Kyoto International Manga Museum

The 1990s saw the publication of a number of important comics theories: Manga no yomikata (How to read manga) by Natsume Fusanosuke et.al. in Japan (1995), Thierry Groensteen's Systèm de la Bande Dessinée in France (1999), and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics in the US (1993). But did these books refer to the same "comics"? They cannot be easily compared to each other, since the artists (and works) which serve as their touchstones differ from country to country; suffice it to mention the role of Tezuka for Japan, Hergé for France, Kirby and Eisner for America. Yet, it is also a fact that these books aimed at something more general, and precisely there lies their potential. This paper will explore what can be gained from comparing them to each other, by pursuing intersections of their methods and findings. (transl. Jaqueline Berndt)

In current manga and comics studies, non-fiction works, works that do not appear in printed form, and amateur works created outside of the "official" publishing industry are relegated to the periphery of the field at best. Can a field called "global comics studies" be relevant without first overcoming this lack of inclusiveness? If we wish to engage in cross-cultural comparisons of certain creations within well-defined theoretical frameworks, we must be able to define what, for our purposes, constitutes a "comic". We might assume that form dictates what is a comic, but is it even possible to establish the formal attributes of a "comic" and then determine which works conform and which do not? We might also attempt to identify "comics" based on content rather than form. However, any distinction drawn between "proper" storytelling forms and those that do not conform runs not only the risk of being arbitrary, but of dismissing the preferred modes of communication of less privileged groups.

This paper will examine the conditions in postwar Japan that gave rise to otaku, specifically those deeply devoted to manga and anime. The theme of our conference is the possibility of international comics studies, and as a preface I submit it is necessary to understand the specifics of production and consumption when studying media. In the case of Japan, manga was positioned as pulp or juvenile entertainment widely distributed in a cheap, disposable format; creators chose the medium after WWII because individuals owned their characters and stories, those with talent could break into the industry and there was relatively little censorship. As a result, manga, and later anime, became an outlet for marginalized creators and ideas in Japan. Starting from the late 1970s, a system of knowledge production formed around media, and there appeared otaku, people who approached media in new ways. Manga today is often made by and for otaku, and features a unique cultural logic and pictorial language. This is not to position Japan as unique, but to stress that comics studies in any country cannot do without considering fans and knowledge communities, which tend to be bound to the patterns of production and consumption in certain areas.

The definition of what constitutes the authenticity of an act of cultural production, in other words, the social conditions under which certain productive acts are acknowledged to receive fair symbolic as well as economic rewards, is subject to very important symbolic struggles by all those involved. In many cases, these conditions comprise not only technical components, such as related to the quality of the final work, but also normative components in regard to how to relate to the productive act itself. This paper will discuss how these normative components, which define the authenticity of the act of "drawing manga", have been represented (and thus defined) by those who still relate to creating manga in a professional way, under the conditions of dissolving boundaries between professionals and amateurs due to the growing fanzine/fan-art market. Concurrently, this paper will examine the possibility of discussing manga works which reflect upon creating manga, first and for all stories set in the manga industry itself (so-called gyôkai mono). (transl. Jaqueline Berndt)

In the latter half of the 19th century, printmedia for children saw a significant development in France. Many of these publications included comics (bande dessinée) which stayed highly popular among French children for a long time. This presentation focuses on media for girls. It pursues the transformation of the respective comics by applying an analytical method, well-tried with regard to Japanese shôjo magazines, to the changing contents of the French periodicals; thus, journals addressed at girls such as La semaine de Suzette, Fillette and Lisette are chronologically examined. Such a magazine-oriented analysis has not been conducted in France yet, although there is some research on comics for girls. This raises the question of to what extent analytical methods can be applied in a crosscultural manner, and particularly, how the study of shôjo manga and the study of bande dessinée for girls can be interrelated.

Compared to well-established disciplines such as literature, fine arts, and sociology, comics studies (or manga studies), as "an academic practice," is still in the nascent stages, and some confusion and contradictions remain in terms of vocabulary, diction, methodology and approaches to discussing manga/comics. It is, therefore, imperative to systematize this field, and several attempts have been made in recent years. Yet, manga is a unique medium comprised of text, images, spatial arrangements, which necessarily demands inter- or trans-disciplinary approaches. Taking Japanese science fiction (SF) as an example, my presentation articulates how SF studies and manga/comics studies intersect in terms of their approaches to genre, themes, styles, and media. In so doing, I will discuss some possibilities and problems of manga/comics studies in relation to the socio-historical conditions of the formation of the SF genre in the postwar period.

