User:Timothy Perper/SandboxHistManga

Sandbox for History of Manga article

Please do not make changes directly on the draft text. It causes chaos -- and I speak from experience. Instead, put comments, criticisms, and suggestions below the text under a separate heading. Thanks. Timothy Perper 10:25, 27 September 2008 (CDT)

History of Manga Article

This is a highly modified version of an article I wrote for Wikipedia. It has new material and has been edited substantially.

Introduction

Manga is a Japanese word meaning "comics" or "cartoon." The word itself dates to the late 18th century and was used by the great 18-19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai for some of his drawings and sketches but stories told in pictures and sometimes words date back to 13th century Japan. This article outlines debates and events in the history of manga.

Debates about the Origins of Manga

Historians of manga see two broad processes shaping modern manga. Their views differ in how much importance is assigned to events after World War II versus events before the war and in Meiji and pre-Meiji Japanese culture and art. These differences of opinion are, in part, arguments over the role of non-Japanese influences, e.g., of the United States, compared to older and far more purely Japanese influences in shaping the art of Japan. Because these issues deal with Japanese national pride, they can become quite heated.

Japanese writers like Takashi Murakami stress events after World War II as crucial for shaping modern manga. Murakami sees Japan's staggering defeat and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having created long-lasting scars on the Japanese artistic psyche, which, in his view, lost its previously virile confidence in itself and sought solace in harmless and cute (kawaii) images. Takayumi Tatsumi also sees a major role for events after World War II, but instead of war, for him a special role exists for a transpacific economic and cultural transnationalism that created a postmodern and shared international youth culture of cartooning, film, television, music, and related popular arts. For Tatsumi, the crucible in which modern manga have developed is post-modernism, not bitter memories of war, immense destruction, and ultimate defeat.

For Murakami and Tatsumi, transnationalism (or globalization) refers specifically to the flow of cultural and subcultural material from one nation to another and to how artistic, aesthetic, and intellectual traditions influence each other across national boundaries. An example of cultural transnationalism is the creation of Star Wars films in the United States, their transformation into manga by Japanese artists, and the marketing of Star Wars manga to the United States. Another example is the transfer of hip-hop culture from the United States to Japan. Wong also sees a major role for transnationalism in the recent history of manga.

Nonetheless, other writers stress continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions as central to the history of manga. They include Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, and Adam L. Kern. Schodt points to the existence in the 1200s of illustrated picture scrolls like the Toba-e scrolls that told stories in sequential images with humor and wit. Schodt also stresses continuities of aesthetic style and vision between ukiyo-e and shunga woodblock prints and modern manga (all three fulfill Will Eisner's criteria for sequential art.

Schodt also sees a particularly significant role for kamishibai, a form of street theater where itinerant artists displayed pictures in a light box while narrating the story to audiences in the street. Richard Torrance has pointed to similarities between modern manga and the Osaka popular novel between the 1890s and 1940, and argues that the development of widespread literacy in Meiji and post-Meiji Japan helped create audiences for stories told in words and pictures. Kinko Ito also roots manga historically in aesthetic continuity with pre-Meiji art, but she sees its post-World War II history as driven in part by consumer enthusiasm for the rich imagery and narrative of the newly developing manga tradition. Ito describes how this tradition has steadily produced new genres and markets, e.g., for girls' (shōjo) manga in the late 1960s and for Ladies Comics in the 1980s (in Japanese, also called redisu レディース, redikomi レヂィーコミ, and josei 女性 じょせい manga).

Kern has suggested that kibyōshi, illustrated picture books from the late 1700s, may have been the world's first comic books. These graphical narratives share with modern manga humorous, satirical, and romantic themes. Although Kern does not believe that kibyōshi were a direct forerunner of manga, for Kern the existence of kibyōshi nonetheless points to a Japanese willingness to mix words and pictures in a popular story-telling medium. The first recorded use of the term "manga" to mean "whimsical or impromptu pictures" comes from this tradition in 1798, which, Kern points out, predates Katsushika Hokusai's better known usage by several decades.

Similarly, Charles Shirō Inoue sees manga as being a mixture of image- and word-centered elements, each pre-dating the U.S. occupation of Japan. In his view, Japanese image-centered or "pictocentric" art ultimately derives from Japan's long history of engagement with Chinese graphic art, whereas word-centered or "logocentric" art, like the novel, was stimulated by social and economic needs of Meiji and pre-War Japanese nationalism to create a populace unified by a common written language. Both fuse in what Inoue sees as a symbiosis in manga.

