Tuesday, 25 March 2014
Manga market price
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/10/japan-manga-anime-recession
"Unfortunately, this soft power is not being linked to business overseas. By linking the popularity of Japan's soft power to business, I want to create a 20-30 trillion-yen market by 2020 and create 500,000 new jobs."
"Unfortunately, this soft power is not being linked to business overseas. By linking the popularity of Japan's soft power to business, I want to create a 20-30 trillion-yen market by 2020 and create 500,000 new jobs."
Sunday, 23 March 2014
Saturday, 22 March 2014
Matt Thorn's article
The following history of manga is a revision of one was first published in three installments in Animerica: Anime & Manga Monthly, Volume 4, Numbers 2, 4 & 6 (February, April & June, 1996). Both the original Animerica articles and this revision were written by me, Matt Thorn, but I have decided to make it available for anyone who wants to use it. See the rules at the bottom of this page.
Please note that my current (2012) view of the history of manga is far more complex and nuanced than the following might suggest. In particular, I regret the degree to which I attributed the development of manga to Osamu Tezuka. If you have any questions about anything in this history of manga, please feel free to ask me at matt@matt-thorn.com. Naturally, corrections of any kind are also very much welcome.
A History of Manga
by Matt Thorn
Origins
What is the origin of manga? The answer depends on how you define "manga." The word itself was popularized by the famous woodblock print artist Hokusai, but, contrary to a popular myth, it was not invented by him. The word is composed of two Chinese characters—the first meaning "in spite of oneself" or "lax" and the second meaning "picture"—and has been used to describe various comical images for at least two centuries. [1]A millennium before Hokusai applied the term to a collection of his less serious works, there were "cartoonish" drawings to be found in Japan, but whether or not pictures drawn in such a style constitute manga is a tricky question. The picture becomes clearer when we limit our discussion to works that fit American cartoonist Will Eisner's definition of comics as "sequential art." The first clear examples of such sequential art are the picture scrolls of medieval Japan, which combine pictures and text to tell stories or describe events. These scrolls look and work like modern manga or comics in many ways, but there is a crucial difference: whereas modern-day manga are produced for mass consumption, picture scrolls were singular works of art produced for an elite audience.
It was in late eighteenth-century Japan, when a growing middle class of urban merchants had developed a vibrant consumer culture, that a manga-like medium produced for popular consumption first appeared. Printed in book form using woodblock technology, kibyôshi ("yellow covers") were storybooks for adults in which narration and dialogue were placed in and around ink-brush illustrations, often in creative ways that consciously blurred the distinction between text and picture. (Multi-volume kibyôshi were known as gôkan.) Like modern-day manga, they dealt with a variety of subjects, including humor, drama, fantasy, and even pornography. By the mid nineteenth century, both kibyôshi and gôkan had disappeared, victims of both government censorship and the convenience and speed of moveable-type technology. Although there are certain startling resemblances , kibyôshi are not the direct ancestors of modern manga. [2] The ancestor of the modern manga, believe it or not, is the European/American-style political cartoon of the latter 19th Century, and the multi-panel comic strips that flowered in American newspapers in the last years of the 19th Century and the first years of the 20th Century.
Some suggest that the Japanese have a historically-rooted affinity for such visual media as manga, but for the first half of the twentieth century, American comics were more popular and diverse than were Japanese manga. So why have manga flourished while American comics have floundered?
Perhaps the single most important factor in the creation of the modern manga industry was the work of one artist, the late Osamu Tezuka, known in Japan as the "god of manga." Tezuka's most popular creation, Mighty Atom, is known throughout the world; an animated version was broadcast in the U.S. in the 1960's under the name "Astro Boy." In his autobiography, Tezuka described what made his manga different from those that came before him:
Until that time, most manga [...] were drawn from a two-dimensional perspective, and in the style of a stage play. The interactions of actors appearing from stage left and stage right were composed as if from the viewpoint of someone seated in the audience. I came to the realization that there was no way to produce power or psychological description using this approach, so I began to introduce cinematic techniques into my composition. The models for this were the German and French movies I saw in my days as a student. I manipulated close-ups and angles, of course, and tried using many panel or even many pages in order to capture faithfully movements and facial expressions that previously would have been taken care of with a single panel. So I would end up with long works five- or six-hundred to more than a thousand pages in length in no time at all [....] Also, I thought the potential of manga was more than getting a laugh; using themes of tears and sorrow, anger and hatred, I made stories that didn't always have happy endings.After drawing several four-panel comic strips for newspapers immediately following the war, Tezuka made his comic book debut in 1947 with a story entitled New Treasure Island, which was published as an akahon, or "red book," a cheap form of comic book named for the gaudy red ink used on the covers. At the time, akahon were a small niche industry providing children with one of the few entertainment media they could afford in the crushing poverty of early postwar Japan. New Treasure Island changed the scene overnight, selling an unprecedented 400,000 copies.
Publishers responded immediately and enthusiastically, and had no trouble finding young artists eager to emulate Tezuka's revolutionary style. Tezuka moved to a rundown apartment building in Tokyo to be closer to the publishing industry, and quickly developed a following of budding manga artists, some of whom actually moved into the same apartment building. Most of these artists--Shohtaroh Ishimori (later Ishinomori), Fujiko Fujio, Fujio Akatsuka, Hideko Mizuno--went on to become giants of the postwar manga industry.
