3
Comics in Postwar Japan

How did the genre which began as an imitation of the U.S. comic strip become so different over 60 years? Comic strips with the rendering of stories in pictures as well as words began in the U.S. towards the turn of the century. In 1893, James Swinnerton’s Little Bears made its appearance in the San Frandsco Examiner; in 1895, R.F.Outcoult’s The Yellow Kid appeared in The World. According to Coulton Waugh’s The Comics (1949), on 16 February 1896, The World used yellow ink on the Sunday edition of The Yellow Kid and from this was derived the term ‘yellow journalism’ to refer to sensational reporting.³⁰ From then on comic strips became a major weapon in the competition between the newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer. Newspapers tried to attract new households by catching the interest of children with comic strips. Sometimes comic strips bearing the same titles were serialized by two competing newspapers, as in the case of The Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids.

In 1919, Asahi newspapers sent a reporter by the name of Suzuki Bunshir (1890–1951) to the Peace Conference at Versailles. On the way he travelled through the U.S.A., where his attention was called to the role of comic strips. He came back to Japan with many samples, which he made use of after his appointment to the post of chief editor of the newly created graphic daily news (later changed to weekly), Asahi Graph, in 1923. In this graphic newspaper he began to serialize Bringing Up Father by George McManus, which had been serialized since 2 January 1913 in Hearst’s New York American.³¹ It was a story of a henpecked husband, which was quite new to the Japan of the 1920s, and it exercised some influence on marital relationships among upper middle-class city-dwellers in Japan. The hero of the story, Jiggs, has climbed high as a successful businessman, but still hankers after corned beef and cabbage, the favourite food of Irish working men. True to their newly won position, Jigg’s wife Maggie will not let him eat corned beef and cabbage, and this proves a source of never-ceasing family conflict. In addition, Jiggs needs contact with his old friends, most of them unsuccessful. The couple have a daughter, Nora, who looks exactly like a Ziegfeld girl, which again set the pattern for beauty in Japan in the 1920s. Mannequins in the department stores showed signs of Westernization just at this period, and this trend, although interrupted by the Fifteen Years’ War, continued, and after the Occupation reached the extreme point, where almost all the mannequins in the major department stores were either blonde or brunette. It was only after the 1960s that the Japanese recovery from a long-abiding inferiority complex began to allow mannequins of all varieties, some with black skin and black hair and some with yellow skin and black hair.

Suzuki Bunshir, the chief editor of the Asahi Graph, serialized the first comic strip in Japan, Shchan and the Squirrel. Suzuki conceived the idea of this comic strip while perusing many samples in his travels to Europe and the U.S.A. After his return, he gave his samples to his staff, explained his idea, and wrote out a plan of the first few instalments. One of his staff, a young viscount by the name of Oda Nobutsune, took on the task of continuing the story, and another, Kabashima Katsuichi, adept at pen drawing, accepted the task of illustration.

Shchan and the Squirrel is the story of a boy named Shchan who goes with his pet squirrel to an underground world, where he finds little mice pestered by goblins. Shchan, a courageous boy, fights many big goblins and becomes a great and respected mayor. The story reflects the dreams of any little boy who feels himself oppressed by adults and wishes for a chance to show his prowess and wisdom. The boy was named Shchan, because Japan was just at that time under the reign of Emperor Taish, and, ‘chan’ being a diminutive, Shchan was a common name for boys born between 1911 and 1925. Shchan made a great hit with city children, and was commercially exploited through the manufacture and sale of a type of cap worn by Shchan in the comic strip. The Osaka headquarters of the Asahi newspaper company held a free party for all Shchans in the vicinity of Osaka, and gave away Shchan caps presented by the hatters’ chain stores.³² A photograph of the party with all the Shchans in ‘Shchan caps’ appeared in both the Asahi newspaper and the Asahi Graph, giving great publicity to the Asahi newspaper and the hatters’ chain.

