Manga and the Representation of Japanese History (Routledge Contemporary Japan Series)

This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history. The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world’s most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar and contemporary Japan. __Manga and the Representation of Japanese History__ will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, Asian history, Japanese culture and society, as well as art and visual culture "This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history. The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world's most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The strategy of combining the narrative elements of writing with graphic art, the extensive narrative story-manga and its Western equivalent of the graphic novel, reflects the relatively new soft power of 'global' media, which have the potential to display history in previously unimagined ways. Boundaries of space and time in manga become as permeable as societies and cultures across the world. Each of the articles in this book investigates the authorship of history by looking at various different attempts to render Japanese history through the popular cultural media of the story-manga. As Carol Gluck, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Susan Napier and others have shown, it has never been easy to encapsulate the complex narrative of emperor-based cyclical Japanese historical periods. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar/contemporary Japan. "-- "This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history"-- "This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history. The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world's most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The strategy of combining the narrative elements of writing with graphic art, the extensive narrative story-manga and its Western equivalent of the graphic novel, reflects the relatively new soft power of 'global' media, which have the potential to display history in previously unimagined ways. Boundaries of space and time in manga become as permeable as societies and cultures across the world. Each of the articles in this book investigates the authorship of history by looking at various different attempts to render Japanese history through the popular cultural media of the story-manga. As Carol Gluck, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Susan Napier and others have shown, it has never been easy to encapsulate the complex narrative of emperor-based cyclical Japanese historical periods. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar/contemporary Japan. "-- Provided by publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd Title 6 Copyright 7 Contents 8 Editor’s notes 10 List of figures 11 Notes on contributors 13 Foreword 16 Acknowledgements 19 1 Introduction: the representation of Japanese history in manga 20 2 Sabotaging the rising sun: representing history in Tezuka Osamu’s Phoenix 37 3 Reading Shōwa history through manga: Astro Boy as the avatar of postwar Japanese culture 59 4 Representations of gendered violence in manga: the case of enforced military prostitution 79 5 Maruo Suehiro’s Planet of the Jap: revanchist fantasy or war critique? 100 6 Making history herstory: Nelson’s son and Siebold’s daughter in Japanese shōjo manga 121 7 Heroes and villains: manchukuo in Yasuhiko Yoshikazu’s Rainbow Trotsky 140 8 Making history: manga between kyara and historiography 165 9 Postmodern representations of the pre-modern Edo period 190 10 ‘Land of kami, land of the dead’: paligenesis and the aesthetics of religious revisionism in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s ‘Neo-Gōmanist Manifesto: on Yasukuni’ 208 11 Hating Korea, hating the media: Manga Kenkanryū and the graphical (mis-)representation of Japanese history in the Internet age 236 12 The adaptation of Chinese history into Japanese popular culture: a study of Japanese manga, animated series and video games based on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms 253 13 Towards a summation: how do manga represent history? 270 Selected research bibliography 278 Index 284 ISBN:,9780415694230,(hbk),ISBN:,978-0-203-09781-6,(ebk) ISBN: 9780415694230 (hbk),ISBN: 978-0-203-09781-6 (ebk)