Tezuka's innovations led to a broadening of the manga market and had a consequence that would inevitably force a radical restructuring of the market: the children who were raised on the manga of Tezuka and his followers, unlike their predecessors, didn't stop reading manga when they got to middle school. Or high school. Or college.
It is important to note, though, that Tezuka was able to exert so much influence because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. Some prewar cartoonists, such as Noboru Oh-shiro, were using many of the "cinematic techniques" said to be invented by Tezuka when Tezuka was a still a child, and were also more technically skilled than Tezuka. But they were confined by the standards of Tokyo publishers (who felt that manga for children should be entertaining and educational, but not too "stimulating") and also by government censors, who allowed only pro-war propaganda to see the light of day for the decade preceding the end of the World War II. "Red Books" were the ideal forum for Tezuka's lengthy, "theme driven" manga, because there was minimal editorial oversight (they were not so much "publishers" as producers of nick-knacks for children made from recycled paper), they contained plenty of pages, and they were popular because the strict rationing of higher quality paper kept the price of "respectable" Tokyo children's publications prohibitively high. Thus, a complex array of factors--cultural, political, economical, and historical--fell neatly into place, allowing Tezuka to catapult to unprecedented prominence.
The Manga Boom
After seven or eight years of talking with what must amount to hundreds of Japanese readers of manga ("comic books"), I finally came to a certain realization: there is a surprisingly clear line that separates the "pre-manga generation" from the "manga generation," and that line can drawn somewhere around 1950. I've met a handful of Japanese born prior to 1950 who love manga, and I've met many born after 1950 who have no interest in manga, but for the most part, the former generation considers manga to be "kids' stuff," and stopped reading manga by the time they entered middle school, while the latter generation has always taken manga for granted as just another medium that can be enjoyed by adults as well as children.Why 1950? Although Tezuka helped transform manga from a simple form of children's entertainment into a sophisticated medium that children were reluctant to abandon as they grew older, the stylistic innovations of one artist didn't make manga into the wildly lucrative industry it is today. To understand that, we have to look at manga in the context of postwar Japanese history and the other mass media with which it was competing. In 1954, when television broadcasting first began in Japan, there were only 866 television sets in the entire country. By 1959—the year Japan's media went wild over the wedding of the crown prince—the number was two million. Television, with its weekly programming format, set the pace for the flow of information and entertainment in a postwar Japan that was undergoing rapid economic development, and the other media followed suit. In 1956, Japan's first weekly magazine appeared, setting off a boom in weeklies that would encompass even the children's market before the decade was out. In 1959, Weekly Shônen Magazine and Weekly Shônen Sunday became the first children's weeklies, and others soon followed. Initially, these magazines were conceived of as general education and entertainment magazines, with manga usually occupying no more than forty percent of each issue. But circulations (hovering around 200,000) were low, as were those of the traditional monthly children's magazines. It didn't take long, however, for publishers to figure out that they could raise sales by increasing the the space dedicated to manga. Within a few years, manga came to occupy more than half of the total space, and at the same time, the magazines gradually phased out "educational" items, much to the horror and disgust of the educators and parents groups that had supported them early on. In Japan, however, there were to be no government hearings of the kind that intimidated and crippled the American comic book industry in the mid-1950s, and despite some blustering, sales continued to rise.
In terms of content, adventure and sci-fi stories of the kind pioneered by Tezuka (labeled"story manga" to distinguish them from the simpler, pre-Tezuka manga) continued to dominate the shônen ("boys') magazines, yet the readership for manga was growing older. Teenagers, young laborers and college students began to turn to the then-popular "rental book shops," where a new genre of sophisticated and serious manga (known as gekiga, meaning "theatrical pictures") had been developing since the late 1950s. These rental manga emphasized realism, in both drawing style and content, and were often grim, pensive, or violent. What humor there was tended to be black, and there was little of the slapstick and comic relief that characterized "story manga," which always took primary school boys as their lowest common denominator. Among the more popular artists working in the rental manga market were Sanpei Shirato and Takao Saitoh, known to English readers for translations of The Legend of Kamui and Golgo 13, respectively. But by this time, the rental book industry was already in decline, for reasons I won't go into here, and in the latter 1960s, a new category of manga magazine, known as seinen ("youth") manga began to appear, such as Weekly Manga Action (1967, Futabasha Publishing) and Monthly Big Comic (1968, Shogakukan Publishing). While some rental manga artists moved to shônen ("boys") manga magazines, many more began working for the new seinen magazines, which quickly began to eat into shônen manga magazine circulations.