This episode shows that mass society was already in existence in January 1925, when the party was held. The mass communication media were already well enough developed to spread news instantly to a wide range of people with the income to buy newspapers and comics and Shchan caps, the aim of the enterprise.

The illustrator of Shchan and the Squirrel, Kabashima Katsuichi (1888–1965), learned the art of pen drawing by copying the ink illustrations in the National Geographic Magazine. Thus, Shchan and the Squirrel shows Western influence in both story and illustrations.

Japan, however, had its own long-standing tradition of cartoons and even narrative comics. The medium was not pen, which was a European import, but brush, which had come from China more than 1,000 years before. There is a natural transition from Chinese ideographs written with a brush to pictures. This can be seen from the diary of Niijima J,³³ the first samurai to break the law of his feudal lord and the central government and cross the ocean to study in the late Edo period, a man who cannot be said to have had a special aptitude for drawing. Similar instances of this easy transition can be seen in the journal of Kishida Gink,³⁴ written in the early 1860s when he went to Shanghai as an assistant to Dr Hepburn in compiling the first English-Japanese dictionary. Kishida Gink, together with Hamada Hikoz, once a ship-wrecked sailor, was one of the first Japanese to start a newspaper.

The earliest traces of cartoons are found on the back of panels of the Hryji Temple built in the Nara Period, one of the oldest wooden buildings extant in the world.³⁵ In Nara, we find, among the remains of the Buddhist sutras, comic self-portraits drawn by the copyists, who made these self-pursuant quests as relaxation from their tedious task. One cartoon is dated AD745. It is also an example of an easy translation of brushwork from the copying of an ideograph to the spontaneous drawing of a comic figure.

In brushwork also, we have scrolls like the Scroll of Frolicking Animals and the Origin of Shigisan, both reputedly the work of Abbot Toba (AD1053–1140), the first cartoonist in Japan.³⁶ He was born into the aristocracy and went into the priesthood, where he took part in the struggle for power and position, little to do with religion. By the strength of his associations, he was raised to the rank of the Chief Priest of the Tendai Sect, the highest position in the hierarchy of the sect, but quitted this position after occupying it for three days. On his deathbed, his disciples asked him who was going to succeed him as the resident priest of the temple. He answered that it should be decided by wrestling (although the wrestling was to be the arms only style).

The superb Scroll of Frolicking Animals calls to mind Walt Disney’s animated cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, a point made by an American student when Yashiro Yukio, an art historian, lectured at Harvard in the 1930s.³⁷ Perhaps there may have been some influence on Disney. The Origin of Shigisan scroll shows a bird’s-eye view of the hungry people living on the ground from the camera angle of the rice storage flying in the sky to rescue them. In this the scroll can be said to be cinematographic, as well as comical, resembling the comic strips in the present century.

The legend that grew up around the personality of Abbot Toba later gave birth to the school of comic drawing called Toba-e. We will not go into the later development of comic drawing in Japan, except to mention that the great Zen priest Ikky (1394–1481) left a series of cartoons of animated skeletons suggestive of Possada in Mexico and of the later Disney cartoons of skeleton dances.³⁸ Zen Buddhism is compatible with the brewing of comic spirit. Still later, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) painted the Hokusai cartoons, and the serious administrator, Watanabe Kazan (1793– 1841) painted cartoons of young pupils playing practical jokes in a country school of the late Tokugawa period.

This pre-Meiji tradition was given a stimulus from the West by the works of cartoonists Charles Wirgman and Georges Ferdinand Bigot, who came over from Europe to portray the Japanese working at Europeanization. They brought to Japan something of the spirit and style of Hogarth and Daumier. This gave rise to a school of cartoonists who painted critical sketches of contemporary events with brushwork reminiscent of the pre-Meiji tradition.

Shchan and the Squirrel, told and drawn to the pattern set by Western comic strips, was soon followed by works more and more influenced by the pre-Meiji tradition. Although with an interruption during the war years, in the last stage of which no comic strips were allotted space in newspapers, Japanese comic strips have developed independently from their U.S. and European counterparts.

