and how confidently. France got The Climber sooner because its manga market was deep enough to take the bet earlier. English readers got it in 2025 because Sakamoto spent a decade making the bet safe.

Which means the more useful question, the next time some brilliant series still isn't in English, isn't "why is the translation taking so long?" It's "what would have to be true about this author's reputation, or about my market, for this bet to pencil out?" Answer that honestly and you can usually predict - with depressing accuracy - which untranslated masterpiece is going to keep waiting, and which one is about to turn up on the shelf as a surprise.

Mine finally turned up. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a mountain to get back to.

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Notes

1. The Climber (孤高の人, Koko no Hito) was serialized in Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump from November 2007 to October 2011, collected in 17 volumes. It is based on the novel by Jiro Nitta, with story by Yoshio Nabeta and Hiroshi Takano and art by Shin-ichi Sakamoto. Wikipedia: The Climber (manga); MyAnimeList: Kokou no Hito. ↩
2. VIZ Media has published the English edition under its VIZ Signature imprint as 2-in-1 omnibus volumes since April 15, 2025. MyAnimeList: Kokou no Hito; Amazon: The Climber, Vol. 1. ↩
3. ICv2's annual white papers reported US manga sales falling 17% in 2008 and a further 20% in 2009. Publishers Weekly, "Down, but Not Out: Manga Holds On in a Tough Market" (June 2010); EarlyWord, "Farewell to CMX" (May 2010). ↩
4. On the 2008-2010 shutdowns - Broccoli Books (2008), Central Park Media bankruptcy (2009), and the simultaneous closures of CMX, Go! Comi, and Aurora alongside VIZ's ~40% staff cuts in 2010 - see Publishers Weekly (June 2010) and EarlyWord (May 2010). ↩
5. Tokyopop shut down its US publishing operation effective May 31, 2011, after losing its Kodansha licenses and absorbing the collapse of Borders, then a primary manga retailer. Publishers Weekly, "Manga Pioneer Tokyopop Shuts Down U.S. Publishing" (April 2011); TIME, "Manga Revolution Apparently Over" (April 2011). ↩
6. On Japanese publishers' preference for properties with proven foreign-market success and the "build domestic success as leverage" strategy, see The Legacy Ghostwriters, "How to Sell Manga Rights to Japanese Publishers". ↩
7. France is ranked the second-largest manga market in the world and hosts the Angouleme International Comics Festival. Statista, "Manga in France - statistics and facts". ↩
8. On France's manga sales rivaling the US on far smaller population - and thus vastly outspending it per capita - see Kleefeld on Comics, "Worldwide Manga Sales", summarizing Kodansha International Rights Division figures. ↩
9. Roughly one in two comics sold in France is a manga, placing French readers second only to Japan in per-buyer consumption. YPulse, "French readers are now the second biggest consumer of manga". ↩
10. An advance against royalties is paid up front and recouped only against future sales. Wikipedia, "Advance against royalties". ↩
11. When Kodansha let its Tokyopop licenses lapse in 2009, series including Rave Master, Initial D, GetBackers, and Life were left unfinished and existing volumes went out of print; some titles were later rescued by Dark Horse, Del Rey, and Random House. Anime News Network (Aug. 2009); Anime News Network, "What Happens to a License When a Publisher Goes Under?". ↩