Shônen magazines responded to the seinen manga threat by incorporating a toned-down gekiga style, with the intention of bringing back older readers who found the straight gekiga-style too oppressive. The seinen magazines responded in kind, reverting to certain "story manga" techniques in order to increase their popular appeal. But in their battle for the older reader, the two leading shônen manga magazines, Shogakukan Publishing's Sunday and Kodansha Publishing's Magazine, began to lose the primary-school boys who had always been their core readership, and circulations plummeted. But Shueisha Publishing's Weekly Shônen Jump, a latecomer and underdog founded in 1968, remained faithful to it's pre-teen readers and quickly moved up from behind to take the lead in the early 1970's. Jump's greatest handicap in its first few years—its inability to pull the best-known artists from the established magazines—proved to be its greatest advantage. While Magazine and Sunday had no choice but to give their star artists free rein, Jump could direct its team of rookie artists to produce works that met readers' demands, which were ascertained through exhaustive reader surveys. Magazine and Sunday were left to struggle to catch up for years to come, but Jump widened the gap every year, and produced blockbuster hits one after the other, such as the long-running Dragonball, by Akira Toriyama, and Slam Dunk, by Takehiko Inoue. In 1980, Jump's claimed circulation was three million; in 1985, four million; in 1988, five million. In 1994, the figure was a mind-boggling 6,200,000. It was far and away the best-selling magazine of any kind in Japan. Weekly Shônen Magazine's claimed circulation in '94 was 3,750,000, while Weekly Shônen Sunday's was 1,270,000—figures most magazine editors can only dream of, true, but modest (to say the least) in comparison to the mighty Jump. [3]
But success in a medium such as manga is not measured by sales alone (though publishers may feel otherwise). Magazine and Sunday's struggle to "grow up" in the late sixties produced some of the all-time classics of manga, such as the boxing epic Tomorrow's Joh, by Asao Takamori (also known as Ikki Kajiwara) and Tetsuya Chiba, and both magazines—as well as the other magazines in the shônen genre—have continued to produce quality manga and more than their share of bestsellers, and they have commanded the loyalty of their readers well into adulthood.
Thus the answer to the question, "Why 1950?" A boy born in 1950 would have been about nine years old when the medium of manga was revolutionized by the weekly format. He would have been in high school when the exciting developments of the mid- to late sixties took place. He would have been a college student (or worker) when the seinen genre had been firmly established. Another Japanese man born a year or two earlier would have already set manga aside by the time the weekly format was beginning to realize its potential, but the younger reader, never allowed a dull moment, would be hooked for life, as would every subsequent generation of Japanese.
And that goes for Japanese women and girls, too.
"Girls' Stuff"
Considering that in most of the English-speaking world comic books are generally seen as "boys' stuff," it is only natural that the genre of shôjo manga, or "girls' comics," should be met by that world with surprise and puzzlement. While there is a lively community of women artists and fans in the English-language underground comics world, there is not even a rough equivalent of the shôjo manga genre, which is created primarily by women artists explicitly for audiences of girls and young women. Whereas female readers of comics in the English-speaking world are a minority within a minority, in Japan it is girls who don't read manga who comprise the minority. And just as foreigners are surprised to hear that Japanese girls and women are such avid consumers of comics, so Japanese girls and women express surprise—and sympathy- when I tell them that women in the English-speaking world have no corresponding genre. [4]Like their boys' counterpart (shônen manga), shôjo manga first took root in the decade following the end of the Pacific War, and, as with shônen manga, it was seminal artist Osamu Tezuka who can be credited with planting the seed. Magazines geared at Japanese primary-school girls had long carried simple, humor-oriented comic strips of the kind common in American newspapers, but it was Tezuka, with a work titled Ribon no kishi ("Knight of the Ribbon," 1954), who pioneered longer, more technically and narratively sophisticated stories combining drama, adventure, fantasy, tragedy, humor, and romance.
In the 1950's and early 1960's, the majority of shôjo manga were created by male artists, most of whom also worked in the shônen genre. The number of professional women artists working in shôjo manga prior to 1960 (most notably, Toshiko Ueda, Masako Watanabe, Hideko Mizuno, and Miyako Maki) could almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. The stories featured primary school girls, and generally fell into one of three categories: humor, horror, or tear-jerker. Mother-daughter relationships featured prominently, and boy-meets-girl stories were still relatively rare, which is not surprising considering the tender age of the heroines (and readers).
Then, in 1963, the revolutionary shift from a monthly to a weekly format that had begun in the shônen manga genre five years earlier began to sweep through the shôjo manga genre as well. There was a need for more artists, and by then it had become clear that women artists were more likely than men to be able to meet the demands of readers and help the publishers realize their goal of selling more magazines. Women artists, such as Yasuko Aoike, Minori Kimura and Waki Yamato, debuted one after the other. But the debut that attracted the most attention was that of Machiko Satonaka, whose first professional story appeared in Weekly Friend in 1964 when the artist was only sixteen years old. In retrospect, this event seems to have been a foreshadowing of the second revolution in the shôjo manga genre.
Between 1967 and 1969, the steady stream of new women artists turned to a flood, and attention soon focused on a vaguely defined group of young artists who came to be known as the "Fabulous Forty-Niners," because many of them were born in or around 1949. Artists such as Moto Hagio (creator of They Were Eleven and A, A'), Yumiko Oh-shima (creator of Banana Bread Pudding), Keiko Takemiya (creator of Toward the Terra), Riyoko Ikeda (creator of The Rose of Versailles), and Ryohko Yamagishi (creator of The Son of Heaven in the Land Where the Sun Rises) began to experiment with new themes, stories and styles, rejecting the limitations of traditional definitions of the shôjo manga genre and appealing to increasingly older readers. They played with notions of gender and sexuality, adapted such "boys' genres" as science fiction, and explored some of the weightiest issues of human existence.
