Card Captor Sakura influenced Negima in some elements as Akamatsu said one character is even designed like Tomoyo of CCS.

I remember that CLAMP promotes their work regardless of their original target audience you will see news about their series that ran in nakayoshi at the back of tsubasa and in X tankoubon you will see ads for CLAMP’s series that are serialized in newtype and newtype 100% comics magazine at the back of their asuka tankoubon like on X and also they have CLAMP no Kiseki that advertizes all their work.

I think all the possible factors you mentioned play a role, except perhaps for the “couple effect.” Among Japanese married couples, husbands and wives tend to be far more independent of each other, and influence each other’s leisure activities far less, than is the case in more “couple oriented” societies such as the U.S. and the U.K..

I don’t know where Paul got his data, but reliable figures for shôjo and women’s manga are very hard to come by. The most common source of such data gives figures for magazine sales by genre, but does not give sales figures of paperbacks by genre. Women and girls still tend to prefer paperbacks over magazines, and they also tend–more so than males–to read magazines in the bookstore and put them back on the shelf without buying them. Then there’s the fact that many so-called boys’ or men’s manga magazines (and paperbacks) actually have a very large female readership, though publishers would prefer to keep that fact quiet, for fear of alienating male readers. A lot of male readers of Shônen Jump have still not caught on to the fact that half the material in the magazine is specifically designed to appeal to female readers, so much so that it is often jokingly referred to as “Shôjo Jump.” So just looking at those charts of magazine sales by genre can be quite deceptive. You can get a better idea by just looking at the amount of shelf space alloted to male- and female-oriented manga magazines and paperbacks in a typical bookstore. It’s pretty much 50-50.

I wonder how much of the drop in manga reading with age reflects a drop in other activities women enjoy when younger, and how much it owes to the fact that women tend to take on more of the family’s domestic and societal commitments, especially for children and elders. Then there’s the couple effect – throughout the developed world, a woman in an established pair often drops or reduces activities not shared with her partner or spouse.

When I see Western leisure-time surveys, I’m always inclined to compare figures for time spent on hobbies with those reflecting time spent on various household tasks and on childcare. In Japan many women with school age children don’t work outside the home, but many also have responsibility for elders either in the home or outside it, and for tasks like condo committees or litter cleaning, which don’t stop when the children get older. So although we might think they have more control over their time than a British or American woman working to help keep the family afloat or get ahead in a career, that’s not necessarily the case.

Paul Gravett gave a talk in London yesterday in which he highlighted that the Japanese market for women’s and girls’ comics was much smaller than for boys. It’s still far larger than the English-language market for women’s material, but I suspect that the reason why it’s smaller than the male comic market are pretty similar.