Fusanosuke Natsume
The difficulties of a manga exhibition
An exhibition of manga was held at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris in October 1999. I was requested by its sponsors, The Japan Foundation, to draw up a basic plan for the exhibition, which subsequently opened in Rotterdam in January 2000. It proved to be a marked success, and we received many requests for it to be presented elsewhere. Such is the background to this new touring exhibition, which, apart from minor changes, is essentially the same as the previous exhibition in Paris and Rotterdam.
I am very happy to see how well received this exhibition has been in Europe, so much so that it is now being taken on tour to several countries. I hope most sincerely that the exhibition will stimulate a deeper appreciation of Japanese manga. However, I would like visitors to be aware of how difficult it is to appreciate the enormous range and variety of Japanese manga through an exhibition of limited scope such as this.
Several exhibitions of manga have been held in Japan over the past decade, although most, unfortunately, have not been particularly successful. The main reason for their failure has been that most such exhibitions have done little more than display the original comic drawings on panels in the manner of paintings in an exhibition.
Most manga take the form of extremely long stories serialised in bulky weekly or monthly comic magazines. In such manga, the emphasis is on the interest of the story rather than perfection on the individual pictorial level. Total annual publishing sales in Japan amount to 2.6 trillion yen; manga account for as much as two-fifths of the number of publications going to press. This commercial success is underpinned by several factors: the artistic maturity of adult manga in circulation since the 1960s and the exploitation of this particular market (adult manga currently account for around half the total manga market), and the extensive use of a mixed media strategy in which manga are combined with other media such as animation, computer games, TV, films, and merchandise inspired by manga characters.
This means that the most popular manga appear in the form of long serials. Almost all the most well-known manga feature extended stories. A display consisting of no more than a few panels is quite clearly unable to convey the complex human relationships and the intricacies of plot that characterise a long story. There are manga magazines catering for readers belonging to a wide range of age groups from infants to young boys and girls, adolescent boys and girls, the middle-aged, and mothers. There are also many different magazines catering for readers with varying tastes and interests. Needless to say, it is quite impossible to represent the whole range of Japanese manga on the walls of an art gallery.
But there is one other problem that has struck me. I attended a small-scale exhibition of outstanding examples of French comics held in Tokyo in 1998, and I felt on that occasion that the interest of the individual pieces was identical to that of paintings in a fine art exhibition. French comics place importance on perfection of finish in the manner of modern painting, and the superb coloration seems to allude to the tradition of European painting.
In contrast, the emphasis in Japanese manga is on the interest of the story, and the pictures have a symbolic significance intended to facilitate reading of the story. If the pictures were too well structured or too dense, this would if anything detract from the interest of the story. Needless to say, this is bound up with Japanese cultural traditions bearing on pictures and writing, but the essential point is that manga are concerned more with reading stories than with appreciating pictures.
In addition, in the case of manga, the printed item is the final product, and the original picture is no more than one stage in the creative process. Original pictures may have been revised in various ways, and they do not generally have a quality that would enable them to withstand viewing as completed pictures in their own right. For these reasons, manga exhibitions held in Japan inevitably end up as tedious affairs from which the intrinsic interest of the genre has wholly vanished.
The aims of this exhibition
Nevertheless, there is in the long run no alternative but to gain an idea of the whole through a restricted display of items. This was clear to me from the outset when I was first asked to compile such an exhibition. The following were several of the main points that guided me in this respect:
1. Focus on short works
Since the story is paramount, Japanese manga are not conducive to appreciation in the context of an art gallery exhibition. I decided therefore to focus on short works whose overall narratives could be appreciated at an exhibition, the aim being to ensure that each work could be appreciated as a whole. Of course, this means that it has not been possible to exhibit many of the most renowned works and that only a limited number of manga artists can be featured.
2. Screen panels
Reading a manga is a highly personal matter, entailing the act of the reader in turning over the pages of the book and his involvement in the story as he concentrates his vision on the page. Use of flat wall panels in public spaces makes it impossible to create the psychological density of this act of reading. I wondered therefore if a similar effect could not be obtained through the use of folding screens, which would give the impression of an open book depending on the angle at which they were set. We experimented with this type of display at the exhibitions in Paris and Rotterdam. But, unfortunately, logistics made it impossible to realise this type of display in subsequent touring exhibitions, and flat panels were used instead.
3. Reading from right to left
In contrast to cartoons in the Western world, Japanese manga are read from right to left. Genres of the traditional Japanese visual arts such as pictures on folding screens and picture scrolls are similarly sequenced from right to left in the manner of the Japanese writing system. Manga are no exception to this rule. Western viewers may well experience the sense of apparent discontinuity and disorientation that Japanese people feel when they attempt to read Western comic books, but since the basic structure of manga as manifest in the sequence of the frames and the direction of the characters is restricted to a right to left orientation, manga cannot be understood if read in the opposite direction.
4. Avoidance of originals
Learning from the failure of previous manga exhibitions, we have followed the principle of avoiding the use of original works. Instead, the exhibition features high-quality copies because printed copies are a major feature of the manga idiom.