Thus, these scholars see the history of manga as involving historical continuities and discontinuities between the aesthetic and cultural past as it interacts with post-World War II innovation and transnationalism.

After World War II

Modern manga originates in the Occupation (1945-1952) and post-Occupation years (1952-early 1960s), when a previously militaristic and ultranationalist Japan was rebuilding its political and economic infrastructure. Although U.S. Occupation censorship policies specifically prohibited art and writing that glorified war and Japanese militarism, those policies did not prevent the publication of other kinds of material, including manga. Furthermore, the 1947 Constitution of Japan|Japanese Constitution (Article 21) prohibited all forms of censorship. One result was an explosion of artistic creativity in this period.

In the forefront of this period are two manga series and characters that influenced much of the future history of manga. These are Osamu Tezuka's Mighty Atom (Astro Boy in the United States; begun in 1951) and Machiko Hasegawa's Sazae-san (begun in 1946).

Astro Boy was both a superpowered robot and a naive little boy. Tezuka never explained why Astro Boy had such a highly developed social conscience nor what kind of robot programming could make him so deeply affiliative. Both seem innate to Astro Boy, and represent a Japanese sociality and community-oriented masculinity differing very much from the Emperor-worship and militaristic obedience enforced during the previous period of Japanese imperialism. Astro Boy quickly became (and remains) immensely popular in Japan and elsewhere as an icon and hero of a new world of peace and the renunciation of war, as also seen in Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Similar themes occur in Tezuka's New World and Metropolis.

By contrast, Sazae-san (meaning "Ms. Sazae") was drawn starting in 1946 by Machiko Hasegawa, a young woman artist who made her heroine a stand-in for millions of Japanese men and especially women rendered homeless by the war. Sazae-san does not face an easy or simple life, but, like Astro Boy, she too is highly affiliative and is deeply involved with her immediate and extended family. She is also a very strong character, in striking contrast to the officially sanctioned Neo-Confucianist principles of feminine meekness and obedience to the "good wife, wise mother" (ryōsai kenbo, りょうさいけんぼ; 良妻賢母) ideal taught by the previous military regime. Sazae-san faces the world with cheerful resilience, what Hayao Kawai calls a "woman of endurance." Sazae-san sold more than 62 million copies over the next half century.

Although Tezuka and Hasegawa both drew extensively from prior illustrative and cartoon traditions in Japan, they were also both stylistic innovators. In particular, Tezuka's "cinematographic" technique became very well known. Natsu Onoda suggests that Tezuka's use of film techniques was systematic and thorough-going, involving quotations from film, e.g., from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives; making use of an imaginary camera for framing shots (that is, panels), for establishing movement, and for mimicking the effects of deep focus cinematography; and in the use of a "star system" in which certain manga characters appear in different roles in different stories. Whether by these techniques or the skillful use of existing techniques or both, Tezuka's work has a cinematic dynamism that occurs widely in later manga. Hasegawa's focus on daily life and on women's experience also came to characterize later shōjo manga. Her intense narrative focus on everyday feelings and experience portrayed women's lives as being the dramatic equal of the adventures of male heroes who slay enemies and found empires.

Between 1950 and 1969, increasingly large audiences for manga emerged in Japan with the solidification of its two main marketing genres, shōnen manga aimed at boys and shōjo manga aimed at girls. Up to 1969, shōjo manga was drawn primarily by adult men for young female readers.

Two very popular and influential male-authored manga for girls from this period were Tezuka's 1953-1956 Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight or Knight in Ribbons) and Matsuteru Yokoyama's 1966 Mahōtsukai Sarii (Little Witch Sally). Ribon no Kishi dealt with the adventures of Princess Sapphire of a fantasy kingdom who had been born with male and female souls, and whose sword-swinging battles and romances blurred the boundaries of otherwise rigid gender roles. Sarii, the pre-teen princess heroine of Mahōtsukai Sarii, came from her home in the magical lands to live on Earth, go to school, and perform a variety of magical good deeds for her friends and schoolmates. Some U.S. writers feel that Yokoyama's Mahōtsukai Sarii was influenced by the U.S. TV sitcom Bewitched but Sarii is a very different character than Samantha, the protagonist of Bewitched. Samantha is married woman with her own daughter, but Sarii is a pre-teenager who faces the problems of growing up and mastering the responsibilities of forthcoming adulthood. Mahōtsukai Sarii helped create the now very popular mahō shōjo or "magical girl" subgenre of later manga. Both series were and still are very popular.

