EAST ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE Rewriting History in Manga STORIES FOR THE NATION EDITED BY NISSIM OTMAZGIN & REBECCA SUTER East Asian Popular Culture Series Editors Yasue   Kuwahara Department of Communication Northern Kentucky University, U SA John A. L ent School of Communication and Theater Temple University, USA This series focuses on the study of popular culture in East Asia (referring to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) in order to meet a growing interest in the subject among students as well as scholars of various disciplines. The series examines cultural pro- duction in East Asian countries, both individually and collectively, as its popularity extends beyond the region. It continues the scholarly discourse on the recent prominence of East Asian popular culture as well as the give and take between Eastern and Western cultures. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14958 Nissim Otmazgin • R ebecca S uter Editors Rewriting History in Manga Stories for the Nation Editors Nissim Otmazgin Rebecca Suter Hebrew University of Jerusalem Dept of Japanese Studies Jerusalem, Israel University of Sydney Sydney , Australia East Asian Popular Culture ISBN 978-1-137-55478-9 ISBN 978-1-137-55143-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55143-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941890 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover Illustration: Matsuoka Waka (Sugino Yukiko) Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York P REFACE In recent years, Japan’s manga market has become an alternative stage for political and historical debate. While in the fi rst few decades after the Pacifi c War, manga had typically dealt with national and international his- tory, and with wartime trauma in an implicit and indirect manner, since the 1990s there have been increasingly numerous conscious attempts to use the manga industry as a means to convey political messages that are not represented in the mainstream media. Two highly publicized, and highly controversial, examples are the comics I ntro to China ( Chūgoku nyūmon ) and H ating the Korean Wave ( Kenkanryū ), which portray Chinese and Koreans as enemies of the state and urge their readers to refute the “mas- ochist” version of Japan’s modern history and the media’s exaltation of Korean popular culture and China’s cultural heritage and economic poten- tial. On the other hand, recent works like Yoshinaga Fumi’s series Ō oku: The Inner Chambers , which reimagines Tokugawa Japan as a matriarchal society and portrays the life of the female Shogun’s “male harem,” have used fantahistory as a means to refl ect on the gender and social norms of premodern and modern Japan from a feminist perspective. The publication of these manga has been invigorated by recent social and political transformations. Since the 1990s, Japan has faced, and still faces, deep challenges, including a shrinking population, economic slow- down, rising unemployment and growing economic inequality, chang- ing gender relations, the emergence of new social and gender formations such as “parasite single” and “herbivore men” and the surrounding media hype, and an increasing distrust of the institutions that was recently exacer- bated in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster. Furthermore, contested v vi PREFACE historical memories have often become an important currency in interna- tional relations, and a major source of tension between Japan and its Asian neighbors. Contentious issues include the question of Japan’s apologies for its wartime aggression, the depiction of the past in history textbooks, the debate surrounding the use of “comfort women” who were forced to provide sexual services to the imperial Japanese military, and Japanese politicians’ continuous visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Within such context, manga has played a distinctive role as an alternative venue to express and debate views of history and contemporary society across a broad spectrum of political positions and perspectives outside the more conventional channels of print and online news media. But what specifi cally is manga’s ability to refl ect and infl uence the for- mation of historical memory, and what are the concrete ways in which this medium relates to the Japanese nation at large, beyond appealing to par- ticular affectionate communities of readers? This volume seeks to answer such questions by exploring the mechanisms for propagating new percep- tions about Japan’s history through manga, the advantages and disadvan- tages of manga as a tool to discuss/contextualize history, and the ability of manga to transcend the limitations of conventional historiography. Rather than focusing on highly formulaic symbols of collective memory on the national level such as museums, monuments, state rituals and cer- emonies, or history textbooks, as the majority of historical literature has done, our book looks at the way in which the past is being integrated and insinuated into the surrounding through the everyday production and consumption of manga. The individual chapters showcase specifi c instances of reimagining, rewriting, and consuming history in manga for- mat, from the late nineteenth century to the present, to address wider questions related to nationalism, modernity, politics, gender equality, and economic and social transformations. This book seeks to do so through a variety of disciplinary approaches derived from the fi elds of history, anthropology, political science, cultural studies, visual cultures studies, and of course manga studies; to explore and conceptualize the variegated relations between manga and political and social history. Focusing on the manga’s distinctive stylistic features, the book argues that manga possesses a peculiar appeal that transcends the limitations of conventional historiography. As a highly popular medium with a distinct grammar and inner logic made of pictograms, written text, and visual frames, the chapters in the book suggest that manga has a strong potential to infl uence mass opinion. While conceived as a popular medium primarily made to entertain, manga involves the selective construction of narratives PREFACE vii based on the opinion of its author, the details she/he chooses to include and those she/he chooses to leave out, the historical and political context at the time of writing, and the historical and intellectual “fashions” of the time, which makes it not only a valuable historical source but also a form of historiographic writing. By depicting historical events and reshaping historical narratives, manga combines information and imagination, fact and fi ction, representation and political statement. Looking at manga as a means to reproduce and creatively appropriate history raises a series of interesting questions: in the face of a growing depiction of history in manga and other forms of popular culture, has pro- fessional historiography lost its authority and allure to interpret the past and set the agenda for remembering it? Can the emergence of manga as a politico-historical medium create a gap between academic and historical understandings