On Manga

Manga is the generic title for Japanese comic books. In recent years, this indigenous literary and art form has spread across the West in tandem with the West's own comic book and graphic novel revolution. It is a phenomenon that deserves more notice.

Manga owed a debt to American comic book art from its inception. The idea that it is a wholly indigenous creation that somehow blossoms, over a hundred years later, out of pre-Meiji Floating World print-making is just not tenable.

It would not exist if General Douglas MacArthur had not turned Japan upside down after its defeat in 1945. Manga is uniquely Japanese but it is also uniquely liberal-capitalist. Its context is a Japan that was forced to live or die by the market as it tried to preserve the best of its traditional values.

The domestic manga market is constructed out of a ruthless process of corporate creative destruction. Most manga writers and draughtsman operate in a high pressure factory environment that is no different from the rest of Japanese corporate culture.

There is little of that free and easy spirit of letting the artist wonder off and ponder his navel while the marketing men wait for the fruits of his genius. It is a business with a brutally direct relationship with a demanding public.

The whole European comic market is only 10% of the size of the Japanese equivalent. Some of its public is so engaged with it that they will compete to be the next generation of 'auteurs' under conditions that would break the spirit of most Westerners.

But what of the psychological function of manga to its readers. Japan is a culture that is both sex-positive and yet concerned to keep its non-Christian world-view operating within bounds that cannot rely on some external force such as God or Kantian flummery.

Japan has to appeal to traditional values without encouraging anyone to return to the dark side of Bushido. This leads to some strange ambiguities in regulation and many misunderstandings by Westerners who come into contact with it.

The explicit sexual and violent content of manga is vastly exaggerated in the West. The norm is, in fact, a wide range of more or less intense explorations of human interaction and of feelings geared to every age range's innermost drives as they move through life.

Manga socialises but it accepts the human condition for what it is - and this will leave some space for the darker shores of sex and violence at the margins of manga as at the margins of any society.

The Japanese simply have the courage not to pretend the dark side is not present in society nor that it can be wished away by appeal to some pulpit, including the pulpit that has been set up inside many Westerners' heads.

Watching manga's effect on my children, I see it as wholly positive. It explores themes and ideas that are difficult to talk about with peers and parents. Fears and desires are reviewed in dreamscapes of considerable sophistication.

The Ghibli anime series of films exemplifies the fantasy non-linear side of Japanese culture but the typical manga is a tale of people who can be identified with in all their human complexity.

Japan may use discipline and ritual to restrain and constrain desire and fear but it does not wish away feelings and drives or give them negative or positive moral value in themselves.

The leitmotif of the Westerner is said to be 'guilt' at failing to meet the standards of some internal policeman whereas the Japanese are said to feel 'shame' for failing to meet obligations that are social if equally internalised. I am not Japanese but the dead weight of irrational guilt in the West is no myth.

This difference between guilt and shame may be fundamental. Manga certainly plays a major role in allowing an outlet for feelings that must not be denied but only so that they may be evaluated and appropriate action considered.

If my children have constructed independently a high moral code of a rather conservative nature (which they seem to have done) then I am sure that I can put this very much down to their reading of manga from an early age as much, possibly more than, parental discipline.

In recent decades, manga has move from the mass market to create its own anarchic artistic fringe and has been heavily exported overseas, driven and transformed by market considerations on the back of anime exports to children's television.

What is most interesting is that the Japanese business community treats export markets in culture much the same way as it does export markets in consumer durables - a challenge in which the best of foreign technology is stripped down, analysed and imported back into Japan to see if it can be systematised.

Westerners, especially the current late teenage generation, have taken to manga in a big way, in part perhaps because it is unique to their generation, a foreign import that most parents simply cannot understand.

Reading manga is certainly a learned skill, counter-intuitive to a mass popular culture that has privileged first the word on the page and then the moving image but was dismissive (until recently) of the comic.

But manga can be positively Wagnerian, albeit without the music. It merges visuals and language in storyboards that are played out in the mind.

The Western separation of text, music and image/sound, of book, of music and of film, means that the mind leaps from the pure internalisation of reading and listening (often culturally privileged as 'high culture') to the passive intake of spectacle (until recently regarded as 'low culture').

Western culture has traditionally found difficulty in making space for manga's half-way house of word and image being internalised as a tale that can immediately relate to social concerns and feelings. Comics can do this but have been dismissed as trivial.

Manga is at its best when it raises serious questions about what it is to be a boy or girl at such-and-such a time of life. At this point, it is an art that is neither solipsistically engaged in great literature nor lost in the collective will of the movie or the opera.

Kids today like this. Their concerns are social AND internal, not just internal OR social - manga can work for them at this level. Part of this younger generation of Westerners has not only taken manga to its heart but is beginning to transform it in a direct dialogue with the Japanese publishing houses.

Japanese-American and Japanese-French ('bandes dessines') influences are now creating new themes and new works for the more sophisticated end of the Japanese market, as well as for the American and European markets, alongside the mainstream offers of Tokyo Pop.

Bit by bit, other related Japanese cultural phenomenon, such as Cosplay (dressing up as anime or manga characters), are likely to merge with Western fandom into new cultural forms.

No doubt, the big Japanese brands and digitalisation will give us new Western-style blockbusters that are as showy as the Marvel-inspired productions that now emerge every year. This is globalisation driven by the market, but it is not one that creates some standard universal pap.

The complexity and intensity of the Manga community's response to the market is not resentful but fertile - a frenetic creativity that matches the inner core of human fears and desires with a very high level of sensitivity and artistic creation.

One can only hope that priests and 'moral guardians' in the West do not get their ignorant, restrictive and grubby paws on this surge of creativity and force it into tramlines that will reduce it to mere brain fodder.

The Hays Code managed to limit the creative glory that was Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1960s. Waves of censors have done this in the West since time immemorial. It happens in Japan too.

What would be tragic would be if Western neuroses limited manga's range in its home base - then, in terms of human liberation, globalisation would have become part of the cultural problem and not part of the solution.

(This posting owes a great deal to a reading of Paul Gravett's excellent review of the history of manga, Manga: 60 years of Japanese Comics (London, 2004).

The book contains a very useful list of web sites which cover almost every aspect of manga at the time of publication.The opinions above, however, are entirely ours)

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