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Introduction: Medieval, Medievalism, and Manga
Minjie Su and Maxime Danesin
When we first conceived the idea of this volume in 2021, we thought a natural introductory point for the subject matter would be the question: What is manga? However, this now feels unsatisfactory and, indeed, unnecessary. As far as the European market is concerned, although manga was once thought of as no more than a fleeting trend, it has taken root in its new environs and is thriving – even more gloriously than at home.1 See, for instance, Andreas Platthaus’s 2003 overview of manga’s success in the German market, cited and translated in Stephen Köhn, ‘Glimpses of the Past: The Allegedly Authentic Samurai Spirit as Seen in Kozure ōkami (Lone Wolf and Cub)’, in Jaqueline Berndt and Steffi Richter (eds), Reading Manga: Local and Global Receptions of Japanese Comics (Leipzig, 2006), pp. 127–45, at p. 127. More recently, Deutsche Welle (DW) reports that the popularity of manga and the growing overseas sales have led Nippon Keidanren (the Japanese Business Federation) to call upon the Japanese government to promote the media (including manga, anime, and games) as ‘the spearhead of the nation’s broader economic growth’. Julian Ryall, ‘Japan: Manga to Spearhead Nation’s Economic Growth’ (2023) <https://www.dw.com/en/japan-manga-to-spearhead-nations-economic-growth/a-65393781> [accessed 25 Apr. 2024]. In addition to its presence in nearly every mainstream bookshop and online streaming service, the manga media has even made its way to major European museums; among these, The Citi Exhibition: Manga, which took place in the British Museum between 23 May and 26 August 2019, no doubt had the greatest impact, not least because it claimed to be the largest such exhibition ever held outside Japan, and also because of the high-profile nature of the venue.2 In a bulletin published in 2020 by the Sainsbury Institute for the Studies of Japanese Art and Culture, Amanda Kennell attributes the rationale for holding this exhibition at the British Museum to the growing global popularity of manga – especially among young people. This is more than justified, as the Manga exhibition turned out to be the British Museum’s most popular exhibition of 2019 and holds the record for having attracted the youngest audience for any paid exhibition at the Museum. Amanda Kennell, ‘Making Manga: The Citi Exhibition’ (2020) <https://www.sainsbury-institute.org/e-bulletin/october-2020/making-manga-the-citi-exhibition/> [accessed 25 Apr. 2024]. And, while we were still drafting this introduction, the anime movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, directed by the Japanese anime director Kenji Kamiyama, appeared on the big screen in December 2024 and has received attention from medievalists, Tolkien scholars, and regular neo-medievalist fantasy consumers. As a result, even someone who has never leafed through a manga book or watched anime in their life can immediately recognise the style as manga and register it as something Japanese when they encounter images featuring, for instance, saucer-eyed characters with colourful, probably exaggerated, hairdos.
We now believe that a more productive way to open this volume is to ask ‘Why’: why should manga media matter, and particularly so to a group of medievalists who have an interest in – and perhaps concerns about – the postmedieval afterlife of their beloved subjects? On the surface, the answer seems straightforward and self-evident. First of all, medievalist imagery and elements are ubiquitous in the world of manga (especially in the fantasy genre), even when the narratives themselves may have nothing to do with medieval Europe.3 For a good overview of medievalist manga, see Clément de Vasselot de Régné and Louis de Vasselot de Régné, ‘La fascination pour le Moyen Âge européen dans l’animation japonaise’, in Martin Aurell, Florian Besson, Justine Breton, and Lucie Malbos (eds), Les médiévistes face aux médiévalismes (Rennes, 2023), pp. 77–88; and Maxime Danesin and Manuel Hernández-Pérez, ‘Mangaesque Knights: Japan’s Path to Global Medievalism’, in Angela Jane Weisl and Robert Squillace (eds), Medievalisms in a Global Age (Cambridge, 2024), pp. 52–64. This indicates a rich corpus of materials which has begun to be considered by scholars in medieval studies and medievalism, so it is only to be expected that we would want to explore, investigate, and analyse it in greater detail. Second, manga media’s cultural and economic impact across the globe is undeniably profound; especially as adolescents make up a significant percentage of its anticipated consumers, the typically long time span of a manga series may play a significant role in shaping the younger generation’s view of the past. For instance, the international phenomenon Attack on Titan was serialised in print between 2009 and 2021, and then was aired as an animated series between 2013 and 2023; it is a manga/anime that many fans claim to have grown up with. As the world of Attack on Titan is largely built on a juxtaposition between Old Norse mythology and fascist imagery (as discussed by Perreaut in this volume), to the extent that the manga is (mis)used by White Supremacists and alt-right supporters as an ideological weapon, Attack on Titan is likely to re-enforce this connection among its readers and viewers, thus affecting the reception and the reimaging of Old Norse mythological elements in the future.