In the postwar period, three factors contributed to their unique character. According to Tominaga Ken’ichi in The Class Structure of Japan, Japanese society went through a transformation in the years 1955 to 1975.³⁹ Owing to the Korean War, the Japanese economy had recovered from World War II by 1955. Since then technological innovation and high economic growth have become marked characteristics.

In 1955, 41.1 per cent of the total working population was engaged in primary industry; 23.8 per cent was involved in secondary industry in 1955, 34.1 per cent in 1974; and 35.1 per cent was involved in tertiary industry in 1955 and 51.8 per cent in 1975. Highly professional occupations accounted for 4.9 per cent in 1955 and for 7.6 per cent in 1975. Those in managerial positions amounted to only 2.1 per cent in 1955 and 4.3 per cent in 1975. Thus in 1975 only 12.8 per cent of people born in the Taish era could hope for a managerial position when they reached their forties, whereas 16.1 per cent of people born in the early Shwa era, between 1925 and 1935, could hope for similar positions when they reached their forties in 1975. This eased the atmosphere of depression in the earlier phase of the postwar period and partly accounts for the prevalence of middle-class managers in Japan today. Of course, together with this there has been an increase in the standard of living and also a rise in educational standards, which have been the basis for social discrmination in Japan since the Meiji Period. I shall return later to these changes.

There was a marked change from a primarily agrarian society to a highly industrialized society in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the change became so marked that more than 90 per cent of Japanese questioned in polls considered themselves to belong to the middle class.⁴⁰

No society moves forward in a uniform manner. There were segments of society which were left behind and hard hit by this change. To this group belonged the generation of young cartoonists who made their début in the 1960s, and they greatly appealed to readers who were frustrated by this smug social milieu of the 1960s.

There used to be a form of popular art for children called a picture-card show.⁴¹ A picture-card showman would walk the streets, gather children together by the sound of his drum and show a series of attractive picture cards with elocution. The children would buy sweets to eat as they watched the free performance. The stories presented were sometimes heroic, sometimes pathetic or horrible, and occasionally comic and erotic. The pictures were never printed but were all hand drawn. Because they had to compete with the mass communication media, they relied upon a limited number of hand-drawn pictures.

5 Picture-card show (kamishibai), photographed by Kimura Ihei at Komatsugawa, Tokyo, 1956

This picture-card showmanship was common after 1929, when so many were unemployed, until the war years, which provided employment for all, though of a very undesirable kind. After 1945 unemployment rose again; children spent much time on the streets, because homes were shared by a number of families and were lacking in space, and they needed cheap amusement. Sweets were also a coveted rarity. In this period there was a renaissance of the art of picture-card showmanship. It was hard work for both the showmen and the artists. Showmen had to walk the streets or travel by bicycle. Artists worked for 14 or 15 hours a day, drawing pictures and creating stock stories. Their life was quite different from that of professional painters and novelists of the same age, and this constant work developed a different skill. The picture-card show declined after 1955, unable to compete with films, television and confectionery shop chains. Then many of the artists began to draw for the lending libraries, which provided cheap amusement for children and young people who hired books cheaply because they could not afford to buy them.

In 1963 a survey was made of lending bookshops in Kbe, one of the major cities in western Japan. Two people covered by the study each borrowed 100 books from one of the lending bookshops every month. Both were resident employees in cleaning shops, in their twenties, and had come from farming villages to the city. In the holidays they did not have enough money to go to films or for other expensive pastimes. The owner of the cleaning shop had a television set, but his family would choose the channel. To such young men, borrowing comic books (manga) was a temporary citadel of freedom. They read three books a day, 100 in a month. The comic books they read were gruesome and satisfied their desire to compensate for their state of alienation.

