User:Timothy Perper/SandboxManga

Sandbox for revising Manga article

Please do not make changes directly on the draft text. It causes chaos -- and I speak from experience. Instead, put comments, criticisms, and suggestions below the text under a separate heading. Thanks Timothy Perper 10:18, 27 September 2008 (CDT)

Revised Manga Article

Text is from SandboxHistManga, moved here.

Tradition and Innovation, Continuity and Change

Are manga a recent invention? The answer is Yes and No.

The word "manga" itself dates to the late 18th century and was used by the great 18-19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai for some of his drawings and sketches

Earlier use Rakuten Kitazawa

Kibyoshi -- Kern

History of Japan is the history of its art -- from Jp art book

and stories told in pictures and sometimes words date back to 13th century Japan. By contrast, post-World War II manga are thoroughly modern in design, manufacture, and distribution within Japan and, in translation, to the world.

Japanese and non-Japanese scholars have been interested in the complex interactions between traditional Japanese art and modernity, especially Japan-U.S. transpacific transnationalism.

rewrite the following material

Historians of manga see two broad processes shaping modern manga. Their views differ in how much importance is assigned to events after World War II versus events before the war and in Meiji and pre-Meiji Japanese culture and art. These differences of opinion are, in part, arguments over the role of non-Japanese influences, e.g., of the United States, compared to older and far more purely Japanese influences in shaping the art of Japan. Because these issues deal with Japanese national pride, they can become quite heated.

Japanese writers like Takashi Murakami stress events after World War II as crucial for shaping modern manga. Murakami sees Japan's staggering defeat and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having created long-lasting scars on the Japanese artistic psyche, which, in his view, lost its previously virile confidence in itself and sought solace in harmless and cute (kawaii) images. Takayumi Tatsumi also sees a major role for events after World War II, but instead of war, for him a special role exists for a transpacific economic and cultural transnationalism that created a postmodern and shared international youth culture of cartooning, film, television, music, and related popular arts. For Tatsumi, the crucible in which modern manga have developed is post-modernism, not bitter memories of war, immense destruction, and ultimate defeat.

For Murakami and Tatsumi, transnationalism (or globalization) refers specifically to the flow of cultural and subcultural material from one nation to another and to how artistic, aesthetic, and intellectual traditions influence each other across national boundaries. An example of cultural transnationalism is the creation of Star Wars films in the United States, their transformation into manga by Japanese artists, and the marketing of Star Wars manga to the United States. Another example is the transfer of hip-hop culture from the United States to Japan. Wong also sees a major role for transnationalism in the recent history of manga.

Nonetheless, other writers stress continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions as central to the history of manga. They include Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, and Adam L. Kern. Schodt points to the existence in the 1200s of illustrated picture scrolls like the Toba-e scrolls that told stories in sequential images with humor and wit. Schodt also stresses continuities of aesthetic style and vision between ukiyo-e and shunga woodblock prints and modern manga (all three fulfill Will Eisner's criteria for sequential art.

Schodt also sees a particularly significant role for kamishibai, a form of street theater where itinerant artists displayed pictures in a light box while narrating the story to audiences in the street. Richard Torrance has pointed to similarities between modern manga and the Osaka popular novel between the 1890s and 1940, and argues that the development of widespread literacy in Meiji and post-Meiji Japan helped create audiences for stories told in words and pictures. Kinko Ito also roots manga historically in aesthetic continuity with pre-Meiji art, but she sees its post-World War II history as driven in part by consumer enthusiasm for the rich imagery and narrative of the newly developing manga tradition. Ito describes how this tradition has steadily produced new genres and markets, e.g., for girls' (shōjo) manga in the late 1960s and for Ladies Comics in the 1980s (in Japanese, also called redisu レディース, redikomi レヂィーコミ, and josei 女性 じょせい manga).

Kern has suggested that kibyōshi, illustrated picture books from the late 1700s, may have been the world's first comic books. These graphical narratives share with modern manga humorous, satirical, and romantic themes. Although Kern does not believe that kibyōshi were a direct forerunner of manga, for Kern the existence of kibyōshi nonetheless points to a Japanese willingness to mix words and pictures in a popular story-telling medium. The first recorded use of the term "manga" to mean "whimsical or impromptu pictures" comes from this tradition in 1798, which, Kern points out, predates Katsushika Hokusai's better known usage by several decades.

Similarly, Charles Shirō Inoue sees manga as being a mixture of image- and word-centered elements, each pre-dating the U.S. occupation of Japan. In his view, Japanese image-centered or "pictocentric" art ultimately derives from Japan's long history of engagement with Chinese graphic art, whereas word-centered or "logocentric" art, like the novel, was stimulated by social and economic needs of Meiji and pre-War Japanese nationalism to create a populace unified by a common written language. Both fuse in what Inoue sees as a symbiosis in manga.

References