Wikipedia has agreed for many years that there are different views about manga’s history– those who start from the postwar years (the 1950s) and those who see continuity in manga as sequential art and go back much further. Some (your prof included) see it as starting in the late 19th century, or the early 20c century.

After reading (pdfs here) 1) Schodt’s Chapter 2 “A Thousand Years of Manga”; 2) Gravett’s 2nd chapter “Japanese Spirit, Western Learning” and 3) Ito’s article, what is your stance?

How far back does the history of manga go? What about the Frolicking Animals scroll or Hokusai Manga? How about kibyōshi and other forms of illustrated fiction?

What are the factors that are important? Sequential art? Style? Japanese origins?

Why is there so much disagreement about talking about the history of manga?

A History of Manga in the Context of
Japanese Culture and Society

K INKO ITO

M
ANGA, OR JAPANESE COMIC ART, IS A HUGE AND LUCRATIVE BUSINESS
that is truly popular in Japan. Nowadays, it is also exported
to many countries, influencing their popular cultures, chil-

dren, youth, and the ways of the people. In this article, I briefly explore
a history of Japanese manga, how it reflected events in Japanese society
during various historical periods, and how it came to be what it is
today.

Manga has humor, satire, exaggeration, and wit. The comic art
includes caricature, cartoon, editorial cartoon, syndicated panel, daily
humor strip, story-manga, and animation. Like any other form of visual
art, literature, or entertainment, manga does not exist in a vacuum. It is
immersed in a particular social environment that includes history,
language, culture, politics, economy, family, religion, sex and gender,
education, deviance and crime, and demography. Manga thus reflects
the reality of Japanese society, along with the myths, beliefs, rituals,
tradition, fantasies, and Japanese way of life. Manga also depicts other
social phenomena, such as social order and hierarchy, sexism, racism,
ageism, classism, and so on.

The Japanese Character

Contrary to popular Western belief, the Japanese are a very comical
people who love jokes and funny stories. The stereotypical images of
the Japanese worldwide are based on the assumption that they are
serious, reserved, diligent, determined, successful, and rigid. Many

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2005
r 2005 Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and
PO Box 1354, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

456

people may also perceive them as economic animals, domineering,
cold, calculating, oversexed, cunning, and unfriendly. Both positive
and negative Japanese images abound, but generally the Japanese are a
humorous, witty, and funny people once they bring down the formal
façade that they project to others, especially foreigners.

The Japanese Language, Communication, and Manga

The Japanese culture belongs to what American anthropologist Edward
Hall calls ‘‘the high context culture,’’ in which people prefer to use
more implicit, unclear, and ambiguous messages whose meanings are
found in the context, rather than explicit, clear, and straightforward
messages. According to Japanese anthropologist Masao Kunihiro,
‘‘English is intended strictly for communication. Japanese is primarily
interested in feeling out the other person’s mood’’ (‘‘The Devil’s
Tongue’’). Japan is a small island nation with a long history, and the
people are homogeneous. In contrast, the United States, according to
Hall, belongs to ‘‘the low context culture,’’ in which messages them-
selves are important and everything must be spelled out.

Japanese communication, being in the high context culture, relies
more on contextual cues such as facial expressions, gestures, eye glanc-
es, length and timing of silence, tone of voice, and grunts, all of which
can be expressed in manga very eloquently. The high context commu-
nication depends more on visual and auditory cues. The Japanese lan-
guage offers ample opportunities for word play, such as puns and
double entendres, thanks to the abundance of homonyms and ono-
matopoeia. Both classical and contemporary Japanese literature, wheth-
er a novel, a haiku poem, or a play, attest to this point.

Japanese onomatopoeia is usually written with katakana, a form of
Japanese characters. Japanese onomatopoeia is ‘‘much more integrated
in the picture than western typography is capable of . . . Japanese
characters are just as much a product of artistic activity as the sur-
rounding drawing. It is calligraphy’’ (Pollman 12–13). As part of the
picture in manga, the onomatopoeia is capable of ‘‘building up atmos-
phere and dynamics’’ (18). It also represents the psychological and
emotional state of the characters. Japanese onomatopoeia is ‘‘often used
to make precise the feelings one wants to convey on specific occasions
or actions’’ (Marechal 149).

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 457

Manga in Ancient Times

Manga and humor have a very long history in Japan. For example,
Horyuji Temple was built in 607 CE in the ancient capital of Nara.
Buddhism was officially introduced to Japan in 552 CE from Paekche,
a southwestern Korean kingdom. Horyuji Temple burned in 670 CE,
and was gradually rebuilt by the beginning of the eighth century.
Horyuji is the oldest wooden structure in Japan, and probably the
oldest in the world. Caricatures of people, animals, and ‘‘grossly ex-
aggerated phalli’’ (Schodt, Manga! 28) were found on the backs of
planks in the ceiling of the temple during repairs in 1935. These
caricatures are among the oldest surviving Japanese comic art.

Manga in the Middle Ages

Bishop Toba (1053–1140) is said to have painted with brush and ink
‘‘the Animal Scrolls’’—humorous pictures of birds and animals—in the
middle of the twelfth century. The monochromatic narrative picture
scrolls consist of four volumes, and the first volume is considered
the best. The scrolls depict caricatured beings such as frogs, hares,
monkeys, and foxes engaging in everyday human activities, parodying
the decadent lifestyle of the Japanese upper class of the period.

In one of the pictures, a frog is wearing priest’s vestments and has
prayer beads and sutras, and some ‘‘priests’’ are losing at gambling or
playing strip poker. The narrative and originally painted picture scrolls
are national treasures of Japan, along with other scrolls such as Gaki
Zoshi (‘‘hungry ghost scrolls’’) drawn in the middle of the twelfth
century, and Jigoku Zoshi (‘‘hell scrolls’’) painted at the end of the
twelfth century. The viewing of these scrolls was limited to a handful
of people, including ‘‘the clergy, the aristocracy, and the powerful
warrior families’’ (Schodt, Manga! 32).

Manga in the Tokugawa Period (1603–1867)

The town of Otsu near Kyoto sold Otsue, or ‘‘Otsu pictures,’’ to people
who were traveling on the main road from Kyoto to the north in the
mid-seventeenth century. Otsue began as simple Buddhist pictures for
prayer and as a form of souvenir talisman, but later included secular,

458 Kinko Ito

uninhibited, comical, and satirical themes. They were printed using a
primitive form of printing and were available to ordinary people
(Shinmura).

The publication of Tobae pictures, a style of witty and comical car-
icature of Japanese everyday life, began in Kyoto during the Hoei
period (1704–1711). The name Tobae stems from Bishop Toba. The
publication of Tobae books in Osaka marked the start of the commer-
cialization of manga at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They
were printed using woodblock and spread from Osaka to Kyoto,
Nagoya, and then to Edo (today’s Tokyo) during the Tokugawa period
(1603–1867). Osaka was then a city center where publishing busi-
nesses were flourishing with a rapidly increasing urban population.

From the Genroku period (1688–1704) to the Kyoho period
(1716–1736), so-called Akahon became very popular. Akahon literally
means ‘‘a red book’’ with a red front cover. In its inception, Akahon was
a picture book based on fairy and folk tales such as ‘‘The Peach Boy,’’
‘‘The Battles of the Monkey and the Crabs,’’ ‘‘The Sparrow’s Tongue,’’
‘‘Click-Clack Mountain,’’ and ‘‘How the Old Man Lost His Wen.’’
Later, Akahon became a picture book for adults even though the main
portion of the book consisted of pictures, not text. Tobae books also
became popular because they were like the variations of Akahon.Manga
became a commodity to be sold to the public, whether it was hand-
drawn or woodblock printed.

Frederik Schodt (Sex and Violence) considered that manga is the direct
descendant of kibyoshi and ukiyoe. Kibyoshi, or ‘‘yellow-jacket books’’—
like Akahon (a red book), Kurohon (a black book), and Aohon (a blue
book) that preceded them—grew out of picture books for children. The
yellow-jacket books later referred to popular reading materials with
pictures that were published during the An’ei period (1772–1781).
Kibyoshi contained jokes, satire, and cartoons for adults.

Ukiyoe literally means ‘‘the pictures of the floating world,’’ and it is a
genre of popular folk pictures. It was especially popular among the
urban merchant caste, the leaders of the Tokugawa culture. The mer-
chants’ art and leisure activities that revolved around the urban
amusement quarters were characterized by hedonism. In the early stage
of its development, there were original paintings of ukiyoe, but it was
through the woodblock-printing version that ukiyoe as art blossomed
and truly became popularized starting in the late seventeenth century.
The most common subjects of ukiyoe included actors, famous beauties,

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 459

and sumo wrestlers, as well as landscapes, birds, and historical
themes. In 1765, Harunobu Suzuki began multicolor woodblock
printing, and this was the beginning of the golden age of color prints
(Reischauer).

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) is a very famous ukiyoe artist
whose masterpieces include woodblock pictures of flowers and birds.
Among his works are ‘‘The 36 Sceneries of Mt. Fuji,’’ which are mul-
ticolored ukiyoe woodblock prints, and illustrations for novels and other
original paintings and drawings of Japanese beauties and samurai.
Hokusai published his fifteen-volume Hokusai Manga at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, when he was fifty-four years old. Hokusai
used the so-called Tobae style, which depicted humans with long,
skinny limbs, in his ‘‘Furyu Odoke Hyakku,’’ but he did not use the
style in his Hokusai Manga. Hokusai started caricature that criticized
the establishment after the Tempo period (1830–1844). The period
was characterized by famine, a rise in prices, and peasants’ riots. In
Hokusai Manga volume twelve, published in 1834, Hokusai caricatured
the aristocratic and samurai class.

Hokusai was the first to coin the term manga, and his book became a
best-seller. Manga began permeating people’s everyday lives, along
with ‘‘Giga Ukiyoe’’ (funny picture ukiyoe) and newspapers with illus-
trations. In 1867, the last year of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Jap-
anese government displayed Hokusai Manga and other picture books at
the World Exposition in Paris (Schodt, Manga!; Schodt, Sex and Vi-
olence; Shimizu; Shinmura; Yasuda).

A certain genre of ukiyoe was also popular during the Tokugawa
period: shunga (spring drawings), whose woodblock print pictures show
shamelessly uninhibited Japanese sexuality and erotic materials. Shunga
also served as sex education manuals for new brides-to-be (Wilson).
This tradition can be found in many contemporary adult manga
for both men and women (Ito, ‘‘Images’’; Ito, ‘‘Sexism’’; Ito, ‘‘The
World’’).

Charles Wirgman (1832?–1891) created and published The Japan
Punch in Yokohama in 1862. Wirgman was a British correspondent for
the Illustrated London News from 1861 to 1887. He was also a cartoonist
and taught oil painting to Japanese students. Wirgman reported sev-
eral important historical events of the day in his magazine: the Nama-
mugi Incident, in which some British men were attacked and killed by
the samurai from Satsuma in 1862; the Satsuma-British War in 1863

460 Kinko Ito

(a consequence of the incident in the previous year); the bombing of
Shimonoseki by the fleets of Britain, the United States, France, and
Holland (1863–1864); and Harry Smith Parke’s (British ambassador
to Japan) meeting with the last Tokugawa Shogun Yoshinobu in Os-
aka. Much conflict existed among the Tokugawa Bakufu government,
anti-Bakufu forces, and the Western nations at the end of Tokugawa
Shogunate; the conflict was a very appropriate subject for Wirgman’s
manga. This was also the time when Western ships made ominous visits
to Japan, demanding that Japan open its ports. The Japanese govern-
ment was obliged to sign unequal treaties with the West, and the
power of the government began to decline.

The Japan Punch lasted twenty-five years and totaled 2,500 pages. It
was very popular among the foreigners living in the settlements, as
well as the Japanese residents. The Japan Punch is also a very important
historical document and is indispensable for understanding the rapidly
changing Japanese society at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the
beginning of the Meiji Restoration, the history and development of
the foreign settlement in Yokohama, and the diffusion of Western cul-
ture into Japan (Reischauer; Schodt, Manga!; Shimizu).

The term ponchi (stemming from the English word ‘‘punch’’) began
to refer to what we call manga today. Words such as Tobae, Otsue, and
Kyoga (‘‘crazy pictures’’), all of which referred to caricature and witty
pictures, were replaced by the term manga. Interestingly, Wirgman’s
manga, which often employed word balloons for his cartoons, influ-
enced many native Japanese artists, such as Kyosai Kawanabe.

A French-style humor magazine called Tobae was published in the
foreign settlement in Yokohama in 1887 by George Bigot (1860–
1927), a French painter. He studied at the National Academy of Fine
Arts in Paris and was influenced by japonisme (Japanism). Other Eu-
ropean artists who were influenced by the Japanese prints from the
mid- to late nineteenth century included Monet, Manet, Gauguin, and
other impressionists, as well as Van Gogh. The diffusion resulted in the
development of new painting techniques of realism. The Tobae mag-
azine was published twice a month for three years and satirized Jap-
anese government and society. It was only possible because the foreign
settlements had extraterritorial jurisdiction rights. Bigot, whose
narrative patterns were arranged in sequence, began influencing the
development of modern Japanese comics along with Wirgman’s manga
(Shimizu).

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 461

Manga in Modern Japan

Manga and Politics

One of the most important functions of Japanese manga in its long
history is satire, and the satire of authority was most dynamic during
the civil rights and political reform movement known as the Freedom
and People’s Rights Movement, which started at the beginning of the
Meiji period (1868–1912).

Taisuke Itagaki, Shojiro Goto, and Shimpei Eto, the leaders of the
new Meiji politics formed the first political party Aikoku Koto in 1874
after they submitted a proposal for the establishment of the National
Assembly. These men were highly influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau
and the liberal British philosophers of the day. Around this time,
‘‘Manga journalism,’’ which satirized the period and Meiji politics,
appeared in the Japanese newspapers and magazines. Manga began
influencing Japanese politics, and in 1874, Eshimbun Nihonchi (‘‘picture
newspaper Japan’’) was published. The magazine imitated The Japan
Punch. In 1875, the Japanese government issued Zanboritsu and Shim-
bunshi Jorei (‘‘slander law’’ and ‘‘the press laws’’), which censored and
controlled speech and journalism (Reischauer; Shimizu; Shinmura;
Yasuda).

The antigovernment Freedom and People’s Rights Movement and
manga played important roles in developing freedom of speech. Things
not allowed to be voiced aloud could be expressed in manga drawings.
In 1877, Fumio Nomura, a samurai from Hiroshima, began publishing
the Maru Maru Chimbun, a weekly satire magazine covering current
events for the Dandansha Company. Chimbun, which means ‘‘novel
gossip’’ or ‘‘novel story,’’ rhymes with shimbun, or newspaper. The ob-
jects of Nomura’s satire were not limited to the government, and they
often included the emperor and the royal family. The Japanese gov-
ernment tried to oppress him, but the magazine increased its sales as
the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement became more popular.
According to Shimizu, Tobae magazine cost eighty sen, whereas Maru
Maru Chimbun cost only five sen. Of course, the magazine targeted
those who were interested in satire and who could afford it—Japanese
intellectuals, journalists, and those involved with the French schools
(Shimizu 95). Maru Maru Chimbun, on the other hand, was for the
masses.

