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JAPAN SOCIETY LECTURE

?? October 2005 - Brunei Theatre, SOAS, London
Lecture by Sharon Kinsella

The Nationalization of Manga *

The issue I want to address today is how manga, or comics for adults, which has throughout its twentieth century history been a marginalized and unacceptable culture, has over the last two decades been simultaneously transformed into a global cultural export and within Japan into a respectable element of national culture. At the same time as adult manga was recognized by various government institutions from the mid-1980s, a new category of realistic adult manga series, frequently with new-conservative themes focusing on politics and economics and military autonomy emerged in regular weekly and monthly manga magazines. The cooperation between manga producers - both artists and publishers - and government institutions, illustrates the integration of the post-war subculture and preceding underground movements with the post postwar political establishment, in Japan as elsewhere.

Before I go on to discuss that however I'm going to give you a brief outline of the history of the manga industry.

Manga is one of the main mass-media in post-war Japan. Its distributive spread is on a par with television and popular music. In 1959 the first successful weekly all-manga magazine was launched, forming the basis of the contemporary manga industry. Manga rapidly over-took the domestic Japanese film industry, which never recovered from its demise in the 1960s, and expanded rapidly alongside and within the same weekly production cycle, as television broadcasting.

At the peak of manga production about 1994 there were 12 magazines which had circulation's of over one million copies per issue, and the most popular weekly magazines, Jump and Magazine, circulated 6.2 million, and 3.5 million, copies respectively. (In November 2002 the first English version of Jump was launched in the US.) Circulation figures for the leading, weekly manga magazines for adult readers: Original, BJ, Spirits, and Morning, hovered around one million copies per issue. Piracy, in the form of passing magazines round, picking them up off racks on trains, and reading them for free in book shops, does mean though that manga readership figures are approximately three times the size of the circulation figures. The leading manga magazine, Jump, was read by at least 20 million people a week, or about one sixth of the population, at its peak. Along with publishing sales in general, from the mid-1990s manga sales have been in decline. The shift of focus of creativity, interest and talent into animation, digital media, video games, and pop-art, has solidified further in the 2000s.

The manga publishing industry is largely conducted by four companies -Sh�eisha, Sh�gakukan, K�dansha and Hakusensha, which have controlled roughly three-quarters, of the total market. It has been an extremely profitable industry, that has allowed large publishers to make the claim that they subsidize scholastic and literary publishing with the revenue from the sales of their weekly comics. For the same reason it has been a desirable industry to enter for a range of media companies. From the 1980s companies such as the advertising mammoth, Dentsu, NHK national broadcasting, and several newspaper groups have struggled to enter the manga market. In 1994 the manga industry officially grossed 540 billion yen, about 3.6 billion English pounds, which was three times the revenue of the domestic film industry.

The contemporary industry is divided into four main publishing categories determined by age and gender. These are: sh�nen manga - boy's manga; sh�jo manga - girls manga; seinenshi - adult manga; and ladies comics. Through the 1960s to 1980s the mainstream of the commercial medium was dominated by boy's and adult manga and genres - gekiga - implicitly linked to comics by men for male readers. The stylistic devises and themes of the girls manga came to dominate amateur manga, or comic fanzine subculture, from the 1980s to present day. During the 2000s girl's and ladies manga, which were previously quite different - girl's manga tending towards fractured graphics, collage, fantasy, and inner psychological drama, and ladies manga essentially a polite terms for graphic porn for women, delivered sometimes within a more social-realist and comedic style - began to move closer to each other and to give rise to a new style of gyaru manga. Early forebears of the gyaru (sassy girl) manga style, would include Uchida Shungiku and Okazaki Kyoko, who's long running series in Cutie magazine, Tokyo Girl's Bravo, has received recent critical acclaim. Yazawa Ai's series, Nana, which draws on the provocative mood and aesthetics of the girl's street culture of the mid-1990s, illustrates the rise of gyaru manga: in 2005, 25 million volumes of Nana had been sold.

Now, I'm going to look briefly at the history of manga in Japanese society.

