A doujinshi convention is an event format at which individuals or small groups (circles) distribute and sell the doujinshi they have produced themselves. It functions as a foundational infrastructure of Japanese subculture and has played a decisive role in the distribution of adult content.

The birth of Comic Market (1975-)

Japanese doujinshi-convention culture begins with the first Comic Market, held in December 1975 at Toranomon Hall in Tokyo. It started small, with thirty-two participating circles and around six hundred attendees, but grew steadily as a twice-yearly event (summer and winter).

From early on, Comiket functioned as a place for the exchange and sale of self-made works outside the existing publishing distribution, and as a venue that tolerated the circulation of doujinshi with sexual content hard for commercial publishing to handle. The basic operating principles of freedom of expression and self-regulatory management have continued from the founding period to the present.

The 1980s: growth and the establishment of the adult category

In the 1980s, Comiket expanded rapidly, with attendance rising from ten thousand to fifty thousand to a hundred thousand. In this period the “erotic doujinshi” clearly established itself as a main component of doujinshi culture, and the separate operation of an “adult zone” began.

Around the late 1980s, new doujinshi-specific conventions began to appear across the country, and women-oriented “yaoi-line” conventions also rose, forming a diversified ecosystem of taste-specific events. Through several venue changes, the event eventually settled at Tokyo Big Sight from 1996, where it continues.

The 1990s: scale and the age of regulation

The 1990s were both the period of Comiket’s greatest scale and a time of repeated social problematization. The 1992 arrest in the Miyazaki Tsutomu case triggered criticism of sexual depiction of young girls, and the strengthening of adult-content regulation through prefectural youth-protection ordinances affected doujinshi conventions as well.

Comiket responded to external regulatory pressure by building self-regulation, including a ban on distributing adult works to those under eighteen and a mandatory adult-mark display on covers. This self-regulatory framework became the basis of present-day Comiket operation.

The 2000s onward: digitization and diversification

The spread of the internet and digital printing transformed doujinshi culture. A market for “digital doujinshi” and “doujin voice” formed, centred on DLsite, and circles active only online, without distributing at events, increased.

At the same time, conventions themselves diversified and specialized. Alongside Comiket, mid-sized events such as Comic One and Sunshine Creation, genre-specific “only” events, and regional events such as Kyushu Comic City developed, forming a nationwide doujin-culture infrastructure. Comiket recorded its largest scale of roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand attendees over three days in the winter of 2019, but was forced into cancellation, postponement, and scale reduction during the pandemic of 2020-2021.

See also

• Doujinshi
• Eromanga
• DLsite
• DL doujin culture