Manga, Manga, Manga, Part III

I ended my first post with this title at the point in the '60s where manga had exploded onto the market with new and more popular shonen (boy's) magazines. Demand for fresh material created weekly editions instead of the traditional monthlies. The first two weeklies were Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday in 1959.

There were shonen devoted to humor, action and fantasy. Themes included sports, samurai warriors, aliens, robots and androids. The importance of technology was a popular subject as well as stories that took place in the future. The superheroes so beloved in the U.S. comic books did not seem to take hold in Japan.

As Japanese boys matured, so did their reading material, giving rise to a new genre called seinen, which Westerners might consider "young adult" for male readers. Targeted at university-aged men and older, this genre included more mature themes as well as pornographic material.

A fair amount of effort has gone into dissecting why manga became so popular in Japan. Paul Gravett had this to say, "In many ways, readers turn to manga for the sorts of vicarious experiences and solid visual storytelling that people in the West expect from the movies." Movie theatres were not as common in Japan as they were in the West.

Another contributing factor may be the long commutes many Japanese "salarymen" take each day from home to work and back again. Manga provided a quick, easy read to make the trip more bearable. Gravett says, "Samurai warriors, sportsmen, yakuza (gangsters), assassins, charismatic mavericks--these are some of the defining images of masculinity in manga, which people millions of men's daydreams during their meal breaks or long commutes . . ." He also suggests that, in a somewhat repressive society, manga provided a "safety valve . . . for the frustration and testosterone of hard-working 'salarymen' ground down by the cogs of big business."

Whatever the reason, manga became an intrinsic part of the Japanese male experience. Women and girls, too, became interested in these magazines that could briefly take them away from their everyday lives.

Initially, all manga was written by men--even those magazines that targeted girls and women. Girls' magazines were called shojo, the equivalent of the shonen for boys. The goals for females were very passive, emphasizing marriage and motherhood as the ideals to strive for.

In the early '60s, women began to aspire to become "mangaka"--creators of manga. Their influence gradually changed the direction of manga for females. An especially well-known group of female mangaka were the "Year 24" group. They were dubbed the 24s because many of them had been born in the year Showa 24 (1949).

Gravett describes the influence of these new mangaka this way: "Men's logic and linearity were overruled. This generation of mangaka unchained their panels from the uniformly regimented rectangles and rows beloved of male creators. They gave their panels whatever shape and configuration best suited the emotions they wanted to evoke . . .time and reality were no longer always locked up inside boxes, and narratives could shift in and out of memories and dreams . . . Their exploration of the fluidity of gender boundaries and forbidden love, in particular, allowed them to address issues of identity of deep importance to them and their readers."

I'll stop here until next time.