A History of Manga

The Rise of Japanese Manga

Japan has become the world leader in comics. Japanese manga, as comics are called here,
have been publicized the world over on television and in newspapers and the most
popular works have been introduced abroad both through legal and pirate translations.
But despite these efforts, they remain insufficient for foreign audiences wishing to
acquire a comprehensive understanding of the genre. In the months that follow I intend to
give a wide-ranging introduction to Japanese manga based on theme, but before I do I
should like to begin with an overview of the basics.

photos show racks and racks of manga at specialist bookstores in Tokyo

First I would like to provide some information on the Japanese manga industry. The
manga industry in Japan is of such a massive scale as to completely overshadow the
industries of the two other great comic-producing nations, the United States and France.
There are a great number of magazines in Japan devoted exclusively to manga but it is
difficult to give an exact accounting of their number given that it is not at all uncommon
for smaller publishing houses to bring out one new magazine after another under different
titles. The core of the manga publishing industry consists of some 13 weekly manga
magazines published by the major publishers alone, along with 10 biweeklies, and
approximately twenty influential monthlies. At any given time there are at least ten
magazines which boast over one million copies of each issue. At most there is one non-
manga magazine in Japan which can claim a readership of over one million.
Yearly sales of manga throughout the 1990's have been in the neighborhood of 600
billion yen, including 350 billion in magazine sales and 250 billion in paperbacks. These
figures do no not include sales of manga appearng in general magazines and newspapers.
The total sales of published material in Japan (including magazines and books but
excluding newspapers) is two trillion five-hundred billion yen, of which manga sales
account for nearly one quarter. Given a total Japanese population of 120 million, we can
calculate that the average Japanese spends approximately 2,000 yen per year on manga in
one form or another.
The three largest publishing houses producing manga are Kodansha, Shogakkan, and
Shueisha. In addition there are some ten odd publishing firms which come in at a close
second, including Akita Shoten, Futabasha, Shonen Gahosha, Hakusensha, Nihon
Bungeisha, and Kobunsha. This is not even to mention the countless other small-scale
publishing firms. The larger publishers mentioned above also publish magazines and
books in areas outside of manga.

It is estimated that there are around 3000 professional manga artists in Japan. All of these
individuals have published at least one volume of manga, but most of them make their
living as assistants to famous manga artists or have some other supplementary source of
income. Only 300 of these, or ten percent of the total, are able to make an above-average
living from manga alone. In addition, there are also a great number of amateur manga
artists who produce small magazines intended for private circulation, called dojinshi.
Characteristics of Japanese Manga
Japanese manga are distinguished from their Western counterparts by the following
characteristics.
Predominance of Serialization in Periodicals
It is exceedingly rare for manga in Japan to be written for publication in book form.
Typically they are first serialized in installments of twenty to thirty pages and
subsequently compiled as a book. Because they are originally published in magazines,
they tend to be black and white. Popular works can be serialized over several years and
run into dozens of volumes when they are released in book form.
Division of Target Audience by Age and Sex
Japanese manga can be divided into the following categories depending on the age of the
audience targeted by the magazines in which they appear: The first category includes
children's magazines (yonenshi), teen magazines (shonenshi), and "young" magazines
(yangushi, also known as seinenshi) which attract readers from their late teens to their
late twenties. The second group includes adult magazines (known as seinenshi, where
seinen refers to adults rather than young people, or otonashi) which are intended for a
more mature audience with no upper age limit. Manga catering mainly to women are
further divided by age into young-girls manga (shojoshi) and "Ladies" comics (known
according to the Japanese pronunciation of the English "ladies" or "redizu.") Women-
oriented manga are marked by sophisticated character descriptions and a distinctive
grammar or frame syntax.
.......the manga readers
.......businessmen, schoolboys, young men and women...readers come in all shapes and sizes
Narrative Sophistication
So-called sutourii-man, or narrative manga, are much more developed in Japan than one-
or four-frame comics, reaching a level of sophistication which has often warranted
comparison with film. While the main compositional element in film is the cut (or
articulation), in manga this function is fulfilled by the frame, or koma. The syntax of
koma arrangement is highly sophisticated, making possible a seemless visualization of
the narrative. While Western narrative comics tend to be theme-driven, Japanese sutourii-
man privilege character development. In Japanese manga the theme is made apparent
through the words and actions of the characters, such that the reader is able to experience
the theme through a process of psychological identification with the protagonists. It is the
success of this method which accounts for the extraordinary popularity of the manga
genre.
Terms
Comics in Japan are referred to as "manga." A certain inferiority complex vis a vis the
West has resulted in a tendency among many publishers to use the term komikku, the
Japanized version of the English "comic." But this term has not taken hold among readers
in Japan, who are much more likely to use the Japanese, manga. Although usually
rendered in the Japanese phonetic script known as katakana, the word is actually
composed of two Chinese ideographs meaning "playful (or 'capricious') "images" and
originally referred to satiric or clever pictures. But the dramatic development of
contemporary manga beginning in the late 1960s brought an expansion of subject matter
beyond satire and comedy. It was in order to encompass this greater range of subject
matter that the term began to be written in phonetic script to avoid the narrower
implications of the Sino-Japanese ideograms. In the West as well, Japanese manga are
often referred to using the original Japanese term written in Roman letters in order to set
them apart as a unique and important genre.

