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.

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.

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

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.....

Copyright (c) Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. 1998

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