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I've found several sources that explain that mangakas (manga artists) have to work insanely long hours to meet their deadlines.

In this Quora answer, an assistant mangaka claims:

We were well-paid, but worked 16-hour days , about 20-25 days per month.

On the same page, another answerer says

The life of mangaka is basically non-stop working: about 14-15 hours every day in drawing, very popular mangakas sleeping about 3-4 hours of a day and have several hours of a week free time.

This blog article quotes the schedules for several mangaka of highly successful manga series.

Oda only sleeps 3 hours a day.

[...]

Here's the time schedule of Kishimoto when he was writing Naruto. On his inking days, the time spent on his desk totalled 19 hours a day.

From personal experience of working over 55 hours in a week, I find the claim to be unlikely.

Is this the the usual amount of work mangakas have to do in order to meet their deadlines?

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    What sort of evidence would you find convincing (in either direction)? I am not sure if we will find more reliable sources for this than blogs.
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Apr 22, 2017 at 16:27
  • At least 3 interviews signed by the author of the interview in some magazine where a "principal" mangaka (a mangaka that with a quick search on the internet can be checked that's a mangaka in any major web page dedicated, at least partially, to manga) states about his schedule, or a video interviewing at least 3 "principal" mangakas where that "principal" mangaka can be seen and states the same, or a total of 3 instances of any of the previous things, is convincing enough for me.
    – user2638180
    Apr 23, 2017 at 0:29
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    Three hours of sleep sounds unsustainably low - and keeping your employees in constant sleep deprivation is a horrible way to extract the maximum productivity out of them, even if you ignore the ethics side of things.
    – John Dvorak
    Apr 25, 2017 at 14:58
  • @JanDvorak I really hesitate to say this because it may sound uninformedly racist but there’s a lot about the Japanese work ethic that surprises non-Japanese. The question could justifiably be extended to, “do Japanese people in general work insane hours?”
    – Ahmed Fasih
    Apr 27, 2017 at 16:38

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