History of manga – Manga, in the sense of narrative multi-panel cartoons made in Japan, originated from Euro-American-style cartoons featured in late 19th-century Japanese publications.[1] The form of manga as speech-balloon-based comics more specifically originated from translations of American comic strips in the 1920s; several early examples of such manga read left-to-right, with the longest-running pre-1945 manga being the Japanese translation of the American comic strip Bringing Up Father.[2] The term manga first came into usage in the late 18th century, though it only came to refer to various forms of cartooning in the 1890s and did not become a common word until around 1920.
Historians and writers on manga history have described two broad and complementary processes shaping modern manga. Their views differ in the relative importance they attribute to the role of cultural and historical events following World War II versus the role of pre-war, Meiji, and pre-Meiji Japanese culture and art. One view, represented by other writers such as Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, and Adam L. Kern, stresses continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions, including the latter three eras;[3][4][5][6] the other view states that, during and after the occupation of Japan by the allies (1945–1952), manga was strongly shaped by the Americans’ cultural influences, including comics brought to Japan by the GIs, and by images and themes from U.S. television, film, and cartoons (especially Disney).[7][3] According to Sharon Kinsella, the booming Japanese publishing industry helped create a consumer-oriented society in which publishing giants like Kodansha could shape popular tastes
After World War II
Japanese artists subsequently gave life to their own style during the occupation (1945–1952) and post-occupation years (1952–1972),[38] when a previously militarist and ultranationalist Japan was rebuilding its political and economic infrastructure.[3][Note 1] Although Allied 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 Japanese Constitution (Article 21) prohibited all forms of censorship,[39] which led to growth of artistic creativity.[3] In the forefront of this period are two manga series and characters that influenced much of the future history of manga: Osamu Tezuka’s Mighty Atom (Astro Boy in the United States; begun in April 1951) and Machiko Hasegawa’s Sazae-san (begun in April 1946).
Astro Boy was both a superpowered robot and a naive little boy.[40] 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.[40] Both qualities 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.[40] 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 seen in Article 9 of the newly created Japanese constitution.[39][40] Similar themes occur in Tezuka’s New World and Metropolis.[3][40]
By contrast, Sazae-san (meaning “Ms. Sazae”) was commenced in 1946 by Hasegawa, a young woman artist who made her heroine a stand-in for millions of Japanese citizens, especially women, rendered homeless by the war.[3][41] Sazae does not face an easy or simple life, but, similar to Astro Boy, she 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” (良妻賢母, ryōsai kenbo) ideal taught by the previous military regime.[42][43][44] Sazae faces the world with cheerful resilience,[41][45] what psychologist Hayao Kawai calls a “woman of endurance.”[46] Sazae-san sold more than 62 million copies over the next half-century.[47]
Tezuka and Hasegawa were both stylistic innovators. In Tezuka’s “cinematographic” technique, the panels are like a motion picture that reveals details of action, bordering on slow motion as well as rapid zooms from distance to close-up shots.[3] More critically, he synchronised the placement of the panel with the reader’s viewing speed to simulate moving pictures; this kind of visual dynamism was widely adopted by later manga artists.[3] In manga production as well as in film production, it gave way to the school of thought that the person who decides the allocation of panels (komawari) is credited as the author, while most drawings are done by assistants. Hasagawa’s focus on daily life and women’s experiences also came to characterize later shōjo manga.[41][45][48]
In the 1950s and 1960s, increasingly larger 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.[49] Until 1969, shōjo manga was primarily drawn by adult men for young female readers.[50]
Two very popular and influential male-authored manga for girls from this period were Tezuka’s 1953-1956 Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight) and Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s 1966 Mahōtsukai Sarī (Sally the Witch). 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.[3] Sarī, the pre-teen princess heroine of Mahōtsukai Sarī,[Note 2] 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.[51] Yokoyama was influenced by the US TV sitcom Bewitched,[52] but unlike Samantha (the main character of Bewitched, a married woman with her own daughter), Sarī is a pre-teenager who faces the problems of growing up and mastering the responsibilities of forthcoming adulthood. Sally the Witch helped create the mahō shōjo, or “magical girl,” subgenre of manga (which became popular in the early 21st century).[51] Both series were, and still are, very popular
Shōjo manga
In 1969, a variety 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 year Shōwa 24 on the Japanese calendar, or 1949 on the Gregorian calendar, when some of these artists were born).[53][54] The group included Hagio Moto, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Ōshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Ryoko Yamagishi,[41] and they marked the first major entry of women artists into manga.[3][41] Thereafter, shōjo manga would be drawn primarily by women artists for an audience of girls and young women.[3][49][50]
In 1971, Ikeda began her immensely popular shōjo manga Berusaiyu no Bara (The Rose of Versailles), the story of Oscar François de Jarjayes, a cross-dressing woman who was a captain in Marie Antoinette’s Palace Guards in pre-Revolutionary France.[3][41][55][56] At the end of the series (which originally ran from 1972 to 1973), Oscar dies as a revolutionary leading a charge of her troops against the Bastille. Likewise, Moto’s work challenged Japan’s Neo-Confucianist limits on women’s roles and activities.[42][43][44] Her 1975 shōjo science fiction story, They Were Eleven, tells the story of a young woman cadet in a future space academy.[57]
These women also innovated stylistic choices of the art form. In its focus on the heroine’s inner experiences and feelings, shōjo manga are “picture poems”[58] with delicate and complex designs that often eliminate panel borders completely to create prolonged, non-narrative extensions of time.[3][41][49][50][59] The group’s contributions in their stories – strong and independent female characters, intense emotionality, and complex design – remain characteristic of shōjo manga to the present day.[48][55]
Shōjo manga and Ladies’ Comics from 1975 to today
In the following decades (1975–present), shōjo manga developed stylistically while simultaneously evolving overlapping subgenres.[60] Major subgenres have included romance, superheroines, and “Ladies Comics” (in Japanese, redisu (レディース), redikomi (レディコミ), and josei (女性 じょせい)), of which boundaries are sometimes indistinguishable from each other and from shōnen manga.[18][41]
In modern shōjo manga romance, love is a major theme set into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization.[61] 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.[62] These romances are sometimes long narratives that can distinguish between false and true love, coping with sexual intercourse, and growing up in an ambivalent world; these themes are inherited by subsequent animated versions of the story.[49][61][63] These “coming of age,” or Bildungsroman, themes occur in both shōjo and shōnen manga.[Note 3][64]
In the Bildungsroman, the protagonist must deal with adversity and conflict.[64] Examples of romantic conflict in shōjo manga are common, as exhibited in Miwa Ueda’s Peach Girl,[65][66] and Fuyumi Soryo’s Mars.[67] Examples for older readers include Moyoco Anno’s Happy Mania,[50][68] Yayoi Ogawa’s Tramps Like Us, and Ai Yazawa’s Nana.[69][70] 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 (including Moto’s They Were Eleven,[71] Kyoko Hikawa’s From Far Away,[72] Yû Watase’s Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play, and Be-Papas’s World of the S&M (The World Exists For Me)[73]).
Another narrative device involves meeting unusual or strange people and beings; for example, Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket[74]—one of the most popular shōjo manga in the United States[75]—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. This device is also used in Harako Iida’s Crescent Moon, wherein heroine Mahiru meets a group of supernatural beings, and discovers that she too has a supernatural ancestry when she and a young tengu demon fall in love.[76]
With superheroines, shōjo manga continued to break away from the Neo-Confucianist norms of female meekness and obedience.[18][49] Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon (Bishōjo Senshi Sēramūn: “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon”) — one of the best-selling shōjo manga series of all time — is a sustained, 18-volume narrative about a group of young heroines simultaneously heroic and introspective, active and emotional, as well as dutiful and ambitious.[77][78] The combination proved extremely successful, and Sailor Moon became internationally popular in both manga and anime formats.[77][79] Another example is CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth, whose three young heroines – Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu – are magically transported to the world of Cefiro to become armed magical warriors and defend it from internal and external enemies.[80]
The superheroine subgenre also extensively developed the notion of teams (sentai) of girls working together,[81] which includes 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.[82] Presently, the superheroine narrative template has been widely used and parodied within the shōjo manga tradition (e.g., Nao Yazawa’s Wedding Peach[83] and Hyper Rune by Tamayo Akiyama[84]), as well as outside it, (e.g., in bishōjo comedies like Broccoli’s Galaxy Angel).[85]
Starting in the mid-1980s, as women who read shōjo manga as teenagers matured, the artists elaborated subgenres to fit their audience.[60] This “Ladies’ Comics,” or josei, subgenre has dealt with themes of young adulthood: jobs, the emotions and problems of sexual intercourse, and friendships or love among women.[86][87][88][89]
Josei (also called Redisu) manga retains many of the narrative stylistics of shōjo manga, with the main difference of being created by (and for) adult women.[90] Redisu manga and art has often been (though not always) sexually explicit, but the content has characteristically been set into thematic narratives of pleasure and erotic arousal combined with emotional risk.[18][86][87] Examples include Ryō Ramiya’s Luminous Girls,[91] Masako Watanabe’s Kinpeibai[92] and the work of Shungicu Uchida[93] One subgenre of redisu manga deals with emotional and sexual relationships among women (yuri),[94] shown in work by Erica Sakurazawa,[95] Ebine Yamaji,[96] and Chiho Saito.[97] Other subgenres of redisu manga have also developed, e.g., fashion (oshare) manga, like Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss[98][99] and horror-vampire-gothic manga, like Matsuri Hino’s Vampire Knight,[100] Kaori Yuki’s Cain Saga,[101] and Mitsukazu Mihara’s DOLL,[102] which interact with street fashions, costume play (“cosplay”), J-Pop music, and goth subcultures in various ways.[103][104][105]