To such readers the most appealing author was Shirato Sanpei 1932–), whose publications could be sold at exactly the number of the lending libraries—that is, 5,000.⁴² Shirato drew an eight-volume work called The Fighting Record of the Invisible Organizers of Koga and a sixteen-volume work, The Fighting Record of the Invisible Organizers. In both, he portrays invisible organizers who fight to the death against the oppressive rule of the fief lords. The cartoons take the standpoint of the peasants, the beggars, and the still more discriminated against Buraku people. There is no single hero. The invisible organizers belong to a group, they succeed one another after their deaths, forming group personalities. Shirato believed that the invisible organizers are the driving force of history, not the apparent heroes, who are just pawns and

6 From The Fighting Record of the Invisible Organizers, by Shirato Sanpei

Frame 3—It’s a beautiful sky…

Frame 4 (bottom right)— I seem to have had this sort of experience before…

Frame 5 (left)— That time too a bird louse flew past my ear, just like this…

substitutes. Many invisible organizers were hidden behind Oda Nobunaga, who first unified Japan after several hundred years of confusion, and Akechi Mitsuhide, who attacked and killed him. This viewpoint appealed to leaders of the radical student move ment who had been expelled from the Japan Communist Party when it began to show a marked orderliness in the years of high economic growth. Shirato’s portrayal of the freedom of the invisible organizers appealed to these readers, who had come to believe in the freedom to take initiatives at their own risk.

Shirato’s artistic style was developed through painting picture-card shows, which be began at 18 after finishing middle school. It was influenced by the Ukiyoe of the pre-Meiji period, but, unlike Ukiyoe, used the techniques of breaking a swift action into many cuts like a slow-motion film, and of building up suspense and horror, techniques from the picture-card show. It is a style permeated with rancour. The abstractions and artificiality do not seem to be used only for the story’s sake, as in the works of many other cartoonists or even novelists of the same period. Its biographical root is in Shirato’s family history. His father, Okamoto Tki, had long been active in the proletarian art movement as a painter. He was one of those who had had courage enough to be photographed with the corpse of Kobayashi Takiji, the leader of the proletarian cultural movement who had been tortured to death, after it had been returned from the police station on 20 February 1933. His eldest son, Shirato, was then only 11 months old, and he lived with his parents through the oppressive years of war. The rancour which overflows in his works has a long history of grim emotion with which he has lived since his birth. His work exceeds the bounds of comic strips and can be called pictorial drama. His portrayal of facets of class strife with fine distinction between different classes and class personalities is unique, even outside Japan. He is singular in not glorifying the oppressed. He portrays the cruel factional strife among the invisible organizers and the resulting unjust purges and executions. In this there is a deep-seated nihilism in his view of history, which makes it distinctly different from the official historians and artists of the Japan Communist Party or of other New Left parties. It was this nihilism and black rancour which attracted to him, and to him alone, many of the young live-in employees who had migrated from farming villages to the city with only the bare essentials of compulsory education. His brushwork is decidedly not urbane, but was rather in the tradition of the brushwork of the pre-Meiji period.

The artist Mizuki Shigeru (1924–) also turned to drawing for book-lending chains when the picture-card shows went out of business. He was born in Sakaiminato, in Tottori Prefecture, where he imbibed much folklore in his infancy and early childhood. It was in this same region that Lafcadio Hearn collected folklore for English transcription. After finishing primary school there, Mizuki went to night school in Osaka. Recruited in 1943, he served as a soldier in Rabaul, New Britain Islands, where he lost his left arm in an air attack. After his return to Japan, he begged for alms in his white war patient’s clothes on the streets of Tokyo for a time, with other disabled war veterans. In 1950 he decided to draw for picture-card shows with his remaining right arm. In 1956, when the business went out of fashion, he switched to drawing for lending libraries. Most of his representative works were drawn in this period. They were sold at a remarkably low price: one whole book brought Yen 20,000 to Yen 25,000, or $70 to $100 according to the exchange rate of the time.

