A History of Manga, Part 1: Scrolls, Hokusai, and the First Cartoonists

Manga is now the best-selling category of comics in the United States, a ¥690-billion-a-year industry in Japan, and the source material for the highest-grossing anime film ever made. It is also very old. The word has been in use for more than two centuries, the pictures it describes go back roughly eight, and the modern form — serialized stories in weekly magazines, collected into paperback volumes — is a product of the years right after the Second World War.

This three-part guide walks through that history from ink scrolls in a Kyoto temple to the vertical-scroll comics on a phone screen. It assumes no prior knowledge. Where historians disagree, the disagreement is noted, and each part ends with its sources. Part 1 covers everything before 1945: the scrolls, the Edo-period picture books, Hokusai's sketchbooks, and the Meiji-era cartoonists who turned a borrowed European form into a Japanese profession.

Before "manga" was manga (12th–18th century)

The picture most often reproduced as "the first manga" is a set of four ink handscrolls known as the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga, usually shortened to Chōjū-giga. They were kept for centuries at Kōzan-ji, a temple in the hills northwest of Kyoto, and are generally dated to the mid-12th century, with the third and fourth scrolls possibly a little later. The most famous scroll shows rabbits, frogs, and monkeys behaving like people — wrestling, swimming, holding a funeral, chasing a thief. There are no words. The animals move across the paper from right to left, and the action unfolds as the scroll is unrolled.

Japan designated the scrolls a National Treasure. The originals are now split between the Tokyo National Museum (scrolls one and two) and the Kyoto National Museum (three and four); Kōzan-ji displays reproductions.

Whether the scrolls are "manga" is an open argument. The right-to-left reading direction, the expressive linework, and the comic timing all look familiar to a modern reader, and the British Museum calls the scrolls an ancestor of the form. But the label was applied retroactively, and not everyone accepts it. The early-20th-century cartoonist Seiki Hosokibara pointed to a different set of scrolls, the Shigisan-engi, as the truer origin, and the critic Kanta Ishida has argued the Chōjū-giga have no real connection to contemporary manga and deserve to be treated as masterpieces on their own terms. The safest reading is that they are the oldest surviving example of a Japanese habit — telling stories in sequential pictures — that manga would later inherit.

That habit continued through the Edo period (1603–1868). Cheap woodblock printing made illustrated books a mass product for the first time. Toba-e, named after the monk-painter to whom the Chōjū-giga were once attributed, were books of exaggerated, comic figures. From the 1770s, a genre called kibyōshi ("yellow covers") combined pictures and text on every page in short, satirical, often adult stories. The scholar Adam Kern, whose 2006 study Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length treatment in English, has argued that kibyōshi may be the world's first comic books. Their most celebrated author-artist was Santō Kyōden (1761–1816).

Hokusai and the birth of a word (1814–1868)

The word manga is written with two characters: 漫 (man, "whimsical" or "impromptu") and 画 (ga, "pictures"). Its early appearances in print are usually traced to Santō Kyōden's Shiji no yukikai (1798) and Aikawa Minwa's Manga hyakujo (1814), though these attributions rest mostly on secondary sources.

The book that made the word famous arrived the same year as Minwa's. In 1814, Katsushika Hokusai — then 55, and nearly two decades away from The Great Wave — published the first volume of Hokusai Manga through the Nagoya publisher Eirakuya Tōshirō. Nine more volumes followed by 1819, five more between 1834 and 1878, and the final three came out after Hokusai's death in 1849. The fifteenth volume includes material by other hands and is not considered authentic.

It is important to be clear about what Hokusai Manga is, because the title misleads modern readers. The volumes are not comics. They are sketchbooks: thousands of small drawings of landscapes, plants, animals, tradesmen, wrestlers, ghosts, and ordinary people caught mid-gesture, printed in black, grey, and pale pink. "Random sketches" is how the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogs its copy. There is no narrative and no dialogue.

What the books did establish was the association between the word "manga" and a particular kind of loose, lively, observational drawing. The British Museum places Hokusai at the head of its own short history of the form, and the painter Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), who worked in the same spirit through the collapse of the shogunate, is usually named as the bridge from Hokusai to the cartoonists of the Meiji era.

Punch, Puck, and the first professional cartoonists (1862–1945)

Modern Japanese cartooning was born from contact with the West, and specifically from two European magazines. The first was The Japan Punch, founded in 1862 in the foreign settlement at Yokohama by Charles Wirgman, a British artist and correspondent. It ran until 1887 and was popular enough that a loanword, ponchi (from "Punch"), replaced older Japanese terms for caricature. The second was Tôbaé, launched in Tokyo in 1887 by the French artist Georges Bigot, a weekly that mocked both Westernization and the Japanese politicians embracing it.

The Japanese artist who turned that imported form into a native profession was Kitazawa Rakuten (1876–1955). He joined the newspaper Jiji Shinpō in 1899, launched its comics supplement Jiji Manga in 1902, and in April 1905 founded Tokyo Puck, a full-color satirical magazine modeled on the American Puck. Guinness World Records lists Tokyo Puck as the first manga magazine and Kitazawa as Japan's first professional cartoonist; the historian Ronald Stewart, summarizing Japanese scholarship, prefers "first modern manga artist." Either way, it was Kitazawa's consistent use of the word "manga" for his own work that fixed its modern meaning by around 1914.

His contemporary Okamoto Ippei (1886–1948) began drawing for the Asahi Shimbun in 1912 and developed a more literary, narrative style; Osamu Tezuka would later name him a primary influence.

By the 1930s manga had found its most important audience: children. Kodansha's monthly Shōnen Club reached a circulation of 750,000 in 1936. Its star was Norakuro by Tagawa Suihō, serialized from 1931 — the story of a stray dog who enlists in an army of dogs and rises through the ranks. As Japan's wars in Asia expanded, Norakuro became what one historian has called an "unofficial propaganda hero." The series was halted in 1941 under wartime austerity, and for the next four years manga, like every other Japanese medium, served the state or did not appear at all.

Continue to Part 2 →Tezuka, Gekiga, and the Jump Era (1945 – 1990s)

Sources for Part 1