Orange Inc. (not to be confused with the anime studio Orange) has officially introduced its new manga app, emaqi, available as of May 28, 2025, on iOS/Android for fans in the United States and Canada. With over 13,000 volumes across 1,700 series from top publishers (including titles from across Kodansha, Kadokawa, VIZ Media, Yen Press, and more), along with nearly 50 exclusive titles on the way, emaqi “offers a fresh digital reading experience with intuitive discovery tools, making it effortless to find your favorites,” according to the official press release.
In Spring 2024, Orange Inc. arrived on North America’s manga scene, announcing that it had received 2.92 billion yen (approximately USD 20 million) in pre-Series A round funding from “Japanese publisher Shogakukan (publisher of Shonen Sunday manga magazine, and part owner of VIZ Media), and investment funds Globis Capital Partners, ANRI, SBI Investment, JIC Venture Growth Investments, Miyako Capital, Chiba Dojo Fund, Mizuho Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and GFR Fund.” At that time, the company hinted (via a press release) that it planned “to create a world where everyone enjoys manga,” through a digital manga publishing venture, emaqi, a play on “emaki,” or “emakimono,” the traditional Japanese picture scrolls—created about 800 years ago—often considered to be the origin of manga.
According to Orange Inc.’s press release in 2024, “The resources will go to increasing the pace of manga localization currently done in Japan roughly fivefold, to 500 titles per month,” and to ultimately “deliver entertainment through the Japanese manga art form and its rich history to generations to come.”
“I started [Orange, Inc.] because I wanted fans around the world to have the same opportunity to enjoy manga culture as we do in Japan,” says Shoko Ugaki, CEO & Founder of Orange. “More than 95% of manga published in Japan have never been released in English. We aim to change that by exposing more incredible manga works to overseas audiences.”
First launched as a digital manga webstore, Mangasplaining expert Deb Aoki reported on emaqi.com’s user experience in September 2024:
After convention appearances and previews of emaqi at Anime Expo in Los Angeles and Anime NYC, emaqi.com launched on September 3, 2024. Emaqi isn’t an all-you-can-read manga subscription site like Shonen Jump or Azuki or even a “some free, some pay-by-chapter” site like K-Manga or Mangamo. Emaqi offers ebooks for sale as complete volumes on an à la carte basis (meaning you pay $4.99 – $17.99 per volume) with the option to read sample chapters before purchase. This makes emaqi more like an ebook store, similar to Amazon Kindle, Bookwalker, or Rakuten Kobo. Like most other ebook stores, most of the manga you buy on emaqi can generally only be read on emaqi.com. Nothing new here.
A little over six months later, Orange Inc. has launched the official app companion to the emaqi.com website. In addition to housing an impressive selection of manga from major publishers, including VIZ Media, Kodansha USA, Yen Press, Akita Shoten, Futabasha, Shonen Gahosha, COAMIX, Nihon Bungeisha, and many more, the emaqi app will be the exclusive home to nearly 50 titles, including Anjo the Mischievous Gal, written and illustrated by Yūichi Katō, The Vampire Dies in No Time, created by Itaru Bonnoki, and Liverleaf by Rensuke Oshikiri. Even better, this exclusive lineup is set to grow to 100 never-before-translated manga by the end of 2025.
emaqi features easy-to-use discovery tools that simplify exploring and finding your favorite manga. “To help fans explore a massive library of manga across genres and worlds, emaqi has developed a novel solution to sampling new series,” reads the PR. “The app has a feature called ‘Dig,’ which allows users to progress through content with vertical swipes and quickly switch between different works with horizontal swipes, making it easy to discover new favorites. The app also features personalized recommendation functions.”
Additionally, the app will soon introduce “a smartphone-optimized reading experience, allowing you to adjust text size without ever spilling beyond speech bubble frames—ensuring that you can enjoy every detail of the manga without interfering with its original art and expressions.”
While emaqi uses a pay-per-title model with in-app purchases via the App Store and Google Play Store, “one-shot titles are available to read for free in their entirety,” and select titles offer a “Wait Until Free” system, which allows “readers to unlock one chapter every 23 hours at no cost.” After finishing the free chapters, users can purchase the remaining chapters.
To celebrate the launch of emaqi, the company is offering a limited-time campaign, running from May 28, 2025, at 12:00 PM to July 8, 2025, at 11:59 PM (EDT).
- Read up to 3 volumes for free from 10 of VIZ Media’s most popular series — including global hits like Naruto, My Hero Academia, and One Piece.
- Enjoy all emaqi-exclusive translated titles with a “Wait Until Free” model — unlock one chapter every 23 hours at no cost.
- Get 50% coin-back on purchases, up to 25,000 coins per user.
Orange Inc.’s AI-assisted manga localization tool caused an uproar
Orange Inc.’s business model is centered on its “dedicated manga localization tool, Factory. According to the company, “world-class machine learning engineers are leveraging deep learning models centered on computer vision and natural language processing to automate much of the time-consuming localization processes required to release foreign language versions.”
In 2024, Orange Inc.’s proprietary technologies were used for the English lettering (but not translation) on Rugby Rumble by Daisuke Miyata, a sports manga series on Shueisha’s Manga Plus website/app—a decision that was swiftly met with criticism from readers, freelance translators, and lettering professionals.