462 Kinko Ito

Manga and Technology

Various factors contributed to the emergence of mass production of
manga satire in a very short time, among which is the advent of zinc
relief printing, copperplate printing, lithography, metal type, and
photo engraving technology (Shimizu). The development of infra-
structures such as transportation and mail service, and the heightening
of the civil rights movement also contributed to the process. Manga
truly became a medium of the masses.

Manga and the American Influence

Rakuten Kitazawa (1876–1955) and Ippei Okamoto (1886–1948)
helped popularize American cartoons and comic strips. Kitazawa drew
manga for The Box of Curios, an English-language weekly published in
the foreign settlements in Japan, and he started working for the Jiji
Shimpo Company in 1899 after Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of the found-
ing fathers of modern Japanese society, discovered his talent. Kitazawa
created Tokyo Pakku (‘‘Tokyo Puck’’), a monthly color cartoon maga-
zine, in 1905. Kitazawa’s style was sophisticated, refined, and real, and
it led to his wealth and fame. His success motivated many youths to
draw manga as an occupation. Okamoto joined the Asahi Shimbun
Newspaper Company in 1912, and started drawing manga.

It was in the 1920s and 1930s when modern Japanese manga began
to blossom. Many manga artists, including Kitazawa and Okamoto,
traveled to the United States and other countries. The United States
had become a leader in comics in the early twentieth century. The New
World, established by Joseph Pulitzer, started ‘‘Yellow Kid’’ comic
strips in 1896, and serial comic strips became a definite part of Amer-
ican newspapers. Kitazawa started a Japanese version of ‘‘Yellow Kid’’
in the Jiji Shimpo newspaper’s Sunday edition. He wanted to make that
edition something that all members of a family could enjoy. The manga
for children was considered an important factor in increasing sub-
scriptions to newspapers. Kitazawa’s characters were printed on playing
cards and made into dolls. The year 1923 saw the emergence of na-
tional manga heroes in Sho-channo Boken (‘‘The Adventures of Little
Sho’’) and Nonkina Tosan (‘‘Easy-going Daddy’’). In the 1930s, fat
monthly children’s magazines started including serialized comics
whose episodes ran to a few dozen pages (Schodt, Manga!; Shimizu).

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 463

Manga and Oppression

The Taisho period (1912–1926) saw the rapid rise of parliamentary
power and the leadership of party cabinets. This period was also char-
acterized by urbanization; the emergence of a new class of well-edu-
cated white-collar workers and a new Westernized lifestyle; the spread
of democracy; new humanistic, aesthetic, and proletarian literatures; an
increase in higher education; and the development of a strong, self-
confident business community (Reischauer).

However, during the 1920s and 1930s, the government also started
to have more control over speech and thoughts. It established the Peace
Preservation Law in 1925. After 1931, the law was enforced with the
‘‘thought control’’ police. Those artists and editors who harbored sub-
versive and ‘‘dangerous’’ ideas were intimidated, and many were im-
prisoned. After the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai on May 15,
1932, freedom of speech, thought, and scholarship were taken away
from the Japanese people, and communist, socialist, and liberal
thoughts were oppressed. Some manga artists and the editors were
among those who were forced to recant their ‘‘dangerous thoughts,’’
along with other intellectuals, leftist political and labor leaders, and
students. According to John Lent, ‘‘Cartoonists who attack the state or
the established order have always faced problems—risking death, in-
jury, and other forms of harassment and torture’’ (7).

Manga and the War

After the so-called Manchurian incident, an outbreak of war with
China in 1937, Japanese totalitarian militarism escalated. This resulted
in international outcry against Japan. In December 1938, the Japanese
government issued a book with cartoons depicting the Manchurian
incident. The book appeared in newspapers in the United States,
France, Britain, Argentina, and Canada. The cartoons were unfavorable
to Japan, and the book had ‘‘Private’’ printed on its cover. It was
distributed only among a limited segment of the government officials
who needed to know how the other nations viewed Japan at the time
(Hirschmeier and Yui; Reischauer; Schodt, Manga!; Shimizu; Yasuda).

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and went to war
with the United States.Manga went to war, too. As the war and the US
embargo progressed, materials such as paper became scarcer, and space

464 Kinko Ito

was no longer allocated for manga in the newspapers. Many cartoonists
were drafted and had to leave Japan for war zones such as China, Java,
Burma, the Philippines, and Borneo. According to Schodt, they ‘‘cre-
ated reports for the public back home, propaganda leaflets for the local
populace, and leaflets to be dropped over enemy lines’’ (Manga! 57).
Many also engaged in creating erotic leaflets to be dropped to the
Western troops in order to decrease the morale and fighting efficiency
of soldiers who were worried about the faithfulness of their women
back home (Schodt, Manga!; Shimizu).

Many other manga artists sought refuge in the Japanese countryside
in order to avoid metropolitan bombing attacks, and still other
manga artists died in air raids and from war-related wounds and
diseases. The war ended on August 15, 1945, with Japan’s uncondi-
tional surrender.

Zosan Manga (‘‘increasing production comics’’), a new genre of
manga, emerged during World War II. As the name suggests, the
manga was used to promote the workers’ willingness to maintain and
increase industrial output, which was one of the government’s primary
concerns. In June 1944, Etsuro Kato edited and published Kinroseinenga
Egaita Zosan Mangashu (‘‘Collection of Zosan [increase production]
Manga Drawn by Working Youth’’). Kato published an instructional
book for drawing manga in 1942, and he was also engaged in pro-
moting groups of working youth who were interested in drawing
manga. Interestingly, Kato used to draw the so-called proletariat manga,
or left-wing manga, before the war, but he switched his position and
went along with the Japanese government during WWII. There was
simply too much control of thoughts and speech at the time.
To keep drawing manga, the Japanese artists had to conform to the re-
quirements set by the government. In 1948, three years after the un-
conditional surrender, Kato joined the Japanese Communist Party. As
Karl Marx cleverly observed, the ruling ideas of the society are the
ideas of the ruling class, which was the Japanese military at the time of
the war.

Manga after WWII

The kind of manga that emerged after WWII reflected what was going
on in Japanese society—politics, culture, economy, and race and ethnic
relations—at the time of publication.

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 465

In the years following the end of war, there was a rush to found new
manga magazines, including Manga Kurabu (‘‘Manga Club’’), VAN, The
Kodomo Manga Shimbun (‘‘Children’s Manga Newspaper’’), The Kuman-
bati (‘‘The Hornet’’), Manga Shonen (‘‘Manga Boys’’), Tokyo Pakku (‘‘To-
kyo Puck’’), and Kodomo Manga Kurabu (‘‘Children’s Manga Club’’).
This manga boom lasted about three years. The majority of Japanese
people were hungry and poor right after the war; they were not satisfied
with the government politics, and had fears and uncertainty about the
future. The country was devastated, and the people were starving for
entertainment and humor. Manga was easily affordable, and the newly
emerging civil society after the unconditional surrender and the seven-
year US occupation provided an abundance of topics for satire.

The headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur’s allied occupation
censored manga, so there is almost no manga that satirized the general.
Nevertheless, the Allied Powers gave Japanese political artists more free-
dom than ever before. Emperor Hirohito, along with other royal family
members, were caricatured in many Japanese manga magazines such as
‘‘Shinso’’ (‘‘The Truth’’) and the leftist ‘‘Kumanbati’’ (‘‘The Hornet’’)—not to
mention in many editorial cartoons of other European nations and the
United States from between the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–
1905) to World War II. It was only during this time, and during the
Freedom and People’s Rights Movement in the nineteenth century, that
the emperor and the royal family were openly satirized.

Children’s manga started to become more popular starting in the
early 1950s. Many masterpieces of manga targeting children were pro-
duced at this time by Osamu Tezuka, Eiichi Fukui, and Shigeru
Sugiura. Tezuka’s Shin Takarajima (‘‘New Treasure Island’’) was pub-
lished in 1947. With 200 pages, it dazzled young readers and sold
more than 400,000 copies. Tezuka is considered the founder of modern
Japanese manga, and his comics that used cinematic techniques had a
tremendous amount of influence on postwar manga artists (Schodt,
Manga!; Shimizu).

Story manga became very popular after World War II. American
cartoons such as Blondie, Crazy Cat, Popeye, Mickey Mouse and Don-
ald Duck, and Superman were translated into Japanese and introduced
to Japan. The people longed for the rich American lifestyle that was
blessed with material goods and electronic appliances. Manga Dokuhon
(‘‘Readers’’) started at the end of 1954, and it caused the second manga
boom after World War II.

466 Kinko Ito

A new genre and technique of manga called gekiga (or ‘‘drama pic-
tures’’) emerged in 1957. Manga artists such as Yoshihiro Tatsumi and
Takao Saito referred to their art as gekiga rather than manga because
their manga read much like novels, with very realistic and graphic
pictures. Gekiga emphasizes the seriousness of the drama, and the
comical aspect rarely appears. Gekiga appealed to junior and senior high
school students and, later, to university students as the young
readers aged.

Sanpei Shirato’s Ninja Bugeicho (‘‘Secret Martial Arts of the Ninja’’)
was serialized between 1959 and 1962. It dealt with various social
issues in a feudalistic setting and attracted many university students
and adults. Seventeen volumes of Ninja Bugeicho—about 6,000 copies
each—were published. Shirato’s manga was read very widely by those
readers who frequented manga book rental stores. These pay libraries
were just like today’s video rental stores, and they numbered 30,000
nationally. The manga rental market died in the 1960s. Fast-paced,
wacky gag comics full of parodies started to be very popular at this
time. Fujio Akatsuka became ‘‘the king of gag comics.’’ Both the
violence in gekiga and unproductiveness of the gag comics were at-
tacked as a bad influence on children’s morale and behavior (Ito, ‘‘The
Manga’’; Schodt, Manga!).

In March 1959, Kodansha, one of the largest publishing companies
in Japan, began publishing Shonen Magajin, the first weekly comic
magazine designed for boys and young adults. Shonen literally means
‘‘boy/boys,’’ and Magajin is ‘‘magazine.’’ The magazine had a few hun-
dred pages of manga. Shonen Magajin was primarily targeted at young
males, but girls also enjoyed reading it.

Shogakukan started publishing its weekly manga magazine Shonen
Sande (‘‘Boys’ Sunday’’) in April 1959, only one month after Shonen
Magajin. These two weekly magazines were not so radically different
from the existent monthly manga magazines for boys, and the sales
were not very good until the emergence of Kyojin no Hoshi (‘‘Star of the
Giants’’—a baseball player’s story) and Ashita no Jo (‘‘Jo of Tomor-
row’’—a boxer’s story) in Shonen Magajin in 1966 and Shonen Sande in
1968, respectively. The stories in these two sports-guts comics series
were written by the same individual under two different pen names,
Ikki Kajiwara (‘‘Star of the Giants’’) and Asao Takamori (‘‘Jo of To-
morrow’’). The pictures were drawn by Noboru Kawasaki (‘‘Star’’) and
Tetsuya Chiba (‘‘Jo’’).

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 467

‘‘Star of the Giants’’ was the story of Hyuma Hoshi, a boy who grew
up to be a famous and successful baseball player for the Tokyo Giants.
The story also featured Ittetsu Hoshi, his Spartan father, who had
played for the Giants years before. Hyuma had to go through many
tough training sessions with his father. In ‘‘Jo of Tomorrow,’’ Danpei
Tange, an ex-boxer, finds boxing talents in Jo Yabuki, a young boy sent
to a juvenile detention center. Tange sends Jo postcards with boxing
techniques, and Jo learns them and tries them out. Jo realizes that he is
capable of winning in boxing matches and gains confidence.

Both Hyuma and Jo had guts to overcome difficulties to achieve
their dreams. They always worked hard even though their efforts did
not always end successfully. Sweat, blood, and tears often symbolized
their great efforts in the manga, and the Japanese could easily identify
with their efforts to succeed. ‘‘You always do your utmost best in any
situation’’—this was the message that ‘‘Star of the Giants’’ and ‘‘Jo of
Tomorrow’’ sent to the readers and the nation as a whole. The stories
were about human growth, growing pains that accompany it, hard
work, dogged efforts, and perseverance. Both of these manga were made
into TV animation and became instant hits (Otsuka & Sasakibara;
Schodt, Manga!).

The Japanese government declared in the Economic White Paper of
1956 that the country was no longer in a postwar period. Japanese
economic and industrial growth began in the late 1950s and early
1960s, and the people were very optimistic. It was the time when
Japan finally started to catch up with the West. Toward the end of
1960, the government published a policy paper titled ‘‘National In-
come Doubling Plan,’’ which was attained within seven years. The
1960s saw an astonishing growth in the gross national product, whose
annual rate was over 10% over a period of 10 years. In 1964, the
Olympic Games were held in Tokyo, and the International World
Exposition was held in Osaka in 1970 (Hirschmeier and Yui; Re-
ischauer; Umesao). The popularity of both manga is related to the
mentality of the Japanese at the time, and what was happening in
Japanese society in terms of economy and industry.

The 1960s also marked the period when certain manga began being
produced by two people: the manga writer, who was like a scenario
writer, and a manga artist, who drew the pictures for the story. Many
artists also hired several assistants, and manga was produced like a
company in the so-called production system. This system enabled the

468 Kinko Ito

comic magazines to be published weekly. At the end of 1966, sales of
Shonen Magajin topped one million, and in three years it surpassed 1.5
million copies. In 1968, Shonen Jampu (‘‘Jump’’) began. It featured
many rookies, such as Go Nagai and Hiroshi Motomiya, and became an
instant hit. Go’s Harenchi Gakuen (‘‘Infamous School’’) was criticized as
vulgar because it introduced overt eroticism to children. Go depicted
both male students and teachers preoccupied with catching glimpses of
girls’ panties or naked bodies. Many parents, women’s associations, and
PTAs protested (Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun, May 10, 1991; Schodt,
Manga!). Despite this incident, Shonen Jampu remained very popular. It
sold over four million copies in one week in December 1984. The De-
cember 20, 1994 issue of Shonen Jampu sold 6,530,000 copies. The
average sales of the weekly magazine today is 3,400,000 copies.
The first English volume of Shonen Jump was published in the United
States in January 2003 (Mainichi Shimbun, November 28, 2002).

Two manga magazines for adult manga maniacs were created in the
1960s. They not only had manga but also commentaries and criticism
on manga, as well as a readers’ corner for readers to submit their
personal manga. In 1964, GARO, which included many gekiga-type
pictures, was published, follwed by COM in 1967. COM was charac-
terized by a touch of urban sophistication, but it went out of business
in 1972. GARO was sold to a new owner in 1997.

