Two Origins of Manga
Despite the manga media’s role in shaping the international image of modern-day Japan, just precisely when in Japanese history manga began is far from agreed on.
1 This section is revised from a subsection in Minjie Su, ‘The Hero We Deserve: The Image of Dark Knight as Anti-Utopia in Kentaro Miura’s Manga Berserk’, in Carolyne Larrington, Hans Rudolf Velten, and Helen Young (eds), Popularising the Middle Ages in Modern Fantasy: Neomedievalism, Video Games, and Vikings (Cambridge, 2026), pp. 71–90, at pp. 72–6. One common practice is to trace manga to Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), who is often mistakenly cited as the first to have coined the term ‘manga’ when he published a series of woodblock prints (i.e.,
ukiyo-e prints, ‘pictures of a floating world’) under the title
Hokusai Manga.
2 For instance, Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo and New York, 1983), p. 18; and Kinko Ito, ‘Manga in Japanese History’, in Mark W. MacWilliams (ed.), Japanese Visual Cultures: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime (Armonk and London, 2008), pp. 26–47, at p. 29. Further connections also tend to be drawn between manga and the caricature drawings from Japan’s distant past, notably the seventh-century doodles on Hōryūji Temple and
Chōjū giga (Scrolls of Frolicking Animals) that are dated to between the mid-twelfth and thirteenth century; depicting anthropomorphic animals interacting with each other in black ink, the latter tends to be cited as ‘a prototype of the manga form’, suggesting therefore a linear history of Japanese art with manga as a direct descendant and the latest successor.
3 Ito, ‘Manga in Japanese History’, p. 26.However, even a superficial examination of
Hokusai Manga reveals its fundamental difference from manga as we know it today: while the latter are graphic narratives, the former is a collection of drawings on various subjects – landscape, animals, human figures of different professions and stages of life, and so on – and was intended as a drawing manual for Hokusai’s students.
4 Adam L. Kern, ‘The Power of Manga in Comparative Historical Perspective’, in Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere and Matsuba Ryoko (eds), The Citi Exhibition: Manga (London, 2019), pp. 104–9, at pp. 106–8. In other words,
manga in
Hokusai Manga is in fact used in the kanji’s literal meaning, denoting something random or casual, which was not necessarily part of a unified theme, a usage that had been well attested in literature before the term began to be used for art.
5 According to Natsu Onoda Power, the term ‘manga’ is borrowed from an existing literary form called manpitsu (漫筆), defined as ‘random notes’; Natsu Onoda Power, God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga (Jackson, 2009), p. 24. See also Andrew N. Nelson, The Modern Reader’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary: Original Classic Edition (Tokyo, 2004), p. 568, s.v. 漫–漫筆. This alone should be sufficiently solid ground on which to, if not set the two apart, at least problematise the manga-Hokusai connection. However, it persists in academic, public, and popular discourses both within and outside of Japan, and is frequently used as a convenient tool for the promotion of manga as a legitimate heir to what is believed to be an undisrupted, homogeneous artistic tradition.
6 The Citi exhibition was more cautious in acknowledging the potential problems of tracing manga to Hokusai. Nevertheless, both the exhibition and the catalogue are filled with ukiyo-e prints juxtaposed with images from famous manga titles, reflecting the museum’s dual goal of attracting Gen Z, among whom manga and anime are (assumed to be) popular, and of retaining regular museum visitors who are no doubt already familiar with the museum’s collection of Hokusai’s printworks. For the rationale behind the exhibition, see Bounthavy Suvilay, ‘Entretien avec Nicole Rousmaniere, curatrice de l’exposition “The Citi Exhibition Manga マンガ”’, Comicalités: Études de culture graphique (2019) <https://doi.org/10.4000/comicalites.3722> [accessed 30 Apr. 2024]. Despite the fact that the
ukiyo-e prints – an art form that bloomed in the ‘unenlightened’ Edo period (1603–1868) – were already in decline in Hokusai’s time, after the Perry Expedition in 1853, they began to be perceived, and zealously sought after overseas, as ‘Vertreter der japanischen Sehweise’ (representative of the Japanese way of seeing) during the first wave of Japonisme.
7 Klaus Berger, Japonismus in der westlichen Malerei 1860–1920 (Munich, 1980), p. 133. This rather orientalist notion soon made its way back to Japan and was embraced by Japanese intellectuals of the Meiji Era, who ‘rediscovered’ in
ukiyo-e prints ‘a space in which Japan was on a par with the “West” – in art as “the expression of the highest and noblest of [Japan’s] national culture”’.
8 Richter, ‘Reading Reading Manga’, p. 208. Effectively, the
ukiyo-e prints are used as a mnemonic bridge as Eviatar Zerubavel has proposed and defined: a ‘memory site’ that helps to construct and maintain ‘the notions of ancestry and descent’, which are foundational to national medievalism.
9 Matthias D. Berger, National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century: Switzerland and Britain (Cambridge, 2023), p. 32. Linking manga to Hokusai redoubles and re-enforces this rhetoric, while in the meantime it downplays the foreign influences that poured in after the Perry Expedition: although the nineteenth-century British cartoonist Charles Wirgman and his humour magazine
The Japan Punch cannot be overlooked as a major influence on manga, for those in favour of the continuity narrative, these are often presented as ‘add-ons’ to what is essentially a Japanese core.