.......a homeless man sells manga on the street

Trends in Japanese Manga

Satirical painting and humorous genre paintings can be traced back as far as the twelfth
century in Japan. The early nineteenth-century artist Hokusai was particularly skilled in
producing this kind of work. With the establishment of a modern state in 1868, Japan also
saw the development of a modern mass media including newspapers and magazines
containing manga. But the most significant advance in the art form came after the end of
World War II. Thus the manga that we know today are really post-war manga. They have
a history of half a century.
Contemporary manga traces its origins to a single genius - that of Osamu Tezuka. In 1947
Tezuka took Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island as the inspiration for a manga
version entitled New Treasure Island published in book form. Despite the miserable
economic conditions of the immediate postwar and the decimation of the publishing
industry, this work became an immediate bestseller, selling 400,000 copies. At the time
Tezuka was a nineteen-year-old medical student. New Treasure Island contained the
germs of a new syntax for manga and had an enormous impact on a new generation of
manga artists. Tezuka himself continued to produce manga until his death in 1989,
authoring such popular works as Astro Boy.
The decade following the war saw the emergence of a great number of manga artists in
addition to Tezuka, bringing about a veritable manga boom. Nonetheless, manga were
still identified as a genre for children. But those who grew up reading manga were not
able to kick the habit after reaching adulthood. This was the postwar generation, the
manga generation. In their estimation of manga, the members of this generation came to
experience a virtually irreparable rift with their elders.
By the late 1960s the manga generation had become university students and
contemporary manga met with a crucial turning point. It was at this time that one began
to see manga which met the demands of university students for entertainment and art. The
rising student movement enthusiastically embraced this newly emergent media and in the
process, Japanese contemporary manga came into its own.
Around 1980 manga techniques began to show an even greater degree of refinement and
manga magazines acquired the breadth and diversity they still maintain today. Today's
manga have emerged as a virtually omnipotent visual media, encompassing forms of
entertainment from joke-books to melodrama to sci-fi, literary works from novels to
travelogues, and manuals for educational and didactic purposes. As such, they have come
to be enjoyed by people in all walks of life.

