Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series 2016

“Art of the People:” Manga Defined through History, c. 1920

Miriam Wattles, ICC Visiting Scholar, UCSB Associate Professor in Art History

December 8, 2016, 18:30- 20:00
Room 301, Building 10, Sophia University

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 lineage of
antecedents, helped articulate the ideals by which the new medium anticipated the future. My paper
interrogates two of the earliest histories— by Okamoto Ippei and Hosokibara Seiki published months
apart in 1924—for what they say about emotional expression, humor, satire, contemporaneity, freedom,
and resistance. Most crucially, it asks about the Demos (common people) during the time that came to
be known as Taisho Democracy.

Miriam Wattles is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at
University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has taught since 2004. Her publications have
ranged from an exploration of the turning point of Yokoyama Taikan, “The 1909 Ryûtô and the
Aesthetics of Affectivity” Art Journal 55:3 (1996) to, most recently, “A Multi-Gendered Scandal:
The Survival of the Prostitute Meme, Asazuma Boat” in Belli, ed, Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c.
1500-1900 (2016). While an ICC Visiting Scholar, she has researched her coming book project, “
Drawing Relations: From Kyôga to Manga, circa 1870-1930.”

Institute of Comparative Culture (ICC) Sophia University 7-1Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554, JAPAN +81-3-3238-4082 / +81-3-3238-4081(fax) / Email diricc@sophia.ac.jp / Web: http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/