Interestingly, whereas the weekly format has become the foundation of the shônen manga magazine market, the same format, though it provided the occasion for both the increase of women artists and the radical expansion of the genre's boundaries and readership, did not last among shôjo manga magazines. The weekly format put pressure on artists to focus on action, and forced them to work at a pace that made it difficult for them to achieve the depth that many of them sought. The weekly format was gradually replaced with a biweekly format, and the weekly format has largely given way to the original monthly format. Now artists can draw longer installments at a less hectic pace, developing the subtleties of character relationships, mood, and setting that are shôjo manga's strongest features.
By the end of the 1970s, shôjo manga had ceased to be a monolithic and homogenous genre. A number of subgenres, such as fantasy and science fiction, or stories focusing on homosexual romance between boys (known as "boys' love," or sometimes "yaoi"), had become firmly established, distinct from the "mainstream" of (heterosexual) love-comedies that themselves had become more sophisticated and less governed by taboo. As the upper age-limit of shôjo manga readerships continued to rise, the 1980s saw a trend towards increased specialization and more narrowly-targetted readerships, particularly with regard to age. Few girls above the sixth grade (except for diehard Sailor Moon or RayEarth fans) would be caught dead reading Nakayoshi, for example, while many others give up Ribbon by the end of middle school. Similarly, the content of Shôjo Comic in 2005 might make a more innocent reader blush, and while Hana to yume might stigmatize one as a sci-fi/fantasy otaku ("geek"), the popular Special Edition Margaret is dismissed by some as too middle-of-the-road.
The market has been made even more complex by the increasing demand among adult women for manga they can call their own, and here we see the same pattern I discussed in the previous installment in talking about shônen and seinen ("young men's") manga: women born after 1950 continue to read manga even as adults. The first magazines to try to tap this market appeared in the early 1980's and were narrowly geared at young "office ladies" (clerical workers) and housewives. The content was similar in many ways to American soap operas: lots of sleaze. By the late 1980s, it became apparent that this formula appealed only to a certain niche as publishers began to realize that many young adult women were buying not these new "ladies comics" but the same shôjo manga they enjoyed in high school. Having finally "got it," publishers in the 1990s began to create a variety of subgenres geared at a specific "types" of adult Japanese women. They range from more "artsy" publications, such as the progressive Feel Young, through the conservative top-seller YOU and the mainstream Chorus, to the unabashedly pornographic Comic Amour. At long last, there are manga catering to the tastes of practically every women and girl of the post-1950 "manga generation."
Yet in many ways, the diverse works that appear in these narrowly-focused magazines continue to hold more in common with each other than any of them do with shônen or seinen manga. Even as tastes have diversified and the market has matured, there remains a certain esthetic common ground that Japanese women—as artists and as readers—have staked out for themselves. There are plenty of girls and women who read shônen or seinen manga, and there are more than a few boys and men (many of them "closeted") who read shôjo or "ladies'" manga. Yet the basic genre distinctions remain, and it seems unlikely to me that they will collapse any time in the near future. From what I can gather, that is just fine with the majority of Japanese manga readers.
[1] Adam Kern, a scholar of Japanese literature, has noted that the popular kibyôshi creator, Santoh Kyohden, used the word in print in 1798. When and by whom the word was created remains unclear. [BACK]
[2] For more on kibyôshi and gôkan, look for anything on the subject written by Professor Adam Kern. [BACK]
[3] Since I wrote this article, the fortunes of Jump have waxed and waned and waxed again. I cannot imagine what those fortunes might be as you read this, but chances are the top spot among shônen manga magazines continues to be vied for by Jump, Magazine, and Sunday. [BACK]
[4] Please remember that this was written long before the North American shôjo manga boom that began in the first few years of the 21st Century--and which I like to believe I helped trigger. (^_^) [BACK]
©Matt Thorn 1996, 2005, 2012
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matt@matt-thorn.com)
Cultural Anthropologist
Translator
Freelance Writer Link: http://www.matt-thorn.com/mangagaku/history.html
Cultural Anthropologist
Translator
Freelance Writer Link: http://www.matt-thorn.com/mangagaku/history.html
Wednesday, 26 February 2014
Hokusai
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By Andreas Ramos, M.A. University of Heidelberg. Andreas did his undergraduate minor in Asian art, incl. the art of Japan and China. Hokusai (1760-1849)Katsushika Hokusai, Japan's best known artist, is ironically Japan's least Japanese artist. Japan's best known woodblock print, The Great Wave, is very un-Japanese. Welcome to the artist often known as Hokusai.Hokusai (1760-1849) lived during the Tokugawa period (1600 to 1867). In a Japan of traditional Confucian values and feudal regimentation, Hokusai was a thoroughly Bohemian artist: cocky, quarrelsome, restless, aggressive, and sensational. He fought with his teachers and was often thrown out of art schools. As a stubborn artistic genius, he was single-mindedly obsessed with art. Hokusai left over 30,000 works, including silk paintings, woodblock prints, picture books, manga, travel illustrations, erotic illustrations, paintings, and sketches. Some of his paintings were public spectacles which measured over 200 sq. meters (2,000 sq. feet.) He didn't care much for being sensible or social respect; he signed one of his last works as "The Art-Crazy Old Man". In his 89 years, Hokusai changed his name some thirty times (Hokusai wasn't his real name) and lived in at least ninety homes. We laugh and recognize him as an artist, but wait, that's because we see him as a Western artist, long before the West arrived in Japan. "From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing." -- Hokusai Hokusai started out as a art student of woodblocks and paintings. During the 600-year Shogun period, Japan had sealed itself off from the rest of the world. Contact with Western culture was forbidden. Nevertheless, Hokusai discovered and studied the European copper-plate engravings that were being smuggled into the country. Here he learned about shading, coloring, realism, and landscape perspective. He introduced all of these elements into woodblock and ukiyo-e art and thus revolutionized and invigorated Japanese art. Although Chinese and Japanese paintings had been using long distance landscape views for 1,500 years, this style had never entered the woodblock print. Ukiyo-e woodblocks were produced for bourgeoisie city gentry who wanted images of street life, sumo wrestlers, and geishas. The countryside and peasants were ignored. What was the influence on Hokusai? Here's an example of Dutch landscape art: 
