For fiscal year 2009, Kodansha posted a heavy 5.7 billion yen ($64m) in losses, following FY2008's 7.7 billion yen ($86m) in losses. All that talk about the manga industry in trouble is clearly pointed at the Big K. I wonder, are they going to be pinning their hopes of success in FY2010 on all those Love Plus manga?

Part of the problem, I'm sure, are the poor returns they've gotten from their Kodansha USA division, who had $2 million in capital to run with. Declining sales in the homeland, along with a huge drop in advertising revenue from their print magazines has caused a majority of the damage. Perhaps if they had a better gameplan when coming into America, they would have been able to prop up the overall company's numbers a bit.

How the company is going to handle things this year, after a number of years of unprofitable performance, is yet to be seen, although I'm sure we'll be seeing more experimental titles getting cut. Instead, the more tried-and-true stories are the ones that will be greenlit in order to assure that the company stays in business.

Well, we can always hope for the US companies to take a heavier stake in the Japanese light novel front, can't we?