What is Nakama? In summary, Nakama is a boy's love scanlation group. The word "Nakama" is the Japanese word used to denote "comrades" or "team mates". While it implies a more professional relationship than friends, it also offers a deeper bond by way of trust and dependence.

Scanlating is the process of scanning and translating manga from it's native language - usually from Japanese or Chinese, to English, French or German. Basically, scanlating is to manga, what fansubbing is to anime. It is a fan-driven, non-profit process as a way for fans to enjoy manga that has not yet been licensed overseas and would otherwise be unavailable. As with fansubbing, once a title has been licensed, it is usually dropped by the scanlation group. Nakama drops all licensed titles and kindly asks that all licensed titles no longer be distributed. Support the mangaka and keep the yaoi market strong by buying their work! ♥

Nakama uses the term "boy's love" to describe manga containing anything from hard yaoi to shounen-ai. There has long been debates in regards to the terms boy's love [or bl], yaoi and shounen-ai. Rather than get into all that here, if you are unfamiliar we suggest you check out places like Aestheticism, the YaoiCon site and Yaoi@Wikipedia to educate yourself and come to your own understanding.

Nakama History

Since its birth in 2003 Nakama has had one goal in mind. To share Hardcore Yaoi with the English speaking world. Back in 2003 there were few places to buy Japanese BL Manga, None of the English publishers had popped up and Yaoi loving fangirls had a very limited access to Yaoi / BL.

In the Years since Nakama's birth Yaoi has seen a huge surge of interest in the English speaking world. Not only do we have 3 Yaoi based conventions in the united states, we have publishers devoted to brining Yaoi / BL titles to the English speaking world. Be it Original English Yaoi and novels, Korea, Japanese or even Italian. There is a wide variety available through your local book sellers so we had to change our policies to address licensing issues.

Sadly with that growth we have also seen several Yaoi based publishers go bankrupt and leave the business. Even more companies have reduced their production rate and there are fewer new titles announced on the licensing list. I firmly believe the English yaoi market is not dieing but just finding a stable foothold in these economically uncertain times. English yaoi is here to stay.

The scanlation community has also grown from the few groups we counted as friends and rivals to a large variety. There are groups devoted to only releasing their choosen author, doujinshi only groups, fandom based groups, shota groups and the list goes on.

Nakama as a group had to step back and consider what kind of group we wanted to be. We were a speed releaser once, We have played the extreme no limits yaoi role, We tried the shoujo / yaoi role and with time we finally settled on what we want to offer from our little niche in the yaoi world.

Nakama wants to share with its fellow fans our favorite hand picked stories produced in the absolute best quality we can possibly offer as a testament to our respect and love for the Mangaka.

We hope you'll all stay with us for this new journey!