Week 4: Manga and Anime as part of Japanese Visual Art Culture

There are many concrete topics to write about, but I decided to write something, that’s in a way connected with our university and maybe it will give some “useless but interesting” piece of knowledge. This talk will be mainly about manga and anime as a universal means of culture diversification in modern Japan.

As many of you probably are not interested in such things and probably will not – contemporary visual media in Japan is one of the few phenomenon of such range in human known history. 

So for the beginning – history of manga in a pill.

There are some conflicts in researchers beliefs about when and where we can pinpoint the manga birth, as there are plenty of definitions of “comics” and “manga”. The fact is, that Japanese culture has many historical data about disposition of Japanese people to create stories and drawings for it without cultural habit of separating it as an art form. In fact Japanese people are hell of a storytellers. Their religions contain hundreds of human and animal like creatures being visualised in old days despite lack of modern means of printing. That bias led to unusual reception for boom of comics magazines in late 50’s of 20th century.

In fact there were no manga culture in Japan before World War II. At that time there were some curiosities  using drawings as a main story telling foundation, but they were occasional, short pieces of parody or political satire. It’s important to say, that Japan had contact with Disney and some more American comics creations. Japanese state that people born before 1950 has been always seeing manga as a child play or a political parody. People born after 1950 see manga as big part of modern media for all range of ages.

After WWII Japan was rebuilding its political and economic infrastructure. There was a censorship on content of war glorification an Japanese militarism, but it was in fact only restriction, as Japanese Constitution (1947) prohibited all forms of censorship. At that time Osamu Tezuka – referred as god of manga – created first manga with cinematic, perspective drawings, breaking out from whole set of America comic standards. It was a big success and it was a base for first world-known anime series.

From Wikipedia: Tezuka's "cinematographic" technique as seen in Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island).

Manga was received as popular and undemanding form of entertainment. Being distributed through many weekly magazines it became popular with children. There were few strictly education magazines that contained less than a half of manga content. Publishers noticed, that the manga content is far more interesting for children than educational parts. Manga shares grew and after about a decade there were first whole-manga magazines on the market. One could say – that’s no different than in America with Marvel comics for instance. It’s not true. Comics in United States were still a niche. Manga in Japan were becoming more and more popular in mass reception. Why so big growth? It’s important to know that Japan had not even 1 thousand of TV sets in 1954 and in 1959 it was only 2 millions for whole population. Even then TV content was connected with political affairs and economic growth. There were no fun content for children and even for adults. But the print was broadly distributed among the population. Manga had no competition. Another thing was that that was the time when Japan was becoming a country with ultimate low level of illiterate people. Manga was perfect for this purpose, as it drew in children more easily than a very strict national literature. In late 60’ there was decline in book and literature market as new technologies broke in from the mass media rims. Manga artists had to do something to keep the manga industry running. The only option was to create content that will be attractive to grew up generation of readers. Manga changed drastically. It was designed for people in their adolescence and used all means to fire up creativity of young people in the contrary of strict education system. It was the proof, that Japanese manga is something else. Jump – a manga weekly magazine – has been selling over 6.2 millions of copies each week. It was enough to make all young people aware of every new manga title even without reading it.

In 1970 manga drew in adult audience and it was officially approved as a form of art and very important media in modern Japanese culture. Decade later it fused with modern technology, remaining one of the most important part of modern Japanese culture.

How’s the manga and anime impact on Japanese society? Most of us – people kept up in European society - usually cannot comprehend the scale of social impact made by manga in Japan. Drawings and manga characters are everywhere in Japan. Even if it doesn’t appear so at first sight. Each company, store, social group, government agenda, project has to have their mascot and tons of drawings presenting it. Even police departments sometimes has drawn cute police characters on its walls and cars. Restaurants logos are less important than it’s mascot character and so on. If you have to write some instruction – better illustrate it. It’s easier that way. If you have public account in internet – use picture as an avatar. It’s more modest. 

Manga is being read by millions of Japanese people in each age bracket and it is not regarded as opposition to standard literature. For young children it was a factor that helped making the illiterates problem not existent in Japan. For adolescents it was a place for creativity. For adults it is the same level of entertainment as literature. It created wave of “cuteness” awareness in whole country, that is one of the reasons that foreigners sees that country so strange....

Just imagine, that instead of new shampoo advertisement you see something like that in the television (yeah, such series were really aired in multiple Japanese TV stations and it is not a commercial...):

Strange.

Ultimately strange.

As far as manga and anime is not so popular in eastern Europe, it influenced American and western societies greatly. In 90’s America and Europe were flooded with anime content with Ghibli (Mononoke, etc.) and Sunrise (Cowboy Bebop, etc.) studios creations in opposition to Disney creations.

As managa hasn’t got so much ability to serve as critical medium, anime took its prime into new century. In XXI century magazines with manga content have almost 40% of whole print shares in Japan. As manga and anime content tends to be mature, rest of the world sees it as a gruesome, brutal, taboo bending creations that should not be presented to children. That’s right. Problem is, that usually they don’t understand that content for children is less than 40% of market at the moment.

Data for 2002, [LINK]

In Japan, anime was introduced as a mature form of creativity. There’s dozen of age shares in the market and as much genres. Impact of each big anime series can be felt on scale of whole country. Anime called Hikaru no Go (about old, traditional Japanese game) created boom for Go game clubs and meetings. Nodame Cantabile (about classical musicians) created boom for classical music felt in all music schools in Japan just few years ago.

On world scale, Neon Genesis Evangelion – one of the most famous anime series from 1995 - was one of the first steps to acknowledge anime as a valid form of expression in countries that never heard of such things. Movies of Ghibli studios proved, that Japanese animation is capable of reaching high intellectual levels and touching mature subjects, becoming as well-known as Disney productions with one difference. Ghibli productions were designed for adults as well as children – not exactly as “family movies”.

Probably everyone here heard of Dr House serial. The same type of hype is in Japan with their productions. But on much larger scale. And serials usually goes for few months, not years. Nowadays there's about 10 - 20 premiers of Anime series each month. With this data, It's not hard to find out, that Anime has big airing time share in each of the Japanese TV channels.

So, what manga or anime do you know or heard of?