Philips Koninck, (1619-1688, Amsterdam)
In Holland in the late 1500s, artists such as Claes Jansz Visscher and Willem Buytewech developed landscape art, which focused on topographically-correct landscape representation. Landscape art reached its peak between 1630 and 1660 through Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Jan van Goyen. By the late 1700s, these Dutch paintings had become so common that the etchings were used as cheap illustrations. Dutch merchants smuggled their goods into Japan. These wares were often wrapped in paper that had been illustrated with these etchings. For Hokusai and other artists, the thrown-away wrappers were more interesting than the imports.Hokusai learned from Dutch and French pastoral landscapes with their perspective, shading, and realistic shadows and turned them into Japanese landscapes. More importantly, he introduced the serenity of nature and the unity of man and his surroundings into Japanese popular art. Instead of shoguns, samurai, and their geishas, which were the common topics of Japanese illustrative art at the time, Hokusai placed the common man into his woodblocks, moving the emphasis away from the aristocrats and to the rest of humanity. In The Great Wave, tiny humans are tossed around under giant waves, while enormous Mt. Fuji is a hill in the distance.  Hokusai's most famous picture and easily Japan's most famous image is a seascape with Mt. Fuji. The waves form a frame through which we see Mt. Fuji in the distance. Hokusai loved to depict water in motion: the foam of the wave is breaking into claws which grasp for the fishermen. The large wave forms a massive yin to the yang of empty space under it. The impending crash of the wave brings tension into the painting. In the foreground, a small peaked wave forms a miniature Mt. Fuji, which is repeated hundreds of miles away in the enormous Mt. Fuji which shrinks through perspective; the wavelet is larger than the mountain. Instead of shoguns and nobility, we see tiny fishermen huddled into their sleek crafts as they slide down a wave and dive straight into the next wave to get to the other side. The yin violence of Nature is counterbalanced by the yang relaxed confidence of expert fishermen. Although it's a sea storm, the sun is shining. To Westerners, this woodblock seems to be the quintessential Japanese image, yet it's quite un-Japanese. Traditional Japanese would have never painted lower-class fishermen (at the time, fishermen were one of the lowest and most despised of Japanese social classes); Japanese ignored nature; they would not have used perspective; they wouldn't have paid much attention to the subtle shading of the sky. We like the woodblock print because it's familiar to us. The elements of this Japanese pastoral painting originated in Western art: it includes landscape, long-distance perspective, nature, and ordinary humans, all of which were foreign to Japanese art at the time. The Giant Wave is actually a Western painting, seen through Japanese eyes. Hokusai didn't merely use Western art. He transformed Dutch pastoral paintings by adding the Japanese style of flattening and the use of color surfaces as a element. By the the 1880's, Japanese prints were the rage in Western culture and Hokusai's prints were studied by young European artists, such as Van Gogh, Renoir, and Whistler, in a style called Japonaiserie. You can also notice his influence in the art movements of Jugendstil in Germany and Art Noveau in France, which use flattening and texture. Thus Western painting returned to the West. The Great Wave is from Hokusai's later years. He did a similar work many years before:  In this wave, the foam breaks up into a flock of birds. This wave is quite humorous; it disperses itself into wind. Without the boats and the width of the other print, this work is not as dramatic. The tension of the sea is drawn out through lines up the side of the wave. 
Peonies and Canary. Woodblock. National Museum at Tokyo. Click for larger image.
Before Hokusai, ukiyo-e artists such as Utamaro and Kunsai drew birds and flowers as illustrations in books. Hokusai was the first artist to make these bird-and-flower artworks primarily as prints.
Flock of Chickens. Woodblock. 1830-1844. National Museum at Tokyo.
With a swirl of plumes, the flock of roosters form a circle of motion, similar to many of Hokusai's water paintings. The birds are precise and realistic. The woodblock could be a technical illustration to a ornithologist's text on breeds of roosters. Hokusai was inspired by European scientific illustrations and the European respect for the beauty of Nature. The rooster at the right-middle has a very happy, contented expression. This is an example of Hokusai's bird-and-flowers illustrations.
The Hanging Lantern of Kaya Temple. Woodblock. Collection of Shozaburo Watanabe.
This is an early example of Hokusai's landscapes. First of all, it's set at a real location, the Sumida River. The trees are done with chiarscuro shading in the European style. But it's not entirely realistic: the water's waves are still in the Chinese stylized fashion. The perspective is also wrong: the tail of the boat is higher than the houses behind it, and the boat appears to be above the house at the front of the illustration. Hokusai is still experimenting and learning various elements, and hasn't yet begun to unify them. Note the playful extension of the birdhouse out of the picture at the upper left.Click for larger image. 
