Manga

In a major announcement made during Shueisha’s Jump Press livestream on Aug 19, 2024, it was revealed that Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter x Hunter manga will be returning to the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump in this year’s 45th issue, set for release on Oct 7, 2024.

This marks the first new chapter in nearly two years since Hunter x Hunter went on a hiatus following the release of chapter 400 in December 2022.

Left-to-right reading order.

Also see this English post about the Japanese Senator visit.

Context: In the past year there were pressure from VISA and Mastercard on shops selling content that can be considered adult; several sites tried to appease them by imposing restrictions on creators, but ultimately VISA and Mastercard stopped doing business with them (or vice versa), thus stopping those shops' ability to accept those forms of payment.

DL.Getchu.com is a Japanese shopping site for doujin manga, and was one of the shops that stopped (or was forced to stop) taking VISA and Mastercard. (Others shops include Toranoana, DLsite, FANZA doujin etc.)

People were concerned about these issues' impact on the freedom of expression. Several days ago, Japanese Senator Yamada Taro went to VISA HQ and confronted executives there. According to him, he was told (machine translation from the news article) "VISA headquarters does not make value judgments on the content handled by each site, etc., and if it does, it is at the site*. VISA also reported that it has never instructed them to stop handling content that contains specific terms (keywords)."

*at the site: the Japanese word used was 現場, on-site where the action happens, as opposed to far away in the back office or executive suite. Meaning if such judgments happened, it was done by somebody far lower and removed from HQ, or so they claimed.

A few days later, DL.Getchu.com announced that it will accept VISA again. It is unknown if it is related to the above, or if other sites will follow suit at this time.