Mizuki drew many war stories. Among these ‘The White Flag’, the story of the fall of Iwjima, is the most important. It was drawn in 1964 in the midst of great prosperity. The story begins when the Commander-in-Chief has already committed suicide. The survivors of the navy and the army hold a conference on what they are to do. An army lieutenant and a navy lieutenant, now the highest in rank remaining on this island, disagree. The navy lieutenant returns to the cave where wounded subordinates are waiting, and says: ‘You have fought well. That is enough. Our country would not force you to do more. You have a right to keep on living.’

A non-commissioned officer, who has lost one eye, looks up to his commander and says, ‘But…’

The officer goes out and waves a white flag to the enemy and gives orders to his men to leave the island by the one motor boat left to them. ‘This is an order. Go.’

The non-commissioned officer says again, “But…”

The officer insists and the other bids farewell, saying, ‘I shall report you to your parents.’

The officer keeps on waving the white flag. He is shot by the army lieutenant who is of the opinion that all Japanese must fight to death. This character, the one-eyed soldier who keeps saying ‘But…’ to the officer’s order reappears in Mizuki’s later works as the father of Kitar of the Grave. In this work One-eye crawls out of his grave and gives advice to his son in a time of crisis, living with him in the period of the greatest economic prosperity in Japan’s history. His son is also one-eyed and, being a ghost, he does not have to go to school, a characteristic which attracted children all over Japan when the work was televised.

The hero of Mizuki’s stories says ‘But…’ to the war authorities, the Occupation authorities, and the officials of economic growth, all filled with confidence just as Mr Keenan, the Chief Prosecutor, was confident of the civilization by which he measured and judged the war leaders of Japan. Very few intellectuals at the time said ‘But…’ to Keenan and other Occupation spokesmen. Mizuki is one of the few among those who had doubts, and has kept on saying ‘But…’. Although he cannot offer alternatives, he is very sceptical of the cult of science and technology that forms the basis of the philosophy of technocrats in Japan today, and asks where this high growth will lead. To express this doubt, Mizuki drew a four-volume work, Sanpei the Kappa, in 1962, in which a boy brought up deep in the mountains plays with a badger and a kappa, an imaginary creature that lives under water. The kappa has been sent from his republic to investigate human conditions, and to study for six years at a human primary school. Sanpei and the kappa go to school on alternate days, a contract quite welcome to Sanpei. When Sanpei dies in an accident, the kappa decides to impersonate Sanpei and lives with Sanpei’s widowed mother. On the day of his graduation from the primary school, the kappa confesses to Sanpei’s mother that he is just a kappa. Sanpei’s mother says that she has known it all along and has been grateful for the kappa’s kindness. Now the kappa leaves for his home country. The mountain range is dark against a sky still lit by the afterglow of sunset. As the kappa’s figure dwindles in the distance, the mother and the badger stand side by side, calling goodbye.

The four-volume work contains other fantastic adventures of Sanpei and his kappa friend. All through the work there is an animism that keeps the story alive. It is a product of all the legends and beliefs rooted in Mizuki’s mind since his childhood in

7 From Sanpei the Kappa, Vol. 4, by Mizuki Shigeru

Frame 1 (right)— University…will they make me study that long?

Frame 2 (left)— Dad said just primary school would do…

Sakaiminato, Tottori. These beliefs were reinforced during his war years in Rabaul, New Britain. In the many months during which the Japanese garrison was blockaded by sea and air and had nothing to do, Mizuki went with other soldiers into the native villages to help with the farming, and to dance and drink together. What the Japanese were doing seemed then quite worthless in contrast to the native way of life. This impression continued to haunt him after he returned to Japan, formed a family and lived in prosperity. The beliefs of his childhood in a Japanese seaside village and those of the natives of the South Pacific islands were fused into one, and took on a trans-historical character better expressed in comic strips than by any other form of artistic expression. On this religious basis Mizuki continues to question the postwar high industrialization and the faith in money prevalent in Japan since the 1960s.

The artist Tsuge Yoshiharu (1937–) began to work, immediately after graduating from primary school, in a small factory and then became a live-in delivery boy in a noodle shop. His natural shyness increased to the point where he blushed whenever he was faced with a stranger. In his quest for a job which did not necessitate meeting people, he turned to cartoons. Tsuge began to work for lending libraries, finishing The White She-Devil when he was only 15. His style of narrative added something new to the history of manga.