From the end of 1967 to the beginning of 1968, many manga
magazines for adult men were founded one after another; among them
are Manga Panchi (‘‘Manga Punch’’), Manga Goraku (‘‘Manga Enter-
tainment’’), Manga Akushon (‘‘Manga Action’’), Biggu Komikku (‘‘Big
Comic’’), Yangu Komikku (‘‘Young Comic’’), and Purei Komikku (‘‘Play
Comic’’). Those readers who grew up reading manga for boys were
becoming adults, and they needed a different type of manga entertain-
ment. They could not live without reading manga. Millions of manga
magazines have been sold, along with the popularity of their animation
versions on TV and related merchandise, since the 1960s. Some popular
manga existed symbiotically with their animation and character
goods and toys (Ishinomori; Mizuno; Otsuka and Sasakibara; Schodt,
Manga!; Shimizu).

Shojo manga, or ‘‘Girls’ Comics,’’ emerged in the 1960s. Shojo Furendo
(‘‘Girls’ Friend’’) and Maagaretto (‘‘Margaret’’) began in 1963, and
Shojo Komikku (‘‘Girls’ Comics’’) in 1968. These magazines
and Nakayoshi (‘‘Good Friends’’) came with supplements such as cards,

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 469

stickers, and paper dolls, and they became very popular among the girls
who started to recognize that they were not just children, but ‘‘girls.’’ It
was the time when the girls ‘‘started hating ugly stuff, boys, and dirty,
violent things,’’ and collected ‘‘cute color pens, erasers, writing boards,
folders, pencil cases, notebooks, etc.’’ (Evers 6).

Shojo manga, when it first emerged as a new genre, had many stories
that dealt with girls’ dreams and fantasies. Interestingly, shojo manga
also attracted adult male readers. Around 1972, female shojo manga
artists who had been born around 1949 started to have great careers.
Shojo manga, formerly drawn only by male artists, was now drawn by
many female artists. They began dominating the genre, and included
such stars of the industry as Keiko Takemiya, Ryoko Yamagishi, Moto
Hagio, and Yumiko Oshima. According to Schodt (Manga!), they were
described as: ‘‘wealthy; their female fans are fanatically devoted; they
are respected in society-at-large; and they are given almost total cre-
ative control over their work’’ (97). The genre of shojo manga was
expanded by female artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It in-
cluded stories that dealt with sportswomen, epic stories, and stories
based on history (Schodt, Manga!).

The Japanese volleyball team won the gold medal in the Olympic
Games held in Tokyo in 1964, and some shojo manga included sports-
manship as the major theme in their stories. The TV drama series
Sainwa V (‘‘The Sign Is V’’) and the TV animation series Attaku
Nambaa Wan (‘‘Attack Number One’’) began in the late 1960s. Both
were based on the manga of the same titles that appeared in shojo manga,
and dealt with the volleyball teams. Their themes centered on sports-
manship, friendship, injuries, fights, falling in love with the coach,
competition, jealousy, superhuman efforts, and other emotions in-
volved in winning the games. They were in a sense comparable with
‘‘Star of the Giants’’ and ‘‘Jo of Tomorrow’’ that appeared in boys’
comics, and were also made into TV animation series. This was the
time when many manga and animation had the theme of sports such as
judo, tennis, soccer, baseball, and boxing. The lessons that these manga
taught influenced youth growing up in Japan. Young people learned
how to persevere in any situation and to always work hard to accom-
plish goals. These manga stories were teachers and agents of social-
ization (Ito, ‘‘Japanese Ladies’’’).

Starting in the 1970s, the theme of sexuality, especially male
homosexuality, was incorporated into the stories of shojo manga.

470 Kinko Ito

According to Fusami Ogi, ‘‘Instead of showing a shoujo dreaming of
romance with a boy, they showed boys and focused on boys’ love’’
(151). This is in sharp contrast to the other type, which focuses more
on the psychology and emotion of female characters, their development
as human beings, and their life stories. Aesthetically drawn young boys
are very popular among the Japanese girls and women. In Japan, there
has been a long tradition of male homosexuality, and it has been much
more tolerated by the people as compared with other societies. Popular
openly gay actors, singers, writers, and commentators abound in the
Japanese mass media today.

The world of Japanese manga has always revolved around men—
male artists, editors, and publishers—and they reacted to the topic of
male homosexuality as repulsive, which caused a sensation. The mass
media criticized that this kind of shojo manga was decadent and de-
generating; it was ‘‘raping’’ the manga. However, this issue of homo-
sexuality gave the manga industry much stimulus (Kumamoto
Nichinichi Shimbun, July 5, 1991).

Nihon Chosen Kenkyusho (Japan Institute of Korean Studies) pro-
tested against a manga story, ‘‘Otoko Michi’’ (‘‘The Way of Men’’),
which was serialized in Shonen Sande in August 1970. In this manga,
Koreans and Chinese, ethnic minorities in Japan, were depicted neg-
atively. They were drawn as intimidating the Japanese merchants
at a black market, or trying to rape Japanese women at the
end of World War II, when Japanese society was in confusion. The
publishers explained that they had no intention of discriminatory
treatment, but were forced to apologize (Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun,
May 24, 1991).

During the 1970s, general magazines mostly read by Japanese
businessmen started to include kyoyo manga (‘‘academic or educational
manga’’). This was a new category of manga referred to as ‘‘information
manga,’’ ‘‘expository manga,’’ or ‘‘textbook manga.’’ According to Go
Tchiei, they did not have a narrative structure, and the protagonists
in this genre of manga were ‘‘applying themselves to the study of
the origins of and various anecdotes about food, liquor, and annual
festivals.’’

There are also many educational manga stories that provide readers
with special knowledge and information about an occupation, histor-
ical figure, or event. They include such topics and occupations as a
professional killer, a surgeon, a gynecologist, a mah-jongg player, a

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 471

horse racer, a cameraman, a detective, a CEO, a schoolteacher, a cook,
a fisherman, Adolf Hitler, a singing group, and a sushi chef.

Manga in general truly gained popularity and legitimacy as enter-
tainment in the 1980s. Another manga boom emerged, and the sales of
weekly and monthly magazines skyrocketed. Many new comic mag-
azines for adults were issued, and manga automatically meant high
profits. The 1980s was also the time of Japanese economic expansion,
when the so-called ‘‘bubble economy’’ allowed more than 85% of the
population to classify themselves as middle class.

Redikomi, or Japanese ladies’ comics, was established as a genre of
manga for adult women in the early 1980s. It is the most recent
addition to the manga scene. The readers range in age from 15 to 44
(which, interestingly enough, coincides with the childbearing age).

Before the emergence of ladies’ comics, the manga artists for girls’
comics retired in their late 20s and 30s. The popularity of the newly
created genre allowed artists to continue drawing for adult females.
The publication of VAL and FEEL began in 1986, and sexual and
erotic scenes were drawn for adult women. This freedom of sexual ex-
pression characterized the ladies’ comics of the early years. The genre of
Redikomi tended to be associated with female pornography when they
first appeared, and for some time, increasingly erotic, gross, and sen-
suous scenes were drawn; this tendency escalated until the early 1990s.

Redikomi magazines published by more established major publishing
houses have almost no sexual scenes. Magazines such as YOU
(Shueisha), Jour (Futabasha), and BE LOVE (Kodansha) focus more on
the reality of everyday life experienced by modern housewives, office
workers, and college students. By the end of the 1990s, many stories
from redikomi were made into popular movies and TV series. Today’s
manga is definitely a very popular and successful multimedia enter-
tainment (Erino; Ito, ‘‘The World’’).

In October 2002, the first independent Japanese manga corner was
exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, one of the oldest and
biggest international book fairs in the world that deals with novels,
children’s books, and translated books. Japanese manga was already very
popular in France, Italy, and Spain, and two translated Japanese manga
magazines are now published in Germany (Mainichi Shimbun, Novem-
ber 28, 2002).

Manga forms a significant part of Japanese popular culture today. A
total of 278 comic magazines were published in 1998, for example, and

472 Kinko Ito

the estimated number of copies published was 1,472,780,000 (Ito,
‘‘The World’’). Manga is read by all people in Japan, ubiquitous in a
society that boasts one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Many
manga cafés—which are stocked with tens of thousands of comics books
of various genres, comic magazines, newspapers, and provide Internet
service—emerged in the late 1990s. Manga cafés are now more popular
than ‘‘Karaoke Box,’’ where one can order food and drinks and sing
along with friends to karaoke music. The new millennium saw the
emergence of manga café chains that are open 24 hours a day, seven days
a week (Ito, ‘‘Growing Up’’).

Manga affects behavior and social trends by creating booms in sports
and hobbies in Japan. The most popular game today is the Japanese
game of ‘‘go,’’ and the most popular sport is tennis. Some criminals
testified in court that they got their ideas from manga (Ito, ‘‘The Manga
Culture’’). In 2002, the Association of Manga Artists and the five major
manga publishers agreed to have November 3 officially designated ‘‘The
Manga Day.’’ Manga is one of the most popular forms of mass enter-
tainment and an agent of socialization in Japan, and will continue to be
so in the years to come.

Works Cited

‘‘The Devil’s Tongue: Misunderstandings Can Create Both Obstacles
and Insulation.’’ Yardley, PA: Time Education Program [supple-
ment package handout], 1983.

Erino, Miya. Rediisu Komikku No Joseigaku [Gender Studies of Ladies’
Comics]. Tokyo: Kosaido Shuppan, 1993.

Evers, Izumi. ‘‘Nakayoshi: Kodansha’s Classic Shojo Manga Magazine.’’
PULP 5.9 (2001): 6–7.

Hall, Edward. Beyond Culture. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.

Hirschmeier, Johannes, and Tsunehiko Yui. The Development of Japanese
Business: 1600–1973. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.

Ishinomori, Shotaro. Mangaka Nyumon [How to Become a Comics
Artist]. Tokyo: Akita Shoten, 1998.

Ito, Kinko. ‘‘Images of Women in Weekly Male Comic Magazines in
Japan.’’ Journal of Popular Culture 27.4 (1994): 81–95.

———. ‘‘Sexism in Japanese Weekly Comic Magazines for Men.’’ Asian
Popular Culture. Ed. John A. Lent. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995:
127–37.

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 473

———. ‘‘The Manga Culture in Japan.’’ Japan Studies Review 4 (2000):
1–16.

———. ‘‘The World of Japanese Ladies’ Comics: From Romantic Fan-
tasy to Lustful Perversion.’’ Journal of Popular Culture 36.1 (2002):
68–85.

———. ‘‘Japanese Ladies’ Comics as Agents of Socialization: The Les-
sons They Teach.’’ International Journal of Comic Art 5.2 (2003):
425–36.

———. ‘‘Growing Up Japanese Reading Manga.’’ International Journal
of Comic Art 6.2 (2004): 392–403.

Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun [newspaper]. Issues: 10 May 1991, 24
May 1991, 5 July 1991.

Lent, John A. ‘‘Comic Art: Some Global Issues.’’ International Journal of
Comic Art 3.1 (2001): 3–8.

Marechal, Beatrice. ‘‘‘The Singular Stories of the Terashima Neighbor-
hood’: A Japanese Autographical Comic.’’ International Journal of
Comic Art 3.2 (2001): 138–50.

Mainichi Shimbun [Tokyo newspaper]. 28 Nov. 2002.
Mizuno, Ryutaro. Manga Bunka No Uchimaku [The Inside of Manga

Culture]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1991.
Ogi, Fusami. ‘‘Beyond Shoujo, Blending Gender: Subverting the Ho-

mogendered World in Shoujo Manga [Japanese Comics for Girls].’’
International Journal of Comic Art 3.2 (2001): 151–61.

Otsuka, Eiji, and Go Sasakibara. Kyoyotoshiteno Manga, Anime [Manga &
Anime as Culture]. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001.

Pollman, Joost. ‘‘Shaping Sounds in Comics.’’ International Journal of
Comic Art 3.1 (2001): 9–21.

Reischauer, Edwin O. Japan: The Story of a Nation. 4th ed. New York:
McGraw, 1990.

Schodt, Frederik L. Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics. To-
kyo: Kodansha International, 1988.

———. ‘‘Sex and Violence in Manga.’’ Mangajin 10 (1991): 91.
Shimizu, Isao. Mangano Rekishi [The History of Manga]. Tokyo:

Iwanami Shoten, 1991.
Shinmura, Izuru. Kojiten. 4th ed. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991.
Tchiei, Go. ‘‘A History of Manga.’’ 1998. Dai Nippon Printing. 6 Dec.

2002 hhttp://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/articles/manga/
manga1.htmli.

Umesao, Tadao. Seventy-Seven Keys to the Civilization of Japan. Osaka:
Sogensha, 1985.

Wilson, Glenn. The Sensual Touch: A Guide to More Erotic Lovemaking.
New York: Carroll & Graf, 1996.

474 Kinko Ito

Yasuda, Motohisa. Kisokara Yokuwakaru Nihonshi. Tokyo: Obunsha,
1989.

Zenkoku Shuppan Kyokai/Shuppan Kagaku Kenkyujo. Shuppan Shihyo
Nempo 1999 [The Publication Annual 1999]. Tokyo: Zenkoku
Shuppan Kyokai, 1999.

Kinko Ito received her BA from Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. She
received her MA and PhD in sociology from The Ohio State University. She is
a full professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology,
and Gerontology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her e-mail
address is kxito@ualr.edu.

A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society 475

Want to know what’s inside these Japanese comics?
Excerpts begin on page 159

.

»

PHOENIX
(Hi no Tori)
BY OSAMU TEZUK

A

See pages 160-187

GHOST WARRIOR
(Borei Senshi from the series Senjo)
BY REIJI MATSUMOTO
See pages 188-214

In memoriam: Osamu Tezuka, revered by all Japanese as the “god of manga”
died on the morning of February 9, 1989, at the age of 60. A remarkable art-
ist, he entertained and inspired millions, and made manga a serious medium
of expression, as well as a social phenomenon. His spirit, and his stories, will
live forever.

Published by Kodansha USA, Inc.
451 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10016

Distributed in the United Kingdom and continental Europe
by Kodansha Europe Ltd.

Copyright © 1983, 2012 by Frederik L. Schodt.
All rights reserved. Printed in South Korea.
ISBN: 978-1-56836-476-6
LCC 82-48785

First edition published in Japan in 1983 by Kodansha International
First Paperback edition 1986 published in Japan by Kodansha International
First US edition 2012 by Kodansha USA

w*Q$S

THE ROSE
(Berusaiyu no Barijjl
BY RIYOKO
See pages 215-237

19 18 17 16 15 14 7 6 5 4 3

BAREFOOT GEN
(Hadashi no Gen)
BY KEIJI NAKAZAWA
See pages 238-256

iG A!
in 1997

Books, like buildings, are assembled from bits and pieces into a hope-fully coherent structure. If the original design is successful, bothmay last a long time and prove useful to many people. Ideally, they
will also retain a special currency in the midst of changing fashions.