At the time of globalization, the circulation of works of art between the various cultures and continents is still quite unequal. Certain countries are more open to foreign creations, others more turned in on their own national culture. France, where I live, is probably one of the countries where the international comics production is the most widely accessible, since translations count for more than half of the total amount of the new titles being published, on a very dynamic market. However, this accessibility is much more limited as far as academic work about comics is concerned. I can easily read a large amount of mangas in my own language, but unfortunately, I have no idea of the critical or theoretical literature about mangas produced by Japanese scholars. Beyond the problem of the scarcity of translations, I intend to speak about the various obstacles that put a brake on academic exchanges about comics, and I will quote as an example the case of my own essay, The System of Comics, that appears to be an exception since it is now translated in the United States, in Japan and in two european countries. These obstacles are, first of all, of terminological and methodological nature ; they are also related to the different structuring of academic research in different countries, to the very status of scholars who work in the field and to their conditions of work. The definition of a reference corpus is especially delicate, if that corpus is to be considered a representative sample, a basis on which it will be possible to think about "comics" in general. The possibility to build an aesthetical or semiological theory of comics that would be valuable both in the western area and in the asiatic area is a new challenge for all of us. It will not be matched without an increase of scholarly exchanges between both areas, and without us all made aware of the advantage we could find in a common theoretical frame.

In the US in 1950, Newsdealer magazine reported that more girls were reading comics than boys. However, the golden age of American comics for girls was very short, only from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. In the 1960s, girls' comics gave way to superhero comics aimed at boys. In 1995, female readership of DC Comics was at an all-time low of 2%. However, as Japanese manga arrived, the number of female readers of comics began increasing. Is that the resurrection of the relationship between female readers and American comics in the 1950s? If we could find any relation among female readers, American comics in the 1950s and current manga, what would it be? This presentation will consider how and why manga have attracted American female readers, examining and analyzing from the golden age of American female comics in the 1940s to the decline in the 1960s.

Yaoi fiction--male-male comics (manga) and illustrated novels created by women for women in Japan--has a history of nearly 40 years if we locate their origin at the "beautiful boy" manga within the shôjo (girls') manga genre of the 1970s. My critical examination of yaoi starts with the premise that yaoi does not represent any person's reality, but rather is a battlefield where straight, lesbian, and other women's desires and political stakes clash and where representations are born. Once born, such representations can and do influence a subject's reality. Yaoi constitutes an unprecedented discursive space that has functioned as women's sexualized subculture for several decades. Today, approximately 15 years into the era of commercial "boys' love" manga and illustrated novels, we are witnessing the rise in the number of homophile (gay friendly) works, the stories that can be called feminist in that the passive (uké) characters are the subjects of desire and also in that they overtly question the existing gender system. Theorizing further possibilities of yaoi as a productive feminist and queer forum seems an urgent task. This forum in question connects to the global one, since yaoi has been spreading to many countries around the world in recent years and transcultural communication has been increasingly happening among fans. This presentation hopes to engage international scholars of comics/manga in the dialogues on the efficacy of theorizing a comics/manga genre as an ongoing productive forum regarding yaoi but also other genres.

Ms. LEE Wai-Chun's 13-Dot Cartoon debuted in 1966 and went on to become a legend in Hong Kong comics, with both the cartoon and its creator becoming household names there. The cartoon stars Ms. 13-Dot, a young woman who lives in an unnamed city somewhere in Asia. With her urban sophistication and love of cutting-edge fashion, Ms. 13-Dot epitomizes the modernized, fashionable woman then admired and idealized by readers, especially women. My presentation takes a closer look at this foremost female character in the development of Hong Kong comics, considering how society's perceptions of the "ideal" modern woman of the 1970s are reflected in the cartoon. Decades after its debut, 13-Dot's legacy continues today with reprints, updates and new work from creator Ms. LEE Wai-Chun, injecting new life into the cartoon and reaching a new generation of young readers. After four decades of continuous work in the comics industry, Ms. Lee is well recognized and has been invited to participate in nearly every major Hong Kong comics history exhibition and event. The discussion will also review Ms. Lee's media popularity and her status as a symbol of the contributions women have made to the Hong Kong comics industry.

