This division of labor caused cultural confusion when Europeans arrived. From the European point of view, farming was real work, while hunting and fishing were just recreational sports.

But a spokesman for the Cultural Affairs Division of Japan's Foreign Ministry attributed the decline to a change in the application schedule rather than any drop in interest in manga.

Prof. LIU Tik-sang is a cultural anthropologist teaching in the Division of Humanities and the Director of the South China Research Center at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.