Whether Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics has achieved this
exalted status is arguable, but the signs are good. It got off to a good start
when first published in 1983, receiving excellent reviews and that year’s
“Special Award” in the Japan Cartoonists Association’s “Manga Oscars.”
Nearly fifteen years later, much to my surprise and delight, Manga! Manga!
is now increasingly referred to as a “cult item,” a “classic,” or even “the
Bible on Japanese comics.” While by no means a best-seller, it still sells
nearly as well as it did when first published, despite being hard to find
and often out of stock. Several universities use it as a textbook in courses
on Japanese popular culture. I occasionally receive e-mail from young fans
around the world who weren’t even born when the book was first pub-
lished. And although no parks or cities have been named after it, in 1996 a
Japanese bistro in Berkeley, California, was.

Of course, what sustains this interest in Manga! Manga! is not just the
book itself but the changes that have occurred around it. When I first came
up with the idea for Manga! Manga! in the late seventies, I never dreamed
that both manga (comics) and their offshoot, anime (animation), would be-
come as popular as they have today, either in Japan or overseas. I simply
hoped to draw people’s attention to a unique and modern Japanese art
form, one that I loved very much.

Those were very different times. Japan was still recovering from the ef-
fects of the seventies’ “oil shocks” and not yet the technological and eco-
nomic powerhouse it is today. No one I knew used mobile phones or faxes
or even computers. In fact, as hard as it is to imagine now, I wrote the first
drafts of Manga! Manga! in longhand and then rat-a-tat-tat typed them up
on a typewriter, manually cutting up the pages and gluing and pasting
them back together to edit them. The completed manuscript was hand-
carried from San Francisco to the publisher in Japan by special courier.

Similarly, while more people were reading comics in Japan then than in
any other country, manga were just starting to emerge from the cocoon of
the youth culture that had spawned them. Clearly illustrating the growth

www.kodanshausa.com

23. When repairs were made on the main hall of
Nara’s Horyuji temple in 1935, caricatures were
found on the backs of planks in the ceiling, prob-
ably scribbled there at the end of the 7th century.
Long noses to this day have an erotic implication
in Japanese art.

A Thousand
Years of Manga

No one knows exactly when the first Japanese tried his or her
hand at cartooning, or why, but it was probably with a
playful, irrepressible spirit. The earliest examples of
caricature have been found in some very unlikely places.

During the 6th and 7th centuries A.D., the imperial Japanese
court was infatuated with Chinese civilization and deter-
mined to adopt as much of it as possible. Buddhism was intro-
duced as a powerful new faith and was accompanied by a
frenzy of temple building. Caricatures of everything from
animals and people to grossly exaggerated phalli have been
found behind the walls and ceilings of two of these sacred
buildings—the Toshodaiji and Horyuji temples in the region
of Nara city—presumably doodled there by bored scribes and
construction laborers (fig. 23).

Again, when Japan’s first undisputed masterpiece of car-
tooning was created at the beginning of the 12th century, the
artist was a priest—the now legendary Bishop Toba. Cho-
jugiga, or the “Animal Scrolls,” as Toba’s work is known

,

was a narrative picture scroll, an art form originally intro-
duced from China to which the Japanese added their own ir-
reverent brand of humor. What did it portray? Among other
things, Walt Disney-style anthropomorphized animals in an-
tics that mock Toba’s own calling—the Buddhist clergy (fig
24).

THE COMIC ART TRADITION

Picture scrolls like Chojugiga are among the oldest surviving
examples of Japanese narrative comic art. Scrolls did not con-
sist of pages or of drawings divided into frames like today’s
comics; they formed a continuum. At first they were accom-
panied by a text, but their length (as much as 80 feet) and
stylization often rendered this unnecessary. As one untied the
string that bound it and began unrolling the scroll from right

Lfj

• >Cx%^
to left, hills faded into plains, roofs of houses dissolved to
show the occupants inside, and, like the comics of today,
changes in time, place, and mood were signified by mist,
cherry blossoms, maple leaves, or other commonly under-
stood symbols.

Like early art forms in all cultures, most early Japanese pic-
ture scrolls had religious themes, but the seriousness of their
subject often could not disguise the playfulness that artists ap-
proached it with. During the Kamakura period (1192-1333),
when warfare raged throughout the land, scrolls were made
illustrating the six worlds of the Buddhist cosmology—
heaven, humans, Ashura (Titans), animals, “hungry ghosts,”
and hell. They reminded the Japanese of the day of the Bud-
dhist precept of nonattachment to the material world, but in a
fashion that was more likely to make him ponder man’s
stupidity than suffer nightmares of guilt. Thus, in Jigoku
Zoshi (“Hell Scrolls”), Gaki Zoshi (“Hungry Ghost Scrolls”;
fig. 25), and Yamai Zoshi (“Disease Scrolls”), suffering is
depicted with sledgehammer realism: grossly deformed
demons mock cowering humans; famished grotesqueries
devour corpses and human excrement with gusto; the frailty
of mortals is pounded home with a parade of maladies and
aberrations—a man with hemorrhoids, a hermaphrodite, an
albino. But no matter how grim the world described, the ar-
tists employ a light and mocking cartoon style (fig. 26).

When not constrained by religious themes, many of the old
scrolls ran positively wild, with a robust, uninhibited sense of
humor much like that of today’s comics. Hohigassen (“Farting
Contests”; fig. 27), told a tale of men vying with each other to
create the most vile assault on the senses possible. Centuries
later there are farting contests held on Japanese television and

24 (above and overleaf). Section of the first scroll
of Chojugiga (“The Animal Scrolls”), showing
animals in priests’ vestments, praying with prayer
beads, reading sutras, and giving offerings in front
of a Buddha figure, represented by a frog.

28 A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 29

K – ‘ ^ 5 > .,-.\., .-1 – . • i-i- * ., JN, cxV
«s – ! – ! ,*’

“THE ANIMAL SCROLLS”

Chojugiga—literally, “humorous pictures
of birds and animals”—is the name of a
series of four monochrome scrolls painted
with brush and ink around the 12th cen-
tury. Popular belief says that they were all
created by the artist-priest Kakuyu, or
Toba (1053-1140), but evidence suggests
that he is responsible only for the first two.
The first scroll depicts hares, monkeys,
frogs, and foxes engaging in human activ-
ities—bathing in rivers, practicing arch-
ery, wrestling, and worshiping. The frogs
are dressed as priests and the hares as
nobles, leading scholars to claim that the
scroll is a parody of the upperclass’s deca-
dent lifestyle. Many regard it as one of the
best examples of Japanese brush painting,
and it bears an uncanny resemblance to the
American style of animal animation in this
century. The second scroll is a rather un-
funny exercise in animal sketches. But the
third and fourth scrolls are hilarious. They
show not animals but priests lost in gam-
bling, watching cock fights, and playing a
type of strip poker. Chojugiga is owned by
Kozanji, a Buddhist temple outside Kyoto.

30 MANGA! MANGA!

}€%’ r^”;
, • irY/’j.-f
; * i ‘,

A – ii

I
I U,

K ‘”
If” I”.-“‘,/

mm

children’s comics known as unko manga, or “shit comics.”
The scroll Yobutsu Kurabe (“Phallic Contests”) depicted men
gleefully comparing their huge erect members and using them
in ingenious feats of strength; the visual jokes involving
genitals that are so common in comics today are therefore
nothing new. What type of person would create such
outrageous art? Scholars’ opinions vary, but legend attributes
both works to the author of the “Animal Scrolls”—Bishop
Toba.

The venerable Bishop was no heretic. Buddhism in Japan
has a tradition of secularism that, while occasionally leading
to excesses among the clergy, also encouraged such seemingly
decadent works as the “Contests” scrolls. In the mid-17th cen-
tury, moreover, there even developed a form of religious
cartooning that directed spontaneous humor to a serious
purpose. This was the Zenga, or “Zen picture.”

Zen pictures were a spiritual aid for the artist, whose
ultimate goal was not the creation of an image on paper but
reinforcement of a state of mind. Imported from China, Zen
Buddhism exhibits some qualities of the earthy tradition of
Taoism and stresses the attainment of a sudden enlighten-
ment, or satori, by freeing one’s mind from the phenomenal
world. The spiritual acrobatics required for such a feat are
boosted by an irreverent attitude and a refined sense of the
absurdity of man’s “permanent condition.” As R. H. Blyth
says in his book Oriental Humor, “Any orthodox religion is
always opposed to, and opposed by, humor. Zen only, in its
being . . . unorthodox, or rather non-orthodox, is hum-
orous, and must be humorous.” From such an attitude were
Zen pictures born.

In their most basic form Zen pictures were simply circles

,

.’•

A

25. Section of Gaki Zoshi (“Hungry Ghost
Scrolls”), by an unknown artist in the late 12th
century. Painted in color on paper, the scroll il-
lustrates the sufferings of human spirits with the
misfortune to be reincarnated as “hungry ghosts,”
who eat excrement and corpses and generally lead
a miserable existence—perhaps a reminder of the
importance of good behavior in this life. Eight
hundred years later, in 1970, ]6ji Akiyama would
incorporate the spirit of this scroll, and many of
the exact same scenes, in his story-comic Ashura.

26. Section of Hyakki Yako (“Night Walk of One
Hundred Demons”), a 15th-century scroll painted
in color on paper by Mitsunobu Tosa. The demons
are a playful lot, devoid of religious seriousness,
who emerge at night, cavort with musical in-
struments, and then disappear with the morning
mist. Throughout the ages Hyakki Yako has in-
spired artists who dabble in the fantastic, including
Shigeru Mizuki, today’s foremost creator of ghost
stories.

27. Section from the scroll Hohigassen (“Farting
Contests”), copy of a lost original, popularly at-
tributed to the artist-priest Toba. A band of men
eat a huge batch of sweet potatoes, and then
gleefully compete in a game in which everyone
loses—collecting huge quantities of wind in bags,
releasing it in each other’s faces, farting, and using
a fan for self-defense.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 31

28. “Ofuku’s Moxibustion,” a Zen picture by
Ekaku Hakuin. A happy matron gives an applica-
tion ofmoxa, a traditional cauterization treatment,
to a woeful old man’s hemorrhoids, implying
thui a brief shock can not only cure but also open
one’s mind and bring enlightenment.

29. A foolish mouse feeds a drunken cat red pep-
pers, thus speeding his own demise. Otsu-e
developed_ in the mid-17th century around the
town of Otsu, near Kyoto. The mass-production
artists used paper patterns to paint in solid color
blocks and then a brush and ink to add details. The
example here is by Shozan Takahashi, one of two
Otsu-e painters still practicing today.

:.,-

drawn to represent the Void. The more humorous pictures il-
lustrated the spiritual riddles called koan, used by a master to
open the stubborn, clinging-to-the-here-and-now mind of the
novice. They could suggest a profound beauty or be very off-
color. Identical Zen pictures were produced by the hundreds
by masters like Ekaku Hakuin (1685-1768; fig. 28) and Gibon
Sengai (1750-1837). The thought behind the action was of
paramount importance; a quick flourish of the brush yielded
a black-and-white metaphor of spiritual truth, and the un-
signed work was then often discarded.

In their simplicity, Zen pictures exemplified a trait common
to almost all Japanese art, including today’s comics—an
economy of line. Josiah Conder, an Englishman who studied
art under a Japanese woodblock artist/cartoonist at the turn
of this century, noted: “The limits imposed on the technique
of his art, and the constant practice of defining form by
means of line drawn with a flexible brush, have enabled the
Japanese painter to express in line even the most intangible
and elusive shapes, without the aid of shading or color.”

But humorous Zen pictures and scrolls were rarely seen by
the common people. Almost all art in olden times was the
property of the clergy, the aristocracy, and the powerful war-
rior families. Clearly, ordinary people also hungered for art
that entertained, and in the mid-17th century a boom took
place in simple cartoons sold only near the town of Otsu, near
Kyoto, on the main road_from the capital to the north (fig.
29). These Otsu-e, or “Otsu pictures,” began as Buddhist
amulets for travelers but later became uninhibited, secular
cartoons with stock themes: beautiful women, demons in
priests’ garb, and warriors. Eventually they were produced in
the thousands by artisans using paper patterns in a crude
form of printing.

Truly popular, secular art was spurred by the refinement in
Japan of the woodblock-printing process in the early 17th
century. During the Edo period (1600-1867), Japan was ruled

30. A woodblock cartoon by Kuniyoshi
Utagawa, from the early 19th century.

32 MANGA! MANGA!

by a feudal dictatorship that tried to freeze social change in
order to preserve itself. A rigid class system was defined;
political dissent in any form, including art, was banned; and
unlicensed intercourse with foreign nations was prohibited on
penalty of death. By the time stagnation and the arrival of the
American “barbarians” put an end to this reactionary experi-
ment, peace and unprecedented prosperity among the mer-
chant class in the towns had already generated a money
economy, and with it a demand for cheap entertainment. This
in turn had stimulated an assembly-line-style, mass produc-
tion of woodblock prints for popular consumption.

The most popular prints were called ukiyo-e—illustrations
of the “Floating World,” a term suggestive of life’s uncertain-
ties and the search for sensual pleasures to sweeten one’s
feeling of hopelessness (figs. 30-34). Ukiyo-e were initially
crude, monochrome prints that usually portrayed men and
women cavorting at Yoshiwara, the red-light district of old
Edo (now Tokyo). The establishment of the day regarded
them as trash, but gradually their subject matter diversified
and their quality improved. They depicted the pleasures and
pastimes of the day—fashions, popular places to visit, the

31. “The Vertical and the Horizontal Face,” by
Hokusai Katsushika. An early use of the “split-
frame” technique, which preceded the sequential
frames of comics later. It is contained in Hokusai
Manga (“Hokusai Cartoons”), a fifteen-volume
collection of Hokusai’s sketches’;- issued between
1814 and 1878, that depicted everything which
struck the artist’s fancy: fat people, skinny people,
contortionists, monsters, and serious still lifes. It
was so popular it was reproduced until the printing
blocks wore out.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 33

32. A mid-19th-century woodblock illustration
by Kuniyoshi Utagawa for a popular horror story,
showing a very haunted house. latest Kabuki theater idols, and oft-told historical tales—in

flowing lines and multiple colors. They were also compiled
into picture books.

Many years later, Europeans would find old ukiyo-e prints
used as packing in tea boxes sent from Japan, and artists—in
particular the Impressionists—would marvel at their strange
beauty. Like so much of old Japanese art, ukiyo-e projected a
spare reality: without dwelling on anatomy and perspective,
they tried to capture a mood, an essence, and an impres-
sion—something also vital to caricature and cartooning.

Like the comics of today, ukiyo-e were part of the popular
culture of their time: they were lively, topical, cheap, enter-

taining, and playful. Masters of the genre regularly infused
their works with humor, experimented with deformation of
line, and dabbled in the fantastic, the macabre, and the erotic.
Hokusai Katsushika (1760-1849), a print artist, was the first
person in Japan to coin the word manga, the current Japanese
term for comics and cartoons. Sharaku Toshusai, active in
the late 18th century, was a master of caricature. Kuniyoshi
Utagawa (1797-1861) reveled in puzzle pictures. And in the
violent warrior prints of Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (1839-92) can
be seen the same stylized blood spatters that characterize so
many action comics today.

