A history of manga in the context of Japanese culture and society.(Critical Essay)

MANGA, OR JAPANESE COMIC ART, IS A HUGE AND LUCRATIVE BUSINESS that is truly popular in Japan. Nowadays, it is also exported to many countries, influencing their popular cultures, children, youth, and the ways of the people. In this article, I briefly explore a history of Japanese manga, how it reflected events in Japanese society during various historical periods, and how it came to be what it is today.

Manga has humor, satire, exaggeration, and wit. The comic art includes caricature, cartoon, editorial cartoon, syndicated panel, daily humor strip, story-manga, and animation. Like any other form of visual art, literature, or entertainment, manga does not exist in a vacuum. It is immersed in a particular social environment that includes history, language, culture, politics, economy, family, religion, sex and gender, education, deviance and crime, and demography. Manga thus reflects the reality of Japanese society, along with the myths, beliefs, rituals, tradition, fantasies, and Japanese way of life. Manga also depicts other social phenomena, such as social order and hierarchy, sexism, racism, ageism, classism, and so on.

The Japanese Character

Contrary to popular Western belief, the Japanese are a very comical people who love jokes and funny stories. The stereotypical images of the Japanese worldwide are based on the assumption that they are serious, reserved, diligent, determined, successful, and rigid. Many people may also perceive them as economic animals, domineering, cold, calculating, oversexed, cunning, and unfriendly. Both positive and negative Japanese images abound, but generally the Japanese are a humorous, witty, and funny people once they bring down the formal facade that they project to others, especially foreigners.

The Japanese Language, Communication, and Manga

The Japanese culture belongs to what American anthropologist Edward Hall calls "the high context culture," in which people prefer to use more implicit, unclear, and ambiguous messages whose meanings are found in the context, rather than explicit, clear, and straightforward messages. According to Japanese anthropologist Masao Kunihiro, "English is intended strictly for communication. Japanese is primarily interested in feeling out the other person's mood" ("The Devil's Tongue"). Japan is a small island nation with a long history, and the people are homogeneous. In contrast, the United States, according to Hall, belongs to "the low context culture," in which messages themselves are important and everything must be spelled out.

Japanese communication, being in the high context culture, relies more on contextual cues such as facial expressions, gestures, eye glances, length and timing of silence, tone of voice, and grunts, all of which can be expressed in manga very eloquently. The high context communication depends more on visual and auditory cues. The Japanese language offers ample opportunities for word play, such as puns and double entendres, thanks to the abundance of homonyms and onomatopoeia. Both classical and contemporary Japanese literature, whether a novel, a haiku poem, or a play, attest to this point.