Introduction
As a fan of manga outside of Japan, there comes a time when one is no longer able to stand waiting for translated editions. Perhaps you search online for scanlations, or head out to your local Japanese bookstore to buy them in the original. Needless to say, taking the latter choice draws its own new problems, primarily being how to read the text, whether by taking Japanese language classes or studying on one’s own. In both cases, it can be the beginning of a long, sometimes frustrating but always exciting journey in acquiring a new language. In full honesty, this is not a general story, but rather my story—and perhaps many readers’ too. While I did not start reading manga anticipating learning Japanese at the time, let alone having it as a specific goal, it would not be an underestimation to say that the linguistic elements of manga quickly became one of the most important aspects for me as a reader.
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Tags: akahon, Anime-manga.jp, anti-comics feeling, classroom, education, educational comics, image-text, intertextuality, Japan, Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japanese manga, Japanese National Institute of Informatics, Kitazawa Rakuten, Kondō Hidezō, language acquisition, manga, manga studies, modern manga, onomatopoeia, post-war period, scanlations, Scott McCloud, Shimizu Kon, shōjo, shōnen, stereotypes, yakuwari-go, Yokoyama Ryōichi
In part one, I showed how the manga artist Tezuka Osamu and his body of work function as more than a mere object of analysis within manga studies but as a totalizing discourse upon which a number of larger critical concerns are projected. This has the rather odd effect of rendering “Tezuka” a milieu which can absorb even those critiques which seek to overcome a Tezuka-centric purview as to what manga might be in both historical and formal terms. I used the critical writings of Takeuchi Osamu not to evaluate them as such but to demonstrate the discursive mechanics of this totalizing absorption. In part two below, I will once again use Takeuchi’s critical oeuvre to examine, in addition to how the critic’s own personal predilections can become subsumed into seemingly objective claims, the assumptions underlying manga formalism: how manga fit with other media, how manga is understood as children’s literature, and how manga is treated as, if not entirely presumed to be, a predominantly postwar phenomenon.
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Tags: adult readership, aesthetics, akahon, Allied occupation of Japan, boku-gatari, Chame, children readers, children’s literature, Chōjū jinbutstu giga, ehon, emakimono, emonogatari, fandom, Gendai manga hakubutsukan, Giants of Children’s Manga, graphic narrative, Hasegawa Machiko, historiography, History, illustrated stories, Japan, jaqueline berndt, Kitazawa Rakuten, koma manga, manga criticism, manga hyōgen, Manga no sengo shisō, Mangashugi, Meiji Restoration, Miyamoto Hirohito, Natsume Fusanosuke, newspaper strips, Osamu Tezuka, Paul Gravett, periodicals, post-war period, rakugaki, Ryan Holmberg, Sazae-san, semiotics, Sengo manga no 50nen-shi, Sharon Kinsella, Shisō no kagaku, shōjo, shōnen, sociology, subjective criticism, Takeuchi Osamu, Tezuka, Tezuka Osamu, Thoughts on Manga in the Postwar, Tokyo Puck, Tsurumi Shunsuke, WWII, Yamada Tomoko, Yomota Inuhiko, Yonezawa Yoshihiro
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