More importantly, manga medievalism has been an integral part of the larger medievalist movement from the nineteenth century onwards, as the preponderance of medieval(ist) elements in manga is one of the many products of Japan’s confrontation, negotiation, and exchange with the West in the nineteenth century. In an effort to modernise Japan, the Meiji government imported knowledge of the European Middle Ages not only as an academic subject, but also as a model on which Japan’s own origin myths could be fabricated for this modern nation that saw itself as on an equal footing with Europe, thus justifying its own imperialist and colonial activities in East Asia.4 Thomas Keirstead, ‘Inventing Medieval Japan: The History and Politics of National Identity’, The Medieval History Journal, 1:1 (1998), 47–71, especially at pp. 52–8; and Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, ‘The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe’, in Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (eds), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 1–24, at p. 20. Therefore, investigating manga medievalism expands the parameters of the studies of medievalism and contributes significantly to delineating the far-reaching effect of the entanglement of Medieval Studies with nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism. This is especially important considering that manga media is still heavily involved in a nationalistic discourse, perhaps now more than ever: over the past three decades or so, due to its popularity overseas and success, manga and its derivative media have been reconstructed in Japan so as to be seen as ‘a politically significant point of reference for shaping national identity “framed by the rhetoric of national interest”’, rendering manga an intriguing analogue to the Middle Ages in its capacity to be ‘a site of identity, a point of identification or an ideological weapon’.5 Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, 2017), p. 6. As such, manga played a crucial role in the so-called ‘Cool Japan’ movement: a soft-power policy that sought to create a new, more favourable global image of Japan after the Second World War.6 Steffi Richter, ‘Reading Reading Manga: Personal Reflections by a Japanologist’, in Berndt and Richter (eds), Reading Manga, pp. 205–13, at p. 211. For a summary of manga’s importance in constructing Japan’s national and international identities, and the ‘Cool Japan’ movement, see also Craig Norris, ‘Manga, Anime and Visual Art Culture’, in Yoshio Sugimoto (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 236–60; Kendra N. Sheehan, ‘Soft Power, Globalisation and the Otaku: Influencing Japanese Nationalism from Within and Abroad’, in Vanessa Frangville, Thierry Kellner, and Frederik Ponjaert (eds), National Identity and Millennials in Northeast Asia: Power and Contestations in the Digital Age (London, 2023), pp. 37–54; Koichi Iwabuchi, ‘Pop-Cultural Diplomacy in Japan: Soft Power, Nation Branding and the Question of “International Cultural Exchange”’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21:4 (2015), 419–32; Frederik L. Schodt, ‘The View from North America: Manga as Late-Twentieth-Century Japonisme?’, in Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (eds), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads (New York and London, 2013), pp. 19–26, at pp. 20–1. In the meantime, however, an inevitable paradox has arisen: manga’s particular obsession with the European past may undermine the very notion of ‘Japaneseness’, as the non-Japanese setting and aesthetics may easily confuse the readers/audience into ‘forgetting’ the narrative’s Japanese origin, thus diminishing any associated cultural and/or ideological significance.7 Koichi Iwabuchi, ‘“Soft” Nationalism and Narcissism: Japanese Popular Culture Goes Global’, Asian Studies Review, 26 (2002), 447–69, especially at pp. 455–6. Besides, the media’s heavy dependence on style and aesthetics makes it susceptible to imitation and reproduction by other countries, so that they can exploit and benefit from it both commercially and ideologically in similar ways. This is perhaps best evidenced by the rise of the so-called ‘Global Manga’, with particular reference to Chinese manhua and South Korean manhwa; both of them have grown out of Japan’s soft-power policy but, in addition to becoming Japanese manga’s competitors on the international market, they are positioned against manga so as to counter Japan’s self-branding and cultural influences.8 All three terms – manga, manhua, and manhwa – are essentially the same thing, as they all correspond to the Chinese characters 漫画, which are loosely translated as ‘random drawing’. See Schodt, ‘The View from North America’, pp. 22–3; Rongrong Luo, ‘“Independent Manhua” (duli manhua) in China: Some Thoughts on Alternative Comics in Times of Globalization’, in Jaqueline Berndt (ed.), Manhwa, Manga, Manhua: East Asian Comics Studies (Leipzig, 2012), pp. 79–106, particularly at pp. 84–6, where Luo demonstrates a case study of how manga as an imported culture is assimilated, domesticated, and adapted so as to reflect issues of the modern Chinese society; Yamanaka Chie, ‘Manhwa in Korea: (Re-)Nationalizing Comics Culture’, in Berndt and Kümmerling-Meibauer (eds), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, pp. 85–99, particularly at pp. 89–95, where Chie focuses on how Korean manhwa, which is gaining more traction than manhua on the international scene, is exploited so as to coin a unique Korean identity both at home and overseas. For the concept of and an introduction to Global Manga, see Casey Brienza, ‘Introduction: Manga without Japan?’, in Casey Brienza (ed.), Global