Japanese American Social History Through Manga

JA Historical Society exhibit runs through January

By M. S. Deshmukh
Special to AsianWeek

Japanese style has influenced America for years, but perhaps its heaviest influence has been in the cartooning arena. From Hello Kitty paraphernalia to the transformation of Saturday morning cartoons into an anime-heavy line-up, the trend is impossible to ignore. Now, an exhibit at the National Japanese American Historical Society (NJAHS) in San Francisco looks closely at the social implications of Japanese American artists drawing manga, or Japanese cartooning.

The exhibit, Manga: A Century of Social Commentary by Japanese Artists in America, occupies six panels on the ground floor of the NJAHS office in Japantown, with one panel devoted to each six artists that the exhibition director, Kenji Liu, felt gave an overview of this Japanese art form.

The collection begins with recently rediscovered works by Henry Kiyama, made in the early 1900s, and ends with the highly acclaimed series of Kaiji Kawaguchi, Eagle, completed in 2001. Also included are Taro Yashima’s simply shaded autobiography of political imprisonment in pre-war Japan, the Japanese American GI cartoons of Jack Matsuoka, the Ohio-based political cartooning of Pete Hironaka, and Stan Sakai’s series, Usagi Yojimbo, the saga of the heroic wandering samurai rabbit.

In keeping with manga’s history, the exhibit incorporates a full spectrum of artistic styles. Since the creation of the first narrative comic, Chojugiga or The Animal Scrolls, in 12th century Japan, the art form has diverged to encompass many subjects, including science fiction, sports, humor, romance, sex and history. It is the style of the illustration and the attention to storytelling and character development that link the best manga stories.

In the current Japanese market however, where the sales of weekly or biweekly pulp journals account for a quarter of all published material sold, manga has taken on a more specific connotation. Manga refers to those serial Japanese comics, of which only a handful filter into the American imagination and market, largely through animated features and series.

From Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s Four Immigrants.

Strictly speaking, only the work of Kiyama and Kawaguchi fall under the category of manga. Kiyama’s work, focused on early 20th century immigrant life, has only recently been translated by American-born manga expert Fred Schodt. Kiyama’s Four Immigrants manga, created between 1904 and 1924, is an autobiographical account of the adventures he and three issei friends faced upon their arrival in California. The collection was first printed in Japanese in 1931.

Kawaguchi meanwhile is one of the premier manga artists of modern times. A Japanese citizen, Kawaguchi has traveled to the United States to study, photograph and draw the people and cities he imagined in his 22-volume series Eagle, which tells the story of the first Japanese American presidential candidate [see “Political Dreams: Japanese Manga series takes APA to the top,” (AsianWeek, May 24, 2002)].

Discussing the title of the exhibit, Liu explained, “We’re taking the word manga and really stretching it.”

The other artists collected in the exhibit are creating their art under a different influence. They belong to the generations of Japanese American artists who lived mostly in this country and whose art is between worlds. While describing the work of these artists as manga may not be entirely accurate, the NJAHS manga exhibit wanted to explore the Japanese American identity through the cartoons and illustrations of these artists.

“The other thing is that we were trying to expand on the idea of what a Japanese American is,” Liu explained. “It’s not just being someone who’s been here a few generations, whose family was here through World War II, who may have been interned.”

From the early days of Japanese American manga — when Kiyama’s immigrant friends explored the California countryside hauling squash and contending with bigotry — through Kawaguchi’s re-creation of American politics, the exhibit truly explores the Japanese American collective identity.

Liu explains: “I wanted to push and see it more as a transnational identity between here and Japan. Sometimes more Japan than here, sometimes more here than Japan.”

Manga: A Century of Social Commentary by Japanese Artists in America runs through Feb. 1 at the office of the National Japanese American Historical Society at 1684 Post Street, San Francisco.