Individual creators have also used the AI-assisted manga translation technologies to simulpub chapters in English and Japanese. For example, Yajima, the Japanese manga creator of Neko Oji ni Tensei Shita no Ojian (The Guy Who Got Reincarnated as a Cat) used Orange Inc.’s AI manga translation services to simulpub Japanese and English versions of their online comic via their X/Twitter feed at @neko_oji_en for several months now:
Yajima is also the creative force behind Mr. Orange, a manga featuring an oversized talking citrus that illustrates Orange Inc.’s technological capabilities. On their X (formerly Twitter) feed, Yajima enthusiastically announced the partnership with Orange Inc., highlighting the unique approach of presenting a press release in manga format.
In the “Let’s Go Mr. Orange” manga, we meet Mr. Orange, a manga fan, who learns from Mr. Bean that it would take “10 billion yen and 10 years” to publish 10,000 manga series in English. Mr. Bean continues, “Translating manga is a massive undertaking that requires a ton of steps,” and involves editors, logo designers, translators, translation agencies, proofreaders, and “artists for phototypesetting” (a.k.a. lettering).
You can read the entire 12-page “Let’s Go Mr. Orange” manga in English, too.
Rei Kuroda, Orange Inc.’s VP of Product and Head of International, spoke to Comics Beat in 2024 about how their localization team, Studio Mikan, “co-works with AI-assisted technologies to bring more manga masterpieces” to readers worldwide.
“We want to create a world where everyone enjoys manga—this is the mission of Orange Inc.,” Kuroda told Aoki in 2024. “We’re just manga lovers first, and we want to deliver all kinds of manga to readers all over the world. This hasn’t changed. I also want to emphasize that we have always felt that the human touch is really important in this process.”
Kuroda continued, “Manga is created by human artists and authors for human readers and fans. The human touch is a really important aspect of localization. So, we’re using AI technologies to streamline the localization process. Everyone wants to focus on the AI aspect of this company, but what we want to do is to make the great masterpiece of a manga available to readers around the world, by offering it in English and, eventually, other languages. To do this, we do use AI technologies, but the manga we localize is the product of a lot of work by a lot of humans, myself included.”
When announcing the launch of the emaqi webstore, Orange Inc. offered readers a clearer understanding of the company’s plans for using AI for manga localization. In a September 3, 2024, press release, it says, “To maintain the integrity of the original works and build trust with the readers, artists and publishers over time, no more than 10 percent of the content on emaqi will be translated using AI support at launch, as the team continues to evaluate and refine its approach for the future.”
“To produce one localized volume of manga in another language requires several difficult, time-consuming, and complicated processes,” Kuroda explained about Orange Inc.’s decision to use AI to make Japanese manga readily available to audiences in the US and Canada (and Orange is hoping to expan in to even more countries in the future) who are primarily English-speaking. “What Orange is doing is using AI technology to try to streamline the more tedious tasks required for manga localization, so humans can spend more time focusing on what they do best.”
“For example, from the production side, erasing the Japanese original text from a manga page, AI-assisted automated tools are good for things like this,” continued Kuroda in his interview with Aoki in 2024. “On the translation side, we sometimes use Japanese-to-English translation that is 100% done by human translators, with no AI assistance. We also have some cases where we start with an AI-generated translation, and human translators will use that as a starting point to review and make edits or adjustments, if needed.”
Ultimately, when it comes to Orange Inc.’s manga localization, Kuroda clarified that a human makes the final decision:
It’s not like AI does this task; the human does another task. It’s always co-working. I always say it’s like Nobita-kun and Doraemon, or Luke Skywalker and R2D2: humans and technology co-working together. Translation is an art, and that’s why humans should continue to be involved in localizing manga from Japanese to other languages.
Orange Inc. is not the only company that has used AI-assisted technologies to “speed up” the pace of manga translation and localization. On social media, some readers and manga publishing professionals, including translators and letterers, have disputed the company’s use of AI to “produce the exclusive manga series they’re showcasing on their site,” arguing that “Orange’s claims of saving time and money for publishers, given that this would come at the expense of readability and would likely result in double work for less pay for translators, localization editors, lettering professionals,” according to Aoki.
They haven’t shied away from expressing their thoughts on the subject either. Here’s a sampling:
In response to criticisms over Orange Inc.’s decision to use AI, Kuroda has said:
We want to bring the great masterpieces of manga to readers in North America and readers worldwide as well. As a manga publisher, we want to respect the domestic fan culture and readers, and publish manga, just like any other manga publisher in the US and Japan. We don’t just want to do everything with AI – we think there’s always the need for the human touch to deliver the manga in other languages to the fans all over the world. I understand that many people will focus on the AI aspect of Orange, but that’s just part of the story. There’s always a human touch in everything we do. I think it is important to let the community know that.
“We also really want the manga community to know that we are manga fans ourselves and that we understand the sensitivity of the topic of AI,” Kuroda has said. “We’re listening and are doing our best to continue to improve ourselves, while leveraging the technology to support a passionate human team at Orange to help bring more manga to more people.”
Readers in the US and Canada can now download the emaqi app to iOS/Anroid at the following link: https://emaqi.go.link/7lF9p