Manga: ‘Japanese’ Comics without Japan? (Abingdon and New York, 2015), pp. 1–22. These cases raise a series of questions regarding ownership and, if we replace ‘manga’ with ‘medieval(ist) texts’, we find in them a parallel to what Candace Barrington defines as ‘linguistic global medievalism’, which allows countries not historically and culturally associated with the European Middle Ages to ‘appropriate medieval texts for their own purposes’, thus becoming ‘the transmitter and beneficiary of medievalism’ and contributing to ‘the destabilization of the dominance of the former colonial power’.9 Candace Barrington, ‘Global Medievalism and Translation’, in Louise D’Arcens (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 180–95, at p. 190. See also Angela Jane Weisl and Robert Squillace, ‘Introduction: Medievalisms: Local Spaces and Global Geographies’, in Weisl and Squillace (eds), Medievalisms in a Global Age, pp. 1–22, at p. 8.
By way of introduction, the following sections investigate the relationship between the medieval, medievalism, and manga through three interrelated topics: the history of manga within the context of medievalism, and Japan’s two Middle Ages with their corresponding medievalisms. However, we find it necessary to first clarify a few parameters for this volume. To begin with, as the plurality of medievalism is now a matter of general consensus, which medievalism or medievalisms do we refer to when we say ‘manga medievalism’? Although there is no space to give an overview of the existing scholarship on the various conceptualisations of medievalism, which is in itself a book-length subject, we identify, in broad terms, the sort of medievalism we find in manga to be two of the four types summarised and categorised by David Clark: direct reworkings of or responses to the Middle Ages and medieval literature and culture, and reworkings of medievalist products belonging to the previous category (i.e., neo-medievalism).10 David Clark, ‘Introduction’, in David Clark (ed.), ‘Beowulf’ in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, 2020), pp. x–xx, at pp. xi–xii. The other two types both have to do with scholarship, i.e., studies on the Middle Ages and all things medieval, and on medievalist works from the above-cited types. For neo-medievalism, we follow Carol L. Robinson’s definition, as the subjects treated in her volume are the most similar to ours in terms of genre and media; according to her, neo-medievalism ‘engages alternative realities of the Middle Ages’, where ‘already fragmented histories are purposed as further fragmented, destroyed and rebuilt to suit whimsical fancy’; Carol L. Robinson, ‘Neomedievalism in a Vortex of Discourse: Film, Television, and Digital Games’, in Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements (eds), Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games (Lewiston, 2012), pp. 1–13, at p. 7. In all the manga titles discussed in this volume, perhaps only Vinland Saga can be said to (partially) belong to the first type, as it is a ‘hardcore’ reimaging of the past based on various Old Norse and Old English sources, notably Eiríks saga rauða and Grænlendinga saga, which makes it a manga/anime counterpart to the TV series Vikings and The Last Kingdom.11 For an overview of Vinland Saga, the historical background, and its potential sources, see Carl Phelpstead’s interview with CBR: Hannah Collins, ‘The Real Viking Lore That Inspired Vinland Saga’ (2020) <https://www.cbr.com/real-viking-lore-inspired-vinland-saga/> [accessed 15 May 2024]. The rest all seem to belong to the latter type, as they are marked by the kind of ‘amateurism and anachronism’ Clark attributes to this category, and the majority of them are medievalist fantasies: although manga artists seldom reveal their sources of inspiration, it is almost certain that these works are more likely influenced and informed by medievalist works than directly by medieval sources.12 For instance, the author of Berserk (an exemplary medievalist fantasy manga discussed in Su’s chapter below in this volume) has revealed in an interview that his depiction of the Inquisition is mainly drawn from the 1986 movie The Name of the Rose, and that the story as a whole is heavily influenced by the Japanese fantasy series Guin Saga (1979–), which is itself a response to the introduction of fantasy works such as The Lord of the Rings. Kentaro Miura, Berserk Official Guidebook (Milwaukee, 2018), p. 162. Second, the word manga itself could be confusing, as it refers to both manga in traditional, printed forms – that is, as graphic narratives – and manga-derived media, such as anime, light novels, and video games, which are all part of an intricately entangled manga-related industry.13 Light novel is a type of popular literature in Japan, relatively short in length and often illustrated in a manga style; many of them are adapted to manga and/or anime. To avoid confusion, from this point onwards in this volume, when we refer to manga, we do so in the first specific sense, and use ‘the manga media’ when we wish to include all the forms; each contributor will also identify the exact form of the subject(s) of their analysis. Last but not least, while the majority of the essays in this volume have a clear focus on the reimaging of Old Norse/Germanic materials/elements in the manga media, this introduction is deliberately broad – that is, in the following sections, we will consider the Middle Ages in general, rather than with a regional focus, for, since the manga media is still a subculture and a newcomer to the field of medievalism, we cannot assume that potential readers will be familiar with either the manga media or manga medievalism.
