‘Manga’s First Century’ by Andrea Horbinski review

Just a few years ago you would have been lucky to find much more than a single shelf of a UK bookshop dedicated to Japanese manga. Anime was available primarily in the form of films by Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. All that has now changed. An enormous variety of manga in translation has become available while streaming services are showing ever more anime adaptations. The storylines and visual languages of these two closely related art forms have become a major cultural thread in the lives of young westerners.

All the more reason to welcome Andrea Horbinski’s scholarly yet accessible introduction to manga’s turbulent 20th century. Many existing histories of manga, including Frederik L. Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), place modern manga within a tradition of Japanese visual art stretching back 1,000 years. Horbinski contends that the origins of manga are better understood as lying in the early 1900s: a moment when a rapidly modernising Japan, keen to make a break with the past, encountered global art forms including the political cartoon.

In 1905 the magazine Tokyo Puck was launched. Its editor, Kitazawa Rakuten, insisted that the word manga (whimsical or free-flowing pictures) henceforth only be applied to political satire. It later expanded, Horbinski argues, into social satire and beyond. Manga artists who claimed, from the 1920s onwards, that their discipline had ancient roots were guilty, she says, of making inflated claims as part of a broader romanticising of Japan’s pre-modern past. For Horbinski, manga is a quintessentially modern medium, from its global artistic debts – speech bubbles and multiple panels – to its methods of mass production and the involvement of readers in steering its direction of travel.

Readers don’t need to take a side in the dispute over manga’s origins in order to enjoy Horbinski’s weaving of manga into Japanese history. We find male anxieties in the 1920s about young women living independent urban lives coming through in manga by the likes of Kitazawa, depicting such women as greedy and vain, even as prostitutes and drug users. Elsewhere, manga artists can be found making women the focus of erotic and sometimes violent fantasies. Fears about the decline of traditional family values dovetailed in the later 1920s with growing scepticism about Western self-interest and the deleterious impact of its culture, from French fashion to American films. Manga artists took up these themes at a time when manga for children was starting to take off. Horbinski’s treatment of the politics of this period is a little uneven but she does an excellent job of showing how manga became caught up in it.

A case in point was the first smash-hit manga for children, Norakuro, whose eponymous hero is a hapless stray dog in an all-canine Imperial Japanese Army. First introduced in 1931, the crucial innovation was the importing by its creator, Tagawa Suihō, of techniques from rakugo (Japanese verbal comedy) into manga. The result was manga that was funny not just because of its satirical power or amusing images but because of its wordplay. Norakuro also pioneered the inclusion of reader engagement via the magazine’s ‘readers’ corner’. It famously fell victim to pro-militarist sentiment in 1930s Japan: Norakuro remained charmingly inept but found himself facing off against pigs on the continent, representing Japan’s Chinese enemy.

The second half of Horbinski’s book is dedicated to the postwar era. We meet Sazae-san, a young housewife modelled on her creator, Hasegawa Machiko, whose domestic adventures kept her at the forefront of manga for nearly 30 years, from 1946 to 1974. And we encounter the ‘godfather of manga’, Tezuka Osamu. Tezuka didn’t think manga needed to be funny – quite the opposite: with Japan’s descent into militarism in mind, he sought to introduce tragedy into manga’s emotional lexicon.

Grittier by far was gekiga (‘dramatic pictures’), containing lots of cinematic action and aimed at high school students. As Horbinski points out, this was the first time that (modern) manga had been produced entirely based on the market. The result was manga that was ‘lurid, violent and vulgar’ – and not universally appreciated by parents. A ‘ban bad books’ movement followed in the mid-1950s. Books were burned, but the industry survived because its young readers liked its product and because from the 1960s onwards television sent its cultural power into the stratosphere.

Tezuka was the great pioneer here. From 1963 Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) led the way in anime production, from stripped-down production methods – Japan did not yet have enough animators – to ways of generating profit from merchandise. Many a critic has rued Tezuka’s role in establishing poor pay and gruelling working conditions as the industry norm. He played a part, too, in the increasingly rigid separation that developed between manga for boys and girls. But it was female creators such as Ikeda Riyoko who gave girls’ manga what Horbinski calls its ‘physical and emotional realism’. Her The Rose of Versailles (1972-73) so captivated its readership that teachers were said to have had to suspend classes when its denouement was published because female students were crying inconsolably.

Self-published manga was already well established by the 1970s, but from this point onwards we find fandom starting to shape manga as never before: conventions, the rise of cosplay, and the emergence of otaku as a term for a superfan whose enthusiasms are exaggerated or distorted in worrying ways. Originally a criticism, it was soon adopted by otaku themselves. 1989 makes sense as a natural endpoint. That year saw the deaths of Tezuka Osamu, Tagawa Suihō, and Emperor Hirohito. It was also the year in which the gruesome murder of four schoolgirls by the so-called ‘otaku murderer’ inspired the return of concerns about the influence of postwar manga. Still, so much has happened in the decades since, not least the global spread of manga, that we must hope Horbinski is considering a sequel.

• Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989
  Andrea Horbinski
  University of California Press, 448pp, £80
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Christopher Harding is Senior Lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh.