About

Hi, I'm Ren (Otaku Ren).

Why I love manga

Do you know how most kids in Japan first find manga?

I was born and raised in Japan, and I grew up alongside the Japan of the 1990s. In Japan, a home where grandparents, parents, and children all live together is called a "big family." The 90s were the years when that way of living was quietly giving way to the smaller nuclear family.

We lived in a slightly old-fashioned house of our own, with a TV, a motorbike, and a family car. Every week the TV showed Super Sentai and Kamen Rider. I watched them and wanted to be a hero.

Manga lived at the dagashiya, the little candy shop near my elementary school. For kids my age, manga meant CoroCoro Comic or Gangan, and I was a CoroCoro kid. After school and on weekends I'd go to the dagashiya, read manga standing right there in the shop, and laugh out loud. Then I'd spend my pocket money on that month's CoroCoro, take it home, open it again, and laugh all over again.

Why did I fall for manga? Partly because there is manga for every age. In CoroCoro, Dangerous Jii-san showed me how funny a page could be. In junior high and high school it was Weekly Shonen Jump: Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, Bleach, Naruto. Sometimes I laughed. Sometimes I felt the hero's struggle as my own. A serialized manga takes years to finish, so you grow up alongside the main character, and by the time the story ends, you're an adult.

I grew up without a father, so it was easy for me to see myself in the world of Naruto.

In Japan, manga isn't only fiction. Historical biographies become manga, and so do the classics. The manga version of The Tale of Genji helped me in high school, when I had to understand the world behind classical Japanese literature.

For me, manga has been more than stories. It taught me about life, kept me company through exam season, and even taught me something about love.

Why I started this site

One day, while I was swimming, a thought came to me: maybe there are manga that fans of manga and anime overseas still don't know about. (Maybe there aren't. But I suspect there are.) And if I could share manga with the world, people outside Japan might come to know Japan a little better.

I hope everyone who reads this site gets to know, and enjoy, manga, Japanese culture, and the things made here.

May manga be with you.

About MangaHaul

MangaHaul is where I write about manga I've read in Japan: essays on what makes a series work, and guides to the context Japanese readers take for granted. Now and then, I'll also cover goods from these series that are hard to find outside Japan.

What you'll find here

Every article is a guide: an essay or explainer about manga I've read, and the context Japanese readers take for granted. When a guide mentions goods I don't own, I say so.

Each article is marked as a Guide at the top. I only write about manga I have bought and read.

Affiliate links and images

MangaHaul does not currently work with any affiliate partners, and none of the links on this site earn a commission. If that changes, the Affiliate Disclosure will list each partner, and any article with affiliate links will say so at the top.

The images on this site are my own photos and illustrations. I don't upload pages or panels from manga. When an article shows a panel, it is embedded from Alu (alu.jp), which shares panels with permission from the publisher and the author.

MangaHaul is an independent site. It is not run by, or officially connected to, any shop or publisher it mentions.

I registered the mangahaul.com domain in 2026. This site has no connection to any earlier website that used the same domain name, and it does not host manga chapters.

Contact

Questions or corrections? See the Contact page.