Recently, a Japanese account "Shiten Akiyama" is getting buzz for reaching out to, and getting positive response from, international fans for his manga who are willing to support him out-of-band:

https://x.com/shiten_room/status/2045819701511758010

Apparently he uploaded translations of his own manga to MangaDex before his publisher forced him to take it down. He posted that the sales of his book weren't great, but he supported overseas fans who wanted to read his work, and only asked them they throw some money into his Ko-Fi account if they couldn't buy it legally.

As a result, he now has almost a million yen in donations from the Ko-Fi, and the goodwill of a lot of overseas manga readers.

Part of me is suspicious that such a perfect example has fallen into our lap right in the middle of the whole Japan/copyright spat, but maybe he and his people were waiting for just this opportunity to make the same point I always wanted to make.

In either case, there's now a very solid counterargument to the "foreigners just want to steal our mangos" cope. I'm going to follow this gentleman's career with great interest.