..manga and its number one rival, GameBoy, sit happily side
by side.....
Information Manga and Ishinomori Shotaro
 Ishinomori Shotaro
On The Publication of 'A Manga Introduction to the Japanese Economy'
Ishinomori Shotaro passed away this year on the 26th of January. He was famous as the
author of A Manga Introduction to the Japanese Economy. He was also widely know
abroad thanks to the English translation of the same work. Ironically, however, the
success of this work has actually given rise to misunderstandings about the nature of
Japanese manga. In this installment I will be discussing this work and its author,
Ishinomori Shotaro
Several years ago I was visited by a newspaper reporter from a certain developed nation
in Europe who wished to discuss Japan's thriving manga culture. The reporter's first
words to me were, "Japanese manga can be divided into three categories, economic
manga, erotic manga, and violent manga. "This comment came as quite a surprise to me
and I was sad to think that Europeans had such a distorted view of Japanese manga. Like
the proverbial troupe of blind men who try in vain to identify the elephant, it struck me
that Europeans had no concept of Japanese manga as a whole.
Needless to say, there is no such tripartite division of Japanese ma nga. In terms of
content alone there are many other genres of manga, including sports manga, romance
manga, literary manga, historical and joke manga. While there is such a thing as erotic
manga, there are no established genres devoted specifically to economics or violence. As
for violence, the difference is only a cultural one (Japan has a lower incidence of violent
crime than the United States and Europe), and "economic manga" are just one part of the
larger genre of 'information manga" (also known as expository or textbook manga).
Moreover, these information manga are not regarded very highly among manga.
Information manga exploiting the illustrative function of the manga form to serve as
study aids for children have existed since before the Second World War. With the
extraordinary development of manga as an expressive form during the 1970s, so-called
"academic manga" began to appear in general magazines mostly read by businessmen.
They do not necessarily have a narrative structure, but the protagonists are shown
applying themselves to the study of the origins of and various anecdotes about food,
liquor and annual festivals.
It was in this context that A Manga Introduction to the Japanese Economy appeared in
1986. Unlike most manga in Japan, this work was released not in serialization but in book
form from the start. Nonetheless, its three volumes sold a million copies, and it was even
read by people born before the war. In this way even those who had previously shown no
interest in manga and who did not belong to the so-called "manga generation" were
compelled to recognize the expressive power of the manga form.
This led to the appearance of ever more manga dealing with subject matter such as
history, science, and classical literature. At the same time, manga even began to be
employed as a public relations tool by governmental agencies. As a whole this new
category of manga began to be referred to as "information manga," "expository manga,"
or "textbook manga." In some cases, they were referred to, with some measure of irony,
as "educational manga for grown-ups."
The Genius of Ishinomori Shotaro
A Manga Introduction to the Japanese Economy may have been enthusiastically received
by people who did not otherwise read manga, but it was widely scoffed at by manga
enthusiasts. In the first place, the initial volume bore Ishinomori's signature but the style
was clearly not his own, while the second and third volumes were clearly his work. The
reason for this inconsistency might be assumed to be the following.
When Ishinomori first received the commission to do this job he was entirely
uninterested, not only because not a single manga released from the start as a book had
ever been a hit, but also because this kind of manga as economics textbook was not
considered appropriate work for a first-rate manga artist. Producing manga study aids for
children was mainly seen as a leisure-time occupation for manga artists who had retired
from an active career.
For these reasons, Ishinomori turned the project over entirely to his assistants and simply
lent his name to the finished product. Contrary to all expectations, however, the first
volume became a bestseller and naturally the request came for more volumes. Ishinomori
had no choice but to take up his pen himself. This made the work a rather bizarre
bestseller of which the first volume was written by someone other than the ostensible
artist and the subsequent volumes were the work of the artist himself. Needless to say
there are often cases where a work becomes a best seller and the author decides to leave
the work of producing sequels to ghost writers. But A Manga Introduction to the Japanese
Economy was extraordinary because the situation was reve rsed.
Despite its rather dismal reception by manga enthusiasts, this work deserves credit for
having helped to establish the genre of information manga. In particular we should take
note of the following two points. First off, it helped to raise society's awareness of manga
as a whole, and secondly it created more job opportunities for manga artists who had
withdrawn from the forefront of the manga world. Both of these points are of course from
the perspective of manga as an industry. At the risk of repetition, however, I would like to
emphasize that information manga were nothing more than an application of what had
already been developed in more established manga genres, both in terms of content and
technique. As such they had nothing to contribute to the larger development of manga as
a whole.
Ishinomori Shotaro was born in 1938. He moved to Tokyo after graduation from high
school and took up residence in the legendary Tokiwa-Sapartment building. This
building, located in Tokyo's Shiina Machi, housed the studio of Tezuka Osamu and the
residences of other promising young manga artists in addition to Ishinomori, including
Fujiko Fujio, Akatsuka Fujio, and Mizuno Hideko, all of whom were to become pillars of
the explosively expanding manga world in the 1960s.
Ishinomori Shotaro was a genius who employed radical new techniques of cut-backs,
fade-outs, and black-white inversion to enhance frame-articulation and narrative
development. In terms of content he produced manga adaptations of highly influential
and intelligent works by writers such as Ray Bradbury, Jack Finney, and John Wyndham.
In the 1960s these were all completely without precedent.
From the 1970s on Ishinomori became a best-selling author of popular works. In the
1980's he went on to set the standard for information manga. There is no disputing
Ishinomori's status as an artist always on the forefront of his age.