Most ukiyo-e artists also dabbled in shunga, or “spring pic-

JAPANESE PRINTS-WESTERN ARTISTS

In his book The Meeting of Eastern and
Western Art, Michael Sullivan describes
the “grande explosion japonaise” in
Europe during the mid- to late 19th cen-
tury. Newly “discovered” Japanese prints
were the rage at fashionable Paris salons,
and their lines, motifs, and formats ex-
erted a tremendous influence on the
leading painters of the day, men like
Monet, Manet, Whistler, Van Gogh, and
Toulouse-Lautrec. William Michael
Rossetti in London was a typical fan.
Writing in 1863, he praised Hokusai
Manga for having a “daringness of con-
ception, an almost fiercely tenacious
grasp of its subject, a majesty of designing
power and sweep of line, and a clenching
hold upon the imagination,” Almost 120
years later, Frank Miller, the young art-
ist/writer for the current American best-
sellers Daredevil and Wolverine, stated in
an interview in Comics Journal in 1982,
“Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in
Japanese prints. . . . They closely resem-
ble comic book drawing, which in many
ways is emblematic. People have come to
recognize a certain configuration of lines
as being a nose, for example. . . . They
deal with a series of images that, like com-
ics, have to convey information.” And
later: “I was able to ‘read’ a hundred pages
of [a Japanese comic] the other day
without ever becoming confused. And it
was written in Japanese! They rely totally
on the visuals. They approach comics as a
pure form more than American comics
artists do.”

34 MANGA! MANGA! A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 35

33. “Staring at a Horse’s Ass,” by Bokusen Maki,
in the cartoon book Kyogaen (“Garden of Crazy
Pictures”), published in 1809.

tures,” which like the erotic comics of today portrayed men
and women (and other combinations as well) joined in every
conceivable position of lovemaking. It is the uninhibited and
often humorous quality of Japanese erotic art that so
distinguishes it from that of the rest of the world, then and
now. Whereas the Chinese erotic artists of old drew their
boudoir stars with dainty little privates, the Japanese shunga
artists gave free rein-to their abundant imaginations. The men
in their prints possess extravagantly displayed and exag-
gerated members (the way most men would see themselves in
their fantasies), and the women are appropriately accom-
modating. Occasionally the authorities would make half-
hearted attempts to stamp out shunga, but little success was
achieved until the 20th century, when Japan bent over
backwards to conform to the Christian concepts of morality
of the international community. Ironically, it is the Japanese
who censor nudity today, while many of the Western nations
have ceased to do so. Original shunga can only be published
or displayed in their unexpurgated state outside of Japan.

Woodblock printing in the Edo period was also used to
manufacture what may have been the world’s first “comic
books.” Like the earlier scrolls, they did not have sequential
panels and word balloons. Instead they consisted of twenty or
more pages of pictures, with or without text, and were either
bound with thread or opened accordion-style.

In 1702, Shumboku Ooka created a cartoon book named

Tobae Sankokushi, depicting mischievous, long-legged little
men frolicking in scenes of daily life at Kyoto, Osaka, and
Edo. It appears to have started a fad in the Osaka area of
what came to be known as Toba-e—”Toba pictures,” named
after the creator of the “Animal Scrolls.” Toba-e were printed
in monochrome and compiled into booklets, and sometimes
the pictures were accompanied by fables in text. Like the old
Otsu-e, Toba-e sold by the thousands. Admiring readers col-
ored them in, and later generations thumbed them to tatters
(fig. 35).

Then there were the kibyoshi, or “yellow-cover,” booklets,
consisting of monochrome prints and captions that told
stories, often published as a series. Kibydshi were popular at
the end of the 18th century and—in a pattern similar to the
development of today’s adult comics—grew out of illustrated
books for children that stressed fables. Kibydshi dealt with
topical subjects for townspeople in a humorous fashion; more
than once they were banned for satirizing the authorities.
Unlike Toba-e, they had a strong story line.

By the middle of the 19th century, the Japanese had a rich
tradition of entertaining, sometimes irreverent, and often nar-
rative art. The old art forms would vanish in the years to
come, but their spirit would continue to inspire cartoonists
and would influence the way Japan was to embrace comic
magazines and books in the 20th century.

34. A miniature god of wealth dances next to a
decidedly female-looking Japanese radish. By the
19th-century artist Kunisada Utagaiva.

35. Illustrated humor books of the Edo period,
with varying degrees of narrative. Those in the
middle are Toba-e,

36 MANGA! MANGA! A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 37

36. “A True Portrait of Perry, Emissary of the
United States of North America.” Whether the
anonymous mid-19th-century artist ever laid eyes
on Perry is unclear; his painting may be based on
the description written to the side. As if to com-
pensate, he has Perry waxing romantic in a poem
about memories of distant California. What seems
a caricature today was the serious attempt of an
artist unconcerned with anatomy and perspec-
tive. Only a few years after Perry, such styles
would vanish from portraiture and only be used
in caricature.

‘If^.-m

WESTERN STYLES

In 1853 the United States, represented by Commodore Perry
(fig. 36) and an armed “goodwill” fleet, forced Japan out of
her self-imposed isolation. In doing so it triggered a virtual
revolution in all areas of life, including art. Over the next fifty
years, Japan accomplished a time-warp transition from a
feudal kingdom into a modern industrialized nation.

With a new social order and new technologies came con-
trasts and confusion. Two-sworded ex-samurai sashayed
down streets with top coats and bowler hats, former
vegetarians extolled the virtues of eating beef, and people
boarded the first trains after leaving their shoes behind at the
station—in keeping with the Japanese custom on entering
buildings—only to be shocked when they arrived at their
destination shoeless. It was a cartoonist’s paradise!

European-style cartoons were introduced during this period
by two eccentric expatriate artists: a Britisher, Charles
Wirgman (1835-91), and a Frenchman, George Bigot
(1860-1927). Wirgman, or “Wakuman” as he was called, was
a self-taught artist sent to Japan in 1857 as a correspondent
for the Illustrated London News. He married a Japanese
woman and stayed until his death. In the words of Ernest
Satow, one of the first British diplomats in Japan, “Wirgman’s
costume, consisting of wide blue cotton trousers, a loose
yellow pongee jacket, no collar, and a conical hat of grey felt,
gave rise to a grave discussion as to whether he was really an
European, or only a Chinaman after all.”

Wirgman recorded some of the most dramatic events of the
period, including a bloody attack on the British legation by a
band of disgruntled samurai, which he witnessed while hiding
under the floor. In 1862 he also published a British-style
humor magazine, The Japan Punch, for the foreign communi-
ty in Yokohama. The Japan Punch was primarily text and
reflected the early isolation of the Europeans—it rarely men-
tioned the world outside of the foreign compound at
Yokohama—but it contained cartoons by Wirgman, who
drew in the typically low-key style of the British (figs. 37, 38).
In the few he drew of Japanese life, he cast a satirical eye on

37. Charles Wirgman’s The Japan Punch, a
monthly with a circulation of around 200, was
published in ‘Yokohama from 1862 to 1887. As the
first Western-style humor magazine it had a
tremendous influence on Japanese artists. The
Japan Punch used Japanese technologies: its ten
pages were of special Japanese paper, printed with
woodblocks, and stitched Japanese-style. But the
samurai Punch on the cover had a quill in his belt
instead of a sword.

P-1″1c W
1876

38. A February 1876 cartoon by Wirgman in The
Japan Punch showed Europeans as they must have
looked to the Japanese—big-nosed, hairy, and
ungainly.

38 MANGA! MANGA! A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 39

TOBAfi
.JOUKVAI . S A T I R I p D E .

39. George Bigot’s Tobae, published in
Yokohama in 1887, was a biweekly, French-style
humor magazine of thirteen pages, with cartoons
parodying the “new Japan.” Like Wirgman’s
magazine, it was aimed at the foreign community
but had a profound impact on the Japanese.

40. “Tobae at Police Headquarters (An Actual
Event),” by George Bigot, in an 1887 edition of
Tobae. In the officer’s hand, as an example of what
not to do, is Bigot’s Tobae. While he reprimands
the gagged editors of Japan’s new Western-style
newspapers and magazines, the Tobae jester, or
Bigot, peers through the window in amusement.

the awe-struck citizens of Tokyo viewing their first bicycle, or
caricatured Japan’s first students educated abroad who, on
their return, he noted, “were supposed to know all about
Politics, Laws, Constitutions, Finance, Sport, Congress,
Cocktails, Religion, and Pickles, and are therefore perfectly
capable of ruling the country.” Wirgman’s journalistic car-
toons were a new type of humor and art to the Japanese, who
were so fascinated that they even put out a translated version
of The Japan Punch. Wirgman is today considered the patron
saint of the modern Japanese cartoon. Each year a ceremony
is held at his grave in Yokohama.

George Bigot arrived in Japan in 1882 to teach art at an
army officer’s school, and was an even more flamboyant
character than Wirgman. He signed his name “Biko,” with the
ideograms for “beautiful” and “good,” married a former
geisha, and wore a kimono and Japanese sandals. In 1887, he
also formed his own magazine, Tobae (after Bishop Toba), in
which he drew cartoons that satirized both Japanese society
and government. Bigot was constantly in trouble with the
Japanese authorities, but to Japanese artists, who had long
been forbidden to criticize their government, his acts seemed
bold, and worthy of emulation (figs. 39, 40).

The Japanese were fortunate to have Wirgman and Bigot as
mentors. Both men were not only excellent cartoonists but ac-
complished formal artists from whom European advances in
perspective, anatomy, and shading (things Japanese artists
had not always put fully to use) could be studied. And
through them the developed social and political cartooning
traditions of England and France, of the British Punch and
Honore Daumier, could be absorbed. Furthermore, both men

introduced two elements which would later be crucial to the
development of today’s comics: Wirgman often employed
word ballons for his cartoons and Bigot frequently arranged
his in sequence, creating a narrative pattern.

From the Westerners with whom they came in contact, the
Japanese also acquired new printing technologies. Woodblock
printing was expensive and time-consuming. The introduc-
tion of copperplate printing, zinc etching, lithography, metal
type, and eventually photoengraving finally made the printed
word—and the cartoon—a true medium of the masses. Soon
after the arrival of Wirgman and Bigot, the Japanese began
publishing their own humor magazines and daily newspapers,
modeled after those of the West. And artists began using a
pen instead of a brush.

The most famous of these Japanese humor magazines was
Marumaru Chimbun, issued in 1877 and inspired by The
Japan Punch. It suggests the speed with which the Japanese
were absorbing Western techniques, for technically the
magazine was superior to Wirgman’s and closer to the
original British Punch. The cover, drawn by Kinkichiro Hon-
da, incorporated Japanese puns but was drawn in a distinctly
British style with a pen and was printed using zinc etching.
The cartoons inside had both Japanese and English captions
(figs. 41, 42).

In 1880, a cartoon by Honda parodying the difficulties of
Japan’s new parliamentary government resulted in a year’s
imprisonment, not of Honda but of the magazine’s editor.
Clearly the government was not altogether pleased with this
new genre of journalistic endeavor.

By the end of the 19th century (fig. 43), the focus of
Japanese cartoonists began to shift from Europe to the United
States, where a lively, less subtle type of political cartoon was
popular, and where Joseph Pulitzer’s New “York World was
experimenting with color Sunday supplements and the first
true comic strips—complete with sequential panels and word
balloons. In 1897, the socialist Shusui Kotoku, later executed

40 MANGA! MANGA!

41. A cover by Kinkichiro Honda for Marumaru
Chimbun, a British-style weekly humor magazine
founded in 1877 by Fumio Nomura, who earlier
had illegally traveled to England. The Japanese
government censored publications with little
circles, hence marumaru (“circles”). Chimbun was
a pun on the loord for newspaper (shirnbun), im-
plying “strange tidings.” The horse and deer at the
top of the page symbolized the ideograms for the
word baka, or “foolishness.” Honda also created
cartoons inside. The magazine was printed in
Yokohama at a shop supervised by an American.

42. A lithographed cartoon by Kiyochika
Kobayashi in Marumaru Chimbun in 1886, lam-
pooning the zeal of officials in Kyoto trying to
eradicate an outbreak of cholera. The official reads
to dogs, who recite the precautions they must take
in sanitation, In the window, cholera, personified
by a cat, fears that he may become “unemployed.”
Kobayashi reportedly studied art with Charles
Wirgman and was one of the first Japanese artists
to use word balloons,

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 41

43. “Patriots of the Meiji Restoration and Today’s Government
Officials,” an 1897 cartoon by Kotaro Nagahara (an artist in-
fluenced by Bigot) in the Japanese magazine Mezamashigusa. Us-
ing a “then and now” split-frame technique, Nagahara parodied
the modernization of Japan, contrasting the hungry idealism of
young samurai in the 1860s when the feudal shogunate was over-
thrown, with their portly selves years later as bureaucrats. Ac-
tually, Nagahara only drew the bottom frame. The top one was
cut out of an 1869 cartoon by Charles Wirgman showing young
samurai in awe at the sight of their first bicycle.

RAKUTEN KITAZAWA (1876-1955)
At age 20, Rakuten Kitazawa was
reportedly told the following by Yukichi
Fukuzawa, one of the leaders of Japan’s
modernization drive: “In the West they
have pictures that parody and criticize
both government and society. These ‘car-
toons’ are the only type of pictures
capable of moving the world. If you wish
to be an artist, you should pioneer this
field.” And this is what Kitazawa did.
Working first for Box of Curios, an
English-language weekly, and then for
Fukuzawa’s Jifishimpo newspaper, Kita-
zawa learned the latest techniques of
Western cartooning and used his skills to
poke fun at and criticize society and
government. In 1905, in the midst of the
Russo-Japanese war, he formed his own
weekly, color cartoon magazine, Tokyo
Puck; the cover to the first issue showed
the Russian czar biting his bellybutton in
frustration. Tokyo Puck, with a circula-
tion of over 100,000, made Kitazawa rich
and famous, and he went on to form other
cartoon magazines as well as train dozens
of young artists. In 1929 an exhibition of
his work was held in Paris and he was
decorated by the French government,
making him one of the first Japanese car-
toonists to receive international recogni-
tion. A museum devoted to his work now
stands on the site of his home in Omiya,
near Tokyo.

42 MANGA! MANGA!

for conspiring to assassinate the emperor, wrote a series on
American political cartoons in Marumaru Chimbun, sug-
gesting that these “crazy pictures” had “shone brilliantly” and
been of great help in securing William McKinley’s victory
over William Jennings Bryan in 1896.

Several years later, two of Japan’s most famous cartoonists
of this century, Rakuten Kitazawa (1876-1955) and Ippei
Okamoto (1886-1948), helped popularize and adapt
American cartoons and comic strips.

Kitazawa learned his trade working at an American
magazine published in Yokohama, the Box of Curios. He
went on to become one of the most versatile and skilled car-
toonists to emerge in Japan and is today the only one with a
museum in his honor (figs. 44-46). When he cartooned with a
pen, as was usual, his drawings had the tight lines and atten-
tion to anatomy and perspective that characterize Western
cartoons. When he used a brush, he could draw in the loose,
simple, and subjective style the Japanese excelled at. His
political cartoons had a sharp international perspective that
makes those of Japan today look insipid by comparison.