At present, shōjo manga (Japanese girls' comics) are receiving growing attention within the international flow of comics culture. One of the reasons may be that until recently in most countries, the production and consumption of popular culture for girls had not developed fully. This may be due to the international structure of gender bias in consumer culture, especially among younger generations. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that comics culture for girls in Japanese society has shown a sudden growth from the 1970s. According to the gender index gap of the World Economic Forum, Japan's current ranking at 98th place (among 130 countries) shows that it is a leading nation as regards the gender gap. That being the case in Japan, it is vital to discuss why girls' culture saw such a rapid growth in the 1970s. I would like to examine the position of shōjo manga within youth culture, drawing upon my own personal experience as a young man at that time, enthusiastic about shōjo manga more than shōnen manga (Japanese boys' comics), by paying particular attention to the development of representations and stories regarding the image of girls. (transl. Miyake Toshio)

Visual storytelling by means of static images has an age-long tradition around the world, but it took until the late nineteenth century for printed pictorial narratives to develop as an entertainment business on a massive scale. Within less than three decades, the North American model of balloon comics in newspapers was adapted in various countries around the globe. Although modern comics seem to exhibit an enormous variety, both historically and locally, they also share striking similarities, not only on an institutional level, but also on a basic formal level (the sequence, the combination of drawings with balloons, rigid formats as the gag comic of only a few panels) and even in regard to content (genres, character types). However, fans usually tend to believe that their favorite kind of comics is unique, eventually even rejecting other types, and furthermore, the majority of secondary literature is highly selective. These inclinations by fans and critics alike foster inevitably a biased perception of the global field of comics. Since translations increase, and comics travel more easily around the globe -- not only via printed but also digital media -- scholars are to consider various types of pictorial narratives from various nations. By making comparisons, not only particularities but also similarities become visible, and this again may lead to a more balanced idea of the comics medium in general.

Considering that manga, bande dessinée (BD) and comics are all reproduction-based media in mass societies, through newspapers and magazines, they clearly share a commonality throughout world history. This can even be found in modes of expression as determined by the medium, particularly in storytelling by means of panels and page layouts. Precisely for this reason, it seems to be meaningful to raise the question of common denominators in the modes of expression, when discussing comics across cultures and languages. In my analyses of the mechanisms of manga expression, I have been taking basic 'visible elements' such as the threefold mutual relationship between pictures, words and panels as its point of departure. Of greatest importance to me is the role which the continuity of panels and pages plays on various levels. I would like to raise the explorative question of a common language by briefly introducing the above-mentioned triangle. (transl. Cathy Sell)

Currently within Japan more than 90% of published manga are domestic products, which compared to both other domestic branches and foreign countries, is an almost unique state of national isolation. In addition, the few translated works that are discussed are done so from the perspectives of literature and subculture, but not the angle of "manga" as such. Yet in contrast with this situation, Japanese manga have achieved a certain degree of success in the overseas market, particularly since the year 2000, leading to the current situation of Japanese manga characterized by an extremely asymmetrical relationship between isolation at home and globalization abroad. Japanese manga as we know it today had initially been modeled on western comics from the Meiji era (1868-1912), a fact that is all but buried and forgotten in the wake of the current export surplus. On the creators' level there are continued interests towards foreign aesthetics, both Western and Asian, and visible mutual influences. But within domestic manga discourse (criticism and research), foreign works and their circumstances have been, suspended as irrelevant since the 1970s, resulting in the present situation that information on the topic is almost unavailable even in Japanese. Henceforth, without domestic self-awareness towards this situation as well as foreign understanding for it, international discussions aiming at global Comics Studies won't be possible. (transl. Cathy Sell)

Comics studies tend to focus on textual analysis (story and characterization) of the cartoon strips or comic books. However, one should not forget that such works could not and should not be read in a vacuum. Cartoons and comics are very much productions of their times as much as they are a mirror of our lives. Text and context should go together in comics studies.This paper argues for such a historical approach, using examples from Singapore and Malaysia. A sense of history is important and its application in our reading of comics and cartoons would provide insights to present politics and society, especially the impact of globalization and the progress of democratization.

Sociology of artworks normally analyzes just the function of the production but not the aesthetic of symbolic forms. The field-sociology of Pierre Bourdieu is the first sociology with the claim of an analysis which is able to understand the symbolic grammar of individual innovations in art production as well. Unlike a discourse analysis, the field-sociology investigates not only the intertexual or the intermedial semiotics of works but at the same time the habitus of authors and the fights about symbolic forms among authors as a constitutive condition of autonomy and innovations. Therefore, innovations cannot be understood simply as an expression of society but of the evolution of social conditions leading to a specific field. In my paper, I will present elements of field-analysis with examples of European and American comic-authors in order to initiate a discussion during the conference whether it could be possible to translate such an analysis into the social space of Japan. Besides the question of specific national differences of a field's structures, my talk tries to put the social legitimacy of comics up for discussion: Are comics still an illegitimate art? How about contemporary Japanese society?