Cyborg 009 + Kamen Rider, Shotaro Ishinomori

Tezuka Osamu and the Expressive Techniques of Contemporary Manga Tezuka
Osamu's Debut: A Manga Prose Revolution
Manga today is flourishing on the foundations laid by Tezuka Osamu. This article will
discuss that foundation in terms of expressive technique.
Foreign, and particularly European readers often describe the experience of reading
Japanese manga as similar to that of watching a film. This characterization was also on
the lips of the young Japanese readers who would go onto become manga artists
themselves when they first read Tezuka Osamu's New Treasure Island upon its release in
1947. Postwar and contemporary manga was born with this first "cinematic" work.
And yet despite this characterization, the pictures of manga are not "moving pictures,"
and unlike film, the frames are of fixed dimensions. So why is it that people persist in
using this cinematic metaphor to describe Japanese manga?
The first surprise in store for readers of New Treasure Island was the scene in which the
young protagonist arrives by car at a wharf, hurrying to catch his ship before it sailed. In
manga prior to this one or two frames would have sufficed to convey the whole scene.
But Tezuka spent eight of the 180 pages of this work to render this scene of a car arriving
at a wharf. And the depiction is different from anything manga readers had seen before.
From the close-up of the boy's face the perspective pans to the driver's seat of the car and
the gradual zoom-in of the car racing along the seaside road is almost as if the artist had
simply pasted successive frames from a film onto the page. This latter technique was
highly cinematic and led to the characterization of this manga as "like a film." But
however much Tezuka may have been inspired by film to create these "pan-out" and
"close-up" techniques, the pictures in his manga still don't move. Furthermore, this
technique was only employed in the opening scene which has little to do with the main
narrative. But the fact that this work as a whole conveyed the impression of something
which could only be called "cinematic" testifies to the enormous impact of Tezuka's use
of the first eight pages of this work to this opening scene with little relevance to the plot.
This work had more than just a plot. It had scenic depictions and a flowing narrative
development.
Narrative manga are descended from picture stories known as 'e-monogatari'. In these
picture stories, however, the accompanying text and not the images were the primary
vehicle of the narrative. In narrative manga, however, it is the images themselves, the
succession of and linkages between the frames that tell the story. The syntax of the
frames is of particular importance. Tezuka's New Treasure Island made this very clear. Its
appearance was like the usurpation of poetry by prose, the replacement of the chivalric
romance of medieval times with the modern novel. If this new manga was like a film, it is
to be contrasted in the Japanese tradition by the kabuki and the noh.
Europeans see the Japanese manga as "cinematic" because frame syntax in European
comics is relatively underdeveloped. While the content may be sophisticated, the
technique has yet to attain the level of modern prose.
Tezuka Osamu and the Expressive Techniques of Contemporary Manga
The Emergence of the Geki-ga and their Incorporation into Narrative Manga
Of course, from a contemporary perspective the technical standards of New Treasure
Island appear almost primitive. But Tezuka continued for over forty years to work at the
forefront of the manga world and was himself responsible for a great number of technical
innovations until his death in early 1989 (this year also saw the death of the Showa
Emperor and the end of the era by the same name which began in 1926 with his
ascension to the throne). It is important to note that Tezuka was able to incorporate the
techniques of the new genre known as geki-ga as it emerged in the 1960s without
completely assimilating to it.
The geki-ga first emerged in books produced for lending libraries in the late 1950s. They
took Tezuka's narrative manga as their point of departure but developed along different
lines.
As I mentioned earlier, Tezuka's work had a strong influence on young manga artists after
the war. Several of them formed the famous Tokiwa-so Group and became professional
manga artists under Tezuka's tutelage. For the most part their work was didactic in nature,
intended to educate and guide young people in the right direction. But unlike the
simplistic moralism and entertainment of the prewar era, their manga had a modern and
metropolitan flair.
But among the artists inspired by Tezuka there were also those whose works were not
necessarily educational or didactic. These artists wrote for people of their own age in
their late teens and produced realistic depictions of the cruelty of society and life in
general. Needless to say, these kinds of depictions were completely reliant on the
"modern prose" techniques pioneered by Tezuka. Because these authors preferred
shocking images (although compared to manga today they seem almost pastoral) they
were refused publication by the major Tokyo-based magazines. Instead they appeared in
lending magazines published by houses out of Osaka and Nagoya, or minor Tokyo firms.
The books for lending I have mentioned were published for circulation in the more than
30,000 private lending libraries in existence at their peak in the 1950s. The vast majority
of the books made available there were manga. These lending libraries often sold cheap
candy as well and were strictly forbidden to children from good families. A certain
segment of young manga artists saw this network of lending libraries as a venue for their
own creative output. They called their work "geki-ga" in contrast both to older forms of
manga and to the works that were being produced by those associated with Tezuka. The
"geki" of "geki-ga" encompasses the two meanings of "dramatic" and "action-filled," so
that one might best translate the term as "action comics."
Beginning in the mid-1960s the manga generation was entering college and demand
increased for manga of interest to university students and adults. This was a great
opportunity for the manga artists of the lending libraries, the geki-ga artists, whose
livelihood was being threatened by the eclipse of the lending library system as a result of
the spread of television. They began to produce manga treating themes hetertofore unseen
in the child-centric manga world--works about history, social problems, news events, and
love.
Not to be outdone by this rising new force, Tezuka himself began to come out with
manga dealing with history and politics done with a geki-ga touch beginning in the
1970s. He was not, however, influenced by the sensationalism and vulgarity of the geki-
ga. When readers eventually tired of the geki-ga, Tezuka's choice proved to have been the
right one.
Today there is no real distinction between the narrative manga and the geki-ga. But
technical matters in the finer sense--the detail of depiction, techniques of deformation, the
rich variety of the frames, and the use of effectlines continue to show a steady
improvement.
Historical Manga and its Best-Known Artists
Pre- and Postwar Historical Drama
Historical manga, usually dealing with samurai, are among the most popular types of
Japanese manga in the West. These are also referred to using the term "chanbara," an
onomatopoeia for the sound of swords clashing together. Typically set anywhere from
late medieval Japan of the 16th century to the end of the Edo period (1603-1868), some
remain close to historical fact and others are highly fictionalized. In prewar Japan
historical dramas were a favorite theme in films and popular novels and after the war
historical themes were taken up in television dramas popular among the older generation.
Historical dramas in manga form, however, have followed a slightly different course.
There is nothing corresponding to historical drama in the prewar predecessors of
contemporary manga. More typical of the Taisho period (1912-1926) were humorous
children's manga like Miyao Shigeo's Dango Kushisuke Manyuki ("The Adventures of
Dango Kushisuke"), the protagonist of which is named after round mochi balls on a
skewer. In the prewar years of the Showa period (1926-1945) wildly popular works like
Tagawa Suiho's Norakuro Nitohei ( "Canine Private Norakuro") and Shimada Keizo's
Boken Dankichi ("The Adventures of Dankichi") were both marked by the militaristic
atmosphere of the time but neither was set in the age of the samurai.
For seven years after Japan's defeat in the Second World War no manga emerged which
dealt with historical themes. These same years also saw the disappearance of the
battlefield dramas which had been so popular during the war. This was a result of
restrictions on freedom of speech imposed by the Allied (mostly American) Occupation
forbidding the production and distribution of novels, dramas, films, and manga dealing
with samurai, martial arts, or the Japanese military. The ostensible purpose behind these
restrictions was to prevent the resurgence of militaristic sentiments. The implementation
of the San Francisco Peace Accord in 1952 brought an end to these restrictions and
Japanese were once more free to enjoy historical and wartime dramas.
This was also the time of the first boom in contemporary manga, when works like the
1952 Igaguri-kun (Master Crew Cut) and the 1954 Akado Suzunosuke, about a great
swordsman who wore a red suit of armor, were overwhelmingly popular among children.
Both of these were written by Fukui Eiichi but the latter was taken over by Takeuchi
Tsunayoshi when Fukui dropped out soon after the beginning of its serialization. Both
works spawned an enormous number of derivatives and sequels.
In terms of both narrative and description these manga were explicitly intended for
children and typically served up a moral together with a good deal of humor. This is
attributable to the fact that they were produced before the transformation of manga that
took place in the late 1960s.
The Coming of Shirato Sanpei
Shirato Sanpei stands out as a unique figure in the trajectory of historical manga. The son
of wartime leftist painter Okamoto Toki, Shirato started work as a kamishibai artist soon
after graduating from middle school in the postwar. Kamishibai is a form of street theater
using pictures drawn on thick paper to accompany the recitation of a dramatic script. It