5. Coloration
In order to make the idiom more immediately accessible to European viewers, we have selected works making extensive use of colour. Japanese manga generally tend to be in black and white, with colour being used only in special circumstances. Black and white linear expression is common in the Japanese traditional visual arts, and this applies equally to manga. In contrast to Western painting, these idioms are rooted in symbolic pictorial expression based on the use of line. In most cases, the use of colour in manga does not create a sense of perspective or three-dimensionality; it tends rather to emphasise flat patterns in the manner of ukiyoe prints.
With these criteria used to select the works to be displayed, the focus of the exhibition came to be placed on modern, short manga centring on works dating from the 1980s. As mentioned earlier, short works do not occupy the mainstream of Japanese manga. But since such manga are generally aimed at a more sophisticated readership, they should provide access to various aspects of contemporary Japanese culture.
History
Japanese manga bear a close relationship to the traditional Japanese visual arts. In both the picture scrolls (emakimono) which flourished during the 12th century, and in the kibyoshi illustrated stories popular during the Edo Period (1603-1868), there is a close interaction between pictures and words, to the extent that reading can be considered a visual art form.
Originally transmitted to Japan from China, the emakimono was a visual art combining pictures and writing that required the reader or viewer to ‘scroll’ through the work. In Japan, this genre was a vehicle for astonishingly dynamic stories. In his work Animation during the 12th century: Cinematic and animation elements in picture scrolls of the National Treasure class (Tokuma Shoten, 1999), the celebrated animation artist Takahata Isao1 shows how the artistic structure of emakimono gives rise to sophisticated visual effects. This structure makes it possible to realise the difference between parallel tracking and panning which is a feature of animation, and creates the complex temporal mode of expression of a single-frame cartoon in which different moments in time are incorporated into the same image (Fig. 1). A long passage of time can thus be expressed in a veiled manner.
 Figure 1b: Scenes from an emakimono picture scroll. Pages 84 to 86 of the work by Takahata, Isao Animation during the 12th Century: Cinematic and Animation Elements in Picture Scrolls of the National Treasure Class (Tokuma Shoten, 1999) |
 Figure 1b:The manga-style frame compos1tion based on the scene of Figure 1a |
But the important point in this context is the alternating combination of narration in the form of pictures and words, which creates an effect similar to that of the major works from the age of the silent movie. The technique of bringing pictures and written characters into close contact and alternating between them was brought to a high level of development to weave together a narrative.
In the case of the kibyoshi books of the Edo Period, the combination of pictures realised by means of woodblock printing and written characters enjoyed popularity among the common people (Fig. 2). As well as establishing a mass readership through the medium of printing, the kibyoshi genre made possible a mode of expression incorporating pictures and writing through the use of sophisticated hand-carved woodblock skills. The genre was underpinned by the townspeople in the big cities. Japanese craftsmen thus created stories in which pictures alternated with written characters, thereby giving the literate masses the opportunity to enjoy the act of reading.
 Figure 2: Pages 54 and 55 of Edo no Gesaku ehon (Popular pictorial novels of Edo), Vol. 4, edited by M., Koike et al, containing Jushi Keisei haranouchi (the True Feelings of 14 Courtesans) by Shiba Zenko. |
The process of modernisation that began with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 resulted in the addition of the new medium of the newspaper, produced using modern printing methods, to the list of mediums available to the traditional visual arts. At the same time, the methods of European painting, along with modern European satirical cartoons, entered Japan and gradually took the place of traditional methods of expression. Multi-frame comics and newspaper cartoons, which emerged in the United States at around the same time as the cinema, were eventually introduced and stimulated the creation of the modern Japanese manga around 1920. This occurred almost concurrently with the emergence within the process of Japan’s industrialisation of that modern townsman, the company employee, and the start of the gradual maturation of new forms of mass culture.
The mode of expression of the manga, whereby pictures and writing are combined in a complex manner within a multi-frame structure, clearly developed under Western influence. But Japanese artists gradually incorporated into these imported manga forms their own traditional tastes and inclinations, especially by exploring narrative possibilities through alternation of pictures and words. The most systematically coherent of these explorations was conducted by Tezuka Osamu, who appeared on the scene shortly after the Second World War.
In 1953, Tezuka created a manga version of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. The desire to recreate a modern psychological drama such as Dostoevsky’s through the medium of manga led Tezuka to effect a radical transformation in the expressive language employed by manga. One example is the scene in which the hero Raskolnikov is prompted by the prostitute Sonya to seek repentance by kissing the ground. Haunted by anxiety, Raskolnikov descends the staircase. The tall rectangular frame in which Tezuka shows him coming down the stairs vividly depicts the mental state of this character, immersed profoundly in his inner torment. The scene in which he immerses himself in the crowd portrays in pictorial form the anxiety he feels relative to the crowd itself. The vivid representation of the crowd seems somehow to allude to the manner of depicting large groups in emakimono scrolls (Fig. 3).