Sunset over Ryogoku Bridge. From 36 Views of Mt. Fuji. Woodblock. Hakone Museum.
By the time Hokusai began his Mt. Fuji series, he was able to unify vast persepectives into calm paintings. Here, a boatload of passangers gaze at Mt. Fuji, in a quiet, plebian scene of ordinary people in their daily life. This realism is Hokusai's unique contribution to Japanese art. This print is from the 1840s, when Hokusai was already in his 70s and fully developed in his artistic skill.Click for larger image. 
Sangi Takamura. Women diving for abalone. From Hundred Poems Explained by a Nurse. Woodblock. National Museum, Tokyo.
This is from the late 1840s. A group of women dive for abalone. Click the image and study the women at the lower left in the large version. They are interlaced through waves and water.Click for larger image. 
Courtesan. Painting on silk. 1812-1821. Collection of Moshichi Yoshiara.
The courtesan is almost buried the weight of her luxuriously textured and detailed kimono. Hokusai pays attention to precision and detail of the cloth. The important issue is the flattening of surfaces and the use of color fields. This became a major influence on Western artists in the late 1800s into the 1900s.Click for larger image. 
Fighting Cocks. Painting on silk. Hakone Museum.
Hokusai also did freehand paintings on paper and silk. Very few Japanese artists were able to work in both woodblock and painting. Note the rooster's very proud and agressive stance.Click for larger image. 
Hokusai Manga. Sketch on paper.
Hokusai also drew thousands of small sketches. These are called Manga in Japanese. There are more than 15 volumes of Hokusai manga. The fisherman and his load of tuna are delicately drawn in three-dimensional perspective.For more about HokusaiAnimation of HokusaiTony White animated a number of Hokusai prints. Watch this and you'll see how Hokusai has influenced so much of our modern culture. | ||||||||||||||||
Katsushika Hokusai
Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎, Katsushika Hokusai? 1760–May 10, 1849) was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. In his time he was Japan's leading expert on Chinese painting. Born in Edo (now Tokyo), Hokusai is best-known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1831) which includes the iconic and internationally recognized print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created during the 1820s. Hokusai created the "Thirty-Six Views" both as a response to a domestic travel boom and as part of a personal obsession with Mount Fuji. It was this series, specifically The Great Wave print and Fuji in Clear Weather, that secured Hokusai’s fame both within Japan and overseas. As historian Richard Lane concludes, “Indeed, if there is one work that made Hokusai's name, both in Japan and abroad, it must be this monumental print-series...” While Hokusai's work prior to this series is certainly important, it was not until this series that he gained broad recognition and left a lasting impact on the art world. It was The Great Wave print that initially received, and continues to receive, acclaim and popularity in the Western world.
Hokusai (1760-1849)
http://www.katsushikahokusai.org/
Hokusai (1760-1849)
http://www.katsushikahokusai.org/
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
Toba Sojo & Shimoboku Ooka
Did you know?
The history of manga is said to begin in the 11th century by a painter and priest of the name Toba Sojo. His work consisted of animal scroll-paintings called choju-giga, and he equated a lot of the elements of his life-style to various animals and their actions. After some time, Shimoboku Ooka created what was called Toba-e, or "Toba Pictures" which, in the 18th century style, were created in an accordion-book style and used little words for visual emphasis. Katsushika Hokusai was also influential in the beginnings of manga as we know it today. He lived in the 19th century and created was is called ukiyo-e, or "floating world pictures", and is mostly known for his woodblock prints called the 36 views of Mount Fuji. However, he also called some of the work in his sketch books "manga", meaning "playful sketches", and while their original purpose was material for their students to copy, they were distributed across Japan. Shunga, or "Spring Pictures", is an outrageous eroticism art style that helped to influence modern manga as well, though not as much as it influenced modern-day "hentai" and other explicit manga. Another topic, yokai, influenced many of the more contemporary artists, such as Maruo Suehiro and Shigeru Mizuki, who detail and depict warriors committing seppuku and other graphic scenes of violence. Manga today still shows strong evidence of political satire in its pages; for example, mocking the rich and powerful and many other elements of society. Kibyoshi, or "Yellow Cover Books", were very popular in the 18th century and were banned off and on by the authorities. Charles Wirgman and George Bigot, two foreign artists that also helped influence the modern East-West oriented manga of today, created Ponch-e and Toba-e magazine respectively, both widely accepted in Japan.
This was a summary of the History of "manga" by Trevor Vardeman. Source: http://manga.about.com/od/historyofmanga/a/mangahistory1.htm |
Wednesday, 29 January 2014
Toba Sojo - Choju Giga
Toba Sojo Facts
Toba Sojo (1053-1140), Japanese painter-priest, is believed to have painted the Animal Caricature, or Choju Giga, scrolls, which are considered among the finest examples of Japanese narrative scroll painting.
Toba Sojo, whose true name was Kakuyu, was a Japanese nobleman of the Heian period who became a Buddhist abbot. According to tradition, he is thought to have painted the famous set of scrolls representing caricatures of animals and people (in the Kozanji, a monastery near Kyoto). Modern scholars no longer accept this attribution uncritically and are inclined to believe that while he is indeed the author of the first two scrolls, which were probably painted during the second quarter of the 12th century, the two remaining scrolls are probably the work of an anonymous follower of the artist who worked during the early 13th century, the beginning of the Kamakura period.
