Takahashi Rumiko and the Turning Point in the History of Manga and Anime

Takahashi Rumiko’s entry onto the manga scene represented the turning point in the history of manga and anime. This turning point signifies the emergence of the genre of romantic comedy (rabukome = “love comedy”)—a romantic relationship-centered genre certainly common to shōjo (girls’) comics category at the time—now beginning to appear in shōnen (boys’) comics, too. Translated by Jon Holt & Teppei Fukud

Remembering Two Titans of Manga: Shirato Sanpei and Saitō Takao

What follows is a pair of recent tributes Natsume Fusanosuke wrote for Japanese newspapers, concerning the pioneering cartoonists Saitō Takao and Shirato Sanpei, who died, respectively, on September 24, 2021, and October 8, 2021. The two articles are here presented in English for the first time. Translated by Jon Holt & Teppei Fukud

Making it Just in Time: Author-Creator Matsumoto Taiyō

Translated by Jon Holt and Teppei Fukuda The first time I can remember encountering Matsumoto Taiyō’s work was probably when he released his short story collection, Blue Spring (Aoi haru - Matsumoto Taiyō tanpenshū [stories published from 1990 to 1993; Shōgakukan, 1993]). All of the stories concern a bunch of young dudes -- full of desires, frustrations, and violent tendencies -- and no chance they can ever get past those things. I thought to myself at that time, “Ah, I bet this stuff means a lot to readers in their teens, but they don’t really do anything for me.” After all, I was a man in my forties, so this stuff wasn’t on my radar as I was busy becoming a grown-up. Keep in mind that Taiyō himself was just in his early twenties. So, it really wasn’t that unnatural for him to write about life like that

Time to Re-Evaluate Taniguchi Jiro\u27s Pace in Manga

Natsume Fusanosuke is Emeritus Professor of the Graduate Program of Cultural Studies in Corporeal and Visual Representation, Gakushūin University. Despite his recent retirement from Gakushūin in March, he is still very active in manga criticism and scholarship. Originally a manga artist himself in the 1980s, by the 1990s he began doing more writing about manga, although he often still employs his cartooning skills to assist in his analysis and explanation of his subjects, much like his American contemporary Scott McCloud. It is not a stretch to compare the latter’s Understanding Comics to Natsume\u27s work in the classic How to Read Manga (Manga no yomikata, 1995; co-authored with Takekuma Kentarō and others) and his subsequent Why Is Manga So Interesting? Its Expression and Grammar (Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono hyōgen to bunpō), which aired originally as a NHK [Japanese public broadcasting] ten-week lecture mini-series. Like McCloud, Natsume pioneered techniques to see and analyze comics that are still in use today by scholars. Although Natsume’s publications are too numerous to list here, he is author and co-author of approximately twenty books on manga and manga scholarship, including monographs like Where Is Tezuka Osamu? (Tezuka Osamu wa doko ni iru, 1992), the first full-length study on the manga giant. After the 1990s, Natsume went on to revise his early approaches to manga study, analysis, and scholarship, as seen in his New Challenges for the Field of Manga (Mangagaku e no chosen, 2004). He also co-edited with Takeuchi Osamu a new reader for Manga Studies, Mangagaku nyūmon (2009). In addition to these achievements, in his career he has been a television host for NHK’s public television show on comics (Broadcast Satellite Manga Night Talks [BS Manga yawa]), and author of other books on Japanese culture, including Grandson of Sōseki (Sōseki no mago, 2003), which tells the story of his family and his connection to Japan’s great modern novelist Natsume Sōseki. In 1999, he was the recipient of the prestigious Tezuka Osamu Culture Award. In the following essay on Taniguchi Jirō, whom Natsume considers one of Japan’s most important manga creators, Natsume re-envisions the artist in the context of recent manga history. Taniguchi passed away in 2017, but his work suggests a path towards a new kind of “adult reading” of manga, which is a theme of Natsume’s recent writing on how Japanese people read their comic books and how perhaps they should read them. As his essay title suggests, he feels the time is now to reconsider Taniguchi’s artistic achievement. In fact, a recent exhibition of Taniguchi’s art ran again in his home prefecture, Tottori, from last January through February. His work continues to be popular with Japanese, such as The Solitary Gourmet (Kodoku no gurume, 1994-96; 2008-2015), which was adapted into a popular television and web series. (English-speaking audiences need only to wait until next year for the translated edition from Fanfare/Ponent Mon.) - Jon Holt & Teppei Fukuda, translator

Charlie Brown and Me

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts turned 71 years old on October 2, and we celebrate the anniversary of this world-famous comic strip with a love letter from Japan. Natsume Fusanosuke originally wrote this essay[1] about his connection to Peanuts in 1999 for a supplement issue of Bungei Shunjū magazine: a special on one of the gods of comics, Tezuka Osamu, with whom Charles Schulz stands in great company. Natsume is a voracious reader and a global observer of both manga and world comics. Here, he describes the appeal of Peanuts for Japanese readers and how it compares to a similarly beloved Japanese comic and cartoon character, the blue robot cat Doraemon. Peanuts was imported to Japan in 1969 (translated by the poet Tanikawa Shuntarō), and still enjoys great popularity (Fantagraphics’ The Complete Peanuts was published in Japan in 2019 by Kawade Shobō). Natsume considers some of the cultural factors that explain why the strip, even though it is very American, still appeals to generations of Japanese after all these years. He also attempts to explain why the character Doraemon has a similar appeal to many Asian peoples, but had yet to (and has yet to) find an audience in America. We take this moment to wish Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang a happy birthday! - Jon Holt & Teppei Fukuda, translator