Manga and the Representation of Japanese History

Roman Rosenbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136224249
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Asiatische Kunst

This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history.

The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world's most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar and contemporary Japan.

Manga and the Representation of Japanese History will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, Asian history, Japanese culture and society, as well as art and visual culture

1
Introduction

The representation of Japanese history in manga

Roman Rosenbaum

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.¹

When we read comics, we make a series of aesthetic and philosophical choices. Although these choices are usually made subconsciously, they’re nevertheless real decisions that we face every time we open the comics section of the newspaper or crack open a new comic book.²

In his introduction entitled ‘Representations of history and politics in French-language comics and graphic novels’, Mark McKinney ponders the significance of the relationship between bande dessinée as a medium capable of connecting historical and political issues with complex artistic expression on a par with film or the prose novel.³ Yet given the astonishing level of the global popularity of manga and pop-cultural studies there are as yet very few considerations of how manga and by extension graphic art contextualises history.

In the Western academic press, manga are controversial, particularly as to the degree of verisimilitude in their representation of history. This should not come as a surprise because by necessity, as Churchill’s well-known epigram (quoted above) on the subjectivity of history illustrates, there is concealed in any kind of representation a subjectivity that undermines the very possibility of it being a ‘true’ history. Controversies like those surrounding Manga Kenkanryū (Hating the Korean Wave, 2005) and Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensō-ron (Discourse on War, 1998) are two conspicuous examples of criticism of the potential of manga to misrepresent history. The highjacking of popular cultural tropes for ideological purposes, be they revisionist or nationalist, is not unheard of in the West either, as can be seen by the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy in 2005 and its worldwide repercussions.⁴ In response to the increasing appearance of manga in discourses on history, this collection of essays examines the soft-power cultural potential of manga in the re-telling of history.

One of the central puzzles explored in this edited collection is how Japanese history is represented in graphic art and in particular in Japanese manga. In this consideration of a discourse that combines graphic trompe-l’oeil with narrative text the essays examine how manga can rewrite, distort, transform and adapt history. The essays explore the representation of history in manga from such diverse disciplines as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology and semiotics, yet all agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history.

For instance, several of the essays demonstrate that Frances Fukuyama’s claim for ‘the end of history’⁵ by virtue of an ideological struggle that has ended in the global triumph of liberal democracy is easily shown to be false by the huge variety of ideological discourses in manga. Similarly, the eminent historian Carol Gluck has argued that contestations over postwar Japanese history have much to do with different views of how free the present could, or should, be of the past. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the pictorial representation of history in manga, where implications of the past are ‘collectively constructed, disputed, and perpetuated’.⁶ In this way manga is both emblematic and symbolic of historical possibilities; as the philosopher and historian Tsurumi Shunsuke has observed, manga are situated in an ambivalent position between reader and artist as an ‘open artifact that permits a variety of readings while inheriting the limitations of the historical circumstances at the time of production’.⁷ Simply put, manga convey the very ambivalence of historical discourse.

Tsurumi, one of the most eminent contemporary philosophers in Japan, has also published a seminal study on the postwar ideology in manga, exemplifying the power of manga to act as a cultural and sociopolitical agent. The current global soft power wielded by manga has been sufficiently documented elsewhere,⁸ but what has been missing is a detailed enquiry into the agency of manga in Japanese history. In his An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, Tsurumi argued, for instance, that ‘what is true of a personal history, is also true of a nation’s history’,⁹ and the leading film critic Satō Tadao argues that manga express a history filled with the sentiments of ordinary people (shomin kanjō no komotta rekishi).¹⁰ Given the linkage between the personal and the national, it is no coincidence that several encyclopedic manga works on history have been written. Each brings its own focus and often there is nothing comical about them: Mizuki Shigeru’s ironically titled Shōwa comikku-shi (A Comic History of Shōwa, 1994),¹¹ for example, deconstructs the grand history of the Shōwa period by juxtaposing it with his personal experience of the Pacific War. Similarly, Ishinomori Shōtarō’s Manga Nihon no rekishi (A History of Japan in Manga, 1985) attempts a complete graphic re-interpretation of Japanese history through the educational manga. Going well beyond the history of Japan, Yokoyama Mitsuteru’s Sangokushi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1971–1986) became a graphic meditation on the relationship between Japan and the Chinese empire.

Manga have long since ceased to be just funny. Nowadays they teach history as much as they require a particular literacy to be read. This can be seen from the repercussions of Kobayashi Yoshinori’s controversial manga discourse on history in the late 1990s, or the heated discussions on Kenkanryū, both of which are revisited in some detail in this collection.

Incidents like these illustrate how the popular cultural discourse of manga can transmit ideological interpretations of history and influence a vast readership. Brigitte Koyama-Richards’ recent One Thousand Years of Manga (2007) traces Japanese comics back to the eleventh century and firmly establishes the media as an art form with a tradition, a history and, most importantly, a cultural significance. Similarly, Sharon Kinsella has argued in A Short History of Manga that pop cultures like manga represent ‘a highly specific form of culture based on the institution of political opposition and open social organization’. As a result, manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world’s most successful commodities.

