Andrea Horbinski's "Manga's First Century"

Andrea Horbinski began studying Japanese in college after she started watching anime in high school, and went on to research hypernationalist manga in Kyoto on a Fulbright Fellowship. While pursuing her PhD in history and new media at the University of California, Berkeley, she harnessed her love of manga and pop culture, writing a general history of manga in its historical and global contexts for her dissertation. Along the way, she uncovered the role that fans of manga have played in the medium’s development since its earliest decades, mirroring her own experience in sci-fi and online fandoms since childhood.

Her new book, Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989, is the result of ten years spent researching, reading, and thinking about manga on three continents, including research stints in Belgium and Japan.

Horbinski applied the “Page 99 Test” to Manga’s First Century and reported the following:

Page 99 of Manga’s First Century takes readers to the 1930s, discussing the ideals and leading figures of the Shinmangaha Shūdan (New Manga Faction Group). The group rose to prominence in this decade by expanding manga for adults to new publication venues under the slogan “market acquisition” (shijō no kakutoku), and sought to avoid political content in their manga—a wise move amongst the escalating censorship of wartime Japan. Although they were quite well-paid for professionals at the time, two of the group’s leading figures, Kondō Hidezō and Sugiura Yukio, apparently saw the Shinmangaha and its activities as complementary to their interest in anarchism. The remainder of the page briefly discusses the nature of anarchism in imperial Japan, and how it was easily twisted to serve the wartime state.

In one sense, this page literally lives up to Manga’s First Century’s subtitle of “creators and fans,” as the Shinmangaha members were upstart young creators seeking to expand manga’s ambit beyond what the establishment thought was wise—a recurring phenomenon in my discussion of manga’s history in the 20thC. And insasmuch as I sought to explain how manga became manga, it is representative of that aspect of the book too; although the Shinmangaha and its creators are not well-known outside Japan (and are somewhat forgotten nowadays there too), they played a key role in manga in the 1930s and 1940s, and themselves became the manga establishment in the 1950s. Bringing otherwise obscure creators and developments in manga to light, and explaining how they fit together and led to the manga that people around the world love today, is the book’s project.

At the same time, this isn’t the page I would necessarily pick to sell readers on the book, even if it does reflect significant aspects of the whole. The Shinmangaha’s leading members achieved a kind of soft landing and were co-opted into the so-called New Order by the end of the 1930s; Kondō Hidezō became the central figure at Manga (1940-45), the state-approved manga magazine that was one of the few outlets in which publishing manga was permissible after 1940. Their experience was thus atypical of manga on the whole, which was censored nearly out of existence as many creators were drafted, blacklisted, or simply driven out of the profession in these years. In this straitened era, manga fans kept manga alive by avidly rereading older manga, either from each other’s personal collections or through used and rental bookstores—which laid down consumption patterns that exploded into new modes of manga entirely after the war. As one excerpt from a largely chronological account, page 99 is only a snapshot; there’s far more to manga history in the book than this one page contains, and readers will learn a lot more about many other people and developments in that history by picking up the book.

Visit Andrea Horbinski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue