Transforming Etiquette Awareness into a "Fun Learning Experience" Through Japanese "Manga Culture"! "MANGA MANNERS" Wins Good Design Award 2025

"MANGA MANNERS" (Kodansha), planned and produced by TBWA HAKUHODO (Minato-ku, Tokyo), has won the Good Design Award 2025.

The Good Design Award is Japan's leading design evaluation system, established in 1957. It evaluates a diverse range of fields, both tangible and intangible, including products, architecture, business models, services, and regional and educational activities. This year, 1,619 works were selected as award winners from 5,225 entries.

"MANGA MANNERS" is a project that utilizes Japanese "manga," which has fans worldwide, to redesign etiquette awareness from traditional "cautionary alerts" to a "fun learning experience." Against the backdrop of increasing foreign tourists and the emerging issues of improper waste disposal and public transportation congestion due to cultural differences, the project was created as an advertising series featuring popular characters from 17 works, including "Sailor Moon" and "Attack on Titan," to convey "manners for enjoying Japan even more" to people visiting Japan.

The project began displaying at Narita Airport in October 2024, and expanded to major Shinkansen stations including Tokyo, Shinagawa, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Shin-Osaka from April 2025. Through manga panel layouts and humorous presentations, the project achieved a design that can be intuitively understood beyond language barriers. "MANGA MANNERS" has generated significant buzz on social media and in the media, contributing to the formation of a sustainable inbound environment by promoting comfortable relationship-building for both tourists and local communities.

The judges highly praised it as "a new approach that fuses two Japanese customs—omotenashi (hospitality) and rule compliance—with the potential to be widely deployed in multicultural coexistence and international exchange settings."