In 1902, under the influence of the comic strips then
blossoming in American newspapers, Kitazawa created the
first serialized Japanese comic strip with regular characters.
Called Tagosaku to Mokube no Tokyo Kembutsu (“Tago-
saku and Mokube Sightseeing in Tokyo”), it ran in the Jiji
Manga, a color Sunday supplement modeled after those of
the United States. But it still did not use word balloons.

.

Okamoto worked for years for the Asahi newspaper draw-
ing social and political cartoons, and greatly helped
popularize the profession of cartoonist-journalist (fig. 47).
Until Kitazawa and Okamoto came along, cartooning was
something done as a sideline by those whose real goal was
success as a “serious” artist. Okamoto tended to draw in a
looser, more Japanese style than Kitazawa, but he too was
versatile, creating for adults and children and experimenting
with a narrative comic strip.

In the 1920s, a remarkable number of Japanese cartoonists
(among them Rakuten Kitazawa, Ippei Okamoto, Sako
Shishido, and Yutaka Aso) traveled abroad, often to the
United States (fig. 48). Okamoto, after visiting the New York
World, marveled at the “Sunday Funnies” that were sweeping
America. Writing back to the Asahi newspaper in 1922, he
commented: “The American people love to laugh, but not in
the stiff manner of the British. Their laugh is an innocent one,
that instantly dispels fatigue. . . . American comics have
become an entertainment equal to baseball, motion pictures,
and the presidential elections. Some observers say that comics
have replaced alcohol as a solace for workers since Prohibi-
tion began.”

44. Tokyo Puck, founded by Rakuten Kitazawa
and probably the most international magazine
ever produced in Japan. Kitazawa’s cartoons had
captions in English, Chinese, and Japanese, and
regularly focused on international events. His
cover for this 1906 issue depicts Teddy Roosevelt
trying to reach an “anti-Japanese” wasp, showing
how concerned Japanese were about discrimi-
natory laws being passed against them in America.
Covers like this resulted in a protest from the
United States Embassy in Japan.

iO

45. In 1911 Kitazawa issued a special edition of
Tokyo Puck on women’s rights, in which he
reacted strongly to a feminist movement stirring in
Japan. The cover caption read. “Virgin! Virgin!
That is where the divinity of the sex dwells.” The
cartoons inside were a hymn to traditional values:
(1) “Lord husband.” (2) “His lordship’s domain
somewhat reduced.” (3) “Still more reduced.” (4)
“Until my Lady queens it all.”

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 43

‘ S

X ! £ £\_
In his other dispatches Okamoto delighted readers with

descriptions of two of the then most popular strips, Bringing
•up Father and Mutt and Jeff.

Largely because of Okamoto’s introduction, on 14
November 1923 George McManus’s Bringing up Father began
serialization in the first issue of the new weekly called Asahi
Graph (fig. 49). By the time World War II began, American
newspaper strips that had been translated and serialized in
Japan included Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals, Bud Fisher’s
Mutt and Jeff, Fred Hopper’s Happy Hooligan, and Pat
Sullivan’s Felix the Cat.

Readers enjoyed American comics as introductions to an
exotic culture, and artists adopted their format (fig. 50). But
unlike in European nations such as Italy or France, American
comic strips (and later comic books) in Japan were no com-
petition for the domestic variety. Japan’s relative cultural
isolation has always allowed her to be more choosy about
foreign influences and then to adapt them to her own tastes.
Around the time Bringing up Father began serialization,
Japanese newspapers realized the power of comic strips to at-
tract readers and began hiring Japanese artists who used
American styles. Foreign comics were exotic but, in the end,
alien. Japanese comics were a smash hit.

In January 1924, a four-panel family strip by Yutaka Aso
entitled Nonki na Tosan (“Easy-going Daddy”; fig. 51) began

46. Tagosaku to Mokube no Tokyo Kembutsu (“Tagosaku and Mokube
Sightseeing in Tokyo”), Japan’s first serialized comic strip, by Rakuten
Kitazawa, in a 1902 issue of Jiji Manga. Two country bumpkins who speak a
humorous dialect stop for a drink at a pump. . . .

44 MANGA! MANGA!

SAy PLEASE COME Rl&HT AWAy
AND &6T THAT BOY AWAY WITH
you 0« I CAtl POCIC6 MAW

He r.ET ».̂ i,, CRAiy

47. Ippei Okamoto portrays himself ordering
crab at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, 1922.
Being unable to speak English was no handicap.

48. In 1931, a clothbound comic book titled
Yonin Shosei (“Four Students”) was drawn and
published by Yoshitaka Kiyama, who had lived in
San Francisco for over twenty years. It was a
good-natured account of the author’s experiences
with the language barrier, racism, and the San
Francisco earthquake of 1906, and was designed
for his friends who spoke both English and
Japanese. In this sequence, Henry (the author)
finds a job as a houseboy for a rich matron, and
assumes he should scrub her back for her, Japanese
style. He is saved by his sponsor.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 45

52. “Cool,” by Saseo Ono, in a 1929 issue of
Tokyo Puck. As lovers neck in the background on
a hot summer night, a male shadow approaches.
The voluptuous flapper extends an invitation:
“Have a seat. . . . ”

53. “The Future Coed,” a 1921 cartoon by
Rakuten Kitazawa. Modernization and education
for women brought, among other things, a genera-
tion gap. Caption: “My poor dear mother and
father, you’simply don’t know the truth about
marriage. You may be older than I am, but I have
more education. Besides, can you even read this
English?”

48 MANGA! MANGA!

serialization in the Hochi newspaper. It was created at the re-
quest of the editor, who wanted something to cheer up the
survivors of the September 1923 earthquake that had leveled
Tokyo and killed over 100,000 people. Nonki na Tosan
starred a likable “uncle”-type who showed people the way out
of gloom and despair; the series became an unprecedented
success. It was compiled into best-selling booklets, merchan-
dised as wind-up dolls, puppets, and towels, and eventually
dramatized on the radio and made into films. Artistically, it
was a direct spin-off of Bringing up Father, but its everyday-
life situations and the self-effacing character of its hero had a
quality Japanese readers naturally warmed to. Initially, the
American influence was obvious: the speech in Nonki na
Tosan’s balloons was horizontal.

Around the same time, the first serialized comic strips for
children also appeared in newspapers. Some, like Katsuichi
Kabashima’s Sho-chan no Boken (“Adventures of Little
Sho”), used dialogue balloons. Others, like the works of
Shigeo Miyao, were done in the captioned-picture style that
would survive in Japan until the 1950s.

Miyao had the distinction of being one of the first profes-
sional artists to specialize in children’s comics. After an ap-
prenticeship to Ippei Okamoto, in 1922 he began serializing a
six-panel strip, Manga Taro (“Comics Taro”), in a daily

newspaper; it was well received and compiled into book form
just in time for most copies to be destroyed in the 1923 earth-
quake. Undaunted, in 1924 he began a comedy tale of a little
samurai-superman, Dango Kushisuke Man’yiiki, as a suc-
cessor. When published as a hardbound book by Kodansha,
it became a long-term bestseller, with over a hundred reprint-
ings in the next ten years. Children’s comics in Japan, like
those in the United States, had begun in the newspapers, but
their compilation into a book format already signaled a very
different direction.

SAFE AND UNSAFE ART

The 1920s were a dizzying decade in Japan, when un-
precedented political and social freedoms led to experimenta-
tion in ideology and lifestyle. Like cities in the United States,
Japanese cities were swept by many of the fads of the Roaring
’20s and the Jazz Age. Western fashions, Harold Lloyd-style
glasses, baggy pants, and flapper dresses were the rage among
young urban sophisticates, who were labeled moga-mobo (a
rendering of English “modern-girl, modern-boy”). Artists like
Saseo Ono and Hisara Tanaka depicted this decadent-
progressive society found in the cafes, bars, and theaters of
Tokyo (figs. 52, 53). Ono in particular gained fame for his
erotic drawings of flapper girls. Mild by today’s standards,

54. A 1929 cover illustration for Tokyo Puck,
titled “Changing Ginza, ” by Hekoten Shimokawa.
Caption: “After moga-mobo, Man-boy and
Engels-girl.”

55. “Two-Headed Quarrel, ” by Kogoro Inagaki,
in a 1930 issue of Tokyo Puck. OfJ the top head,
labeled “Landlords, rides the military. On the
lower head, “Bourgeoisie,” rides the government.
The carbine in the middle is “Imperialism.” Cap-
tion: “The present quarrel between the govern-
ment and the military over who is to rule the
nation only exposes what is really a conflict be-
tween a feudalistic landlord class and the new
bourgeoisie—over imperialism. ”

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 49

56. Kanemochi Kyoiku (“Bringing up a Rich Man”), by Masamu Yanase,
(I) The sound of a bugle (2) grates on the ears of landlords, (3) nationalists,
and (4) a policeman in his run-down station, but (5) is music to the rich man
soaking in his tub. (6) He finds its sound invigorating—imagines business
booming, and maybe even starting a healthy little war. (7, 8) But then a ser-
vant tells him the bugle belongs to a group of his sharecroppers organized as
the Young Proletarians. (9) As the rich man drives off for the day, he orders
his driver to lean on the horn and blot out the dreadful noise. Kanemochi
Kyoiku was begun in 1929 in the Yomiuri Sunday Manga, a remarkable
U.S.-style color supplement for children and adults that featured works by
artists from both ends of the political spectrum.

57. A poster calling on the government to stop its
war of aggression in China appears on a telephone
pole. A policeman tries to remove if … and
another appears. By dissident artist lard Yashima
in New Sun, published in 1943 outside Japan.

50 MANGA! MANGA!

his work fell into the category of what was then referred
to as ero-guro-nansensu (ero-tic, gro-tesque, and nonsens-
ical) art, a forerunner of today’s erotic comics and gag strips
for adults.

But Japan’s rush to modernize did not occur without social
disruption, especially over economic inequities. Many in-
tellectual artists were radicalized by the problems they saw
and opted to work in the new “proletariat” and agit-prop
genre of cartoons and comic strips (figs. 54, 55). The success
of the Russian Revolution in 1917 handed them an attractive
ideology on a platter. To be an antiestablishment artist in the
’20s and ’30s in Japan almost always meant being a Marxist.
Publications such as the Musansha Shimbun (“Proletariat
News”), Senki (“War Banner”), and even several moderate
magazines regularly featured the radicalized work of artists in
leftist groups like the “Japan Proletariat Art League.”

The most versatile ideological artist of all, Masamu
Yanase, used his artistic talents to skewer his enemies and fur-
ther the cause. Drawing in the style of Germany’s resistance
artist, George Grosz, and the radical United States artists
Robert Minor and Fred Ellis, he depicted wholesome laborers
and fat, corrupt bosses in cartoons. In 1929 he even created
an ideological comic parodying George McManus’s Bringing
up Father. It was called Kanemochi Kyoiku (“Bringing up a
Rich Man”; fig. 56).

But cracks were appearing in Japan’s liberal facade. Even as
artists were being politicized, an out-of-control ultrana-
tionalistic military, bent on expansion on the continent of
Asia, was taking control of the civilian government.
Ideological artists like Yanase frequently suffered arrest, and
occasionally torture.

In the late ’20s and the early ’30s, the government’s new
thought-police, armed with an Orwellian “Peace Preservation
Law,” learned to control those who harbored subversive ideas
(fig. 57). They did so by intimidating artists and their editors.
More than one magazine was forced to close; most were
coerced into self-censorship. Arrest was the fate of editors
who did not comply, and it happened so often that some
magazines designated an employee as “jail editor”—he who
had the honor of taking the rap and saving the company.

Persecution encouraged artists to work in safer genres, in-
directly producing a boom both in children’s comics and in
ero-guro-nansensu for adults.

Comic strips in the 1920s had generally consisted of no
more than four to eight frames on a page, serialized in
newspapers or their color supplements (fig. 58). In the 1930s,
however, fat monthly children’s magazines like Kodansha’s
Shonen Club began including longer, serialized comics, where
each episode often ran to 20 pages and formed a complete
story. When these stories were compiled, they were issued as
beautiful, clothbound, hardback volumes of around 150
pages, printed in color and sold in fancy cardboard cases.
Many children’s classics emerged from this period, notably
Suiho Tagawa’s Norakuro (“Black Stray”) and Keizo
Shimada’s Boken Dankichi (“Dankichi the Adventurer”).
They call up fond memories for older Japanese people today,
and their reprints still sell well (figs. 59-61).

EARLY CHILDREN’S MAGAZINES

The most famous prewar Japanese
children’s magazines were published by
Kodansha: Shonen Club, a boys’ monthly
formed in 1914; Shojo Club, a girls’
monthly begun in 1923; and “Yonen
Club, a monthly for very young children
founded in 1926. All contained photo-
articles, lavishly illustrated stories, adver-
tisements, considerable color printing,
and serialized comics which were also
compiled into hardback books. They
were, in a sense, the prototypes for to-
day’s huge children’s comic magazines:
they specialized according to the age and
sex of the reader; they often contained
over 400 pages per issue; and in their hey-
day they had enormous circulations—in
January 1931, “Yonen Club sold over
950,000 copies. But war took a terrible
toll on what were once cheery and enter-
taining magazines. Photographs and ar-
ticles increasingly featured the exploits of
Japanese soldiers. Covers showed boys
scowling and carrying guns instead of
smiling and playing. And comics, perhaps
regarded as frivolous, began to disappear.
The July 1945 issue of Shonen Club con-
sisted of only 32 pages, all text, with no
cover. The last page showed readers how
to throw a hand grenade. All three
magazines survived the war and again
began serializing comics, but they were
never able to regain their former glory. In
the early 1960s, they were completely
replaced by magazines that specialized in
comics.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 51

58. Spido Tare (“Speedy”), by Sako Shishido,
debuted in the Yomiuri Sunday Manga in 1930 and
wowed young readers with its cliff-hanging action.
Speedy, the hero, was a little boy combatting an
international conspiracy, and he drove cars, flew
airplanes, and used a parachute. Spido Taro’s
layout, pacing, and use of sound-words clearly
showed the influence of the American “Sunday
Funnies” and action films. Shishido had lived in
the United States for nine years and studied
American cartooning through a correspondence
course. Spido Tare was compiled into book form
in 1935.

59. Lieutenant Norakuro yells, “Charge! . . . ”
Suiho Tagawa’s Norakuro (“Black Stray”) was a
series of stories about a bumbling stray dog who
joined the Imperial Army and over the years rose
from private first class to captain. In the process he
stopped walking on all fours and making mistakes,
but he also became less humorous and less in-
teresting. Norakuro featured a series of battles
with other “animal” armies and seemed to support
the military, but the Japanese Imperial Army even-
tually frowned upon it as bad for their image.
Norakuro ran in Shonen Club from 1931 to 1941
and was compiled into ten hardcover books of
about 150 color pages each.