The type of painting found in these scrolls is derived from the tradition of Buddhist monochrome ink painting that flourished during the Heian and Kamakura periods and was employed to depict the Buddhist deities in their proper iconographic form. At the same time the Animal Caricature scrolls may also be regarded as one of the most outstanding examples of the school of Japanese painting known as Yamato-e, which specialized in depicting narrative scenes taken from Japanese history and from literature such as the Heiji Monogatari and the Tale of Genji as well as stories and legends of famous Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines.
Since the scrolls are not accompanied by a text and have no unity of subject matter, the exact meaning of the paintings is not known. However, it is said that the first scroll, which is artistically by far the finest, represents a veiled attack on the corruption of the Buddhist clergy of the time. A worship scene showing the seated Buddha in the form of a large frog with a monkey in priest's garb and rabbit and fox attendants would support such an interpretation. Other sections of this scroll show the animals wrestling, swimming, and frolicking, all rendered in a free, humorous spirit. The later scrolls, although they also depict some animals, primarily show the human figure rendered in a similar satirical manner.
The scrolls are painted in black ink on white paper. Particularly fine are the first two scrolls, those believed to be by Toba Sojo, which show a mastery of brushwork and a remarkable animation. This pictorial tradition, although ultimately derived from China, where it had flourished since Han times, was introduced into Japan during the 6th century and had continued to be popular in the Buddhist monasteries. Depending on line rather than color, the Japanese painters of this school employed a remarkable economy of means and expressive power which are very typical of the best of the painting of the Far East.
Toba Sojo, whose true name was Kakuyu, was a Japanese nobleman of the Heian period who became a Buddhist abbot. According to tradition, he is thought to have painted the famous set of scrolls representing caricatures of animals and people (in the Kozanji, a monastery near Kyoto). Modern scholars no longer accept this attribution uncritically and are inclined to believe that while he is indeed the author of the first two scrolls, which were probably painted during the second quarter of the 12th century, the two remaining scrolls are probably the work of an anonymous follower of the artist who worked during the early 13th century, the beginning of the Kamakura period.
The type of painting found in these scrolls is derived from the tradition of Buddhist monochrome ink painting that flourished during the Heian and Kamakura periods and was employed to depict the Buddhist deities in their proper iconographic form. At the same time the Animal Caricature scrolls may also be regarded as one of the most outstanding examples of the school of Japanese painting known as Yamato-e, which specialized in depicting narrative scenes taken from Japanese history and from literature such as the Heiji Monogatari and the Tale of Genji as well as stories and legends of famous Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines.
Since the scrolls are not accompanied by a text and have no unity of subject matter, the exact meaning of the paintings is not known. However, it is said that the first scroll, which is artistically by far the finest, represents a veiled attack on the corruption of the Buddhist clergy of the time. A worship scene showing the seated Buddha in the form of a large frog with a monkey in priest's garb and rabbit and fox attendants would support such an interpretation. Other sections of this scroll show the animals wrestling, swimming, and frolicking, all rendered in a free, humorous spirit. The later scrolls, although they also depict some animals, primarily show the human figure rendered in a similar satirical manner.
The scrolls are painted in black ink on white paper. Particularly fine are the first two scrolls, those believed to be by Toba Sojo, which show a mastery of brushwork and a remarkable animation. This pictorial tradition, although ultimately derived from China, where it had flourished since Han times, was introduced into Japan during the 6th century and had continued to be popular in the Buddhist monasteries. Depending on line rather than color, the Japanese painters of this school employed a remarkable economy of means and expressive power which are very typical of the best of the painting of the Far East.
Further Reading on Toba Sojo
The best publication of the scrolls is Hideo Okudaira, Choju Giga, Scrolls of Animal Caricatures, adapted into English by S. Kaneko (1969). For a more general discussion of Japanese scroll painting see Kenji Toda, Japanese Scroll Painting (1935), and Dietrich Seckel, Emakimono: The Art of the Japanese Painted Handscroll (1959). □Wednesday, 22 January 2014
Todays EPQ Lesson
Basically I am going through different articles on the internet looking for research on a Buddhist priest called Toba Sojo, who was the man who started making "hilarious" animal drawings that amused the people in his village, which the idea of creative drawing (manga).
Toba Cojo
History of Manga
It has often been said that the "father" of manga is Rakuten Kitazawa, a 20th century manga-ka. However, the origins of manga go back much further than the 20th century. Manga's humble beginnings date back to the 11th century where a Buddhist priest and painter named Toba Sojo, expressed his extremely whimsical sense of humor in what is known as animal scrolls or Choju Giga. These paintings are often satirical and can be slapstick in nature and depicted a humorous focus on the Buddhist priesthood. Another feature of this period is that there were few words to go along with the action being depicted.
Another creator, Shimoboku Ooka, built upon Toba's Choju Giga and, instead, used an accordion style format for presenting the images. However, like Toba, he used few words to go along with any action shown.
The term "manga" did not begin to be regularly used until the 19th century when Katsushika Hokusai, a floating wood pictures artist (known as ukiyo-e) coined the term to describe his drawings in his sketchbook. He used the term "manga," meaning "playful sketches."