of history or are these simply complementary processes? Looking at governmental policy, national symbols, the education system, and intellectual discourse only partly explains the way historical memories and political views are being constructed and reproduced. The chapters in this book thus explore the role of manga as a way to write and rewrite history, and suggest that manga provides an alternative venue for people to acquire information and shape their opinions about history and politics. * * * The introductory chapter, by Nissim Otmazgin, outlines the phenom- enon that this research is concerned with, namely the increasing presence of manga in Japan’s political life and its political and social trajectories. It explores the way historical memory is created, disseminated, and repro- duced through manga, and demonstrates how manga’s special grammar, aesthetics, text, and inner logic build new historical narratives. As a road map to the book, the chapter introduces the concept of “banal memory” to analyze the way in which everyday popular culture—such as reading manga—becomes part of the construction of national memory. It is sug- gested that looking at manga as a historical and political medium should matter to scholars of historical memory not only because of manga’s wide accessibility and emotional appeal in Japan and other Asian countries but also because manga serves as a political fi eld of contested memory. Michael Lewis’ chapter investigates the role of Tokyo Puck editor Kitazawa Rakuten (1876–1955), considered to be Japan’s fi rst modern cartoonist, in creating a stream of widely circulated pictorial satires and caricatures that indicted offi cial indifference to the mass impoverishment viii PREFACE that accompanied industrialization. Through a close reading of Kitazawa’s cartoons, Lewis demonstrates that Meiji period cartoon’s critiques, made more powerful by the use of humor and parody, presented a readily under- standable explanation of the public’s economic desperation and political frustrations but also suggested means of redress. Looking at Rakuten as an “organic intellectual,” to borrow Gramsci’s defi nition, Lewis argues that his cartoons helped shape the public’s response to social inequality seen in the 1918 “rice riots,” a convulsive series of variegated protests, at times violently destructive, that seemed to bring Japan to the brink of revolution. Orna Shaughnessy’s chapter explores the political Manga of Kanagaki Robun and Kawanabe Kyōsai from the 1870s through the early twentieth century as a means to comment in dissenting and irreverent ways on the current events of the day. It further compares Kanagaki and Kawanabe’s publication E shinbun Nipponchi with the roughly contemporary publi- cations of Japan’s M arumaru chinbun , J apan Punch , and the Northern Indian publication A vadh Punch to emphasize how the medium both embraced and scorned all things “Western,” shedding light on the trans- national and multicultural origins of the medium. With Michele Mason’s chapter we move on to postwar manga and particularly the works of Nakazawa Keiji (1939–), most renowned for his ten-volume collection B arefoot Gen (H adashi no gen , 1976–1980), which centers on the eponymous, six-year-old Gen and his family in the aftermath of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima. While in that work Nakazawa deftly tempers the horror with tender moments and humor appropriate for a youthful audience to create a heartwarming, humanistic portrayal of the victims’ struggles, in his less-known H it by Black Rain series (1968–1973), the author illuminates in a much grittier fashion the postwar hardships of atomic survivors (h ibakusha ). By examining the col- lection’s storylines, suffused with bitter anger, hard-hitting violence, and cutting cynicism as they depict wretched poverty, sickness, discrimination, disfi gurement, depression, and alcoholism, Mason shows how Nakazawa explicitly decries the hypocrisy of both the US and the Japanese gov- ernments, and situates these compelling narratives within their complex global, political, and social intersections. Roman Rosenbaum’s chapter tackles the works of one of the great classics of historical manga, Ishinomori Shōtarō’s magnum opus Manga Nihon no rekishi (A Manga History of Japan). This voluminous compen- dium marks an attempt at historiographical analysis of Japanese society PREFACE ix and culture from its ancient ancestral roots right up to the contemporary world. Against the background of the transcultural renaissance of manga on a global scale, the chapter examines the neglected graphic discourse of Ishinomori’s work within the discourse of Japanese cultural representation. Barbara Hartley’s chapter takes a different approach to the idea of rewriting history in manga, focusing on intertextuality in the manga series Shanaō Yoshitsune , comparing it with depictions of Yoshitsune in histori- cal sources and in the eighteenth-century drama Yoshitsune Senbonzakura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees), one of the “big three” kabuki/bunraku texts and perhaps Japan’s best-known Yoshitsune narra- tive. This enables Hartley to consider the fraught relationship between the “facts” of history and information circulated in fi ctional representations, and refl ect on why it is that when trying to understand the past we must be as alert to the importance of cultural production such as manga as to the historical record. In other words, she argues that both fi elds, history and cultural production, are, in fact, essential for the reconstruction of narratives of the past and the inclusion in history method of some of the strategies generally associated with cultural production and will add value to our attempts to understand and learn from the past. The next two chapters focus on reception of manga, in different yet related ways. Alexander Bukh’s chapter focuses on the reception of revi- sionist historical manga in Japan. While the majority of current scholarship on revisionist manga focuses on the structure of the texts and the inten- tions of the authors, this chapter explores through of a survey conducted among students of two Japanese universities the way in which young read- ers in Japan actually receive the texts. On the other hand, Toshio Miyake’s chapter is based on fi eldwork con- ducted on the multiple media platform originated by the historical web- manga A xis Powers Hetalia (2006–present) and on its globalized success among female fandom in order to refl ect on the biopolitical mobiliza- tion of m oe (“burning passion”), as a combination of polymorphous plea- sure and sexualized parody, shaping emergent representations of nation, history, and identity. The chapter thus shifts the focus on the increasing intermingling in contemporary Japan between nation branding of Cool Japan, historical revisionism, and youth subcultures and the way this has contributed to raising popular culture as a strategic site in the hegemonic redefi nition of the past, present, and future of the nation. Finally, Rebecca Suter’s chapter closes the book by positioning its investigation within the broader context of past and present trends in the