Until recently, perhaps, manga have tended to be be controversial. In the 1920s, the manga medium was far more limited in scope, with little in the way of genre development and no extended story manga narratives, but many early manga artists were critical of the political establishment. Manga artists joined organizations such as the Proletarian Artists League, and contributed to Marxist manga journals such as R�d� Manga (Labourer's Manga) and N�min Manga (Peasant's Manga). During the run-up to the Pacific War, however, manga artists were gradually drawn under the control of government cultural agencies and most were purged from society. During the Pacific War itself many manga artists became engaged in writing nationalist propaganda materials for the authorities, some finding themselves designing instructional flyers to be dropped from airplanes, over newly colonized territories. In the early 1950s an impoverished version of manga re-emerged. This time it was distributed mainly as cheap booklets, hawked to children on the streets, or in the form of hard-back books and magazines which could be rented by the day from book loan shops (kashihonya) rather like modern day video rental stores.

Until the mid-1950s manga was reportedly only read by children, but more and more poverty-stricken, young, urban workers, often those who had migrated to the cities in search of employment, began to read manga as their only source of culture and entertainment. Artists of book loan shop manga publishers, partly in response to this new adult readership, began to develop a new genre of serious, social-realist, political, adult manga, which they re-named gekiga.

In the 1960s editors of large publishing companies contracted some of the marginal, low-status, low-payed gekiga artists to write series for the first weekly, all-manga magazines. The use of gekiga, previously limited to series run in rental-manga, represented a new potential for developing adult manga audiences. Boy's manga became increasingly widely read amongst students and young workers and publishing company editors commissioned many quasi-radical manga series in the latter half of the sixties. By radicalizing the content of manga publishers attracted mass audiences to the medium.

In 1969, for example, Jump, now the most popular magazine - which bears a general reputation for bland commercialism - carried a story titled 'The Human Condition' (Ningen no Joken), which polemisised against the American army bases and talked about social control and freedom. Jump magazine went further in supporting the students' cause and even published encouraging photographs of student demonstrations on its inside pages. Sunday manga magazine published by Jitsugyo no Nihonsha meanwhile serialised a sympathetic historical drama by Fujiko Fujio about Chairman Mao and the Chinese cultural revolution between 1969 and 1971. Between 1968 and 1973, Magazine - the leading boy's manga magazine, serialised a story by artist Chiba Tetsuya and script writer Kajiwara Ikki, titled Tomorrow's Joe (Ashita no Joe), about a poor boy who fights to the top through boxing. Tomorrow's Joe is reputed to have been extremely popular with radical students who read the series to put themselves in a fighting mood before joining street demonstrations. When the Japanese Red Army, which represented the radical extreme of the largely middle-class student movement, hi-jacked a plane to North Korea in 1968 they proclaimed to the press "We are Tomorrow's Joe!", thereby attempting to identify themselves with students and young workers via a manga character.

Many top manga artists of this period who were contracted to produce series for the leading weekly manga magazines also lent their talents to producing political materials such as Manga AMPO, produced for organizations such as the Japan Labour Union (Nihon R�d� Kumiai).

The expansion of manga, its transformation from a minor children's medium to a major adult medium, was closely linked with the student movements and Japanese youths attempt to reject established culture and political framework. Not only did manga provide an alternative attitude and public medium, but the very act of reading a manga magazine implied making a stand against "adults" and their high-brow literature which young people felt reflected the interests of the Japanese establishment. Directly political themes disappeared from mainstream adolescent manga in the 1970s, but dissident attitudes, continued to exist in sublimated forms in many of the succeeding genres, such as new wave gekiga, science fiction, erotica, and (fujori) absurd manga.

The manga industry was able to provide this cultural outlet because of the medium's peculiar position, within the wider network of the mass media and culture industries. Manga are made by publishing companies, which are not obliged to receive radio or television broadcasting licenses from the government, and which are therefore politically freer than other corporations that comprise the Japanese mass media. On the other hand, because they carry very little advertising, manga are free from the influence of company sponsorship. The technical simplicity of manga production has also encouraged a strikingly open, or democratic, participation in the medium. Competitions asking readers to send in their work are held by virtually all manga magazines several times a year, so that the work of unknown amateur artists, or the experienced but unknown assistants of already successful manga artists, has frequently been published by high circulation magazines. Such a degree of access has been unimaginable in music, film or television.