£6 , jm, ..j • • . : ” .

••j

3 • .’.

• !

, fi

‘••m .**.’
60. Artist Suiho Tagawa with Norakuro mer-
chandise in 1937.

61. Dankichi and his mouse sidekick show
faithful natives how to worship at the “Rising Sun”
shrine, which he had them build. Boken Dankichi
(“Dankichi the Adventurer”), by Keizo Shimada,
was the story of a little boy who became “king” of
a Pacific island, painted numbers on the natives to
tell them apart, and showed them how to wage
war with coconut bombs, elephant tanks, and bird
airplanes. When white foreigners encroached on
the island, Dankichi and his native army drove
them off with fanciful cannons that shot—not
shells—but live tigers. Boken Dankichi was
serialized in Shonen Club from 1933 to 1939 and
compiled into three hardcover volumes.

MANGA! MANGA! A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 53

62. Kasei Tanken (“Mars Expedition’}, scripted
by Taro Asahi and drawn by Noboru Oshiro, was
a precocious science fiction comic published dur-
ing the dark days of 1940. A complete story in 150
pages, it was printed in three colors and featured a
little boy who traveled to Mars in a dream with his
pals, a cat, and a dog. It depicted rockets and Mar-
tians in detail and incorporated actual photo-
graphs of the moon.

Most of these comics were moralistic, stressing traditional
values of loyalty, bravery, and strength for young boys; so
much so that in spite of their disarmingly naive style, the
degree to which they furthered the cause of militarism is still
the subject of scholarly debate. Yet hidden among the lesser-
known works of the time was one of Japan’s first science fic-
tion comic stories, Kasei Tanken (“Mars Expedition”; fig. 62),
foreshadowing the tremendous popularity of this genre in the
postwar period.

Compared to today’s comics, those of the ’30s had slow
plots and unimaginative layouts, but many were in color,
which today’s comics are not. Their lengthy book format,
furthermore, represented another Japanese innovation on the
American newspaper comic strip. The American comic book,
in reality a slim magazine, was just beginning to develop
around this time, and it was compiled from newspaper comic
strips. Japanese book-comics, however, were being compiled
from stories first serialized in magazines—as is still the case
today.

54 MANGA! MANGA!

COMICS AND THE WAR MACHINE

World War II began for Japan in 1937 in China. With fanatic
militarists in control of the government, the imperialist
adventure on the continent spread out of control, ending
finally with Japan’s defeat in 1945. During the long, dark
years of the war the entire nation was mobilized, and artists
and their creations were no exception (fig. 63).

The degree of conformity the government was able to im-
pose on artists and intellectuals is frightening. Some, of
course, believed in Japan’s avowed goal of liberating Asia
from colonialism; others underwent what was called tenko,
or conversion to the government line. The solidarity of an
already very homogeneous nation was marshalled to bear
upon dissidents through a carrot-and-stick approach: non-
cooperation was punished by preventive detention, bans on
writing, and social ostracism, while those who recanted were
rewarded with rehabilitation programs and support from the
community. In Japan, unlike Germany, executions were not
necessary. With a few notable exceptions, artists who had
spent most of their lives criticizing the government did an
about-face and offered wholehearted support to the
militarists.

The government skillfully exploited the Japanese propensi-
ty for factionalism. Prior to World War II, it was virtually
impossible to succeed as a professional cartoonist without
belonging to some sort of group. In 1940, after most dissident
groups had been destroyed, umbrella organizations like the
New Cartoonists Association of Japan (Shin Nippon
Mangaka Kyokai) were created with government support to
unite cartoonists under an official policy. The New Car-
toonists Association absorbed eight existing organizations,
including the New Cartoonists Faction Group (Shin Manga-
ha Shudan), which had been most powerful. The New Car-

63. Aniki no Tsutome (“An Elder Brother’s Du-
ty”), by Etsurd Kato, ca. 1944. Standing in front of
a line of school boys mobilized to work in fac-
tories, an “older brother” worker shields them
from a bottle of beer labeled “temptation.” As the
war dragged on, one of the primary concerns of
the government was to increase—and eventually
just to maintain—industrial output. This led to an
entire genre of comics and cartoons known as
zosan manga, or “production comics.”

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 55

64. Kagaku Senshi Nyu Yoku ni Shutsugen su
(“The Science Warrior Appears in New York”), by
Ryuichi Yokoyama, in a 1943 edition of Manga.
Towards the end of 1943 the tide of war was turn-
ing against Japan. The idea of a giant robot that
could stomp the enemy probably helped ease the
frustration of the Japanese, who were already suf-
fering bombing raids but were helpless to strike
back.

toonists Association’s organ, Manga, a monthly edited by
Hidezo Kondo, was the only cartoon magazine to continue
publication throughout the war years, when paper was in
short supply.

After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, cartoonists who
were not banned from working or off fighting on the front
were active in one of three areas: producing family comic
strips that were totally harmless or promoted national
solidarity; drawing single-panel cartoons that vilified the
enemy in Manga or other domestic media; and working in the
government and military service creating propaganda to be
used against the opposing troops (fig. 64).

Family strips were low-key and optimistic, depicting in a
humorous way the trials of living in a state of war for nearly a
decade. Fusato Hirai’s Omoitsuki Fujin (“Innovative
Housewife”) emphasized conservation and recycling at home
when supplies were short. Ichio Matsushita’s Suishin Oyaji
(“Mr. Promotion”; fig. 65) featured an energetic little com-
pany president who constantly exhorted his workers and the
populace to increase production and thereby win the war.
The most popular Japanese newspaper strip of all time,
Ryuichi Yokoyama’s Fuku-chan (“Little Fuku”; fig. 66), had
begun in 1936 arid survived the war by adapting. In 1940 its
title was changed to a more aggressive “Advance, Little
Fuku!” and the original pattern on the robe of a supporting
character was changed from “ABC” to “123.” During the war,
ABC was the acronym for the enemy: America, Britain, and
China.

Cartoons in the magazines, such as the semi-official
56 MANGA! MANGA!

Manga, regularly exhorted the nation to “Annihilate the
Satanic Americans and British!” Kondo, the editor of Manga,
drew skillful caricatures of politicians on the cover—a fanged,
green-faced Roosevelt with hair standing on end, and an ef-
fete, pot-bellied Churchill (fig. 67).

Artists directed their work overseas towards two objec-
tives: persuading the native populations of Asia that the
Japanese were liberators and the Allies the Devil in disguise,
and sowing dissension in the ranks of Allied troops. Car-
toons were an excellent medium for both goals because they
transcended the formidable language barrier. In many regions
the people were illiterate.

Many cartoonists were drafted and sent to war zones where
they created reports for the public back home, propaganda
leaflets for the local populace, and leaflets to be dropped over
enemy lines. The greatest success was achieved with native
Asian populations, who were often eager to throw off the

65. Suishin Oyaji (“Mr. Promotion”), drawn by
Ichio Matsushita in 1943. (1.) Mr. Promotion
mourns the death of Admiral Yamamoto, the hero
of Pearl Harbor. (2) An assistant bursts in, an-
nouncing that the men are agitated. (3, 4) Zealous
employees with banners respectfully ask their
president to write slogans to reinstill the proper
spirit in the men. (5) Mr, Promotion, in a burst of
energy, churns out slogans such as “Britain and
America—Sworn Enemies,” “Never Forget the Ad-
miral, ” and “Increase Production in the Name of
Our Hero!” (6) As his employees race off to show
“fighting spirit,” an ink-covered Mr. Promotion
yells, “And I’ll write many more!”

. • > , : • : • • • • • •••:-

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 57

66. Panels from a 1942 episode of Ryuichi
Yokoyama’s Fuku-chan (“Little Fuku”), the
longest-running Japanese newspaper strip of all
time. It debuted in 1936, survived the war, and
continued until 1971. It owed its success to its
lovable hero, Little fuku, who made people smile
no matter how rough life was.

67. Hidezo Kondo’s Roosevelt with fangs, a
cover illustration for a 1943 copy of Manga, the
officially sanctioned wartime cartoon magazine.

58 MANGA! MANGA!

yoke of European colonialism. But these influential artists did
not always cut an imposing military figure. Yokoyama, Fuku-
chan ‘s creator, was so small of stature that he had to have his
regulation samurai sword shortened to prevent it from drag-
ging on the ground.

There was work for everyone. Even the prewar moga-
mobo faction was kept busy creating erotic leaflets directed at
the American, British, and Australian/New Zealand troops.
Erotic-pornographic cartoons and comic strips were designed
to make the lonely soldier worry about the faithfulness of his
girl back home and thereby decrease his fighting efficiency
(fig. 68). Americans on rest-and-recreation in Australia were
invariably portrayed seducing the Aussie soldier’s wife while
hubby slogged through the jungle in the war zone.

But Japan’s enemies were also using propaganda cartoons,
sometimes obtained from unexpected quarters. The Allies
regularly issued a propaganda newspaper called Rakkasan
Nyusu (“Parachute News”) and dropped it throughout Asia
to Japanese troops and civilians in an attempt to weaken their
morale. Since international copyright laws had long since
lapsed, the Allies felt perfectly free to use the popular Jap-
anese strip Fuku-chan in their own newspaper. When Yoko-
yama, Fuku-chan’s original creator, was in Java drawing

Japanese propaganda leaflets, it is easy to imagine how sur-
prised he would have been to see his own work fluttering
down from the sky. On his return to Japan he was reportedly
investigated by the police.

Early Allied propaganda leaflets were mostly ineffective
because they were written by people with an inadequate com-
mand of Japanese. But towards the end of the war a
humanistic, highly effective comic strip called Unganaizo
(“The Unlucky Soldier”) appeared. It had an oddly familiar
look, and to the great surprise of those Japanese artists who
had formerly been active leftists, it was created by none other
than an old comrade, Taro Yashima, once a member of the
proletariat movement in Japan. After being jailed and tor-
tured in 1933, Yashima sailed to America, where he
volunteered his services to the United States Army when the
war began. Yashima was the only Japanese leftist artist who
found a way to continue his overt resistance to Japanese
militarism.

As Saburo lenaga has observed in his book The Pacific
War, “The flood of crude officially sanctioned ‘information’
during the war years turned Japan into an intellectual insane
asylum run by the demented.” Comic art as a tool of politics
was both a product and a cause of the madness.

1?
p

j.

TARO YASHIMA (1908-)

Taro Yashima’s Unganaizo, produced dur-
ing World War II on behalf of a desperate
U.S. Office of War Information, was a
twenty-panel comic leaflet that depicted a
Japanese peasant dying for corrupt of-
ficers. In contrast to the bumbling efforts
of American propagandists with a poor
understanding of Japanese, it did not meet
with the enemy’s derision. Unganaizo was
repeatedly found on the bodies of dead
soldiers, a grisly testimony to its effec-
tiveness. By the end of the war Yashima
was in India working on a guide to sur-
render for the war-weary Japanese
soldier, who had been taught that suicide
was his only recourse in defeat. One of
Yashima’s main concerns, however, was
to show the American people that the
Japanese were not savages or mindless
slaves to their emperor, as the Western
media often implied. To this end in 1943
he created the New Sun, a narrative with
captioned drawings. It was an expose of
Japanese militarism and an account of
how he and other dissidents had tried to
oppose it before the war began. After the
war Yashima remained in America, where
he became an award-winning author of il-
lustrated children’s books.

68. An anonymous wartime propaganda leaflet.
Some of the artists who created such erotic
material radically filtered their drawing styles to
please American tastes, and then after the war
complained that they had forgotten how to draw
Japanese women.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 59

69. The cover for the first issue of Kumanbachi
(“The Hornet”), 1947—a hornet attacks the nose of
then prime minister Shigeru Yoshida. Kumanba-
chi appeared with the slogan, “I am the hornet of
democracy, and for the sake of the democratic
revolution, I fly around . . . BZZZ . . . , never
tiring.” Like many cartoon magazines in the new
“democracy,” Kumanbachi delighted in pillorying
establishment figures, but it was short-lived,
lasting only nine issues. Fumio Matsuyama, the
cover artist and founder of the magazine, was a
former member of the old Proletariat Art League,
Today he is well known for his long years of work
as cartoonist for Akahata (“Red Flag”), the Japan
Communist Party’s daily newspaper.

© 1947 King Features Syndicate

00

*«.»*!
* a •

70. Chic Young’s Blondie, a comic strip of the
formerly “satanic” United States, was translated
and serialized in 1946 in a magazine and later com-
piled into booklets. Women readers, taught to be
submissive to their husbands, loved to watch Blon-
die lord it over Dagwood and to glimpse the lux-
urious, mechanized, and leisured life of the
American housewife. Shown here is a cover to a
1947 booklet.

THE PHOENIX BECOMES A GODZILLA

After Japan’s unconditional surrender in August 1945, surviv-
ing cartoonists emerged from rural evacuation or straggled
home from all corners of Asia to settle in the bombed-out
cities. Like a phoenix rising from smoking ashes, their art
form began to flourish again—this time beyond anyone’s
wildest dreams.

Censorship continued in Japan for several years under the
Allied Occupation, but it still allowed political artists more
freedom than they had ever known before. The first result
was a burst of activity. After surmounting a chronic paper
shortage, newspapers and new or revived adult cartoon
magazines like Van, Manga, and the leftist Kumanbachi
(“The Hornet”; fig. 69) gave social and political artists a
forum. Adjustment to new political realities progressed with
amazing speed (fig. 70). Artists now embraced “democracy.”
Leftists were joined by .prewar comrades who had
“converted” to the side of the militarists for the duration of
the war. Few questions were asked. It was symbolic of the
change that the Yomiuri newspaper sent Hidezo Kondo, who
had drawn Roosevelt with fangs, to report on the official
signing of the U.S.-Japan Peace Treaty in San Francisco in
1951. But the spotlight was no longer on political cartoons.

The immediate postwar period was one of hunger and
black markets, of orphans and limbless veterans. More than
anything else, people wanted to rebuild their lives. In the dai-
ly newspapers, serialized four-panel strips for the family were
humorous, reassuring, and immensely popular. Favorite
themes were average families making the best of hard times,
and lovable little children. Most of the strips were subdued,
endearing, and notable for their similarity of style. One
which particularly caught the public fancy, however, was
Sazae-san. As befitted the new era, its star was a young
woman, and so was its author, Machiko Hasegawa. In the
years after its appearance in 1946, Sazae-san spawned songs,
a live-action film, an animated TV series, and over 20 million
cartoon books. Its success paved the way for a later rush of
women artists into a field that had been completely dom-
inated by men (fig. 71).