Manga Studies in Japan has been based upon the assumption of a domestic readership; thus, the 'experience of manga' has been discussed in a context where everyone involved in Manga Studies were also supposed to be manga readers. However, due to the global circulation of Japanese manga, these conditions are increasingly eroding. In this paper, I would like to discuss survey methods by examining the case of a manga readers' survey conducted in Taiwan in 2008, with a special focus on the accounts of experiencing manga under the conditions of globalization. I will also refer to the methodological question of how to actually grasp readers' media experience. This is not just an imposition on Japanese Manga Studies or Manga Studies in general, but an issue of contemporary Comic Studies in general. (transl. Miyake Toshio)

World War II was above all a total war. As a result of this global conflict, not only armed forces in the war-waging nations were mobilized but societies as a whole throughout the world. With the development of comic art into a more subtle medium from the 1970s onwards, a new dimension was added to the widespread military-oriented war comic portrayal of World War II. Attention was now also devoted to a category that became very prominent in the public memory and representation of World War II: the war victims. Nakazawa Keiji's Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) and Art Spiegelman's Maus, for example, have enjoyed a large popularity among readers well beyond their country of origin.
The influence of comics on portraying war-time violence and persecution, as well as readers expectations, raises the question to what extent comic book narratives of this global war are either products of transnational culture or above all national stories. How important are national frames for portraying the large variety of World War II experiences and emotions in comics? The way Anne Frank - the Jewish girl from the Netherlands who became a global icon of World War II - has become a comic book character among comics, manga and historietas around the world, may serve as a revealing case-study.

While it is in Ôtomo Katsuhiro's Akira that the legacy of the atomic bomb becomes most directly associated with the child's body, such an association builds on, and gains coherence through, a large number of prior manga, animations, and stories in which the impact of the atomic bomb becomes entangled with childhood and children's experience of modern war and Japanese history. Nakazawa Keiji's Hadashi no Gen is a crucial work in this respect, because it not only makes children's experiences central to its vision of the politics of war in the atomic era, but also implies a specific configuration of childhood that relies on and contributes to postwar Japanese transformations in education, entertainment, and other socio-economic distributions. We thus need to look at Gen not primarily in terms of a child's experience of postwar Japan's relation to nuclear war, but in terms of an "atomic experience" of childhood that reconfigures Japan within a postwar world order. An exploration of the profound connections between Gen and Tezuka Osamu's Tetsuwan Atomu (as well as Urasawa Naoki's reprise of it in Pluto) will help to highlight this atomic experience articulated around through transformations in childhood. What is more, reading such an experience across different manga will allow us to begin to delineate the ways in which procedures characteristic of manga become integral to the production of a "child bomb" that has exploded across global media with its audio-visual counter-currents. Such an account of manga is also intended to provide as a critique of Murakami Takashi's presentation of the "little boy" of postwar Japanese popular culture as the impotent and ambivalent consumer of (American) militarism, which works primarily to reinforce the Japaneseness of manga and anime for global consumption. The child bomb of manga, however, has a mind of its own.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the formation of the "A-bomb literature" genre in literature, a field closely related to manga. In 1973, the year that Barefoot Gen began publication, Matsuji Ibuse's novel Black Rain was elected to become part of the Japanese high school curriculum, and Nagaoka Hiroyoshi published his History of atomic bomb literature (Fûbaisha). These developments were closely linked to the desire to recapture and rememorialize the atomic bomb experience, a desire which accompanied the transformation of Japan's postwar society. The violent event of the atomic bomb got closely related to people's formation of "agency" by means of the retrospective representations which they received, a tendency from which "Barefoot Gen" cannot escape either. In my presentation, I attempt at a cross-disciplinary reinvestigation of the position and significance of Barefoot Gen, focusing on its interrelations with other contemporary representations of the A-bomb experience, first and foremost literature. (transl. Nele Noppe)

This paper discusses the significance of the act of painting in Nakazawa Keiji's Barefoot Gen, especially with regard to its depiction of painters, and investigates how the manga's imagery functions in a performative way. Several painters appear in Barefoot Gen. Three painters, including Nakaoka Daikichi, Gen's father and former Japanese-style painter, have a powerful influence on the hero. Gen himself decides to become a painter towards the end of the story. In this graphic novel, visual images are often conceived not so much as representations of reality but rather as moments that trigger various actions and events. By examining the performativity of the visual images, this paper argues that Barefoot Gen activates the political function of manga in both its depicted content and ways of depiction in the context of the works of Nakazawa and his contemporaries.