In The Master of Gensenkan, for example, the hero enters a hotsprings establishment and buys a long-nosed goblin mask for fun. Then the saleswoman in the toy shop says, ‘You are just like the master of Gensenkan.’

The present master of the Gensenkan inn had also come to the town as an unknown traveller and bought a goblin mask in this shop. Then he went into an inn where the mistress was deaf and dumb. Gossip had it that he asked the old woman who came to serve him, ‘Was the mistress born deaf and dumb?’

‘Yes, maybe because of sins she committed in her previous life.’

‘Do you believe such a thing?’

‘We cannot live without believing it.’

‘Why can’t you live without believing it?’

‘If we did not have a previous existence, we would be like…’ there she checked herself.

‘Like what, do you say?’

‘We would be like…ghosts.’

The guest went down to the hotsprings where he found the mistress of the house naked. He tried to touch her. She escaped but, after spending a long time in her own room half naked, putting her makeup on, she came to the guest’s room. Since then the guest had been the master of Gensenkan.

The stranger now wants to walk toward Gensenkan to lodge there. The old woman at the toy shop tries to stop him, saying: ‘You can’t do that. Terrible things will happen.’

‘What terrible things?’

‘Why, you are exactly like the master of Gensenkan, don’t you see?’

And another woman says, ‘Quick! Someone must go and tell them about this at Gensenkan.’

A harsh wind blows, and the scenery becomes suddenly weird. A crowd of old women gather around the stranger and move together toward Gensenkan. At the entrance of Gensenkan, a man with the same face as the stranger breaks from the grip of the mistress and moves forward to confront him. That is the end.

In this Tsuge tries, as in most of his picture dramas, to grope for images that will enable him to reach the umbilicus of his uncertain existence. That is exactly what the wartime government and the Occupation did not try to do. To ascertain, to the best of one’s

8 From The Master of Gensenkan by Tsuge Yoshiharu

ability, the uncertain ground upon which one supports oneself, this has been a constant effort for Tsuge in his picture dramas. For this reason his work had a small range of passionate readers. Their number soon increased and reached millions. This represents a reaction against the cult of science promoted by both the Occupation (for the Occupation government could not for strategic reasons appeal to Christianity with the Japanese as an audience and so resorted to this cult of science) and the Japan Communist Party. Tsuge’s expression of this reaction constituted his principal attraction to youth in the 1960s and 1970s. He became a symbol of youth culture and also of counter-culture, for young people at that time felt that they were being subjected to the rule of another cult of science, practised by rising technocrats.

In addition to the picture-card show and the lending library, a third factor contributed to the unique character of modern Japanese comics. This was the emergence of women cartoonists. Before the war, Japan had virtually no female cartoonists, and immediately following the war there appeared only one, Hasegawa Machiko, whose work I shall discuss in another context in Chapter Seven. In the later period, however, they emerged one by one until by 1974 they formed a force great enough to work a change in the character of the Japanese cartoon. In the years since 1974 the most creative contributors have been women cartoonists.

9 From Earthward bound… by Takemiya Keiko

Takemiya Keiko and Hagio Moto each showed a fine tactical sense when they experimented in weekly girls’ mangas with long works— Hagio’s The Clan of Poe and Takemiya’s The Song of Trees and Wind—in which homosexuality featured. They were a great success. The main figures are male, and, in the interaction of these male characters, the cartoonists portrayed the attraction and repulsion between young people in a way which no male cartoonists could have done.