Comics for children also reappeared in children’s
magazines like the old Shonen Club, and in special color
newspaper supplements (fig. 72). Perhaps reflecting a desire
to forget the past, there was a boom in science fiction stories
created by such artists as Fukujiro Fukui and Ichio Matsu-
shita. Children’s comics at this time were mostly short pieces
that employed styles pioneered before the war. But changes

60 MANGA! MANGA!

71. The days of the Occupation: A young Sazae
and her little sister emerge from a store that rations
bread. “Sazae,” says little sister. “I think I dropped
a loaf of bread.” “Well, start looking for it. . . . ”
American soldiers in a truck zip by. “There it is!”
Machiko Hasegawa’s Sazae-san was serialized in
the Asahi newspaper from 1946 until 1974 and still
sells well today as a series of sixty-eight volumes of
cartoon books,

72. Cover for The Kodomo Manga Shimbun
(“The Children’s Comics Newspaper”), a three-
color weekly founded in 1946 that helped fill the
gaps until children’s comic magazines began ap-
pearing. In the strip in the center, a young boy eats
an entire can of jam and then fools his father by
putting it upside down on the table. Children were
hungry for sweets, and food was a common
theme. The Kodomo Manga Shimbun was an ex-
ample of American-style color printing, and it
used English on the cover. During the war English
had been banned: with peace it appeared
everywhere.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 61

73. Masao Morishita, aged fifty-eight, is one of
the few professional kami-shibai narrators still
working today and has been in the business over
thirty years. Every afternoon at the same time, he
wheels his bicycle to a nearby park, where a crowd
of children and their mothers are waiting. Deftly
slipping sequential drawings in and out of the
upright frame on his bicycle, Morishita provides
both narration and sound effects. Timing is crucial
to create suspense. Usually the show consists of
three parts: drawings involving quizzes and au-
dience participation; a comedy story; and a ghost
story. The story shown here is “Blood Screams.”

62 MANGA! MANGA!

were brewing outside the established publishing industry that
would radically transform it. Young people in particular were
starved not just for food, but for cheap entertainment.

One immediate result was a surge in popularity of il-
lustrated outdoor storytelling, called kami-shibai, or “paper
plays” (fig. 73). Using a sequence of hand-painted cardboard
story sheets (varnished to keep off the rain), narrators would
travel around neighborhoods and present—with sound ef-
fects—stories to local children. Often the show was “free,” on
the condition that those in the audience bought traditional
sweets sold by the narrator. From the end of the war to the
year 1953, when television broadcasts began, it is estimated
that 10,000 people made a living as kami-shibai narrators and
that 5 million people a day watched a show. Over twenty
companies in Tokyo alone hired aspiring artists to produce
the story sheets. Kami-shibai, like television animation to-
day, was linked with comics. Several stories, notably Ogon
Batto (“Golden Bat”), became comics later. And when televi-
sion rendered kami-shibai storytelling obsolete, many of the
artists who worked for the industry went on to become comic
artists; some, like Sampei Shirato and Shigeru Mizuki, were
to become nationally famous.

At the end of the war, the traditionally powerful Tokyo
publishers were in disarray, and the old-style hardback com-
ics they issued were too expensive for most children. As if
sensing an opportunity, dozens of tiny companies sprang up,
mainly in the rival business center of Osaka, publishing “red
book” comics: notoriously cheap comics with red-ink covers,
printed on rough paper and hawked on the streets. Artists
were paid next to nothing but given considerable freedom.
And among them was a young medical student named Osamu
Tezuka, whose remarkable success would awaken the Tokyo
companies to a new potential of the comic medium.

In 1947, when Tezuka was twenty, he created the comic
Shintakarajima (“New Treasure Island”), loosely based on a
script by Shichima Sakai (fig. 74). Shintakarajima was 200
pages long. Its creative page layout, clever use of sound ef-
fects, and lavish spread of frames to depict a single action
made reading Shintakarajima almost like watching a movie.
Young readers were dazzled. No precise records exist, but
sales of the comic are estimated at between 400,000 and
800,000, without the benefit of publicity.

74. Osamu Tezuka’s 1947 smash hit Shintakara-
jima (“New Treasure Island”) was a goulash of
Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and Tarzan.
The artist duo Fujio-Fujiko have described their
reaction to Tezuka’s new-style comic in their 1978
semi-autobiographical comic, Manga Michi (“The
Way of Comics”), (TOP) “We turned the first page
of the book we had borrowed without permission,
and reeled in shock!” (MIDDLE) Chapter title: “To
the Sea of Adventure.” Sign: “Pier.” (BOTTOM)
“New Treasure Island began with a flowing scene
in which young Pete roared off in his sports car. It
was Osamu Tezuka’s debut publication—a revolu-
tion in postwar comics!”

Tezuka is an example of how one talented individual, born
at the right time, can profoundly change the field he decides
to work in. His heart was not in medicine, and when he even-
tually abandoned his scalpel to become a professional artist
he brought to the medium of children’s comics the cultivated
mind of an intellectual, a fertile imagination, and the desire to
experiment. Comics were merely a forum for Tezuka to ex-
press himself. Stylistically his main influence was not comics
but film, and the animation of Walt Disney and Max Fleisher.
Tezuka was a frustrated animator.

Soon after the appearance of Shintakarajima, Tezuka was
approached by several newly formed, Tokyo-based, quality
boys’ magazines, including Manga Shonen and Shonen, in
whose pages he began the serialization of what were to
become two classics—Jungle Taitei (“Jungle Emperor”) and
Atomu Taishi (“Ambassador Atom,” later changed to Te-
tsuwan Atomu, or “Mighty Atom”). Years later he would
animate both works as pioneering television series. Western
readers may already be familiar with these works as Kimba,
the White Lion and Astro Boy (figs. 75, 76).

TEZUKA ON FILMS AND COMICS
From the autobiography of Osamu
Tezuka: “I felt [after the war] that existing
comics were limiting. . . . Most were
drawn . . . as if seated in an audience
viewing a stage, where the actors emerge
from the wings and interact. This made
it impossible to create dramatic or
psychological effects, so I began to use
cinematic techniques. . . . French and
German movies that I had seen as a
schoolboy became my model. I ex-
perimented with close-ups and different
angles, and instead of using only one
frame for an action scene or the climax (as
was customary), I made a point of depict-
ing a movement or facial expression with
many frames, even many pages. . . . The
result was a super-long comic that ran to
500, 600, even 1,000 pages. . . . I also
believed that comics were capable of more
than just making people laugh. So in my
themes I incorporated tears, grief, anger,
and hate, and I created stories where the
ending was not always ‘happy.’ ”

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 63

ii V’J’ \***«-~^ f

© 1980 0 Tezuk

75. Leo, the Jungle Emperor, and Hige Oyaji are
caught in a blizzard while on an expedition to the
mountains. To save his friend’s life, Leo impales
himself on Hige Oyaji’s knife and offers his body.
A sobbing Hige Oyaji reluctantly accepts Leo’s fur
and flesh, and lives. One of the moving final
scenes from Osamu Tezuka’s Jungle Taitei (“]ungle
Emperor”), a humanistic tale of three generations
of intelligent lions who try to protect and organize
the animal kingdom. It was serialized in Manga
Shonen from 1950 to 1954 and made into Japan’s
first color animated television series in 1965.

The demand for Tezuka comics (and imitations) seemed in-
satiable. He experimented with his new style in a spate of pro-
ductivity, creating science fiction, detective stories, historical
works, and romances for girls. Stories of hundreds of pages in
length and his new cinematic techniques allowed a level of
character and plot development that had been previously
unimaginable.

Volumes have been written in Japan about Tezuka and the
revolution he triggered. Most striking is the effect he had on
young readers. None of the major artists today has escaped
his influence. Many have specifically stated that they chose
their career when they first read Tezuka’s comics.

Manga Shonen, the Tokyo monthly magazine that serial-
ized Jungle Taitei, also played a major role in popularizing
comics. It was founded in 1947 by Ken’ichi Kato, a former
editor of the prewar Shonen Club who was purged from his
job by Occupation forces in the belief that that magazine had
been militaristic. Manga Shonen only lasted until 1955, but it
was a remarkable experiment in that it was one of the first

64 MANGAl MANGA!

76. After being transported into the past by a time machine, Atom and his
surrogate father, Dr. Ochanomizu, are attacked by a dinosaur while fording
a stream. Tetsuwan Atomu (“Mighty Atom”), Japan’s most famous science
fiction comic, starred a little boy robot with superpowers and human emo-
tions. In his long (and continuing) career, Atom consistently opposed war
and injustice—unlike American superheroes he fought not for freedom but
for peace. The story, a pioneer in a huge genre of robot characters, was
serialized in Shonen from 1952 to 1968 and made into Japan’s first animated
television series in 1963.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 65

77. In the 1950s young Japanese vied with each
other to have their own comic submissions ac-
cepted by the magazine Manga Shorten. Fujio-
Fujiko treated this theme in Manga Michi. (LEFT)
“Michio Maga was stricken with an indescribable
feeling of failure!” (CENTER) “Beneath the large-
type name of Shigeru Saino, sandwiched among
those of the other entrants and printed so small a
magnifying glass was needed to see it, he finally
found his own name.”

78. Soon after Osamu Tezuka moved into the
ramshackle apartment building Tokiwaso in 1954
he was joined by other aspiring artists, some still in
their teens, and eventually they occupied the entire
second floor. Poor, but inspired by Tezuka’s ex-
ample, they began submitting their work to the
comic magazines. Today, many of these original
residents are rich and famous. Eight of them are
shown here as they appeared in 1956, in a drawing
by Fujio-Fujiko (Messrs. Fujimoto and Abiko, top
right). By this time, Tezuka had already left. As
for Tokiwaso, it still stands, a tourist attraction
slated, rumor has it, for demolition.

66 MANGA! MANGA!

Japanese children’s magazines to concentrate on comics. In
addition to the work of reigning professionals, it also featured
the works of unknown amateurs. Boys—and some
girls—from all over Japan sent in samples of short comics,
and their names were published and ranked according to the
excellence of their submission (fig. 77). Artists of promise
were sent little metal badges; the best had their creations
published and, in what must have seemed like a dream come
true, were sometimes commissioned to create a serialized
story.

Partly as a result of Tezuka’s success, comics came to be
regarded as a creative medium accessible to anyone—unlike
novels or films which required education, connections, and
money. A list of contributors to Manga Shonen in the early
’50s reads like a who’s who of the comic industry today—
Fujio-Fujiko, Fujio Akatsuka, Reiji Matsumoto, Hideko
Mizuno, Shotaro Ishimori, and on and on—many of whom
became professionals at the age of seventeen or eighteen. The
list also includes Sakyo Komatsu, a top science fiction writer,
Tadanori Yokoo, an internationally famous illustrator, and
many of Japan’s finest designers, cameramen, actors, poets,
and screenplay writers.

Demand for the new story-comics by monthly magazines
in Tokyo brought Tezuka to the capital in 1954. There he
moved into a rundown apartment building named Tokiwaso,
which became a mecca for young artists from all over Japan
who wished to follow in his footsteps. Several began living in
the same building and eventually became his main com-
petitors (fig. 78). The “red book” comic boom in Osaka had
been short-lived, but it had helped popularize comics. The in-
dustry was now centered in Tokyo.

Artists who drew serialized stories for Tokyo-based
magazines in the 1950s were the elite of the industry. But
there was still another group, creating the same kind of story-
comics, who worked for a pittance. Their publishers, though
centered in Osaka, were linked not with the “red book” com-
ics but with the kashibon’ya, or professional book-lenders,
who at one time were estimated to number 30,000 nationally.
These pay libraries, like kami-shibai, were a response to a de-
mand for inexpensive entertainment and lent both books and
comics for a small fee according to the number of days bor-
rowed. Many comics were created exclusively for the pay
libraries, taking the form of “books” and monthly
“magazines,” notably Kage (“Shadow”; fig. 79) and Machi
(“City”). Both the comic books and comic magazines were
about 150 pages long with stitched bindings and hard covers.
They had to withstand the readings of hundreds of people.

The artists who cartooned for the pay-library market, like
their counterparts in the children’s magazines, made use of
the cinematic techniques and novelistic plots coming into
vogue. Increasingly, their readership was older, often in-
cluding high school students and young factory workers. Art-
ists like Takao Saito, Masaaki Sato, and Yoshihiro Tatsumi
dropped the Disney-style of drawing that was popular in the
children’s magazines and adopted a more serious, graphic ap-
proach to depict more adult and action-oriented themes.
Appropriately, they even gave their comics a new

name—gekiga, or “drama pictures.” With the advent of
television, many kami-shibai artists who lost their livelihoods
started drawing gekiga, bringing to that genre new talent and
narrative skills.

The incredible popularity of story-comics, whether created
by the Tezuka camp of artists or by those working for the
pay-library market, led Tokyo-based publishers to decrease
the amount of text in most monthly children’s magazines, add
more pages, and increase their size so as to better display the
artwork. This was not enough. By the end of the 1950s the
Japanese economy was beginning its explosive growth. Young
people had spending money, and they wanted more comics.

In 1959 Kodansha, one of the largest book publishers in
Japan, jolted the industry by issuing Shonen Magazine, the
first weekly wholly devoted to comics. It soon ballooned into
a 300-page monster. Other publishers quickly followed suit,
and within a few years seven weekly comic magazines with
the same basic format—five for boys and two for
girls—engulfed the industry. Meanwhile, since people could
afford to buy comics and no longer needed to borrow them,
the pay-library market collapsed (today there are only
around 2,000 lenders left), and its many talented and produc-
tive artists entered the mainstream of the industry. Usually
this involved their coming to live in Tokyo.

As artists Fujio-Fujiko have noted, the changeover from a
monthly to weekly format was as traumatic for artists as the
switch from silent movies to “talkies” had been for actors. It
meant that artists had four times as much work to do as
before, and only a quarter of the time between deadlines.
Their entire lives had to be reordered.

From that point on, the escalator went through the ceiling.
In 1966 the weekly circulation of Shonen Magazine topped 1
million; in 1978 Shonen Jump and Shonen Champion passed
the 2-million mark; and in December 1984 Shonen Jump sold
over 4 million copies in one week.

By the mid-1960s the industry had assumed its present
configuration. It was predominantly located in Tokyo.
Television and comics were firmly intertwined in a symbiotic
relationship. Major book publishers supported themselves
with sales of comics, first serialized in magazines and then
compiled into series of paperbacks. Meanwhile the average
age of the readership was steadily rising, resulting in the ap-
pearance of comics for adults. Women had finally entered the
field in force as artists for girls’ comics, displacing men with
the convincing argument that they better understood female
psychology.

While the development of comic books in the United States
faltered, and sales shriveled, Japan gave birth to a Godzilla.
But the explosion of the industry did not occur without a
sacrifice. The color printing that was so common before the
war all but disappeared. Political and editorial cartoons were
virtually destroyed by politics, ideology, and later, apathy.
Humor magazines featuring short, sophisticated comics and
cartoons in the tradition of the British Punch or the American
New Yorker were driven out of business, and the artists of
this genre were demoted to the role of filling in the spaces be-
tween the long story-comics in comic magazines.

79. Kage (“Shadow”), a popular hardcover
magazine for pay libraries, published from 1956 to
1966. The cover is by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the first
person to coin the word gekiga, or “drama pic-
tures,” as distinct from manga, or “comics.”

A THOUSAND YEARS OF MANGA 67