Shōjo manga

In 1969, a group of women manga artists later called the Year 24 Group (also known as Magnificent 24s) made their shōjo manga debut (year 24 comes from the Japanese name for 1949, when many of these artists were born). The group included Hagio Moto, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Oshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Ryoko Yamagishi and they marked the first major entry of women artists into manga. Thereafter, shōjo manga would be drawn primarily by women artists for an audience of girls and young women.

In 1971, Ikeda began her immensely popular shōjo manga Berusaiyu no Bara (The Rose of Versailles), a story of Oscar François de Jarjayes, a cross-dressing woman who was a Captain in Marie Antoinette's Palace Guards in pre-Revolutionary France. In the end, Oscar dies as a revolutionary leading a charge of her troops against the Bastille. Likewise, Hagio Moto's work challenged Neo-Confucianist limits on women's roles and activities as in her 1975 They Were Eleven, a shōjo science fiction story about a young woman cadet in a future space academy.

These women artists also created considerable stylistic innovations. In its focus on the heroine's inner experiences and feelings, shōjo manga are "picture poems" with delicate and complex designs that often eliminate panel borders completely to create prolonged, non-narrative extensions of time. All of these innovations – strong and independent female characters, intense emotionality, and complex design – remain characteristic of shōjo manga up to the present day.

Shōjo manga and Ladies' Comics from 1975 to today

In the following decades (1975-present), shōjo manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously evolving different but overlapping subgenres. Major subgenres have included romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics", whose boundaries are sometimes indistinguishable from each other and from shōnen manga.

In modern shōjo manga romance, love is a major theme set into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization. Japanese manga/anime critic Eri Izawa defines romance as symbolizing "the emotional, the grand, the epic; the taste of heroism, fantastic adventure, and the melancholy; passionate love, personal struggle, and eternal longing" set into imaginative, individualistic, and passionate narrative frameworks. These romances are sometimes long narratives that can deal with distinguishing between false and true love, coping with sexual intercourse, and growing up in a complex world, themes inherited by subsequent animated versions of the story. These "coming of age" or bildungsroman themes occur in both shōjo and shōnen manga.

In the bildungsroman, the protagonist must deal with adversity and conflict, and examples in shōjo manga of romantic conflict are common. They include Miwa Ueda's Peach Girl, Fuyumi Soryo's Mars, and, for mature readers, Moyoco Anno's Happy Mania, Yayoi Ogawa's Tramps Like Us, and Ai Yazawa's Nana. In another shōjo manga bildungsroman narrative device, the young heroine is transported to an alien place or time where she meets strangers and must survive on her own. Examples include Hagio Moto's They Were Eleven, Kyoko Hikawa's From Far Away, Yû Watase's Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play, and Chiho Saito's The World Exists For Me.

Yet another such device involves meeting unusual or strange people and beings, for example, Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket, whose orphaned heroine Tohru must survive living in the woods in a house filled with people who can transform into the animals of the Chinese zodiac. In Harako Iida's Crescent Moon, heroine Mahiru meets a group of supernatural beings, finally to discover that she herself too has a supernatural ancestry when she and a young tengu demon fall in love.

With the superheroines, shōjo manga continued to break away from neo-Confucianist norms of female meekness and obedience. Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon (Bishōjo Senshi Sēramūn: "Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon") is a sustained, 18-volume narrative about a group of young heroines simultaneously heroic and introspective, active and emotional, dutiful and ambitious. The combination proved extremely successful, and Sailor Moon became internationally popular in both manga and anime formats. Another example is CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth, whose three young heroines, Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, are magically transported to the world of Cephiro to become armed magical warriors in the service of saving Cephiro from internal and external enemies.

The superheroine subgenre also extensively developed the notion of teams (sentai) of girls working together, like the Sailor Senshi in Sailor Moon, the Magic Knights in Magic Knight Rayearth, and the Mew Mew girls from Mia Ikumi's Tokyo Mew Mew. By today, the superheroine narrative template has been widely used and parodied within the shōjo manga tradition (e.g., Nao Yazawa's Wedding Peach and Hyper Rune by Tamayo Akiyama and in bishōjo comedies like Kanan's Galaxy Angel.

In the mid-1980s and thereafter, as girls who had read shōjo manga as teenagers matured and entered the job market, shōjo manga elaborated subgenres directed at women in their 20s and 30s. This "Ladies Comic" or redisu-josei subgenre has dealt with themes of young adulthood: jobs, the emotions and problems of sexual intercourse, and friendships or love among women.

Redisu manga retains many of the narrative stylistics of shōjo manga but has been drawn by and written for adult women. Redisu manga and art has been often, but not always, sexually explicit, but sexuality is characteristically set into complex narratives of pleasure and erotic arousal combined with emotional risk. Examples include Ryō Ramiya's Luminous Girls, Masako Watanabe's Kinpeibai, and the work of Shungicu Uchida. Another subgenre of shōjo-redisu manga deals with emotional and sexual relationships among women (akogare and yuri), in work by Erica Sakurazawa, Ebine Yamaji, and Chiho Saito.

Other subgenres of shōjo-redisu manga have also developed, e.g., fashion (oshare) manga, like Ai Yazawa's Paradise Kiss and horror-vampire-gothic manga, like Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight, Kaori Yuki's Cain Saga, and Mitsukazu Mihara's DOLL, which interact with street fashions, costume play ("cosplay"), J-Pop music, and goth subcultures in complex ways.

By the start of the 21st century, manga for women and girls thus represented a broad spectrum of material for pre- and early teenagers to material for adult women.

Stylistic Innovation in Girls' and Women's Manga

A comprehensive history of stylistic novelty and innovation in shōjo and related manga has yet to be written in English. Nonetheless, certain trends are apparent.

One is the fluidity and dissolution of panel borders. Early shōjo manga, like Mahōtsukai Sarii and Ribon no Kishi, were composed of a regular series of rectangular panels with sharply defined borders, a style familiar to U.S. readers from newspaper comic strips and comic books. By the end of the 1960s and the emergence of women-drawn shōjo manga, images were no longer separated by distinct borders, and what borders did exist were often non-rectangular. Because borders are absent, the same character may appear more than once in the same image thereby to create a sense not that the character has been reduplicated but remains the same no matter where she is. Time is not atomized into distinct frames, but becomes continuous, and psychological unity and continuity of apparent movement are created not by a regular succession of film-like images projected onto a rectangular panel or screen, but by showing different aspects of a unitary character as she stops to think, feel, or interact with her world. She remains the same person, because no borders or barriers separate her from her former self.

Another innovation was the extensive use of decorative motifs in the drawing. These include flowers, feathers, stars, sparkles, and swirls that cause a multiplicity of images to fuse into a single, coherent visual and psychological statement.

More to come.

Shōnen, seinen, and seijin manga

Manga for male readers can be characterized in different ways. One is by the age of its intended audience: boys up to 18 years old (shōnen manga) and young men 18- to 30-years old (seinen manga). Another approach is by content, including action-adventure often involving male heroes, slapstick humor, themes of honor, and sometimes explicit sexuality. In Japan, manga are classified by the intended audience or demographic of the magazine where the manga originally appeared. Thus, seinen manga in Japan are marketed to young men (for whom the kanji are 青年, meaning "youth, young man", roughly "lad") whereas seijin manga are marketed to adult men (from the kanji 成人, meaning "adult") and are frequently sexually explicit. Shōnen, seinen, and seijin manga share many features in common.

Boys and young men were among the earliest readers of manga after World War II. From the 1950s on, shōnen manga focused on topics thought to interest the archetypical boy: sci-tech subjects like robots and space travel, and heroic action-adventure. Shōnen and seinen manga narratives often portray challenges to the protagonist’s abilities, skills, and maturity, stressing self-perfection, austere self-discipline, sacrifice in the cause of duty, and honorable service to society, community, family, and friends.

Manga with solitary costumed superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man did not become popular as a shōnen genre. An exception is Kia Asamiya's Batman: Child of Dreams, released in the U.S. by DC Comics and in Japan by Kodansha. However, lone heroes occur in Takao Saito's Golgo 13 and Koike and Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub. Golgo 13 is about an assassin who puts his skills to the service of world peace and other social goals, and Ogami Itto, the swordsman-hero of Lone Wolf and Cub, is a widower caring for his son Daigoro while he seeks vengeance against his wife's murderers. However, Golgo and Itto remain men throughout and neither hero ever displays superpowers. Instead, these stories "journey into the hearts and minds of men" by remaining on the plane of human psychology and motivation.

Many shōnen manga have science fiction and technology themes. Early examples in the robot subgenre included Tezuka’s Astro Boy and Fujiko F. Fujio’s 1969 Doraemon, about a robot cat and the boy he lives with, which was aimed at younger boys. The robot theme evolved extensively, from Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1956 Gigantor to later, more complex stories where the protagonist must not only defeat enemies, but learn to master himself and cooperate with the mecha he controls. Thus, in Neon Genesis Evangelion by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Shinji struggles against the enemy and against his father, and in Vision of Escaflowne by Katsu Aki, Van not only makes war against Dornkirk’s empire but must deal with his complex feelings for Hitomi, the heroine.

Sports themes are also popular in manga for male readers. These stories stress self-discipline, depicting not only the excitement of sports competition but also character traits the hero needs to transcend his limitations and to triumph. Examples include boxing, e.g., Tetsuya Chiba’s 1968-1973 Tomorrow's Joe and Rumiko Takahashi's 1987 One-Pound Gospel, and basketball, e.g., Takehiko Inoue’s 1990 Slam Dunk.

Supernatural settings have been another source of action-adventure plots in shõnen and some shõjo manga in which the hero must master challenges. Sometimes the protagonist fails, as in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note, where protagonist Light Yagami receives a notebook from a Death God (shinigami) that kills anyone whose name is written in it, and, in a shōjo manga example, Hakase Mizuki's The Demon Ororon, whose protagonist abandons his demonic kingship of Hell to live and die on earth. Sometimes the protagonist himself is supernatural, like Kohta Hirano's Hellsing, whose vampire hero Alucard battles reborn Nazis hellbent on conquering England, but the hero may also be (or was) human, battling an ever-escalating series of supernatural enemies (Hiromu Arakawa's Full Metal Alchemist, Nobuyuki Anzai's Flame of Recca, and Tite Kubo's Bleach).

Military action-adventure stories set in the modern world, for example, about World War II, remained under suspicion of glorifying Japan’s Imperial history and have not become a significant part of the shōnen manga repertoire. Nonetheless, stories about fantasy or historical military adventure were not stigmatized, and manga about heroic warriors and martial artists have been extremely popular. Some are serious dramas, like Sanpei Shirato's The Legend of Kamui and Rurouni Kenshin by Nobuhiro Watsuki, but others contain strongly humorous elements, like Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball.

Although stories about modern war and its weapons do exist, they deal as much or more with the psychological and moral problems of war as they do with sheer shoot-'em-up adventure. Examples include Seiho Takizawa's Who Fighter, a retelling of Joseph Conrad's story Heart of Darkness about a renegade Japanese colonel set in World War II Burma, Kaiji Kawaguchi's The Silent Service, about a Japanese nuclear submarine, and Motofumi Kobayashi's Apocalypse Meow, about the Vietnam War told in talking animal format. Other battle and fight-oriented manga are complex stories of criminal and espionage conspiracies to be overcome by the protagonist, such as City Hunter by Hojo Tsukasa, Fist of the North Star by Tetsuo Hara, and the shōjo manga From Eroica with Love by Yasuko Aoike, a long-running crime-espionage story combining adventure, action, and humor (and another example of how these themes occur across genres).

For manga critics Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma, such battle stories endlessly repeat the same mindless themes of violence, which they sardonically label the "Shonen Manga Plot Shish Kebob", where fights follow fights like meat skewered on a stick. Other commentators suggest that fight sequences and violence in comics serve as a social outlet for otherwise dangerous impulses. Shōnen manga and its extreme warriorship have been parodied, for example, in Mine Yoshizaki's screwball comedy Sergeant Frog (Keroro Gunso), about a platoon of slacker alien frogs who invade the Earth and end up free-loading off the Hinata family in Tokyo.

References and Notes

Please do not change the reference formatting. 

Comments and Suggestions

This page is for writing the history manga article starting from the Wikipedia article most of which I wrote and referenced. It needs some major work, including the addition of an entirely new section on manga before WW2 (Meiji and Tokugawa periods, including kibyōshi). The text is my own, stripped-down, de-Wikified, and rewritten version of the original article. Timothy Perper 10:25, 27 September 2008 (CDT)

From John Stephenson, Talk:Manga:

if you are the sole author of all the material you import from Wikipedia, then the fact that it originally appeared over there is irrelevant - it can appear on Citizendium with no credit to Wikipedia and under the CZ creative commons licence rather than the Wikipedia one. The only thing you have to do, apart from perhaps writing more to cover gaps left by removing Wikipedians' contributions, is put the {{WPauthor}} tag at the top of the Talk page, below {{subpages}}, including a declaration that the material is yours. Something like: {{WPauthor|WP credit does not apply - material on WP written by me|[[User:Timothy Perper|Timothy Perper]] 04:03, 28 September 2008 (CDT)}}In cases of articles written on WP by other people, you can import them as well, but there must always be a credit to Wikipedia (by checking the 'Content is from Wikipedia?' box) and you have to commit to substantively improving the article, as otherwise it would be a candidate for deletion. John Stephenson 23:29, 27 September 2008 (CDT)