 Figure 3: Crime and Punishment, pages 131 to 133 of the Complete Works of Tezuka, Osamu (Kodansha, 1977) |
Tezuka’s achievement constituted a revolution in the expressive language of manga, which had previously been considered unsuited to complex narrative modes. At the same time, Tezuka suggested possibilities for narratives that would prove of interest even to adults. Many adventurous manga appeared during the 1960s to explore these possibilities further. Such manga proved especially popular among the post-war generation of baby-boomers, as a result of which manga developed to embrace a wide range of readers from adolescents to young adults.
Forms of expression
The important role played by sex and violence in the revolution in the expressive language of manga during the 1960s and 70s is no doubt ascribable to the universality of these themes among adolescents and young adults. In the process of growth, adolescence is a period when each individual readjusts his or her personality, a stage in our development when we confront our sexuality and attempt to break down the walls of our childhood Elysium through violently destructive impulse.
Nevertheless, sex and violence are no more than two of the diverse topics treated by manga. To judge from reports in the mass media outside Japan, inflammatory portrayal of sex and violence is often considered to be the defining characteristic of Japanese manga. But I feel personally feel that the distinctive feature is rather the restrained psychological expression and the representation of daily time that appear in the interludes between the more spectacular and unrestrained scenes.
In his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud succeeds in presenting a theory of comics employing the comic as his medium, and in doing so makes a number of interesting points. He classifies the relationship between successive frames in terms of 1) motion to motion; 2) action to action; 3) subject to subject; 4) scene to scene, 5) aspect to aspect; and 6) non-sequitur. Almost all comics in the West are connected in the form of types 2), 3) and 4), although of these by far the largest proportion is occupied by type 2). In contrast, types 1) and 5) are much more common in Japanese manga as typified by Tezuka Osamu than in Western comics (Fig. 4). For instance, frame linkage of type 1) may involve the stepwise movement of someone turning round as if in slow motion. In the case of type 5), we may move to the scene before an event is about to occur. For instance, the scene may move from a house to a particular part of the house (Fig. 5).2
 Figure 4: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Pages 74, 75 and 80 (1993) |
 Figure 5: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Frame fro the middle column of page 78 of Hinotori (Phoenix) and frame from the uppr column of page 79, by Mizuki. |
McCloud explains this difference in technique as being primarily due to the fact that the enormous number of pages in Japanese manga entails the use of a correspondingly large number of frames. But he suggests that underlying this tendency is the tradition of placing important on the apparently functionless concept of ma—the concept of appropriate timing or spacing in the Japanese arts. But anyone familiar with the films of Ozu Yasujiro will surely be aware of the value that can be attached to everyday, routine occurrences by gently focusing on ordinary scenes, and it is this focus that is a feature of Japanese culture. I hope that viewers will be able to sense this same tendency in this exhibition of manga.
I feel that it is precisely this everyday, psychologically introspective approach that constitutes one of the main attractions of Japanese manga as well as being one of the genre’s main features. In order to create scenes that make a real impression in the context of a long, continuous narrative, a detailed, everyday portrayal of psychology is essential. Assuming that the fascination of manga lies in this unique sense of ma incorporated into a superficially restrained mode of expression, this exhibition of short manga will surely convey this feature in full measure.
Natsume Fusanosuke
26 April 2000
Notes
1. Takahata Isao (born 1935). Animation film director and producer. Graduated from the Department of French at the University of Tokyo. His work as a director has included the TV series Arupusu no shojo Haiji (Heidi, The Alpine Girl), Haha o tazunete sanzenri (3,000 Leagues to Visit Mother), Akage no An (Anne of Green Gables) and the theatre animation films Hotaru no haka (The Tomb of the Fireflies), Omoide poroporo (Memories are Never Forgotten) and Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko (Pompoko). His work as a producer has included Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä) and Tenku no shiro Rapyuta (Raputa, the Castle in the Open Sky) (both directed by Miyazaki Hayao).
2. An American student who visited Japan in 1999 conducted a similar follow-up survey on comics in Japan and the United States in connection with this graph. He concluded that the differences pointed out by McCloud were not in fact evident, a result that he explained as being attributable to the possibility that differences had disappeared as a consequence of McCloud’s book having subsequently influenced comics in the United States. But it is clear that a further detailed follow-up study is required in connection with this classification and the graph.
Fig. 1: Pages 84 to 86 of the work by Takahata Isao Animation during the 12th century: Cinematic and animation elements in picture scrolls of the National Treasure class (Tokuma Shoten, 1999). Scenes from an emakimono picture scroll and their manga-style frame composition. http://www.ntv.co.jp/ghibli/shuppan/books/data/12c.html
Fig. 2: Pages 54 and 55 of Edo no gesaku ehon (Popular pictorial novels of Edo), Vol. 4, Jushi keisei haranouchi (The True Feelings of 14 Courtesans) by Shiba Zenko. http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/books/4390110403/glance/249-2679080-3265125
Fig. 3: Crime and Punishment, pages 131 to 133 of The Complete Works of Tezuka Osamu (Kodansha, 1977). http://www.phoenix.to/mt/10.html
4. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, pages 74, 75 and 80 (1993). http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/006097625X/249-2679080-3265125
5. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, frame from the middle column of page 78 and frame from the upper column of page 79 of Hinotori (Firebird). http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/006097625X/249-2679080-3265125