A precedent for this may be found in the Takarazuka Girls’ Opera, begun in 1913. The opera was invented by an enterprising capitalist, Kobayashi Ichiz, to attract visitors to a hotsprings resort at the terminal station of his newly built private railway which extended from Osaka. His plan was to open a department store at the starting point and a weekend resort at the terminus, and to sell residential land along the line. The Girls’ Opera provided girls, who in those days were not permitted to associate with boy friends, with an imaginary association with the stage. The girl actresses played boys’ roles much better than male youths of the period, so in a way they were better, gentler and more civilized males. This Takarazuka culture has been inherited by modern female cartoonists. No wonder Ikeda Riyoko’s comic strip about the French Revolution, The Rose of Versailles, of the seventies was so appropriate to the stage of Takarazuka and made such a great hit as part of the repertoire.

Today there exists a galaxy of women cartoonists. Those noted above are the ones whom I consider to be the most creative. We can add also the names of Kimura Minori and shima Yumiko, who are of the youngest generation, in their late twenties. The combination of humour and the women’s rights movement is interesting and promising. In view of the fact that more women will enter employment with the increase in the number of elderly people in society, this range of cartoons will prepare a new social atmosphere.

Among the male cartoonists of the 1970s, Yamagami Tatsuhiko (1947–) is the most controversial. His cartoon creation, Gaki Deka, is an extremely fat, over-fed primary school pupil, whose only interests are money and sex. He has no interest whatever in school, but calls himself the only boy policeman and polices the other children primarily out of financial and sexual interest. Gaki

10 From Gaki Deka, Vol. 2, by Yamagami Tatsuhiko. Gaki Deka (right): You’re sentenced to death! Man (left): What do you mean, death!

Deka’s irresponsible and shameless pursuit of his interests seems to give us an image of Japan in relation to South-east Asia and in that way is quite indispensable.

Manga now forms an enormous proportion (about 20 per cent in 1977) of all Japanese publications.⁴³ There are ten weekly comics, each of which has a circulation of over one million. The most popular, The Boy Champion Weekly, sells two million copies (now four million in 1986). Companies which publish comics are thriving, while others verge on bankruptcy. Some actually went bankrupt in 1977, 1978 and 1979.

The change which comics have brought about in the nature of publishing in Japan has been the subject of controversy. The paper of the largest labour organization, Shy, serialized a debate on the topic between Inaba Michio (1927–) and Tsumura Takashi (1948–).⁴⁴ Inaba expressed total condemnation and Tsumura enthusiastic support. Inaba is a middle-aged professor of Tokyo University and Tsumura a young freelance critic who dropped out of Waseda University during the university feud. Moreover, Inaba represents the Old Left and Tsumura the New Left. Their differences are thus understandable. The issue was taken up by the national broadcasting station, and a panel discussion of 20 scholars of opposing camps was televised all over Japan in the autumn of 1978.

Just as comics present a problem for the labour movement, they also present a problem for education, from primary school up to university. The sudden increase in university students who read comics has already brought about a radical change in the character of education. According to a statistical analysis by Tominaga Ken’ichi, in 1955, when Japan was on the threshold of high economic growth, 6.9 per cent of Japanese between the ages of 20 and 29 had completed primary school only, 46.5 per cent had completed middle school, 29.8 per cent new system high school (or old system middle school), and 16.8 per cent had been to junior college or university.⁴⁵ About twenty years later, in 1975, the same classification shows the following percentages:

Primary school—0.0%

Middle school—23.0%

High school—49.1%

Junior college or university—27.3%

Unclassified—0.6%

Before the war, only about 5 per cent of this age group had gone to junior college and university. The change is quite extraordinary.

Since about 1960, professors have been complaining about the students reading comics. In this regard, I personally consider that the student who has read and understood The Fighting Record of the Invisible Organizers by Shirato belongs to a very intelligent group in today’s university population in Japan. This is a defence of comics but not of university students as a whole.

Today many universities have comic clubs, where students draw pictures and publish them in their own magazines. Even Tokyo University has one, whereas Kyoto University does not yet have one. Waseda University has produced the greatest number of successful cartoonists so far.

Probably, the development of Japanese cartoons away from the trend set by the U.S.A. resulted from the influence of the picture-card show, of lending libraries, and of women cartoonists, as well as from differences in social history.