Manga and the Representation of Japanese History (Routledge Contemporary Japan)
Language: English
Pages: 296
ISBN: 1138857408
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history.
The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world’s most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar and contemporary Japan.
Manga and the Representation of Japanese History will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, Asian history, Japanese culture and society, as well as art and visual culture
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The panel is extremely powerful in its symbolism, with Tezuka using both word and image to reinforce all the national discourse of imperial wartime Japan. In the English version, too, this panel brings World War Two to mind – lacking the symbolic depth of the kanji and furigana tension, the English finds power in repetition. ‘I will rule over the land of the rising sun’, Ōama declares, ‘and we will call our country Nippon – the land of the rising sun!’ The bars of light work together with the
details about Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensōron, see some of the representative arguments dealing with his work including Clifford, ‘Cleansing History, Cleansing Japan: Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Analects of War and Japan’s Revisionist Revival’ and Sakamoto, “‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?”: Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensōron’. 4 Yonezawa, ‘Manga no kairaku’, cited in Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us, 181. 5 Generally, Kenkanryū claims Korea’s current
happiness. In this text, we still see no consciousness of economic problems, no existential insecurity, no questioning of the possibility (or indeed politics) of intimacy. The emotional turmoil is highly constructed – almost mannered. We perceive an amazingly even distribution of power, not only between Marceau and Ladrick, but also between men and women. Ultimately, Ladrick takes care of young Master Richard Montgomery, he even embraces him on the final page; and Richard’s older sister – like
discussions on Kenkanryū, both of which are revisited in some detail in this collection. Incidents like these illustrate how the popular cultural discourse of manga can transmit ideological interpretations of history and influence a vast readership. Introduction 3 Brigitte Koyama-Richards’ recent One Thousand Years of Manga (2007) traces Japanese comics back to the eleventh century and firmly establishes the media as an art form with a tradition, a history and, most importantly, a cultural
a similar intent, and it is likely that they are simply uncritically providing a product to fill a ‘military fan’ niche, an opportunity to revel in technological minutiae without any moral considerations. In the end, the manga combines a remarkable number of wartime images and contemporary manga tropes. Behind the table of contents, a blushing high school girl holds out an akagami (red paper), one of the draft notices that saw countless men sent to their deaths, imploring the reader to accept it