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History of manga

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Double page from vol. 4 of the Hokusai Manga, showing bathing and diving people.
Katsushika Hokusai · Public domain

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Historians and writers on manga history have described two broad and complementary processes that shaped modern manga. While their views differ in the relative importance they attribute it 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; 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). 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. Manga reflects Japanese society, myths, beliefs rituals, traditions, and fantasies.

Before World War II

Manga is said to originate from emakimono (scrolls), Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga, dating back to the 12th and 13th centuries. During the Edo period (1603–1867), another book of drawings, Toba Ehon, embedded the concept of manga. The word first came into common usage in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the publication of such works as Santō Kyōden's picture book Shiji no yukikai (1798), and Aikawa Minwa's Manga hyakujo (1814); this also includes the celebrated Hokusai Manga books (1814–1834), which contain assorted drawings from the sketchbooks of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai (1760–1849). Kitazawa Rakuten (1876–1955) was the first artist to use the word manga in the modern sense. Another example is in the first half of the 19th century it is speculated to be Dehōdai mucharon (1822), with prints from the artist Hiroshige, who illustrated several books of this kind between 1820 and 1837.

Writers stress the continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions as central to the history of manga. They include Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, Adam L. Kern, and Eric Peter Nash. Schodt points to the existence in the 13th century of illustrated picture scrolls like Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga that told stories in sequential images with humor and wit. Schodt also stresses continuities of aesthetic style and vision between ukiyo-e, shunga woodblock prints, and modern manga (all three fulfill Eisner's criteria for sequential art). While there are disputes over whether Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga or Shigisan Engi Emaki was the first manga, both scrolls date back to the same time period. However, others like Isao Takahata, Studio Ghibli co-founder and director, contend there is no linkage between the scrolls and modern manga.

Schodt and Nash see a particularly significant role of kamishibai, a form of street theater where itinerant artists display pictures in a lightbox while narrating the story to audiences in the street. Professor Richard Torrance has pointed to similarities between modern manga and the Osaka popular novel, written between the 1890s and 1940s, and argues that the development of widespread literacy in Meiji and post-Meiji Japan helped create audiences for stories told in words and pictures. Ito also roots manga historically in aesthetic continuity with pre-Meiji art, but sees its post-WWII history as driven in part by consumer enthusiasm for the rich imagery and narrative of the newly developing manga tradition. She 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 (redisu) in the 1980s.

Even though Eastern comics are generally held separate from the evolution of Western comics, and Western comic art probably originated in 17th century Italy, Kern has suggested that kibyōshi, picture books from the late 18th century, may have been the world's first comic books. These graphic narratives share humorous, satirical, and romantic themes with modern manga. Although Kern does not believe that kibyōshi were a direct forerunner of manga, they believe 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, as Kern points out, predates Hokusai's popular Hokusai Manga usage by several decades.

As illustrated magazines for Western expatriates introduced Western-style satirical cartoons to Japan in the late 19th century, new publications in both the Western and Eastern styles became popular. At the end of the 1890s, American-style newspaper comic supplements began to appear in Japan, as well as some American comic strips. 1900 saw the debut of Rakuten's Jiji Manga in the Jiji Shinpō newspaper—the first use of the word manga in its modern sense, and where, in 1902, he began the first modern Japanese comic strip. By the 1930s, comic strips were serialized in large-circulation monthly girls' and boys' magazines and collected into hardback volumes.

Similarly, writer Charles Shirō Inoue sees manga as a mixture of image and word-centered elements, each pre-dating the Allied 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 for a populace unified by a common written language. Both fuse in what Inoue sees as a symbiosis in manga.

The roots of the wide-eyed look commonly associated with manga date back to the illustrations of shōjo magazines published during the late 19th to early 20th centuries (for example, Shōjo Gahō). The most popular illustrators associated with this style at the time were Yumeji Takehisa and Jun'ichi Nakahara, who, influenced by his work as a doll creator, frequently drew female characters with big eyes in the early 20th century. This had a significant influence on early manga, particularly shōjo, evident in the work of influential manga artists such as Macoto Takahashi and Riyoko Ikeda.

However, other writers (for one, Takashi Murakami) have stressed events after WWII. Murakami sees Japan's surrender and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having created long-lasting scars on the Japanese artistic psyche, which, in this view, lost its previously virile confidence in itself and sought solace in harmless and cute (kawaii) images. However, Takayumi Tatsumi sees a special role 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, which was, for Tatsumi, the crucible in which modern manga has developed, an example being Norakuro. Another writer who stresses post-war for manga and limites the span to sixty years is Schodt's.

For Murakami and Tatsumi, transnationalism (or globalization) refers specifically to the flow of cultural and subcultural material from one nation to another. In their usage, the term does not refer to international corporate expansion, neither to international tourism, nor to cross-border international personal friendships, but to ways in which 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 US, their transformation into manga by Japanese artists, and the marketing of Star Wars manga to the US. Another example is the transfer of hip-hop culture from the US to Japan. Professor Wendy Siuyi Wong also sees a major role for transnationalism in the recent history of 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-WWII innovation and transnationalism.

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