Therefore, in addition to giving an overview of this volume and the rationale behind its purpose and structure, it is necessary to use this space to first set out the basis – not only for this particular volume but also for the future studies we hope to inspire and engender. We begin with the two theoretical ‘historical origins’ of manga that are popular among manga researchers both within and outside Japan, contextualised within the discourse about medievalism(s).
 
1      See, for instance, Andreas Platthaus’s 2003 overview of manga’s success in the German market, cited and translated in Stephen Köhn, ‘Glimpses of the Past: The Allegedly Authentic Samurai Spirit as Seen in Kozure ōkami (Lone Wolf and Cub)’, in Jaqueline Berndt and Steffi Richter (eds), Reading Manga: Local and Global Receptions of Japanese Comics (Leipzig, 2006), pp. 127–45, at p. 127. More recently, Deutsche Welle (DW) reports that the popularity of manga and the growing overseas sales have led Nippon Keidanren (the Japanese Business Federation) to call upon the Japanese government to promote the media (including manga, anime, and games) as ‘the spearhead of the nation’s broader economic growth’. Julian Ryall, ‘Japan: Manga to Spearhead Nation’s Economic Growth’ (2023) <https://www.dw.com/en/japan-manga-to-spearhead-nations-economic-growth/a-65393781> [accessed 25 Apr. 2024]. »
2      In a bulletin published in 2020 by the Sainsbury Institute for the Studies of Japanese Art and Culture, Amanda Kennell attributes the rationale for holding this exhibition at the British Museum to the growing global popularity of manga – especially among young people. This is more than justified, as the Manga exhibition turned out to be the British Museum’s most popular exhibition of 2019 and holds the record for having attracted the youngest audience for any paid exhibition at the Museum. Amanda Kennell, ‘Making Manga: The Citi Exhibition’ (2020) <https://www.sainsbury-institute.org/e-bulletin/october-2020/making-manga-the-citi-exhibition/> [accessed 25 Apr. 2024]. »
3      For a good overview of medievalist manga, see Clément de Vasselot de Régné and Louis de Vasselot de Régné, ‘La fascination pour le Moyen Âge européen dans l’animation japonaise’, in Martin Aurell, Florian Besson, Justine Breton, and Lucie Malbos (eds), Les médiévistes face aux médiévalismes (Rennes, 2023), pp. 77–88; and Maxime Danesin and Manuel Hernández-Pérez, ‘Mangaesque Knights: Japan’s Path to Global Medievalism’, in Angela Jane Weisl and Robert Squillace (eds), Medievalisms in a Global Age (Cambridge, 2024), pp. 52–64. »
4      Thomas Keirstead, ‘Inventing Medieval Japan: The History and Politics of National Identity’, The Medieval History Journal, 1:1 (1998), 47–71, especially at pp. 52–8; and Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, ‘The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe’, in Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (eds), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe (Baltimore, 2009), pp. 1–24, at p. 20. »
5      Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, 2017), p. 6. »
6      Steffi Richter, ‘Reading Reading Manga: Personal Reflections by a Japanologist’, in Berndt and Richter (eds), Reading Manga, pp. 205–13, at p. 211. For a summary of manga’s importance in constructing Japan’s national and international identities, and the ‘Cool Japan’ movement, see also Craig Norris, ‘Manga, Anime and Visual Art Culture’, in Yoshio Sugimoto (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 236–60; Kendra N. Sheehan, ‘Soft Power, Globalisation and the Otaku: Influencing Japanese Nationalism from Within and Abroad’, in Vanessa Frangville, Thierry Kellner, and Frederik Ponjaert (eds), National Identity and Millennials in Northeast Asia: Power and Contestations in the Digital Age (London, 2023), pp. 37–54; Koichi Iwabuchi, ‘Pop-Cultural Diplomacy in Japan: Soft Power, Nation Branding and the Question of “International Cultural Exchange”’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21:4 (2015), 419–32; Frederik L. Schodt, ‘The View from North America: Manga as Late-Twentieth-Century Japonisme?’, in Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (eds), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads (New York and London, 2013), pp. 19–26, at pp. 20–1. »
7      Koichi Iwabuchi, ‘“Soft” Nationalism and Narcissism: Japanese Popular Culture Goes Global’, Asian Studies Review, 26 (2002), 447–69, especially at pp. 455–6. »
8      All three terms – manga, manhua, and manhwa – are essentially the same thing, as they all correspond to the Chinese characters 漫画, which are loosely translated as ‘random drawing’. See Schodt, ‘The View from North America’, pp. 22–3; Rongrong Luo, ‘“Independent Manhua” (duli manhua) in China: Some Thoughts on Alternative Comics in Times of Globalization’, in Jaqueline Berndt (ed.), Manhwa, Manga, Manhua: East Asian Comics Studies (Leipzig, 2012), pp. 79–106, particularly at pp. 84–6, where Luo demonstrates a case study of how manga as an imported culture is assimilated, domesticated, and adapted so as to reflect issues of the modern Chinese society; Yamanaka Chie, ‘Manhwa in Korea: (Re-)Nationalizing Comics Culture’, in Berndt and Kümmerling-Meibauer (eds), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, pp. 85–99, particularly at pp. 89–95, where Chie focuses on how Korean manhwa, which is gaining more traction than manhua on the international scene, is exploited so as to coin a unique Korean identity both at home and overseas. For the concept of and an introduction to Global Manga, see Casey Brienza, ‘Introduction: Manga without Japan?’, in Casey Brienza (ed.), Global Manga: ‘Japanese’ Comics without Japan? (Abingdon and New York, 2015), pp. 1–22. »
9      Candace Barrington, ‘Global Medievalism and Translation’, in Louise D’Arcens (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 180–95, at p. 190. See also Angela Jane Weisl and Robert Squillace, ‘Introduction: Medievalisms: Local Spaces and Global Geographies’, in Weisl and Squillace (eds), Medievalisms in a Global Age, pp. 1–22, at p. 8. »
10      David Clark, ‘Introduction’, in David Clark (ed.), ‘Beowulf’ in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, 2020), pp. x–xx, at pp. xi–xii. The other two types both have to do with scholarship, i.e., studies on the Middle Ages and all things medieval, and on medievalist works from the above-cited types. For neo-medievalism, we follow Carol L. Robinson’s definition, as the subjects treated in her volume are the most similar to ours in terms of genre and media; according to her, neo-medievalism ‘engages alternative realities of the Middle Ages’, where ‘already fragmented histories are purposed as further fragmented, destroyed and rebuilt to suit whimsical fancy’; Carol L. Robinson, ‘Neomedievalism in a Vortex of Discourse: Film, Television, and Digital Games’, in Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements (eds), Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games (Lewiston, 2012), pp. 1–13, at p. 7. »
11      For an overview of Vinland Saga, the historical background, and its potential sources, see Carl Phelpstead’s interview with CBR: Hannah Collins, ‘The Real Viking Lore That Inspired Vinland Saga’ (2020) <https://www.cbr.com/real-viking-lore-inspired-vinland-saga/> [accessed 15 May 2024]. »
12      For instance, the author of Berserk (an exemplary medievalist fantasy manga discussed in Su’s chapter below in this volume) has revealed in an interview that his depiction of the Inquisition is mainly drawn from the 1986 movie The Name of the Rose, and that the story as a whole is heavily influenced by the Japanese fantasy series Guin Saga (1979–), which is itself a response to the introduction of fantasy works such as The Lord of the Rings. Kentaro Miura, Berserk Official Guidebook (Milwaukee, 2018), p. 162. »
13      Light novel is a type of popular literature in Japan, relatively short in length and often illustrated in a manga style; many of them are adapted to manga and/or anime. »