first emerged in the 1930s and enjoyed enormous popularity until it was eventually
eclipsed by television. Shirato was one of several kamishibai artists who later turned to
creating manga.
Shirato produced his first manga for books distributed through lending libraries, or
kashihon (see the previous installment for more information on kashihon). His first work
featured a ninja as the protagonist. Ninja were popular characters in prewar pulp novels,
but at the time they tended to be portrayed as mountain sorcerers. The 1960s saw a new
boom in ninja novels in which the ninja ran in bands and had special fighting abilities
which they used to influence power struggles among feudal lords, or daimy It was in the
context produced by these ninja novels that Shirato created his own radically new ninja
manga.
Shirato Sanpei's ninja manga dealt with grand themes and stretched over multiple
volumes. They provided highly dramatized accounts of the class contradictions of late
medieval Japan, struggles between organizations and individuals, and of East Asian
attitudes toward life and death. They far outstripped other manga of the time both in
theme and expressive technique. Shirato's best known work of this time was Ninja
bugeich Kagemaru den ("Records of Ninja Warfare: The Legend of Kagemaru").
Unfortunately, however, these works were in serious danger of remaining virtually
unknown outside a small coterie as a result of the demise of the lending library system in
the early 1960s.
By the mid-1960s, just when the media started to address the fact that the postwar
generation persisted in reading manga even after reaching adulthood and attending
college, Shirato's works were reissued by major publishing houses. At the same time
Shirato began serializing new works for the magazines of large publishers and for Garo, a
magazine read exclusively by manga devotees. His works became widely read and
appreciated mostly by students and intellectuals. Perhaps the best know historical manga
in the West is Kozure Okami ("The Lone Wolf and his Kid"), with illustrations by Kojima
Goseki and text by Koike Kazuo. Kojima was also a product of the lending library
system. In the late 1960s he worked on the production team for Shirato Sanpei's Kamui-
den ("the Legend of Kamui").
Hirata Hiroshi also merits inclusion in any discussion of historical manga. Hirata got his
start producing manga for lending libraries and his portrayals were shocking enough to
merit not one but two incidents of censure. His gift for depicting love and hate in human
relations with a fierce touch made him a favorite of writer Mishima Yukio. The sci-fi
manga artist Otomo Katsuhiro is also a fan of Hirata and even accepted the commission
to design the covers of his collected works.
Laughter in Contemporary Manga
Terms Used for Comedic Manga
Just as the English word "comic" shares its root with the term "comedy," the Japanese
"manga" also has the meaning of "comical." The original term in Chinese characters
meant "light-hearted jokes expressed in pictures." "Manga," then, were pictures intended
to make people laugh. Although the postwar period saw comedic manga eclipsed by
narrative manga, laughter remains an important element of the genre and it is this element
that I will discuss today.
Comedic manga can be grouped in the following categories.
Satirical Manga: including caricatures, manga on current events, politics, and social
issues, are typically single-frame although some may be longer. They are published in
newspapers and general magazines. Despite the fact that virtually every newspaper
carries a few, not once over the last thirty years has a satirical manga made much of a
splash. Most are done by manga artists of the older generation.
Nonsense Manga: humorous manga of one or several frames which are not satirical. They
are referred to as "nonsense" manga from the perspective of those who think of satire as
the only proper mode of manga. The same term, however, has sometimes been used to
describe manga which play with and undermine everyday common sense. In either case,
it is used exclusively by manga artists of the old school.
Gag Manga: Although the term "gag" originally refers to a spur of the moment joke,
beginning with the comedy revolution of the late 1960s which I will discuss later "gag
manga" has been used to refer to all comedic manga.
Akatsuka Fujio
Certainly in prewar Japan and even into the first twenty years of the postwar, comedic
manga were nothing more than pictorial adaptations of the tales told by comedians and
rakugo artists. They were populated with droll characters clowning and bumbling around
in a buildup to a final punch line.
In the late 1960s, however, a man named Akatsuka Fujio came along to change all that,
with wildly popular works like Osomatsu-kun and Tensai Bakabon. The characters in
these works were utterly warped, both in looks and personality. It was not uncommon for
the supporting characters to be more active than the protagonists and the laughs came
more from spontaneous humor than from punch lines with long buildups. They were new
in every sense. Akatsuka lost his touch after an initial string of successes but there is no
denying his status as great pioneer.

