Travelers Can Max Out on Japanese Manga

TOKYO – Travelers in Japan who are manga (mahn-gah) fans can now max out on them by spending time in manga-kissa (mahn-gah kee-sah), or “manga cafés,” that are stocked with hundreds of manga books that, for a small fee, patrons can sit and read for hours at a time.

For the few people around the world who are not familiar with the term manga, it refers to Japanese comic books, which, along with anime (ah-nee-may), the Japanese word for animated films, have taken the world by storm.

Like kabuki, samurai and tsunami, these two words have transcended the Japanese language and become part of the vocabulary of the world.

Anime and manga have not only transcended international and linguistic borders, they have spawned two of the most dynamic industries in the world, and have become powerful cultural forces in Japan, in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Manga, or the comic books, generally come first because they provide the titles, names and storylines, and if they are successful they may be animated—a much more expensive process than printing and binding books.

Animation is, of course, a modern technology, but manga have been a part of Japanese life since the 7th century, when Buddhist monks began to create picture scrolls depicting animals, flowers, leaves and other symbols. Some of these early scrolls featured animals that acted like humans…and satirized Buddhist priests.

By the 13th century manga were being used to decorate the walls of temples. In the 16th century, manga began to appear as hanga (hahn-gah) or woodblock prints. Some of the most popular of the larger of these prints depicted 69 different sexual positions, which, among other uses, were given to newly married couples on their wedding night.

In the 1700s manga woodblock print artists began to make collections of their prints, write captions for them, and bind them into books. By that time, the content of the prints ranged from exuberant eroticism and political satire to depictions of nature.

As the decades passed, artists began to include stories as well as captions in their manga books, with the narratives gradually becoming more and more important. Eventually, books illustrated with manga became the leading literary form in the country.

The most popular of these books featured prints and stories about famous courtesans in Japan’s huge red-light districts, and were known as ukiyo-e (uu-kee-yoh-eh), which can be translated as “portraits of the floating world.”

The word manga was created in 1815 by an artist named Hokusai, who was to become one of Japan’s most famous hanga masters. He made the word up from ideograms meaning “whimsical” and “picture.”

Just as Japan’s woodblock prints had a major impact on European painters in the 16th and 17th centuries, Western techniques of shading, anatomy, and perspective were introduced into Japan in the late 1800s, resulting in dramatic changes in the appearance of manga.

By the early 1900s, manga books were a thriving part of Japan’s new publishing industry. With the onset of war in the 1930s, the activities of manga artists and publishers came under government control. Only those that supported the military goals of the government were allowed to stay in business, and then only on a drastically reduced scale.

With freedom restored in 1945 and the prewar publishing giants reduced to small operations, new manga artists and publishers sprang up by the hundreds, publishing cheap copies called akahon (ah-kah-hone) or “red books.”

One of these new artists was a former medical student named Tezuka Osamu, who revolutionized the content of the comics by creating such characters as Mighty Atom and writing storylines in a variety of themes about real life. His New Treasure Island, published in 1947, sold over 400, 000 copies, resulting in the industry changing from producing comics for children to comics for teenager and adults.

Now, there are monthly manga for boys, for girls, for salary men, for young women, and for virtually every other group, covering everything from fashion and male-female relations to how to be an effective manager. The sales numbers of many of them are in the millions. A number of the most successful ones are sold around the world in translated editions.

Animated films based on Japanese manga are also sold world-wide, as theater films, television series and videos. Their plots run the gamut of human interests and emotions, from adventure and love stories to action films.

Their categories include mecha (may-chah), or “big robots;” hentai (hane-tie), or “porn;” martial arts, science fiction, fantasy, and “cyber punk,” etc.

The Japan Foundation estimates that between 70 and 80 percent of the young people in the U.S. and other foreign countries now studying the Japanese language were prompted to do so by their desire to read manga in their original language.

Copyright © 2007 by Boye Lafayette De Mente
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boye Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan, Korea, China and Mexico since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on these countries, including the first books ever on the Japanese way of doing business: Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, first published in 1959 and still in print, and How to Do Business in Japan, published in 1961.

To see a complete list of his titles [each one linked to Amazon.com’s buy page], go to his personal website: http://www.phoenixbookspublishers.com/.