Comics are flourishing today in America and Western Europe and in all the socialist nations of the world, where they paly an important role in information transmission and help shape the feelings and attitudes of children and young adults. The situation in Japan is no different. Each year, printing presses on this little island nation in the Far East churn out hundreds of millions of comic books and magazines for tens of millions of readers. There are over 3,000 active artists. Comics in Japan have not prospered so much as exploded into a phenomenon of extraordinary proportions. However, the information about Japan's vast comics culture is hardly available at all in the West, and individual comic stories are rarely introduced to Western readers.
The isolation of the Japanese comic clearly have to do with the way it is published. Captions and word balloons of Japanese comics must of course be printed in Japanese, which is totally indecipherable to foreign readers; translations are rarely provided. Also, Japanese comics, like other Japanese publications, open and are read from right to left, making them hard to follow visually for people used to reading in the opposite direction.
There is also the matter of cultural distance. The Japanese comic is designed for Japanese readers who share particular attitudes and customs, many of which are unknown outside of Japan. There are, therefore, going to be lots of Japanese comics that simply cannot be understood unless the reader is Japanese. But this is not really the obstacle it might first appear to be, for there are also numerous Japanese comics that can be fully understood - and enjoyed - on an international level, as many foreign fans who can read Japanese comics in their original form will attest to.
This is why Japanese animation - which is dubbed and doesn't confuse the viewer by "reading" in one direction or another - has been able to open the door for Japanese comics overseas where printed materials have failed. Having solved the problem of language, animation, with its broad appeal, has in fact become Japan's supreme goodwill ambassador, not just in the West but in the Middle East and Africa, in South America, in Southeast Asia, and even in China.
Thanks to animation, people in other countries have begun to learn what Japanese comics are like. Fans go off in search of comics based on their favourite feature-length animation films and in doing so come across other kinds of Japanese comics. Contacts between Japanese comic artists and animators and their counterparts in other nations have grown more and more productive, and here and there one now begins to spot items about the world of Japanese comics in foreign papers and magazines.
Still, foreigners living in Japan are duly amazed when they first discover just how big boom in Japanese comic has become. Daily they are surrounded by examples of the vitality of comics culture that would be unthinkable in their own countries. A Japanese businessman on his way to work sits on the train with his nose buried in a children's comic book. That same comic, in a single week, might sell 2,5 million copies. And in that same week on TV there will be more than 30 brand-new episodes in Japanese-made comic-animation series.
HISTORY OF COMIC
Manga means "comics" in Japanese. In Japan, manga are read by young and old and are a monster publishing phenomenon with annual sales in the billions of dollars. In the rest of the world, thanks to Japan's economics might, manga concepts are revolutionizing the toy, cartoon, and graphic design industries. Manga can be fantastical and funny, or gritty and violent, with heroes as diverse as samurai, sushi chefs, mah jong masters, teenagers in love, and bored office workers, to say nothing of anthropomorphic cats, and warrior robots. As such, manga offer an entertainting and sometimes disturbing ~ window on Japan society.
What do you call a comic?
The word manga (pronounced "mahngah") can mean carricature, cartoon, comic strip, comic book and animation. Coined by the Japanese woodblock - print artist Hokusai in 1814, it uses the Chinese ideograms, man ("involuntary" or "in spite of oneself") and ga ("picture"). Hokusai was evidently trying to describe something like "whimsical sketches". However, it is interesting to note that the first ideogram has a secondary meaning of "morally corrupt". The term manga did not come into popular usage until the beginning of this century. Before that cartoons were called Toba-e, or "Toba pictures". After 11th century artist, giga or "playful pictures", ponchi-e, or "punch pictures", after the British magazine. In addition to manga, one also hears today the word gekiga, or "drama pictures", to describe the more serious, realistic story - comics. Some Japanese however, simply adopt an English word to describe their favourite reading matter: komikkusu.
© Shirley Sutantio and Joyce Yu, 29 September 1999