Akatsuka Fujio's Tensai Bakabon

Shoji Sadao emerged on the adult manga scene at almost the same time as Akatsuka
Fujio. Shoji used drawings which could only be called infantile from contemporary
standards to draw out the humor in the details both of everyday and entirely surreal
situations. These techniques were also unprecedented in manga history.
Tanioka Yasuji came on the scene in the very end of the sixties and produced manga
characterized by in-your-face and explosive humor.
From this point on Japanese comedic manga began to free itself of the restraints imposed
by morality, educational concerns, and tradition in favor of the pure pursuit of laughter.
The Entry of Scifi Writers
In 1974 Yamagami Tatsuhiko's Gakideka ("Boy Detective") caused quite a stir.
Yamagami's inclusion of themes involving abnormal sexual desire which had always
been taboo was certainly shocking enough, but perhaps even more important was the
realistic precision of his style. Up until this point the characters in comedic manga had
always been highly simplified and stereotyped.

Yamagami Tatsuhiko's Gakideka

Yamagami Tatsuhiko wrote scifi manga for ten years before he shifted to gag manga. It
was this experience that gave him his cynical view of people and civilization as well as
his precise drawing style.
Umezu Kazuo, a veteran of mystery manga, brought out his hit comedic manga Makoto-
chan at about the same time as Yamagami got his start in the genre. His style was also
realistically precise, one which he had cultivated from his days as a mystery manga artist.
 Umezu Kazuo's Makoto-chan
The Rise and Fall of Four-Frame Manga
A new boom in four-frame manga came about in the early 1980s, as the manga market
expanded with the founding of several new manga magazines. The new four-frame
comics, however, were overwhelmingly conservative and nostalgic in spirit, nothing
more than old-fashioned depictions of practical jokes and bumblings. The widespread
popularity of this pathetic humor was evidence that manga had become little more than a
simple distraction from the banalities of everyday life.
But even from among these pedestrian four-frame artists there emerged a genius by the
name of Igarashi Mikio. Igarashi's manga were sharp-edged criticisms of social
hypocrisy.
The mid-1980s saw the beginning of a new genre of four-frame manga which were called
"manga of the absurd." These were manga in which one was never sure exactly where to
laugh. Yoshida Sensha and Enomoto Shuji were the most influential practitioners of this
style. Their eccentric style gained them many followers among younger manga artists but
quickly became cliched and lapsed into solipsism. Meanwhile, banal four-frame manga
have continued to be produced and forgotten amidst a dry-spell of comedic manga.
Shojo Manga: A Unique Genre
Shojo Manga--Only in Japan
Foreigners coming to Japan from countries where manga culture is relatively
undeveloped are inevitably struck by the incredible breadth of the great sea of Japanese
manga, which claim even university students and intellectuals among their readers. But
even those foreigners who recover from their initial astonishment to awaken to the
pleasures of manga are often still puzzled by the genre of girls comics, or shojo manga. It
seems that it is hard for foreigners to grasp the idea of a special genre of manga written
for women readers, focusing on love stories, and executed in a unique style.
Broadly speaking, shojo manga share the following characteristics.
First, more than ninety percent of those who write and read shojo manga are women.
Beginning in the late 1970s with the so-called "New Wave" works which I will discuss
later, shojo manga acquired a certain number of male readers, but even so that readership
has not expanded beyond a limited number of afficionados. Part of the reason why a
special genre specifically for women has arisen can be found in the sheer vastness of the
manga market as a whole. Another reason has to do with the fact that "girls culture" and
"boys culture" have always occupied separate spheres in Japanese culture.
Second, the main themes of shojo manga include soap-opera dramas of mother-daughter
relationships, stories of girls rising to stardom, and love stories. The narrative structure
tends to be melodramatic and predictable, much in the same vein as soap-operas or
Harlequin romances.
Third, the names, appearance, and situations of the characters in shojo manga are either
imaginary or pseudo-Western in inspiration. Shojo manga are steeped in the Japanese
fascination with the West dating back to the Meiji period--a characteristic which lends
itself to the creation of a narrative space outside of everyday Japanese experience. The
characters are drawn in highly exaggerated fashion, with enormous, sparkling eyes often
occupying as much as one third of the face. Their hair is often blond and curly and their
legs are long and extremely thin. They represent a kind of Japanese ideal of the
Caucasian woman and for that reason often lack the high noses and ample breasts and
