A Bit More Detail

At the Kinokuniya bookshop in the heart of Tokyo’s shimmering financial district the economic texts and business guru biographies have been shoved aside to make room for a section on poverty and despair. Tailored to reflect the dismal mood of 21st-century Japan, and named after The Lower Depths, the relentlessly bleak play of Maxim Gorky, the display creaks with dozens of works on penury, failure and defeat. All in cartoon form.

Japan, say its business and political leaders, has arrived at a turning point. Long-term decline is a possibility for everyone, it seems, except the nation’s cartoonists. Confidence has vanished and popular culture is the canary in the coalmine.

Once the national feeling was that Japan did everything better than everyone else. In the 1980s, when its economic rise seemed unstoppable, the giant robot suits of the Gundam series were the focus of manga. The undertone was that, although vast, intergalactic killer robots were fantasy, Japan was the only country with the engineering and technology skills even to contemplate their becoming a reality.

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[P]lots that historically oozed distorted nationalism and swagger — acted out by virile samurai, robot salarymen, boy superheroes and improbably powerful fairies — have given ground to themes of suicide, depression and criminality. Even the power of kawaii (cuteness) that so dominates popular culture seems to be deserting Japan in its hour of need. Hello Kitty still sells well but the modern audience is after something that combines cuddliness with a degree of nihilism.

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Roland Kelts, an expert on Japanese popular culture at the University of Tokyo, said that the large-scale loss of confidence had begun to filter into current manga and cartoons even before the national decline became so evident. Both genres had always had their distinctly dark side in Japan, he said, but there was now a detectable sense of defeatism running through them.

Today, manga is telling us that Japan’s future is desolate, echoing the common sentiment that all is lost. “Aside from the visual winks that have long been a part of the culture, Japanese people generally prefer indirectness to openness, and couch their protest in embedded images,” he said. “Today, as various points of postwar national pride falter, Japan’s relative isolationism serves its graphic artists perfectly. Manga artists now repeat images of fallen glory and gutted gods.”

Storytellers would travel from town to town with their butai (miniature stage) on the back of a bike. The setup was reminiscent of a Punch and Judy show, but instead of puppets the narrator would slide a series of poster boards with watercolor illustrations in and out of the box. He would act out the script, which was written on cards placed on the back of a board.

Each show consisted of three stories of about 10 minutes each: an adventure for boys, a domestic drama for girls and then a simple comic story. The majority of performances ended in a cliffhanger, forcing eager audiences to return the next day.

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“A lot of attributes seen in anime are present,” [writer Eric P.] Nash said, “such as giant robots and monsters from outer space.” He also mentions the “manga-sized eyes,” wide and oversized, meant to convey emotion found in popular characters such as Jungle Boy. Golden Bat, created in 1931, was considered to be the world’s first true comic superhero. Although visually resembling Captain America’s nemesis Red Skull, Golden Bat and Superman share more commonalities: the red cape, skill of flight, superhuman strength and a fortress of solitude, albeit in the Japanese Alps.

Kamishibai artists departed from traditional Japanese line art drawing by creating a cartoon-like style and applying “chiaroscuro,” the Western style of contrasting light and dark, providing depth and mass.