Modern manga was, again, influenced by Rakusen Kitazawa in the early 20th century. There had been restrictions on such materials that were being lifted and this isolated country was beginning to see outside influences, such as those from the West, infiltrate Japanese society. Needless to say, these influences of Western culture began to appear in the manga we know today. Much of Rakusen's work is on display at the Omiya Municipal Cartoon Hall or Manga Kaiken. Another influential early modern manga-ka, Ippei Okamoto, created Hito No Issho (Life of a Man). His main contribution is the institutionalization of the manga-ka as artists by the creation of Nippon Mangakai, the first Japanese cartoonist society.
Manga in its current form mixes Western comic formats and style with Japanese ideas and ideals such as honor, pride, service, respect for elders and others, and humility, to name a few. The person often most credited for what manga is today is Osamu Tezaka. Manga enthusiasts should know that Osamu created the now-classic manga, Astro-Boy, in 1952, and it is still very popular today in Japan. Astro-Boy memorabilia is still shown in many manga/anime fairs, such as the Tokyo Anime Fair in 2010, as it became the first anime or animation of a manga. A US manga fan can often find Astro Boy either on e-Bay or can import this title through Amazon or through book chains such as Barnes and Noble and Borders, where there are locations on the Central Coast. Osamu's work greatly influenced the manga artistic styles of current manga-ka: Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball series), Tite Kudo (Bleach), Masashi Kishimoto (Naruto), Kazuki Takahashi (Yu-Gi-Oh!), and Eiichiro Oda (One Piece) to name a few.
It has often been said that the "father" of manga is Rakuten Kitazawa, a 20th century manga-ka. However, the origins of manga go back much further than the 20th century. Manga's humble beginnings date back to the 11th century where a Buddhist priest and painter named Toba Sojo, expressed his extremely whimsical sense of humor in what is known as animal scrolls or Choju Giga. These paintings are often satirical and can be slapstick in nature and depicted a humorous focus on the Buddhist priesthood. Another feature of this period is that there were few words to go along with the action being depicted.
Another creator, Shimoboku Ooka, built upon Toba's Choju Giga and, instead, used an accordion style format for presenting the images. However, like Toba, he used few words to go along with any action shown.
The term "manga" did not begin to be regularly used until the 19th century when Katsushika Hokusai, a floating wood pictures artist (known as ukiyo-e) coined the term to describe his drawings in his sketchbook. He used the term "manga," meaning "playful sketches."
Modern manga was, again, influenced by Rakusen Kitazawa in the early 20th century. There had been restrictions on such materials that were being lifted and this isolated country was beginning to see outside influences, such as those from the West, infiltrate Japanese society. Needless to say, these influences of Western culture began to appear in the manga we know today. Much of Rakusen's work is on display at the Omiya Municipal Cartoon Hall or Manga Kaiken. Another influential early modern manga-ka, Ippei Okamoto, created Hito No Issho (Life of a Man). His main contribution is the institutionalization of the manga-ka as artists by the creation of Nippon Mangakai, the first Japanese cartoonist society.
Manga in its current form mixes Western comic formats and style with Japanese ideas and ideals such as honor, pride, service, respect for elders and others, and humility, to name a few. The person often most credited for what manga is today is Osamu Tezaka. Manga enthusiasts should know that Osamu created the now-classic manga, Astro-Boy, in 1952, and it is still very popular today in Japan. Astro-Boy memorabilia is still shown in many manga/anime fairs, such as the Tokyo Anime Fair in 2010, as it became the first anime or animation of a manga. A US manga fan can often find Astro Boy either on e-Bay or can import this title through Amazon or through book chains such as Barnes and Noble and Borders, where there are locations on the Central Coast. Osamu's work greatly influenced the manga artistic styles of current manga-ka: Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball series), Tite Kudo (Bleach), Masashi Kishimoto (Naruto), Kazuki Takahashi (Yu-Gi-Oh!), and Eiichiro Oda (One Piece) to name a few.
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
Research: An Article About The Origins of manga
Toba’s Choju Giga: Telling Stories With Scrolls
The tradition of narrative art or telling stories with a series of sequential images has been a part of Japanese culture long before Superman ever put on a cape. The earliest examples of pre-manga artwork that influenced the development of modern Japanese comics are commonly attributed to Toba Sojo, an 11th-century painter-priest with a whimsical sense of humor.Toba’s animal scroll paintings, or choju giga satirized life in the Buddhist priesthood by drawing priests as mischievous rabbits, monkeys engaging in silly activities including farting contests, and even depicted the Buddha himself as a toad. While there are no word balloons or sound effects in Toba’s paintings, they do show a progression of events, happening one after another as the scroll is unrolled from right to left. This tradition of reading images from right to left continues today in modern manga.
In later years, Toba’s influence on manga was acknowledged with the introduction of Toba-e or “Toba pictures,” an 18th century style of humorous images bound in books, accordion style. Created by Shimoboku Ooka, Toba-e relied on visual humor and used few words.
The Funnier Side of Hokusai
Another influential artist in the development of modern manga was Katsushika Hokusai, the famous 19th century ukiyo-e ("floating world pictures") artist and printmaker. While Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print images of 36 Views of Mount Fuji are known the world over, his manga sketchbooks are also some of the best early examples of humor in Japanese art.Hokusai was also the first artist to use the term "manga" or "playful sketches" to describe his humorous images. Hokusai’s manga includes irreverent images of men making funny faces, sticking chopsticks up their noses and blind men examining an elephant. Originally intended as sketches for his students to copy, Hokusai manga were distributed throughout Japan.
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