Sake for Children

So, it turns out that the previous post (Manga, Sake for the Eyes, Art Press, 1986) was merely a shorter rewrite of a longer piece published in Libération in December 1982, the year Daney visited Japan. 

Sake for Children 

December 1982, Tokyo. Manga is ancient, Manga is erotic. It might even outlive Japanese cinema. 

Take a vending machine–any one, at random. Insert 200 yen. Wait for the dull thud of a falling object. Listen to the machine being a good sort and thank you: Domo arigato gozaimasu! (thank you very much). Bend down toward the fallen object: it could be a pack of cigarettes, a can of beer or a magazine. Open it: it’s a manga? You’re at the heart of the matter–your investigation into the “Japanese look” can begin. 

What is manga? Stories in drawing, graphic novels poorly printed on low quality coloured paper. Manga is everywhere: sold in kiosks and bookshops, discounted in the second-hand booksellers of Kanda, left behind in café tables or in public baths. Little known abroad, studied unofficially by a few French japanophiles more or less “tatamised” (Thierry Lagarde in Tokyo and Jacques Lalloz in Kyoto), manga is a considerable phenomenon. 

One in four Japanese people reads manga regularly. Thirty millions copies are published every week, month and bi-weekly. As always with Japanese media, the centre is very strong and the periphery is absolutely uninteresting. Five large publishers in Tokyo own most of the market and a single title (Big Comic, created in 1969) sells one million copies. Each publisher diversifies its target audiences according to age and sex. The kiddies, teenage boys, young girls, adult males and married women are reached at variable speeds. 

Each week, 6.6 million manga are published for teenage boys and 1.5 million for young girls. Baseball or Samurai vs sentimental romance. Girls read more slowly than boys so each month, the proportion is reversed: 6.4 million for the girls and 1.5 million for the boys. Every fifteen days, 2.5 million manga are bought, read and thrown away by “slightly older” adults. Of the total, ero-manga are estimated to account for an admissible ten per cent–3 million copies sold and immediately transformed into sexual fantasies. Beside Garo, a magazine for enlightened manga-philes, we count at least 300 small magazines, almost fanzine-like, printing between 5,000 and 30,000 copies. Manga artists (called mangaka) are almost always independent workers. Every man for himself and the jungle for all. Manga is much more than a craze or a wave, it’s a tidal wave. 

The readers of Manga are among the most curious sights on Tokyo streets. No laws prevent them from hiding in the back of a bookstore to check out the “this week’s issues. This practice is called tachiyomi (reading at the storefront). Buyers or not, they gather in silent groups to lose themselves (or find themselves) in these soft and cheap images where Japan deliriously dreams of itself. Unlike pachinko, this other solitary game, it’s not the frustrating steel ball that the tachiyomi enthusiast follows, but his own gaze going from image to image, right to left, top to bottom and page to page, at astonishing speed. He is a “reader” but in the technological sense: he doesn’t really read, he performs a sort of electronic sweep of the page–he scans it. Later, in the subway, the reader will amuse himself between two snoozes, or get aroused between two stops, depending on whether the manga is funny or erotic. En masse and in secret, the Japanese person is at home in these images. And to take a closer look at these images (forgetting all caution) is a way of meeting him a little. 

For this is a popular production. Gripping and lazy, repetitive and full of surprises, wildly uneven. To read through a manga is to encounter without warning a pearl-strip among many dirty-strips, it is to lose one’s way between lousy nude photos, unreadable ads and silly games. Genius mangaka rubs shoulders with botching amateurs and cheaters who draw from photos. But the pleasure is intense. One can discover one’s favourite authors, follow them incognito from week to week, and enjoy a production that hasn’t reached “cultural dignity”. In Japan, what is popular tends to last. Whether deviant fans of subculture, nostalgics of the “B-movie spirit”, shrewd sociologists or Japan-loving gaijins: manga is made for them. 

Unlike an inept and mawkish television with its six national channels (but no cable) and a cinema losing momentum, manga is the direct line connecting Japanese people to their fantasies–a never-ending self-analysis. No heavy unconscious here, nothing happens metaphorically or “in a certain way”, and symptoms are strong. Everything is here, exposed in drawings, told without precautions. Here’s where one must seize in vitro the making of the “Japanese look”, between these thousands of bodies of ink and paper and the mutant faces that sometimes make one question whether Japan belongs to the Asian continent. 