hips of actual Caucasians.
Fourth, shojo manga have a unique set of semiotic codes. Unlike comics written for men,
which advance in a linear fashion from one frame to the next, shojo manga employ an
irregular narrative progression and make liberal use of modified frame shapes. There are
frames without outlines, extremely long vertical or horizontal rectangles, portraits of the
protagonists superimposed on top of several separate frames, and flowered patterns used
as decorative backdrops behind the characters.
The use of images of characters superimposed over several frames and decorative
backdrops is a style which dates back to the lyrical, stylish pictures popular in women's
and fashion magazines since the prewar period. Shojo manga, however, are distinctive in
that they have taken up this kind of expression to tell stories. In their world-famous
sexological treatise Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a Woman, John Money and
Patricia Tucker argued that male oriented pornography is characterized by direct
depictions of the opposite sex, while pornography for women tends to route those
depictions through the same sex. Something very similar might be argued for depictions
of romantic love. In shojo manga, love stories are structured through the exaggeration
and aestheticization of the protagonists who are the same sex as the readers.
A Short History of Shojo Manga
The first shojo manga worthy of the name began to appear in the mid-fifties. Before that
time there were only lyrical comics much like those of the prewar, written by men and
published in women's magazines. In the mid-1950s girls magazines began actively to
serialize comics just as magazines for boys began to shift from education- and
entertainment-based content to pure manga form. Until this time very few women had
professional careers and thus there were very few women manga artists. For this reason
most comics for girls were produced by male artists like Tezuka Osamu and Yokoyama
Mitsuteru. Tezuka's "Knight in Ribbons" recounted the exploits of a woman knight in
male drag. This work was influenced by the all-women Takarazuka Revue, where women
played men's roles, and provided young girls with an imaginary space onto which to
project their desire for liberation from repressive gender divisions.
In the mid-1950s, women manga artists began serializing in girls manga magazines tales
of mother-daughter relationships, the worlds of entertainment and high society, romantic
love (albeit only the most insipidly sentimental kind), and supernatural experiences. This
was an age of women manga artists creating works for other women and was essentially
devoid of works suitable for men. The only exception was Mizuno Hideko, the single
spot of feminine color in the legendary Tokiwa group, whose no-holds-barred work
"Fire," which featured a rock singer as its protagonist, also enjoyed a male readership.
The mid-1970s saw the emergence of "New Wave" shojo manga, which included artists
then in their mid-twenties such as Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, Oshima Yumiko, and
Yamagishi Ryoko. These women belonged to a generation brought up on postwar manga.
They produced manga dealing with science fiction, fantasy, and young boys in love.
Portrayals of young homosexual boys in love with each other seem to have struck girl
readers as more romantic than the coarse reality of heterosexual romance and also gave
the artists more freedom to exercise their creativity. Needless to say, these tales of
homosexual romance were also played out in imagined Occidental settings. These new
works went beyond the boundaries of shojo manga as it had been and, liberated from the
imperative to be "ladylike," went on to achieve a significant male readership as well. As a
result, many female manga artists began to be commissioned to write for magazines
aimed at men and boys.
With the increasing specialization of manga magazines in the eighties publishers began to
compete to bring out more and more new magazines. Whereas manga for women had
previously been limited to those written with young girls in mind, a new market began to
develop for manga intended for adult women. These new women's comics dealt with
adult love affairs, marriage, and social and historical themes which would not have been
appropriate as shojo manga. In Japanicized English this new genre is known as "redisu
komikku," or "ladies comics."
The late 1980s saw the appearance of a number of pornographic manga magazines within
the ladies comic genre. They were brought out by smaller publishing houses but quickly
stole audiences away from the more moderate ladies comics. These manga treat topics
ranging from rape to incest, to lesbianism, scatology and necrophilia. But even with this
outrageous content, not all of them rehearse reactionary notions of sex. Many of them
also incorporate a progressive vision of sexuality promoting human rights and women's
liberation.
Copyright (c) Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. 1998