In the 1990s I visited Kodansha, a publisher founded in 1909. Kodansha was in many ways the Japanese counterpart of Macmillan, for whom I worked at the time. I was essentially making a courtesy call to find out how sales of Kodansha’s translation of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians was selling. I was escorted to an upper floor of the company’s skyscraper where the meeting rooms were located. Around the corridors of this floor a small collection of Impressionist paintings was displayed. The company director I was meeting told me that he had been given an assignment for a full year to acquire the paintings (I could not have dreamed of being given such an assignment by Macmillan). When my Japanese hosts gave me a brief description of the company, they mentioned that it published the number two manga in Japan, with a weekly print run in the millions, so large that several printers were contracted to produce each issue – no single printer could print fast enough. For a British publisher, this was publishing on an unimaginable scale.
Some of the most important artists who were instrumental in the early development of this huge creative industry were the work of a small community of artists living and working together in small single rooms in a modest (to say the least) apartment building in the Tokiwaso neighourhood of Shiinamachi, a short walk from our apartment in Higashi Nagasaki. The story of the origins of manga in the 1950s and 1960s is told in a reconstruction of the apartment building, the nearby phone box (used by the artists to communicate with publishers) and the former telephone exchange building that constitute the Tokiwaso Manga Museum.
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| The Tokiwaso museum. |
Shiinamachi flourished in the post-war reconstruction period because its businesses and good communications provided opportunities for people arriving from other towns and the countryside. A group of young almost all male (only one female) artists (their numbers varied, and there were at most seven) moved to Shiinamachi together with many Japanese who migrated to Tokyo from the countryside. They rented small rooms that served as their studio, living/dining space and bedroom. They a shared toilet (two urinals and a Japanese-style squatting toilet) and kitchen. These tiny rooms must have been typical of the tiny spaces in which reconstruction Tokyo residents lived. One display in the museum consists of two pie charts showing expenditure of the manga artists compared to the average spend of residents of Shiinamachi. The manga artists spent more on drink, somewhat less on food, and a notable portion of the money at the bath house.
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| The kitchen. |
The apartment building was completed in 1952. Two of the first occupants were Terada Hiroo (1931-1992) and Tezaku Osamu (1928-1989). Terada is especially known for a number of famous manga Sebango 0, Supotsuman Sasuke, Supotsuman Kintaro, Moretsu Sensei and Kurayami Godan. Tezaku stayed only for a short time. He had already had some success as early as 1947, and by 1954 he had achieved national fame and moved out of the Tokiwaso building. His career later expanded into movies – he is known as the Japanese Walt Disney.
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| Two studio rooms. |
The only female artist Mizuno Hideko (1939-) had been an assistant of Tekazu and came to Tokiwaso to collaborate on a manga with Shotaro Ishinomori and Fujio Akatsuka. In 1955 she had already published a story featuring a tomboy heroine, and from the 1960s became a leading exponent of shōjō manga, aimed at young girls aged 7-19. I discussed the shōjō manga with Ryōka, our son’s partner. She explained that there are manga for girls targeted at the various stages of education (elementary, junior high and so on).
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| Mizuno Hideki's studio. She drew the image on the wall as a reproduction for the museum of the original drawing from her days in Tokiwaso. |
Some of the rooms in the museum recreate the studio/living spaces in which the artists worked, while others document particular aspects of their work. In room 17 a video particularly interested a superannuated publisher. Manga artist Kimura Naomi (1962-), who confusingly is male despite his name, demonstrates the pre-digital production used by the artists of Tokiwaso. The artist would first draw a two-page spread of the manga in pencil, which he then drew over in ink. Once the ink had dried the spread was vigorously rubbed with an eraser to remove any trace of pencil that remained visible. Then a sheet of an adhesive material was laid over each image area; the artist then carefully cut round the figures in the image area and removed the overlay to create backgrounds that were consistent across the spread. The artist then added in ink shading and details to the figures. The characters of the dialogue were drawn by hand. In other words, the process was meticulous and laborious.
One of the occupants of Tokiwaso, Yamauchi Jhoji (1940-), is commemorated in the Toshima Kuritsu Park not far from the Tokiwaso building for achievements beyond his manga career. Although Yamauchi started his career as a manga artist, he is now more famous for his illustrated children’s book. He is also the author of educational materials for young children, and in particular for a pictorial method of teaching elementary school children the fifty sounds of Japanese hiragana characters (the basic alphabet, which together with kanji form Japanese characters).
The tiny living spaces of Tokiwaso contrast with a very different living environment that we visited in Sankei-en garden in Yokohama. The former Yanohara family residence, a large Edo (1603-1868) period gassho-style farmhouse, was moved from Shirakawa, in the mountainous Hida region, to Sankei-en in 1960. In Japanese gassho means praying hands – the steeply sloped hipped and gabled roofs of gassho-style structures are said to resemble praying hands. The roof served two purposes; it protected the house from heavy snowfalls and provided an attic space for farming silk cocoons. In the attic silkworms were fed on mulberry leaves for about 30 days, by which time the cocoons had formed. The attic also provided work spaces for processing silk. There were three silk crops a year. The Yanohara home is four storeys tall – three of those occupied by the attic spaces.
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| The Yanohara family residence, front view. To the far right are the stables, now the area where visitors leave their shoes. Next to left is the famili living room. Third left is the entrance to the tatami guest area. |
The Yanohara were farmers, but also one of the three most important families of their region, and exercised administrative functions for the local government such as tax collecting (as an enthusiastic volunteer, Mr. Suzuki, explained in comprehensible English). The family grew millet and were silk farmers. Despite their prosperity, as farmers the family occupied the lowest rung of the rigid social hierarchy of Edo Japan.
The Yanoharas were also obliged to provide space to accommodate guests, in particular men who patrolled the domain of the lord of the region. Therefore, the house was divided into two very clearly demarcated spaces. To the right as one faces the front of the house were the stables (owning horses was another indicator of prosperity) and a living room for the family. Behind these were a master bedroom, the kitchen, and a workroom where tools were stored, and where a wooden trough stored water. Fires in pits (known as irori) in the centre of the room provided heat in the living room and a cooking fire in the kitchen. A wooden hob over the fires prevente embers reaching the roof thatch (firs was a constant concern in wooden buildings). The kitchen fire is kept burning so that modern visitors can experience the smoky smell of the farmers’ home and the blackened timbers. The smoke also repelled insects, which prolonged the life of the thatched roof.
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| Yanohara residence, side view of the guest area. The window at the top of the roof space is a katomado, the window below it is a hanagoya. |
However, the family was not allowed to enter the spaces set aside for higher status guests. These rooms differed from the family’s domestic areas in several respects. The flooring was of tatami mats, not bare wood; the guest rooms were more brightly lit by ample sliding windows; there were decorative features in the transoms between the rooms, such as a decorative fan motif or an anchor and paddle design. There were tokonoma (alcoves) with a flower arrangement or other decorative feature, Buddhist and Shinto altars.
These two very disparate domestic spaces, the tiny rented rooms in Tokiwaso, and the spacious home/guest accommodation of the property-owning Yanohara family, document and express two very different periods of Japanese social history. The Yanohar’s flourished economically in Edo period Japan compared with much more humble farming families, but rigid hierarchy ensured that they could never rise above their lowest of social ranks. No tatami mats for them. Post-war Japan was by no means an egalitarian un-hierarchical society, but people could move to Tokyo to seek opportunity, quirky artists full of new ideas could secure tiny rented living spaces and a community to exchange and develop a new mass medium of entertainment and communication. And they could rise to the status of manga gods.
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