Ohta Publishing
Japanese publishing company
Ohta Publishing Company (太田出版, Ōta Shuppan) is a Japanese publishing company. With a number of controversial books that disturbed the Japanese society and its erotic manga comics, the company has established itself like a source of provocative "subculture" items.
History
Ohta Publishing was created in 1985, when it separated from the publishing department of Ohta Production, a talent agency specializing in stand-up comedians. (Founded as a yūgen-gaisha, it has, as of 2013, been converted to a kabushiki gaisha.)
Initially, from an outside perspective, Ohta Publishing did not seem like a serious company but rather a sort of toy company of Takeshi Kitano (who was an Ohta Production artist back then). It released books that were of interest to Kitano himself.
In 1989, Ohta published the famous book The Age of M about serial child murderer Tsutomu Miyazaki and started establishing itself like a source of provocative "subculture" items. Around the same time, the bi-monthly magazine QuickJapan was founded. In 1993 Ohta released the book The Complete Manual of Suicide and in 1999 Battle Royale, which shook Japanese society.
At the end of the 1990s, the company also started working with manga artist Naoki Yamamoto, dubbed the master of erotics, and founded the manga magazine Manga Erotics. Its successor Manga Erotics F now accounts for a large percentage of all company's manga sales.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ohta Publishing” is japanese publishing company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ohta, Publishing and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “japanese publishing company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3349906. VIAF identifies the subject as 41146936614513780507. The Library of Congress control number is n89142885. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2013, 1989 and 1993.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Ohta Publishing”, its source revision and the description used here.
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Ohta Publishing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.