Paper short abstract:

Manga, defined theoretically and historically c. 1920, stressed freedom of format and expression. Thematically, it might include reportage, sharp critique, or horror. It sought to dissolve all boundaries between popular and fine art. 1920s manga complicates present histories of the visual arts.

Paper long abstract:

Different definitions of manga tend to clash around narratives of origin. Today scholars reach back to late 18th century popular illustrated fiction kibyōshi or even further back to the 12th century chōjū-giga scrolls, while fans seeking familiar stylistic conventions and formats will insist that modern manga began with Tezuka―and usually emphasize his borrowings from Disney. Almost never are the forms that arose during Meiji and Taisho brought into play. Yet “manga” (called such) began to be published in a variety of periodicals, newspapers, and soft and hard-covered books from about 1900. Between art and literature, reportage and poetic fantasies― manga was defined by the influential Okamoto Ippei in 1924 as an “art of the people” (民衆畫) and a way “to dig at the times and human emotions” (世態人情を穿つ). Manga histories, by means of their stated parameters and their lineage of antecedents, helped articulate the ideals by which the new medium anticipated the future.

My paper interrogates two of the earliest histories― by Ishii Hakutei (1918) and Hosokibara Seiki (1924) as well as the very influential how-to by Okamoto Ippei, the leader of the Tokyo Manga Circle (published in full in 1928)―for what these essays say about manga's emotional expression, humor, satire, contemporaneity, freedom, and resistance. The future potentiality of this new medium that arose in the early decades in Japan was squashed by a combination of political and aesthetic forces in the course of the 1930s. Yet the myriad of ways that this "manga" (unrecognizable as such today) was realized materially in these forgotten years complicate much present discourse on manga, art, as well as ideas on artistic modernity in Japan.