10 Schodt, Manga! Manga!, pp. 28–30. And, again, the Citi exhibition is a representative example: prior to the exhibition, the British Museum published a blog article which is essentially a list of twelve ‘key works’ including Chōjū giga, Hokusai Manga, Wirgman’s Japan Punch, post-war graphic narratives, blockbuster manga titles, all the way to a little known piece called Giga Town, a collection of comic strips featuring animal characters from Chōjū giga; the selection and inclusion of Giga Town here makes a succinct argument for manga’s historic roots. The British Museum, ‘Manga: A Brief History in 12 Works’ (2018) <https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/manga-brief-history-12-works> [accessed 30 Apr. 2024]. For the problems of such presentations, see Rebecca Suter, ‘Reassessing Manga History, Resituating Manga in History’, in Nissim Otmazgin and Rebecca Suter (eds), Rewriting History in Manga: Stories for the Nation (New York, 2016), pp. 175–83, especially at pp. 178–9. On the other hand, the sense of authenticity and legitimacy imparted by the
ukiyo-e prints enables manga to be exploited to further this constructed continuity, thus creating a self-perpetuating cycle of continuity, tradition, and national exceptionalism.
As a counterargument, Ronald Stewart has instead turned the spotlight to Kitazawa Rakuten (1876–1955); widely believed to be the first person to have applied the term
manga exclusively to cartoons and comic strips, Rakuten has been hailed as one of the founding fathers of modern manga.
11 Mark W. MacWilliams, ‘Introduction’, in MacWilliams (ed.), Japanese Visual Culture, pp. 3–23, at p. 11. Despite Rakuten’s own lack of consistency in his use of the term, Stewart convincingly demonstrates that Rakuten’s choice of
manga was meant to announce his departure from traditional Japanese art forms, notably the
ukiyo-e prints: for him, manga is not something that has grown out of native Japanese traditions, which he found distasteful, but is essentially foreign.
12 Ronald Stewart, ‘Manga as Schism: Kitazawa Rakuten’s Resistance to “Old-Fashioned” Japan’, in Berndt and Kümmerling-Meibauer (eds), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, pp. 27–49, particularly at pp. 33–6. In adopting a foreign model that represented modernity and civilisation, Rakuten hoped to distance his art from any pre-Meiji visual culture and argued that, on a national scale, by producing and consuming this new type of manga, Japan could also become the Asiatic counterpart to the West. The advertisement for Rakuten’s own magazine
Tokyo Puck (launched in 1905) reads:
the top ranking countries of the world all have their own representative
manga magazines. England has London
Punch, the U.S. has New York
Puck, and with the arrival of
Tokyo Puck, Japan too has at last become a first-class country.
13 Ibid., p. 40.Therefore, Rakuten saw the pre-Meiji Japan, to which
Hokusai Manga belongs, as outdated and undesirable, thus casting it into a figurative Middle Ages in the era’s role as ‘a space of the rejects’, as opposed to the more enlightened, therefore ‘better’, societies that Japan had now joined.
14 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC, 1999), p. 185. The underlying logic is in essence the same as in the mode of ‘temporal global medievalism’ as defined by Barrington, in which ‘the Western European is considered to occupy the modern “now”, while others are perceived as occupying a medieval “then”’, so that colonisation and orientalism are justified as a necessary means by which to bring those still living in a medieval darkness ‘to the joys of a beneficent and enlightened modern period’.
15 Barrington, ‘Global Medievalism and Translation’, p. 185. In giving new forms and meanings to an older appellation, Rakuten replaced the future that would have grown out of the Japanese past with one that came out of the traditions of another, which he believed is superior. In its efforts to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Imperial Japan effectively adopted the same rhetoric when it distanced itself not only from the Japan of ‘then’ but also from non-Westernised Asian countries. These are the truly ‘medieval’ and therefore need to be enlightened, not under the rule and guidance of Europe, but by the Empire of Japan: the local equivalent to Europe.
Therefore, the schism of manga reflects the schism of Japan’s history and national identity, divided up by the Meiji Reformation: on the one hand, Japan was ‘psychologically’ colonised by the West and adopted the same orientalist mentality; on the other, it ‘imagined itself as being in the position of agent’ by assuming ‘the Western discourse of colonization’, so that it could rise above the inferior status of the other Asian countries and join ranks with the ‘first-class nations’, which Rakuten believed Japan could achieve by producing and consuming the new type of manga.
16 Haruko Momma, ‘Medievalism—Colonialism—Orientalism: Japan’s Modern Identity in Natsume Soseki’s Maboroshi no Tate and Kairo-ko’, in Davis and Altschul (eds), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World, pp. 141–73, at p. 165. See also Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan: 1853–1964 (New York, 2004), p. 24. As a result, Japan became, in its own eyes, ‘a unique amalgam of East and West’;
17 Keirstead, ‘Inventing Medieval Japan’, p. 69. and, as such, it is inevitable that Japan’s past also needs to be re-scrutinised and rewritten, leading to the co-existence of two Middle Ages with their corresponding medievalism.