Even specialists of Japanese history like John Dower have relied heavily on manga in their analyses. Dower’s influential War Without Mercy (1986) offers a rich textual analysis of both the graphic discourse in Western caricatures and prewar Japanese government-sponsored humor magazines like Manga.¹² In Embracing Defeat (1999), Dower continues his analysis of manga as a means to engender political ideology via historical narratives, canvassing humor magazines like Puck and Manga as vehicles of wartime propaganda.¹³ The Asia-Pacific War has left Japan an unresolved legacy, and manga has long – and controversially – provided a representation of history, becoming one of the world’s most powerful modes of conceptualising historical verisimilitude.

Combining narrative discourse and graphics, the extensive Japanese story-manga¹⁴ and its Western counterpart, the graphic novel, manifest the transcultural soft power of a ‘global’ media that has the potential to display history in previously unimagined ways. Boundaries of space and time in manga become as permeable as societies and cultures across the world. The essays in this edited collection address the authorship of history by investigating attempts to render kin-gendaishi (modern and contemporary) history through manga. As Carol Gluck, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Susan Napier and others have shown, manga and graphic art are able to rewrite, reinvent and re-imagine the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in a way that distorts the complex narrative of emperor-based Japanese historical periods. They achieve this appealing dichotomy of fidelity and fabrication primarily through the superimposition of a complex tapestry of genres that divide readership into gender- and age-based categories, including shōjo (young woman), shōnen (boys), seinen (young man), yaoi (boys’ love) and yuri (girls’ love). It used to be easy to read a comic, but with the global advance of manga as a cultural hybrid, readers now need to be familiar with a range of academic discourses, for manga are intertextual, address gender groups, are delineated into genres and, most importantly for this volume, they convey a specific sense of historicity.

A brief reading of manga scholarship

Compared to the well-established Franco-Belgian bande dessinée tradition and comic strips in Western newspapers, little was known outside Japan of the world of manga until the 1980s.¹⁵ Walt Disney’s anthropomorphic characters and the American superhero comics tradition reigned supreme and to some extent enjoyed a global fan base.¹⁶ All this changed rapidly with the collapse of Japan’s economic miracle, which saw a gradual shift to the soft power of manga as a global commodity. Frederick Schodt introduced Japan’s national comic books in his seminal Manga! manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (1983), with a foreword by Tezuka Osamu, well before the English translation boom, and predicted their rise on the international market. Few were then available in English and it was another two years before Will Eisner published his magnum opus Comics and Sequential Art (1985). Pioneering the emerging global phenomenon was Keiji Nakazawa’s Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), produced in English translation by the, volunteer organisation Project Gen, formed in 1976. It was not until the mid-1980s that further English translations appeared. Takao Saito’s Golgo 13, one of the longest running manga series in Japan, appeared in 1986 promoting the eponymous video game, but the breakthrough did not come until Koike Kazuo’s Kozure Ōkami (Lone Wolf and Cub) was released in North America by First Comics in 1987. Most likely because the covers were designed by Frank Miller, this translation quickly became one of the most successful Japanese manga released in the United States. In 1996, Schodt published his Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga, once again dedicating an entire volume to introducing manga to the West. The manga boom increased exponentially from that point to where manga are now localised in the European and American market. This localisation has blurred the boundary between autochthonous graphic traditions and manga as a Japanese product and resulted in several contemporary hybrid graphic art movements, such as Amerimanga and La nouvelle manga, that have developed their own home-grown manga traditions.

Following Schodt’s introduction of manga scholarship to the United States, research on its sociocultural implications began to be published in the 1990s. Jaqueline Berndt’s investigation of manga and comics culture in Japan¹⁷ was followed by Susanne Phillipps’ analysis of time structures in Tezuka Osamu’s Phoenix.¹⁸ Both were early examples of German scholarship that highlighted the storytelling techniques of manga narratives and their ability to combine colorful paintings and calligraphy into a synergetic media able to permeate national and cultural boundaries.

Manga discourse gained momentum largely due to the rapid increase in translations. In 2000, Sharon Kinsella’s monograph on adult-oriented manga¹⁹ was one of a new crop of studies that applied academic rigor to investigating the harmful potential of manga. In 2001 Susan Napier published her examination of the linkage between Japanese anime and manga; her ‘Remaking master narratives: anime confronts history’ was one of the first studies to consider the historical implications of alternative media.²⁰ Napier focused on Japanese history and the question of constructing a Japanese national identity in popular culture. It is her work that motivated the current volume on how manga convey histo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s notes
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the representation of Japanese history in manga
• 2 Sabotaging the rising sun: representing history in Tezuka Osamu’s Phoenix
• 3 Reading Shōwa history through manga: Astro Boy as the avatar of postwar Japanese culture
• 4 Representations of gendered violence in manga: the case of enforced military prostitution
• 5 Maruo Suehiro’s Planet of the Jap: revanchist fantasy or war critique?
• 6 Making history herstory: Nelson’s son and Siebold’s daughter in Japanese shōjo manga
• 7 Heroes and villains: manchukuo in Yasuhiko Yoshikazu’s Rainbow Trotsky
• 8 Making history: manga between kyara and historiography
• 9 Postmodern representations of the pre-modern Edo period
• 10 ‘Land of kami, land of the dead’: paligenesis and the aesthetics of religious revisionism in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s ‘Neo-Gōmanist Manifesto: on Yasukuni’
• 11 Hating Korea, hating the media: Manga Kenkanryū and the graphical (mis-)representation of Japanese history in the Internet age
• 12 The adaptation of Chinese history into Japanese popular culture: a study of Japanese manga, animated series and video games based on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
• 13 Towards a summation: how do manga represent history?
• Selected research bibliography
• Index