A Cultural History of Postwar Japan Read online

  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 no
t 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 y
ou 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.