Sexual plots deliberately sadomasochistic, backstage stories of baseball or sumo, shameless “pee-pee”, rebellious samurai, voyeurist chronicles of the big city, small scatological cartoons, longings for the prince charming, sci-fi and eternal myths: everything can be recycled into manga. Its link to historical truths is more than tenuous, its educative value low, its morality insignificant. Manga are almost always frenzied: delirious and diluted. 

Where else (beside fashion?) could one find such stylistic freedom, such joyful invention, such plastic vitality and comparable audacity? Nowhere else, it seems. The art and the manner to design pages, to decompose the action and carve bodies are just as obviously japanese as the “pages à manger”—the fake prepared dishes displayed in restaurant windows. And that excessive taste for the impossible angle, the obscene detail or the emptied-out space is recognisable to us. It once made the grandeur of the late “Japanese cinema”. Has it taken refuge in manga? 

One evening, unable to resist, I went to visit Professor Yoshiya Soeda, the author of three books on manga and an authority. In his small studio in Shin-Koenji, covered with scholarly books, he graciously answered my questions. Yes, manga continues the cinematographic style today, in its own way. There are excellent reasons for this: during the 20th century, old manga (didn’t we recently see Hokusai’s in Paris?) and young cinema travelled together for a while. These travelling companions have a beautiful shared history. Flashback to the thirties. 

Now imagine the Japanese street. Silent cinema screenings are animated by a benshi (1). The benshi is the man (in flesh and bone) who lends his voice, his sounds and his commentary to the film’s actions. Facing this animated manga that is a film, the benshi learned to place his text and his onomatopoeia like a talking fumetti on an image that can’t help itself. The Saturday night audience, Durassian before its time, goes to see images in order to listen to their favourite benshi. In his autobiography (2), Kurosawa evokes the romantic figure of his eldest brother, Heigo, leader of the Tokyo benshi union at the time of the arrival of the talkies (1931) — who committed suicide. The benshi was the great victim of talkies. 

Imagine the Japanese street again. There, for a gathered audience of children, unfolds the kamishibai or “paper theatre”. Showmen of graphic novels edify the masses. Now, kamishibai artists saw films and were influenced by the “cinematographic language” then in full upheaval. And largely because they were left-wing, they adapted the tricks of Soviet montage to make agit-prop in the streets. Despite the success of talking cinema and the requisition of artists for the needs of imperial propaganda, the kamishibai didn’t die immediately. Professor Soeda even proposes the date of 1957 and names the party responsible for the coup de grâce: television. 

Modern manga (although it had existed since the twenties) is the direct heir of the cinephile “paper theatre” before the war. Its first golden age coincides with the fifties. Then, a new generation of mangakas was adapting to (smaller) formats and different (faster) speeds. An audience of ageing children was continuing to read manga. Infantilisation began. Osamu Tezuka, Shirato Sampei, Ishimori [sic] Shotaro, Tsuge Yoshiharu, Takita Yu and many others transformed fairground and marginal manga into a prosperous medium. 

Content-wise, their manga were willingly epic and moral, well-intentioned and with a sort of humanist boy-scoutism that was the dominant trait of the era. This candor of postware “good resolutions” was gradually lost making space for more cynicism and indifference, but today’s manga fans regret it: it reminds them of their childhood (like Hergé or Jacques Martin for us). 

On the other hand, plastic invention was continuous and plots were “to be continued” endlessly. For years, Sampei compiled his admirable Ninja Bugeishō (“Ninja Martial Arts Notebooks”). A fitting return, Oshima brought them to the screen in 1967, simply filming the drawn pages as they were. Tezuka, the most famous of all, with his French beret and Osakian joviality, never stopped inventing little message-carrying characters, some of which (like Tetsuwan-Atom, which became “Atom-boy” in the USA) became known worldwide. In 1951, after the death of his son, he created Robot-boy whose adventures continued for seventeen years! Tezuka’s sensibility is humanist and even ecological: Robot-boy fights against the military use of the atom and pre-emptively against anti-robot racism. Today, in another serial-saga, Tezuk has launched his characters in quest of a mythical bird, none other than the Phoenix (Hinotori). 

Despite benefitting from an affectionate respect (the complete works of Tezuka are being published again), this generation of mangakas has been surpassed. From the seventies, manga experienced a second boom. It learned to manage its audience, following them in their growth, in their relative enrichment, their nouveau rich culture, their depoliticisation. The sixties had seen the triumph of weekly manga and the return of adult ero-manga. During the seventies, a young female audience was won over, and today it’s women who are about to be seduced. 

By diversifying its targets and feminising its audience, manga lost its heroic character. Some, including Tezuka himself, complain: these kawai manga sadden them. We're moving toward stories drawn from everyday life, down-to-earth, even regionalist. We no longer ask big questions but vulgarly tell small stories. Or we fall back on a stock of universal stories, like "The Three Musketeers" or this series by Ryoko Ikeda, Rose of Versailles, which was such a success that adventurer producer Mataichiro Yamamoto and Shiseido beauty products commissioned a film version from Jacques Demy (it became Lady Oscar, 1978). 

So what does a successful mangaka look like today? Like Mizushima Shinji. One day, we learn he's exhibiting at Ueno, on the top floor of the Matsuzakaya department store. We go. It's good publicity for him ("a handshake equals ten copies sold," he tells me) and a good image for the store since Shinji is one of the richest and most famous mangakas in Japan. The exhibition looks good too, with original pages under glass, ready-to-be-signed boards, ink stamps with the effigy of characters invented by Shinji. In red, green, blue, a whole little world of baseball players in tracksuits, from the round-eyed brute to the shaggy, loud kid. A world dedicated to an eternal "we won!" that delights schoolchildren. 

Frail and excluded from stadiums despite his passion for baseball, Shinji took his revenge by drawing and reports an annual turnover of 240 million yen. Enough to employ several assistants (150,000 yen per month for seven years: after that, they fly on their own) and to pose sportingly with them. Behind a glass window, before the amazed eyes of an audience of all ages, the assistants demonstrate their craft. A true Japanese tradition in this case: one works on details, another handles shadows, a third the outline. 

When interviewed, Mizushima Shinji doesn't shine with modesty. He's not interested (he says) in Western modern art, traditional Japanese art, or even other people's mangas. He only likes what he does (what he's been doing for ten years without renewal). "My manga is very amusing," and he speaks of it like a soft drug. His manga is "sake for children." 

Obviously, he's exaggerating, success has gone to his head. But if it's true that manga is the sweet daily delirium "made in Japan," its use seems irremediably in-country (3). Universally known in Japan, Tezuka, Sampei and the others are almost ignored elsewhere. They don't complain about it (except Tezuka who's preparing a breakthrough in France). As much as fashion opens Japan to the outside world (that is, the West), manga is the expression of a closed microcosm. 

Strange archipelago, this Japan? Free from any concern about speaking to the rest of the world, having everything to sell to it, and stories to tell to it. Active and empty. Anti-America, in other words. A strange premonition seizes the traveler. That of a culture both very ancient and very provincial, which enters the 21st century in the leading pack but without an image of itself, sleepwalking in its pragmatism, exposed to blunders (see the episode of rewriting school textbooks) or to a disarming chauvinistic candor ("we are Japanese — therefore incomprehensible") (4). 

Will the electronic peasant of the 21st century be Japanese? Is he already in a world that confuses information (fast, very fast) and communication (slow, very slow)? Does he no longer need images to communicate with what is not him? No, that's not possible. 

(1) On benshi, see the recent book by Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Towards a Theory of Japanese Film, (page 79 of the French version published by Gallimard/Cahiers du cinéma).

(2) Something Like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa (published in French by Cahiers du cinéma / Seuil). 

(3) The only Japanese stories sold abroad are animated movies. Their only strategy is aimed at tiny children. Many mangakas are repressed filmmakers. Tezuka, from the sixties, made several feature-length animated movies (animecheun, as they are called in Japanese), sometimes released in the USA (Cleopatra, A Thousand and One Night, Phoenix 2272). Beside the fact that this is another aspect of the "Japanese look", it is clear that for any manga lover, the move to animation equates the death of everything he liked in the discontinuous art of graphic novels. 

(4) There is an anecdote. Philippe Pons, like others, relates it in his small book (Japon, Seuil): "When the foreigner speaks in Japanese, he is looked at with surprise, and, to begin with, he will be answered in broken English or with gestures signifying that he is incomprehensible." QED.

  

 First published in Libération on 15 December 1982. Reproduced in Ciné journal, Cahiers du cinéma, 1982.