Since the 1960s, conservative intellectuals, citizens organizations, teachers, the PTA, and politicians, have frequently condemned manga as a vulgar, tasteless medium which is damaging both to public morality and children's education. Dissident intellectuals and disaffected urban youth have simultaneously regarded manga as critical, taboo breaking and progressive. Since the late 1980s, however, there have been significant changes in the content and perception of the medium within national culture.

Information manga

There has been a general movement towards the assimilation and promotion of certain manga by educational and cultural institutions. Manga critic Kure Tomofusa, describes this process of selective granting and acceptance of "cultural citizenship", after a long period of 'outsider' or 'immigrant' status.

In Autumn 1986 the Japanese economic newspaper, Nihon Keizai Shinbun, published the first hard back manga book devoted to educational purposes. This was Japan. Inc. An Introduction to Japanese Economics drawn by veteran manga artist Ishinomori Sh�tar�. The book was later translated into English and French and published by the University of California Press. Following the successful publication of Japan. Inc., in 1986 a new category of high quality 'information manga' which exerted a great internal influence on manga genres throughout the commercial medium, and a great external influence on the way in which manga was received in Japanese society, flourished. 'Information manga' (j�h� manga) is a loosely defined general term used to refer to a rapidly expanding and sub-dividing production category, which includes, introductory (ny�mon) manga, business manga, political (seiji) manga, educational (ky�y�) manga; literary (bunkashi) manga, and documentary manga. Information manga books and series have been described as 'cultured' (bunkateki) and 'high-quality' (j�hin).

As the information manga trend has advanced, then so adult manga has assumed many of the characteristics of newspapers. Like newspapers, political, information, and business manga, have become more directly involved in the wider Japanese economy by providing factual market intelligence and political commentaries on international relations and domestic social issues. Editors of adult manga touching on contemporary themes and using photo-realism in their visual imagery, have been forced to be careful to skirt direct copying of copyrighted documentary photography. Unlike ordinary manga magazines and books, which are generally printed on low quality recycled paper, information manga books have often been printed on expensive paper, sometimes with full-colour printing, and bound in hard back covers with glossy dust-jackets. The front cover and dust jacket illustrations of high-quality manga frequently depict photographs or fine art illustrations rather than manga pictures.

In 1989, Ch�� K�ron Sha, a well known academic and literary publisher, began publication of a 48 volume work: The History of Japan in Manga (Manga Nihon No Rekishi), which re-told the entire history of Japan. In order to carry out the work, manga artist, Ishinomori Sh�tar�, was linked to a team of over 50 specialists of Japanese history and archaeology, including a large number of the academic staff of the highly prestigious Tokyo University. The Manga History of Japan has been recognized by the Ministry of Education and Culture (Monbush�) for its educational purposes in Japanese schools.

Many companies quickly responded to the popularity of information manga books by using information manga for communications and public relations exercises. Producing company communications in manga format enabled companies to get in touch with target audiences who would otherwise be cynical and unimpressed by company mission statements. Sekai Bunkasha publishers launched a manga book series of company profiles. Profiles produced so far include romantic histories of Honda, Ajinomoto, and Nomura Securities. Since 1988, Ajinomoto has used a manga company history to tell the tale of how Ajinomoto company revolutionized processed food production. Honda's company manual tells new company recruits how Honda developed water-cooled engines in a struggle to produce the best cars in the world. In 1987 Asahi Shinbun Sha, broke into the information manga market with the publication of a manga version of Morita Aki�, the owner of Sony company's autobiography, Made in Japan.

In each of these accounts of company history, company operations are modestly presented as public services or practical projects for the betterment of humanity rather than profit making enterprises. In this regard corporate information manga books are similar to 'infomercial' music videos previously distributed amongst the US public by American companies, or company websites launched on the internet. Some companies have used information manga to combine advertising exercises with public information projects. Such combined exercises conferred upon the companies, a new form of moral legitimacy - as a public service. Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company, for example, used manga to produce medical advice books. In 1990 the company began producing a series of information manga books about various aspects of health and disease entitled the Otsuka Manga Healthy Kenk� Series. Drawn by veteran artists, Ishinomori Sh�tar�, Akatsuka Fuji�, and Nobaru Baba, over 200,000 copies of these books, which are not commercially available, have been distributed amongst elementary schools and libraries.

As the first editions of information manga ushered in radical new perceptions of the medium, publishers of literature and even academic journals, which had never previously allowed themselves any association with manga, began to jostle for the opportunity to produce new series of information manga books. Publishers also began to rummage through post-war manga history to find early works by veteran manga artists that were appropriate for publication in new editions re-categorised as 'manga classics'. Works produced mainly in the 1950s were re-published in both collector edition hardback volumes or alternatively packaged in the pocket-sized soft-back novel format (bunkobon), in the 1990s. In the 2000s manga nostalgia publishing has turned more to the re-issue of radical and even extremely esoteric and unknown material from the 1960s and 1970s.

Manga has also been officially placed into Japanese history by its appearance in museums. In 1988 Kawasaki City Museum opened a large hall, 100 meters in length, dedicated to displaying in 90 framed panels, the history of post-war manga. Between July and September 1990 the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition of the pioneering work of the late manga artist Tezuka Osamu. This became in fact the largest exhibition ever held in this prestigious institution. In 1993 Takarazuka municipal government in Hy�go prefecture opened a sophisticated purpose-built museum based around the manga of Tezuka Osamu - now frequently presented as the grandfather of Japanese manga. From the mid-1990s the number of manga-linked official cultural initiatives has mushroomed: in 1996 the previously sleepy Comic Association launched annual Asian Manga Summit, attracting thousands of guests and artists; Kawakami in Okayama prefecture became the host of an Astroboy and manga classics museum; and Sakai Minato village in Tottori prefecture invested in lining its high street with bronze statues of the animistic creatures in Mizuki Shigeru's Ge ge ge Kitaro stories.

Manga also began to enter the national school curriculum at various levels. In 1985 works by Tezuka Osamu and Sat� Sanpei were incorporated into sections of elementary school textbooks on Japanese culture approved by the Ministry of Education and Culture. Later questions on manga began to appear in university entrance exams and some universities - such as Rika began to offer courses on manga history and criticism. In 1989, Bunkach�, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, declared that manga could, for the first time, be considered for educational awards.

Finally in an unprecedented step in 1994, manga was used directly by the government, in the form of an Environment White Paper in Manga, printed by the Ministry of Finance. The white paper produced using this manga story was printed in Japanese, English and several other languages and later distributed to elementary schools in several foreign countries. This action by a government agency carried the message that in Japan writing official documents in manga form is normal and that manga can be considered a special and official aspect of Japanese culture. Manga was chosen as an appropriate cultural form capable of negotiating an improvement in Japan's image abroad.

New themes and genres developed in information manga books were also reflected in a new category of realistic, social and political adult manga series published in weekly magazines. From the later half of the 1980s, distinctive new adult manga genres emerged in these magazines which reflected the enhanced cultural, political and educational role of manga in society. From within the genres of adult political and economic manga came some of the best-selling manga series of this period. In 1990 only two series published in any K�dansha manga magazine, sold more copies than the political adult manga series Silent Service (Chinmoku no Kantai), of which 2.2 million volumes had been sold by 1992.

One of the most famous figures of adult manga is Section Chief Shima K�saku (Kach� Shima K�saku). Section Chief Shima Kosaku is a series about a good salary man by Hirokane Kenshi. By 1992 the series had sold a total of 1,300,000 copies of 17 collected volumes of the series. This story is based on the life of a salary man who works hard for a large electrical company, and struggles to reform company factionalism. Shima K�saku is the flamboyant, just and able section chief of the General Affairs department of a large electronics company, Hatsushiba Corporation, modelled on the real life electronics corporation, Matsushita. For Shima K�saku the giant electrics company is the focus of his life and is seen in a positive light.

Kaji Ry�suke's Principles (Kaji Ry�suke no Gi) by Hirokane Kenshi serialised in Mr Magazine, from 1992 became another prototype of new political stories.
Kaji Ry�suke is a young LDP member fighting for political reform in a realist ministerial drama that portrays politicians, and in particular the LDP, in a romantic and even heroic light. Kaji Ry�suke's Principals encourages a sense of trust and positive enthusiasm for an institution which has been viewed with some skepticism by the public throughout much of the late post-war period. A key figure of Japanese political reformism - the author of the controversial A Blueprint for a New Japan - in the New Frontier Party, Ozawa Ichiro claimed that Kaji Ry�suke's Principles was his favorite bedtime reading.

The growing readership of political and economic adult manga stories with contemporary themes, was noted by manga editors and newspaper journalists alike. The license to be bold and imaginative in considering the different aspects of current affairs in manga appeared to be stealing attention away from high-brow current affairs magazines, where, it was believed, similar issues were being debated with rather less innovatory zeal.

The new political themes in manga are also linked to an awareness of Japan's changing position in the international community. Editors and leading artists of adult manga displayed an acute awareness of the potential new role for adult manga not only as an arena for domestic political debate but also as an official representation of Japanese culture and politics abroad.

Silent Service (Chinmoku no Kantai) by top adult manga artist Kawaguchi Kaiji, is a very well-known series running between 1988 and 1995. Silent Service is about a Japanese-built UN nuclear submarine, staffed by an international crew, and captained by the heroic Japanese, Captain Kaeda. The submarine mutinies before it joins up with UN fleets, and sets off on a vigilante mission to challenge the military actions and moral authority of the UN and the USA on behalf of the global population, and in particular small independent nations. 'Silent Service' became so popular during the gulf war that in 1991 it was debated in the diet and subsequently adapted into a 3-hour radio drama aired on NHK, which was then listened to by 11 percent of the national population in the early hours of the morning.

Kaji Ry�suke's Principals, Section Chief Shima K�saku and Silent Service all exhibit a characteristic trait of new adult manga. In these dramas the focus of interest was on the economic and political concerns of Japanese social �lites. A pervasive quality of previous genres of commercial manga and especially realistic gekiga stories had been their focus on the preoccupation, hopes and problems of ordinary Japanese people.

Possibly the most widely critiqued neo-conservative manga of the 1990s, has been Kobayashi Yoshinori's Gomanism Sengen (Manifesto of Arrogance) series run in Sapio magazine, and his later volume, Sens�ron (War Theory), which presents a historical revisionist view of Japan's role in the Pacific war and its colonization activities in Asia. Kobayashi's War Theory, which sold about 3 million copies in 1998, challenges the idea of a particular Japanese war guilt, and the reality of international reportage on Japanese invasions of China and the Imperial army's use of comfort women.

Conclusion

Ironically, graphic style of information manga and political and economic adult manga series, which are now being most favoured as serious culture, are the realistic, dramatic styles developed by the politically anti-establishment gekiga movement, which was concerned to express the deprivations and combatitive spirits of oppressed minorities and the Japanese working class. The manga history of Sony company, Made in Japan, for instance, has been drawn by a leading artist of the 1950s' gekiga movement, Sait� Taka�, and bears the word gekiga in huge characters, on its dust jacket. The term gekiga, which this movement invented as part of their struggle for recognition as serious political artists with an anti-establishment bias, has now become a term, used to describe high-quality artistic manga with a pro-Japanese political bias.

The promotion of adult manga to the status of 'culture', has also involved the promotion of manga artists to the role of official cultural authorities. In an interview about his recently commissioned work The History of Japan in Manga, Ishinomori Sh�tar� demonstrated his new authority as a spokesperson of Japanese politics, and mediator connecting contemporary Japanese youth with national political goals.

The mutual activities of respectable publishing companies, and cultural institutions have promoted a section of commercial adult manga to the status of national culture. Adult manga are no longer a sanctuary for critical social attitudes, but are rather at the forefront of developing popular neo-conservative political attitudes.

From the middle of the 1980s, there appeared to be a desire amongst governing corporations and institutions to formulate new social and cultural values that might help to cohere Japanese society. Through the promotion of manga to the status of national culture, Japanese government agencies and institutions demonstrated, and perhaps tested, the potential for a more inclusive, modern and flexible style of government social policy, which might have the effect of encouraging broad sections of 'pathologically passive' Japanese youth - or indeed all Japanese who grew up in the post-war period - to reconsider their commitment and active engagement with Japanese society.

Interestingly, girl's manga has not been part of this retrospective memorialization process and, with the exception of a Chibi Maruko Chan museum, all exhibitions and museums have focused on gekiga and men's manga. While radical artists of yesteryear have been ushered into the halls of fame, the creative center of manga has been even more firmly located within general stylistic field of girl's manga, and otaku manga, animation, and graphics.

*Please note that this lecture is drawn from previously published material and the book Adult Manga (Curzon: 2000).

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